Remember how the deleted Orwell pissed everyone off last week? Well, it extra specially pissed off this kid who had put all his notes for school into the damn thing only to find them deleted along with the book itself. Pissed him off enough to sue douchebag Amazon over the schoolyard bully tactics. Who’s laughing now, Biff? Sniff, sniff… Junior, you make …someone… proud to be American. I hope this puts you through college.

Justin Gawronski, the Michigan high school student bringing the suit along with another Kindle user, had made “copious notes” on the version of “1984″ he was reading as a summer homework assignment, the suit said.

“After Amazon remotely deleted ‘1984,’ those notes were rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book,” it said.

The suit claims Amazon had not disclosed to Kindle users previously that it had the ability to remotely delete content and asks the court to prevent the online retail giant from doing so in the future.

“Amazon has no more right to delete e-books from consumers’ Kindles and iPhones than it does to retrieve from its customers? homes paper books it sells and ships to consumers,” it said.

The suit seeks unspecified damages for Gawronski and other Kindle users whose digital books were erased.

Moby (who gets to go on vacation while I sweat it out here) points to these enthusiastic Green Apple Books folk who purchased a Kindle and set up a “battle royale” between it and a storesworth of books.

Supermarkets now sell one in five books. (In related news: Reisman announces Indigo to develop frozen foods section.) The poison line forms to my left, the noose and tanto blade lines to my right.

Figures for volume share in 2009, provided by the three leading supermarket booksellers, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, and based on Nielsen BookScan data, show that the supermarket sector has more than trebled its share of the books market in the past five years. The combined market share of the three supermarkets is now estimated at just under 20%, compared with the 6.4% share of the market they were estimated to have by TNS in 2004, reported by the Competition Commission’s investigation into Woolworth’s takeover of Bertrams.

Tesco’s volume market share this year is 9.24%. Category manager David Cooke said this figure was more than half a percent behind last year because of continuing fallout following the collapse of its supplier EUK in late 2008. Asda’s market share is 7.61%, up from just under 7% in 2008. Sainsbury’s average market share in 2009 is approximately 2.72%. The figures do not take into account book sales from Morrisons, Waitrose or Costco.

No. Stop it, you dirty-minded harlot. This is about wizards! Who’s the best ever? Tolkien’s Gandalf or Rowling’s Dumbledore? I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. And I said to put that AWAY!

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin. Once upon a time, there was a kindly old wizard whose only concerns were pipe weed, hobbits and a gold ring that caused all kinds of trouble. Gandalf (for so the wizard was named) lived happy in the knowledge that he was the greatest wizard of them all. Until, one day, an obscure conjurer who ekes out a living as headteacher of a remote public school found international stardom when a former pupil made it big in Hollywood. And so it came to pass that Albus Dumbledore was hailed by a new generation as the greatest wizard of them all. But which was truly the greatest? Time to put them to the test.

…For Britain’s most avid, and responsible, reader, aged 91: 25,000 books borrowed over 60 years with NO LATE FINES. Someone give that woman a medal, and put her sweet face on a poster for library advocacy.

Louise Brown, 91, has read up to a dozen books a week since 1946 without incurring a single fine for late returns.

She borrows mainly large print books because she is partially sighted, and has almost worked her way through her local library’s entire stock.

Library staff in Stranraer, Dumfries and Galloway, say the pensioner’s rapacious reading habits over 60 years could earn her a place in the record books.

You don’t need the record books, honey. You’re in our good books forever!

The library ice cream flavour debate reaches across the pond in an article at the Guardian… The main point of note here is that one of the head Bens or Jerrys offered the best flavour idea yet: “Malt Whitman”. I would so buy that. Better than all these library-themed flavours would be author-themed flavours.

Joyce Carol Floats

Peanut Blyton

Cherry Higgins Clarke

Almond Rushdie Slushie

Edgar Ice Mallows

Agatha Chipsy

Roald Dahlop

Swirls Dickens (Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More?)

Martin Anise

Fill-up Roth Froth

Three-dough Tolstoy

Vanillan Thomas

Chewy L’Amour

John “Heavenly” Hashberry

Take it away!

Coetzee is the bookies’ favourite for the Booker

Try that with your Kindle—coke smuggled in book spines into prison (from Moby)

I’m posting this one because I love the headline: “New World Library Launches Eckhart Tolle, Mother Teresa iPhone Apps” What an age we live in…

Sony ereader manuals “leaked”… oh noes! The public will see how awesome they are and build excitement about buying them!! You give those manuals back! C’mere, I said. Give those widdle manuals back, you naughty, well-paid insider. You’re such a cheeky snuggums!

Britain rescues a medieval font fetish book from the hands of a dastardly American collector… friggin’ imperialist power stealing the treasures of other civiliza… tions….. Oh…

Another vacuous celebrity enters the easy-peasy world of literature…

Publisher’s Weekly, as well as Library Journal and School Library Journal, are up for sale. Want to go in halvesies with me? I have $6.52 in dimes and pennies.

Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly and its affiliated publications, Library Journal and School Library Journal, up for sale. The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S.

Bookninja: Hey, newspaper! Fuck you, clown. Moby mobylises the troops. Pitchforks, stand to my left. Torches, stand to my right. Do not charge until you see the whites of their collars. MAAARCH!

“Buying the newest hardcover…not very smart,” says a helpful article in the Baltimore Sun.  Huh? The same newspaper that just unloaded their Books Editor (in the same industry that constantly wails, “help us! Print is dying!”) encouraged its online readers yesterday to avoid buying books (among other things).  Apparently, this is one of the easiest ways for the paper to help its readers trim expenses during this current economic climate.  Should we not buy newspapers or magazines as well? Well, they didn’t say that…

The Sun lists a whole slew of things to avoid in these difficult times: buying movies, eating out, going to bars—even owning a pet (time to give up Fido—“Sure, your four-legged friend may be fun and loving, but between food, vet bills and toys, how much are they really costing you?”).  They make some good points (stop buying $10 packs of cigarettes, stay within the speed limit to avoid having to pay speeding tickets), but many of the things they warn against seem plain silly. It appears that nobody is paying attention to editorial content at the paper anymore.

He does? More like Stephen King loves that you’re unquestioning enough in your love of the book as an object to get fleeced for $200 for his signature. I just love how some PR flack came up with the idea of King and Scribner teaming up to fight to save the book as an object and laid it down over the reality of King and Scribner ripping the shirts off the backs of loyal fans.

Stephen King and his long-time publisher intend to sell 1,500 copies of a signed, limited edition of his upcoming “Under the Dome” to his most fervent collectors at $200 a pop.

“We’re doing this to generate additional revenue,” says Susan Moldow, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Scribner imprint. “We used to have a regular business of signed first edition mysteries, but we stopped because there wasn’t an additional mark-up.”

There will be this time: Presuming all 1,500 sell out, the print run will generate $300,000, to be divvied up between Mr. King and Scribner. Ms. Moldow declined to elaborate on the profit split, saying, “We have a unique joint venture with Steve, the terms of which we don’t disclose. But he does well.”

She said the book will be available shortly for pre-ordering from Simon & Schuster’s Web site, as well as a site operated by Mr. King.

“This is fighting back against the disappearance of the book as an object,” she adds.

The NYT editors and WaPo (that’s for you, Steve) bloggers both commenting on Google, about their plan for books and their many possible invasions of privacy. For a company that ostensibly strives to do no evil, they seem to be constantly putting themselves in situations where evil is the most likely outcome.

Google’s effort could create new interest in millions of out-of-print books, which would be made available at no cost at public libraries. That means that a student at a community college or a freelance writer could access the same books as a Harvard professor.

At a time when publishing’s economic model is threatened, there is also an important financial upside for authors and publishers. Google would charge users for accessing copyrighted books from their own computers and sell online ads, and it would give writers and publishers 63 percent of the revenue. The settlement would create a books rights registry to distribute payments.

Google’s access to most books would not be exclusive since Microsoft or Joe’s Online Library could cut their own deal with authors and publishers and scan books as well. However, it is likely that as a result of the settlement, Google would be the only company with the right to “orphaned” works, books whose rights owners have not been located.

If that were to happen, Google could use monopoly power to price these books exorbitantly.

Brief note: I’ve finally removed CBC’s Arts pages from my rss and bookmarks… There’s just nothing there but wire stories and late celebrity infotrash. The CBC used to have one of the great online arts pages, but now it’s just a scrapyard and their books coverage is insulting. Someone nudge me if they ever start trying again.

Harlequin benefits from weak Canadian dollar, in addition to usual benefits derived from semi-literate populace

The adult brain adapts faster than expected… like when I find it unbelievable that an “Irish” pub doesn’t keep Guinness on tap, but I somehow manage to drink Kilkenny… The mind is a mysterious and beautiful machine

Roald Dahl bio almost finished and then…

The recession apparently can’t touch tentacle porn and statutory rape (don’t freak out, comic nerds… I’m making a joke)

Daily Dose of Digital

Sony strives to get wifi e-reader out ahead of Kindle…

…and claims to have 1m books at their disposal

The year of the ebook (from SFSignal)

Booker bundle

Sarah Waters a popular favourite

SMH impressed with heavyweight list

Librarians are lobbying for their own flavour of Ben and Jerry’s and I for one heartily support them… If there’s anything sexier than a tight lipped librarian, it’s a tight lipped librarian holding a pint of ice cream. I suggest the following names:

Chocolate Heart Attacks In the Stacks

Reading on Borrowed Lime

Cappucino Card Catalogue

Horn-Rimmed Cookie Dough

Due Dates and Figs

Withering Looks Shhherbet

Tight Sweaters, Loose Buns… and Pralines!

Butterscotch by the Volume

Misshelved Maple

Spinster Cherries (oh, yes, I went there)

“The Computers Are Not For Porn, Sir” Vanilla Nut

Sternly-Worded Recall Notice Strawberry

“I Get Off at Five, George” Afternoon Delight…

Any I missed? I smell a contest….

Bizarre, compelling, apparently-eyebrowless author profiled in the NYT.

William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

Here are a few links to various Booker Longlist announcements and breakdowns. Arts pages seem particularly delighted by the chimp on the list.

Telegraph (heh heh… a chimp)

No but seriously… The list is Anglocentric

Guardian (hee hee… a chimp, in sunglasses!)

No but seriously… who would you choose?

Times (hur hurr… see… a chimp!)

No but seriously… I’d hate to judge this one

Independent (um, seriously, what is everyone laughing at? was there a monkey involved or something?)

Barnes and Noble to offer free wi-fi in all stores… it’ll be interesting to see how suits from the B&N board room manage to eventually make this forward-thinking move useless by hobbling the service with restrictions

Kerouac’s will was a fake… someone’s in for a biiiiiig lawsuit, daddio

Samsung seeks to be a bigger player than Amazon and Sony in the e-book market… Reach for the stars, kid!File this one under, “Qu’elle suprise…”: Hemingway, The Musical, was a flop…

UK online bookseller The Book Depository now has an American e-storefront… yay for options!

Jackson book sales drop off as more competitors enter the lucrative field of necrophilia

In what might be one of the coolest vis poems ever, a man is ready to print a giant linocut typographical map of Paris. Hot damn. Just gorgeous. Process description here. Now he just has to find a printer able to accomodate.

Moby points to this piece from an author’s blog on her novel called Liar that features a young black girl with short “nappy” hair, but the cover of which features a white girl with long hair. The reason? It’s supposedly hard to sell books with black people on them in the US. Good thing we fixed that endemic racism thing by electing Ol’ Slim Jim to the White House, eh?

The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional. I have privately been campaigning for a different cover for the paperback. The response to the cover by those who haven’t read Liar has been overwhelmingly positive and I would have looked churlish if I started bagging it at every opportunity. I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response. But now that this controversy has arisen I am much more optimistic about getting the cover changed. I am also starting to rethink what I want that cover to look like. I did want Bloomsbury to use the Australian cover, but I’m increasingly thinking that it’s important to have someone who looks like Micah on the front.

The longlist for the Booker Prize has been released and includes Byatt, Coetzee, and Sarah Waters.

Byatt, AS The Children’s Book

Coetzee, J M Summertime

Foulds, Adam The Quickening Maze

Hall, Sarah How to paint a dead man

Harvey, Samantha The Wilderness

Lever, James Me Cheeta

Mantel, Hilary Wolf Hall

Mawer, Simon The Glass Room

O’Loughlin, Ed Not Untrue & Not Unkind

Scudamore, James Heliopolis

Toibin, Colm Brooklyn

Trevor, William Love and Summer

Waters, Sarah The Little Stranger

Iraq slides back to censorship

Saramago’s upcoming elephant novel is news, for some reason

Random snags book reprint no one wanted until Jackson died

William Shatner reads Sarah Palin’s exit speech as a poem (below), with double bass and bongo accompaniment… Oh, yes, this IS HAPPENING! (via everyone’s FB feed)*** Update: NBC’s lawyers are tools and they have removed the video that might have driven more people to watch their show ****

You know how I feel about Love You Forever, right? Creepiest fucking book ever written. It’s like Stephen King’s Misery, but for toddlers. In fact, it’s not even for toddlers. It’s an enabling work for possessive parents with abandonment issues. I always imagine the title being whispered in a sinister, possessed voice over windchimes tinkling in a minor key. “Love You… FOREVER….” That mother is psychotic. I’m not trying to be funny here, people. Someone seriously needs to institutionalize that woman. Well, my other pet peeve is The Giving Tree, in which a little sociopath allegorically (and inadvertently) illustrates everything that’s wrong with the patriarchy/capitalism by absent mindedly using and abusing a mother/nature figure. Thankfully, someone else has got my back.

The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. I guess that this is a pretty common target in these kinds of discussions, but damn is it ever deserved. Tree loves boy. Boy loves tree. Boy grows up. Boy exploits tree. Tree takes it all silently, growing less happy with each lonely year. Boy gets old, tree is a stump, boy sits on tree, no apologies. I mean, I get the point: the tree loves the boy. But heck, even Jesus was able to rise triumphant when all was said and done; couldn’t Silverstein have made the love at least a little more, you know, mutual? (Other questions: Why didn’t the tree’s apples grow back? And how did the boy build himself and his family a house out of branches?)

Anyone have titles to add to this?

The LAT’s Ulin on the trouble with Kindle:

For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than mere commerce that shouldn’t be merely bought and sold.

Because of that, it’s not the incidents themselves but their ramifications that are disturbing, the idea that Amazon can effectively alter the collective memory at will. The issue, in other words, isn’t that Amazon has erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can.

Apple will have a new Kindle competitor (essentially a giant iPod touch) out by early 2010…  (Sounds more like a tablet computer than an e-reader, which, if I’m not mistaken, rides on the major selling point of NOT being a computer with a lit screen… I suppose we’ll see.)

Not book related at all: “Computer? Computer?” They’ve finally invented transparent aluminium

I don’t even know what to say. I mean, I knew stupid had a strangle-hold on society, but this is a new level of… what? I don’t even know. I’d say I’m speechless, but we both know I’m not. It’s my job to call douchery when I sees douchery and it’s my job to call fucktardery when I see fucktardery. But is it my job to call pathetic idiocy when I sees it? Maybe this guy, who calls himself a Harry Potter rabbi and quotes from the books like scripture to justify his social activism, is calling it all for himself. (I’m getting too old and cranky for this job. Excuse me: “job”.)

Slack, 29, is a self-declared ‘‘Harry Potter rabbi’’ who quotes from the series as a clergyman might quote scripture, and his organisation uses parallels from the Potter books to educate and mobilise Potter fans around such issues as workers’ rights and combating genocide.

Slack started the group in 2005 and has used his online connections to reach millions of Potter fans. His group’s accomplishments include collecting more than 13,000 donated books to give to community centres and a youth centre in Rwanda, and raising $US15,000 ($18,200) for the Genocide Intervention Network’s civilian protection program for displaced Darfuris and Burmese.

Slack relates all sorts of social issues back to themes in the Harry Potter books. Using the opinions of Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore as a moral compass, Slack suggests Potter fans should fight prison torture because Dumbledore was against Dementors, and that they should support fair trade because Dumbledore agreed on giving rights to house elves.

‘‘We always connect everything back to the books,’’ Slack says. ‘‘It’s very Talmudic.’’

Is there a hint of irony in here? Am I missing it? Have I become so jaded? It’s a joke, right? I suppose it doesn’t matter how people get there, so long as they’re—&*!@#$–Oh, who the fuck am I kidding, it matters how you get there! Dude, you look like a sad, deluded reject, but it looks good on you. Keeping fighting the good fight.

Simon Kernick, he who has been mounted by Dan, The Man in Tan, enjoys being on the bottom. Here’s hoping Brown takes him out for brunch later instead of leaving a packet of poptarts on the pillow like he did for Tom Hanks.

“The book with the new cover is not, never was, and never will be for sale, and Deadline’s still in print with its original cover and available in Smiths and elsewhere. I also knew about the whole thing from the start, and it seems to have worked because my backsales have gone up very substantially in the weeks since it begun, and both Transworld and Smiths are very pleased. I guess, in conclusion, I’m fairly relaxed about the whole thing since anyone who got the book as part of the promotion, got it free and should have been told that it wasn’t by Dan Brown but my me.”

Salt publishing, which does some great titles, has made success of it’s Just One Book campaign and will survive the year, despite losing its arts council funding. Lo and behold, it can be done! Ahead? Diversify from poetry. Hmm. Publish something people might buy? It’s so crazy, it just might work! Glad they’ve made it. Hard times abound for small presses, especially poetry presses, but those that are prepared to change and grow can come out stronger. Here’s to perseverance and ingenuity. And the charity of book lovers.

Salt launched the campaign in May to avoid closure after facing “financial difficulties”, following its loss of Arts Council funding in the previous financial year. It asked people to “buy just one book, right now”.

The company is now planning to broaden its publishing programme into literary fiction and children’s poetry, as well developing as a number of other programmes, in a bid to diversify the company’s revenue stream.

Chris Hamilton-Emery, director of Salt Publishing, said: “We raised a great deal of money through direct sales in the first five weeks, and have since that time focused on developing our trade sales: Gardners are running a promotion with us just now.”

Salt has already opened a London office and hired two new permanent members of staff, Hamilton-Emery explained, adding he would now be focusing on “diversifying, improving sales and finding some additional income to see us through that planned transition.”

As this story currently stands, I’m shocked and appalled. But something in me wonders if there’s more to come out. Not that this excuses Australia from punishing people for telling stories and keeping the reasons secret.

In July last year, writer Kingsley Flett’s Shadow Warrior — a book he co-wrote with former SAS soldier and criminal David Everett — was published by Penguin. It has since sold about 15,000 copies. In December West Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Robert Cock froze the bank account Flett had established for his publishing activities.

Last week Penguin publishing director Robert Sessions wrote to WA Premier Colin Barnett urging him to “intervene in this matter and show that natural justice is still of paramount importance to your government when it comes to the citizens of the state of Western Australia”.

The matter is expected to return to the WA Supreme Court in the next few weeks when Flett’s lawyers will ask that the judge exercise his powers to set aside the freezing order.

They say their client, who has never committed a crime, should not be punished for telling the story of someone who did.

With the moveable feast of capitalism known as the oil war on a multi-city tour, British poet laureate commissions “war poetry”, whatever that means. (I say that in partial jest—she does a good job of defining and providing examples of what she means, I’m just being an old fart by questioning how, at the ground level, “war poetry” is any different from “poetry”.) Here’s a related video of Andrew Motion chatting about the same thing.

Poets, from ancient times, have written about war. It is the poet’s obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. In modern times, the young soldiers of the first world war turned the horrors they endured and witnessed in trench combat – which slaughtered them in their millions – into a vividly new kind of poetry, and most of us, when we think of “war poetry” will find the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon coming first to our lips, with Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke … What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? … There’s some corner of a foreign field … Such lines are part of the English poetry reader’s DNA, injected during schooldays like a vaccine.

The NYT looks at the history of histories within histories.

Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. Sometimes these interior texts inform the plot or enhance the theme, other times they are just lively bursts of color, sparks thrown off during the authorial process. It’s easy to understand the appeal of creating these miniatures. A few deft lines can conjure perfect examples of untutored rawness (Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s “True Grit,” has a manuscript entitled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge”), sublime dullness (“The Purpose of Clothing Is to Keep Us Warm,” in Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s “Chronicles of Bustos Domecq”) or anything in between. Why write the whole book when you can get so much mileage out of the title alone?

Author famous for tackling issues of identity, dead at 51.

Salinger sequelist to appeal ruling

Eeeeenteresing: Cronenberg to take on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

What’s the only thing gross-er than a book of hate by a genocidal madman? A book of hate that’s been touched by said genocidal madman… Signed copy of Mein Kampf for sale

Daily Dose of Digital:

Kindle 2 reviewed in the NYer

Amazon still under fire, despite apology (but I sense a calming on this… do you? That’s what corporations want, you know… calming. Burn your outrage and then just suck it up. They can wait.)

Publishers in talks with Apple for Kindle rival

Philip Marchand sticks a fork into the holy steak of Modernism. Conclusion? Overdone and undercooked. He takes particular aim at Malcolm Lowry, favourite Canadian adoptee and a god of Modernist fiction, via Under the Volcano, which one ex-prof of mine described as a “perfect” novel. Now, whether or not you think Lowry is Canadian (see, here in Canada, as I’ve noted, even though we’re prepared to abduct and/or expropriate any and all famous people who’ve even farted on the other side of the border and had their stench blow on a summer’s wind into the Great White North, Lowry actually spent significant and creative time here), you can’t deny that he’s been an untouchable. Of course, Marchand has made a career of touching the untouchables, to greater and lesser effect. Here, I wonder. I liked this novel when I read it, but it’s been years and years. Time for a reappraisal? (Note to NP Eds: was this article edited drastically? It appears to cut off mid-thought.)

That work, about a drunken British consul in Mexico clearly based on the author, is Lowry’s claim to fame. Admirers regard it as a monument of modernist literature, on a par with the fiction of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. No academic or critic of note, as far as I know, has launched a serious attack on its reputation — certainly Canadian literati are not about to dismiss a certifiable genius whose most productive years were spent in this country and who clearly showed Canadian influences in such stories as “October Ferry to Gabriola.”

Yet the novel is one that many people confess they can’t finish. This is not surprising. “Modernism” is another term for “unfriendly to readers,” and Lowry takes pains to plant modernist signposts all over his narrative. At one point, for example, the author does a Joyce riff. Here is his protagonist in full stream-of-consciousness mode, complete with Joycean puns, after having conversed with a character named Quincy: “Old De Quincy; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastrophysicist.”

The Goog can’t be held responsible for defamatory third party statements returned to a browser as part of a search query. In related news: British high courts were invaginated today by a semi-visible pseudopod, and subsequently ingested via pinocytosis channels so that their nutrients could be absorbed, assimilated, and egested via exocytosis from Google’s ass.

Justice David Eady ruled that Google’s Internet search engine isn’t considered a publisher under defamation law, and therefore isn’t responsible for the content of the short descriptions of Web sites that appear in Google searches.

The case was initiated by Metropolitan International Schools Ltd., an online training company based in the U.K. The company had sued Google over comments posted on Web forums accusing the training company of running a scam, an allegation Metropolitan International Schools denied, according to the judgment.

The Web forums didn’t belong to Google, but Metropolitan International Schools sued Google for publicizing the claims through its search results. In its defense, Google argued it shouldn’t be held responsible for the content of the 39 billion Web pages available on the Internet.

Justice Eady ruled that there is “no reasonable prospect of success” and dismissed the suit.

Iran – Shahriar Mandanipour

India – Aravind Adiga

Hungary – Ferenc Molnar

Pakistan – National Translation Bureau

India – Golden age of Indian writing?

Are lesbians taking over crime fiction? Let’s hope so! Laurie R. King for president!

It’s hard for the straight world to get a handle on what life is like when you grow up without a single role model who is so secure in her sexuality that it doesn’t matter any more. Where everybody knows and nobody really cares. This is where we want to get to. I don’t know of a singe “lesbian” author who isn’t heartily sick of the label and will continue to be until the world starts referring to everyone by their sexuality. On the other hand, as Stella Duffy says, “I do also want those 14-year-olds who are scared and shy and not yet out and have no access to a wider world to know that there are other possibilities out there, and I appreciate that my being called a ‘lesbian writer’ does sometimes give them a chance to find me, my work, others like me (like them).”

Which is the reason we do it – or part of it. Because we were all scared, lost 14-year-olds once, and we know how much it mattered to have something that normalised who we were.

We are everywhere now. But until McDermid’s Report for Murder was published in 1987, every single work of “lesbian fiction” on my bookshelf had a plot that wholly or partially revolved around the protagonist’s angst about her sexuality, the constant fear of being outed and, frequently, her hopeless love for a straight woman, doomed to heartbreak. Then McDermid proved to the risk-averse world of publishing that lesbian characters didn’t hurt sales, and particularly not in a genre where the protagonists are, almost by definition, on the margins of society.

As she points out, “lesbians are particularly suited to the crime novel because the detective is both transgressive and discounted by society. And we don’t actually have to do anything like drink too much or be emotionally screwed up to meet those criteria. We just have to be ourselves.”

It’s looking like a big year for books this fall. Regardless of your opinion of any or all of them, you can’t deny that a season packed with Brown, Conroy, Pynchon, Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Irving, Byatt, et al., will be remarkable for an industry still trying to recover from the Harry Potter factory shutdown that laid off thousands. But will it be good? (I believe this article proves either that publishing people have been so fucked over as to be paranoid or that the arts press corps are so jonsesing for bad news that they’ll spike an ice cream with cyanide just to cover the kid dying.)

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”

Amazon and The Beez have issued an apology, calling their 1984 turn “stupid” and “thoughtless”. I’d like to add “underhanded”, “inconsiderate”, and “greedy”. Will this be enough to restore confidence in the Kindle platform (and right slumping media sales)? I know I’m not convinced. And neither is Cory Doctorow, surprisingly. I want to OWN my books. I mean, like studded dog collar and fetish harness own them. If books were spouses, I’d be one of those controlling douchebags you see leading their wives around by the elbow and the small of the back and interrupting them constantly when they try to talk. And if the Beez and his cronies got all up in my grill and tried to take my bitch, I’d be all like, “Books, honey, get back in the house, I’ll deal with this.” And then I’d cart my spray-on tan ass out in a muscle shirt and Mets cap and kick someone’s ass just for the sheer pleasure of it before doing a line of coke and buying a pit bull and a Kawasaki crotch rocket. … you know…  IF books were spouses. But I digress. As Moby pointed out today, Amazon has NEVER made a profit. Isn’t that a bit of a vortex to throw your money into, dear investor?

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Just a reminder that under every hot sexpot librarian is a geek so painfully nerdy that you just want to cuddle them to bits… for a change. (Srsly, dudes, at 2:28…. WTF is she singing into? I don’t want to know…)

Picture this: DAN BROWN! takes up a third of your cover, and your name is in small type below. You wrote the book, and Danny Boy has no involvement. You’re not ghostwriting, or writing-as, or even co-writing in a  James Patterson (ISO 9000 certified) sense. Your publisher is just hoping that the words DAN BROWN will encourage people to pick the book up and mistakenly buy it. Dude, do you feel like someone’s banging your partner on the side and telling everyone about it? You should. Isn’t this a kind of schlock novel version of three card monte? I’m a little confused. Was Brown in on this? I mean, it has a certain ham-fistedness to it, so I suppose he could be involved, but I rather doubt he takes much of an interest in Earth and its humans anymore now that he’s ascended to Turtania, the mythical realm of billionaires who wear black turtle necks and tan jackets.

I didn’t think The Da Vinci Code, which is a crime-thriller-cum-religious-tale, was a particularly well-written book when it first came out in 2003. But nobody can deny it has mass appeal and its racy and pacy plot has spawned a whole set of imitators. With more than 81 million copies sold so far and two hit films based on Brown’s novels, it’s one of the publishing successes of the century.

So I picked up Deadline. Would it be the story of a young female journalist struggling for the scoop of the decade against the odds? At which point, I noticed someone else’s name on the cover beneath Dan Brown’s: Simon Kernick. “Aha,” I thought, “The title is actually ‘Simon Kernick: Deadline.’ Perhaps Kernick is the fictional detective starring in this novel?”

But as I looked closer, it dawned on me that in fact, Brown had not written this book at all. And Kernick is not the detective hero of the piece. The front cover, which proudly boasted that it was “exclusive” to WH Smith, bears the legend: “Dan Brown. If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy…Simon Kernick. Deadline.”

I had got it entirely wrong. Kernick is, in fact, the author of Deadline. Brown is not.

Try finding someone’s old shopping lists or used hanky in your recently purchased (and ganked) Kindle tome. Well, when you put it that way…

In the window of a secondhand bookshop in North London hangs, among other things, a chest x-ray, an air freight invoice and the handwritten guest list to a party, complete with notes for the host’s speech. Inside the shop, about a dozen photo albums containing family holiday snaps, wedding day memories, pictures of pets and more are laid out on a table for customers to browse through.

They may well recognise some of the items. All have been accidentally sent to the shop in boxes of donated books, many of them stuck between pages as makeshift bookmarks by previous owners. All these articles are on display to give people a chance to see them, and claim them back. The shop’s manager tells me that so far only one, a photograph of a cat, has returned home.

While they’re sometimes rambly and odd, I can’t help but enjoy AL Kennedy’s blog posts at the Guardian, ruminating on all things writerly. Here she goes on about her chair and then launches into a bit about researching novels, something near and dear to my heart right now. Encouragingly, she says she thinks and obsesses for a few years before actually writing. I thought that was just procrastination, but apparently I’m doing it just like the pros.

The research I prefer, the type with which I am comfortable, involves me sitting in my study surrounded by a ziggurat of books at which I munch away until they give in. Sadly, if something doesn’t appear to be in any book, anywhere – and many things I seem to need for the next novel are ridiculously arcane – then I have to seek out free-standing human beings and pester them exactly when I am unable to articulate a description of what I don’t have and can’t understand. Would you let a random scribbler into your premises and then put up with them basically describing a void, the dimensions and angles surrounding a nothing, while waving their arms a bit too much? I know I wouldn’t. And I’m only ruining these people’s afternoons because they’re experts – so this isn’t just a theft of time, it’s a theft of expert, well-informed time.. for which I can’t pay, because paying is rude and stops a favour being a favour, but you have to bring them something… but what do you bring someone who earns – say – ridiculously more than you do …? Do you obsess for weeks trying to figure out what they might like …? You’ll then feel slightly grubby if that works… or do you take a flyer and get it wrong…? You’ll then feel thuggish… And if you see them again, should you give them books ? You write books… but what if they don’t like your books, or books at all…? and if you sign the books, that’ll mean people feel bad when they dump them in the Oxfam shop – plus, that’s a bit up yourself, isn’t it, foisting your own signed books on people? But not signing them might seem rude…. And what if they run over the time they said they’d give you…? Do you interrupt, do you let them go on, do you cry? If they really nail something magnificently, are you allowed to kiss them on the forehead? What if you’re bellowing because they’re deaf, but they haven’t said so, but they are… is that rude, or just audible? I have spent a number of fretful hours lately, sitting on patient strangers’ sofas and feeling bad, bad, bad about myself.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a glut of these articles lately, lamenting the reputation of romance in pop culture and the reception of the genre by mainstream critics? I’m a little confused. Do they actually EXPECT to be taken seriously? Isn’t enough to just sell more copies than everyone else and leave it at that? It seems a bit like McDonald’s complaining that food critics don’t visit often enough. Why invite disaster into your home?

Readers apparently feel a little embarrassed about romance novels, too. An editor at Harlequin told me that in the Bible Belt, inspiration and romance are the bestsellers — strange bedfellows indeed. “They buy their inspiration at the bookstore, and they order their romance novels online.”

In a sense, romance still labors under the burden that used to weigh on all fiction. Puritan sermons in the 17th century were spiked with warnings about reading novels. Thomas Jefferson railed against novels, too, claiming they were “a great obstacle to good education…a poison [that] infects the mind. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.”

An early Labrador settler to get the Susanna Moodie treatment

UK Kindle this fall?

USA Today’s bestseller list will include Kindle sales

Unpublished Vonnegut going ebook

John Keats house restored

Forward Prize shortlists go with established authors

At the Morning News.

RB: You come from Toronto, and I noticed Michael Ondaatje has blurbed your book. Is there a literary mafia in Toronto?

GA: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

RB: Is he the Don Corleone of it?

GA: I don’t know. That’s a good question: Is he the Don Corleone? Well he’s too furtive and shy to be the Don Corleone.

RB: Maybe it’s his wife, Linda?

GA: Could be, could be. Yeah, she’s pretty feisty…and a good writer in her own right.

The Atlantic posts a series of essays by “foreigners” such as Margaret Atwood, Monica Ali, and Anne Michaels examining national vs. international literatures. Interesting reading.

In our age of globalization, when immigration and the Internet and multinational conglomerates have made cultural transmission across borders easier than ever, does the idea of a national literature still have meaning? Where, in a civilization divided between cultural nativism and cosmopolitan mélange, does such a literature belong? The Atlantic, in conjunction with the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity, asked four novelists with international followings to consider these questions.

One of the holy grails of publishing these days (and there are a few) is not a book time will immortalize, but rather a book that shops like Target will prioritize. And that, my friends, is where economic and cultural evolution meet in a splendidly ugly splash of bodily fluids. Ah, the cirlce of life. Of course, this circle has a five pointed star in it, but still…

Compared with a large chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble, which averages about 200,000 titles per location, Target carries only about 2,500 titles in each of its 1,700 stores. Offerings include diet books, children’s picture books, young-adult novels and series romances. Paperbacks far outnumber hardcovers, and over the last decade Target has focused on the larger trade format as opposed to the smaller mass-market paperbacks. (The other big-box retailers rely mostly on the biggest commercial books of the moment, though Costco does on occasion offer its own special picks of little-known authors.)

Virtually every book at Target is shelved face out. Books in the book club and Breakout program are set apart on so-called endcaps — narrower shelves that stand at the front or end of aisles — with specially designed signs.

At a Target in Clifton, N.J., last week, one top shelf was devoted exclusively to the current book club pick, “The Wednesday Sisters” by Meg Waite Clayton. Five small stacks were lined up, face out, while lower shelves held previous selections, including “The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes” by Diane Chamberlain and “Still Alice,” a first novel by Lisa Genova. Another endcap featured Breakout books under a sign that read “Hand-Picked Titles From Emerging Authors” and showed a picture of a small chick pecking its way out of a broken eggshell.

Not surprisingly, the conspicuous display helps sell books. “Still Alice,” which was a Target book club pick early this year, has sold 51,000 copies in its Target edition. Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that released “Still Alice,” said that the book — which has sold 174,000 copies over all, according to BookScan — has sold more in Target than in any other outlet.

A blogger (author?, sorry, I’m not in the know here) begs the people who pick scifi’s Hugos (ie, the readers) to pull up their socks and do it right. An open letter like this in the mainstream lit world would be dismissed as having a return address from the Realm of Crankcrit (the fabled land where conspiratorial misanthropes roam free and live in glass houses), but in the scifi world, people sit up and take notice, and start discussing. How healthy and vital!

Dear Science Fiction Fandom

I wanted to have a word about the Hugos. Science Fiction Fandom, these are your awards: the shortlists chosen and voted for by you. And because I too am a fan (though without Hugo voting privileges) they are my awards. They reflect upon us all. They remain one of the most prestigious awards for SF in the world. These lists say something about SF to the world.

Science Fiction Fandom: your shortlists aren’t very good.

I’m not saying the works you have shortlisted are terrible. They’re not terrible, mostly, as it goes. But they aren’t exceptionally good either. They’re in the middle. There’s a word for that. The word is mediocre.

File under, Unlikely in Sane Universe: Uman Thurman to play nun in adaptation of book about Ugandan schoolgirls

File under, 15 Minutes is Years in Republican Time: Bigoted airhead beauty queen, now the darling of a Republican party that seems to really go in for bodies over brains these days, has a book deal to tell her side of the story (which is presumably more than the “Duhr…mens-es kissin’ mens-es is garsh durn wrong” shocker she’s already given out)

File under, Necrophilia Pays Off for Rupert: Harper Collins is doing well after rushing a Michael Jackson book to press… (The book is square, trimmed, glue-bound, and easily ripped, much like Michael’s nose was)

File under, But What Do They Wear for Fake Ears?: Twilight fans give Trek nerds a run for their stolen lunch money

File under, Happy Smut Day: It’s been 50 years since the Yanks decided they wanted their smut more than they wanted Jesus… And they’re all going to hell for it!!!

It’s a frightening world. Amazon is trying to control your mind. But let’s be realistic: compared to environmental, viral, and nuclear annihilation, the whole Amazon thing doesn’t really make the news cut. Yet, on the other hand, the reason we’re following stories like this is to distract us from our imminent demise as a species. So let’s get on with it: AMAZON WANTS TO CONTROL YOUR MIND!

Amazon’s remote deletion of files from the Kindle paves the way for remote book-banning

A class action suit is brewing against Amazon over their strong-arm tactics

And as if acting like angry little customs agents at the border between reality and thought weren’t enough, Amazon’s also getting ready to put ads at the start of your books (I suspect this will be the deal breaker for most of us)

On the other hand, they’re offering “rare” books by POD


Competition is ramping up for Kindle, especially in countries where the market penetration has been delayed—hopefully these new companies will stick bamboo shoots under your thumbnails or something, just to get ahead of Amazon’s cornered market on the infliction of pain

Where’s the part in which she sits down at a table on which a midlist author’s hopes and dreams are filleted, sauted, and servered with a thick cream sauce to hide the stench of mediocrity?

Esther Newberg, 68, is an executive vice president at International Creative Management, now celebrating – or, as she prefers to describe her longevity and clout, now soldiering through – her 32nd year as a New York literary agent. Her clients include Patricia Cornwell, Carl Hiaasen, Caroline Kennedy and Thomas L. Friedman. She and Tate George, her 17-year-old Scottish fold cat, juggle households on the Upper East Side and in Sag Harbor.

Sounds tough. You read about these things and you wonder how some people “soldier” through.

Should publishers really be enabling all these teen authors with book deals when they’re most likely not ready to write something actually worth reading?

publishers should naturally be wary of publishing young people’s work simply because they’re young and have produced a novel, focusing on the hook and turning a blind eye to the quality. In your early teens, you’re not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice to take on high-falutin’ genres like fantasy and romance.