You mean random, six-foot-tall, toddler-crushing piles aren’t good enough? Pfft. Well, Mr. Fant-see-pants, do tell.

Who among us hasn’t, at moments of crisis, turned out our shelves after an exam or a breakup in an effort to reflect the shift in our internal weather? As a form of mental detox, you can’t beat it: the only disappointment in Purnell’s case is the new system he has adopted: the arrangement of his books in alphabetical order by author, from former colleague Lord Adonis to Emile Zola.

Canadian books in spaaaaaaaaaaace!

No link that I can find, but a press release announces that Gil Adamson’s The Outlander has been sold to Trudie Styler of Xingu Films for adaptation… A ‘Ninja favourite done good

Hong Kong bookstores do well with titles banned on mainland

Just what’s needed to turn the tide against teen idiocy—Harlequin launches imprint aimed at future stirrup-pant wearing laundromat mannequins… My question is: will the writing level have to be pulled back for the younger audience or ramped up?

Virginia’s lighthouse beach goes for a song, the lyrics of which are just “£80,000″ repeated again and again over a techno beat

Daily Dose of Digital

Amazon bows its head, touches its lips with one finger, and moves the dirt around with a toe—aw… How can I stay mad at you with that hang-dog expression on your face…

But new reports say they didn’t just erase the books, they erased people annotations to the books… so students who had been working on projects have lost everything… You’re grounded again, Amazie… Until you can learn to not be cartoonishly evil, you’re staying right here, mister, where I can keep an eye on you…

Should publishers fear the Kindle?

B&N launches its own ebook store that’s reportedly friendly to a wider range of devices… No word here on whether the books have a DRM leash like at Amazoodle

Looking for a non-bookstore-linked option? This guy got a Sony e-Reader last year and loves it… Most importantly, he has yet to buy a damn book for it… Fight the power, brother!

EU consults authors and publishers on Google situation

At Heidegger High School, the only sport is seduction…. Summer reading you can watch! (from Moby)

It’s generally advisable to not respond to bad reviews. You can usually only make a fool of yourself in attacking back. But what happens when the review crosses the boundary between critically negative and outrightly personal in its attack (and how can we define that boundary)? Is it ever okay to shoot back? Not if you plan to act like a baby who just got his finger pinched in the drawer and is now punching it, I’d say. As someone who’s been soundly (and bizarrely) attacked recently, I’d say responding requires a certain quiet, generous diplomacy. Angry people don’t want reason, they want a backrub. So give them a backrub and then when they calm down and can see reason again, politely tell them to fuck off.

By any stretch of the imagination, it could not be described as anything other than a hostile review, although subsequent debate was much concerned with whether it actually constituted an ad hominem attack.

De Botton, understandably stung, responded by posting a message on Caleb Crain’s website, a forum that he has since said – somewhat curiously – he regarded as semi-private (and what, indeed, can semi-privacy be?). Other outlets picking up on the story quoted the most egregious example of de Botton’s displeasure, in which he promised Crain that “I will hate you until the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”

Of course, this is not discourse of a particularly rarefied kind; but it is also surely instantly recognisable, without wishing to veer horribly into the realm of pop psychology, as the pained cry of an angry child, in which the impulse towards naked hatred is overlaid with a more adult but none the less strained desire to impress on the object the consequences of their actions. Elsewhere in the post, and perhaps more revealingly, de Botton questioned the sanity of Crain’s review; in a later message, he described Crain’s “accusations” as indicative of a “vindictive lunacy”.

Visiting author? Hot, willing ladies await your bidding! Every escort guaranteed to be triple-D!! (Discerning, Diplomatic, and Deferent!!!)

Literary escorts, by and large, are middle-aged women who make a living by picking up authors at the airport, shuttling them from one media outlet to another, filling them in on the next interviewer’s background, buying them lunch, telling them where the liquor store is, preventing them from having nervous breakdowns. Some do it as a job, some as a hobby. Escorts are always smart and invariably funny. A lot of them smoke.

Escorts immediately make you feel as if you had known them for decades. Their duties range from bypassing pileups on I-95 to purchasing double soy lattes to explaining why only one person showed up at your reading in Winnetka. In Los Angeles, where your first interview might be in Malibu and your second in Pasadena, no author could function without them. The same is true in Kansas City, a burg the size of Asia. But literary escorts are not simply chauffeuses; they are coaches, reconnaissance experts, debriefers, psychologists, comrades in arms. With few exceptions, they adore writers, and consider themselves lucky to ply their arcane trade.

Literary escorts embody the values of the cities they inhabit. In Boston and Milwaukee, they have names like Sally and Mary; in Los Angeles, names like Kim. In Seattle, the escorts talk a lot about coffee. My first escort in Los Angeles drove a black Porsche, wore a little black dress, was present and accounted for in the jewelry department, and would steal away during interviews to visit Rodeo Drive boutiques. She gleefully volunteered intimate details about her private life, enlisting me as an off-the-rack psychotherapist during my three-day visit. I liked her so much that I would cut short interviews so I could scoot back out to the Porsche and hear even more stories about her fascinating marriage.

Yann Martel is buying drinks next time

McGraw-Hill lays off 550

JK Rowling promises no more Harry

Richard Flanagan says new Aussie rules will kill industry

The most controversial dictionary ever?

America’s finest news source sold to China

I didn’t meet Seamus Heaney while in Ireland, but I did get to hang out with two of my favourite Irish authors at my reading in Dublin: Paul Durcan and Roddy Doyle. (That said, I’d love the opportunity to chat with Heaney, if only because he looks startlingly like my dad—and just think of what a mind-fuck that would be… I love him dearly, but my dad doesn’t read books. Ever. Picture this: when I told my dad I was reading for Roddy Doyle he said, “Isn’t that the guy from Planet of the Apes?”) This lovely profile piece around Heaney’s 70th birthday talks about how Heaney’s fame makes it an exercise for him to go out in public, though he retains his grace and charm.

Everyone wants a piece of Ireland’s first Nobel-winning poet since Yeats. When we arrive at our destination, an oyster bar overlooking St Stephen’s Green, the ebb and flow of Irish pride in Seamus, as he is universally known, surges up in a succession of spontaneous greetings. Everyone recognises Heaney’s professorial spectacles and silvery mop.

A frisson passes through the restaurant. This woman wants to tell him about her daughter, recovering from leukaemia, and to ask for an autograph. Two punters, checking the starting prices on a laptop, volunteer a tip about the 2.30 at Leopardstown. Another old chap wants to be remembered. And the maître d’ is beside himself with getting the best table ready.

I wonder how Heaney can stand it.

No need to worry. The object of this attention seems to move in a serene bubble of modesty and unconcern: he likes the attention, and it does not really trouble him. He’s had it, in different ways, all his life, and he knows that, for an Irish poet, it comes with the territory.

Sickening. How DARE they? These “authors” are the rusty heroin needles of literature, surely. Each and every one. I mean, spending all that time seeing the world from a child’s perspective in order to entertain and delight… Come ON! They should all just preemptively register as sex offenders now and get it over with. Good thing they have a sane laureate advocating on their behalf… (oh, and I reiterate: Philip Pullman for president)

The Vetting and Barring Scheme is managed by the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which was set up in response to the 2002 Soham murders, committed by former school caretaker Ian Huntley. It kicks off this October, requiring the 11.3m people across the education, care and health industries who work with children to register – for a £64 fee – on a national database.

Authors including Michael Morpurgo, Quentin Blake and Anthony Horowitz have all hit out at the scheme, saying along with Pullman and Fine that it meant they wouldn’t be appearing in schools in the future. “All of us are constantly invited to do tours of schools abroad. If we can no longer enthuse British children about reading then I’m happy to go to more sensible places like Australia, New Zealand, America, France and Italy,” said Fine on Friday.

Pullman, talking on BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning, asked why he “should have to pay £64 to a government agency to be given a certificate saying ‘I’m not a paedophile’. It’s so ludicrous that it’s almost funny, but it’s not funny, it’s actually rather dispiriting and sinister.”

Browne, however, has taken a more sanguine approach to news of the scheme. “I feel that as writers we shouldn’t necessarily be granted an exemption,” he said. “If all people who work with children have to be vetted by the police then we shouldn’t be an exception. It seems a bit odd that we have to pay for it, though.”

The links that fed into these pieces on big name authors trying to get their books out before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code sequel corners the market are much more exciting than the text of either: “Novelists racing to beat Dan Brown”. You can see how a guy’s hopes might be raised. I’m picturing crowbars and steel-toed boots. Sigh. I propose a new headline for later this year that might ease my pain: “Critics racing to beat Dan Brown”.

Publication of new books by writers such as Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and William Trevor have been brought forward to give them a chance of reaching the best-seller lists before Brown’s new novel hits the shelves on September 15.

The Lost Symbol is expected to dominate the book charts for months and is already in the number one spot on online retailer Amazon’s pre-order list.

Publishers said they had had to act fast when they heard of the publication date for The Lost Symbol.

A senior executive at Penguin, which is publishing Trevor’s new novel Love and Summer on August 27 and Hornby’s new book, Juliet Naked, on September 3, said: “When we heard that Dan Brown’s book was due out on September 15 there was a fair bit of reshuffling.

Ricahrd Nash, former Soft Skull publisher and bookman of sheer awesomeness, on why the current model of publishing is standing the shadow of a piano while holding a lit stick of dynamite and wearing a sandwich board with a red and white target and a bullseye that reads “Dodo”.

The question increasingly arises in today’s media: can publishing be saved? No. It cannot and should not. There are plenty of non-profit publishers that exist to create and distribute the un-economic content. For-profit publishing should not be saved – it should figure out new business models, ones that offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for. We cannot wait for a deus ex machina to descend. (In other words, neither MySpace, nor Twitter, nor price-fixing, nor some new piracy-inducing extension of copyright law will save publishing – we simply need to start doing business better.)

What are those services? It’s premature to state definitively, but we need to start with the conversation, so that we can listen to what the readers want. Clearly the reading group is the best thing that happened to publishing in the past 30 years – while reading is solitary, talking about books is social. Given that books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media, they are commensurately better reflections of our minds and identities than other media. We publishers should be servicing readers’ desire to communicate about themselves with peers, offering books as the basis for connecting.

For the next little while, expect these daily doses to contain near toxic levels of Kindle poisoning as the world reacts to the shocking “discovery” that electronic files aren’t so much bought as rented at the discretion of faceless, money grubbing corporations. I won’t buy an e-ink reader until a decent DRM-free, open source one comes along. I guess I’m stuck with all these gorgeous, corpulent, sensually-pleasing bookasaurs.

Everyone’s pissed at Amazon… again (still?)

But new info suggests the removed books may have been pirated—which raises the question: how did pirated texts make it on to Amazon in the first place?

Here’s BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow on the subject… Hm, I didn’t know he was into copyright stuff…

University presses are stepping up ebook efforts (I hate to be the one to point this out but there’s no where to step but up from the ground floor… Actually, I don’t really hate to point that out; I quite enjoy it…)

Writer, on failing to become an author, becomes twit instead…

Is the logical evolution of the e-reader the book? (video) (from Maud)

Author of Angela’s Ashes, dead at 78.

Ninja Lisa Peet reporting for duty, as always, last. My day job whups my ass for a full eight hours faithfully, so my writing time tends to happen late. Plus all you young whippersnappers — you make me feel positively stately. Or what passes for stately around here, which is basically old and cranky. It’s been fun, though — an honor to be an honorary ninja, and to work with all you hotshots on both sides of the border.

I have my own blog, Mappa Mundi, which is pretty much a noodly amalgam of observations — about books, life, and pets, mostly — and you’re welcome to stop by.

But! I’ve also got a litblog in the works. I know, I know, me and everybody’s grandma. But I really enjoyed my time over at Readerville, and wanted to keep some of that good momentum going. So in the spirit of Andy Hardy (almost said the spirit of Andy Rooney, which isn’t too far from the truth either) I’ve got a few compañeros from there on board and we’re putting together something that I hope will be fun and interesting, and I do hope everyone will check it out when it’s up and running. I’m shooting for the end of August, so stay tuned. And since it won’t be anything like Bookninja — if my time here has taught me anything it’s that there could never be another Bookninja — I hope George will give it a mention when the time comes. (It does have a name, but I’m reserving my right to change my mind up until the very last minute.)

No new publications at present — I’m just toiling away here in the dark for my own purposes — so if your trigger fingers are feeling clicky, go buy George’s book.

This is where we all hug and cry around the campfire, right? And then steal cigarettes from the cartons under the counselors’ beds, because we’ll all be gone in the morning. Bye, ninjas!

Heather ‘The Cat Lady’ Clitheroe here. Thanks much for reading my posts for the last couple of weeks. If you’re dying for more cat lady action, you can find me at Lectio.ca.

If you’ll permit me to flog for a moment…I have a short story appearing in Evolve (about halfway down the page) edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and set for release in March 2010. It’s a vampire anthology, and my vampires are cool because they’re Japanese vampires that steal your soul (ooooo-ooooOOOOOO!).

I’d also like to mention that I have a story in the current issue of Kaleidotrope, which got a lovely mention in Locus this month (woo! yay!). Kaleidotrope is a young magazine, edited by my friend Fred, and it’s definitely worth reading. Plus, the cats think you should all try to support emerging writers (i.e. me) and emerging fiction editors and magazinateurs (i.e. Fred) by subscribing. And buying gift subscriptions for friends.

And, finally…mad props to the Banff Centre for the Arts, who have been kind (and foolish) enough to let me come for writing residencies. I can’t say enough good things about the Banff Centre, and if you ever go there, be sure to have breakfast with Jim Olver and to say hello to the gang in IT. They’re good people.

Thanks again…and welcome home, George!

Elvis is about to leave the building. It’s been real. As shameless and exploitative as I usually am, I’m going to duck out modestly on this one. Okay, one pitch: I may be moving to Toronto come January, and if anyone out there knows any available gigs/opps for a young, punky, spunky whippersnapper like myself, then do me.

George, you must be some sort of cyborg to handle this. Best of luck to ya. And to my fellow temp-ninjas, we were clutch. My NY couch is available always. And no thanks to my partner, who still — unbelievably — has the chutzpah not to exist.

If you liked what I had to say here, check out my book blog A Certain Bent Appeal. I review books, I mouth off, I post news, videos and links, I jump to many the conclusion, and it’s all done with love and a healthy dose of snark. I post daily on week days so please drop in, add me to your Google Reader or RSS feed, whatever you like. Right now I’m reading the Amazon First Novel shortlist as a way to see whether newcomers to the Canadian literary scene are diverging from the old motifs of the Can Lit Guard. It’s going to be more terrifyingly intelligent and thought-out than an Anne Michaels book and definitely a bit more fun.

Now some well-deserved thank yous:

• Thank you to George for this opportunity, for taking a risk and handing over the reins. Thank you also for taking the time to build and update this site. Canadian literary culture needs you.
• Thank you to the commenters who made for very lively discussions.
• Thank you to my lovely partner, who took to calling herself a ‘Bookninja Widow’ these past couple of weeks. XO

You know, we all said it was going to happen. Apparently when you buy a book for your Kindle, it’s only there so long as Amazon, or the publishers selling the book, say so. People were astonished this morning to find their copies of 1984 and Animal Farm “disappeared” from their Kindles. I know. How ironic. The explanation? The publisher changed its mind. What’s next? A crowbar division to get the hard copies? Biggest mark of shame yet on Amazon.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

Bookninja: “Jack Vaaaaaance…!”

Jack Vance, described by his peers as “a major genius” and “the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy,” has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing — six decades and counting. Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor, Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore’s shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.

Bookninja: “Ridley Scott is alive?”

In a speech at the 2007 Venice Film Festival at  special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley Scott, the legendary director of Alien, announced that he believes that science-fiction as a genre is dead -gone the way of Westerns.

Scott believes, as we do at The Daily Galaxy, that although the flashy special effects of block-busters such as The Matrix, Independence Day and The War of the Worlds, may sell at the box office, that none can beat Stanley Kubrick’s haunting 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is as fresh (and perhaps more relevant) today as the day it premiered.

The video at the end of the post -Kubrick 2001 -The Space Odyssey Explained- is a minor masterpiece in itself and is not to be missed.

“There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it,” Scott said.

Apparently authors are getting drastic and pimping themselves out to bookclubs via direct marketing campaigns that would make an Scientologist Amway hooker blush.

The focus on book clubs has spurred the evolution of a new breed: the author-hustler, the writer who succeeds in large part because of door-to-door salesmanship. After the writing comes a new challenge, one of industriousness, perseverance, and charm. Since 2000, Adriana Trigiani has averaged two to three book clubs a week by phone, and this past April, she led “The World’s Biggest Book Club,” a 300-person event run out of New York’s Convent of the Sacred Heart High School (the very set of Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga’s [mis]education). Chris Bohjalian, whose book Midwives was an Oprah selection in October 1998, began phoning into groups after he was forced to cancel his book tour in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Requests keep increasing, and this year he anticipates talking to 120 groups. As soon as The Divorce Party came out, Laura Dave was reaching out to book clubs at the suggestion of her editor and publicist, both of whom recognized her book’s potential appeal to the middle-aged woman. “Every time I speak to a book group,” Dave says, “almost without exception that book club refers me to another book club that emails.” Dave has done over 100 discussions in person, by phone, and on Skype. She says that Gwyn, the middle-aged narrator of her second novel, is a composite of some of the women she’s met in groups.

Stop acting coy. You know the song I mean.

No one else wants to shamelessly flaunt themselves? Or else the rest of you want to take the time to write a decent post? All right, fine. I’m both shameless and half-assed, so I’ll go first! When I’m not actively taking steps to try and become a Canadian citizen by guest-posting on internationally renowned book blogs, I write a blog of my own called Citizen Reader, where I regularly pick on Jodi Picoult, Thomas Friedman, and books I don’t think deserved to be published. I also write for a lovely database called the Reader’s Advisor Online, which public and other libraries can subscribe to so they can better help readers find books they might like.

I also like long walks and holding hands. But that’s a whole other story. Thanks, gentle readers of Bookninja, fellow ninja family members/guest bloggers, and of course, our ninja lord and master, George, for putting up with me here. It’s been fabo. Now go buy George’s book.

Apparently strangers aren’t so strange if they share a love of the same book. Like the time when I was 12 when that one old guy offered me a Coke slushie, a Dragonlance novel, and a ride in his van. Ah, the memories.

Novels aren’t just sources of solitary cogitation. They are social objects, and we use them to brandish our identities, mark our allegiances and broker our relationships. They can provoke passions as strongly as politics. Thanks to the intimate connection between story and reader, they impact upon us very personally, and can drive otherwise undemonstrative folk to feel they have a right – nay duty – to confront complete strangers with their zeal, and have thus been responsible for some of the most unexpected human encounters I’ve had.

One of the grandmasters of Canadian Science Fiction, dead at 83.

Okay, so some of these might have been touched on here and there. I tried reading much of what’s gone on the last couple weeks while on the plane, but I just can’t keep all that awesomeness in my head at one time. So pardon the reposts:

News:

Carol Ann Duffy just went one more step up the Awesome Ladder, ascending from Gnarly to Rad… only a few more steps and she’ll be at the top: Totally Tubular. Presenting the Ted Hughes award, funded with Duffy’s paycheque… (The Laureates of the future thank her for being a rate buster, I’m sure)

Michel Jackson, le fou etoile, est aime apres tout… peut-etre… Ma Francais est tres tres bien, non?

Remainders are great for making money… except if you’re, you know, an author

It’s really perfect, if you think about it: New Nabokov story  to be released in magazine full of naked little girls (mental note: do not look at search stats for next month until the hits on that last phrase die down…)

Ted Kennedy LE to come, like a high-end dominatrix, between rich Democrats and their money

In an undoubtedly fair and balanced story, the New York Post (aka the Fox News of print journalism), notes that Arabic translation of gay travel book turns word “gay” into “pervert”

Publishers lean on backlist tombstone set in troubled times—ZOMBIE POWER!

Penguin is the world’s largest publisher… In related news, gay penguin leaves partner for chick… Fucking little tuxedo’d player. Even considering my own biographical details, I’m inordinately sad

New Pinter award from PEN

The Pope and Oscar, sitting in a tree….

New Grahan Greene mystery

Tolkien family versus the world, round 12

Naipaul switches teams

Aussie book regulations changed, publishers recry foul… Moby with the call

Reports say Frank McCourt is deathly ill and we wish him the best

Daily Dose of Digital

If publishers force Amazon to raise ebook prices, they’ll get pirated… In related news: 2+2=4

When to release the ebook of your expensive hardcover?

…And again

Kindle set to bring future to UK

Youtube book club?

Spain arming for digitial revolution

So, the news cometh. But first, I’d like to announce that I’ve asked our wonderful guest bloggers of the last two weeks to make some posts today, at their discretion, linking directly and shamelessly to their own projects, whether that be their own blogs or twitter accounts (which you should follow), or their books and/or writing projects online. Please support our good, hardworking ‘Ninjas so they get more than a tshirt and thong out of the last two weeks’ labour. And if you’re at Amazoodle buying their book, might as well throw one of mine in there too. You know, for the free shipping. Really, I’m doing this to break the self-congratulations ice. Honestly. Look, just buy the damn book.

Hear my piercing cry! Note my impressive wingspan! Shield your eyes against the light flashing from my brandished talons! I am come, and shall never leave again! Until next time.

So, I’m in the Toronto airport, terminal one (second only in my pantheon of hated, cruel goddesses to Halifax international, where hope goes to die), where I just paid 10 clams to type this, so I should be brief. He said.

I had a great time in London, Belfast, and Dublin where I partied too hard for my own good,  but also got some good work done. I am refreshed and reinvigorated, and will return to you, my flock, on Monday. Speaking of shepherds, let’s have a big hand for the Bookninja guest bloggers who rocked your literary world while I was away. I peeked in occasionally and was amazed to see the variety and strength of the posts and the vibrancy of the conversation. I hope you long-time readers enjoyed the change of pace (but not too much because you’re back to me on Monday), and that any new readers who followed the guest bloggers here will stay on and join the Bookninja family. Because, in the end, that’s what we are: a family. A dangerous, semi-invisible family of merciless killers. Chokes me up just thinking about it. Sniff.

That all said, I’d like to thank, in no particular order, the starting line up for the first ever Bookninja.com Grand Experiment in Mob Rule: Sarah Statz Cords, Bronwyn Kienapple, Lisa Peet, Heather the Cat Lady, Rob Wiersema, and Menachem “Elvis the Pelvis” Kaiser. I’ll send you emails soon to invoice you for the costs associated with that one party where the elephant got loose and stepped on Heather Reisman’s yappy Yorkshire Terrier. Come to think of it, maybe I should be paying you.

I go back and forth on Dave Eggers (author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founder of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency). When I read his writing (particularly the nonfiction stuff) I love him. When I hear about his writing a movie, funding charitable concerns for youth literacy, and starting oral history projects, I can’t help it–I start to get a little tired of him. Primarily because I’m jealous. I mean, come on. Does the guy ever sleep?

But today’s a day when I love him with that same uncomplicated love I felt for him when I first finished A Heartbreaking Work… Primarily because he had this to say, when interviewed by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir:

“Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they’re all printed on paper. That’s the main way we get them motivated, that they know it’s going to be in print. It’s much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it’s only going to be on the Web.”

God bless him. Not it may seem churlish to be saying this on, you know, a web site (and a damn fine web site at that) but something about hearing that kids today (or, as ancient people in our mid-30s like me say, “those darn kids”) still like to see some things in print does my heart good. And precious little does that anymore, so I’ll take it.

In a rather bizarre turn, the UK has instituted a policy that all persons who work with children, including visiting children’s authors, pay a 64 pound fee to be registered on a national database. This includes an obligatory police check.

The scheme, called the Vetting and Barring Scheme, has been put in place after the 2002 murders by a former school caretaker.

Authors are protesting in droves. Said Philip Pullman:

“It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation,” the author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy said today. “When you go into a school as an author or an illustrator you talk to a class at a time or else to the whole school. How on earth – how on earth – how in the world is anybody going to rape or assault a child in those circumstances? It’s preposterous.”

Other others, such as Gillian Cross, do not see the new policy as out of order:

“I understand entirely why people are enraged about the whole child abuse suspicion frenzy, which is particularly hard on men. It is nevertheless true that many children are abused. Theirs is the real suffering, and if checking can help to prevent that, I’m not opposed to it.”

This reminds me of an article I wrote a few years ago about a website called Turnitin.com. Over 300 courses at U of T used the site. Students were required to submit their papers to the site and the site would compare them to a database of previous essays. What I mean to say is – is it right to cast a shadow of guilt over a majority of innocents? Is this a result of a sex panic, as Pullman suggests?

One thing is clear, the children that this policy is supposed to protect are now bereft of some of the best minds in kids lit. Where’s the justice in that?

In American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis has a bit to say about the nom de plume (which is what Nom de Guerre’s been calling himself so we won’t find out he’s secretly a sissy writer) and its various uses. Aside from the usual reasons of privacy and nonculpability, some of your more prolific authors will put them on, like hats out of a trunk, to dress up for different genres. Of course if you’re as prolific as, say, Joyce Carol Oates, you run the risk of having two stories under two different names being accepted by the same journal. But most of us don’t have to worry about that particular scenario. Mostly the pseudonym is a small flirtation with multiple personalities — or, as Nora Roberts says, “It’s marketing. There’s Pepsi, there’s Diet Pepsi, and there’s Caffeine Free Pepsi.”

It’s also a useful distancing tool for writers who do hack work to pay the bills, so as to avoid the old crap showing up on their Amazon page when they finally sell that literary fiction. Which is not to be confused with distancing tools used by literary fiction authors writing under their own names who would just rather stay home, thanks.

Still, for a really good smokescreen you can’t beat plain old anonymity. Taking that idea and running with it is The New Anonymous, a new journal that blind screens and edits all submissions and then publishes them — you guessed it — anonymously: “At The New Anonymous we celebrate the text. We are at once a literary journal and a literary act.” The first issue is out, and you can order it through their website. It’s also on sale at newstands, but we’re not allowed to tell you which ones.

Sniff, sniff. Only one more day of posting for us…George is coming home soon, and he’ll discover that we’ve had boyfriends over after eleven, and that we tried to make salt-water taffy last Saturday. And, um…that the microwave caught on fire last Saturday, but not because of the salt-water taffy. And, um, there was a noise complaint from the neighbours, but it was totally bogus, so….

Anyhow. Under ‘aaaand because we love you,’ here’s a link to This American Life’s ‘Pro Se’ episode. It’s worth listening to, if only for the following lines:

“Brian says that Tony’s story demonstrates that no two psychiatrists can agree on anything; they basically just make it up as they go along. I think his story demonstrates that it is a huge mistake to screw with psychiatrists. And you should be careful not to tell people you’re crazy, ’cause you might turn out to be way too convincing about it.”

Somebody should mention that to, oh, a celebrity or eleven. Maybe a couple of writers, too.

Where have I been living? Ever since someone commented about book trailers being a good idea to publicize books, I’ve suddenly noticed these trailers everywhere. And they’re good:

• Quirk Books dramatizes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters;
• The Morning News’s Robert Birnbaum links to a trailer for Midnight Picnic (please note: any book that gets compared to Jim Crace’s stellar Being Dead is a book I must read);
• Neil Gaiman narrates one for The Graveyard Book (am I the last person to learn of Neil Gaiman’s super-sexy voice, by the way?)
• Too bad I’ve already tried to read (and failed to understand or enjoy most of) Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, because the trailer makes me want to try again; and
• Even Jodi Picoult gets in on the action.

Okay, I just threw in the Picoult to see if you were still paying attention. At least her trailer watches just like her books read; it’s too long and the sound and idea of it grated on my very soul. Here. Console yourself with a new book trailer (of a sort) from Carte Noire.

• I have a (now not so) secret fetish for hideous sci-fi covers. Bring on the neon! Bring on the tacky fonts! Better to be brash than sepia, I like to say. io9 may think these are ‘the worst’ covers but I happen to think they’re the bees knees, thank you.
• More on book jackets from Sonya Chung over at The Millions.
• Brian Joseph Davies argues that fiction could not have created a stranger character than Michael Jackson (and he seems a bit jealous about this).
• Interview with artist Ben Jones over at Fecal Face (could there be a better name for a website?)
• Excellent advice for structuring your short story collection from BookFox.
• Brian Utley is reading a book a week for a year and blogging about it. It’s not cooking the entirety of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but it’s still a fine endeavor, regardless.
• Hilarious break down by Chris Lander of Stuff White People Like about books being made into films (with Where the Wild Things Are as the case in point).
• Could this be a Stuff White People Like post – that white people like to read about regular jobs by regular folks but with high-gloss photos and stories about the redeeming value of manual labour? The Book Bench looks at an upcoming book titled Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress.
• The Hunter graphic novel adaptation promises to be Mad Men chic, but even more depraved!
• It takes just 42 years to compile the world’s most comprehensive thesaurus.
• Proving that people will read anything based on Jane Austen’s novels, Quirk Book announced that a follow-up to their surprise hit Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is planned. It’s called Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters and will hit stores on September 15th. Can this unholy mash-up work without the presence of the Living Dead?

Romance novels don’t usually get the respect they deserve. Take a look at this interesting post on the shifting ‘zeitgeist’ of the romance novel

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a host of “rape romances” that are routinely sneered at by younger romance readers and/or people young to romance reading. The device is that the hero is cruel, arrogant, and he “rapes her until she loves him.

Not the end of the world, as it turns out.

I find it interesting that many women’s fantasies at that time featured rape prominently… Mind, this definition of “rape” is not a legal one; it’s a highly stylized one in which it allows the female to retain her Good Girl status while still A) having sex and B) enjoying it because the hero is a different kind of rapist: One who is attractive, who is uncontrollably attracted to the heroine, and who gets her off after he’s made it possible for her to have an out, i.e., “I was raped.”

But peek at this gentle rebuttal.

Happy Bastille Day, neither a Canadian nor United States holiday — not sure where the Quebeçois stand, but I’m sure someone will fill me in — however, still something to think about. While an extensive trolling of the internet hasn’t revealed a whole lot of commemorative Bastille Day literary news, there is a strong emphasis on the dangers of not learning from and thus repeating history, which I am fairly sick of by this point.

In terms of Bastille Day reading, the Afterword’s list is all in French and therefore doesn’t help me much, although it looks smart; Reading Copy’s is a bit more égalitarian. My own shortlist involves my lovingly dilapidated bedside copy of Simon Schama’s Citizens — I fell off my chapter-a-month horse a few months back. It’s an accessible and entertaining read, and my Bastille Day Resolution is to start over again from the beginning and stick with it to the finish, because it’s a very good book and I imagine it’s better to know this stuff than not.

I did find a two-week-old article by Cass Sunstein in the Spectator about the dynamics of group extremism, which was long but germane — even if he does wait until the last page to admit that extremism can be useful, which we of course know because it’s Bastille Day.

On the other hand, all we really need to know is right here, and it’s short.

That’s right. The annual conference of the American Library Association was held in Chicago this past weekend. With that many wild conference attendees in town, seeking to blow their shushing stereotypes and letting their buns down all at one time, I’m surprised that the city is still standing. And after reading some reviews of the event (nicely made available for us librarians too lazy to attend the conference itself), I’m actually feeling a little bad I didn’t dredge up the energy to go. Tops on the list:

James Kennedy’s program on the fantasy genre was enjoyably weird. I’m going to have to look into this Kennedy guy (he’s the author of the fantasy book The Order of the Odd-Fish), because I like anybody who comes up with this line:

“But I will tell you what T.S. Eliot couldn’t bear, and that was that his name was an anagram for toilets.”

And then there was the panel titled Books and Blogs, Made for Each Other? I took away points for the boringness of the title, but added points back because the panel included YA author John Green. My favorite part of this review was that “none of the panelists thought Twitter would replace blogs.” That makes me very happy, because even thinking the word “Twitter” gives me a small but intense headache behind my right eye, and then makes my eyelid twitch. I should really get that looked at.

(Links via The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog and RickLibrarian.)

From Publisher’s Weekly, we have a delightful story on the popularity of zombies in fiction and media.

Zombie fiction is filling an increasing number of niches in genre publishing schedules. Last fall, Night Shade Books, a leading specialty publisher of fantasy and science fiction, brought out John Joseph Adams’s anthology The Living Dead, a connoisseur’s culling of much of the best short zombie fiction published over the past three decades. It will be followed next February by St. Martin’s The New Dead, a collection of all original zombie tales, edited by Christopher Golden and featuring contributions from Max Brooks, Joe Hill and other horror heavyweights. Ulysses Press’s The Ultimate Book of Zombies: An Anthology of Flesh-Eating Fiction will just precede it into print this December.

There’s even mention of zombies for YA books. Oh, be still my heart. Zombie Harry Potter? Yes, please!

The Guardian reports that a new publishing venture, Full Circle Editions, has started up in the UK. It’s the brain child of Bloomsbury founder Liz Childer (most famous for having discovered J.K. Rowling), two TV producers and a former editor of industry rag The Bookseller.

Their first offering, a book of poetry called The Burning of the Books, was just launched and is obviously bred from deep love for the book as physical product – it features creamy paper, fold-outs, photos and a slipcase. In an age of e-books, cut-backs and superleads is this madness?

But I was there out of curiosity about the new publishing house as much as the physical product. There’s an inherent interest in all these big names getting together – especially now, when publishing is so mired in difficulties: when small presses such as the much-loved Dedalus are lurching from crisis to crisis, bigger houses are announcing job losses every other week and cynical marketers are attempting to stifle the variety and independence of publishing outlets yet further by locking us into dependence on purchasing hubs such as the Kindle – a device with fire-based säuberung embedded in its name and repression in its DRM-infected software.

It is clear from the article that Full Circle has sprung from a desire within the founders to free themselves from constant prostration to the bottom line, celebrity authors and marketing hoopla.

There will always be a market for specialty books such as graphic novels, chapbooks and the like so despite the article’s reservations I don’t think this venture is entirely made of marshmallow fluff and pipe dreams.  And isn’t it the case that a recession is the prime time to innovate when others are cutting back and hiding behind their (limited) budgets?

Freehand Books appeared last year just as the recession was making its introductions and landed a win with a Giller nom for Good to a Fault. So perhaps Full Circle’s debut is perfect timing, after all.

In directly inverse proportion to the heartbreakingly lovely cover of its new fiction special, tales of internecine struggles behind the scenes at Granta are getting uglier. In the Guardian last weekend, Robert McCrum took some serious issue with acting editor John Freeman’s Granta-without-borders vision.

In his June mission statement, Freeman said: “Thirty years since Bill Buford, Pete de Bolla and Jonathan Levi gave birth to the new Granta, the landscape has changed again. While American literature remains enormously vital and restless – could England ever have produced a Thomas Pynchon? Junot Diaz? – a literary journal cannot in good conscience pretend that an Anglo-American dialogue is at the heart of our cultures.” His talking points aren’t particularly radical, and really only stretch Granta’s basic platform a little. But he’s inflamed McCrum’s loyalty and coaxed out of him some good old-fashioned Anglocentric defensiveness:

Whatever happened to that “Anglo-American dialogue” that Granta “in good conscience” no longer has time for? The short answer is that it actually went global about 20 years ago. Under the new management, readers of Granta will be missing this bigger picture, but here it is, anyway. Like it or loathe it, the engine of the contemporary global literary dialogue is Anglo-American. At the risk of stating the obvious, the intermarriage of English and American culture in its broadest expression sponsors the really dominant cultural fusions. Four out of the last 10 Nobel laureates write in English. Barack Obama reads Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Derek Walcott’s poems, and quotes from the King James Bible.

Goodness. And we’re not even talking about football teams here. At least nobody on either side has said the word Postcolonialism. Yet.

JW: Alex, let’s try “21st Century Book Nerd Semiotics” for $1000.

AT: In a previous Bookninja post, Sarah wishes she made as much money as her male publishing counterparts so she could buy a book purse to solve — THIS problem! James Wolcott.

JW: What’s a Culture Snob to Do?

AT: Gooood!

But… is it? With all the concerns over e-royalties, DRM, and the price of the Kindle, is it horrendously shallow to mourn the potential passing of the book as a signifier of taste? I can’t help myself — I think so. As a daily subway rider and inveterate title-peeker, as someone who would rather scour your bookshelves than look in your medicine cabinet, I would deeply miss that little frisson of nosiness. I’m just not good at making snap judgments based on clothes or eyewear. And that goes both ways — I like being scouted. Hey, I have the most lovingly curated bathroom reading in the North Bronx.

I sense a little desperation in the air. Not for nothing are literary dating services cropping up all over. There will always be ways to take each other’s measure, but I’m not exactly sure what they are.

Who knows, maybe Penguin Books deck chairs will be ubiquitous someday. That’s not quite the cultural indicator I’m thinking of, though.

[Disclaimer: Please note that nobody is calling Sarah a culture snob. It was just an easy meta-Ninja reference.]

The good news: For the first time ever, a gay book has been translated into Arabic. The bad news: They used an old Arabic word for ‘gay’ which apparently means ‘pervert.’ The author,  Michael Luongo, commented:

This is the first-ever gay book to have been translated into Arabic after first having been printed in English, so I am very proud. The only problem — the big problem — is that they used an old word in Arabic for gay which also means ‘pervert.’ So the new book has in huge words ‘Michael Luongo — Pervert Travels in the Muslim World’ across the cover.

The New York Times is running a story on sponsored bloggers. Well, maybe not sponsored, per se, but bloggers who get swag to ‘test’ and then blog about it.

“The proliferation of paid sponsorships online has not been without controversy. Some in the online world deride the actions as kickbacks. Others also question the legitimacy of bloggers’ opinions, even when the commercial relationships are clearly outlined to readers.”

George linked to this article a little while ago – about bloggers requesting review copies. I think review copies of books fall somewhat outside of the latest diaper pail sensation, but do they really? Should all bloggers offer a disclosure statement if they’ve received a review copy? By the way…blogging on Bookninja is awesome.**

**oh, and I’m getting a free t-shirt for it, too.

Here’s your frivolous book craft links for the day: Book Purses!

Seriously. Has everyone else already seen these? I’ve never carried a purse in my life and I WANT that Chicago Manual of Style one. Now if only I made as much cash as all my male counterparts in publishing I could have one.*

All right. Now go back about all your big important Monday business.

*You know I had to say it.

…one giant leap for women in publishing.

Hot on the heels of Bronwyn’s post pointing out pay disparities according to gender in the publishing industry, I thought it’d be nice to highlight one woman who’s doing pretty well in publishing right now: reality TV star Lauren Conrad:

“Lauren has topped the New York Times Best Seller list for a second week in a row with her debut novel, ‘L.A. Candy’…Loosely based on her own life, ‘L.A. Candy’ follows 19-year-old Jane, who moves to Hollywood to start an internship and winds up becoming one of the town’s hottest reality stars.”

First of all, if you have no idea who Lauren Conrad is, no worries. I live in America and I have no idea. Evidently she’s on some program called “The Hills.” Secondly, yes, I do look at OMG! Yahoo on a daily basis, because I work a desk job and blowing time on guilty-pleasure Internet sites is just what you do to make it through the day. And, last but not least, I love that the novel is only “loosely based” on Conrad’s life…and features a main character on a reality show. Maybe James Frey should take note and at least “loosely” base some of his nonfiction on real life.

Publishers Weekly has released their annual salary survey and the bit that is really getting me riled up is the news that the salary gap between men and women in the US is $30,600! Granted, this is less than 2007’s gap of $39,080, but there can be no excuse on earth to make this right.

One might think that publishing, an industry with a high percentage of female employees, would be less prone to old-fashioned ideas about gender. This is disgusting and cannot be excused. I’d be more than ecstatic if someone could give me a tip on how this is possible.

In other happy news, 70% of respondents work at a company that has instituted a salary freeze. Only 13% feel very secure in their jobs and 11% feel very insecure. A whopping 35% did not receive a raise last year. And yet only 26% of respondants expect to leave their job in the next two years. What a loyal bunch we are.

Please click here if you would like to gorge yourself on these statistics. Do not blame me if it causes indigestion.

[Edit: these comments are based on the PW article. The focus of this article, in turn, is US-only]

I’ve heard of self-publishing successes (i.e. The Shack and Daemon – hey, no hate here) but a book deal from self-publishing on the Kindle is a first for me.

Boyd Morrison uploaded his novel The Ark to the Kindle and people. actually. bought. it. This garnered the attention of wily eyed Simon & Schuster who snapped up Morrison for a two book deal. Both The Ark and a new novel in the series will release in hardcover in summer 2010.

Morrison’s website is leading me to believe this is secretly a Jesus book and yet, kudos to him. He’s managed to bypass agents, the slush pile, politics etc. and landed himself what I imagine is a fairly sweet book deal. This should also bring attention to and increase the validity of e-books. It is sort of funny, though, that a digital book still needs to be printed to be seen as ‘actually published.’ Small steps.

Amazon should be chuffed that their precious Kindle is being knocked off by the Chinese. Maybe they’ll even be fake Kindle vendors on the streets, hawking their monstrous white wares. Not too many details about this puppy other than it’s $210 (less than ye Kindle), has a cellular connection to allow for downloads, has a 6″ screen and looks completely like Amazon’s device (except for the fact that it appears to be missing that annoying slide-y device on the right). It’ll be available in Japan later this year.

Via Gizmodo

Is there a point where you give up on Summer Reading Lists? They’re such an innocent guilty pleasure, romantic without the weight of actual romance, so heavy with all that salty, sunbleached potential. I never really get tired of them. And in case you too find yourself nearly halfway through July — which makes it almost the midpoint of capital-S Summer in my opinion — and in need of some good summer fantasy by way of reading material, David Gutkowski of Largehearted Boy has compiled a Summer Reading List database going back to just before Memorial Day 2008. It holds all the warm-weather reading dreams you could possibly want.

Then again, if perhaps you’ve reached this halfway point and suddenly realized that being involved in the production of something awful called a Summer Books Double Issue means you’re not getting any real time off until the end of August, and that your personal Summer Reading fantasy involving being stretched out on the Jersey Shore reading The Food of a Younger Land has been replaced by a day trip to Orchard Beach with a tuna fish sandwich and two Heinies in a plastic bag and coming home on public transportation with sand in your bathing suit… well, you might want to pick a beach book that’s a little more prickly, a little more demanding of your time and attention because who the hell wants to let your guard down like that anyway? Relaxation is for sissies.

And in that case, I give you Columbia Journalism Review’s Summer Reading List for Journalists. From Xenophon’s Anabasis to D.D. Guttenplan’s brand new The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, there’s not a piece of brain candy in the bunch. You will probably not come home with the coveted sunburn. But your mind, your mind will be on fire.

Via The Guardian, we learn that Arundhati Roy sees writing as a weapon (among other things). Referring to her Booker Prize, she comments…

“The prize,” she says now, “was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.”

I don’t know how I feel about this. Is literature intended primarily to effect change? Or is it a mix of entertainment and admonishment? I don’t think we ever really talked about that in e-school (get it? e-school? Instead of j-school? English majors? Eh? Eh?)…it was assumed that there was a body of work that was important…weaponized literature, I guess.

I suppose there must be a divide in literature as weapon and the vampire polemics we seem to be swimming in these days. I’m not sure what kind of sparkly, brooding weapon they’re supposed to be.

I love stuff — artifacts, ephemera, pretty things, kitschy things, oddball objects with stories attached. But I don’t like the maintenance of said stuff — I’m not a good duster — and now that I live in a nice big house after years of apartment life, I’m always on guard against acquiring dreadful amounts of new stuff (with varying degrees of success). Fortunately for people like me, there’s Stuff Porn, books like Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes’ wonderful Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance and Leanne Shapton’s portrait of a Relationship as Defined by Stuff, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry.

And now there’s Significant Objects, a kind of interactive Stuff Porn site, where participating writers are invited to invent histories for random thrift shop items, each of which then goes up for sale on eBay accompanied by its fictional story. The winning bidder gets the object and a printout of its tale, and proceeds go to the author. It’s a fantastic idea on so many levels — as a creative experiment, sociological commentary, examination of mythmaking. Me, I just really really want Lydia Millet’s Chili Cat:

“We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.”

…happy birthday to you!

I highly recommend Studio 360’s show on Tesla. It’s fascinating. And we love us some Nikola Tesla here at Bookninja. At least I do. Jude Law needs to forget about playing Hamlet and take on a role as Tesla instead.