Book killer? I don’t know. Who can plumb the mind of a creature who has ascended to the Valhalla of multimillionairehood and now lives in Turtania, the mythical realm of terrible, filthy rich authors who wear tan jackets and black turtlenecks? Will the bodies clogging the doors of your local big boxes frighten away readers who might have chosen other titles, or will the outrageous pricetag and immensely vapid prose simply keep them too poor and busy to bother? Seems like the main concern here is that other A-list authors are getting a dose of what it’s like to be a mid-list author, or poet. Actually, poets aren’t quite so advanced as mid-list. We’re more like sub-list authors.

As the number of media outlets covering books shrink, and as fewer stores—think Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com—control more of how books get promoted and displayed, you don’t want your little first novel (or your potential blockbuster, more likely) to be hit by an avalanche of Dan Brown articles, TV interviews,  and step ladders. “It’s standard procedure to try to determine when other houses are publishing important books,” says a marketing executive at Penguin. “We often change our dates accordingly.” That, and the need, ever more desperate, to make sure your book lands at the top of the dwindling number of bestseller lists; because those lists are relative, no self-respecting publisher would want to put his Patricia Cornwell, say, up against Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, even more so if they have previously landed at No. 1 so a good part of an agent/author’s job is manipulating that pub date.

Still, it’s simply not possible to release only one book at a time, and even Doubleday has some big names that can’t help but compete for floor and media space with the megastar.

Google books: point and counterpoint… who to believe?

UC profs want some changes to the thing

Sicklit (achoolit?) finally fulfilling Woolfe’s congested dreams

William Golding accused of terrible crimes… by William Golding

Holmes repackaged as pulp… Taking (perhaps) a page out of the Bookninja rulez manual, they keep the text and change the cover to lure people in (I like Hard Case)

Booktrust Early Years shorlists

Why is the idea of Fahrenheit 451 as a comic book a bad thing? Isn’t the irony offset by the times?

Now this is a series of web projects I can get behind:

To Hell with Publishing

To Hell with First Novels

To Hell with Journals

To Hell with Prizes

I got a few more to-hell’s for you, people. Call me.

Textbook publisher will rent books to college kids. Better print them on hose-able plastic, guys.

With college textbooks often costing more than $100 apiece, students spend an average of $700 to $1,100 a year, representing one of their biggest expenses after tuition and room and board. Many students try to save by buying used books or ordering books from overseas, where they can often cost half the domestic price. Many students also resell textbooks at the end of the academic year, feeding the used-book market.

Besides giving students a new option, rentals give both publishers and textbook authors a way to continue earning money from their books after the first sale, something they do not get from the sale of used textbooks.

“Our authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale,” said Ronald G. Dunn, president and chief executive of Cengage, formerly Thomson Learning. “There’s a tremendous amount of activity around rentals now, but we’re the first higher-education publisher to move in this direction.”

The education system is failing our poets by not forcing people to memorize their works. Or something.

…alas, there are two things almost guaranteed to baffle a University Challenge team. One is to ask them to identify a piece of classical music. The other is to ask them to identify a poem or a poet. I have already written about this but, once again, it has happened. Last Monday, students at the Universities of Edinburgh and Central Lancashire were asked to name the author of the following lines:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

I shouted out the answer by the fourth word, but none of the contestants could hear me. And none of them got the answer. They knew all about amino acids and one of them had a mind-boggling knowledge of Premiership league table positions, but of poetry they are ignorant.

Is there anyone apart from me who is unhappy about this?

I used to be unhappy about this, but to tell you the truth, I’ve stopped caring. I call it beer and antidepressants. I’ve learned to slow my metabolism to a near stop, and soon I will bury myself in the mud at the bottom of a river to wait for better conditions in which to practice my slimy, gooey, poetic lovemaking, creating a pond scum of wiggling verse and eventually bringing music back to the world.

I’m sure there are plenty of real people who have been used by novelists, but I suspect this refers to as “characters”. Though I could be wrong. Byatt hauls out the hideous “A” word here, which kind of kills the whole thing from the start for me.

AS Byatt has launched a vigorous attack on writers who combine biography and fiction, calling it an “appropriation of others’ lives and privacy”.

Her broadside against authors of “faction”, which she describes as “mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention”, is particularly startling given that it could be applied to her rival for this year’s Man Booker prize, Hilary Mantel, who is longlisted for her historical novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall.

“I really don’t like the idea of ‘basing’ a character on someone, and these days I don’t like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead,” said Byatt in an interview with the organisers of the Booker prize. “It feels like the appropriation of others’ lives and privacy. Making other people up, which is a kind of attack on them.” Oscar Wilde appears in her own Booker-nominated novel, The Children’s Book, she added, but “the novelist doesn’t say what he thinks”.

Ah, good, there are exceptions. Now just change my name to AS Byatt, and I’m in the clear!

Hm, should I wear the khakis or the speedo today? What? Um, muumuu was NOT an option.

After 40 years, why is Puzo’s Godfather still popular?

The leavings of James Joyce’s genetic code takes a break from being a dickhead to allow Ulysses to reach the market in a budget edition…. with a small press!

Bookstore sales up in June, down overall

Josh Wheedle, or whatever he’s called: Angel could take that Twilight douche in a fight (thanks, Pat)

Definition of crazygonuts awesome: poet sues Oprah for $1T (yes, trillion) for plagiarising his “work”… This is why I stick around people. I mean, you couldn’t make that up!

Books on Madoff, and books involving banks are popular right now, for some reason….

Daily Dose of Digital

CC creators like distributing their stuff through Google books

In a move designed to wipe the last vestige of literature’s stain from Dan Brown’s tan jacket, Random House will release a Lost Symbol eBook (maybe next they can convert that text into “moving images” with “sound” to further facilitate the reading process…)

eBook app usage up 300%

Publishing industry has critical digital skills gap … solution: hire Bookninja!

An indy rock band rode a white Pynchon lie for what it was worth, back in the day. Sounds like it was all in good fun. Let’s give them a present.

The band members told Essex that Pynchon, wearing a Godzilla T-shirt, had approached them after a concert at a Cincinnati laundromat-cum-rock club; that he didn’t reveal his identity until months later, when he spotted a copy of his short-story collection lying around backstage; and that he always paid his restaurant bills in cash.

It was a great story. It was also mostly untrue. When asked about the article last week, Lotion’s lead singer, Tony Zajkowski, now a graphic designer at Wired, blurted out, “Oh, God, you got the big bullshit story!”

The novelisation of movies is a tricky business. Really? I thought you just hired Wayland Drew and let him loose like they did with Willow. I hear they’re about to release a novelization of that movie that hasn’t yet been filmed, The Lost Symbol. I hope they get Tom Hanks down right.

AUTHORS of film novelisations, not unlike pornographers, rarely get the respect they deserve. Generally, practitioners of such genres are held in contempt by writers and critics, who dismiss them as hacks.

That is not entirely fair. After all, most books by movie stars, politicians, athletes and businessmen are cobbled together by ghost writers, furnishing the alleged “author” with an eloquence and turn of phrase that would otherwise not be available to them. Yet reviewers will routinely praise manufactured books – withholding their criticism of the ghost writers who take part in such literary fraud – while looking down their noses at those who toil in the novelising fields.

Such selectivity defies logic. Novelisations are the work of the authors whose names appear on the cover. Well, more or less.

Technically, they are the rewording of screenplays written by other people, supplemented by vivid descriptions of images furnished by the directors. But sometimes, as in the case of the 1976 release Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, they are written by the directors themselves.

So novelisations are not what anyone would call “original”. But no one pretends they are.

Oh, I guess I’m part of the problem here. I take it all back. It’s a form of art. Like crayons.

I continue my “vacation”… by going to work. It’s a workation. Please kill me.

DFW remembered one year later

The nests in which Scifi authors write (from BoingBoing)

European publishers challenge the Google

Proving that idiocy doesn’t respect international boundaries, To Kill a Mockingbird challenged in Brampton, ON

Finally Anne Frank’s story will get the Disney treatment… and be told in the most saccharine, ridiculous way possible… rest in peace, Anne

First historical thesaurus published after 45 minutes work

Yale bans images of Mohammed in new book (you can do something as offensive as graduating a mouthbreathing cokehead like Bush, but back down on this? Yale, Yale, Yale… tsk)

Sony’s store to only sell ebooks in ePub format. In related news, previous sentence means something to someone somewhere…

Awesomeness incarnate, and occasional author, Michael Crummey, profiled at the National Post.

If you begin at the end of Michael Crummey’s new novel and skim the acknowledgements page first, you’ll notice some odd titles among the family histories and medical textbooks the St. John’s author consulted while researching his latest book. There’s one called Fables, Fairies and Folklore of Newfoundland; another titled Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells.

“I wanted to find the most outrageous, the most outlandish stories I could find,” says Crummey during a recent visit to Toronto, “and shove them all into one story.”

That story is Galore, a book that spans 200 years and chronicles two rival clans: the Sellers, a line of wealthy merchants who own most of the small fishing village of Paradise Deep, and the Devines, a poor family of fishermen, mystics, and other strange sorts. A cast dozens strong includes the ancient witch-like Devine’s Widow; the merciless King-me Sellers and his progeny; the cursed Martin Gallery; the eccentric inventor Tryphie; and Judah, cut from the belly of a whale in the novel’s opening pages, an image that came to Crummey while he was standing in his kitchen and recalled the lyrics to an old sea shanty he sang as a child. Newfoundland and Labrador, situated as it is on the far edge of the country, often seems like another world entirely, and that’s never been truer than in Galore: There are spells and resurrections, curses and ghosts, all of which hold very real places in the history of that province.

I continue my “break from blogging” by only blogging half as much as usual. I need a mojito here, garcon. Chop chop!

Prison poets charged with plagiarism… go figure

Even Google supporters want Google reigned in

Desmond Tutu signs book deal for illustrated children’s bible

Uganda’s civil war gets even more graphic

Allison Flood is a peeker

Rupert’s bleeding cash like a stuck pig(gy bank)… Why?

Archeologists find cache of cuneiform tablets in Assyrian/Hittite temple… Be careful you don’t unleash Gozer the Gozerian again, people

More authors turn to web and POD, more editors sigh in relief

Let me tell you, I’ve seen my share of crazy lately. From both expected and unexpected sources. So, in hopes of reassuring myself that crazy exists outside the boundaries of my correspondence, I returned to Crazy Mall Walker Lady, whom I love. LOVE. (She’s a great actress, I suspect.)

Good news for fans of small press in Canada, as well as fans of important cultural heritage. Ubercool lit press Coach House has bought its longtime home and will be staying put on the street they got named bpNichol Lane. From the press release:

Coach House Press is purchasing its building! The historic coach house, located on bpNichol Lane (near the University of Toronto campus) and home to Coach House Books and Coach House Printing since 1968, has just been acquired by long-time tenant Coach House Press.

The press purchased two coach houses on bpNichol Lane – the buildings that house the editorial offices, printing operations and warehouse. As one of only three Canadian publishers to print on site, the Coach House is a popular spot during the Doors Open festival. Visitors can observe twin Heidelberg presses print up to 5,00o sheets an hour, explore cases of handset type, learn about the perfect-binding process and sit in the chair that has caressed the behinds of everyone from William S. Burroughs to Michael Ondaatje. Many important works of Canadian literature have traveled from the acquisition stage to the final trim under one roof (or, rather, two connected roofs).

To celebrate the new development, and to celebrate founder and Coach House owner Stan Bevington’s recent appointment to the Order of Canada, Coach House is holding a Wayzgoose Party on September 3, 2009. Historically, the Wayzgoose was an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each summer’s end (when the season of working by candlelight began). At the Wayzgoose Party, friends and readers can visit the Coach House, tour the premises, have a few drinks, eat some food, buy some books and mingle with authors, publishing figures and neighbourhood residents.

Come out on September third and celebrate the fabulous news! Coach House will present short speeches at 6 p.m. from some well-known fansand friends, and we’ll be throwing sausages and burgers (beef and veggie) on the barbecue at 6:30. The Wayzgoose Party runs from 5:00 until late at the Coach House (80 bpNichol Lane).

LAT’s David Ulin looks at how life is getting in the way of reading—not the death of reading, but the death of structures that facilitate reading. Brother, don’t I know it. For me, it’s also that reading gets in the way of reading, if you follow me.

So what happened? It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

A ragtag group of Scottish literary agents band together for survival in the literary world’s post-apocalyptic deathscape

Barnes & Noble to acquire Barnes & Noble (um, haven’t we just been talking about how textbooks are on the way out?)

Either Thomas Pynchon has an incredibly persuasive publicist or is on some seriously kick-ass meds—the dude is everywhere! Here he’s making up a mixed-tape for readers of his new novel. What’s next, a boxing match with Don Delillo?

Author’s Guild still supports Google, Bookninja still doesn’t care

Even Booker winners still have regular jobs nowadays—Magnus Mills profiled around being a bus driver, novelist—love his reasoning for keeping a day job…

Surprising news: Twilight sweeps teen choice awards

On August 11, 2003, ex-Ninja Pete and I put up our first test posts on the (then HTML-based) Bookninja site. The site has gone through some changes for better and worse since then, but I can generally say I’m happy with it. We’ve been lauded, ignored, and attacked by critics, myriad book people, and assorted nutbars (and any of those v’s and n’s can be interchanged to form a variety of reader reactions) but have stuck pretty close to the original formula of providing book news with an emphasis on calling out spin and bullshit when we see it.

Bookninja’s not a newspaper or magazine, but not quite a blog or webzine, either. Something more like a combination between a newslog, a barroom table, and a stand-up comedy act. I want you to get your news in a choppy format, your articles with depth, and the occasional chuckle here or there. In pursuit of this, I try to be funny, facetious, snarky, earnest, cynical, confessional, skeptical, gullible, etc. etc. as required. Pete and I chose the name “Bookninja” because ninjas are stealthy, deadly, but also, in terms of pop culture’s cultural tourism and worship of ultraviolence, also pretty silly. The name allows a certain range of flexibility. We might be ready to kill you five time, or just throwing some sick choppy-chop moves into the air for shits and giggles. You’ll never know until you wake up and find yourself dead or alive. We live every day with the burden of this power.

So, I go in for the joke over the serious criticism, and a turn of the screw over fluffy acceptance of the status quo.  Yet, the personality I wear here (like a clown nose) isn’t necessarily the me of real life. I’m not nearly so hard-to-please, gossipy, or funny. IRL, I basically try to be a nice guy, though I often fail. At least sometimes I fail spectacularly, which is better than failing quietly.

Sad news time: back in the spring as she was preparing to launch her new book Perfecting, ‘Ninja K (aka Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer), who has headed The Magazine element of the website for the last couple years, let me know she couldn’t continue. Apparently she wants a life. Pfft. That said, It must be frustrating working with me, because I’m behind on everything, and often she’d get me an article and I’d sit on it for weeks at a time before she finally had to fire some shuriken into my ass cheeks to get me going. So, for the record, any mistakes or tardiness or late payment were my fault and never hers. She’s an impeccable editor with a mind able to generate a seemingly endless supply of interesting ideas. I wish I could have taken advantage of them all! Kathryn goes back to being a mere mortal with her departure from Bookninja, but will remain, as did Ninja Pete, on the masthead as editor emeritus, as a constant reminder to her of what could have been….

Saying that, help me wish her well and goodbye, though I expect we’ll still see her around here as a writer, if I ever get it together enough to get the Magazine revived without her help. Now go buy her book. It’s a great read, as I said a couple months back.

So, here’s to me: The Last Ninja standing after the battle of attrition. (Fucking can’t rely on novelists, man. They’re just so flighty and needy. Oooh! I need my TIME to create my ART. Boo-fucking-hoo. Can’t you just be like me and sacrifice everything you ever cared about so strangers can get their news?)

And for the record, read everything I write with “:)” and my tongue firmly in your cheek. Ew.

The new Where the Wild Things Are trailer. Prepare to cry. Even my battlehardened eyes would be moist if I hadn’t had my tear ducts cauterized in what’s become known as “The Birthday Cake Caper of Aught-Four”.

Two words: Quantum Flux. Might explain some of the weirdness around here lately…

A reading of Gabriel Fournier’s The Eclipse Of Infinity reveals that the new science-fiction novel makes more than 80 separate references to “quantum flux,” a vaguely defined force the author uses to advance the plot, resolve conflict as needed, and account for dozens of glaring inconsistencies.

“I’m really excited about this latest book—there’s action, adventure, drama, and a little bit of something for everyone,” said Fournier, who decided to introduce the narrative device after realizing that the galactic ambassador vaporized in chapter two needed to be alive a lot longer. “And, of course, there’s something I call quantum flux, which is like the binding force behind everything in the universe. Plus, it can cause time travel. And it’s an energy source, too.”

And speaking of book covers, Liar is getting a new one for its American edition. I realize there was a colossal bumble made at Bloomsbury, but the explanation they give (that putting a white woman on the cover a book about a black woman was to “symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup”) is just so grasping and ludicrous, and reeks of denial. Anyway, glad to see that they’re making amends, even if it is only after a monstrous public outcry. Symptom addressed. Now for some preventative medicine?

Larbalestier said she was “very impressed” with “how quickly and decisively” Bloomsbury responded, and that she was “very happy” with the new look for Liar, which follows the story of Micah, for whom lying is second nature until her boyfriend Zach dies. “I was hopeful that people would notice and speak up and that if they were loud enough that there’d be a change for the paperback edition. People spoke up sooner and louder than I dreamed. I’m extremely grateful,” she said. “I think the new cover is gorgeous. While it’s true that the model is not exactly as I imagined Micah (she looks quite a lot like the American basket ball player Alana Beard) she is much, much closer than the previous model.”

But Larbalestier believes the issues of “whitewashing” of covers, ghettoising of books by people of colour, and low expectations for these books are industry-wide. In 2004, Ursula Le Guin asked why “even when [my characters] aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover … I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that ‘what sells’ or ‘doesn’t sell’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don’t buy fantasy – which they mostly don’t – could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?”

Philip Marchand continues to write on interesting subjects in his Open Book column for the Ntl Post, but seems bizarrely cut off mid-stream. How did fantasy fiction take over the entire two shelves at the back of the store?

You don’t have to be a fundamentalist, however, to wonder what this triumph of fantasy in our popular culture portends. An atheist such as W.P. Kinsella ignores his own core beliefs and practically makes a living out of a sub-genre of fantasy, i.e. baseball fantasy. He has never lacked for a readership.
(more…)

Jessa points to a piece on book covers that were sacrificed to the dustbin for various reasons.

It may be, as offline readership continues to decline, that the mere fact of a bound, printed book with a paper dust jacket is something to celebrate. But every book jacket designer has at least one that got away—a fresh, inventive cover that was shot down en route to the bookstore shelf. These “lost” covers form a parallel universe in which the books we read and love exist in entirely different skins.

The reasons why cover designs get killed vary: The author’s spouse didn’t like it. The marketing or sales department didn’t think they could sell it. The chain bookstores said they would only stock it if the cover was red instead of white. Designers can produce hundreds of compositions before finding one that makes everyone happy. But does anyone really know whether a given cover sells a book? “We all assume we know something about this body, whatever it is—the buying body or the body politic,” says Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund. “But, frankly, no one has a clue.”

While Lady Ninja is off in San Francisco winning the proverbial bread and bringing home the (hopefully literal) bacon, I’m here, stuck between children who insist on slobbering on my work clothes and accidentally kicking me in the face with feet that somehow have cream cheese on them. Usually I only get half of all this slobber and kicking, so I’m a little overwhelmed. At least the cream cheese tastes fresh.

In the classrooms of the future, textbooks are history… As is grammar, critical thought, and student accountability, but I digress…

Salinger “sequel” still trying to wor(k)(m) its way to publication… NYT and others support it…

Nick Cave to sing his new novel (dude could sing the phone book and I’d be there…)

Is Wikipedia sliding downhill?

Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin profiled at the NYT

Headline: “Alice in Wonderland gets ’sexy’ TV makeover“… Lede: “The four-hour live action adventure, based on the 1865 Lewis Carroll story, will star Tim Curry and Kathy Bates”… … … … … … … … … Um…?

Borders UK auditors grab cheeks and scream in horror

German Jews want Mein Kampf reprinted

The Pynchon trailer mentioned below is now posted here.

There are plenty of people my age who are feeling a little stunned today to find out writer and director John Hughes has died at such an early age. But I doubt there are many as upset as a fan who got to know him through the generosity of his spirit, as this woman did. What an incredible story and experience. Thanks to Ami for the link. (Trailer below)

If you have a contract and don’t make your deadlines, you may be offering your publisher a chance to drop your hot potato ass in a time of cost cutting and cutbacks. So what are you doing here? Get working!

“What has happened is that in the cold light of morning, publishers are looking at all these expensive deals they made based on the inflated marketplace, and now the bill is coming due and they don’t want the contracts anymore,” said one top agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I buttoned up all my contracts—I amended all of them way before the due dates came. Once the author delivers on time, then the publisher has to find something unacceptable in form and content, and that’s a much more serious thing to do. At that point there’s a whole process that they have to go through, and it’s much more challenging for them to find something in breach.”

As a result, authors are under unprecedented pressure from their agents to stay on schedule. Most of the literary agents interviewed for this article said they have tried to impress on their clients that if they want to make sure they don’t lose their contracts and find themselves having to pay back an advance that in many cases they’ve already spent, they had better be vigilant about turning their manuscripts in on time.

“I don’t want my authors to be in that situation, so I’ve been reminding them all year long to not treat their deadlines lightly,” said the independent agent David Kuhn. “Everyone’s paying attention to their contracted deadlines more than they used to, for sure—at least publishers are, and therefore agents are, and therefore authors should.”

Today it seems as though there’s nothing an author won’t do (and, frankly, mostly willingly) to get some publicity. Here is a list of things Edmund Wilson would not do.

Edmund Wilson’s printed note, a response to a student group asking him to do a reading, breathes of another world. He added in a handwritten scrawl that he doesn’t do “live readings either when I’m offered a very large fee.” And the printed card itself lists a bevy of activities that he declines. Unlike participants here and now – myself and the others – he doesn’t “contribute to or take part in symposiums or ‘panels’ of any kind,” “give interviews” or speeches. He is an ornery writer, devoted to his craft.

The note, probably fifty years old, could be the occasion for tearful nostalgia–or for the charge of nostalgia. Where are the Edmund Wilsons today? Or even, since Scialabba discusses him, who are the successors to Noam Chomsky? The question is an old one; it both predates and postdates my own “The Last Intellectuals.” Just look at Norman Mailer’s “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), where he takes stock of his fellow novelists–and finds them wanting. Where are the successors to Wolfe, Hemingway and Faulkner, he asks? To inquire as to what–and who–constitutes an intellectual generation remains valid. Yet many take it as a personal insult. They respond, “Look at me! The water is great! Come on in!” Daniel W. Drezner, who has written a robust defense of new and younger intellectuals, cites a media studies professor, “There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why.”

Prepare to have your brains bashed in by an obscene amount of marketing dollars thrown at the Dan Brown novel. And boy-oh-boy does he ever need it. The shrinking violet of publishing is finally going to get some attention!

HarperCollins counters by throwing obscene cash at… someone named Cathy?

Booker longlisted titles see 60% sales increase… The system works! The corrupt, meaningless system works! Calloo! Callay!!

Is Pynchon getting a hermit-author version of cabin fever?

A bank for poets? (I imagine something not so much like with a vault with money in it, but more like a cell with pasty people in it)

Today’s resistence-is-futile recession announcement: S&S wakes up disoriented and sore in the nether regions, sees saucer of boom times speeding away over economy cornfields

Daily Dose of Digital

Oh, unknown e-reader, how little we knew ye

Review of Barnes & Noble’s new ereading tech laments what’s missing over what’s offered

Sony review gets points for pink (chicklit knows no technology barrier…. can’t wait for the decals of strappy sandals and women lying barefoot in fields of daisies with their faces hidden by open books)

Aaaaand… here comes Acer, always last in, with a shittier, cheaper version of everything

There will be no exception for small literary magazines in the changes around the Canadina Periodical Fund’s cuts to publications that sell fewer than 5000 copies. There’s a Facebook group protesting the cuts here. A glimmer of hope at teh end of the piece. If there’s one thing we know about the Harper government, it’s that they’re as desperate for power as anyone. Make a big enough stink (like the entire arts community did last year) and they’ll flipflop for votes. So yell, and let them flip and flop, and then vote as you would.

Whatever hope small literary and cultural magazines had that they could change the minds of Canadian Heritage about its 5,000 annual paid threshold for the new Canada Periodical Fund are pretty much dashed. The small magazine community started a letter writing campaign and a Facebook group and certainly made its needs and interests known through its industry association, Magazines Canada. But what they are receiving back from the minister, James Moore, is a form letter that seems to slam the door fairly firmly. It says, in part,

The CPF will support a broad range of periodicals, but it will no longer offer support to titles that sell fewer than 5000 copies total per year, or specialized support for arts and literary magazines, including those that sell fewer than 5000 copies a year. A recent evaluation of our existing programs found that specialized funding for arts and literary magazines currently offered by the Department was duplicating the funding offered by the Canada Council…I trust that this information is useful.

The Facebook group offers the following list of federal contacts to express your opinion to. If I’ve learned anything in the last few years of arts advocacy, it’s that letters trump phone calls and emails. I suggest writing in print and copying to email, if you can afford the time.

Minister of Canadian Heritage: Hon. James Moore

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-9650
F: 613-992-9868
E:

Constituency Office
2603 St. John’s St.
Port Moody, BC V3H 2B5
T: 604-937-5650
F: 604-937-5601

Liberal Heritage Critic: Pablo Rodriguez

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-5080
F: 613-992-1710
E:

Constituency Office
7450, Les Galeries d’Anjou Blvd, Suite 530
Anjou, QC, H1M 3M3
T: 514-353-5044
F: 514-353-3050

NDP Heritage Critic: Charlie Angus

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-2919
F: 613-995-0477
E:

Constituency Office
20 Duncan Avenue S.
PO Box 276
Kirland, ON P2N 3H7
T: 705-567-2747
F: 705-567-5232

Bloc québecois Heritage Critic: Carole Lavallée

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-996-2416
F: 613-995-6973
E:

Constituency Office
110-5540 Chambly
Saint-Hubert, QC J3Y 3P1
T: 450-926-5979
F: 450-926-5985

Liberal Leader: Michael Ignatieff

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-6364
F: 613-992-5880
E:

Constituency Office
656 The Queensway
Etobicoke, ON M8Y 1K7
T: 416-251-5510
F: 416-251-2845

NDP Leader: Jack Layton

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-995-7224
F: 613-995-4565
E:

Constituency Office
221 Broadway Avenue, Suite 100
Toronto, ON M4M 2G3
T: 416-405-8914
F: 416-405-8918

Bloc Québecois Leader: Gilles Duceppe

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-6779
F: 613-954-2121
E:

Constituency Office
1200 Papineau Ave, Suite 350
Montreal, QC H2K 4R5
T: 514-522-1339
F: 514-522-9899

Conservative Leader: Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
T: 613-992-4211
F: 613-941-6900
E:

Constituency Office
1600-90th Avenue SW, Suite A-203
T: 403-253-7990
F: 403-253-8203

Remember to write MPs c/o both the House of Commons and their constituency offices. That way their entire staff will know about your concerns.

Longtime ‘Ninja favourite Gil Adamson finds herself in the UK, and extensively profiled by ‘Ninja favourite newspaper, the Guardian. British readers, buy this book!

Adamson keeps saying things like this: that she was writing the book for herself, that she didn’t care whether it was published or not. In fact, when she was finally done, after a decade of working on it, she did absolutely nothing about it. Eventually, her partner, the poet Kevin Connolly – the couple live in Toronto – persuaded her to send it to a Canadian agent, but the book ended up falling through the cracks.

“It was just a stumbling mess, a total stumbling mess,” she grins. “I did nothing – I thought it’s fine, it’s done, I don’t have to do any more, I can just sit here and be lazy.” But Connolly lost patience and took the book in to his own publisher, House of Anansi Press, who leaped on it. “Really I don’t deserve it because I did nothing. Kevin’s the one who pushed me over cliff, but it’s worked out very well,” she says.

Adamson describes The Outlander as a “literary western”. Connolly told her she’d written a picaresque when she eventually let him read it. “After it was published some people said it was a western. Ondaatje said adventure, someone else called it a thriller – it’s just sliding all over the place and didn’t seem to fit anywhere. I think of it as a kind of literary western – that was what I was hoping for,” she says wryly.

Example.

Ken Hausch, a Libby-area Luddite separatist and conspiracy theorist, announced Monday that his much-anticipated manifesto, My Lonely Battle Against The Mind-Control Slavery Of The Illuminati And Its Footmen In The CIA, KGB, U.N., Vatican, NASA, IRS, AT&T, Federal Reserve, Disney, The Order Of Skull & Bones, And The Rosicrucians, is “coming along fine” and should be completed by fall of this year.

“So far, so good,” the unemployed, one-time University of Washington physics graduate student said. “Right now, I’ve got about 14,600 pretty solid pages in the can, with probably fewer than 5,000 to go. Once that’s done, it’ll just be a matter of double-checking the facts, tightening up the writing and making sure the whole thing’s got a nice, cohesive flow.”

Margaret Atwood as pop culture junkie? I’m told she does read Bookninja on occasion… I’ll be her smack any day!

The Hugo Chavez bookclub apparently does not involve a single, actual club

Obamas get in on craze around a self-published cookbook (which has now been picked up by a mainstream company)

Michael Ignatieff (re)joins Writers’ Union, now covered for dental will receive strike pay if required to man the barricades

The march of the big box bookstore towards becoming Walmart continues

In industry news that almost no one cares about but I post just in case: Rupert takes kick in the pants through HC while Random does well enough

The women behind Little House on the Prairie (I’m totally typing this like Melissa Sue Anderson played Mary… my hands reaching toward the keys blindly, eyes looking up and to the left with a perpetually worried set of eyebrows… Oh my, do you see how I can’t see? Really, I can’t see. Hang around long enough and I’ll have a panic attack to throw some drama into the farming.)

Sony cuts its ebook prices to get more competitive in the ebook wars, but are the Kindle/eReader preachers prosletysing about the future of reading getting a tad ahead of themselves?

Are printed books on the road to obsolescence? If so, what might it mean for the vast industry dedicated to their production and sale? Digital books are value neutral – they’re nothing more than a different distribution platform for the same product, the written word – but, if the rhetoric is accurate, they may be about to cause a “massive amount of pain and suffering in the book industry” as one analyst recently put it to me.

On the face of it, it’s difficult to understand why the book industry has been “hijacked” by an “increasingly frenzied conversation” about e-books, as the New York Times recently reported from the New York book expo. For while Sandy Cox may be typical of the media coverage of e-reading, she’s not yet close to being a typical book buyer. Last year $113 million worth of e-books were sold – a substantial figure that’s less impressive in light of the more than $24 billion in U.S. book sales last year.

Amazon, meanwhile, zealously guards Kindle sales figures, but speculation among various technology Web sites seems to have settled into a general consensus that the Kindle has hit or exceeded most or all of the sales goals Amazon has set for it. The introduction of two competing e-readers by Sony generated headlines that suggested an all-out war was brewing in the space.

“It’s crazy,” says Jim Milliot, the business and news director of Publisher’s Weekly. Pointing out that they constitute only about 2 percent of the market, he says that impact of e-books is being exaggerated.

Stephanie Meyer has been accused of plagiarising parts of her new novel (what’s it called again? Breaking Wind?) by an unknown internet author. Now, you guys know I’m ready for the occasional fall-from-grace story in which undeserving schlock authors get their comeuppance, right? But this… Well, you have to read the original letter and decide for yourself. I can’t believe I’m going to say this but, barring any new information, I’d have to side with… gulp… Stephanie Meyer…. … … … I need a shower. (One thing’s certain from reading the excerpts—if you could be sued for stealing the state of “bad writing” from the universe instead of just actual text from another author, someone would have a case here.)

Hachette called the claim “completely without merit” and said that any lawsuit would be “defended vigorously”.

Scott’s lawyer, J Craig Williams, claims that Scott’s book was published and posted on the internet in 2006 and cites similarities. Among these are that both books include an after-wedding sex scene on a beach, that both contain a scene about a woman who is sick because she’s pregnant with a child with evil powers, that both feature a scene in which the pregnant wife is dying, that both include a scene in which the main character sees their baby for the first time, and that both see the main character turn into a vampire. Scott also points out that in both books the main character refers to his wife as “love”.

Reader Mike points to his buddy’s personal account of his recent foray into bookselling. There’s the usual idiot customer bits, but also some funny bits on stocking, pricing, and ordering. From the sounds of it, I suspect he works in a big box store, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it’s timely advice for customers, and has a slight rant-y quality that will appeal to booksellers who really want to like what they’re doing.

A lack of organisation on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my part
“I want a text book to revise for my nursing exam, I don’t care which but I need it in two days time”. Not going to happen, and don’t try to pretend that this is a surprise or that it’s unreasonable. Ten years ago you would have had to travel to a bookstore and get them to order it which they would do either by mailing or telephoning a request for a book. They would either have to know a suitable book for you, or would have to find it either in a paper catalogue or with the help of someone at the publisher. These days we have online booksellers where you can browse for a book you think is suitable and if you’re lucky you might get it in two days if you pay a premium. You have no excuse for being a lazy arse.

Q: Should authors doing public readings be censored or voluntarily censor themselves? A: Does the pope shit in the woods?

Two days after updating her Twitter account with the message: “Had the most amazing Philadelphia reading. And by ‘amazing’ I mean ‘potty-mouthed.’ I think this is officially my tour of dirty words.” Weiner received what she called “a sternly worded email” from a book store in Framingham, Massachusetts that requested her upcoming reading there be curse-free.

But why? While Weiner is no Erica Jong or Irvine Welsh, her books do contain sex and swearing and her audience, mostly women, is likely to be aware of this (and unlikely to be offended by her propensity for using the word “cock” in conversation).

Are you a fan of narrative or episodic fiction? Hm. Not sure. Which one’s the one where people get laid and bombs explode under cars? That one.

This being the 100th anniversary of the first American edition of “Huckleberry Finn,” it is the perfect time to ask an essential question: Are you a Narrative or an Episodic personality? In other words, do you believe that your life tells a meaningful story? Or do you think that you live, like Huck Finn and every other picaresque hero, from isolated minute to isolated minute—episode to episode—and that far from adding up to a coherent tale, your life is “a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing”?

Hemingway was correct when he said that all American literature comes from Mark Twain’s classic tale of the runaway boy and the fugitive slave. Hemingway’s own “In Our Time,” a collection of interrelated short stories that portray the episodic adventures of a young boy named Nick Adams, is a model of the genre. Picaresque novels define our national literature: Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” William Faulkner’s “The Reivers,” Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” John Barth’s “The Sotweed Factor,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five”—the list goes on and on. Even non-fiction has been influenced by the episodic style. The so-called “gonzo” journalism of a writer like Hunter Thomson, with its adventurous protagonists passing through random events, is the non-fiction equivalent of the picaresque.

But episodic fiction has been dealt a sorry hand of late. Our most popular critically acclaimed novels are pure narratives. Their straightforward storytelling style connects events together in one continuous thruline whose fundamental purpose is to reveal the Big Fated Meaning of life. In the war between Narratives and Episodics, the former are winning hands-down.

Well, I do believe Bookninja turns six a week today. In celebration, I’m going to reduce my workload for a bit. I haven’t sold ads for July and August so I could feel free to take time off if I wanted it, but here I am posting my (rather sexy) arse off day after day. Time to get chillin out, maxing, relaxing or coolin.

Do charity bookshops do their job too well?

Computers come closer to cracking calligraphy

Bubbles gets book deal before Michael’s other chimp, Cory Feldman

Sarah Waters tops critics summer reading list (the good ones at least…)

Libraries raise Global Google Threat Warning Level to “Peuce”

The Post interviews Martin Amis

S&S to publish The Secret for teens (hint: has to do with Clearasil)

Awkward Family Photos site gets book deal


“Flarf“? Why wasn’t I included on the memo?

Is inflating print run numbers publishing’s penile bragging?

The Post reports on the rise in creative writing programs in their Ecology of the Book series.

The first significant creative-writing program in North America was the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, founded in 1936. Its alumni have won 16 Pulitzer Prizes, and includes such writers as Flannery O’Connor, W.P. Kinsella and Denis Johnson. In 1975, there were 79 degree-conferring programs in North America. By 1992, when Humber’s program was established by novelist Joe Kertes, that number had jumped to 508. Last year, there were 774. In Canada in recent years, programs have been established at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph, adding to well-entrenched programs at the University of British Columbia, the University of New Brunswick, Concordia University and the University of Windsor, among others.

McGurl says he sees no evidence that the growth is slowing – and, in fact, writing programs are springing up in other English-speaking countries. (Last October, Australian writer Nam Le told me that when he left Melbourne to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he’d never heard of creative-writing programs in Australia. Now there are several. “There wasn’t the marriage of creative writing and academia,” he said. “It’s changing rapidly now).

“You’d imagine it would reach a point of saturation,” says McGurl. “On the other hand, if you look at this history thus far, you don’t want to underestimate the desire on the part of the masses to be writers.”

This fellow can’t get work done in the library because it’s too quiet and sexually tense. He is of course assuming that everyone else feels the same level of tension he’s experiencing. Sometimes it’s just you that’s horny. And thats OKAY. There’s NOTHING WRONG with that. Only IF you don’t assume that the librarian is giving you smouldering looks when really she’s wondering if she should call security.

The second problem is that the British Library reading rooms are too quiet to concentrate. I’m referring to a paradox that researchers who study sound and concentration have discovered: that workspaces designed to be quiet actually increase the likelihood of distraction because in silence even someone’s breathing can seem loud.

In other words, you need some background noise to focus and in the BL there is very little, which is perhaps why people such as Tristram Hunt huff around in a state of perpetual annoyance.

But even this, combined with all the factors cited above, is not as distracting as . . . the sexual tension. All libraries are, of course, petri dishes of simmering lust, but the BL is extreme: its walls contain more erotic pressure than an oil rig, a North Sea fishing trawler and several series of Mad Men combined. And it turns out that I’m not alone in thinking so. In 2005, Olivia Stewart-Liberty reported in The Spectator that “the whole building sighs with hothouse groans, which swell and fade to muffle other sounds”; in 2006 a gay website exposed the British Library as a cottaging ground and the regular BL readers who I’ve discussed it with concur.

Not that we can agree as to why. Explanations put forward include: the intrinsic erotic appeal of women in pencil skirts, stockings and Sarah Palin spectacles telling you off; the intrinsic filthiness of all librarians (after all, Casanova was one); the enforced silence and bookish atmosphere, which conspire to make you want to do something loud and physical in response; the safety (the theory goes that people feel free to flirt without feeling obliged to take things farther); the presence of books, which after all, are intrinsically sexy and have been connected to seduction for hundreds of years; the unexpected corners.

Indigo lost some money, but don’t worry investors, Head’s got it all under control.

The Canadian Press reported that sales for the quarter ended 27th June were up from $190.6m to $193.6m. Online sales dropped 9.1% to $19.1m after the bookseller disposed of several non-profitable businesses.

Chief executive Heather Reisman said in a statement: “Given the challenging economic environment we believe these results highlight the resilience of our brands.

“A significant percentage of which are made in China and have nothing to do with books,” added Reisman (in a ficticious quote supplied by Bookninja).

After a rush of betting that’s created a statistical spike in the Booker scene reminiscent of the WOW SETI signal, one is fairly sure intelligent life is out there. And it’s (used leaked information to) bet on Hillary Mantel. Reconvene the jury!

The odds on Mantel gaining the award have been slashed with 95% of all bets placed on her novel alone and the value of those bets rising tenfold, according to bookmakers. William Hill said it had “never seen a betting pattern like it”, after a spate of bets made Wolf Hall “the only one in the running for the punters”. A spokesman for the bookmakers, which over the weekend cuts the odds on the novel winning from 12-1 to 2-1, said: “It’s almost like an unspoken psychic rumour has gone round that this will be Hilary Mantel’s year. We’ll lose a five-figure sum if the support continues. It is as though a tip has gone around the literary world telling everyone that Mantel is a certainty.”

The contest is notoriously difficult to call and betting does not usually heat up until the shortlist of contenders is announced in September, the spokesman added.

But hundreds of people were placing bets of up to £50 on the 57-year-old novelist from Glossop, Derbyshire, this year, just days after the longlist of 13 books was chosen from the 132 potential contenders.

If we remove Gordon Lish’s changes to Carver, do we get as good a story? We sure get a different one.

As the world now knows, the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including “Why Don’t You Dance?”, were substantially, if not brutally, edited by Gordon Lish, who was Carver’s editor first at Esquire magazine, then at McGraw-Hill, publisher of the debut collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), and later at Alfred A. Knopf, which issued the “breakthrough” book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. From the start, critics admired the author’s spare manner and his ability to evoke “a whole culture and a whole moral condition [in] the most seemingly slight sketch” (Frank Kermode). After that, Carver, in the words of his second wife, literary executor and tireless promoter Tess Gallagher, “would come to affect world literature”. No exaggeration there. He became one of those writers who are easy to imitate, but perilously so, for no imitation could emulate the authority of the real thing.

But what is the real thing? In the original manuscript of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, before Lish’s blue pencil descended, the girl’s sympathetic words to the yard sale vendor, “You must be desperate or something”, are not uttered while the pair are dancing. The sentence is adapted from an earlier remark she makes to her boyfriend when they first inspect the items for sale. “They must be desperate or something.” The vendor has yet to make an entrance. It was Lish who changed the words and placed them in her mouth as she “pushed her face into the man’s shoulder”, making it the emotional high point of the narrative. Lish also removed elements of the girl’s speech as she relates the experience to friends: “Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played records. Look at this phonograph”, etc. Overall, however, Lish excised only 9 per cent of the story – almost the smallest portion of any in the untitled manuscript that Carver submitted to the publishers. Most of the stories in it were cut by 50 per cent or more, before it was presented to the reading public as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”, originally called “Where Is Everyone?”, was reduced by 78 per cent – in other words, just over a fifth of what Carver wrote survived into the finished book.