Blah. Blech. Blargh.

Sarah Palin “writes” one of them book-thingies in very short time, doncha know

And if Tina Brown and her Daily Beast have anything to say, the two month turn-around will become the new industry standard—and not just for slack-jawed morons like Palin

People who least need free Kindles scoff at free Kindles

B&N denies charges of blackballing authors who don’t link to B&N

Moby Dick on your TV gets some big name actors

Self-published cook book sells 70000

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude top novel of last 25 years

I was in all day meetings last Friday and here I am back at home, sick as a (presumably remarkably diseased) dog. So bear with me as I haul my moaning corpse around and try to be witty. Did you hear the one about Dan Brown’s… um… hair spra—?….no… turle nec—?…no um… sphinct—?…no… Aw forget it. Here’s some news.

Google stopped in cyber-tracks, has robo-pants around e-ankles

R IP: William Sapphire

HK publisher has Nads of Steel (TM) (made in China)

Poets House gets new… house… something about stones here

Surprise, surprise: Bush officials didn’t want Rowling at the White House because her books promote witchcraft

British libraries now fully public

Borders UK will stock Sony Reader

Dan sold nearly 2m in one week, can he sell out his tiny print run of 6.5m in under a month?

Part-time’Ninja and novelist Joseph Boyden interviewed at the post

Terry Pratchett interviewed at the Telegraph

Baby dancing to Beyonce.

Sweet win for Goose Lane and Thomas.

With the end of Reading Rainbow, Levar Burton can finally live.

When the news came that Reading Rainbow would be canceled due to a lack of funding, I felt—well, to use a cliché like you’d find in one of the hundreds of books I pimped endlessly—like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Every day I went to work hoping that maybe the studio had burned down, that maybe the program had been cut, that maybe PBS would finally stop squeezing the life from me drop by drop. Now that it’s over, I feel the relief a bruised and broken soldier must feel when he is rescued after rotting away for decades in some dank, forgotten POW camp.

May that godforsaken show burn in hell.

Noah Richler pops off at Glendinning in the Globe today, regarding her controversial remarks around the quality of Canadian literature. Sort of an angry I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I? piece. Again, for me, it’s not the content of what she said, it’s that she said it like a drunken aunt with lipstick on her teeth hitting on her inlaws at a wedding. Class used to be what we knew the British for. Used to be.

You want fireworks? You want literature that is invested with energy because every page is written as if it was the writer’s last chance? Well, don’t turn to English novels but to the political and cultural margins of a collapsed empire that started becoming parochial more than half a century ago – and is today to the point that the word “tuque” provides Ms. Glendinning such supercilious amusement. Canadian writers, along with Indian and Australian and Irish and African and Asian ones, have been writing the most exciting and original novels in, umm – oh, whatever kind of English it is, give the woman a lexicon – for decades. In these literatures, you will find a fervour and a generosity of spirit that is sorely lacking in the English, the dearth of which explains why most do not get North Americans even when they like us.

But in truth, what really concerns me is just how bad Victoria Glendinning’s manners are – she’s Jack Rabinovitch’s guest, after all – and, no surprise, how mortified she is as a writer at the prospect of having to say thank you for that unsolicited cup of tea. Ridiculously, she argues that Canadian writers’ largesse, their habit of fulsome acknowledgments “starting with the book’s editor – unfailingly sensitive, creative and patient – plus family, friends and first readers,” attests to too much help, interference in the book, explaining the apparent homogeneity of our fiction.

Ninja favourite Dan Nester, author of How to Be Inappropriate, writes on his experience of the NYC poetry scene, and how he got the hell out.

There is a school of thought that holds that the poet’s job is to straddle the sacred and profane, to say and do the perfectly wrong thing at the perfectly right time. To do so, writing teachers and writing books tell us, is to act as a prophet, a truth-teller. This translates into some remarkable misbehavior on the part of poets. I, too, engaged in this poet misbehavior. Stealing centerpieces at restaurants. Heckling pool players in George Plimpton’s basement. Making a point of mentioning to a Student Upset That the Thesis Film in Which She Appears Naked Throughout Is Now Playing at the Film Forum, that I had just seen her naked onscreen at the Film Forum. Instigating a bar fight at the book party of a Successful Fiction Writer, in which I punch out the second-string bouncer and am taken away in a police van. To complain or protest as I did all this would itself be regarded as inappropriate, somehow un-poet-like.

Poets behave badly, a Famous Poet once wrote to me after I complained about how another poet sent me a flurry of angry emails for rejecting his sestina. Their feelings of entitlement are misplaced. As long as one keeps busy with other poets in New York, none of this bad behavior matters. I introduced poets to each other, ran reading series to meet other poets, edited journals and solicited poets’ work, talked to journal editors about poets and poets about journals, introduced poets to publishers, drove poets on tour, put poets up in my mother’s home. After 10 years, my address book filled with poet-names of all stripes: narrative, language, experimental, lyric, avant garde, conceptual, formalist, slam, feminist, political (always far left), personal-confessional. Those who attended the readings I went to were, by and large, other aspiring poets.

Which of the glut of formats out there will be the winner? Amazon and the other major players want to lock everyone else out with proprietary formats. Here’s to them not winning.

The proliferation of formats has been a source of confusion and frustration for consumers, but it has been mitigated by the fact that consumers can load their smartphones and laptops with software for the various formats (which most of the major companies give away).

While a printed book has a fixed form, an e-book can change its spots. Even though most software packages offer similar interfaces, subtle differences exist, and many buyers choose a reader platform based on how they want a book to appear.

I’m running to catch a flight to Ottawa, so I’ll try to check in from the airport to see if any more Giller judges had serious lapses in “judgement” (see what I did there?), but until then, wish me well as a battle against a medium-sized layover in Pearson airport. Hopefully there will be no nervous breakdown. I’m in all day meetings tomorrow, so I might prepost a few things, or maybe you’ll have to find your news elsewhere. I know. I KNOW. You’ll be okay. I promise. Just come back Monday, ‘kay?

Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol ebook stats are in line with industry standards. I believe this means the hoard of treasure on which he sleeps at night is 6 gold pieces, 2 silver, and 3 electrum smaller than first estimated, and that his enchanted Turtleneck of Mediocrity is probably working at only +3 instead of an Industry-Killing +6.

You’ll remember I called this. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Nicked from Zoe’s feed)

The Lost Symbol sold just 100,000 in e-books format according to Doubleday. Overall Doubleday sold 2 milllion copies. The 5% ratio of e-books to print is about in-line with the average for book sales.

Does this have something to do with Jamie Lee Curtis? I sure hope so. Because she’s HOT. Oh, wait, it’s about a horror anthology that features only men. The British Fantasy Society* says it was just “lazy sexism”. What does that even mean? Is it like Andrew Dice Clay on quaaludes or something? I guess it means that no one even noticed that an unrepresentative list was being created. Oh, I see. Actually, people, the official term for that is “sexism”. Needs no modifier.

“I can only apologise and hope that the discussion has made other editors and publishers realise that this kind of lazy sexism is unacceptable and to watch their own lists in future,” he said in an apology posted on the BFS website.

Speaking this morning from Spain, Adams said he would ideally like to publish – “by way of apology” – a book of interviews with female horror authors. “It seems the only viable alternative but the difficulty is that I don’t know if we can afford to,” he said. “I do feel embarrassed and I’m happy to stick my hand up – I took my eye off the ball.” Future volumes in the series, covering science fiction and fantasy, would be much more balanced, he added.

James Cooper, the editor of the book, said he was “mortified” by “such an obvious misrepresentation”. “I’d like to stress that it was by no means intended, though I appreciate that this is perhaps the weakest kind of excuse one could offer,” he said.

He had selected “without any predetermined agenda” authors who had influenced him over the last 25 years, focusing particularly on writers who had special relationships with small presses. “I was too busy focusing on the writers I’d managed to recruit to notice the writers I’d inadvertently omitted,” he said. “A female perspective, of course, would have offered a keen contrast to that presented by many of the male writers.”

Hey, at least they’re owning it here. Unlike some. Bravo, and here’s hoping your creepy community of unblinking, pale writers will hold you with their yellow-nailed hands to the all-female book.

*Note: not 80s teens devoted to Samatha Fox

It’s wild-Nobel-speculation time already? Sigh. I grow old in this chair. I used to know it was fall by the smell of cool breezes and the laughter of children… (Though Oz would be a good choice)

At the 2 million sales mark, Dan Brown used the smallest portion of his winnings to fulfill the longtime fantasy of saddling and riding Oprah around the NYT book section office while yelling “Yippee ki-ay, motherfucker!!”… My understanding is, if he gets to 3 million before the end of the year he’ll splurge on testing his longstanding theory: one can actually fry an egg (condor’s, natch) on the sputtering, indignant forehead of Harold Bloom

Ralph Nader continues to redefine “also ran”

Why, exactly, were the Algonquin writers so famous, anyway? I mean, aside from the martini entry in the GBoWR

Some sweet writers among the McArthur Geniuses

Afterword points to this map of banned books in honour of Banned Books Week, which is celebrated concurrently with Alabama’s Banned Books Millennium

Tony Harrison wins first PEN/Pinter Prize

The Goog deal has collapsed, according to Moby

Aaaaand because you can never have enough Beatles cartoon in your day:

Amazoodle is currently blocking anything that looks like a public domain book from its Kindle store. They say it’s because the multiple titles creates customer confusion. Should be no problem whatsoever to figure out who should get to see a public domain work and who shouldn’t. No problem at all.

I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2,000+ e-books at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.

The Globe notes that the British judge of the Giller Prize, Victoria Glendinning, has been less-than-flattering about what it means to be a Canadian writer, and what makes a Canadian novel. I drop this down here, and then flee in terror, with all the nervous, delicate grace of a zookeeper leaving a 50lbs slab of wildebeest in a cage full of starving lions. Splat! Yoink! Have fun, guys!

There is a convention in Canada of appending to your novel a list of people who are fulsomely thanked for their support, starting with the book’s editor – unfailingly sensitive, creative and patient – plus family, friends and first readers. These last are generally fellow members of a writing group, who have contributed insightful modifications.

But has any major work of art ever been produced by committee? Readers may wonder whether a writer’s vision and voice may not get ironed out by such proactive input, and indeed there is a striking homogeneity in the muddy middle range of novels, often about families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever.

The US, too, is a nation of immigrants, but American novelists do not bang on so about their heritage and antecedents. Brits do, but differently, less personally. As it happens, all the Man Booker shortlisted novels are set back in time.

This Wired article tries to explain the intricacies of the lawsuit against Scribd for doing something someone thinks is bad for various reasons that are outlined within. No… No, I didn’t read it. Because I don’t WANT to, okay? Fack! I already have to read INTERESTING stuff I don’t want to. Please, leave me alone.

Copyright filtering technology is a form of copyright infringement, according to a lawsuit against document service Scribd.

The lawsuit, lodged in a Texas federal court Friday, broaches a novel legal theory in which the U.S. courts have never squarely decided.

The suit maintains that the copying and insertion of a copyrighted work into a filtering system without compensating the copyright holder, or obtaining their consent, is a violation of the Copyright Act. The case comes as copyright filtering technology is quickly becoming a behind-the-scenes feature on university sites, user-generated content sites and online social networking venues.

Robert McCrum has a challenge for publishers: get off the subtitle crutch and walk free again! Hallelujah!

Publishers worry about subtitles. Authors would be better advised to focus on their titles. The truth is, if you have to justify your book with a subtitle, the game is up. Buyers pay scant attention to them; librarians and bibliographers often forget to catalogue them. They linger only as fig leaves of authorial shame. Who now remembers, or cares, that George Orwell’s Animal Farm bears the subtitle A Fairy Tale, or that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was also known as The Whale?

What ever happened to the old days when cookbook writers were anthropologists? Um, there were old days when cookbook writers were anthropologists? Oh. Really? Well, what happened to them? I’ll tell you what: spiral binding.

Joan and her generation of food writers had an entire world to discover. The work of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Claudia Roden, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Diana Kennedy introduced Americans to the great cuisines of the world, as well as many great regional cuisines of the United States. All of these food writers employed what one might call an anthropological or descriptivist approach to food writing. They visited home cooks and chefs in their kitchens, beat the pavement, and found recipes in dusty archives. Such cookbook authors still exist (Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, for example) but today the shelves of your local bookstore are dominated by what one might call the prescriptivist approach to writing cookbooks.

I was trying to come up with a headline that was witty and endearing without being insulting. Here’s hoping. A small, little known author gets a profile in a small, little known paper of record.

For “The Year of the Flood” she conjured the voices of Adam One, Ren and Toby. Adam One is the leader of God’s Gardeners, an ascetic cult whose religion inculcates reverence for the environment and animals and a respect for science that rests on the belief that the creation story cannot be taken literally. Ren is a street-savvy dancer who survives the “waterless flood” (the unnamed plague) locked inside a strip club. Toby is a onetime member of the Gardeners who is hiding inside a fancy spa to escape a stalker.

“Flood” is neither a sequel nor a prequel to the 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake” (though “Oryx” does provide a back story). “It’s the same time slice,” Ms. Atwood explained. “It’s different parts of the landscape, seen from very different points of view.” She wrote “Flood” after everybody asked what happened next and is now at work on a third book in the trilogy.

Ms. Atwood, writing in longhand, creates a tree of characters and charts that pinpoint their birthdays, and even casts their horoscopes. She sees in astrology a device to get people to talk about themselves.

“You wouldn’t want your character to have the wrong horoscope any more than you would want them to have the wrong name,” Ms. Atwood said mischievously. She also did considerable research into religious hymns, she said, to come up with the 14 hymns she wrote for God’s Gardeners that appear in the book.

Trilogy? Dear Margaret, please tell me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, you don’t still consider what you’re doing to be non-science fiction. I mean, a TRILOGY! Next we’ll get a  God’s Gardener’s calendar with art by Alan Lee. … … … Which I’d probably buy, I admit.

Happy Birthday, Billy! Long may your pulp and glue support my pulp and glue! (Thanks, KS!)

National Book Award down south takes it to the people, Idol-style

Slog points to a prudish vigilante who brought Sharpie-esque redaction justice to a picture of Moby’s dick

Did old French geezer get jiggy with Diana? F’n French. How do THEY DO THAT?

Somebody’s getting INTO short fiction? Huh.

Kids books: the place to be

The final word on the Kindle v Books environmental dispute?

The Dan Brown circus train pulls into the UK this week—how efficient is it to have the clowns, bearded lady, barker, and encephalitic pinhead all in the same guy?

Newsflash: Kirk Cameron is still a deluded douchebag, but now for completely different reasons:

Not for the first time, I’ll say it: Umberto Eco is right. It’s true: penmanship is lying on the scrap pile of history, partially buried by poetry, 5 1/4″ floppy disks, and a picture of Madonna from when she didn’t look like a veiny prop from a horror movie about undead hairdressers. Here Eco looks at the various nails in handwriting’s coffin (from which, presumably, Madonna could rise at any moment to steal your children and bang out a few hours on your BowFlex trainer).

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it’s well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters.

In an interview, a teacher said that students also make lots of spelling mistakes, which strikes me as a separate problem: doctors know how to spell and yet they write poorly; and you can be an expert calligrapher and still write “guage” or “gage” instead of “gauge”.

I know children whose handwriting is fairly good. But the article talks of 50% of Italian kids – and so I suppose it is thanks to an indulgent destiny that I frequent the other 50% (something that happens to me in the political arena, too).

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

John Grisham feels Dan Brown’s pain. I mean, who the hell has the brainpower, much less willpower, to brave for all those unnecessary distractions, like “character”, “motivation”, and “meaning”? They just get in the way of exciting, implausible developments and unlikely wooden dialogue. Quoth the Grish, in defence of Prince Turtania:

“I know that what I do is not literature,”
…
“If I try to understand the complexities of the human soul, people’s character defects and those types of things, the reader gets distracted.”

The American author adds: “Of course, I’ve read literature in the classic sense. We’ve all got those type of books on the shelves at home. They made me read them at school and I admit that I didn’t like them much. I couldn’t understand why they were said to be so good.”

It seems Amazon is constantly engaged in doing something shitty, these days. Now they’re forcing sites that use their data (think sites like LibraryThing, in which users incorporate Amazon data and images into their pages) to remove links to other competitors or lose access to the info, which is arguably some of the most complete book data available for public consumption.

According to social networking site LibraryThing, Amazon now requires affiliates to “remove links to other booksellers on work pages,” or risk losing access to book data that the massive online bookseller provides to LibraryThing. LibraryThing, which has a community of 700,000 people, said it disagreed with the move, but was forced to comply because ultimately the disadvantages were stronger.

“LibraryThing is not a social cataloging and social networking site for Amazon customers but for book lovers,” it said in a blog. “Most of us are Amazon customers on Tuesday, and buy from a local bookstore or get from a library on Wednesday and Thursday! We recognize Amazon’s value, but we certainly value options.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (space-)hits out at the Booker Prize for (robo-)ignoring science fiction. Bravo. I’m surprised that  the reaction is so pliant, even in it’s passing of the buck. However, having sat on juries here and there, you do have to work with what you’re given.

“Speaking as an outsider from California and as a science fiction writer I see these very brilliant writers doing excellent work who are never in the running at all, for no reason except their genre and who their publishers are – the so-called club members. It just needs to be said,” he said today. “The Booker prize is so big, the way it shapes public consciousness of what is going on in British literature, but the avant garde, the leading edge, is being ignored or shut out of the process entirely.”

According to Robinson the ghettoisation of science fiction is a comparatively recent phenomenon. He pointed to a little known letter written by Virginia Woolf to the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, after he had sent her a copy of his novel Star Maker. “I don’t suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction,” wrote Woolf. “But you have gone much further and I can’t help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.”
…
The chair of this year’s Booker judges, James Naughtie, admitted that Robinson “may well have a point”, but suggested that “perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges”.

“There has always been a debate about whether the prize is sufficiently sensitive to all the forms of contemporary writing. He may well have a point,” he said. “We judge books that are submitted. The fact is that the science fiction component this year was very, very thin. If it is the best contemporary fiction in this country then most publishers haven’t yet tumbled to the fact.”

Nigerian author Uwem Akpan can now officially say he’s one of them as wot was pick by Orpah, yeh

Yeah, Booy! World’s richest short story prize goes to Simon Van Booy, pictured here just leaving Brideshead

White Noise recovered

Travel writing’s undiscovered country

Samuel Johnson: Yankee-h8tr

British Fantasy Awards announced (from SFSignal)

Ostrobogulous for the lexically adventurous

Daily Dose of Digital

US government urges changes to Google book deal

Scribd says their lawyers have asked them to publicly state they don’t encourage copyright infringement

Children’s publishing in the digital age

Australia is deep in it with all this talk of this and that and t’other (I have no idea what’s going on)

Espresso Book Machine can print 2m PD Google files … sure changes the face of the book launch, doesn’t it

I suppose this is good news for the Goog, since they’ve been having their nuts roasted over the fire lately by governments around the world

In related news, S&S has a new digital piracy policy

What does Dan Brown get wrong about Washington?

Bookcase pr0n

Life publishes a bunch of never before seen photos of Papa that were taken to run with a little serial story called “Old Man and the Sea”. And for a little context on the difference between the respect for fiction then compared to now: Dan Brown sold over 1m copies of his new book on its first day; the OMatS isse of Life sold 5.3m copies in two days. Damn.

Interviewed. You know, for those of you who go in for that kind of thing.

There aren’t too many writers who can claim to have single-handedly created a literary genre, but with the launch on Monday of The Dog who Came in from the Cold, a sequel to Corduroy Mansions, Alexander McCall Smith can be said to be one of them. Every weekday over the next 13 weeks, a new chapter of The Dog Who Came in from the Cold will appear online at Telegraph.co.uk, with an extra chapter appearing in the Saturday edition of this paper.

While some may suggest the serial novel is as old as Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens – and McCall Smith himself admits he was put up to it at a party by Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City remain popular – there is something unique about the way these novels unroll day after day, week after week.

Has Orpah’s new book pick been leaked? Most interestingly here, is that it’s SHORT FICTION!

A mysterious cardboard box arrived Thursday morning at D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose. It was labeled: “Oprah’s Book Club Selection #63. Do not open until September 18.” Politics and Prose co-owner Carla Cohen had no idea what #63 would turn out to be, but she had ordered 40 copies anyway. It was Oprah, after all.

Dear GOD! Does the short story still exist? Despite evidence to the contrary the answer is: Apparently!

“More crappy news for short story writers,” is how The Rumpus interpreted a literary agent’s polite rejection note to short story writer writer Mark Tainer:

… I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don’t like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can’t in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it…

‘Ninja reader Steven Galloway leaps to the defence of Canlit after a bizarre attack by National Post columnist Barbara Kay, which focused on the work of Lisa Moore (whose book February is actually quite good). Kay’s attack was ideological as much as literarily (?) critical, and Galloway calmly puts her in her place (which is located somewhere under his shoe). Galloway for PM!!

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I’ll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Canadian writers are absolutely not living in “bohemian zoos; mysterious stipends drift their way.” It sounds absolutely marvellous, but there’s no such gilded cage here in Canada. Most of the Canadian writers who earn a living from their work do so because people in countries other than Canada read their work. Canadian literature is one of the most respected literatures in the world. Lisa Moore, for example, is published by major presses and read enthusiastically in the U. S., U. K., France and the Netherlands. Her work has been praised by The New York Times and The Times of London. Only in Canada would Kay be able to use the phrase “preternaturally CanLittish” as a pejorative.

To indict Canadian literature on Barbara Kay’s grounds is ignorant and arrogant.

BoingBoing points to this bizarre story where an author who was going to video conference-in to a class (presumably to overcome distance and budget issues) was asked to set it up so that the kids could see him, but he couldn’t see the class. This was explained as a requirement of privacy regulations around photographing the kids. I suppose they were worried he’d record it and sell it to a pr0n site that specializes in attentive kids. Sick, man. Sick. (P.S. Big fan of the Free-Range Kids movement.)

I was setting up a phone call with a 4th-grade teacher and her class — they live a good thousand miles across the country from me. I let her know that I have Skype, so nobody needs incur any long-distance charges. Her response via e-mail just now: “Is there a way to Skype with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us? Due to confidentiality and other school district guidelines, I am hoping this is a possibility.”

Truly, I am speechless. I’m just glad this won’t be an in-person school visit, because it would be really awkward wearing a blindfold all day, lest I actually lay eyes on these kids.

Normally I’d reserve this spot for comment on how we should stamp on this thing with steel boots to ensure it can never evolve and eradicate our species, but today I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the difference between sudoku and crosswords: you can’t yet solve crosswords if you’re as stupid as the world’s smartest robot. It’s the last hope we have to cling to. Once they pick up the cryptics, it’s all over.

The “author” of Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters expounds upon his artistic process. Surely there are valuable lessons for all aspiring wise-asses here.

Elinor and Marianne are sisters looking for love. Elinor is reserved and sensible, Marianne headstrong and sensitive. Unfortunately, thanks to Britain’s cruel, patriarchal inheritance laws, they’ve been booted from their ancestral estate and, what’s worse, left without dowries sufficient to attract good and handsome husbands. Then, just when the sisters’ prospects are at their lowest ebb, a gigantic man-eating jellyfish drags its gelatinous body from the surf and tries to dissolve them in its corrosive stomach acid.

I can’t wait until my new work in this rapidly expanding sub-genre comes out. For Whom the Bell Trolls. I expect it to be big. And green.

An industry study suggests the release of free e-textbooks won’t hurt academic publishing. Academic publisher counters with “Whoa whoa whoa! Hang on a minute there. What’d he say?”

The study, the first of its kind, tracked students’ use of 36 core text e-books at 127 UK universities from November 2007 to December 2008. Nielsen Bookscan figures showed that sales of print editions of the same titles fell 18.7% between 2006 and 2007, the year before the project, and by 13.7% during the year of the project.

Ian Rowlands, co-author of the report, said at its presentation this week (15th September), that there was “no correlation between print sales and e-book use measured by download. There is no conclusive evidence that free provision of e-books negatively affected print sales. Print sales of some titles went up, and some went down. There are probably faint signals that publishers may have a softer landing than predicted on textbooks.”

This articles suggests then corrects the possibility of a HuffPo/NYRB partnership. There’s editors flying all over the place here like someone took a scraper to the old editorial block and started hacking away.

“The Huffington Post is about having the the best of the old and the best of the new,” Ms. Huffington said. “We have the traditional way of covering books with the best of the reviews from the New York Review of Books and then the readers can interact,” by posting their own reviews, she added.

The Observer put in a call to speak with Robert Silvers, who has edited the NYRB since it was founded in 1963, and will post an update as soon as we hear back [see update below].
…
UPDATE: Mr. Silvers called into the Observer to clarify that NYRB is still in “serious discussions” with the Huffington Post, but is still working out official details and plans to make an “official announcement” of the partnership soon.

Dan Brown sold 1 million copies in one day, the fucker

Not 24 hours later and the book is available for pirate download

In related news: the Kindle edition of The Lost Symbol is outselling the print edition at Amazon (there’s got to be something funky about this math, because I don’t see how that could be, given the market sales for the device…)

Philip Pullman, much admired hereabouts, plunges and twists a not-so-subtle knife

Bookninja’s own Robert Wiersema on the work in question — sucks readers in, but ultimately suckers them

Six of the best (?) conspiracies theories you’ll find in Dan Brown novels and their attendant debunkings

In related news: The Masons apparently have BBC in their pocket as well (probably nested right beside the Star Wars fan club membership card, but I digress)! This thing goes deeper than even Dan suspected. We’re through the looking glass here, people!

Secrets are good for you, so why is this guy, like, totally trying to unCOVER everything? Gawd!

Reading Kafka or watching Lynch can make you smarter. What about the everyday kinds of surrealism I see out my window? I feel like they make me stupider. Am I rite?

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers’ findings appear in an article published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.

“The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat –– something that fundamentally does not make sense –– your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. “And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.”

The Lost Symbol gets found… again and again and again… People seem to still be asking the will-it-kill-publishing questions, perhaps without realizing that a good percent of those buying this book probably wouldn’t have bought any books this year if it hadn’t come out. Like most Masons. So how does death of the industry follow? I suppose there’s this: deep discounting, to the point that Book Depository is selling it for almost 75% off. Ah, loss leader theory. The slot machine of the retail world. So is the book any good? Well, no. But even the stodgiest critics are couching their derrisive sniffles by trying to pretend as though they’re supportive of having this “fun” thing all the kids are talking about these days. It’s terrible, but it’s fun. Terribly fun. Rip-roaring idiocy that’s fun. Like all Dan Brown writing, the sentences could curdle butter and melt milk with their idiocy, but you can’t deny they’re fun. You can’t even BE a Professor of Symbology in real life, but the position sure sounds like fun. Fun fun fun fun!

It’s not like an entire day could have gone by without me showing up for “work”, is it? Surely this is Tuesday and my attendance record remains untarnished. Yes, yes, it’s Tuesday. Item! I think “jackass” has an air of class to it that I’d like to avoid when talking about Kanye West. I prefer the utilitarian “uberdouche”.

Ever wanted to know what  it would take to print the internet? Of course you have…

Angels are the new Vampires (insert Buffy joke here, you nerd)… I can’t decide if what’s remarkable about this is how little difference it makes or how little I care

Novel-Ts… Literary baseball shirts …with extra wide necks so you can fit your huge egghead through

E-book author debuts print version on bestseller list

Harry Potter theme park erected to celebrate legacy of needless decadence (I can almost hear the terrible “British” accents now… roight, guv-nah!)

Atwood gets a good review from Michiko, who sounds like she really wanted to hate the book

A teenglish dictionary for bewildered parents

Feeling like you’re not on enough federal watch lists? Maybe try joining Osama’s book club

GalleyCat points out some upcoming, and possibly uncomfortable, changes to Amazon’s search-inside-the-book thing. Now readers can actually perform colorectal examines on unsuspecting authors, and no one has to leave the comfort of his or her home. Or something.

That was where the really interesting development kicked in: “Amazon is looking for all new titles to be placed in the program 3-4 weeks before publication—sooner, if possible. It would be nice if once we list the title, we can upload the PDF of the title so that customers can look at the book as soon as it is announced.” The added emphasis is ours—and while we can see some advantages to giving readers a sneak preview of a book months in advance, we’re not sure we’d go so far as to consider it uniformly productive for every book. And we’re definitely not convinced it’s something publishers should be compelled by retailers into doing.

Profiled in the National Post. If I ever interview her, she’s totally not railroading me. I’ll stand against her impish charm with a stern facade of unamused indifference. I swear it.

“The moment you get into [writing] something, there really isn’t something else you could have done. Otherwise, you would actually have done it,” she says. “The books I end up writing are the ones that I would rather dodge altogether, but those are really the only ones I can write, because those are the ones I’m obsessed by. It would be so much easier to write an update of Pride and Prejudice and have everything turn out happily. If you don’t have conviction about it, you can’t do it.” Then she laughs. “I can always knit to pass the time. There are other things that I could do. I don’t have to be writing a book.” Pause. “I could play solitaire.”

There’s that laugh again.

The thing about consulting an oracle is that you don’t get to decide how it conveys its message to you. With most authors, an hour and change would be enough to delve into the ideas that went into their latest book. Not so with Atwood. Though a pleasant conversationalist, she is fond of digressions (say, about the state of the publishing industry). And she comes prepared to quibble (for example, explaining why her politics are not necessarily of the left). She responds to a question about which books she’d take with her to the other side of the apocalypse by insisting that we first figure out the scenario.

“Are you allowed ‘collected works of’ or is it just one book? Oh, you’re not making rules? Well, you have to put rules on it or else it’s not real,” she says.

Robert McCrum gives a brief history of how the Booker’s gone, then laments the oversight of some good books. We could do this all day, couldn’t we?

What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breaths the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative. Every one of these books explores the past in some form.

Taking few risks, it offers JM Coetzee and AS Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner’s podium. In a recession, it’s a list that will transmit a warm glow of reassurance into the troubled breasts of nervous UK booksellers. God knows what they will make of it in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur.

Occasionally, as it has every right to do, the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time. Just as notable as its penchant for 16th-century (Wolf Hall), 19th-century (The Quickening Maze) and austerity Britain (The Little Stranger) is its neglect of a new novel of real distinction. For those who remember the promise of August’s longlist, there’s one quite extraordinary omission here.

Now one person’s meat is another’s poison, etc, but Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is, for my money, the closest Booker has come in many years to a small masterpiece. Deceptively spare, composed with a profound simplicity, Brooklyn describes the experience of exile in a way that resonates far beyond the limits of a tale about an Irish girl’s passage to postwar America and her shy apprehension of first love in a foreign land. Not since John McGahern’s Amongst Women, shortlisted in 1989, has an Irish novel moved so many readers.

Well, the massive machine that’s grown up around Dan Brown (akin to a money- and attention-sucking version of that artifically intelligent ship that had grown up around the Voyager probe in that first Star Trek movie from the 70s) has downshifted to pick up torque and will pull the uninsured hands of your migrant-worker mind into its gearbox, where you’ll be mulched, liquified, and washed with a hose down a rusty grate in the middle of the floor before the proper authorities can be notified. But I digress.

DJ Taylor writes an article following the headline I might have used on any given day: “Dan Brown is going to be the ruin of us all”. How can the industry survive when a system has been created that keeps the bestselling book of the decade at half price, presumably forcing the competition to … compete.

At a rough calculation, several million pounds that could have been used to irrigate an industry struggling to emerge from recession is simply being thrown away in defiance of fiscal logic. Here, after all, is a product that hundreds and thousands of people want to buy. Why not make them pay a proper price for it?

By chance, the fanfare over The Lost Symbol’s arrival in last Friday’s Bookseller coincided with two other announcements. One was the demise of the fine old independent publishing firm of Marion Boyars. The other was the news that authors’ advances are being squeezed. Up to a point, that is. Should you happen to be in the Dan Brown category you can expect to receive even more money up-front; the rest of us, though, can expect rather more frugality from our sponsors.

All this renders the book’s publication horribly symbolic. For all the bright-eyed talk about ‘diversity’ in the nation’s bookshops, the over-riding tendency in publishing is for more discounted copies to be sold of fewer, similar books. Some might argue that putting Dan Brown on sale at half-price is a thoroughly democratic way of making literature more accessible to a mass public. In the end, though, price-cutting simply devalues the allure of what remains.

Apparently, Dan Brown was briefly “crippled with nerves” while writing, but then realized he was just expected to produce a throwaway piece of claptrap that can be read in one sitting, so things got better. Dude, can’t you hire someone to be crippled on your behalf? Or just buy someone and cripple them yourself to relieve stress? The NYT breaks the review embargo here, and occasionally uses some surprisingly positive adjectives that make me worried Maslin stayed up all night and wrote the thing in an 8am coffee-and-crying jag.

Within this book’s hermetically sealed universe, characters’ motivations don’t really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes “The Lost Symbol” impossible to put down. So Mal’akh’s story is best not dissected beyond the facts that he is bad, self-tattooed, self-castrated and not Langdon’s friend.

Also, the author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls. And Mr. Brown would face an interesting creative challenge if the phrases “What the hell

…?,” “Who the hell … ?” and “Why the hell … ?” were made unavailable to him. The surprises here are so fast and furious that those phrases get quite the workout.

Well, regardless of literary snobbery I riff with here, this thing is going to be big, and I’m sure there are even some of you folk who’ll guiltily sneak in three page chapters on your lunch break when no one’s looking. It’ll be like surfing porn in your cubicle. Have fun and let us hold-outs know what it’s like. Just don’t get your kit off.

* Updated to add LAT review, which also breaks the embargo. You got to wonder if they hoped it would be broken.

Jonathan Lethem takes a solid look at the legacy left by JG Ballard in this excerpt from the intro to a coming book of short stories. I’d buy it.

A writer viewed as radical is rarely also so entrenched in formal reserve as was Ballard. Much of the energy in his fiction comes from the pull of his prophecy against the dutiful, typically middle-class English politesse of his characters, the unradicalism of their attitudes toward one another and themselves. In the “Vermilion Sands” stories, scattered through the first two decades of his career, much of the dialogue might be taken from a Barbara Pym novel, if instead of small-town vicarages Pym’s milieu had been a crumbling desert resort inhabited by aging celebrities.

Ultimately, Ballard is simply a master story writer — the maker of unforgettable artifacts in words, each as absolute and perplexing as sculptures unviewable from a single perspective. In this book of 98 stories, there are at least 30 you can spend a lifetime returning to, to wander and wonder around. Even the lesser pieces are invaluable, because they support rather than diminish the masterworks and because Ballard’s hand is always unmistakable.

Very funny post over at the Globe, wherein Brian Joseph Davis takes a stab at editing Dan Brown. For some reason the publishers haven’t even sent me the book yet. Huh. I wonder why?

In defence of well-written, enjoyable potboilers though, I have to point out that your writing style is so toxically inept that Vladimir Putin could use it to poison dissidents.

That’s hardly constructive criticism, so I’ve also taken an editorial pass at excerpts from the first two chapters of The Da Vinci Code. I’m not attempting to turn you into Faulkner by any stretch of the imagination but there are several tips I hope you find helpful in the future. I’ve left it in track changes, a file format I’m guessing your editor has never shown you.

Punk poet and memoirist, dead at 60. I read the Basketball Diaries back in the 80s. It had nothing to do with me becoming a poet, but plenty to do with me not turning tricks in New York or masturbating at the sky.

The diaries began, innocently: “Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league. I’m enthused about life due to this exciting event.”

By the end of the book, Mr. Carroll was a heroin addict who supported his habit by hustling in Times Square. “Totally zonked, and all the dope scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags,” the final entry read, continuing, “I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure.”

You know, I’m kind of there myself, Tommy. A simpsons director and a Pynchon scholar meet in a bar…

ME: I talked to him on the phone today. YBSH: Talked to who? ME: Thomas Pynchon. YBSH: WHAT!?!? ME: Yeah, Pynchon LOVES The Simpsons. This is the second time he’s been on the show. I directed him over the phone from New York. He sounds like a New York Grampa. Gruff but sweet. Good guy. This had the benefit of being true. I had talked extensively to Thomas Pynchon that day. Not about anything substantial. Mostly about which word he should emphasize in the phase, “The Frying of Latke 49.” (It was “Latke.”) But it was a lot closer to America’s second most famous reclusive author (or second most reclusive famous author) than Sherlock was ever going to get. Vengeance. After that, there was no going back to small talk.  YBSH drifted off to the cheese cubes to ponder the colossal injustices of the universe, and I was left to ponder my crime against casual conversation.

They’ll knock you flat out. Get it? Get it? Anyway, the SK government is going after the book profits of Colin Thatcher, former cabinet minister and convicted murderer. Should criminals be allowed to profit from the stories of their crimes? (Thanks, Frankie)

Morgan said Justice ministry officials have read Thatcher’s book, Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame, and believe it meets the criteria of legislation passed this spring to prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes.

The government will send letters to the author and publisher asking for financial documents and a voluntary payment, but also inviting them to explain why they believe the law does not apply.

“When (justice officials) receive that information, they would expect compliance with the act to receive funds on it. If co-operation isn’t forthcoming, then they would make an application to the Court of Queen’s Bench,” Morgan told reporters outside the Saskatchewan legislature.

“I think they’ll want to proceed with it as soon as they possibly can,” he added.

The government would ask the court to compel the release of documents and funds. The order would also be registered in other provinces.

US Copyright czar comes out against Google

Simultaneously good and scary news: Google will let anyone who wants to sell from Google’s ebook catalog

Digital publisher implodes before takeoff

Proven: authors using Twitter sell more books… Correction: Author’s named Stephen Fry using Twitter sell more books…

S&S courts ivory tower market with special site

WHS in the UK sparks ebook price war… NOW we’re talking…

Alison Flood checks in on with several authors who are working to revive places and characters created by others.

This autumn, eight years after Douglas Adams died, Arthur Dent and friends will be hitching across the galaxy once again, Bram Stoker’s Dracula will be stalking the pages of a book for the first time in more than a century, and Winnie the Pooh will be returning to the Hundred Acre Wood in the first official sequel to AA Milne’s much-loved children’s books. Such continuations of the work of popular authors, who have inconveniently interrupted their output by dying, are big business for the literary world these days. Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies, whether it’s Sebastian Faulks taking on James Bond in Devil May Care last year, or the bucketloads of Virginia Andrews novels she has “written” since her death more than 20 years ago.