A bunch of newspaper men and the fabulous Bookslut Jessa Crispin get together to talk about the dying book review section in print media. Jessa expects an angry mob ready to string her up for leading the pack of internet folk (which she confessed to me by email prior to the engagement), but gets treated well. One of the participants blogs the whole thing.

So, whose fault is it?

The book publishers? For printing more and more titles and advertising fewer and fewer of them?

The book writers? For just not being as good or as interesting as in the golden days and not deserving the space now dolloped out so generously to the stars of sport?

The book critics? For not judging and selecting properly or at all? For describing instead of arguing a case, for enthusing with puff rather than endorsing with reasons. Is there too much reviewing and not enough literary criticism?

The World Wide Web? For allowing an infinity of choice while being at the same time averse to anything ‘over 260 words’ – and preferring when possible not even to pay for those.

The government? By which we mean here the terrible Bush goverment and its part in the economic crash that has led hot breakfasts to be cut at Harvard and all sorts of problems even in Princeton? Fortunately we stay away from the big picture.

Britannica seeks oldest set of self

Does the brain like ebooks?

Portrait of the artist as a Jung man

Area man knows more about Marvel universe than own family

John Cheever summons demons or something at the Guardian

“New” Vonnegut story, anyone?

Ray Kurzweil teams up with company to develop new reader software for the blind…  exactly what DOESN’T Kurzweil do?

EU goes digital and transparent on documents

I knicked that headline from Moby who gets up earlier than I do, but, really, what other headline is there for this story? Wal-Mart and Amazon have risen from their rocky/watery lairs and will do battle in the downtown Tokyo of the American marketplace. God, I can’t WAIT to see Bezos fire that red beam from his mouth. If we could just throw an e-bone in there to entice Google/Gamera to jump in, we’d have an earth-splitting Mexican standoff that could destroy the world! Cooooool. Moby fleshes out the situation here.

The idea driving discussion in the book business these days is a purely capitalist trope masquerading as a populist cause. It’s being taken up by young digital gurus and aged captains of mega-retail alike — people who are either drunk on new technology, or happy, in the midst of a recession, for an excuse to hide their agenda — and all agree in proclaiming publishers who resist are evil and authors who do likewise are patsies. It is the idea that a book should cost ten bucks, no matter what. Doesn’t matter what kind of book it is, who wrote it, how big it is, what the format is, the quality of the work or even of the paper it’s printed on — all the things that drive what it cost to make a thing. Apply this notion to other manufactured objects and it would be scoffed at as lunacy. Really? All cars should cost $10? All beers? All clothes? I won’t even get into discussing how this dictates that the manufacturers and creators of those objects — after all, the only people with a financial stake in a business where everything is returnable — have no say in that valuation. But there you have it: The book reduced to a thing of no inherent actual quality, just a price.

Paul Quarrington, one of Canada’s greatest novelists, has cancer and has decided to spend his time singing and getting to know planet Earth. What a generous and invigorating piece of writing. A fine way to start your week.

As we journeyed through the Torngat Mountains, I finally realized what this trip was all about, for me. First of all, let me get a little scientific on you. The Torngats-comprised of Precambrian gneisses-are amongst the oldest mountains in the world, almost four billions years old. They rise out of the water with enchanted austerity. Sitting well above the tree line, the Torngats are stark naked and make no apology about it. “Torngat” is an Inuktitut word meaning “Place of Spirits,” and it very clearly is. The mountaintops are usually shrouded in cloud, and it’s easy enough to imagine the Spirits assembling there, going through the itinerary for another year. (”All righty! We have some squamous sessile tumors to give out!”) In short, the Torngat Mountains took what little breath I have away from me. The thought occurred that I was on another planet, and that’s when I realized, no, I’m on this planet, I’m just none too clear on what it actually looks like. I realized that what I wanted to do was spend a little time getting to know the third stone from the sun; it has been my home for 56 years, but I have spent much of it confined in the settlements. I wanted to explore and examine, I wanted to interact-yes, in the broadest, most spiritual sense, I wanted to go mountain climbing.

The Huffinton Post’s new books section isn’t for the weak of resolve. Not talking about readers, either. You poor saps working as publicists bear the brunt of this one here. An open letter outlining everything you have to do if you want to get covered at the HP. Comes across a little…um…somethingsomething.

I know many of you are looking at this Books section and wondering how the hell you are going to make any noise for your titles considering there’s so much on the page — videos, slide shows, reviews, link outs, splashes all of it changing before you’ve even had a chance to read something you heard about on a publishing blog, which by the way, is at least a day behind everything else on the web.

So let me see if I can offer you a little guidance, because there are a bunch of surprises.

#1. This is NOT a book review section. Let me say that again, because I know about 72,000 publicists just plotzed because they have no idea what to do other than ask for a review. Huffington Post Books is not a review — there’s a reason those sections in newspapers are dropping like flies. Book reviews tend to be conversation enders, and when you’re living in the age of engagement, a time when people are looking for conversation starters, that stance gets you nowhere.

And now you’re thinking, If I can’t send you books to review, how does anyone get attention for them on your site?

I thought you’d never ask.

Boys like zombies, girls like vampires. Think about it:  teenaged boys stink, shamble, and are in desperate need of brains… Teenaged girls, on the other hand, will drain you of all life if you let them and will eventually all become old bats. Open and shut. I love show-ciology—it’s so simple!

Our current preoccupation with zombies and vampires is easy to explain. They’re two sides of the same coin, addressing our fascination with sex, death and food. They’re both undead, they both feed on us, they both pass on some kind of plague and they can both be killed with specialist techniques – a stake through the heart or a disembraining. But they seem to have become polarised. Vampires are the undead of choice for girls, and zombies for boys. Vampires are cool, aloof, beautiful, brooding creatures of the night. Typical moody teenage boys, basically. Zombies are dumb, brutal, ugly and mindlessly violent. Which makes them also like typical teenage boys, I suppose.

Zombie stories are life lessons for boys who don’t mind thinking about bodies, but can’t cope with emotions. Vampire stories are in many ways sex for the squeamish. We don’t need Raj Persaud to tell us that plunging canines into soft warm necks, or driving stakes between heaving bosoms, are very basic sexual metaphors.

Listen, let’s be honest, boys might like vampires a whole lot more if they were able to form marauding hordes like in Left 4 Dead and offer themselves up to your shotgun in wave after hideous, satisfying wave of spattering blood. But, nooOOOoo, they have to be all aloof and intellectual and bent on kissing and such. Come on, Vlads, you’re dead. Get freaky and start rioting. We’ll show up.

It just struck me after I hit “publish” that the last story in the news round up might need its own post in case it sparks comments from outraged or depressed literary types. They’re so drastically cutting bestseller prices to the point the one wonders how anyone’s making back the costs of the whole operation. Publishers, tell me: is it more important that your book get sold by Walmart than that you make anything from it? I don’t get it. How do you end up signing to those terms?

The online division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) said on Thursday that it is pricing the top 10 pre-selling books on its website at $10 each, including free shipping.

The $10 price represent a 66 percent cut on the $28.99 listing price for Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life”, or a 64 percent cut on the $27.99 price for Michael Crichton’s “Pirate Latitudes.”

The titles will not ship until November, but eager consumers can now place orders for the books online — representing “pre-sales.”

Walmart.com also said it is rolling out a new book program, called “America’s Reading List.” Under that program, it is cutting the price of 200 of the nation’s best-selling books, including “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown, by 50 percent or more from their listing price.

Here’s something new: Halloween book burning at Baptist church includes Bibles…

Penguin Canada’s David Davidar becomes CEO of “Penguin International”

Bantam signs Dean Koontz to officially fuck up Frankenstein… No really!

Salon interviews Edmund White

Enid Blyton’s ghost talks with kids

The book industry needs to have contingency plans for postal strikes (’prolly should have had one for the readers’ strike as well… eh, you live, you learn)

Clever interviewer cracks The Alexie Code

Walmart to follow painful British supermarket price-reduction model

Popular author Graham Taylor has quit writing to care for his young daughter with an incurable disease… Damn, I’m actually tearing up reading this… I often have to tell childless friends I can’t go out to that reading or apply for that residency or  can’t get that story in on deadline because of prior commitments around the kids, and I curse my lot as someone distracted from his art, but this is mind-blowing. I don’t want to be one of those parents who either envies or pities those without kids, but it’s stories like this that make me remember there can come a point at which you have to choose if you’re a parent and a writer. If you don’t have kids, tell me, what would be important enough to make you give up your art? Because before kids, I would have said “nothing”.

As well as writing he also dabbled in the priesthood and the music industry, working with musical heroes like the Sex Pistols.

But he has now decided to hang up his pen and devote his life to his adorable 11-year-old daughter, Lydia, who is suffering from Crohn’s disease.

Mr Taylor, 51, of Scarborough, North Yorks, said: “Looking after Lydia is going to be a lifelong thing and I’ve made my decision.

“I’ve realised that I’ve got to stop writing until she’s of an age where she’s more able to look after herself.

…To me it’s reality. “Every Day Of Local Dad’s Life An Endless Battle To Hold On To Good Pen“. I have one pen only and the only time it leaves my pocket is lay down some hellfire poetry, baby. I wouldn’t let the president use it to sign a world peace agreement. And on the off chance I misplace it, you’re all guilty until you can prove to me you’re innocent of my having lost it. (Yes, I’m already saving for my children’s therapy bills.)

The Daily Beast gets the scoop on exactly how hard it was to get an unauthorized history of The Simpsons through the pipe. Ah, the Fox legal team. Never too busy protecting their own ass to try to violate someone else’s.

The problem, or delight, in writing an unauthorized history is that someone’s feathers are bound to get ruffled (by the lawyer’s reaction to my book about The Simpsons—an entity that has earned upwards of $3 billion for its parent companies—it seemed that I had engaged less in an act of ruffling than total depluming). In the case of my Simpsons history, the squawking started early, only a few months into the project.

Back in 2006, as a 26-year old associate at Vanity Fair, I was delighted to be assigned my first feature—the oral history of The Simpsons, something I’d pitched knowing that it would be short, fun, pegged to the release of a major film; a cakewalk for a green reporter. Dead. Fucking. Wrong.

Is the only thing standing between publishers and defeat the inconvenience of libraries? Would the industry collapse if it were just simple to borrow a book instead of having to get off your fat ass and go somewhere to pick it up?

Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.

“I don’t have to get in my car, go to the library, look at the book, check it out,” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, which publishes authors like Janet Evanovich, Augusten Burroughs and Jeffrey Eugenides. “Instead, I’m sitting in the comfort of my living room and can say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting’ and download it.”

As digital collections grow, Mr. Sargent said he feared a world in which “pretty soon you’re not paying for anything.” Partly because of such concerns, Macmillan does not allow its e-books to be offered in public libraries.

Cory Doctorow thinks Access Copyright is stupid

McSweeney’s to go broadsheet

B&N reader: hey, you got your iPod in my Kindle! Mmmm!

It’s hard to get the new Nobel winner in English… Heaven forfend!

Today in Death Of…: Is browsing a dying art?

The British Society of Authors recommends authors seek higher digital royalties… hm… revolutionary. Here, authors, let me save you membership in organizations like this—new headline: Bookninja recommends authors always seek higher everything royalties.

The Society of Authors’ plans to increase its recommendations for e-royalties to make them “more favourable” for writers. But the proposals have already been called “unrealistic” by publishers.

Currently the society’s guide for e-books says authors “should receive at least 25% [royalties], preferably 35%, rising at an agreed level of sales. Some publishers offer 50% of net receipts, most others offer 15% to 25%. Resist anything less than that.”

Following up on yesterday’s news that the GG’s (for which I was a judge in the poetry category) were announced is yesterday’s news that the National Book Awards (aka GGs of the Sowth) were announced. Carl Phillips, the upcoming Griffin judge, is in the poetry category. What’s surprising to me is that I only know a few of the titles here. How’d I miss so much this year?

Fiction:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)

Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)

Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)

Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry:

Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)

Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)

Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Vampires have taken over YA lit and pop culture because straight teenage girls use them as a proxy for the gay men they would ideally prefer as boyfriends over the smelly, unkempt, mumbling boys they grew up with. … … … … Huh… … … … Makes sense. I’d totally take a vampire over my 17 year old self. I guess this is why it was so hard for me to get laid as a kid. That or the D&D. But both do involve the undead. I better roll a saving throw here just in case. Nhoy!

Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn’t about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There’s a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men. Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi novelist and geek grandmaster, found out just how many during the shitstorm of pique that covered him from head to toe this past summer after he suggested in an interview that the vampire craze had run its course and should disappear for another twenty to twenty-five years. (Twilight fans took to Twitter in protest.) A foolish hope. The craving for vampire fiction is not a matter of taste but of urges; one does not read or watch it so much as inject it through the eyes, and like any epidemic, it’s symptomatic of something much larger: a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life.

It’s sad how far things have fallen for the mainstream print media. “Report: Majority Of Newspapers Now Purchased By Kidnappers To Prove Date”

According to a report published this week in American Journalism Review, 93 percent of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands.

“Although the vast majority of Americans now get their news from the Internet or television, a small but loyal criminal element still purchases newspapers at a steady rate,” study author and Columbia journalism professor Linus Ridell said. “The sober authority of the printed word continues to hold value for those attempting to extort large sums of money from wealthy people who wish to see their loved ones alive again, and not chopped into pieces and left in steamer trunks on their doorsteps.”

“These are sick, sick individuals,” Ridell added. “God bless them for saving our industry.”

Well, the GG finalists have just been announced in Toronto. The poetry list looks sweet. Must have been chosen by geniuses. Pure geniuses. And at least one sack of dead weight. Ce ça. Congratulations to all.

Poetry

David W. McFadden, “Be Calm, Honey” (Mansfield Press)

Philip Kevin Paul, “Little Hunger” (Nightwood Editions)

Sina Queyras, “Expressway” (Coach House Books)

Carmine Starnino, “This Way Out” (Gaspereau Press)

David Zieroth, “The Fly in Autumn” (Harbour Publishing)

Fiction

Michael Crummey, “Galore” (Doubleday Canada)

Annabel Lyon, “The Golden Mean” (Random House Canada)

Alice Munro, “Too Much Happiness” (McClelland & Stewart)

Kate Pullinger, “The Mistress of Nothing” (McArthur & Company)

Deborah Willis, “Vanishing and Other Stories” (Penguin Group)

Ray Robertson waxes on why it’s alright that he never gets nominated for the Giller. Apparently he doesn’t feel he meets the unwritten criteria for consideration: historical, bucolic, and outside the can.

Some point, in other words, when I knew that the tender sensibilities of that year’s distinguished arbiters of taste would no doubt be chafed by some damning reference of mine to either bodily functions (because we all know that people in works of literature don’t go to the bathroom) or popular culture (because we all know that people in works of literature spend the majority of their time occupied not with jobs and families and television and boredom, but with either travelling to remote countries looking for lost lovers or distant family members or else sitting in abandoned lighthouses alternately listening to the mournful sounds of the sea and brooding upon those timeless day-to-day concerns of time, loss, and memory) or for simply failing to set said novel in a sufficiently charmingly bucolic and/or fascinatingly exotic locale (because we all know that real literature doesn’t take place where most people actually live and work and go to the mall and die).

I send you here, for a similar argument. In other awards news, the Griffin Trust has announced next year’s judges: Anne Carson, Carl Phillips, and Kathleen Jamie. Next up, the GG shortlists, in just a few short minutes.

It takes a whole lot to be involved in publishing these days. Mostly you need to be able to survive downsizing and then confuse the shit out of technophobic authors by downloading web promotions to them. Just read up on it here.

Once we get back from Frankfurt, we’d like to see you on morning talk shows like the “Today” show and “The View,” so please get yourself booked on them and keep us “in the loop.” If I’m not here—which I won’t be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeks—just tell Jenni, my assistant, when she gets back from jury duty.

Remember in your blog to tabskim your readers’ comments. You can use Twitter, Chitt-chaTT, or Nit-Pickr. When you reply to comments, try to post at least one photo per hour of you doing everyday tasks around the house, such as answering comments and posting photos. Please make sure they’re pre-scorched. Let me know, when I get back from Retreat a week after my vacation, if self-surging is a problem.

LG enters reader game with solar powered reader, perhaps not understanding its market… hint, LG, avid readers don’t get much daylight…

New e-book company to focus on older titles

Aussies upset at getting shafted on Kindle stuff—hey, Australia, quit yer whining. Try being the retarded cousin of the internet like Canada is and not getting the Kindle at all…

The Goog plans “buy anywhere, read anywhere” scheme… I hope this has to do with porn…

Would you rent books the way Netflix lets you rent movies? Some people apparently said yes to that question

It’s going to be a busy day for me today, as you’ll see, so I’m going to kick back with a news compendium and maybe one or two other posts and take it easy before things get going.

An American scientist (an ID badge-carrying member of that cosmic comedy troop that takes the mysteries of life and makes them the hysterics of life) the donates hisn rather significant Shakespeare collection to UCLA

And to prove their laffy-daffiness, scientists had the missile headed to blow up the moon tweet its last moments as the falling whale from Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide… youse guys…. (speaking of scientists, see image below)

And of course, there’s a new HGttG book coming, so it’s a good excuse for people to wear bathrobes in public

Bidding war for Mandela archive

Mr Rochester beats the pants off Mr Darcy… don’t get all hot and bothered now, it’s just a romantic character poll

John Freeman has been named permanent editor of Granta… this is a good thing

Edinburgh has someone new for you to suck up to

Penguins spotted in China!

The “inherent” similarities between Grand Theft Auto and Thomas Pynchon (from Michael)

Brits not only buy more books than Americans, they buy fewer potboilers and bodice-rippers—someone should study this data for possible correlation to Big Mac sales

Letter of mind-blowing awesomeness:

Are we living in a post sci-fi world? Hegemony, man. It’s just like Mulder said. Wait. There it is again! How can we call something a genre when we breathe it like air these days. And this might explain why Peggy says she doesn’t write it.

Sci-fi has made many predictions about the future, but did any of them forecast that in the early years of the 21st century everyone would be watching … sci-fi? Our TV screens are filled with Dr Who, Lost and now FlashForward. Each summer brings more blockbusters in the Lord of the Rings and Star Trek vein, and a flood of superhero franchises. In comics and video games, sci-fi is the norm. It’s not just part of mainstream culture, it is arguably the dominant cultural expression of the early 21st century.

If further evidence were needed, that bastion of television arts journalism Newsnight Review chose to dedicate a full programme last Friday to the question “Has cult gone mainstream?” While the role of sci-fi as a mirror for society, the hunger of audiences for modern myth and the purchasing power of the Geek pound all came under discussion, the real conflict was being played out live on the Newsnight Review sofa. We watched with terrified fascination as bathrobe-clad, uber-geek Kevin Smith faced off against the minuscule but pugnacious presence of feminist author Jeanette Winterson. It was an encounter worthy of Star Trek itself, like watching representatives of two alien species attempting to negotiate without the aid of a universal translator. And it was a perfect illustration of the conflict of values that exists between sci-fi and literary culture.

This fellow admits a dark secret from his closet of mental horrors: he never did like Where the Wild Things Are. And he suspects kids don’t really either. So either get out your wrecking sledgehammers and agree or roll up your sleeves and strike a wicked-cool Kung Fu cat stance in front of the nostalgia wagon protect that baby.

My 10-year-old son, Isaac, and I were at some kid movie enduring the antic coming attractions, when a trailer came on for Spike Jonze’s soon-to-be-released adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” On screen, a boy in a white wolf suit romped through a forest alongside monsters played by actors in old-fashioned Godzilla-style rubber suits but with computer-­animated faces and, in one case, Tony Soprano’s voice; there was also a bittersweet indie rock soundtrack, as if this were a Zooey Deschanel movie for grade schoolers.

“What do you think?” I asked Isaac. “Should we see it?”

“Nah,” he said. “It looks weird. Plus the book wasn’t any good.”

Me, I thought it looked pretty cool, or at least tasteful: the trailer promised a quieter and more pensive film than, say, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” and I liked the way Jonze has recapitulated the Dürer-meets-Mad-magazine quality of Sendak’s illustrations. But as for the second part of Isaac’s critique — and I’m a little anxious stating this publicly — I didn’t think the book was any good either.

Frankfurt Bookfair: waning?

The Telegraph’s Sunday crossword was dedicated to authors’ names… Anyone want to clip this and send to me?

Old favourite of mine, Berkeley Breathed, profiled in New York Magazine (from Michael)

RIP: Raymond Federman, avant garde author, dead at 81

Forward Prize winner Emma Jones profiled in SMH

The TLS asks whether there’s still room for the literary journal, those apostles of the late Lord Modernism.

The importance of such publications in the literary or intellectual history of a period is tantalizingly hard to gauge, especially in the case of journals that were short-lived and erratically distributed. To the enthusiast for a particular coterie of minor poets, the yellowing pages of the few issues that appeared before debt and infighting took their toll may have the aura of holy relics. But to the literary historian, focusing on who read what and who influenced whom, the scale of attention given to such a publication will be largely determined by whether any of its contributors subsequently enjoyed a significant reputation. The social historian, in search of pattern and representativeness, may well conclude that such a source has the documentary value of school magazines or the annual reports of local horticultural societies, and allot space accordingly.

Americans cover your eyes or do something exciting like watching state assembly on CSPAN: I’ve been hearing terrible rumbles from the other side of the country for a while now, but it just gets more and more disgusting over there. Don’t kid yourselves: a Harper majority likely means the same thing for all of Canada. The BC publishing industry is hurting as funding to cultural industries there has been decimated (x8).

The Arts and Culture branch of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts has cut all provincial funding from the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (ABPBC), BC BookWorld newspaper and the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers (BCAMP).

The information was delivered via phone calls with the ministry on Tuesday.

“It’s devastating,” says Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the ABPBC. Her organization has lost $45,000 in funding – out of a yearly $290,000 budget.

“It’s a massive amount,” she says. “It’s also demoralizing. You think you’re in a sophisticated society and you find out that this is not actually the case, so it’s very distressing.”

Ms. Reynolds, whose organization represents some 50 B.C. publishers, says provincial funding for cultural industries has dropped from $19.5-million last year to $3.6-million.

As usual, the Globe’s comments section is filled with semi-retarded flamers, which usually keeps me away from the site, but it’s an important story.

Google: not just battling citizens anymore

Barnes and Noble will not just lie there quietly and think of England after all

Cory Doctorow advocates for DRM in books… Psych! Opposite of that

Waterstone’s forbids innocent staff to see that good-for-nothing punk of a booksite

Sometimes you come back from Thanksgiving weekend (yes, we celebrate it now up here because the igloo gets snowed under by late November—hey, it beats a holiday celebrating a genocidal mass murderer like Columbus…) and all there seems to be is library news. And not one stitch of it is illustrated by a Lisa Loeb-ish woman in a tight sweater, wool skirt, and hair bun. So rather than ignoring it in petulant anger, you ghettoize it in an omnibus post because you know there are closet ‘Ninjas out there sneaking peeks from the circulation desk when the head librarian is snoozing in her office.

Now here’s a great story—American GI returns looted German books 64 years later (the books were likely hidden by anti-Nazi librarians fighting the good fight back in the day)

Berkeley students stage library sit-in

Should libraries be allowed to sell books?

Librarians save us authors by providing a kind of nursing home or storage unit for books… at least, I think that’s what he’s saying (how does this get an op spot at the LAT?)

British Library acquires Eva Figes archive

And this might provide a nice segue to the next post, if you’re reading from the bottom up, like you should be: what exactly will happen to libraries once e-books dominate?

Despite the Dan Brown effect (no the other effect, the one that doesn’t involve douchebags at your work sporting black turtlenecks and camel hair jackets and blockading the water cooler with chatter about Masons and conspiracies) and massive marketing campaigns, A-list book sales are on the way down. Thanks, Motoko, for the Friday downer.

over all, according to BookScan, book sales were down about 4 percent compared with the same week last year, suggesting that neither of those titles or any of the other big fall books from heavyweights like Mitch Albom, Pat Conroy, E. L. Doctorow and Audrey Niffenegger were helping booksellers to overcome the sludgy economy.

“They are all great books, but they are all hardcover books,” said Ellen Archer, publisher of Hyperion, a unit of Disney that just released Mr. Albom’s “Have a Little Faith.” “How many hardcover purchases can one person make given these difficult times? Are they going to choose one of their nonfiction reads and one great novel and stop and wait for the paperbacks? Probably.”

Around this time of year it all seems to run together, don’it?

Booker judge John Mullan dishes on the process

Who is Herta?

Why Mantel deserves the Booker

Zuh Germanz on why it Hertas so good

Australia laments Coetzee loss

Get a sneak peek inside Herta’s ouevre* via the Goog

Nobel predictably shies from predictability (kind of like the kid in the black trenchcoat at school who loves a band until the album gets popular then spends his days trashing it for selling out, even though it’s the exact same songs he loved earlier in the year… also watches Eraserhead compulsively)

*Not a euphemism

In these days of glamorous awards news and presidents getting Nobel prizes for promoting peace and not being bigotted warmongers bent on destroying the planet—which, when you think about it, is really only the most very basic requirement of their paid and elected position—let us spare a moment to think about the plight of the b-list news item.

Gabriel García Márquez film being held up by prostitution groups, much like, as many suspect, García Márquez himself may have been at some point in the past

Edgar Allen Poe finally gets funeral suitable for dude who fetishized death

Guy squeezes article out of his bizarre hatred for Eric Carle’s Hungry Little Caterpillar—why are we going here when there are books like The Giving Tree and Love You Forever that need to be completely erased from the human collective unconscious before we can progress as a species?

A special Christian edition of Goin’ All Roguey has fallen through… Special Christian edition? Isn’t that sort of like Jesus dressing up as Jesus for Halloween?

Frankfurt scaled back this year, now just “Furt”

It’s goof-off-at-work Friday—chew on this pencil puzzle a bit, why don’t you

A roundup of Nobel Prize reaction:

Complete Review’s in depth profile

NYT

BBC

Guardian

Times

Telegraph

Time

An AP bit quotes a Nobel judge as saying it’s time to drop the Euro bias

NPR questions what the real value of the Nobel is

The plan to treat bloggers as thieves-and-scoundrels-in-waiting isn’t sitting well with blogger Choire Sicha, and he’s got a pretty good pulpit to announce this from. (From @RebeccaSkloot)

Now that we are all on Facebook, we are each a sole proprietor. We are all perpetrators and victims of promotion (for the most part that promotion is tediously of the “self” variety). That every consumer is now a retailer is capitalism’s ultimate and most logical evolution. Regulating every last one of us in our tiny, imaginary boardrooms (in my mind, mine is mahogany-paneled and has a Häagen-Dasz fountain) is as ludicrous as not skipping past the advertisements on one’s DVR.

The LAT opines that it wasn’t really necessary to let an author inclined to tip Eyeore to the rictus grin end of the pollyanna scale, much less add an otter with pearls, and speculates, in a rather rambling way, that this might have been about money… Ya think?

This is the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s tales of the beloved bear, and it was clearly penned with all the care a conscientious and talented author could muster. And yet, even if Benedictus got it right, with great attention to the nuances that made us love Milne’s original stories from the 1920s, he got it wrong. The guileless Pooh and his pals were just fine as we left them decades ago in the enchanted forest, where “a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

Literature belongs to its era and can’t simply be added to decades later, especially after the author has died. Call me cranky, but I don’t think we need another Pooh book. And we certainly don’t need a new character like the otter, Lottie, that Benedictus has added, even if she helps address a gender imbalance in the Hundred Acre Wood. Why couldn’t Benedictus have made the haughty otter the hero of her own book, giving future generations of children a new story, while leaving intact the Pooh tales their parents and grandparents treasured?

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore starts his own publishing company—ROCK AND ROLLL!

Harvard acquires Updike archive

Mantel’s Booker novel displaces Dan Brown from Amazon number 1

Not that the German’s would care—72% never consult a bestseller list

“Wisdom” from the mouths of deluded idiots—the Kanye West-still-making-a-fool-of-himself edition

TS Eliot named as poet most in UK are sure will make them look smart

Don Paterson, who is pretty much one of the best poets working in English today, takes the Forward Prize. I haven’t read the new book, but he’s a worthy winner, if you just consider his oeuvre. Faber, in fact, takes two Forwards.

Sixteen years after he debuted on the poetry scene with the acclaimed collection Nil Nil, Don Paterson has triumphed over one of the strongest poetry shortlists in years to take the Forward prize for best collection with Rain, a work which judges said showed the Scottish poet’s “total mastery of his art”.

Paterson, 45, beat a line-up of acclaimed poets including Peter Porter, Sharon Olds and Glyn Maxwell to win the £10,000 award for Rain, a continuation of his personal and philosophical exploration of the world around him.

“It was a close call. These are some extremely gifted poets and it was an atrociously strong shortlist,” said judge and former Forward prize winner David Harsent. “Had it been a poor season I suppose one could have said there were one or two stand-out books, but that simply was not the case here. Every book on the shortlist had to be thought about very carefully, and there was by no means a country mile victor.”

Judge gives Google one month to make it work

I don’t remember seeing the number before, but this piece says Amazon settled erasing that kid’s 1984 essay for $150,000 of please-go-away money (went to charity)

Everyone’s still talking about the Kindle going worldwide*

Moby aggregates some interesting analysis on this from a subscription-based newsletter I have no intention of paying for

UK assured Amazon something something territoriality yadda yadda minutiae minutiae

*New and improved formula: now with 35,000,000 fewer Canadians!

Romanian/German essayist and poet Herta Müller takes the top spot, only the 12th woman to do so. Check out Michael’s Complete Review page dedicated to Müller.

Romanian-born German novelist, essayist and poet Herta Müller has been named winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, praised by the judges for depicting the “landscape of the dispossessed” with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose”.

Müller becomes only the 12th woman to have won the Nobel since it launched in 1901; in 2007 British novelist Doris Lessing won for her “scepticism, fire and visionary power … [which] subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. Worth 10m Swedish kronor (£893,000), the Nobel is awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, as described in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895.

Kill it! Burn it with fire!! That or else save it from the infestation of imps crawling all over it. (From Andris’s FB feed)

This guy at Bloomberg thinks it’s all about politics (and truth be told…) He thinks Americans are being ripped off (as opposed to what I think, which is that Philip Roth is being ripped off) because they’re in reality superior to everyone, if not popular. Anyway, if he had a million dollars, he’d bet it on Atwood this year. She’s too busy touring to get the Nobel this year. Couldn’t we wait until next year?

….recent precedent suggests that U.S. writers don’t stand a chance. Last year Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary at the time, explained why: American authors are isolated, insular and ignorant, he said.

Exceptions can be made, it appears, which must be why Toni Morrison got it in 1993. It can’t have been for fine writing, so it must have been for what the French call “les bons sentiments” — the right feelings.

And that’s the point. One of the reasons that American writers, pace Engdahl, are generally superior to Europeans is that the best of them don’t groan softly under the burden of their genteel moral feelings. They don’t moralize at you at all.
…
Meanwhile, if I had it, I’d bet $1 million on this year’s obvious Nobel winner. She has everything going for her: Women have only won six times in 50 years. Politically, she’s perfect, and an environmental activist to boot. Sophomores love her, especially those of a smarmily moralistic disposition. She can be contradictory and irrational, but so long as the feel-good factor works, who cares? She’s even ethnically acceptable, being non-American.

Ron points to an interesting graphic which, involving font-fetishism, I post for the sake of ex-Ninja Pete.

Profiled at the National Post.

“A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe,” Chabon says. “They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.”

The memories in the book, which is dedicated to his brother, run the gamut, from touching to embarrassing to obscure (trying to understand why he likes watching Jose Canseco play baseball, for example). Steeped in nostalgia, the majority of the pieces began as columns for Details magazine. Dan Peres, the editor of Details, flew to San Francisco during Conde Naste’s halcyon days to pitch Chabon on the gig. He says the author brings a sensitivity to even the most trite men’s magazine fare.

“With Michael, the stories aren’t about a conquest, but an awkward rite of passage,” Peres says, who arrived in California the day Chabon was awarded the Pulitzer and says the author not only kept their appointment but also kept his original pay rate. “Michael’s pieces don’t feel like you’re readinga crazy story, but rather experiencing something you may have gone through yourself.”

The big news here today is that bloggers who receive free books to review must now disclose these books or face an $11,000 fine for taking gifts and endorsing corporate wares. Apparently there’s a difference with mainstream media: in the world where people get paid to do this, newspapers are the recipient of the books and assign them. The article implies that the books remain the property of the paper. Which is weird because I’ve never NEVER returned a review copy to a paper. Apparently bloggers, as individuals, are starstruck by the free merch and therefore subject to fawning. Actually, that’s not too far from the truth with some of the fannish blogs out there, but here? Shee-it, it’s way more likely I’ll make fun of you than fluff you, so you send at your own risk. Anyway, the whole thing is So. Very. Wrong. Mediabistro asks: will big media stand up for bloggers?

Also:

Kindle goes worldwide

Guardian reviews it

Run away!! Brain to computer to brain interface developed… Hideous! Wait, on second thought… if you’ve seen Lisa Loeb naked, please contact me

Congratulations, New York Times! You got around to the Google story! Aw! It’s like the 92 year old guy walking across the marathon finish line three days after the race is over. But you finished, didn’t you? You should be proud. No one can take that away from you. Here’s your participation pin and the reporter from Special Olympics Today would like to have a word with you for a story profiling your accomplishment. Also, there’s cream pie!

A murky past in a creative writing course. No, really. I saw this a while back and somehow misplaced the book mark. Then reader Jessica reminded me of it via Facebook feed. It’s kind of nuts, isn’t it? To think DFW had to workshop the early work of someone whose most accomplished prose reads like early work. But I digress.

Well, today all we’ll talk about is the Booker Prize, and Friday I expect it will be the Nobel, if things hold (come on Roth, or some poet!) I know, I know. It’s gets a bit much this time of year, doesn’t it? Well, still to come are the GGs, the Giller, and the rest, so put your legs up and get your nail file out…

Reuters wire coverage

Independent

Guardian’s main article, Sarah Crown asks, Did the right woman win?

The rest of the Guardian coverage, which includes audio, etc.

Time’s infotainment on Mantel

Bookseller notes split vote

Daily Mail notes that the bookies were right for once

BBC has a general piece that includes video of Mantel reading from Wolf Hall

In related news, the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize is announced

Reader Monica sends in this gallery that proves you don’t need to love reading to love books. Delightful!

You know, a guy bathes a couple kids and puts them to sleep and the entire world decides to announce its shit while he’s gone. Anyway, Mantel won much to everyone’s lack of surprise.

Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to prominence in the Tudor court.  Hilary Mantel has been praised by critics for writing ‘a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell.’

James Naughtie, comments ‘Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century.  Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail.

‘It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII’s court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women.

‘In the words of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, “the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions.  This is how the world changes.” ‘

This is the first time the publisher Fourth Estate has had a Man Booker Prize winner. They have previously published three shortlisted books – Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (2007) and Carol Shields’ novels Unless (2002) and The Stone Diaries (1993).

Other books are starting to feel the gravitational pull of Dan Brown affect their sales. Unfortunately, these books seem to be about grown up D&D players who wear robes and spank each other in hidden rooms. And not in the good way. But I suppose it’s better than no sales at all…

The success of The Lost Symbol is starting to have the expected positive impact on related titles. Cynthia Fowles, director of rights and publicity at Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, which received a huge boost from The Da Vinci Code, said the company has been monitoring inventory levels on all its books connected to Templars and secret societies to keep accounts from running out of stock. To date, two books in particular have benefited from increased consumer interest in all things Brown—James Wasserman’s The Secrets of Masonic Washington (Dec., 2008) and Robert Hieronimus and Laura Cortner’s Founding Fathers, Secret Societies (revised edition Dec., 2005).

Your Giller Prize shortlist, presumably devoid of muddy middles and stray Glendinning martini olive swords, but also of small press titles and, most surprisingly, of Margaret Atwood:

Kim Echlin, The Disappeared

Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean

Linden MacIntyre, The Bishop’s Man

Colin McAdam, Fall

Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault