The world’s most lucrative poetry horse race kicks off this week and the speculation is hot and heavy. It’s always a mug’s game to speculate on these things, but if I had to guess, I’d also say it’ll be Solie and Glück (or Glenday).

First off: the prize is now old enough to get a paper route (which might help pay for some of that redoubled generosity of a $200G prize)

Poet Paul Vermeersch rounds up the nominees at the Globe with a positively heartwarming love letter

Poet Jacob Mooney analyzes the demographic breakdowns of Griffins past

Poet Chris Banks wonders if and why the Griffin is better than the Governor General’s Award

The model behind Dave Eggers’ awesome 826 Valencia literacy charity from SF is being exported to London. This kind of novelist-run venture is incredibly important in providing great services and great role models for kids. I had the opportunity to tour and read at Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words in Dublin last year, and I was absolutely floored at how successful and important the work is there. I know a bunch of you are Eggers’ nay-sayers, mostly because of McSweeney’s-fatigue, I suspect, but you can’t take this from him. Good work, Dave.

The first children’s centre to try his radical approach was established in 2002, in Eggers’s native San Francisco.

Named after its address in the Mission district of the city and guilefully hidden behind a Pirate Supply Store shopfront, “826 Valencia” helps students aged from eight to 18 to develop writing skills in informal workshops. By seducing young patrons with pirate parrots and peg legs, it removed the stigma associated with extra literacy lessons.

The San Francisco store was followed by a Superhero Supply Store in Brooklyn, New York, which sells capes and tins of “anti-matter”. Seattle then took up the challenge, setting up the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company. The growing network of individual projects is linked through the Once Upon a School website.

Writers behind the London project are to pilot a similar venture in an unused shop for six months, and are seeking a suitable space and further funding.

The publishing industry, which I seem to recall has done its fair share of doom and gloom caterwauling when it thinks it might help change policy, has news for Garrison Keillor, who has apparently made himself relevant for a couple days by claiming the industry is doomed: we’re not dead yet.

While he’s free to correct us if we’re wrong, we’re pretty sure Keillor is no expert on the industry. And, call us crazy, but when we want to know about the future of publishing, we’d prefer to hear from people who know what they’re talking about. That’s why we’ve gotten in touch some of our favorite book editors, publicists, critics, and agents to see what they thought of Keillor’s piece. Read their insightful, funny, and sometimes scathing responses after the jump.

“Keillor’s jeremiad is wrong on so many levels, and proceeds from a place of such monumental self-regard and fundamental misinformation, that a proper rebuttal would require an entire afternoon and a minimum of ten double-spaced pages. That, or one satirical essay by Mark Twain or Colson Whitehead.

A bunch of clean-up items I missed during my vacation last week and even some from today.

A brief, but funny, rumour hit Twitter from the Canadian Association of Journalists conference when a bad/good joke was mistaken for the truth: the Globe and Mail is switching to a full colour daily glossy mag in the fall… teehee! They can’t even afford their own newsprint or to properly pay writers now…

The tale of Alice’s lost chapter: illustrator as editor

A best-selling Swedish author was on one of those boats full of aid and activists stormed by Israeli troops this morning

DFW’s undergraduate thesis to be published as book, followed, presumably, by his sixth grade summer vacation journal

BEA: all about anxiety

Library Voices: a group that draws from lit to create pop music (Thanks, Shannon)

Adderall receives honourary degree from Harvard

Great works of literature retitled to generate more web traffic

Well, all day long at school I hear how great iPad is at this or how wonderful iPad did that! iPad! iPad! iPad!

The real problem with ebooks: you’re tied by DRM to your device
“Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they’d put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music’s Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can’t be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.
The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of “Moby Dick” I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony’s PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.”

iPad has only limited selection of books available for international release due to negotiations with those pesky publishers

Amazon and Penguin have kissed and made up, though

Guinness Book sees Marvel’s success and launches own iPad app

Next up in appland (located just south of Santa’s Workshop) is Harry Potter, world shocked to realize Harry Potter app doesn’t exist when Potter branded white stretch pants do…

Toronto White Pages, aka The Foresticidal Maniac, are being moved online… finally

Apparently, there’s this gathering going on down south that has to do with things, many of which I’m unsure about. What I do know, however, is it is either attended by, or exclusively dedicated to, women named Beatrice. Powers of deduction, people.

BEA is all about the e-shit… with e-books leading the shit

Though some are skeptical

App lets BEA attendees decide hottest titles (what could possibly go wrong with that?)

BEA speakers says Kindle users are pushovers, is offered job at Bookninja

Still on vacation and will be ’til Monday, so here’s your news in slurry form, blended and served in a styrofoam cup.

Scientists develop sarcasm detecting software, presumably much to the detriment of scientist egos everywhere

Great Toronto mag Taddle Creek gets some press with a wicked stunt*: they’ll give any reader to spots a mistake between their covers a free 2-year subscription

First Holmes book with inscription could be yours, except you’re worthless in comparison

Don Paterson will judge star-making new poets contest for Picador

Bush’s book starts with his decision to quit drinking, and presumably ends three months before the start of his presidency with his decision to take it back up

Kids books: the Hummers of literature?

To follow up on Stephen Fry Twitter prize of yesterday, Bookninja pal Jian Gomeshi “wins” Twitterary prize of his own

Facebook is right now announcing new privacy features to supposedly address the mounting criticism over its privacy invasion… this is what I was holding out for. If it doesn’t really address them, I’m gone — I’m sick of being laughed at (from Julie’s feed)

Random US restructuring works, despite having all the excitement of a grass growing race

Finally the world is jaded enough to hear Mark Twain’s story without gouging out own eyes in disgust

*You thought it was going to be Conan doing a wheelie on a chopper bike with a banana seat, didn’t you

It’s a good time to be a ‘Ninja, even more so than the rest of the time when the best part of it is all the flipping out and beheading of enemies. Ex-Ninja Pete is guest editing the Afterword blog at the Post and old-timer Jorge is profiled at the Torontoist site. It’s good to be us. We’d like to thank our wives, Jesus, Pfizer, and the good people at the Maple Leaf bacon division for never poisoning us, you know, directly.

Bookninja began as an online forum for a bunch of writers to kibitz and argue about the state of the book world but has since evolved into…an online form for a bunch of writers to kibitz and argue about the book world. The difference? Now thousands of other people—including other writers, publishing folk, and many intrigued readers—are listening in and even joining the chat. The conductor, head vocalist, and stage hand for this bookish choir is George Murray, who co-founded Bookninja with fellow author Peter Darbyshire back in 2003, when the phrase “book blog” still had to qualified with some form of descriptor for the web-challenged.

Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger spoke with Murray about the past, present, and future of the pioneering books blog.

Well, ironically, I am able to post more here on the slow connections of the central Ontario internets than I was on the blazing highspeed of Toronto, in part because I have some actual time—I don’t have to worry about the kids running into traffic or being abucted or anything, though I did recently hear banjos playing in the woods. I wonder what that’s all about…?

Moby announces book trailer winners

Harvard and Stanford working to bookless libraries

File under, Well, Duh: Books in home as important as education level of parents in predicting intelligence of kids

New e-reader, the Novel, actually looks good

… Which is good because ebook sales are waaaay up

Does a growth in number of indy booksellers bode well for industry?

More protesters try to arrest Karl Rove (I suggest he starts touring around with a sound technician to play a waa waa waaaaaaa effect every time this happens)

Wimbledon has poet laureate

Gizmodo says your iPhone/iPad is made in a hell factory

Amazon venturing into translation

B&N counters with entering vantiy publishing

Rock tour or book tour?

Attention Nerdly Ninjas: Neil Gaiman has written a Dr. Who episode. End communication.

Stephen Fry seeks most beautiful tweet

NYPL gets in on Improv Anywhere Ghostbusters prank

TKaMB turns 50, gets unpronounceable acronym

More on this “flarf” thing all the kids are talking about these days

Smash your Kindle, ask the hippies…?

…No, no.. Just test it out in college! (Does it come with a beer-proof coating? Because I suspect that will be the main weakness, if not)

First Lady lit—stupi-tastic

Do you like the new Waterstone’s logo? A whole bunch of people don’t

PW throws in with Scribd

Pop-up particle physics? Muon-o-licious!

Will ebooks kill the rare book dealer?

Youth edition of Obama’s book to be published by RH

Location of brain’s language centres refined

[This story was first posted on the morning of Monday, May 17, 2010 and has been bumped to add new material but maintain the flow of comments--new material below]

Monday, May 17

Hey, all. Readers wrote in over the weekend pointing to an issue brewing in the bookselling world and I’m hoping all y’alls can help me understand the intricacies of it.

As I understand it, Penguin had embargoed the sale of Stieg Larsson ’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest until its release date, May 25. Books are routinely shipped to stores ahead of their release date to be readied for sale on the day of release, but Indigo apparently jumped the gun eleven days early, ensuring that independent bookstores (remaining in a post-Chindigo world) that carry the title will basically have their sales eaten away by the heavily discounted big box offering flouting the rules.

Further, Indigo reportedly even changed the release date on their own website to match the date they started selling, May 14,  as opposed to the date set by Penguin (which you can see Penguin is sticking to). Penguin sent a form to all stores asking them to sign that they would respect the embargo date, on pain of not receiving future titles ahead of release date, but apparently this doesn’t apply to Indigo. And I can’t really see how Penguin could enforce that, anyway. So, effectively, having killed off its competition and created a monopoly, Indigo can now ignore contracts and set their own terms. In the words of Indigo’s Star Wars counterpart, M. le Vader, “I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further…”

Reports are that Penguin will start immediately shipping to smaller stores this week, but the damage is already done, no? A full weekend (at least) headstart at a hungry readership…

Do we have any takers to properly contextualize this for me, the non-bookseller? Is this a big deal? Overblown? Par for the course?

Tuesday, May 18

After this story broke here on Bookninja, the real journalists at the Post got on the horn and contacted Penguin and Indigo, who both swore nothing was wrong, illegal or otherwise out of order in this transaction. For a moment, I thought I’d been punk’d, but it turns out that there’s an industry-wide (mis)understanding of what words like “embargo” and “on-sale date” mean, and the independent booksellers commenting on this thread (below) are furious, saying they’re being effectively held to a different standard than Indigo simply because of size. Commentors below identify as from indy stores such as McNally Robinson and Powells in Oregon. Anyone else have an opinion?

Wednesday, May 19

The ever-vigilant Steven Beattie has a roundup of the fiasco and some great analysis over at his blog, That Shakespearean Rag. There doesn’t seem to be much mainstream press coverage of this, though.

Even if there was not a signed embargo agreement, it was dirty pool for Indigo to release its stock more than a week before the publisher’s stated release date. As publishing moves further and further toward Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, the first few selling days of a major release become more and more important, and independents that didn’t even have the title in their stores when Indigo put the book on sale lose out. One indie bookseller commenting on the Bookninja thread acknowledges that customers who had placed advance orders for the book called to cancel, saying that they had already picked up the title from Indigo over the weekend. Clearly, every lost sale hurts independent bookstores, which are already struggling in a highly inimical environment.

Penguin would be entirely within its rights to exact punitive measures against the big blue monster, such as restricting when (or even if) the chain receives stock of future titles. Naturally, Penguin will not do this. How can it? Indigo accounts for too large a slice of the bookselling pie in Canada. Penguin would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. It would be much easier to exact punitive measures against smaller independents, which may be ordering only 20 or 50 copies of a given title.

The ebook is here, you just have to get used to it. Or, as an alternative, you can just take a deep breath and decide to see how far down this irrelevance thing goes, says author.

First off, no one is absolutely sure exactly what is going to happen, because technological change is like that. Only one thing is pretty clear and that is that things will change, and we need to proactively adapt to those changes, lest we be forced to adapt in ways that are less appealing.

History has shown that you can’t build a sandbag wall against the tide of technological change, you have to either have a boat, build a boat, or get on someone else’s boat. Or be very clever and do something no one could have predicted … perhaps with my boat metaphor this would be to grow gills or turn into a fish.

Amazon has gone on a hiring spree to bolster its Kindle line-up, presumably in anticipation of a rumble with iPad (also, diversifying its software). Not noted here is the hidden listing for “5 burly men with axe-handles, masks, and purchasable sense of discretion”….

After the iPad announcement, I debated with my colleague Brad Stone whether the iPad would kill the Kindle. I argued that the Kindle could never compete with the iPad’s user interface or hardware design. Brad said that the Kindle was here to stay, that it was a device “for book lovers, and the iPad is not.”

Then, a few days later, we reported that Amazon had purchased Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specialized in a new touch-screen technology, which signaled that the company was going to stay the course with the Kindle.

But the ferment of activity in the job listings gives some hint about Amazon’s plans.

For example, the job listing for a “Software Quality Assurance Engineer” suggests that some kind of project is moving from concept into a development phase, where this kind of engineer helps guide the process through to final production.

I’m leaving tonight for ten days in Ontario, some of which will be spent in Toronto, and some of which will be in the wilds of Owen Sound, where most telecommunications are conducted from the tops of hills by banging on hollow logs with rocks, so I may or may not have posts coming. Check back, set your rss feeds to “listen”, and pray for Mojo.

Roger Ebert signs with Grand Central for memoir

Anne Rice’s house selling for $3.3 million—six foot deep “basement”, four coffin garage, and landscaped graveyard includes world’s only natural habitat for dramatic black roses. Inflated sense of talent and self-worth not included…

Short story junction Joyland launches ebook imprint

The problems with the Tehran bookfair went way beyond censorship and banning of authors… some women dared to show their hair….

Get your noogie-ing knuckles and wedgie-ing grips ready… the college nerds are playing quidditch… it’s sad when you first realize not all social rejects are offset by big brains

Robert Munsch: coke addict.* Damn. But really, when you think about it… who but someone struggling with addiction could have come up with that abomination Love You Forever? That book has chemical troubles written all over it. Scholastic supports his continued production of gravy-train titles him though. In all seriousness: Get better, Bob.

Top 10 underground Welsh novels… (note: not about fairies)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… The Jersey Shore kids, with a collected IQ of -6, have a tie-in book coming (The proceeds of which, will presumably be used to clean up America’s other seaboard disaster, the Axe body spray, cheap hair gel, and burnt umber tanning cream spill off the NJ coast that threatens the countryside and is turning the wildlife into vacuous douchebags)

Venerable British lit agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop taken over…

File under The Landslide Brings You Down: British Booksellers Association sign with Google Editions prg

*Kudos and wrist slaps to the Calgary folks who editorialized by adding that picture to this story…

I can’t imagine anything involving Geoffrey Hill being not serious, but there is a drop of comedy here, if unintentional. If you use Facebook as a measurement, and scientifically-speaking, why wouldn’t you?, the slam guy is in the lead.

Promises to use poetry as a “weapon, bloodsoaked and glinting” and plans for a poetry slam contest suggest the competition for the role of Oxford poetry professor is heating up. The 11 candidates have each laid out their reasons for standing – one of them entirely in verse.

“I thought it might be oh-so hip / to win me a professorship, / and so I thought I’d write this note / to woo, to wow, to win your vote,” writes Robert P Lacey, a medic who says if he were to be voted in by Oxford graduates, he’d write a poem a week and post it online, and also “form another, smallish prize / for poetry that please my eyes”.

Outsider Lacey is up against best-known candidate Geoffrey Hill, whose backer, Professor Dame Averil Cameron, describes him as “a lecturer of unrivalled power, whose standing as a poet gives his discourse an added dimension”. Hill might be the most eminent writer in the running, but Oxford-based performance poet Steve Larkin is currently the frontrunner in terms of supporters, with 317 members in his campaigning Facebook group, compared with Hill’s 227.

The guy who wrote the screenplay for Gladiator has a new book aimed at young teens, but he’s been uninvited from a speaking engagement at a school there because the book deals with teen sexuality.

As the man who wrote the play Shadowlands and the screenplay to the film Gladiator, William Nicholson is the kind of writer whom most schools would beg to address their students.

I hear, however, that Claire Hewitt, the headmistress of Manchester High School for Girls, has “disinvited” the highly respected author, pictured, from giving a long-planned talk to her charges about Rich and Mad, his new book aimed at children aged 13 and over.

The headmistress felt that the book, which tackles themes of teenage love and sexuality, was simply an “inappropriate” subject for discussion.

Dudes, in my experience, as soon as you’re dealing with someone called a “headmistriss”, things are bound to get either sexually pinched or totally pornographic. Seems like in this case someone is making diamonds of coal with their tweed-suited bum. Next time, man. Next time. (You know it’s happening when they suggestively fling away their horn-rimmed glasses and shake out the hair bun. Watch for it.)

Hachette big winner at first UK Bookseller Industry Awards

Did a California candidate for governor manipulate his book sales to gain cred in his campaign?

Yiddish author’s papers being hailed as potential gold(berg)

Scott Turrow lists his favourite legal novels

Russia wants more readers

Hollywood, done gnawing on the bones of Jane Austen, tosses her femur over the shoulder and turns malevolent gaze on the Brontë sisters…

Slate asks why there’s been no “great Mormon novel”… Bookninja answers: it’s too hard to write convincingly about the underwear

Bloomsbury to launch Australian division

Will the iPad lead the illegal book sharing tsunami that is bearing down on us all like a hyperbolic shotgun full of hate? (I can’t believe I live in a world where the word “illegal” can be coupled with “book sharing” and people probably won’t look at you like you’re Hitler…)

It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.

Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.

Steven Heighton writes a list of dos, don’ts and assorted advice to a younger Steven Heighton. Great stuff.

This sequence follows up on a series of a few “memos to myself” that The New Quarterly recently asked writers to produce—memos the writer would relay back through time to his or her younger self, starting out in the craft. These new ones are to be wormholed back to a writer—myself, or anyone else who’s interested—a decade deep in the work.

Charlie Orr has hit a hum-dinger with his design of hypothetical Neil Gaiman title: If You Read This Book the World Will End. Brilliant stuff. I totally want to read that book now. Mostly to get out of work next week. (Below is a detail. See the full pic at the link above.)

PW gets some new leadership after its buyout

Moby announces finalists for its awesome book trailer awards

150,000 fools parted from money: Laura Bush’s memoir, co-authored with Republican party strategists, moves

And a timely British piece on why political memoirs suck

New award for sports books

Nebula Award winners named

Cooooooooooool…….. Six artistic takes on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, found at Flavorwire. (Thanks S) Link to the project here.

Drawing comparisons to both Dante’s Inferno and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a work of genuine madness, and one of the most violent books in contemporary literature. Zak Smith (who previously illustrated each page of Gravity’s Rainbow), and five other artists (Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle) have taken on the daunting task of illustrating every page of the grizzly tale. The styles range from hauntingly vivid to extremely abstract, each image complemented with a quote from the source material that served as its inspiration.

This article focuses mainly on one of Head’s other objectionable sides (besides the attempted murder of Canadian bookselling and publishing industries as outlined a couple days ago in the stellar letter by Amanda Jernigan), her support for a foundation tied to the Israeli military machine.

David Thomas, a professor of international relations at Mount Allison, is one of the professors speaking out against Reisman’s honorary degree.

“The main thing for me is her direct ties to the Israeli military,” Thomas said.

“This is a military that has been accused and found guilty on several occasions of gross violations of international humanitarian law.”

In recent years, some activists have boycotted Indigo stores because of Reisman’s connections to Israel.

Thomas put forward a motion asking the university senate to reconsider its decision, but he said Mount Allison president Robert Campbell dismissed it.

The professor said his concerns were “trivialized” during the meeting.

iPad, iPad, iPad… Sheesh.

There’s no denying it now: the game has changed

Will the iPad agency model fly in the UK?

Canadian publishers getting all squee about iPad

Which e-reader app to choose for your device?

“Brain Shots”—abridged e- and audio versions of “big idea” non-fict titles

Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, two men I respect enormously, despite both the headline above and the occasional desire to slap them silly, each have books coming touching on their mutual friendship. Aw….. Let’s buy them a present.

Martin Amis says his new novel, “The Pregnant Widow,” isn’t remotely autobiographical, but members of his circle will instantly recognize Nicholas, the protagonist’s older brother. A sandy-haired freakishly articulate leftist who’s fond of word play and more interested in politics than sex, Nicholas resembles a certain irreverent public intellectual who’s targeted figures such as Princess Diana and Mother Teresa.

Christopher Hitchens says he was “flattered and honored” to appear in the novel as an older brother figure, and he’s returning the compliment. His forthcoming memoir, “Hitch 22,” includes a chapter about his long friendship with Mr. Amis, and references banter and inside jokes that closely mirror bits of “The Pregnant Widow.”

That which floats like an island of plastic info bottles in the Pacific of your mind.

Phillipe Claudel wins UK’s biggest foreign fiction prize

Now that no one of taste, class, or sense smokes anymore [ducks, covers head], what to do with all those ciggy vending machines? Vend books from them!

Is this the least sexy/interesting PKD adaptation of all time

Kids lead library borrowing uptick

Little Orphan Annie orphans no one

JK Rowling tops list of best role models for children (who want to be drag queens—I kid, I kid… Drag queens know when to say “no” to mascara…)

Taschen and the coffee table books of remarkable ass

Sadly for me, a certain percentage* of my bad writing made it into some journals and one of my early (quiet, you) books, so there’s no going back ironically to ridicule it from the safety of not having it published and being able to chose among the worst of the worst. And yes, I thought I was great at the time. But no one told me different, the bastards. It was like everyone just let me walk around with mustard on my face during a dinner party. If you’re actually friends with someone, you either make the international signal for “wipe your face, pig” or you come up with a napkin and do it for them. Godammit. Still, if there’s one thing the publication of my bad writing has done for me today, it’s to galvanize my determination to eradicate it from all future books. So yes, bad writing has a place in this world. And that place is to shame me.

Sadly, if bad writers have one thing in common it’s that they’re all firmly convinced that they’re good writers. Really good writers.
…
Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with “Bad Writing,” a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don’t necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful. But was Lott able to spin the straw of poems like “Sketches of Despair” into the gold of a nifty short film featuring interviews with the likes of George Saunders and Margaret Atwood? Hard to say, as “Bad Writing” has yet to find distribution.

*I survive day to day by assuring myself it’s a relatively small percentage, but still…

The GOOD thing about e-ink is that mistakes can be corrected in real time and pushed out to consumers (I’m not ready to call them “readers” yet… maybe someday I’ll actually try one of these things…) who’d otherwise have to buy a second brick of dead tree to have their library up to date.

An Amazon spokesman confirms that the company does, from time to time, contact customers with updates, and they occur with both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Back when books had to be printed on dead trees, authors couldn’t do anything to fix an error they found after a book had been published. Once the book was in readers’ hands and on library shelves, the matter was moot.

But now that books, like computers, are connected to the Internet, they’re much more dynamic. Theoretically, the ability to change a book could be used both for good and bad purposes.

We’ve moaned about the loss of the sight, the touch, and the smell of the paper book. Now comes the less tangible practicalities. How do you inscribe or annotate one of those electronic fuckers? Notes to self, author signatures, good wishes from aunties and uncles—all lost to the tyranny of e-ink. I’m not worried. I’m pretty sure that somewhere, in some deep, buried laboratory bunker under the Canadian Shield, Margaret Atwood and her team of wacky scientists are hard at work on the issue.

Before I worked in publishing, and learned about things like first editions and galleys, I treated books like they were notepads, scribbling lists and phone numbers into them, stuffing articles between pages to read later. It’s these lists I flip back to now to remind me of who I was years before—a journal of sorts. For example, on an impulsive train ride taken one March, when my roommate Emily and I were living in Paris many years ago, we used my copy of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Stories to write down the list of ten people—living or dead—we’d invite to a dinner party. I chose Camille Paglia in my number one spot (Paglia, whom I had not even read at the time!); Emily chose Jack the Ripper.

What will eventually become of these books with their treasure trove of notes and inscriptions? Electronic books are just pixels on a screen. These personal connections to the past make physical books so much more than that.

From the frustratingly ridiculous, to the funny, to the hopeful. A microcosm for life Bookninja is (quoth Yoda).

Sarah Palin is dangerous not just because she continues to write shitty books, or because she somehow believes America should be governed by the laws of the Bible, but because she has an entire species of idiots, which I hereby dub “Palinstinians”,  who hang on her every word and enable her stupidity and hatred

More on Larkin’s toads

Funny bit on cover headlines that could save Newsweek

Kindle best”seller” lists to actually include books “sold for money” now

Is interest in translated lit growing in America? I’d like to see a state by state breakdown of who’s reading what. I bet it would overlap perfectly with 2004 diagrams of USA vs. “Jesusland“

How stupid would you have to be to ask Juliet Capulet for love advice?

No, not glowing Dan/ielle Brown/Steel reviews: literary characters that, were they real and around to day, would appear in the tabloids just like the current parade of talentless spray-tanned hair stands and vapid lantern-jawed men (also Sarah Jessica Parker).

Emma Bovary from Madame Bovary

Here is a woman made for reality television. Emma Bovary’s social climbing, extramarital affairs, and living outside her means in an attempt to place herself among those in the upper echelons of society that she is desperate to be counted among. Despite her intense desire to rise in society, she bungles all opportunities presented to her with poor etiquette and establishing herself as an outsider. Modern day equivalent? A stint on The Bachelor followed by a season on The Bad Girl’s Club. Or social rattlesnake Kelly Bensimon from The Real Housewives of New York.

[Note: I found this in my "drafts" folder, but had thought to post it last month... Sorry]

Mount Allison has plans to give Chindigo CEO Heather Reisman an honourary degree. But not everyone is happy. ‘Ninja friend, editor, professor, and drop-dead awesome poet, Amanda Jernigan sends in the following open letter, which does a great job of contextualizing much of the anti-Indigo sentiment has developed over the years.

To: Dr Robert Campbell, President and Vice-Chancellor, Mount Allison University; Dr Stephen McClatchie, Provost & Vice-President, Academic & Research, Mount Allison University; Ms Gloria Jollymore, Vice-President, University Advancement

Cc.: Dr David Thomas, Dept. of International Relations, Mount Allison University; Dr Karen Bamford, Chair, Dept. of English, Mount Allison University; Stuart Woods, Editor, Quill & Quire; Martin Levin, Books Editor, Globe and Mail; Dru Oja Jay, Editor, The Dominion; George Murray, Editor, Bookninja; David Stonehouse, Editor, Telegraph-Journal (St. John); Al Hogan, Managing Editor, Times & Transcript (Moncton); Kim Jernigan, Editor, The New Quarterly; Tim and Elke Inkster, Publishers, The Porcupine’s Quill; Andrew Steeves, Publisher, Gaspereau Press; Ellen Pickle, Bookseller, Tidewater Books

12 May 2010

Dear President Campbell, and Vice-Presidents McClatchie and Jollymore:

I am writing this open letter to add my voice to the chorus objecting to Mount Allison’s decision to grant an honorary degree to Heather Reisman, President and CEO of Indigo Books and Music Inc.

I read with interest and alarm Dr. David Thomas’s letter regarding Ms Reisman’s involvement with the HESEG foundation. I agree with Dr. Thomas that “universities and intellectuals have a special responsibility to create a just society and to oppose war and militarism,” and it seems clear that tacit support of the HESEG foundation, through the planned honorary degree, runs counter to that responsibility.

I have my own reasons for opposing Ms Reisman’s honorary degree, however. I studied English literature at Mount Allison University from 1997-2001, and have since returned (in 2009) to teach in the English department here. In the intervening years, I worked in the world of Canadian small-press publishing, and so had a front-row seat on the depredations of Chapters/Indigo in the Canadian book trade. A recent article in THIS Magazine paints the picture: “Some 350 indie bookstores closed across Canada in the past decade, and, according to Susan Dayus, executive director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, much of that had to do with the arrival of the Chapters chain. ‘Those closures happened very quickly when Chapters opened,’ Dayus says. ‘The leadership of Chapters was very predatory—they opened across the street or kitty-corner to successful bookstores. And those who didn’t have strong financial backing went under.’”

It wasn’t just the independent bookstores that Chapters threatened; small publishers felt the squeeze as well. It wasn’t that Chapters didn’t buy our books (I say “our” because I was working for Porcupine’s Quill, Printers & Publishers, in Ontario at this time): they did buy our books — and then returned them, in ruinous numbers. Publisher Tim Inkster kept close track of the situation:

“In 1998 Chapters (& Indigo) ordered 13,293 copies of Porcupine’s Quill publications. And returned 4,052 — less than 30 percent, which was somewhat higher than industry standards at the time but not excessively so — leaving us with a net sale of 9,241 units, worth about $90,000 which was not bad at all. I remember David Peterson, chairman of the Board at Chapters at the time, talking about ‘growing the market’ for Canadian books. I was keen.

“In 2004 (six years later) Chapters ordered 2,797 copies of PQL books. And returned 1,415 — more than 50 percent, which left us with a net sale of 1,382 — which means quite simply that we have lost 85 percent of the business we once did with Chapters over the course of those same six years.

“In the calendar year 2005 Chapters returns are running at 68 percent, which is disastrous — maybe not catastrophic — but pales in the face of Chapters’ returns in the current fiscal year-to-date (since 31 May 05) which weigh in at 167 percent of sales. This is ruinous, and this cannot be permitted to continue.” (Canadian Notes & Queries)

Porcupine’s Quill is a small press; Tim and Elke Inkster print and bind all of their books in house. A Chapters order, in the thousand-copy range, would have necessitated special print runs, and an up-front cost well in excess of what the press would have spent in a normal year. Like many small presses, the Inksters swallowed the cost, banking on Chapters’ promised sales. When the books were returned, in droves, the press was nearly put out of business.

This huge discrepancy, on Chapters’ part, between orders and returns, is hardly emblematic of the corporate “responsibility” the company claims to espouse.

I can only think that the rationale for Mount Allison’s decision to grant Ms Reisman an honorary degree is Ms Reisman’s “success” in business. Since my return to academia, I’ve had limited professional involvement with the business world — but my years working in the book trade gave me huge respect for certain business people. I have huge respect for Tim and Elke Inkster, who have sustained their small press for 36 years against heartbreaking odds. I have huge respect for Ellen Pickle, Sackville’s own independent bookseller, who has sustained Tidewater Books in Mount Allison’s home community for 15 years, as many of her bookseller-counterparts have gone under. But I cannot respect a corporation like Chapters/Indigo that operates by bulldozing competitors, expanding unsustainably, and abdicating its responsibility to the communities of readers and writers it depends on.

Writers get their starts with small presses; small presses are sustained by independent booksellers who care enough to carry and hand-sell their books. The whole ecology of writing and reading at the grassroots level has thus been threatened by Chapters/Indigo, in a way that seems to me have frightening implications for the intellectual life of our country.

Mount Allison, as a small, liberal-arts university, is deeply invested in that intellectual life, and must work to sustain it. Granting an honorary degree to Heather Reisman runs directly counter to this imperative. I must ask the administration to reconsider.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,
Amanda Jernigan

Amanda Jernigan
Part-time instructor,
Department of English Literatures,
Mount Allison University

I just received my hardcover copy of ex-Bookninja Peter Darbyshire’s The Warhol Gang, available now from HarperCollins. It’s a thing of great beauty. And it’s a fantastic novel. I read it a few months ago in ARCs and I was blown away by the “reality” of Pete’s unreal world. Here’s the copy:

Trotsky works for a neuromarketing company that scans his brain to test new products. Only his name isn’t really Trotsky — that’s a code name he’s forced to use. And the products aren’t real — they’re hologram prototypes. Trapped in an increasingly artificial world that leaves him haunted by hallucinations, Trotsky goes to accident scenes at night in search of something genuine. Instead, he finds Holiday, a wannabe actress who fakes accidents for insurance settlements but who dreams of stardom. She leads him to the Resistance, a violent underground society living in a forgotten space in the mall that runs throughout the city. But when an encounter with a troubled cop turns deadly, the group is discovered by the media and dubbed “The Warhol Gang.” At first Holiday and Trotsky embrace their notoriety, but they’re forced to confront their own desires and differences when the gang takes on a life of its own and the body count rises.

The Warhol Gang is an absurdist tale for an age of absurdism, a black comedy for anyone who’s ever been trapped in an endless mall or fantasized about wiping out everyone in the office.

So consuming and frightening and lingering. I still think about it like it’s a transparent sheet laid down over our world. It truly is a book for our time. Brutal, funny, and scary. I laughed out loud at least a dozen times reading it, and winced a dozen more. For a crossroads comparison, I say Denis Johnson stomping Chuck Palahniuk into William Gibson while Kurt Vonnegut cheers him on. You have to read it.

Amazon.ca

McNally Robinson

This is a lengthy article about something that has apparently angered Tintin fans. I most assuredly read the entire thing and now wish to report that it is indeed of interest and justifiable in its consumption of column inches, attention, and time. Several elements of the article linked to here are compelling. I also appreciated the use of grammar and punctuation, which were generally above par. Please read for yourself and post a general summary in the comments, so that I might compare it to my own, which I will post after you post yours. Sincerely, George

“Tintin est mort” ran a Liberation head­line on March 4 1983. Georges Remi, better known by his pen-name Hergé, had passed away the day before in Brussels after a long illness. His homeland of Belgium was plunged into national mourning – and not just for its real-life native son. As the headline suggested, Hergé’s death marked the end of Tintin’s adventures, too. Where other illustrators have been happy for their characters to outlive them, drawn by other hands, Hergé had been unambiguous on the matter: no one else would be allowed to draw the cartoon. The 22-book series, which started in 1929 and introduced generations of youngsters to lands as far afield as Tibet and Egypt – all through the eyes of upstanding young reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy – had come to a close.

That’s not to say that its readers faded away. A generation after Hergé’s death, about two million Tintin books are sold every year, comfortably beating all but a few contemporary rivals. That figure will probably jump when the first of a planned trilogy of Tintin films to be directed by Steven ­Spielberg and Peter Jackson comes out next year.

But long-time admirers of Hergé, many of whom knew him personally, are not happy. Many, in fact, are fretting over the way his legacy is being managed. The rumblings have become a long-running saga in Belgium, a country where bande dessinée comic strips remain a popular art form; the movie project will bring it to a global audience.

A physicist has corrected a century-old OED definition of “siphon”. That’s right, you all retroactively just failed grade 10 physics.

“An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon,” Dr Hughes said.

The most up-to-date version of the OED defines a siphon as:

“A pipe or tube of glass, metal or other material, bent so that one leg is longer than the other, and used for drawing off liquids by means of atmospheric pressure, which forces the liquid up the shorter leg and over the bend in the pipe.”
As any petrol thief knows, to get the liquid over the “hump” of the tube you have to suck the other end or, more pedantically, lower the pressure in your lungs to beneath atmospheric pressure by expanding them. Once the liquid has passed the highest point in the tube, the continuous chain of cohesive bonds between the liquid molecules in the tube, and the force of gravity, do the rest.

With Yann Martel getting a shitkicking and making the news for it, the arts media is now primed for Michiko’s latest: a coal-raking of everyone’s favorite whipping post, Martin Amis. Her review actually prompted coverage in the Guardian who referred to it as a “skewer”.

The name alone is enough to induce terror in a writer. From the very first sentence of her notoriously direct criticism you know how things are going to go, which is why Martin Amis must have winced when he read the opening of Kakutani’s review of his new book The Pregnant Widow today.

“This remarkably tedious new novel,” was how she began. And it only got worse from there.

Kakutani accused Amis of deploying cheap tricks and exchanging his mastery of language for “a mannered, self-indulgent style”. She reserved her worst opprobrium for the characters he has depicted, whom she described as “a bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed twits, who natter on endlessly about their desires and resentments and body parts”.

I took the day off yesterday, and guess what I did all day. You’ll never. Go ahead. Nope. I wrote a poem. No shit. I do that sometimes. But I also wandered unescorted onto the deck of a military sub parked in the harbour. Apparently security isn’t as tight up here as it is in New York where I used to live. Otherwise, I’d probably still be in a detention cell, crying and admitting to having joined the Taliban or something. See, I had seen a couple people who looked like they were civilians come out of the hole in the top, so I just stepped onto the ramp and strolled over. When I stepped down onto the deck the guys with the guns just kind of looked at me expectantly for a moment and I said, “Can I get a tour?” They looked at each other for a moment and then one said, “No tours, no photos.” What I thought was, Hmm, perhaps you could have told me that with a sign or pointed gun before I ambled across the gang plank and was standing over the open hatch—but what I SAID was, “Oh, sorry, boys” and I turned and strolled off.  “No problem,” one said in return. I love living in Canada.

Sarah Palin to continue inflicting herself on the collective mind like an oozing boil on the ass of good taste

Borders to help children’s library replace stolen books…

Atlantic Canada doesn’t just look at the scenery, breathe the fresh air and listen to music, it also reads

You could have Capote’s Brooklyn brownstone for a paltry $18M…

Brit publishers not worried that new government will slowly erode freedoms and systematically undermine cultural endeavour as is happening here in Canada

Tyra Banks to write series of fantasy novels about models… … … … Naw, too easy

Waterstones rebranding

Would Google settlement cause diplomatic stress? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure the endless fucking noodling on it is causing carpal tunnel sydrome in my wrists

The Globe came out strongly in favour of an end to what it calls a “hidden subsidy” to Canadian publishers, arguing that the strength of the art will prevail over any damage to the sector. Not really sure where I stand on this. But one thing’s for sure: we all know the Globe doesn’t benefit from any hidden subsidies.

The Canadian Booksellers Association met with James Moore, the Minister of Heritage, on April 29, asking the federal government to reconsider the provisions of the Copyright Act that it says, rightly, are no longer commercially reasonable and should be removed.

The present regime favours both branch plants of foreign-owned publishers and Canadian-owned publishers that are also distributors for foreign firms under agency agreements. The Canadian-based publisher can charge up to 10 per cent more than the American price; if they charge more, then what the Copyright Act calls “parallel importation” is permitted – the same is true if a specific book is simply not being distributed.

In effect, this is a subsidy in favour of Canadian publishers, including the subsidiaries of American and other non-Canadian publishers – at the expense of book-buyers. No doubt, this has encouraged the publication of Canadian books, but in recent decades the success of Canadian literature has shown that the rationale for this trade barrier has withered away. Moreover, book-buyers can buy online from the United States and other countries.

Decorator of my childhood reading, dead at 82.

Slate can’t resist poking the body of that near dead hobo down by the tracks, but they also examine the factors that led to the downfall of the print giant (spoiler: it was probably botulism from a can of beans opened with a rock and eaten under the bridge).

The 30-year debate in the journalism reviews, among industry analysts, and over beers between reporters about the fate of the newsweekly category was settled today by Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, who announced that he wants to sell Newsweek. If the infinitely patient and hideously rich Graham can’t see a profitable future for the money-losing magazine, that future doesn’t exist. The category has finally gone to mold and will, in another 30 months or 30 years, advance to putrefaction.

Try to relax, dude.

Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.

“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”

With Brontë Sisters Action Figures! (From reader Scott, who has not misjudged me)

How best to parse the dense cottage industry of theory that’s sprung up around story? In a story, in the style of Borges, of course.

Rumors had reached us of a doctrine called Theory emanating from distant corners of the university. We in the Department of Philosophy understood it immediately as a grand hoax. I will not dwell on my particular amusement, in which I was so tragically at odds with my collaborator, Theo Rhee. This is the story not of my particular emotions but rather of Theory. Suffice it to say that the self-parody of the appellation, singular and majuscule as if affixed in Plato’s firmament, appeared to rule out all interpretations competing with that of shenanigan. So, too, did the buffoonery of the language, phraseology bloated past the point of grotesqueness. Above all, what convinced us that we had an advanced absurdist on our hands was the localization of Theory to departments of literature, the very experts steeped in the collective genius of expression, whom we judged to be as likely to embrace violations of the laws of sense and felicity as physicists to make merry with violations of the laws of nature. We looked to these colleagues to explain a poem to us, not to tell us our epistemology.

You really, REALLY can’t judge books by their covers, especially when they’re in those bizarre foreign editions.

What possible discussions took place in Germany, for instance, when publishers first received the manuscript for Martin Amis’s House of Meetings – a novel that describes the misery of life in a Russian gulag – and set to work on a cover that featured six figures body-popping in the windows of a modern apartment block? What prompted Italian book designers to give junior wizard Harry Potter a hat shaped like a mouse, and why did the French opt against the monochrome design that jacketed Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated in the UK and the US, concocting instead a watercolour of somebody fondling a woman’s breasts?

“What you are trying to get across on a cover is the essence of a book, quite an ambiguous thing,” says Nathan Burton, a British designer who created the striking cover for Ali Smith’s The Accidental, based on an image of a dead woman. “Designers in different countries read and interpret the fiction in different ways.” It doesn’t quite explain how Germany arrived at silhouetted dancers for House of Meetings, but “the germ of an idea can come from anywhere,” says Burton.

Do we really need articles like this any more? I mean, besides the stupidly easy process of getting your work into print these days, do we really want to encourage people to be clogging up the system with more slush? Mind you, this piece seems relatively reality-driven and does encourage people to give their heads a shake before they start whipping that novel at every mailbox in the biz. (Of course, anecdotal evidence historically sides with the chance that no one who actually needs to read those parts will.)

But here’s the toughest part, harder than any other step, but easily the most essential. It’s the thing you want — no, need — to think about most before even opening that basement door and facing the daylight. Is your book actually any good? Will anyone out there really want to read it? Just who do you think you are, anyway?

According to Pepper, if there’s one universal rule of thumb for the first time author, “It’s being honest with yourself.”

“There’s two ways of looking at it,” he explains. “There’s like 18 billion books published. Why does the world need another book, whether it’s by me or not by me? How am I going to move the meter here? Be honest. Writing should not be a self-indulgent thing, that I’m doing it because I like to do it. If you’re going to ask a publisher to pay money for it, or an agent to spend their time shopping it, then you really do have to believe you can find an audience for it. That audience doesn’t consist of your Aunt May. That audience is people who don’t know you that you have turned on by your writing. I think the biggest mistake always is just thinking you’re better than you are.”

Eleven shall go in, only one shall emerge, and hopefully it will be the brilliant malevolent stare of Geoffrey Hill that decides the contest. I swear the man could kill you with an eyebrow. But seriously, let’s be honest, this is a no-brainer, despite how good any other candidate might be.  Hill might very well be the best writer working in English, much less poet. Let’s get him lecturing about it in the highest profile, most well-documented post in the world. Do it for history, Oxfordians.

Eminent English poet Geoffrey Hill is widely seen as the frontrunner for the post, the most prominent in British poetry behind the poet laureate. Backed by Professor Hermione Lee, author and president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and broadcaster Tim Gardam, principal of St Anne’s College, the award-winning 77-year-old Hill has been nominated by more than 70 Oxford graduates and is the best-known name in the running. His appointment could help dispel the sordid air that has hung around the professorship since the resignation of Ruth Padel from the position last year, after it emerged that she had alerted journalists to sexual harassment allegations made against Nobel laureate and fellow contender Derek Walcott.

Hill will be competing for Oxford graduates’ votes against Beat poet and musician Michael Horovitz, who has promised to “shake things up” were he to be elected by opening discussions out to “everything which is broadly poetic”.

Damn, some days I can’t find anything of interest, and others, I just think, aw fuck, throw it all in there. Today is one of both of those days. Naw, I’m just cranky.

Borders Australia leaves suicide note for consumers to read as they loot its boots and buckles

Fay Weldon: completely bat-shit crazy

Stupid-ass teens and twens (and probably some even stupider tweens) are naming their babies after that sparkly heroin addict vampire from Twilight. Thanks, Mom. What’s next, a rose tattoo with a drip of blood from it?

And speaking of complete fucking idiot moms, the one who withheld Gossip Girl titles from library in order to effectively ban them from checkout by teens finally returns books and, get this, hopes library will waive the fines… Bookninja, on the other hand, hopes the library will contract our (pro bono, people) merciless ridicule and flaming-paper-bag-of-dog-shit-on-front-door-step services

Comic book award winners include the very cool and brilliant Seth

Yann the Mann, as previously noted, is taking the zen high road to his bad reviews, and frankly, coming out on top of all the screaming… Lesson to be learned, authors?

20 Best Puffin kids books

Who’s who in the publishing world Twitter…ulmp…verse… Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a bit there…

Is this guy, Christos Tsiolkas, the next big thing? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last seven years of covering articles like this, it’s that wild speculation on virtually unknowable matters of relative unimportance pays off in spades when it comes to not starting your day of work!

What will the world’s archived tweets give to history? Apparently, a whole lot.

Although the library’s acquisition might seem to be a capitulation to frivolity and short attention spans, historians say, it’s actually about how digital archives such as this are shaping the future of history.

“We are in a period of great transition,” Martha Anderson says. “We’re trying to figure out the best way to leave evidence for future generations of scholarship.”

Anderson works for the library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. She is the person charged with figuring out what to do with the billions of tweets in Twitter’s archives. Some 50 million new tweets are posted every day; all of the public ones will become available to the library after a six-month delay from their posting, to better delineate between current events and history.

Dating writers is a gateway to writing, says Molly Ringwald

Sharp-eyed reader Phyllis notes that Nora Roberts opened a romance spa in the middle of civil war country

Finally a pro for my love of the drank: it makes your vocabularly better… or a good vocabulary makes you drink… one of the two

Zombie William Styron has Twitter account

For you gossip hounds: Morton gives Jolie the old Diana one-two

The Brits already have a publishing-related laundry list for the new government there, whatever that may be

Just a few months ago we were all lining up to fellate Macmillan for standing up to neighbourhood bully Amazon and now comes the revelation that company reps in a part of the world that basically runs on bribes made bribes in a bid for a textbook contract. Now they’re banned from receiving World Bank money for six years. Looks like the next round of fellating will be Mac’s… IN PRISON! That’s right, people: the CLINK! The SLAMMER! STATESVILLE! The BIG HOUSE! The CROWBAR MOTEL!  You’re going down! And up. UP THE RIVER! How the worm has turned! The gig is up, Macmillan. We’re on to you. Naw, I’m just kidding. S’cool. But that get out of jail free card you got for humiliating Amazon is hereby revoked.

The World Bank said it had banned British publisher Macmillan from taking up its contracts for six years after the company said it paid bribes to secure a deal to print textbooks in south Sudan.

Macmillan said it made “corrupt payments” in a bidding process for an education project supported by a World Bank-managed fund in the African region, the bank said in a statement.

“The World Bank Group has debarred Macmillan Limited … declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts for a period of six years in the wake of the company’s admission of bribery payments relating to a Trust Fund-supported education project in Southern Sudan,” read the statement.

International donors have pumped millions of dollars into development projects in war-ravaged south Sudan through a Multi Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) managed by the World Bank.

After taking an assortment of critical shit-kickings and pantsings (I still don’t get this, other than as a reaction to wild success… the book just isn’t THAT BAD), publishers of Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil have gone into damage control mode and have sought help from the independent booksellers community by widebanding a call for public engagement with the title. Let readers come to their own conclusion and not be bullied by reviews! (Unless, you know, they’re good, in which case, follow them blindly.)

Wednesday publisher Cindy Spiegel sent an e-mail blast to the NEIBA listserv, headlined “a call for discussion.” Citing Beatrice and Virgil’s mixed reviews, raves and pans, she asked independent booksellers to host discussions about it in their stores. “In the spirit of the community-building that independent booksellers do so well, I’m enlisting your support—let’s encourage readers to come to their own conclusions about this novel. I very much hope you will urge your customers to read the book and join the conversation.  Perhaps you could even host a discussion group in your store.  It’s exciting to see a book generating such lively debate, and a bookstore like yours seems the perfect place to host this type of dialogue,” wrote Spiegel.

Interesting tactic. I suspect this is one of those books that will be taught for years and years to come, despite its critical failure today. Why? It’s teachable.