Clive Thompson writes at Wired about how automatic translation software has improved to the point that there may be no need for a “Globish” language (aka English). Fascinating stuff.

How have the machines become so adept? Mostly by using new “statistical” techniques. Instead of trying to teach a program the rules of language, computer scientists locate massive corpora of online documents previously translated by humans — say, UN proceedings, which are routinely available in six different languages, or bilingual newspapers. Then they train cloud computers to recognize which words and phrases match up across tongues.

That’s why Google is leading the pack: It’s best at finding oodles of documents to train its cloud. This method also means that the more the Web grows, the better our multilingual machines will get.

The geopolitical implications are profound. For years, pundits have wondered which language will eventually dominate. Will English remain the lingua franca? Will Mandarin ascend?

But maybe it’s no longer a competition. Machine translation could be good enough to obviate the need for a primary global language.

Just for the record, that’s not books written by Doctor Who robots with plungers for arms. It’s a “lower” caste of Indian society that’s rising within the publishing world in Delhi.

Indian society can sometimes seem harsh or even brutal. Nowhere is this more evident than in its caste system, a centuries-old hierarchy of categorisation based on ancient Hindu teachings that groups people into one of four main castes (and thousands of sub-castes). Traditionally, the caste someone belonged to decided where they would live, what job they would do and even what they would eat. People outside of these groups were considered unclean and not true Hindus, fit only for tasks such as cleaning toilets, making leather and sweeping the roads.

Dalits have suffered centuries of abuse and even today, despite legislation to protect them and an increasingly urbanised society, they are still the victims of widespread prejudice, discrimination and violence. A recent report by the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front, a coalition of human rights groups in southern India, revealed a bewildering degree of discrimination, both in scale and form.

Among the various abuses detailed by the authors of the report, Dalits were not allowed to use a mobile phone in the presence of upper-caste people. They were also prevented from having their clothes washed, permitted only to drink tea from coconut shells while squatting on the floor, barred from entering temples, forced to eat faeces, raped and burned alive.

Yet Dalits total more than 150 million people – around 20 per cent of India’s population – and the realisation has slowly come that with such critical mass, this community could have considerable leverage.

Amanda Ross, a creator of the Richard and Judy book club, offers some (pretty damn obvious) strategies for finding something new to read that you might not have chosen otherwise. No offence, Amanda, but I’m really not interested in finding things I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. It’s Twilight and Dragonlance for me, and that’s it.

A stranger’s opinion Independent bookshops are very much governed by the taste of the ower. It’s very, very brave of people to run bookshops, because of competition from chains and supermarkets. If you want to use them as your recommendation, then you need to spend time talking to the owner and see what kind of taste they have

Hannah Sung of the CBC Book Club somehow got it into her head that I was a big soccer guy, which I kind of am, but in an armchair way. I’m no John Doyle, but I had a stab at answering some questions on the blog.

Q.: What do you like best — reading about, playing or watching soccer?

George Murray: I haven’t really played soccer in almost 20 years, owing in part to the many years before that when I played left half and had to trot the length of the field every day, which eventually blew out my knees. But what I do remember enjoying in the sport was the “click” of a good play. It’s the same thing I enjoy watching soccer on TV. Momentum in footy can appear a bit like a riptide: the sea and the shore pounding against one another seem relatively stable with a little give-and-take until you’re suddenly sucked out to sea. I like plays that seem to materialize out of nowhere, like a current beneath the apparent surf, or an unexpected chess gambit. Everyone is mid-field and mucking about and then suddenly the stands are on their feet as the pieces shift and the momentum changes. It’s magical. I even saw this last night, watching my son, aged seven, play. One minute the game is at an impasse and then someone takes an unexpected pass and breaks away and all the parents are jumping and cheering. Of course, with seven-year-olds, there’s a whole lot more shin-kicking involved…

Stacey May Fowles has a fantastic, generous, and clear-eyed personal essay up at The Walrus blog about what it’s like to work as a woman in publishing. She frames her piece around Russell Smith’s controversial Globe opinion on how male publishing professionals should behave (in short, keep it in your pants). It’s a very good read.

In Smith’s discussion of this reality, he argues that avoiding lechery is “not so difficult as to make it impossible, though. If you’re smart, you keep a close eye on it. And a lid.” Ten years in magazine and book publishing and I’ve met many men who, unlike Smith, did not keep an eye or a lid on “it.” Early in my career I worked for a publisher who encouraged me to have a threesome with him and his wife. At the time I thought they were cool and “progressive,” but was thankfully too green to accept the invite. Later on I worked for someone who thought it was acceptable to bring up my cervix in an office environment (a positively Smith-ian colleague and writer came to my defense by asking, “Did you really just say that in front of seven witnesses?”). A prominent literary academic once touched my breast in front of his very angry wife at a work-related fundraiser. Another time, while I was on the clock at a book festival, I had my ass discreetly grabbed by four separate male writers in one evening, concluding with a very drunk writer inviting me to run away with him the following morning. And when a writer I had worshipped shamelessly for ten years kissed me in an elevator after his reading that I’d staffed, I felt the simultaneous elation and shame of enjoying it.

And here’s the rub; when you’re young and marginally published, when you’re proving yourself to an industry that deems you expendable and dime a dozen, you don a (low-cut) black dress and yearn to feel special and accepted. You are constantly told you are lucky to be a part of this party you’ve somehow snuck into. No one is listening to you but they are looking, and it’s difficult not to appreciate the crumbs you’re being thrown. You spend your youth highlighting passages in paperbacks, and then all of a sudden you’re surrounded by the same celebrated men who crafted your teenage daydreams, the men who penned the books that you read and reread, and you are tasked with making sure they have a drink in hand and are enjoying themselves. They want something from you and you have their attention.

What Smith missed in his column is that for some of those publishing “hotties,” sexuality is a tool used in pursuit of respect — and there is a deep sadness that sets in with the realization that so few really care about your manuscript or your theories or what you studied at university, but instead are deeply interested in how well you “entertain.”

The media and publishing industry in Delhi are still pretty much behind David Davidar, despite the mounting column inches and opinions about him and publishing culture here

Breaking News: JM Coetzee smiled… yeah, right… next you’re going to tell me that Geoffrey Hill once hugged someone

Waterstone’s down 70%

Regina store closes, blames ebook… B&N on the other hand experiences ebook-led growth

Plato had musical code embedded in books… Was riff from “My Humps”

Cover before striking… matchbook lit mag

The first few years of reporting on the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing were fun… Now I just feel old as I see it pass by again… But the winner this year is genuinely funny

Last chance to vote for Atlantic Canada reads… might I suggest Kathleen Winter to those who don’t know the titles?

Wonder Woman bucks superheroine trend, gets more clothes… The alternate storyline will reportedly involve a subplot in which Princess Diana maintains a romantic relationship with a red-headed book blogger who she bankrolls so he can work on his poetry, but whom she also occasionally dresses in the old suit for and uses sexually like a dog gnawing on a squeaky chew toy… Hey, it’s what I heard!

Terry Pratchett prize for debut fantasy books

Thank god Osama bin Laden reads Twilight.

Because, in short, e-books aren’t books.

e-book Beethoven will of course be a much different experience than the same guy between covers. Garrison Keillor has said, “On the Internet we’re all hummingbirds.” We flit from place to place, taking a sip here and a sip there. That’s swell, but it isn’t the way to read Austin, Yeats, and Joyce. My book on an iPad or whatever will be richer in worthwhile ways, but it will be less absorbing and probably less emotionally compelling. (I’m making another prophecy of my own, that the iPad, a TV screen, will win out over the Kindle and its “e-ink,” because the iPad and its clones will be far more flexible.)So real books and e-books will coexist. That has happened time and again with other new technologies that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos didn’t wipe out horses. Movies didn’t finish theater. TV didn’t destroy movies. E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.

Libraries are finally getting to play lead instead of catchup. This will be the saviour for the entire industry, I tell you. Hooray for libraries! (Librarians, I am available for gratitude-based celebratory makeout sessions, but only if you’re wearing tight, scratchy wool skirts and sweaters. And glasses. And those stockings with the seams up the back. Basically, you need to dress like an extra from an Aerosmith video who’s hired to lapdance in the background on a photocopier. Hey, at least I’m honest.)

Starting Tuesday, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, are joining forces to create a one-stop website for checking out e-books, including access to more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.

And in a first, participants including the Boston Public Library and the Marine Biological Laboratory will also contribute scans of a few hundred older books that are still in copyright, but no longer sold commercially. That part of the project could raise eyebrows, because copyright law is unclear in the digital books arena. Google Inc., which is working on its own book scanning efforts, has been mired in a legal brouhaha with authors and publishers over its digital books project.

To read the books, borrowers around the world can download and read them for free on computers or e-reading gadgets. Software renders the books inaccessible once the loan period ends. Two-thirds of American libraries offered e-book loans in 2009, according to a survey by the American Library Association. But those were mostly contemporary imprints from the last couple of years—say, the latest Stephen King novel.

The Internet Archive project, dubbed Openlibrary.org, goes a step further by opening up some access to the sorts of books that may have otherwise gathered dust on library shelves—mainly those published in the past 90 years, but of less popular interest.

Remember the PLRC, people. Fewer libraries equals fewer loans equals less money for you. British authors, particularly genre authors, are quaking at their 6p per loan loss. It adds up.

A 2007 survey by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society found that the average income for an author in the UK was £16,531, and that the top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income.

“PLR is very important to people who are having hiccups in their career, and pretty important for newly published authors as well,” said Haddon. “The division between bestsellers and everyone else is huge. Publishers seem to me to be looking for the next big thing, and if you don’t produce huge sales in your first couple of books you’re gone. There’s never going to be a Dick Francis, who took seven books to get off the launch pad, because your publisher won’t stand by you that long. The point about PLR is that actually it will help to feed the author while they’re trying to find another voice, or genre, or pen name, because that’s what they have to do.”

The DCMS said it would not speculate about future spending decisions.

Can the DIY aesthetic so popular among the ETSY/et al. crowd  be applied to self-publishing as a model for getting by? I imagine, in the non-fiction market at least, the answer is “yes”.

As late as the start of the twentieth century, cottage industries supported many families. When automation arrived, “cottage industry” became an undeserved term for substandard work.

But the cottage industry has made a comeback.

I know, because I am one. So are my co-authors — Marla Brown, Eleanor Morgan, and Peggy Parks. After meeting through an Atlanta-based women’s business group, we have written a book about the reasons, challenges, and benefits of being in business for yourself, with tips on how to pull it off. Opportunity Meets Motivation: Lessons From Four Women Who Built Passion Into Their Lives and Careers will be published soon.

eBook sales led by Transworld and Faber in UK

Is your eReader using “conflict minerals“? Allow me to answer that for you. Yes. Yes, it is.

B&N catching up to Amazon?

Amazon adds audio and video to Kindle app (note, not playable on actual Kindle….)

Yet another eReader on the market… by the time I’m ready to buy, they’ll be in gumball machines at Zellers

Book on crooked agent who disappeared written by former client

Michael Crummey wins CAA for Galore—fabulous book! Go buy it if you haven’t already

Big name authors are getting iPhone apps to promote their books, and so the dreaded compound Businese word “value-added” rears its fugly head in the book world. Soon editors and proof readers will be dubbing voice-over tracks to the text so as you read you can have a “bonus” commentary… “You should have seen how he plotted this the first time… I mean, over and over, and time shifts and sequence problems. Haha. He was just such an idiot. The best day of his life was when I was assigned to this thing, I tell you. Hah.. Good times.” Blooper reels, here we come.

In March the number of books available as iPhone apps passed the number of games for the first time. “It was a tipping point,” says digital editor Dan Franklin at rival publisher Canongate. “The plan is now to be creating something you can only experience digitally” — something which, he admits, defies the instincts of a publisher. “It’s our next challenge [but] it’s difficult,” he says.

TradeMobile’s Bowe feels the “companion” approach works particularly well for fiction. “Tolkien for example would be amazing,” he says. “Really for authors with rich, detailed characters and locations it’s great.”

(Hmm. I wonder if there’s a little local poet guy who might get his own iPhone app, say this August…….? Hmmmm…..? ……… Wait for it… WAIT FOR IT…!)

Except, you know, the uncivilized guy with his junk in his hand back by the computers. But I digress. Libraries = good. Especially MOBILE libraries. Bookmobile for the win! Get behind your libaries, people.

One of my favourite book titles of recent years is The Child That Books Built, by Frances Spufford, because it wonderfully encapsulates the fact that for millions the very building blocks of identity are found on bookshelves. One study carried out by American academics, involving 70,000 case studies in 27 countries, found the biggest determining factor in children achieving academic success was not wealth or class, nor parents staying together, but the presence of books in the home.

Since buying books is an unimaginable luxury to those struggling to buy groceries, the only viable route towards improving those children’s chances in life is the local lending library. But we all need to support the institution. When user numbers fall and cash-strapped councils have to weigh the claims of libraries against social services, the former can be a soft target unless demand is visibly high. In the spend and splurge years, the middle classes found books were relatively affordable compared to income, particularly when shopping on Amazon, and many people lost the library habit.

I’ve started a new thing with Ninja Boy. We can buy novels, stories, poetry, etc., but if he wants non-fiction, we go to the libary to get it. Hopefully this will instill both a love of research (and the realization that information is transient) and a respect for literature as something worth keeping and rereading. Probably though, like everything parents do, it will cripple him mentally later in life and lead to tens of thousands of dollars in therapy bills. Sigh.

We authors love to hear nice things about our books. So blurbs can be especially gratifying, when a peer or otherwise-in-the-know type is able to recommend you. However, as we all know, blurbs can also be terribly written or, in this case, overwritten.

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

Wow. That’s… well… unbelievable. Really.  I’ve got three blurbs on the back jacket of my upcoming book, Glimpse—the first time I’ve used author recommendations in five books. It was actually a pretty pleasant experience, and I think all three are not only from top-notch poets, but also useful as forms of recommendation (ie, not just little show-off spots for the authors to remind my readers that they too are poets…)

Judge it by its trailer.

”It’s the good the bad and the ugly, and there’s some pretty ugly stuff out there,” he said.

”Like all digital marketing, it only really works if it’s interesting and engaging with a viral element. A lot of publishers are just producing generic videos of authors talking about their books, but YouTube is absolutely saturated with that type of content.

”Video doesn’t work as stand-alone marketing. It has to be tied into other things, but you certainly can’t ignore video distribution as a channel for marketing.”

Brett Osmond, marketing and digital manager at Random House, said teen and crime fiction lend themselves best to videos, because those genres have fan bases primed for online viral marketing.

Seems odd reporting on books this morning with all the shit going down in my hometown of Toronto. Looks like there’s growing evidence of human rights abuses and that the police may again be using agent provocateur tactics by dressing as radical protestors and upping the ante at peaceful protests to justify shutting it down. Gross. Even the barely literate, garbage-choked Toronto Sun, a foul rag that supports its minimal text (all with a right wing editoral slant) with ads for carpet dealers and hookers, is crying foul.

Rush legend Geddy Lee options Rheostatics legend Dave Bidini’s Baseballissimo for film

Seattle looking to get rid of phone books (so should we all!)

British industry take advantage of typo to comment on English loss at World Cup: Totally Rank

Will “roll-up” computers revolutionize ebooks? Can a revolution be revolutionized?

Wylie flexing muscles, pawing hoof in dirt on ebook issue

82 with deal for first novel—rock it, granny!

Creative writing as force for good (as opposed to what comes out of most MFA progs, which is undoubtedly evil…)

The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut

Who did Borges like reading most? Wrong.

Aaaand because I love you: a day in the life of a pet AT-AT… I want one! I’d even be willing to pick up the Jabbas!

Queer teen fiction is a lifeline for LGBT teens.

First came a gem, a book for young people that made them cry: Martin Wilson’s 2008 debut, “What They Always Tell Us,” set in Tuscaloosa, Ala. The story about a troubled year for two brothers, one of whom finds solace in a relationship with a boy, made him feel less like an “alien on your own planet.”

A world of books followed. Brent read his way through Tom Dolby, Robin Reardon, Julie Ann Peters and David Levithan. He soon realized there were lots of coming out stories but he also craved romance, fantasy and paranormal books with characters who just happened to be gay, like Damien in the “House of Night” vampire series he loves by the mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast.

“I see the characters trickling into the mainstream genres. I really like that,” Brent said. “It makes being gay feel natural, which it is, of course. Books give you hope.”

Sparkles and vegetarianism do not a sustainable villian base make. Neil Gaiman quoted first in the excerpt below:

“My next big novel was going to have a vampire. Now, I’m probably not. They are everywhere, they’re like cockroaches.”

He said he hoped that mainstream culture would lose its interest in the undead so that vampire fiction could regain its potency. “Maybe it’s time for this to play out and go away. It’s good sometimes to leave the field fallow. I think some of this stuff is being over-farmed,” he said.

Many in the horror fiction community felt that the rise of glamorous, fanged creations in books and shows such as True Blood (based on Charlaine Harris’s novels), the Night World series and The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith, and Twilight, Stephanie Meyer’s series of books which have been turned into blockbuster films, have helped to create a new generation of “softer” vampires. Sam Stone, a member of the British Fantasy Society and creator of The Vampire Gene Trilogy, said the fault lay with the “huge influx on the market of paranormal romances and teen vampire fiction”.

“I personally think vampires should not be depicted as vegetarians, as they are by Meyer. In other books, they tend to be quite neurotic. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was so good because it was dark, multi-layered with violence that was inferred. Teen vampire fiction is spoiling that,” she said.

“Get up!” screams the Goog shrilly. “You want some more of this?!?! GET UP!”

Viacom sued Google/YouTube for $1 billion in March, 2007, alleging massive copyright infringement. In March of this year, Google and Viacom each filed motions for summary judgment. In its motion, Viacom accused YouTube and Google of building a business on material the company knew to be infringing, and disputed Google’s claim to be a “safe harbor” under the DMCA. But in its motion, Google defended its “safe harbor” claim, illustrating a key point: copyrighted content is not necessarily unauthorized content, and Google has no way of judging which content being hosted on its site is infringing until a copyright holder steps forward.

“The crux of Viacom’s argument rests on trying to break the DMCA safe harbor because Google and YouTube execs knew that there was a lot of infringing content on the site,” Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick explained earlier this year. “But Viacom’s argument breaks down entirely when you realize it doesn’t explain how Google could ever make the actual determination of which videos are infringing.”

In yesterday’s ruling, the court agreed with Masnick. “Mere knowledge of the prevalence of [infringement] in general is not enough,” Stanton wrote in his decision. “To let knowledge of a generalized practice of infringement in the industry, or of a proclivity of users to post infringing materials, impose responsibility on service providers to discover which of their users’ postings infringe a copyright would contravene the structure and operation of the DMCA.”

Literary debuts are increasingly difficult marketing propositions. Luckily, I am a household name.  Or I will be when I change my name legally to Mr. Clean. Watch for my first novel, Lemon-Scented Muscles, early next year.

The contraction of the high street and the dynamics of online retailing are putting extra pressure on literary publishers, with subscriptions plummeting to less than half their previous figures.

With Waterstone’s the only high street chain with a literary profile and Amazon working to a sales model with low initial subscriptions, publishers hoping to launch new names are facing particular challenges. Débuts which two years ago would have gained initial subs of 1,000–2,000 copies are now subscribing just 250–500. Established literary writers who would have gained subs of 5,000 copies two years ago are now subscribing just 2,000.

Hamish Hamilton publisher Simon Prosser said: “If you have established names, you can say to the retailers: ‘Look at their sales figures’ but launching new literary authors is a real challenge. You have to be more creative than ever.”

All’s Quiet on the Wizard Front

Karen Solie, lesser writers win Trillium awards

Myth of drunk superstar writer shattered: sober is better

Could Miles Franklin outcome affect outcome of Booker in favour of crime genre?

Part-time Ninja Alissa York gets Afterword book club treatment

Superman grounds himself to get in touch with the people, aw… in related news…

Russell Smith, who’s written about sex in fiction for Bookninja, says it’s hard to not think about sex while working in publishing because all the women are so damn smart and hot. Well, Mr. Smith, I beg to… um… well, now that I think about it, you’re kind of right. They are all hot. Damn. But, as Smith goes on to point out, that doesn’t give anyone the right to jump on them or make them uncomfortable. And besides rights and wrongs, you’re a friggin idiot if you make the people making you look good uncomfortable.

But I have never in my whole career made a real pass at one of my colleagues or, I think, been flirtatious to the point of making someone seriously worried about my attention. Even when I was single.

Why? Why be so cautious, when we all know that the workplace is where most romantic relationships start, and that a lot of those go on to be perfectly respectable marriages? Where else are you going to meet people with similar interests?
…

So why not go for it? I’m not even in a situation of power, as the Penguin president was. My editor has power over me. I could hardly be accused of intimidation by coming on to my boss.

I could, however, be accused of idiocy.

Accomplished story writer David Means on why he hasn’t written a novel. Very well said. I know there are a few of you out there with vehement opinions on this. Thoughts?

Yeah, I’m tempted by the novel. Tempted is the correct word because compared to the demands of the story it would seem that the novel, all that wide-open space, would be enticing after four story collections. But what’s not enticing to me is the idea of simply going big and wide for the sake of giving into the possibility of going big. I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they’re highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.

Big and wide can mean expansive and comprehensive, but it can also mean bloat. Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue—some even start that way—and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news.

The English have largely stopped their rampant, violent colonialism. The English LANGUAGE? Not so much.

…I can’t help but wonder if, in the long term, it’s even possible to stop most of the world’s languages from being driven to extinction by English, Spanish, Chinese and the other dominant tongues of globalization.

According to a June 14th paper by researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the answer is, sometimes. The team modeled what happens when two languages compete for dominance in a given geographical region. What they found is that if the languages are sufficiently grammatically similar to one another and both are perceived as economically or socially valuable, then they can survive together in the same place for an indefinite amount of time. This makes sense when you look at a place like Europe: Because they live in relatively close proximity to one another, Europeans with different native languages have to interact frequently for both personal and economic reasons. Furthermore, many European languages like French, Spanish, and Italian are close descendants of one another, and as such have many words and grammatical patterns in common. If you know one, it’s easy to learn another. In short, for a second language to survive, the payoff for speaking it must be high, and the barrier for learning it must be low.

Will the archivists of the future be stuck combing through your one line emails and emoticons trying to piece together the great conversations of the day? No, because no one except Google will ever read your email, and they only do it to sell you porn toys. Face it, you’re not very interesting. Maybe you should buy one of them porn toys.

At their best, literary letters, often pruned and published posthumously, have something for everyone: general readers get a glimpse of how authors write freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary merit, scholars get enough material for a wheelbarrow full of monographs, and literary estates make a few more shillings off the back of their benefactor.

All this is well and good – except for one small snag. Nobody writes letters any more: at least not the kind of erudite, humorous missives that are the hallmark of great correspondence.

A point by point debunking of yesterday’s Siegel piece in the Observer wherein he lambasted contemporary fiction.

Here we go again.

Every few years someone finds a platform to declare fiction dead, despite all evidence to the contrary. This time around, it’s Lee Siegel, writing in The Observer. Siegel’s piece flogs a tired horse, that fiction is less central to our culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and not as good. It’s hard to figure out which is more problematic: how poorly Siegel’s argument is made, or how many things he gets wrong in the process.

That is, depressed and overworked trying to find something worthwhile. How to navigate the slush pile (eg, Amazon.com) once anyone can publish anything? Won’t somebody think of the readers?

“Digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry,” a recent Wall Street Journal report proclaimed. “Self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.” To “circumvent” means, of course, to find a way around, and what’s waiting behind all those naysaying editors and agents, the self-publishing authors tell themselves, are millions of potential readers, who’ll simply love our books! The reign of the detested gatekeepers has ended!

How readers feel about all this usually gets lost in the fanfare and the hand-wringing. People who claim that there are readers slavering to get their hands on previously rejected books always seem to have a previously rejected book to peddle; maybe they’re correct in their assessment, but they’re far from impartial. Readers themselves rarely complain that there isn’t enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices. So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?

Is To Kill a Mockingbird great literature? Apparently not. According to, you know… a sports writer who dislikes “liberal humanism”.

It’s impossible that anyone who grew up in Alabama in the mid-1930s, when the book is set, would believe that story, but it’s a sugar-coated myth of Alabama’s past that millions have come to accept.

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in “To Kill a Mockingbird”; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as “an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.”

It’s time to stop pretending that “To Kill a Mockingbird” is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in “Jurassic Park.”

Into which is dumped the lifeless body of information I don’t care to tackle individually.

DC Comics releases iPhone app (Marvel did this a while back)

(Speaking of literary apps, you should check out the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app, which is really quite charming a slot machine meets moods and subjects kind-of-way)

Gaiman wins Carnegie

Tea Party bookshop changes name in order to avoid association with pack of deluded bigots

HuffPo looks and publishers websites (and Melville House makes the cut!!)

Writing (fiction, I note—ahem) is no longer an artistic endeavour, it’s a profession. And professions are not likely to engender risk and riskless endeavours seldom produce good art. So says the NY Observer in a passionate editorial. Other reasons follow, including non-fiction and James Wood.

Exhibit A in the argument that fiction is now a marginal enterprise: Everybody complains that The New Yorker list is inbred, house-approved, a mere PR ploy for the magazine, but no one does anything about it. If fiction were really alive, if it were still the vibrant experience it used to be, then an artistic affront like the “20 Under 40″ junior pantheon would be something against which literary people would deploy all their creative energies. About 150 years ago, the established taste represented by the French Academy’s annual Salon inspired the gorgeous, seminal mischief of the Salon des Refuses, a counterstatement suffused with every liberating, original quality that the Salon’s official productions lacked. Where are the counterlists to The New Yorker’s 20? Where is the mischief in the little literary magazines, the fiction-publishing monthlies like Harper’s and The Atlantic, the countless online sites devoted to contemporary fiction? Isn’t such sharp dissent what the Web was supposed to empower?

Alas: The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs that are all about the profession. The carefulness, the cautiousness, the professionalism that keeps contemporary fiction from being meaningful to the most intellectually engaged people is also what is stifling any kind of response to The New Yorker. After all, kick against The New Yorker’s conventional taste and you might tread on some powerful person’s overlapping interest. You might anger Nicole Aragi, fiction super-agent. You might alienate a New Yorker editor! Literary triumph in Manhattan is now defined by publishing one or two pieces in The New Yorker each year. That is too narrow a definition of literary triumph.

Eesh. Not necessarily wrong, but given all he says in this interview, you gotta love the j-school instinct to go straight to that quote for the headline. It’s been a rough year for Yann, but I give the guy credit for how he handles it all.

I have taken along a review by David Sexton, literary editor of the London Evening Standard and a critic with impeccable taste, who had accused Martel of being “not very bright” because of a quote in which he said the monkey and donkey which feature in the taxidermist’s clunky play, large chunks of which appear in the novel, were appropriate representatives of Jews because they embody mental nimbleness and stubbornness respectively. Martel is keen to see the review, as he has heard about it but has yet to read it. I hand it over and lean back. All in all, I am sensing disaster here.

Apart from an “Oooh” (or maybe “Pwooh”) at being accused of stupidity by Sexton, he takes it philosophically. “I think there are four kinds of reviews. There are bad bad reviews; good bad reviews; bad good reviews, and good good reviews. Good bad reviews that point out genuine flaws are useful. This is just idiotic and very personal. I’m using allegory. If he says that of me, I wonder what he feels about Art Spiegelman in Maus. In Maus the Jews are characterised as mice. But were the Jews mouse-like in the Warsaw ghetto uprising? I wonder how he feels about that characterisation.”
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I suggest that what the critics are trying to tell him is it’s none of his business – he’s not Jewish, is a different generation, is almost inevitably going to come up with a treatment which offends aesthetically. “The tragedy of the Holocaust wasn’t exclusively Jewish,” he says. “It was non-Jews who did it. It was an act of two groups, so it’s not just for Jews to be expert on the Holocaust. In any case, we’re in dialogue with history, and you no more own a historical event than people own their language. The English don’t own the English language; the Jews don’t own the Holocaust; the French don’t own Verdun. It’s good to have other perspectives. If you claim to own an event, you may suffer from group think.”

That which yon beavers of electronic industry doth build to stop the flow of information.

Libraries in peril  from one end of America to t’other

The Books of O (Orpah issues her latest directive to her robot army of hairsprayed zealots)

Philip K Dick festival to provide goers with chance to dress up like insane genius

Robert Pinsky looks at the poetry of some guy name of “Lincoln”

Imagine living in a country where the populace gets upset if the president doesn’t attend the funeral of a leading artist… We’re just lucky ubiquitous media attention keeps Stephen Harper from trying to physcially strangle us one by one

Moby keeps its sharp, whaley eye on the issues, man: in this case, the lack of info flowing from the Google settlement

David Mamet and comic books—no, really

Borders bundles $20 gift card with Kobo, effectively dropping the price by $20… depending on how you look at it… Nook to counter with offer to give each customer a backrub

Fall from grace now complete: Headship of Penguin International goes to someone other than Davidar

Samantha Francis should be given a medal for courage

Penguin Canada now at a “crossroads” (isn’t that where they used to hang people?)

Susan Orlean tries to lay out her publishing house/assigned editor geneology without naming names. Positively tangled.

My first book was acquired by two people I will call Editor A and Editor B, who ran a small imprint at a big publishing house. We had a great lunch to celebrate. A few months later, Editor A left book publishing to become a newspaper writer. Editor B became my primary editor. She and I had a nice lunch to talk about my book.

A few months after that, Editor B was promoted to publisher of the larger house—let us call it Publisher W—that owned the small imprint. Because Editor B—that is, Editor/Publisher B—now had too many duties to edit my book, I was assigned to Editor C.

Editor C and I had lunch. A few months later, he got a new job at another publishing house. I was assigned to Editor D.

Editor D and I had lunch. It was a pleasant-enough lunch, but Editor D had no actual interest in my book or me; he was just taking it on because Editor/Publisher B, now his boss, had asked him to.

A few months later, Editor/Publisher B was fired.

Some time between when I was a young actor and now, Tom Stoppard got old. But at least one thing remains the same: he’s still probably right.

The playwright stressed that he was not making a case for “good and bad”, pointing out that his sons and grandchildren know things that he does not because of technology. “I just don’t want the printed page to get swept away by that,” he said.

Stoppard suggested that English and the humanities have been affected by a drive to put science-based subjects first.

“There was a period when I was 30 or 40, when science teaching was felt to have lagged and felt to be the area which would improve everybody’s life, and I’m sure that was the case.”

But he added: “Since then, we have been more and more worried about the humanities being neglected and at the level of higher education that is a cause of enormous concern.”

After all the hooplah and agony caused by the 20 under 40 thing in the last couple weeks, it was only a matter of time before other countries wanted to try the painful process out for themselves. Here are the Telegraph’s British guesses, fronted with a photo of awesome novelist (and, surely coincidentally, the most beautiful woman in letters), Zadie Smith.

The lists generated by the New Yorker and Granta are interesting as much for what they reveal about a country’s fiction as about the concerns of a writing generation. Though creative writing courses such as the pioneering one at the University of East Anglia have taken off in Britain, their presence is nothing like as pervasive as that of institutions such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the States. “Writing is more developed as a craft in America,” says John Freeman, “and American writers are constantly engaged with the question of being American. There is no similarly defining issue over here.” It is notable that most of the writers on the New Yorker list came though a creative writing programme – and many now teach on one.
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So with these potential problems in mind and in the hope of unleashing a debate similar in ferocity to the one triggered by the New Yorker, we are pleased to unveil our list of writers. We have used the same selection criteria as the New Yorker – all these writers are under 40 and all, with two exceptions, live in Britain – at least most of the time. But we haven’t controlled the types of writing, or worried about whether writers stand in some way for different experiences of Britishness. And we have frankly failed, if it matters, to achieve a gender balance – 13 out of the 20 are men – and most of these writers are white. But in other ways we have striven to be diverse, refusing to overlook excellent science fiction and genuinely good thrillers.

Our list is based unapologetically on talent and, to a lesser extent, potential – one of our selected writers, Anjali Joseph, will publish her first novel next month. Implicit in our selection is the expectation that these writers have their best work ahead of them. If some people complain that they haven’t heard of most of them, we will regard that criticism as a badge of honour.

Giant, activist, bizarrely accurate three point shooter, and, apparently, coiner of “my bad”, dead at 47.

The “my bad” item, written by British professor of linguistics Geoffrey K. Pullum (the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) quotes one source who recalls first hearing “my bad” in the Bay Area in 1988, after Bol had joined the Golden State Warriors. And indeed, if you run an archives search on “basketball” and “my bad,” the first three usages are all linked to Bol.

Hilary Mantel wins historical fiction prize

Hollywood turns its greasy eye on Catcher in the Rye like a porn director hanging out at the bus terminal to cruise the girls getting off the red eye from Iowa

Something about a tax on books in Britain that will or won’t be happening

Kobo software for Android phones

New Eggers charity gets check from Amazon

John Grisham talks about how he went from being a mediocre lawyer to being a mediocre novelist (video)

NYT on the ereader price war that broke out this week

List of top publishers (by sales) contains the usual suspects and a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of

You leave Emily out of this! What we had was special and beautiful and pure and even your filthy, leering, prurient interest can never change that! Let’s go, dear. Oh, and don’t forget to unhook your harness from the swing this time…

The New Yorker goes Canadian, aw yeah!

B&N has thrown down the gauntlet against Borders and their Kobo. And the result is win, as the kids say, for Nook buyers. Live in-store browsing, new purchase sharing with other Nook users, and a price match for the cheapest-til-now Kobo. Afterword has the call. I’ve always thought the Nook looked and operated (from what I’ve been able to glean) most like the kind of ereader I’d want to own, were I inclined to rent my books instead of owning them, of course.

An academic who was used to navigating the halls of higher learning finds herself lost in the halls of higher expectations.

After years of publishing with academic presses ranging from the relatively obscure to the venerable, I brought out a book in 2007 with a major New York house. This year I published with the same company again—this time, to my delight, with the help of agents who had invited me to sign with them.

Certainly, from the outside, my publishing experience looks like a soaring trajectory. And in many ways, it’s been exhilarating. Five years ago, even my wildest dreams did not include being interviewed by Diane Rehm or profiled on the pages of Salon.com. In other ways, it’s been a startling lesson in how much sweat and skill it takes to code-switch successfully. Peeking out at the publishing world from ivied walls, I’ve often felt lost.

Dude, what ISN’T it for!!! I use it as a coaster, doorstop, paperweight, flyswatter, trivet, table-jiggling stabilizer, kindling, as absorbant material in baby nappies, to patch holes in my walls during the cold winter months! It goes on and on!

But seriously, if we’re going to ask questions, how about this little one that’s been nagging at me the last few years: with poetry surviving several thousand years of countless wars, fires, dark ages, population decimating pandemics, ethnic cleansings, brutal totalitarian regimes, periods of indifference, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, meteor strikes, and everything short of the sun blowing up, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL SPECULATING ABOUT WHETHER POETRY HAS A FUTURE!?!!?! But I digress…

I went to read a few of my own poems, but also to ask the audience a question: what is poetry for?
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The answers were varied, but many embraced emotion: “to draw emotion and deepen insight”; “to enlighten in both senses of the word”; “to turn a rush of emotion into a form of music”; “to engage with emotional reality”; “to make language work as hard as possible”; “for singing out loud”; “to encourage social awakening”; “to delight so that it may inform”; “to illuminate the world”; “to clarify and express feeling”. People see poetry as the means of expressing powerful emotions, but often that will rein in the imagination, and produce a one-dimensional statement rather than a representation of the world in words.

I remember during the 1991 Gulf war, when the midnight bombing raids were being carried live on TV, we used to receive numerous poems at the Guardian from people expressing their horror at the grisliness of war. In times of stress – look in the bereavements column of your local paper – people turn to poetry. But it is almost invariably bad poetry: all emotion, no tranquillity.

The simplest and best answer I got at the event in Oxford was “for paying attention”. Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, echoes that phrase. “One of the things poetry gives all of us is a way of developing an attentiveness to life, a way of observing the world, of noticing things and seeing them differently,” she says. A good poem looks closely at the world; does that Martian thing of trying to see it for the first time. Everything else – the emotional charge, the lyrical delight, the intellectual pleasure – is secondary.

I notice this last weekend has dropped quite a litter of future-of-reading articles into the puppy basket of the arts pages, everything from ebooks to … well… ebooks.

Cory Doctorow on New York meeting Silicon Valley (pretty entertaining piece, as usual from Doctorow, whether or not you agree)

The Globe does that book-is-dead/long-live-book thing that everyone was doing five years ago

Reading: now it’s social

In perhaps the most interesting article an UNH prof calls for a return to “slow reading“, like slow food, I guess:

Thomas Newkirk isn’t the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called “slow reading” movement, but he argues it’s becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible.

“You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute,” he said. “That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.”

Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly “taste” the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they’ve become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books.

Rare Faulkners up for auction

Hot looking Moleskine Kindle cover…. I… I… I w… I waaa… I waaaaaaannnnn…. NO! I mustn’t give way!!!

David Ulin moves to other side of desk

IMPAC goes to indy press book

Nutbar “mutilates” first folio

Like John Updike? Read this.

Food writing gets a taste of fame

Henry Winkler: from Fonz to kids author… Aayyy!!!

Inventor and guy who will outlive us all, Ray Kurzweil, is releasing what he hopes will be the software to correct the ebook failings so far

The appetite for this story in the books pages seems to know no bounds (PW has an entire section devoted to it…) My appetite, however, along with my lunch, has been lost… Blah. It’s like rubbernecking at a bad accident.

Penguin illustrates perfectly how NOT to handle a harrassment suit

Davidar speaks, saying relationship was “flirtatious”, but consensual


What will Penguin Canada do to assuage fears of a leadership vacuum?

But Pearson remains on top, despite it all

Geoffrey Hill rightly wins the Oxford Poetry Professor seat by a landslide. Good days for my poetry collection.

His academic credentials and plethora of literary prizes have meant that Geoffrey Hill has been the frontrunner for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from the race’s start – and, this afternoon, the British poet was elected by a landslide.

Hill, who celebrates his 78th birthday today, was voted in ahead of nine other candidates with 1,156 votes, beating contenders including the Beat poet Michael Horovitz, the biographer Roger Lewis, Oxford-based performance poet Steve Larkin and South African poet Chris Mann.

The university will be hoping that the election of a candidate so highly regarded in the poetry establishment will go some way to dispelling the sordid atmosphere that tainted last year’s election, in which Ruth Padel resigned after it emerged that she had alerted journalists to allegations of sexual harassment made against her rival Derek Walcott.

Widely acclaimed novelist, dead at 87.

Asked by The New York Times in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “José Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities allowed Saramago great flexibility.”

On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” and on the other to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”

I’m in meetings all day today here in Ottawa, so you get your news cafeteria style. Grab a tray and get in line.

An “anonymous” female worker who had a skeezy publishing boss writes about “what it’s like for a girl” to work in the sector… the comments are worth a read too

Footy fever drives sales of soccer books like a stadium chair through a police car window

A foodie subplot in Meyer’s Tweenlight?

Larsson’s widow is refusing to settle for the family’s offer of “sharing”

Twitter has an interesting hashtag on the loose #booksthatchangedmyworld

iPad uncensors some literary apps, including Joyce and Wilde graphic novels… about time

The theatrical trailer for Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go… Looks more promising than I’d dared hope:|

Found a great little bookstore here in Ottawa that you should visit if you ever come to town: Perfect Books, with the motto “Fiercely Independent”. I bought Carol Ann Duffy’s new selected poems there. Nice place.

Happy Bloomsday to those of you about to rock the best “holiday” you don’t get a day off for. But why, when statistically speaking, most of us would rather park our fat asses in front of American Idol, do so many people celebrate the day celebrated in a notoriously inaccessible book?

Dublin will be awash in commemorations, from dramatic readings to special breakfasts including the kidneys that Leopold purchased and fried for Molly before he set out. Thousands will consume the lunch he ate in Davey Byrnes, “the moral pub” — a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Joyce’s alma mater, University College, will confer a medal named for him on the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

“St. Joyce has replaced St. Patrick in the new, post-Catholic Ireland,” the columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole once quipped to me.

That doesn’t explain the many who will gather in American cities to observe Bloomsday. There will be dramatic readings, broadcast on the Web, in various theaters up and down New York’s Broadway and special commemorations at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, where the autographed manuscript copy of “Ulysses” is housed. Many will listen to the readings and lectures because they’ve never read the apotheosis of high modernism. In fact, the book may grow more inaccessible each year, since most young readers lack the grounding in the classics that Joyce took for granted in his future audience.

Publishers turn their collective Eye of Sauron to the rolling shires of Scandanavia in hopes of finding another pot of gold buried among the Moomin Trolls and such.

Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular among serious mystery readers for decades, but even best-selling novelists like Henning Mankell are not yet widely known in the United States.

If there is a formula to the genre, it often includes a cold, stark setting and a grizzled detective figure who consumes too much coffee and junk food. The book covers tend to the bleak and icy, with images of frozen lakes, barren forests and perhaps a foreboding bloodstain.

“Their protagonists are aggressive, but more subdued than in American crime fiction,” said Dave Callanan, a senior editor for books at Amazon.com. “They’ve had their jobs tramped all over them. There’s a slight cynicism to them.”

And they solve all their problems with alternative energy sources and Nokia phones. It’s true. Look it up.