This seven-hour reading of Great Gatsby looks so much better than the first six or seven words of this sentence sound. (And speaking of literature and theatre, this is the closing weekend for my beloved One Little Goat’s NYC premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s “Ritter, Dene, Voss”, which opened the fabled La MaMa season in the EV. Please go! The reviews are generally stellar!)

A MAN sits down at a gray metal desk one morning and tries to boot up a computer from the Flintstone age, one with a screen that looks like an old cathode-ray TV set. Nothing happens, so he pulls out a paperback and begins to read aloud. The book is “The Great Gatsby,” but this guy apparently skipped 10th-grade English when it was assigned. He reads slowly, haltingly, stumbling over pronunciations, getting the emphasis all wrong. The last time we heard “Gatsby” read this badly was in the old Andy Kaufman sketch….

…It’s more a dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.

Slowly, over half an hour or so, the man in the office (Scott Shepherd) starts to become interested in what he’s reading. Pretty soon he’s doing the voices, raising his pitch almost to a falsetto for Daisy Buchanan and artificially deepening it for Tom. And then, miraculously, people who have been silently coming in and out of the office, going about their workaday business, begin to imitate the characters, speaking the lines and even acting them out. A young woman who had been idly reading a golf magazine turns into Jordan Baker. A bullying, key-jangling janitor becomes Tom. Wilson, the garage mechanic, emerges — of course! — from the tech guy, summoned to deal with all that balkycomputer equipment.

This, or something like it, is what happens when you get caught up in a book. You hear it in your head, and it takes over your waking existence a little, so you can’t wait to be done with whatever you’re doing and immerse yourself in the pages again.

The National Post extends Heather Reisman’s wettest dream ev-AR! (her author scented candles) and gives it a bit of currency

St. Martin’s says they weren’t capitulating to government censorship in pulping, rewriting-under-orders, and redacting of book…. Phew. Glad that’s cleared up

CW prof writes bizarre letter to former students—this isn’t really news, per se—many of them are insane/over-privileged/socially retarded—it’s just recent and involving a name we might recognize


Is Agatha Christie actually any good?

US libraries catch up to digital charge—82% now have wireless and many are starting phone apps

e-Pub Rosetta Books is offering a new HIGHER royalty rate to authors

The Nobel jury has their winner… now the waiting begins… Do you trust the bookies? History says you’re foolish to, I think

Jonathan Franzen pulped in UK due to printer’s error

I love how on the Tea Party Coloring book it has to be noted that it’s “for kids”, as opposed to the largely illiterate, hammer-hand-crayon-grippers that make up the adult majority of this “movement”

For the screenies: Script Has Been Floating Around Hollywood for 75 Years

A nice long video interview in which Margaret Atwood talks about technology, Twitter, Canadian humour, books, and, yes, writing. Click here if video doesn’t load below.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed (Ed’s such a nice guy… and tall, too) looks at the question of whether an argument can be made to save “the book” in the future. After examining the dream utopia of a wired world of siteless info, the article goes on:

Against all that, there are classic arguments in favor of the book. Consider four.

The epistemological argument: Books are the material evidence of what we know. They are knowledge, and through them we discover what we know and who we are.

The cautionary or monitory argument: In their function as record-keepers, books transform history into the present and the present into history. Books cause us to remember and to prevent future generations from forgetting or misunderstanding us and the long collective story of particulars.

The technological argument: No predigital means of transmission has been as effective as the codex. Books don’t need batteries. They’re cheap in the scheme of things, and remarkably permanent. They travel well. The so-called invention of distance education, in the mid-20th century, was preceded at least 1,500 years earlier by books sent long distances from one early Christian community to another.

The autobiographical argument: Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. This last argument has been given less respect than it might. Great and fancy libraries astound us, but it’s the personal library where a scholar’s serious work begins. Lose the personal library, and we become less than we are.

Those are four good arguments. But they don’t make my case for books.

What does? WHAT DOES??? Read on, dear minion. Read on.

Here in Canada, a poet and literary activist has written an open letter calling for some action after a government program dumped 600 books on the web without paying the authors. Which gets you thinking about e-rights and royalties. Well, it got me thinking enough to find this article wherein a bunch of agents and publishers talk about it more cohesively than I can.

The notion that digital publishing is a complex cost center for publishers is, as Aiken put it, the “company line” that the big six have been touting for years. And in the name of those costs, Aiken said, publishers have essentially been cheating authors out of fair royalty rates on e-books. As Aiken explained, “With 25% of net, under the agency or publisher model, the publisher will always do better on e-book sales [than the authors].” And this, Aiken noted, gives publishers “an incentive to favor e-book sales.”

So how much better do publishers do on e-book sales? One attendee, who identified himself as working in contracts at Scholastic, asked Aiken to do the math. Aiken then did the math out loud, tallying what a publisher makes vs. what an author makes on three different formats of a frontlist title—the hardcover, the e-book edition sold through the wholesale model (which Amazon uses), and the e-book edition sold through the agency model (which Apple uses). With his math, which he walked the audience through, a publisher, on a title with a $26 list price, makes roughly $5.10 on the hardcover while the author makes $3.90. On the e-book sold through the wholesale model, the publisher brings in $9.25 while the author gets $3.25. On the e-book sold through the agency model, the publisher gets $6.38 and the author gets $2.28. (A graphic that ran in the Huffington Post displays this visually. Interestingly, though, more costs are subtracted from the publishers’ bottom line.) So with that math Aiken’s question remains the same: why should authors make less on one version of a book than another? In a fair world, authors would earn at least as much (in dollar terms) on e-book sales as on hardcover sales, Aiken said.

And the WSJ gets in on it too, with an in depth look at how ebooks are putting the boots to authors:

It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers.

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

“Advances are down, and there aren’t as many debuts as before,” says Ira Silverberg, a well-known literary agent. “We’re all trying to figure out what the business is as it goes through this digital disruption.”

Key Porter closes Toronto office, lays off 15… Boo!

Scholastic study finds kids need more money to reap benefits of plastic shit and mind-rotting video games in Scholastic flyers—oh, and that kids like ebooks while parents resist (cha-CHING!)

Writers Trust Awards pit families against one another—Ninja favourites Kathleen and Michael Winter join other Ninja favourites Cole, Donoghue, and Helm on the fiction list

Blackberry’s new tablet, the PlayBook, will team with Kobo and Kindle

But is Amazoodle looking to go one step further and release it’s own iPad competitor? Question: where will that leave the Kindle, just launched for the web?

Blio gets off to shakey start

Borders to take Gypsy caravan route to success… I can only hope there’ll be guitars and fiddles, too….

Besides simply LOOKING creepy enough to not want to leave your children alone with him, Shel Silverstein may also have BEEN creepy enough… Enter his songs…

Teen Read Awards undoubtedly significant to someone

The last two of Chapters semi-independent fingers slip below the surface

Haruki has 11:1 odds on the Nobel—Transtromer leads with 5:1

Jonathan Lethem is leaving Brooklyn, which constitutes something of an endgame in the long, slow hipster exodus what will eventually lead to the burrough’s collapse into a soulless black hole of affluence and mediocrity called “Queens”

More on confusion and shades of grey teased out of the VQR tragedy

Jacques Derrida is just like the rest of us… except famous, smart, and rich:

Okay, I admit it, it’s been a hard couple months around here. I can tell by the stats you fickle taskmasters aren’t happy. But I have shit going on out the wazoo. And I also have a new book out. It’s a book of aphorisms called Glimpse (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, McNally Robinson, Powell’s) and they’ve been going over quite well. Here’s the Facebook page. I was at the Winnipeg authors festival, THIN AIR, last week and it sold completely through there. What’s more, even before that it had made it to the bestseller list at McNally Robinsons—a FICTION bestseller list. Vengeance is MINE! Here’s a roundup of some recent coverage of it:

There was a full page in the National Post last weekend, comprising a photo, an interview, and a sidebar with selections from the book

The Post is also now running a contest where readers are encouraged to submit their own aphorisms for a chance to win a signed copy of Glimpse

The PostMedia papers, led by the intrepid Richard Helm at the Edmonton Journal, have been carrying this nice profile piece

The Telegraph Journal downeast has this one

And here’s a Publishers Weekly mention for the Glimpse iPhone app, which you can download for free (there’s still a bug in it, I warn you), and which gives you a single aphorism a day to share with friends via Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you like it on your phone and want the whole book, it’ll sell you an e-version for $9.99 where you can scroll through them all. It’s NEAT!

This fellow, name of “Ford Maddox Ford” (that has to be a typo, no?), has a theory: if you open any book and read page 99 out of context, you’ll know whether or not you want to go back to the beginning and give it your attention. This is interesting and provides me with a space to bitch about poetry, as I am wont to do. I say, if a poetry book makes it to page 99, it’s likely under-edited and bloated with filler. But that’s just me. (And yes, I’ve written to page 99 before. See above. Bloated.) But I digress. Now a new website will help test this “theory” widely, but with unpublished manuscripts, of course.

In many ways, the page 99 test makes sense. By then – between a third and a quarter of the way through most books – the characters should be established, the author should have hit his or her stride (if he or she is ever going to) and it is far enough in to allow glimpses of an unfolding plot but too early to give away any vital clues or twists.

What happens when what you write interferes with your family’s delicate balance in which everyone has agreed to stop trying to violently kill one another and instead whither each other away with poisonous looks and barely concealed contempt?  Or: poet vs the douchebag millionaire brother.

A prominent Irish poet has lived up to descriptions of her work as provocative, anarchic and untameable by sparking family divisions with her latest collection.

More than 900 copies of the Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins’ book, entitled Hurting God, were pulped by her publisher following objections from her millionaire brother.

He took exception to references in the collection to him and the pair’s mother which he and other members of the family characterised as “offensive” and “untrue”.

A new version of Ms Higgins’ work is now in prospect, with the offending passages removed – at a cost, the publishers say, of thousands of euros. The poet came into conflict with her wealthy brother Joe, a businessman who has served as chairman of Galway airport and developed extensive business interests.

Texas in dead heat with Texas for title of Stupidest Pack of Slackjawed Bigots in America

Public libraries public no longer

Remember the collective nouns from yesterday? To whit: A Card Catalogue of Geniuses

Don DeLillo wins PEN Saul Bellow award, which is awarded annually to one member of small group of friends in honour of the decision to stay part of the group

Library moms out-sexy soccer moms with sit-in

How do you figure out which scifi books use the most accurate science? You ask those laffy-daffy clowns of the cortex, scientists, of course

You read it for the fiction, right? Well, these ones, anyway—Playboy’s most scandalous fiction

Speaking of getting graphic, this kid knows where it’s at and has teamed up with Stephen King to write a graphic novel called American Vampire… Ka-CHING!

Harlan Ellison misses his first deadline ever

Books like “The Secret” represent a kind of intellectual virus… physical too, I’d say: I once had a subway reader brush one against me and I totally broke out in weeping sores… Or maybe that was just the Toronto air. Not sure.

Can your book stop traffic? This guy’s can

Dying author needs scion to help him finish his book

British Library to post ancient Greek mss to web

Ebook cannibalize print

Ebooks DON’T cannibalize print

Apps, ebooks, and you…

Hey Kindle owners: your days of feeling intellectually superior to iPad owners are over

I loves me some Larry Hill. There, I said it. Apparently I’m not the only one. There’s over 499,999 others. [Insert low, impressed whistle here.]

Author Lawrence Hill was feted at a luncheon on Friday, as his published HarperCollins Canada announced that his novel The Book of Negroes, which tells the story of a young girl named Aminata Diallo who is taken from her African village and brought to the United States as a slave, has sold more than 500,000 copies in Canada. (In the United States, the book was published as Someone Knows My Name).

“Throughout the five years of researching and writing The Book of Negroes, I dared not think about what might happen if I finished it,” said Hill. “In my wildest dreams I didn’t imagine my own soul, wedged between two covers, could travel the world or sit in the hands of so many Canadians. I am grateful for the successes the book has enjoyed. And now it is time for me to pay it forward, by finishing a new novel and another after that.”

A cheat sheet for our post-Armageddon future.

I’m in the very lucky position of having had only a small number of bad reviews. I think my previous book got something like 15 or 16 reviews, and only one was truly negative. Mind you, if things go sour for my new one, I hope I don’t find myself in the position of having to invent excuses as to why everyone hates it. This critic-turned-author examines her own reaction to negative reviews of her first book.

I’m gamekeeper turned poacher, and have felt for the first time the full force of the Bad Review. My first non-fiction book has managed to attract the attention of no fewer than 27 reviewers and most of that number have been, I’m relieved to say, extremely positive. A few were mixed, and a couple too silly to take seriously. But a small number – four, to be exact – were downright hostile.

Not wanting to run and hide – actually, I was hoping for some comfort – I posted the negative reviews on Facebook. My writer friends (yes, I have some) duly obliged. “She’s just a wannabe writer,” said one, of the author of a particularly cutting example. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, criticise,” said another. “It’s personal – she’s probably getting back at you for a bad review you’ve written about someone she knows,” said a third.

Were they kidding? Is this really what writers think of critics? That they spend their time typing up vicious reviews of authors because they’re jealous, or to defend their friends? Or because it’s the closest their talentless, deluded minds can get to literary immortality? The thing is, having been on the “other side” for so long, I know better. I know that the majority of reviews are not personal, and are not written by people who can’t master the craft hitting out at those who can.

Bookninja covered this years ago, in an essay by ex-Ninja Kuitenbrouwer: is the TPO (trade paperback original) something to be ashamed of? We’re glad to see the WSJ has caught up to our 2005. Oooh! Oh, yes, I went there.

The paperback-original gambit is “all about creating a brand identity in the marketplace or establishing yourself as an author, and then people will buy you no matter what the price,” said literary agent Deborah Schneider, whose clients include Mr. Nicholls.

Granted, the paperback original is hardly a new concept. In Europe, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, it’s the industry standard. In the U.S., it’s long been the default choice for romances and other genre fiction. In the ’80s, Gary Fisketjon, now an editor at large for Knopf, created Vintage Contemporaries—publisher of the iconic “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney—as a launching pad for young writers who would subsequently move up in class to hardcover.

But a stigma lingers. The belief that a paperback original, however worthy, will be given short shrift by reviewers tells part of the story. “Critics pay more attention to hardcovers even if they say they don’t,” said one agent who requested anonymity. Those eager to make the case for paperback originals point to the The New Yorker’s “briefly noted” reviews of “The Thieves of Manhattan” and “The News Where You Are.” They point to the New York Times’ recent review of “Vida,” a debut short-story collection published by Black Cat, a Grove/Atlantic imprint devoted to paperback originals.

I’m in Manitoba, Canada’s Minnesota, for Winnipeg’s THIN AIR authors festival. So I’ll be sporadically blogging from my very nicely appointed hotel room (they know how to treat the authors here, perhaps because when you leave the hotel room……… I kid, I kid because it’s my job. I’m in a really nice arts complex called “The Forks”, for some reason, and there’s a nice artsy neighbourhood nearby called “The Exchange District”, which might be confusing to you Yanks. I think they exchange arts and culture there, as opposed to the blood of foreign and domestic civilizations…)

Canadian Donoghue leads Booker shortlist sales with Room

Five cliches of author photos, most of which seem to involve a hand near the face (hey! Dionne Brand made the list!)

Shania Twain to write (presumably) shortly-statured but smokin hot memoir

Speaking of hot stuff, Zadie Smith to write books column for Harper’s

John Milton: dirty limerick perv

Kafka papers in somethingsomething-esque limbo

Kindle will kill us all, via bus driver

Seattle’s The Stranger spoofs the Franzen Time cover with a Tao Lin cover (you had to know something like this was coming)

Is one of these the ever-elusive “future of the book“? (video)

eBook sales through the roof!

Your fall lit-movie roundup, at GalleyCat

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m off at O-My-God-O’clock tomorrow for Winnipeg to attend and read at the THIN AIR authors festival. If you are in or near the Gateway to the West, I encourage you to attend! If not, you might find posting sparse. But how is that different from my fucked up behaviour this last month or so? Really, if you aren’t prepared for irregularity by now, I can only expect your marks in grade 10 science, the one with the bearded teacher who burned strange smelling things on the Bunsen burner, were pretty darn low.

A great article in the NYT by one of my favourite poetry critics alive, David Orr, wherein he examines the prevelance of the introductory epigraph, or citation, in modern poetry collections. I’d love that column inches still get spent on this kind of thing anywhere, but in the paper of record, it’s even better. Orr even cites Canadian poet adn literary critic Carmine Starnino. Double win!

Randall Jarrell said his generation lived in the age of criticism; we apparently live in the age of citation.

Why is that? In part, our abundance of epigraphs is simply a function of poets doing what poets have always done. Chaucer opened “The Knight’s Tale” with a quotation from the Roman poet Statius; Alexander Pope began the 1743 version of the “Dunciad” with an epigraph from Ovid; and Keats prefaced his ­“Poems” with a quotation from Spenser (as well as a drawing of Shakespeare’s head). But while epigraphs have always been a part of poetic tradition, they do seem to be unusually thick on the ground these days, and not just in America — as the Canadian poet and critic Carmine Starnino wryly noted in the January issue of Poetry magazine: “Lately it seems no book of Canadian poetry can be put to bed without an epigraph to tuck it in.”

Some of the credit (or blame) for this peculiar ubiquity probably belongs to the continuing and often underestimated influence of T. S. Eliot.

This guy wonders why he bothers reading so many books when there’s really nothing to distinguish any one from another. Dude. Two words: Ginko. Biloba.

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

Laura Miller sees a fundamental disconnect between criticism of characters as “unlikable” and their value… Some people might argue, see, that “unlikable” is a synonym for “real”.  (Truth is, they’re unlikable. You should hang with me instead. I just smile a lot and nod.)

All of this raises a question I’ve been wanting to ask since we started, concerning an observation people often make about Franzen’s (and many other authors’) characters, which is that they are “unlikable.” I confess, I’ve grown to hate such remarks. It makes me feel like we’re all back in grammar school, talking about which kids are “nice” and which kids are “mean.” It’s a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.

James Wood, in his book “How Fiction Works,” wrote that this complaint implies that “artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of — or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them.” That we might recognize a character’s unappealing qualities while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, “and that this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its own kind,” doesn’t seem to occur to far too many readers. Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon reader reviews, a “contagion of moralizing niceness.”

What happens to your library of books when you die? In my case I’ve asked my executors to use them as kindling for my pyre.

An author’s library, like anyone else’s, reveals something about its owner. Mark Twain loved to present himself as self-taught and under-read, but his carefully annotated books tell a different story. Books can offer hints about an author’s social and personal life. After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, the Ransom Center bought his papers and 200 of his books, including two David Markson novels that Wallace not only annotated, but also had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990. Most of all, though, authors’ libraries serve as a kind of intellectual biography. Melville’s most heavily annotated book was an edition of John Milton’s poems, and it proves he reread ”Paradise Lost” while struggling with ”Moby-Dick.”

And yet these libraries rarely survive intact. The reasons for this can range from money problems to squabbling heirs to poorly executed auctions. Twain’s library makes for an especially cringe-worthy case study because, unlike a lot of now-classic authors, he saw no ebb in his reputation–and, thus, no excuse in the handling of his books. In 1908, Twain donated 500 books to the library he helped establish in Redding, Conn. After Twain’s death in 1910, his daughter, Clara, gave the library another 1,700 books. The Redding library began circulating Twain’s books, many of which contained his notes, and souvenir hunters began cutting out every page that had Twain’s handwriting. This was bad enough, but in the 1950s the library decided to thin its inventory, unloading the unwanted books on a book dealer who soon realized he now possessed more than 60 titles annotated by Mark Twain. Today, academic libraries across the country own Twain books in which ”REDDING LIBRARY” has been stamped in purple ink.

But the 1950s also marked the start of a shift in the way many scholars and librarians appraised an author’s books. They began trying to reassemble the most famous authors’ libraries–or, in worst-case scenarios like Twain’s, to compile detailed lists of every book a writer had owned. The effort and ingenuity behind these lists can be astounding, as scholars will sift through diaries, receipts, even old library call slips. A good example is Alan Gribben’s ”Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction,” which runs to two volumes and took nine years to complete.

This raises an obvious question: Why not make the list of an author’s books before dispersing them?

Ever since people started complaining about Franzen getting good press, it seems like the arts pages have shifted into a combination of Patriarchy-Watch Mode and Guilty Introspection. Timely? Witness two articles on the role of women in publishing and writing:

Does the relative lack of men in the publishing biz hurt the industry?

Although Pinter reiterated to PW that he’s worked with “a lot of brilliant women in editorial” and readily acknowledged that they can and do publish books that interest men, he couldn’t help wondering if an industry so weighted toward the female side wouldn’t produce a different set of books than one a bit more diverse. “I hope it doesn’t get worse—if 85% [of the industry is female]—it’s hard to think that acquisitions aren’t in some way affected by that.”

Stuart Applebaum, spokesperson for Random House, said that the publisher doesn’t dwell much on the gender makeup of the industry. “This is not an issue of concern or even much contemplation for us,” he said via e-mail. He then cautioned against drawing too many sweeping conclusions from survey results and added, “more than 50% of Random House, Inc., U.S. officers and department heads are women, and we couldn’t be happier about that.”

Others don’t see a problem with an industry that’s dominated by women. Retha Powers, assistant director of the publishing certificate program at CUNY (an undergraduate program), said she doesn’t think that 85% statistic is worrisome, noting that men and women will likely both struggle with getting men and boys to read. “I don’t think there’s potential for overlooking male readers because there’s always a focus on trying to get that elusive 18–35 male reader,” she said.

Could a woman write the (mythological) “Great American Novel”?

A thought exercise, perhaps specious: If this book had been written by a woman (say, Jennifer Franzen), would it have been called “a masterpiece of American fiction” in the first line of its front-page New York Times review; would its author, perhaps with longer hair and make-up, have been featured in Time as a GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST; would the Guardian have called it the “Book of the Century”? Without detracting from Franzen, I think we can say it would not have received this trifecta of plaudits, largely because we don’t ascribe literary authority as freely to women as men, and our models of literary greatness remain primarily male (and white). Of course, there are the always-pointed-out exceptions: Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison, whose Beloved topped the New York Times list of the best books of the past 25 years. So is there really a problem here?

There is, I think, and we might call it not the problem with no name but the problem we can’t define: the problem of unconscious gender bias and how it affects the ways we think about accomplishment and authority. It hardly seems like a coincidence that when a generation of celebrated novelists dies out (Bellow, Mailer, Updike), the new ones anointed are typically white men. (When Zadie Smith—whose work occupies a similar literary space to Franzen’s, at once engaged by the domestic and the social—is on the cover of the Times and Time, perhaps women writers can start to feel differently.) Myriad studies show that women and men alike unconsciously ascribe more authority to a male candidate than a female candidate with the same qualifications. In many circumstances, we also simply assume men are more talented: Before the advent of blind auditions, fewer than 5 percent of the players in major American symphonies were women. But after blind auditions began to be held, the percentage of female players soared almost tenfold. Is there any reason to believe our evaluations of literary talent (which almost always happen with full knowledge of a writer’s gender) are uninfluenced by that kind of unconscious bias?

Hachette in fight with UK b&m stores over ebooks

Virgin airlines continues to lead, now offering ebooks as part of in-flight entertainment

A pen that records what you hear at the time you’re taking notes… could this change education?

Best “word junkie” iPhone apps? Not sure what constitutes a word junkie… mostly video games, apparently

Should the British library be archiving Stephen Fry’s tweets? Yes… yes, we all should.

Museum-quality Rowlings

Best free ebook websites!

Yay for Kathleen Winter! And for the handful of small presses (Coach House, Gaspereau, Biblioasis)

• David Bergen for The Matter With Morris (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Douglas Coupland for Player One (House of Anansi Press)
• Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge (McClelland & Stewart)
• Alexander MacLeod for his short story collection Light Lifting (Biblioasis)
• Avner Mandelman fo The Debba (Other Press/Random House of Canada)
• Tom Rachman for The Imperfectionists (Dial/Random House of Canada)
• Sarah Selecky for her short story collection This Cake Is For The Party (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Johanna Skibsrud for The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press)
• Cordelia Strube for Lemon (Coach House Books)
• Joan Thomas for Curiosity (McClelland & Stewart)
• Jane Urquhart for Sanctuary Line (McClelland & Stewart)
• Dianne Warren for Cool Water (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Kathleen Winter for Annabel (House of Anansi Press)

So, pretend there’s this set of awards for comics by and about women and you’re a guy who comes along and is nominated for three of them for your graphic novel featuring a particularly strong female character. Hypothetically-speaking.  So, what do you do, hotshot? WHAT DO YOU DO!? Me? I’d just point into a crowd, yell “Hey! It’s Judith Butler!” and then run like hell the other way.

An Ottawa-based graphic artist has found himself at the centre of a dispute after being nominated for three Lulu Awards for his book The Road to God Knows.

Von Allan has a nod for best newcomer, best female character and book of the year at the U.S. awards, which are for comics by and about women.

But Von Allan is a man — and that has some women in the industry wondering how he could be named, especially in the best newcomer category.

“I was looking at Twitter and some other sources and then I started to realize some people aren’t happy about this,” he told CBC News.

Listen, if you want to find the REALLY secret archives of the Vatican, I suggest you start searching hard drives

So it’s official: O-Franz is real (now, all you haters apologize to Moby)

Has iPad lived up to its hype? Don’t know, don’t care, but iBooks is now a more popular download than Facebook and Twitter

Wait a minute, Tolkien had female characters in his books?

The NYT takes a close look at two virtually unknown poets…

Why you shouldn’t date writers (except me)

The Dutch do so many things right (except, you know, football) — crime is down, happiness is up, sex is safe and relatively shameless, there are libraries in the airports… Why do we live here again?

Mr. Rasenberg’s serendipitous discovery of Schiphol’s new Airport Library is precisely the experience that Dick van Tol, the project’s coordinator, said he hoped to engender. Opened with little fanfare over the summer, the library — the first ever at a major international airport — has 1,200 books in more than two dozen languages, all by Dutch authors or on subjects relating to the country’s history and culture.

“There are 18 million passengers a year that only transfer through Schiphol,” about 40 percent of total traffic, said Mr. van Tol, who works for ProBiblio, a nonprofit agency that supports Dutch public libraries. Their layovers, he said, averaged somewhere between five and seven hours. “Most of these people never leave the airport, so they don’t see anything of Holland.”

The first discussions about creating the library began in 2006, at ProBiblio’s offices, which happen to be in the shadow of Europe’s fifth-busiest airport. “We can actually see the planes going up and down,” said Mr. van Tol. The agency presented its proposal a year later to Schiphol’s board and they began working together on the project in 2008, with an initial budget of €250,000.

Moby fires back at detractors who doubted their Franzen/Oprah scoop by posting photo of Freedom cover, complete with Orpah 2010 seal… I, for one, never doubted you, Grandpappy

Expect to see a lot of digital marketing this Giftmas season

m4??: Dapper professional male, former Prime Minister of Britain, seeks unarmed crowd for quiet times and non-hostile book signing events… A/S/L unimportant

Stephen Fry speculates on the death of the bookstore

Time to retreat to your zombie-proof safe room… Jimmy Carter is loose on the web… (You DO have a zombie-proof safe room, don’t you?)

I couldn’t get a spot in Brutal Nipple Clamp Anthro 210, but luckily there was still one seat in The Semiotics of Ass Paddling… (See what I did there?)

Ernest Hemigway: comedian

Hanif Kureishi gets PEN/Pinter award

Tom Wolfe gets lifetime achievement award, presumably for either his writing or dressing like a affected tool

Think paying £100 is a lot for a book? What if that book was worth £6,000,000?

“Get a Real Degree“. Need I say more?

I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun. Moreover, if I wanted to read literature from the developing world, I would go ahead and read literature from the developing world. At least that way I’d learn something about some less privileged culture – about a less privileged culture that some people were actually born into, as opposed to one that they opted into by enrolling in an MFA programme.

Like many aspiring writers in America, I enrolled in graduate school after college, but I went for a PhD rather than an MFA. I had high hopes that McGurl, who made the same choice, might explain to me the value of contemporary American fiction in a way I could understand, but was disappointed to find in The Programme Era traces of the quality I find most exasperating about programme writing itself: oversophistication combined with an air of autodidacticism, creating the impression of some hyperliterate author who has been tragically and systematically deprived of access to the masterpieces of Western literature, or any other sustained literary tradition.

Are vampire books, like Meyer’s Twilight and Breaking Wind, fucking up our youth’s brains in ways other than atrophying their language centres?

Researchers are interested in how such dark works might affect young minds, and why teenagers are especially drawn to stories with vampires, zombies, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes.

“We all remember being teenage is a difficult period, full of contradictions – dark feelings one day, joyful feelings the next. The ‘Twilight’ books are very much about this, about budding sexuality and not really knowing what you are,” Nikolajeva said. “Although I’m not at all a fan of ‘Twilight,’ I do understand the appeal of it.”

Nikolajeva argued that authors have a moral responsibility to include some positivity and hope in works aimed at teens.

“If young people read books where there is no hope at all, it’s really damaging,” she said. “We need to be aware of young people’s being influenced by what they read or watch, the games they play. It all plays a very important role.”

So long as we’re talking about “hope”, I should note that these books damage mine as well. For THE FUTURE!

Rambo author goes Kindle-only

Harlequin readers apparently have brain cells enough to press buttons as well… Well, I stand corrected!

Wifi Kobo coming

If people will buy a song for $.99, why not a literary essay? Well, Little Timmy, let me tell you a little about how life works… See, when a man really really loves someone….

Kurzweil’s Blio e-reader software set for release

Ted Hughes letters reveal much about Sylvia/his distaste for America

DFW novel gets cover and release date

Rupert Murdoch nows owns Agatha Christie

BR Meyers continues to make a living sayin’ shit

Six-year-old author who has “23-book deal” doesn’t… In related news, insane people continue to be allowed to breed

A circulation desk that is apparently out of circulation. HAWT!

Word.

AUSTIN, TX—Reacting to news that independent outfit Shaker House Books had closed Monday, longtime customer Stephanie Brear said she couldn’t believe she “flushed seven years down the toilet” patronizing the local store. “I put so much time into supporting my quirky local bookshop, with its charming window displays and us-versus-the-world attitude, and for what?”

Philip Pullman hates the Catholic Church and, apparently, the now. I find it harder to slip into a novel in first person, present tense, which might say more about my age than my ability to suspend my disbelief, but there you go. What do you think, my Shadowy Minions? Agree?

“This wretched fad has been spreading more and more widely. I can’t see the appeal at all. To my mind it drastically narrows the options available to the writer. When a language has a range of tenses such as the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, each of which makes other kinds of statement possible, why on earth not use them?”

He added: “I just don’t read present-tense novels any more. It’s a silly affectation, in my view, and it does nothing but annoy.”

The six authors listed for this year’s prize are Peter Carey, Andrea Levy, Howard Jacobson, Tom McCarthy, Damon Galgut and Emma Donoghue. The first three authors’ novels are in the past tense while the others written in the more “fashionable” style.

Moby says they have it on good authority that Orpah’s pick will be Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. At least it will, from all misogynist accounts, be a good one. Fucking Oprah and the patriarchy, man.

Reliable sources tell me Oprah has selected Franzen’s newest book, Freedom, for her revived book club.

The lesson here? Never underestimate the cynicism of people in show biz. Nor of Oprah, either.

Dear Older People, Can life get any more surreal and confusing? Sincerely, George (P.S. Don’t answer that.)

William Burroughs, long accused of being too graphic, now is

Speaking of which, here come the gift guides… First up: graphic novels

Vatican library reopens, all 182 copies of The Basketball Diaries checked out in first 10 minutes

Fox News suddenly and mysteriously creates Simply-Drawn Liberal/Islamo-Conspiracy Counterspin unit, taps Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly for Frother and Reserve Frother roles

The Russians are coming!! Someone get Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen and that girl from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off!

Next up: colour e-ink readers, also known as “TV”

In the months and years after 9/11, a raft of significant poets wrote about the event. Here Merwin, Kinnell, and Szymborska profiled. But there were also entire books published, like Melville House’s first book, Poetry After 9/11, which are worth a read as historical documents.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, poems began popping up around New York City, some propped up in windows or taped to lamp posts. It seemed that in the turmoil of all that tragedy, poetry helped people cope with emotions that they otherwise struggled to grasp.

Andrew Motion explains that the Booker jury didn’t set out to be popular. It just kind of… happened. They’re ever-so-sorry.

So what did we set out to be, if not popular? Open-minded. That’s to say, we had no preconceived wish to reward particular styles, or genres, or themes, or individuals. We wanted to find books that seemed “the best”, and to base our decisions on what we found in front of our eyes. And how would I characterise this “best”? By all the means that sound familiar, but make their material strange. Good writing (adventurous as well as scrupulous). Imaginative daring (confirming what we feel might be true about the world, by means that are surprising). Historical sense (an ability to see the present in the past, and vice versa, so as to illuminate both).

If nothing else, our search for these things has allowed us to make a list full of variety. It’s conventional for judges to make such a point – partly to emphasise the range of work on offer at any particular time, and also perhaps as a way of reassuring themselves about the breadth of their taste.

Shocking report says the corporations known as James Patterson and Danielle Steel score the most number one hits in publishing

US tax dollars used to buy entire 10,000 print run of book Pentagon doesn’t like

iPad not content to simply kill the book, will also target the computer

Pulp fiction covers, the pre-porn of my youth

Apple v Amazon, the deadly dance continues

Candidate for World’s Best Human, Stephen Fry, publishes HC, e, and app all simultaneously

Will Orpah book be Mandela memoir?

Hey, grammarians/punctuation-o-philes -phobes, read this thing I don’t care about!

Walter Scott, still churning them out 200 years later

Book exports down this half

Citing demographics, Knopf starts “Knopf Knitting”

Just when you thought Jimi Hendrix couldn’t get any cooler, you find out he was a sci-fi buff….

And sticking with rock stars, Zepp fans are pissed over £445 picture book

Dude says he can guess your book preferences once you tell him what tv shows you watch… I guess this means I don’t read

JFranz’s schwank book launch gets NYT coverage… GASP! It’s all TRUE! (It should be noted that all launches for my upcoming books, Glimpse, will match this launch in every minute detail, down to importing fawning Brooklyn hipsters and some of Russell Smith’s army of literary “hotties”*)

Douglas Coupland to design firefighters’ memorial

Sony says to world: IT’S OKAY! IT’S OKAY! WE’RE NOT WORRIED AT ALL! Then laughs to long and loud

*Disclaimer: the definition of “hipsters” may or may include higher- or lower-functioning hobos, and “hotties” may or may not include the recently deceased

This is a shame and has been painful to watch unfold the last year or so. The gutting of the periodical fund is not only hurting a bunch of bigger mags, many of which can presumably pick up the slack by adding more perfume samples, but it’s virtually killing the existing structure for the small lit mag in Canada. If literature was a school of salmon, little magazines would be the spawning pools. If it were a aboriginal tribe, they’d be sacred grounds. If it were physical matter, they’d be the particle jets of black holes. But now a whole lot of them are going to be a whole lot of nothing.

Canadian Living, Chatelaine, Maclean’s and Reader’s Digest were among the magazines each allocated the $1.5-million maximum Wednesday. But this was 40 to 50 per cent less than what these magazines had been used to receiving: in 2008-09, for instance, Canadian Living, perennially one of the top five Canadian periodicals in circulation and revenue, received a total of close to $3-million through the PAP and CMF.

Another rule introduced by Mr. Moore disqualified publications with paid circulations of less than 5,000 from receiving CPF assistance, with the result that virtually all the country’s literary magazines (among them The Malahat Review, Descant, Grain and Prairie Fire) were removed from government rolls.

Thus while fewer magazines are receiving government assistance than previous, the ones allocated CPF money this week often are getting more than before. Canadian Stamp News, for example, receives $63,188 whereas in 2008-09 (the last year comprehensive statistics were available) it got about $54,000 via the PAP and CMF. Cottage Life has $265,674 for 2010-11, compared with the roughly $240,000 granted in 2008-09, while Cycle Canada’s CPF package totals almost $112,000, up almost $30,000, or 26 per cent, from what it received in ’08-’09. The Walrus is getting just over $261,000, whereas in 2008-09 its PAP/CMF investment was about $218,000 – $112,450 for editorial expenses, $104,749 in postal subsidy.

Stamps. Great.

The Wall Street Journal is starting a book section.

The Wall Street Journal is set to launch a book review in the next few weeks, even as newspapers across the country cut back on book coverage.

The new weekly section will be the Journal’s first one dedicated solely to reviews. It will complement an expanded Saturday edition set to appear this month.

Shocking, I know. Here he is interviewed about “the future of the book“.

Will you mourn the loss of the physical book if eBooks become the dominant format?

It doesn’t fill me with quite the degree of horror and sorrow that it seems to fill many of my friends. For one thing, I don’t think that physical books will cease to be produced. But the ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing –- I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail. Often times they are remained or returned, using double the carbon footprint. And more electricity is used to pulp them and turn them into more books. If you look at it from a purely ecological point of view, it’s crazy.

My life continues to interfere with my ability to conduct my life. Please forgive and watch for a revival.

Should swearing be allowed in kids books?

Why all the hubbub over Franzen coverage–are people judging the book or the man?

Is stealing from Wikipedia plagiarism?

How can we make Wikipedia more reliable?

How do you feel about big awards that end in a tie?

How about populist lit awards that benefit from shortlisted authors pressuring friends to vote?

Will Sandman the TV show suck or be Dr. Who?

Who is the average book buyer in America?

Are the British better at expressing their rage at prominent political authors than Americans?

Should we feel better about John Grisham now that we know he had to work crappy jobs like the rest of us?

Is any book worth nearly $9M?

Are you ready for the fall’s “big” books? And chiefly among them?

The Booker Shortlist keeps Donoghue, but misses Moore. Carey and McCarthy also make the cut.

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Picador – Pan Macmillan)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Review -
Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

This is awesome. Some Chilean artists dropped 100,000 poetry bookmarks over Berlin. Of course, here we’d have Fox news calling them terrorists, but there people have this thing called “Fringenfrugenbeshupenfutzleintien”, which roughly translates to “common sense”.

Lasting for half an hour, the initiative was intended as a protest against war and a message of peace, as well as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the independence of Chile. It was the fifth “poetry rain” project from Chilean art collective Casagrande, which has arranged previous poetry bombing events in Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Gernika (2004) and Warsaw (2009) – all cities which, like Berlin, have suffered aerial bombings during their history.

Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to “break the morale” of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing “‘builds’ a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way”.

Many, many moons ago, when I first started this whole “poetry” thing, a painter friend and I started a guerrilla poetry group called “Perhaps, a Self-Centred Geisha”. We did something similar, except without the budget for helicopter time, we conscripted some friends and walked all around Toronto one weekend putting tiny poems into the covers of other books and magazines, in the change slots of parking meters (yes, they used to have those), and under windshield wipers. 25,000 in all. It was a lot of fun and we got some good feedback over the years. I understand there are even some people who collected the full set of 20 poems. I don’t think I even have the full set anymore.

It seems we’re doing a lot of frettin’ these days. What was/is/will be a book? It’s old news, man. People have been fretting about this shit forever.

When books first arrived people didn’t know what to make of them

Tech-savvy kids today don’t really get this “reading” from a “book” thing

Is the book just a vehicle to ensure movie ticket sales?

And now the paper/digi- divide is separating couples in their own homes! Oh, Technology! You hussy homewrecker!!

Scholastic revamps marketing to create whole new ways of selling plastic shit, video games, and TV tie-in books to unsuspecting kids

Dancing with the Stars doesn’t mean dancing with authors

35 million books downloaded via iTunes?

Can the book survive the academy?

Guardian runs with its Not the Booker Prize again

Arts investment turn-around finally happening in culture-gutted BC?

VQR closes office and cancels winter issue in wake of suicide

Like air, bookstores rush in to fill a vacuum

San Diego public library offering free ebooks to patrons

Gay Archie character arrives to do God’s work: making Fox News commentators apoplectic

Canadian Tim Lilburn joins Irishman Colm Toíbín and American Chase Twitchell in picking the best of the best in poetry, or whatever you think of that whole process, next spring. Thoughts? I think it looks like a good list of judges.

Upper west side B&N closes… The armageddon begineth

And besides closing it’s own major outlets, Borders thought this would be a good time to introduce a paid loyalty program… hey, Borders, how about getting people to show their loyalty by, I don’t know, SHOPPING AT YOUR STORES!?!?

Do you use online dictionaries? Better get started… Which one is currently best?

Staples sides with Amazon

Sony releases updated readers, apparently pink

A side by side comparison of Nook, Kindle, Sony and Kobo (this kind of thing is worth 20 articles of futzing over preferences…)

JFranz novel is the Cabbage Patch Kid of the lit world

Richard and Judy unveil eight books as part of their “comeback” show… Didn’t they just leave? Is this a comeback or more a “jump-out-of-the-closet-and-go-BOO”?

Did you miss getting Freedom for free from Amazon? Me too

Lit festival orgy

Dear Bookninja, What does a psychopath look like? Sincerely, Billy Jones | Dear Billy, This guy. Sincerely, Bookninja

Guardian first book award longlist

Random sales down, but profit up… me sees a lot of empty desks…

JK gives £10 million to MS charity, no word if donation was in cash or makeup products (I kid, I like her more every day, now that she’s rich and free and good with her money instead of just a mediocre writer)

Heart of Darkness, by the panels