Paul Theroux

Shirley Hughes (my son has always found her books creepy, and so do I…)

John Berger

Susan Johnson

William Styron

Carol Ann Duffy strikes back with Vader-like precision, lopping at the wrist the hand that cut her poem from the UK cirriculum. Who’s your daddy, Schofield? (Sorry, watched a brief Star Wars clip this morning and got nostalgic.) It’s better than you deserve, having your name in there. (Not a bad poem, either!) This is all over a poem, not a memo, points out Mark Lawson, and therefore much of the room for debate must be made in the class, rather than the lines. And you kind of have to be half crazy already to let a literary work tip you into violence.

Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.

“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare - the greatest writer - some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”

The great literary editor, dead at 94.

MacLean’s has a good overview piece on the CNQ/TNQ Salon des Refusés that’s taken on the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. I didn’t realize the editors were getting snippy with each other, but it makes sense in some ways—-while TNQ and CNQ two of the greatest Canadian lit mags, they’re like night and day when it comes to the practical agenda of dealing with people. And I guess that should tell you something about how important the discussion is, when two very different venues come together to say, Hey, something was wrong here.

The two special issues are gorgeous, with most stories accompanied by appreciative essays from colleagues and explanatory notes by the authors themselves. The editors have already jointly staged in Toronto a panel discussion of the issues surrounding short-story writing, part of Pages bookstore’s “This Is Not A Reading Series.” They plan more public events. For two journals whose circulation is normally lower than 1,000 copies Canada-wide, launching this project has been a formidable effort.

It has also opened serious rifts between the two magazines’ editors. “It’s been a stressful and incredibly traumatic — well, yeah, traumatic — alliance,” Daniel Wells said in an interview. (Wells is no relation to the reporter of this article.) Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly have different temperaments. The New Quarterly is gentle, nurturing, celebratory. It makes friends easily.

CNQ can do the nurturing thing, but its burgeoning reputation has more to do with its ability to get fierce and snarky. The journal’s cumbersome title reflects its original mandate. It was launched in 1968 by William Morley, who ran the rare books division of the Queen’s University library. Morley used it to list rare books for sale and queries about other books. When the Internet threatened that mandate, CNQ shifted into literary criticism, first under Douglas (now George) Fetherling and then, from the late 1990s, under Metcalf.

Bidding war for Olympic superstar. Excuse me while I search the flab that covers my sedentary body to find a vital organ I might skewer with this letter opener.

Hoy’s autobiography is tentatively scheduled for next autumn. His agent Ricky Cowan confirmed that discussions with publishers about the book were ongoing, but would not comment further. Weidenfeld & Nicolson publisher Alan Samson, who is bidding for the memoir, said: “The USP of the book is that he is genuinely heroic – we may be seeing a sea change away from books about overcoming obstacles to books about genuine heroes of our times.” HarperCollins sports publisher Tom Whiting, who has also made an offer, added: “We are all seeing him as the true Olympian after Beijing … He’s got a story to tell and he’s a great role model for kids.”

Books from three-time sailing gold medallist Ben Ainslie and cyclist Victoria Pendleton are also being offered to publishers. And an “inspirational memoir” from US swimming superstar Michael Phelps, Built to Succeed, was sold in an American auction to Free Press for a reported $1.6m.

This lovely strange piece comes via Jessa. It was actually compelling and heartwarming to read. You know, I’m starting to get the impression that comics aren’t just for kids anymore. Maybe some arts journalists should pick up on that for an article or two. Maybe we should also give the medium some other designation so that adults won’t feel ashamed about reading comics in public… Graphic somethingsomething. Or somethingsomething novels.

Contests, fine print, and other tricks of selling books. This author has come up with a contest where you can plot her next book and win 5G, but to enter you have to show proof of purchase of her last one (self-published). Tricksy, nasty, filthy little hobbitses. Ah, the publicity stunt—-the sleezebag uncle of communications.

There are no royalties involved, sadly, but “even if you don’t win, you could stand a chance of being a runner-up and having a cash offer from the publishers to reserve your plot for another book in the series!” Brittney’s website enthuses.

But then we get to the heart of the matter. You have to include proof of purchase of her first book with your submission. Will she be deluged with entries for this wacky marketing ploy?

Shirley Dent ain’t buying this Literary Darwinism stuff. And she’s not shy about it, either. Me, I just love watching these critical fads go by like a parade of brightly, if scantily, dressed men in handlebar mustaches while having grown up just enough as an artist to not really care about them.

Never before have I written “fuck me!” in the margin when annotating a scholarly text. Forgive me: I simply couldn’t help myself as I saw literature reduced to a conglomeration of atoms.

I detest this attempt to lock up literature in a biological grid of causation. Literature is not an evolutionary join-the-dots in which, as Ian McEwan puts it in his contribution to The Literary Animal, “troops of bonobo” can point the way to “all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel”. Such interpretations strip literature down to an impoverished universalism: a bland and neutral manuscript where ciphers of the same biological impulses and selfish genes can be repeated ad infinitum.

Glad to see this through the mist of oil particles: Edmonton will be posting poems by its laureate in a park on the river. Lovely! Way to go, Edmonton.

Blodgett said he aimed for a cycle of poems that fit together in the walkway along the river.

The poems are to be revealed in a ceremony Friday.

Blodgett, 73, is author of Elegy, a collection that started out as a tribute to artist Toni Onley, Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano and more than 20 other books of poetry and criticism. He was appointed Edmonton poet laureate in 2007.

The project is being funded through the Art & Design in Public Places, which is hosted by the Downtown Business Association. The program describes itself as a community based, multi-partner initiative designed to help revitalize Edmonton’s downtown through the placement of publicly and privately funded works of art and design.

Funding that will likely be villified and done away with soon enough?

I can barely bring myself to read the papers these days, lest I find more cuts by Stephen The Butcher Harper who seems cartoonishly bent on destroying arts and culture. But there is some hope. The pitchforks and torches are starting to come out and the town halls are starting to get packed.

Supporters of arts and culture rallied last night in a sweltering downtown Toronto theatre to denounce more than $40 million in recent cuts to programs by the Harper government and to strategize on ways to defeat Conservative members of Parliament in the impending election.

Hundreds of artists and supporters crowded into The Theatre Centre at Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd. to hear speakers, including author/activist Naomi Klein, decry cuts to programs such as Trade Routes, that promote Canadian film and culture abroad, as well as reductions in programs such as the Canada New Media Fund.

“This is not a fight about Canadian cultural values and cultural expression. This is not a fight about this and that ideology. This is not a fight about what percentage of GDP should go here or there. This is not a fight to save our national reputation. This is a fight about all of the above,” said Gregory Elgstrand, a member of new citizens group the Department of Culture.

We need to stop complaining to each other, though, and start talking to our friends, families and neighbours, anyone who might be voting, or tempted to vote Harper (I saw an election commercial for him the other night—-all white faces, soccer moms, vets, mechanics, and Bay Street types, posed with rictus grins in favour of Conservative… It was a scary moment). I guess the Department of Culture website is a good place to start to inform yourself, but you should be taking your views to the people around you who aren’t cultural practioners and talking to them in terms they understand. Tell them that Culture is one of the prime ways peoples and countries interact and exchange power, and that crippling its development and export is as foolhardy as crippling the economic or military sectors—-it’s like handing your money to a stranger on the corner or leaving the front door unlocked and asking for invasion. Tell them the reason some people think arts and culture doesn’t affect their lives is because it can at times be too big a phenomenon to be seen, that we move through it the way we do air, or a fish does water—-a medium one might not appreciate until it’s gone.

The slush pile is literature’s suburb subdivision — teeming with misplaced hopes, hiding the occasional psycho, and about as uniformly boring as the faceless storage unit houses that line the streets. Here an editor reminisces about slushpiles gone, the hours wasted and opportunities missed.

The slush pile is the great awkward albatross of the publishing industry. Writing must come from someone, and go to somewhere, and not everyone has a friend whose boyfriend happens to be editor of a literary imprint: every day someone decides that there’s nothing for it but to post their precious manuscript to someone they’ve never met, at a company that is receiving stuff from people like them all the time. And even in the best-case scenario - where every word of every submission is read - it is a deeply fallible system. Publishing history teems with stories of missed opportunities. Last year, for example, researchers rooting through 50 years of Knopf archives discovered readers’ reports rejecting Anne Frank’s diary (”A dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotion”), Borges (”utterly untranslatable”) and Sylvia Plath (”There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”). There will have been a dozen editors - one for every publishing house that rejected him - who kicked themselves when DBC Pierre won the Booker prize in 2003.

And it is not, generally, a best-case scenario. While there are advantages for a publisher to going through slush piles - ideally finding the next Roth, or, more realistically, circumventing agents’ fees - there are also great disadvantages, not least of which are the hours and hours of labour for very little return.

I enjoy telling the story of how I met Ninja K in the slush pile for a magazine I once ran. We were almost bleeding out of the eyes at how bad the submissions were (and how many there were, even for a very small, very new fiction magazine… how heartbreaking, all those hopes and terribly cliché dreams) when K’s ms floated to the top, a slight golden glow around it. What? People who can write sometimes submit unsolicited to magazines!? Ah. Maybe there was a reason to go on. We were so desperate for good content that we called her to make sure she hadn’t also sent it somewhere else. And now we’re pals. So that’s at least one good story that came from the slush pile.

UK school chiefs are asking schools to destroy copies of an anthology containing a Duffy poem that addresses knife violence. Once again we see that while stupidity and small-mindedness most often seem to come through a southern twang, they can work themselves out in any accent, eh wot?

The poem starts: “Today I am going to kill something. Anything./I have had enough of being ignored and today/I am going to play God.” It describes a youth’s yearning for attention and a journey to sign on for the dole, and makes references to the killing of a goldfish. It ends ominously with the youth walking the streets armed with a bread knife.

Duffy, widely considered a front-runner to be the next poet laureate, yesterday declined to comment. But her literary agent, Peter Strauss, said: “It’s a pro-education, anti-violence poem written in the mid-1980s when Thatcher was in power and there were rising social problems and crime. It was written as a plea for education. How, 20 years later, it had been turned on itself and presented to mean the opposite I don’t know. You can’t say that it celebrates knife crime. What it does is the opposite.”

Michael Rosen, the children’s laureate, said: “By this same logic we would be banning Romeo and Juliet. That’s about a group of sexually attractive males strutting round the streets, getting off with girls and stabbing each other.

“Carol Ann is an easy target because she’s a modern poet.” He added: “Of course we want children to be talking about knife crime and poems like these are a terrific way of helping that happen. Blanket condemnation and censorship of something never works.”

A fun little bit at a Guardian blog on the most-often-left-behind-in-hotel-rooms books.

Aside from the Top 10, the list throws up some fascinating facts: for example, there were 10 copies of the Kama Sutra abandoned in the Peterborough Travelodge, which is the basis for a short story all in itself. Had the couples in question worked through all the positions and no longer needed the book? Was it the last gasp of a dying relationship? The reading matter of lonely businessmen who couldn’t afford the pay-per-view adult channel? And if you’re going to go to the trouble to buy the Kama Sutra for you and your loved one, surely a bit more effort than the Peterborough Travelodge (as nice as I’m sure it is) is required for that all-important setting?

Maybe people need to take a more appropriate book with them when they stay at a Travelodge. A dozen copies of Stephen King’s mobiles-turn-you-into-zombies horror The Cell abandoned in Southend? Should have taken along King’s Everything’s Eventual collection, which contains his haunted hotel room story (and recently John Cusack movie) 1408. Can’t get through Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, the ninth most abandoned book? Should have tried The Cement Garden, which probably best sums up the view from your window.

Muhammed book censored by Random House finds German and UK publishers

Penguin allows you to sample before you buy (from Maud)

Guardian doesn’t quite buy the Sony eReader

New service for small publishers from big distributor

Anne and Gilbert take raucous sex show on tour

Ah for the days of Norman Mailer in the middle of a riot. But, alas, it’s not to be, all thought killed, as it were, by the demographic chart.

Here at our end of the forty-year war there are no Norman Mailers. Only pollsters. And consultants. And political scientists. The interpretation game is theirs now, and with the solemn mystifications of their profession, they guard it from befouling by mere “reporters,” as Mailer always referred to himself. The pollsters’ findings and the scientists’ graphs are what we are to consult should we wish to make some portentous comparison of this year’s mood to, say, that of 1976 or of the odds facing this year’s Republican standard-bearer to the chances of the one nominated in 1988.

It is a facile thing to say that the evolution from Mailer-style reporting to the works of these present-day wise men represents a decline, or even a catastrophic plunge, in the nation’s understanding of itself, but it has the virtue of being true. We are accustomed to thinking of history as a story of progress, but the replacement of observers like Mailer by superstar pollsters and consultants engagés is something very close to the opposite. Yes, Mailer was unbearably egotistical, given to exaggeration, and forever fleshing out a pet theory of history—the war of the hip and the square—that seems farcical in retrospect. But in his description of virtually any person, scene, building, or event, or even in his casual comments about the decor of a room where an event is about to take place, we learn more about what it’s like to be an American than we do from all the pollsters’ statistics put together.

Lucky Glück (yes, I know that’s not how it’s pronounced)

He must have had the millionth typewriter

NYC: inspiring terrible prose

You had to know this was coming: Sarah Palin, book-banner

Should publishers should host their own covers for Amazon, etc.?

Novelist Henderson profiled at the CBC.

Buzz is something we might have expected from the 33-year-old Henderson, whose award-winning debut, the 2002 short-story collection Broken Record Technique, pegged him as one of CanLit’s most promising talents. Along with Vancouver authors like Kevin Chong, Nancy Lee and Annabel Lyon, Henderson was part of the UBC creative writing program’s highly touted millennial class. Broken Record Technique was on its quirky, mildly experimental fringe. Henderson’s stories included a talking marmot, a teen named Spiro Chete (who raises bullfrogs in his basement) or a character hooked on Junior Mints. Technique is a frisky, funny book, both smart and appealing. It’s also very cool, from the cartoon cover art to the odd-duck acknowledgments (a footnoted list).

With The Man Game, however, Henderson has taken a very different tack. Can you get more uncool than early Vancouver history? Lumberjack sports, outpost bordellos and one horse towns aren’t, as far as I know, back in fashion.

Guardian blogger Lee Rourke waxes moony-eyed on the history of the chapbook. I’m right with you, Lee.

It isn’t all that surprising chapbooks are still popular today as they have been around for a rather long time. Records a mere click away report the earliest known chapbooks dating from as far back as 1553. In the days when daily newspapers were a luxury for the elite, handmade chapbooks - from collections of bawdy verse to general everyday news - served as the only communicative device for the general public to rely upon.

Literature as we know it, in terms of its underground distribution, just couldn’t have survived without the original ‘chapmen’ who peddled issues from village to village, it seems, so culturally indebted to them are we and important their history is.

Forty favourite books from Pullman. Not a bad list at all. I’ve read a bunch of them, but there’s a few more on here I’m going to take advice on and finally read.

I posted yesterday on how the book is about to be killed (again) by the ereader. Turns out the book was ailing anyway, what with all its internal organs like the short story failing. Sigh. It’s a good thing we have all these hypothetical deaths to distract us from our owning looming certain deaths.

I would not say the short story is exactly dead, but it looks to me pallid and ill from neglect, volumes like this one to the contrary…. Like the best of the genre, all of these stories use their primitive black-and-white symbols to conjure the low, fleeting voices of angels and demons expressed in human words. Will they last? Will the short story last? I’ve no idea.

Acadian author honoured for 50 years of publishing

Roald Dahl: sex spy (I always suspected that dude’s magic finger met its share of giant peaches)

Holocaust hoaxer in court

Publisher admits errors in age rating row

Nabokov scans from Laura (from Maud)

SKers can see a scamming librarian from 10 miles off… but mostly because they can see everything from 10 miles off…

On writing by committee the tie-in for a successful internet mystery game. Yes, this fate awaits you too. And you’ll love it. You’ll call it liberating and show up for every press engagement with a smile. Why? Because you’re getting PAID. It’s kind of like the logic you’ll one day use to justify buying that faceless home on the suburban cul-de-sac. The kids love it and you’ve just never been happier…

When giving Mr. Riordan guidelines for writing the first novel, Mr. Levithan and three other Scholastic editors wanted to make sure that the books would complement the Internet game. One instruction was that the 10 books would reveal only one clue per title, leaving gamers to find the other 29 online; another was that the series take place in a number of locales around the world.

Mr. Riordan, who looks the part of a prim schoolteacher, showing up for an interview on a blazing hot summer day in a wheat-colored blazer and dark slacks, said that throughout the writing of the book he checked in with the team of editors at Scholastic, who asked him to add or change details.

He said writing a book with a committee was not selling out, but was in some ways “liberating.” Writing the Percy Jackson books, he said, “was a very solitary experience.”

Hometown hero Davidson profiled in the Guardian.

“It’s sort of a case of being an overnight success,” he explains, “but I’ve been writing for 20 years, started this book in 2000, got an agent in 2006, and have been dealing with the publishing industry for the last 18 months.”

Published in the US and Canada on August 5, The Gargoyle is number one in Canada and riding high on the New York Times bestseller list – just the kind of spectacular performance which will reassure Davidson’s British publisher, Canongate, that their record six-figure advance was a safe bet.

It’s a rip-roaringly original piece of writing which centres on the relationship between a drug-addled pornographer who has been severely burned, and a beautiful former nun who believes their romance began 700 years ago. Comparisons range from The Secret History and The Name of the Rose to Life of Pi and Possession – it’s clearly hard to categorise.

Mmm hmm…

A small lit prize has garnered some big-time press by taking on Random House (quick! everyone get a kick in while they’re down!) and removing their books from contention.

“No one should expect that publishers print every piece of trash that comes into their offices, and The Jewel of Medina may be neither good literature nor good history,” he said. “That is beside the point since Random House had already paid a $100,000 advance, arranged for book club publication, and foreign publication. It changed course and self-censored solely on the political grounds of fear of offending Muslims or fomenting violence.”

“That form of cowardice will only lead to more and more of this form of self-censorship and is an attack on the integrity of literary publication,” Langum continued. “We must stand up to it, in whatever ways are available to us. The form that was available to our small foundation was to put Random House out of the running for our prizes.”

The Langum Trust prizes are awarded for a work of American historical fiction and for a work of American legal history or biography. Last year a Random House title, Kurt Andersen’s Heyday, won the fiction prize.

A noble, if questionable, effort. Somewhere in a subbasement of Random House, a mailroom clerk slaps the back of his neck and comes away with a black smudge and the tiniest drop of blood you ever saw.

A website for match-making among book nerds. Aw. How altruistic and selfless of Penguin.

Those who sign up to the dating system will be asked in their profile to list the book they have read most recently. They will also be able to search potential suitors’ profiles for mentions of their favourite book.

Katya Shipster, a Penguin spokeswoman, said: “The idea behind the site was to get readers to be able to interact and connect on many different levels. We’re trying lots of different online initiatives at the moment. We want the most amount of people to get the most enjoyment out of our books – and to possibly even find relationships at the end of it.”

Hopeful suitors will be able to sign up to the site for free, but will have to subscribe should they wish to contact anyone.

Ding! Ah.

That vampire author who’s rocking the publishing world with her undead feminist manifesto (sarcasm alert) is angry that an early draft of her third book in the popular series was leaked online. In retaliation, she’s decided to scrap the book. Ouch. Five bucks says we see that book within a year.

“I have a good idea of how the leak happened, as there were very few copies of Midnight Sun that left my possession and each was unique. The manuscript that was illegally distributed on the internet was given to trusted individuals for a good purpose,” wrote the Arizona-based author on her website.

“I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being.”

The announcement comes after the release of Meyer’s highly anticipated fourth instalment, Breaking Dawn, which resulted in a massive backlash by fans who have been following the love story of Edward, the vegetarian vampire, and Bella.

An essay on the prose stylings of Solzhenitsyn.

It’s probably heresy to say so, but it seems censorship in its more benign manifestations — along with a skilled editor — was good for Solzhenitsyn’s prose, forcing some of the compression and ellipses that contribute so much to the power of “Ivan Denisovich” and, to a lesser extent, the other early novels. This may be partly why the four sprawling historical novels, in 10 volumes and more than 5,000 pages, that make up “The Red Wheel” (1993-97), written after Solzhenitsyn went into exile in the United States in 1974, seem so unsatisfactory to me. History and polemic overpower the fiction, and for non-­Russian readers the issues at stake don’t appear to justify the effort of mastering them.

Sigh. Summer’s over and here I am posting the latest pre-apocalyptic death-of-the-book article. (On a side note, is this accompanying photo totally shopped? He’s “reading” the verso, I think. That means they had to shop the ebook into his hands, probably over a pbook. Sweet, sweet irony.)

Outside the British Library the slim volume in my hands could mark the beginning of the end for slim volumes. It is the Sony Reader, the electronic book that hits the British market this week – and the gadget that, if the publicity is to be believed, could kill off the book as we know it.

All this will be of some interest to the British Library, which houses 30 million books and counting (adding an extra 300,000 every year).

If the Sony Reader represents the future of books – slim and sleek and rather beautiful in a geeky, gadgety kind of way – the British Library represents the past and present of books, old and dusty and possibly somewhat dog-eared. They’re not really going to get on.

Who needs mind-altering drugs when you can just ride the virus coaster. Man, I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe! Did you know that Lisa Loeb can fly once she puts on that devil outfit? It’s true. And her guitar is covered in mouths that back up her tunes with more voices than Def Leppard has track overdubs.

The English (American) language in 3000 AD

Woman who kept library books (and tried to pay for them) on sexuality because she didn’t want kids to read the content, has been ordered to return them (takeaway message of sadness? somewhere, some other double digit IQ is calling this woman a hero)

Dudes. Duuuuuudes. I am so fucking sick it’s not funny. Those airplanes are like tuberculosis labs with all the caps left off the test tubes and petri dishes. I’m dying here. Wasn’t I supposed to have caught all these colds by the time I was 20? I swear this has to do with my mother’s OCD cleaning when I was a kid. She’d spray me in the face with Lysol if she thought a germ was about to drip from my nose. Anyway, another day of links instead of individual posts. I guess this is better than the last five summers, in which we shut down for August. Things will ramp up again in September.

Conservative cuts amount to censorship, say artists (pitch forks and torches, people!)

In defence of Random’s decision to not publish book about Muhammed’s daughter (and of course, the Danes want it already)

Top 10 endangered languages (wouldn’t that be Bottom 10?)

Pimp my Kindle

Kids book controversy down under

Text books go online where they belong and should be less crippling to your average student beer budget (and of course, Amazon is right there for the rebound… and they’ve also acquired Shelfari. One day I hope to link to the “Amazon acquires Bookninja” story. Sigh…)

Vernor Vinge profile at NYT

The ultimate in tech upgrade

Borders: losing less money one year in a row

Well, here I am once again in the clutches of my old nemesis, the Halifax International Airport. I’ll struggle to keep its claws from my throat while reaching for the dagger in my boot; you read these these links.

Rushdie is about to sue the pants off his lying bodyguards

Rawi Hage talks up his new novel to occasional ‘Ninja Kevin Chong

Jacob Two (plus) Two

What are we teaching our kids?

Mental note: run for White House with Obama

Haruki Murakami cover pr0n

Seattle bookstores on the ropes

SF author Scalzi on “writing for free on the internet” (from SFSignal)

• Libraries: LIBRARIES!
• On the semicolon
• For the deadline-challenged among you: the Sunday Times lit quiz
• Sharon Osbourne, novelist
  
• On the lure of the tie-in novel
• Where have all the lushes gone, long time passing (out)

Or girth, depending on how you look at it. Book titles are getting longer. Stories are getting shorter. Soon they will pass each other in a bizarre literary Möbius strip.

Think of what would have happened to George Orwell’s snappy title. 1984: One Man’s Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that Sex with Comrades Can Have Torturous Consequences.

You can forgive Herman Melville for adding “or, The Whale”, to Moby Dick, since, firstly it has no colon, and secondly, when he published it no one would have had a clue what it was all about. However, Moby Dick: How Ishmael Lost His Shipmates and Found His Soul While Chasing Jungian Archetypes Around the Globe and Carrying Out Experimental Marine Mammal Research, does not really cut the wasabi for the sushi.

When I woke up this morning, I was suprised to find a pimple on my face. Hm, that’s strange, I thought. I usually don’t get a pimple until right before I’m making a public appearance. D’oh! I should have mentioned last week, so you could clear your hectic schedules, that I’ll be reading at the Tree Reading Series in Ottawa tomorrow evening. The event starts at 8, rest of the info at the link above. I realize this is short notice, but I figure that with a well-timed combination of sleepless standby and the use of all your points, you should be ablet to catch a flight there in time. Listen, people. No pain, no gain.

Two big 20th century lit editors die so this guy riffs on what fiction editors do: decide

RIP: Leopoldo Serran

What does your nation’s bestseller list say about your peeps?

“Offensive” word removed from kids book? Ricidulous, says Michael Rosen

Some non-bookish fun for Friday

This guy really doesn’t like crosswords. I myself went through a craze a couple years ago where I was doing cryptic (British) crosswords every night. I couldn’t get enough of them. Now I do maybe two or so a week, mostly in pursuit of procrastination. I find the quick clues (North American-style) to be rather facile, so I don’t do them anymore, but find the cricket and legal references in the British ones frustrate me sometimes. Fucking bowled-over maidens and periwigs. Back when I was working in a press room in New York, it used to madden my colleagues that I could complete the NYT puzzle to Saturday and usually get quite far in the Sunday puzzle. I always played it up by dropping my copy on the desk in the Press Chief’s office at 10am and then emailing the group that they could check their answers there. Strangely, in the US ones it’s baseball and legal references that stump me. Fucking ERAs and torts. Anyway, this dude is seriously frothing at the mouth about crosswords, saying that they aren’t a marker of intelligence and that they keep supposedly smart people from reading. Um, no arguments on point one, but about point two: what if you do both?

What always gets to me is the self-congratulatory assumption on the part of puzzle people that their addiction to the useless habit somehow proves they are smarter or more literate than the rest of us. Need I suggest that those who spend time doing crossword puzzles (or sudoku)—uselessly filling empty boxes (a metaphor for some emptiness in their lives?)—could be doing something else that involves words and letters? It’s called reading.

But somehow crossword types think that their addiction to this sad form of mental self-abuse somehow makes them “literary.” Sorry: Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility, one that demonstrates an inability to find pleasure in reading. Otherwise, why choose the wan, sterile satisfactions of crosswords over the far more robust full-blooded pleasures of books?

Zach points to this podcast (audio) of CBC’s Q wading into commentary on the joint Salon des Refusés between CNQ and TNQ and critical of the Penguin short story anthology—-Penguin apparently declined to send someone to debate, so they got Adrian Michael Kelly to comment alone on who has the right to make a canon for the entire country.

So apparently Rushdie isn’t “Scruffy” after all. While the writer me is relieved on Sir Salman’s behalf, this makes the Bookninja me kind of sad. It was like an extra birthday, when I heard that. Oooh! A gift!? For me?!

Rushdie’s lawyer Mark Stephens said today that the authors of the book now “accepted that much of the story published in the Mail on Sunday was false”. He said that Evans had been “over-egging” his position at the time: “He was a police driver making out he was an armed special protection officer,” he said.

Stephens added that Rushdie had made no requests for damages, nor for any changes in opinions in the book, merely for “the falsehoods” to be changed. “The authors have admitted that there were falsehoods in the original manuscript and have made amendments accordingly,” he said.

Screenwriter turned “accidental” novelist, profiled in the Guardian.

Despite the melodrama of the story, Jones’s prose is sparse and uncluttered; she says the dialogue has changed very little from its time as part of a film script, although she’s had to alter the pace a little as it was too staccato for the book. “It’s such an emotional story – love and grief and all these giant feelings, I was always trying to find that balance where it wouldn’t tip over into overstating a thing but where it wouldn’t be so cool as not to tell it,” she says.

“In my mad head it was sort of a novelisation. Film scripts are like the tops of little mountain peaks or the tips of icebergs, then having the rest of the iceberg there, and being liberated to write that iceberg, it was like being let off the lead - it was wonderful.”

Having struggled to get her scripts produced, the success of her novel has brought the film and television world knocking on her door. The Outcast itself has now started “the slow trudge” towards becoming a film. She’ll be writing the screenplay herself, and intends to approach it, as much as possible, as if she hasn’t seen the book before. “Won’t that be fun? I’ll be thinking ‘Do we need to have this?’ and ‘That bit’s rubbish, we’re not going for that.’ I think I have to liberate myself from what’s there - it’ll be hard to do.”

Seems like this cycle, everyone’s got an article on signing books. The bizarre Craigslist ad didn’t hurt the chances of every arts section hooking an article on it. So, is signing a pleasant task for authors or a chore? (There’s even a Frankenhand namecheck at the end.)

Umpteen authors can report the awfulness of the day nobody queued to buy their book, let alone have it signed. Abi Titmuss, the former nurse turned national sexpot, arrived for a signing in Manchester two weeks ago, to find a queue of three men in zip-fronted leisurewear waiting in WH Smith to inspect her memoirs. By contrast, the queues of people avid for signed copies of Katie Price’s new “novel,” Angel Uncovered, have broken records. Dozens of poets can recall poetry readings where no books arrived for sale, but where they were asked, as a kind of booby prize, to sign a member of the audience’s copy of Summoned by Bells.

Excessive success, however, can also be a burden. There’s a shocking story about Stephen King signing books in a Seattle shop. He signed for hours until his shoulder ached and a publicist had to apply an ice-pack. Then his fingers dried up; they cracked and began to bleed, and he asked for a bandage. Hearing this, a fan in the queue demanded to have some authentic Stephen King blood on his book. Others joined in and he signed in his own blood for hours. Chuck Palahniuk, the modern gross-out novelist, author of Fight Club, recalls a visit to a store in Austin, Texas, where the staff dished out free beer to the signing queue, and where an aggressive queuer, possibly not Chuck’s greatest fan, demanded of a quaking employee: “Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by that dickwad?”

• Peter Jackson caves in and will write “The Hobbit” script with del Toro (so Gollum won’t necessarily have eyeballs for teeth and a tongue with toothy mouth at the end)
• The Beeb looks at age-rated books for kids
• Rules for world-building in SFF (from SFSignal)
• RIP: Frank Ledwell
• Write a book critical of Bush, get put on the FAA’s terror watchlist

• Thurber Prize gets chuckles
• Enid Blyton tops UK loved list over Dahl and Rowling
• Lytton gettin’ spittin’
• Wyndham Lewis set for comeback
• David Sedaris on book signings

This Q&A with a raft of Aussie independent booksellers is quite entertaining.

I worked at a bunch of bookstores in my day and you’d be surprised at some of the stupid shit that goes down with customers. When I was 15, I worked at Coles and remember once during the Christmas rush I was totally frazzled with a lineup stretching around the store and out into the mall. This one dude waited in line for probably 25 minutes and came up to the cash with no book.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where can I find the cement.”

I blinked a few times and then tried, “Do you mean rubber cement, like for models? You can try next door at Leisure World.”

“No,” says he. “I mean mixing cememt.”

… … … …

Even the other customers were gob-smacked. I locked my till.

“Come here,” I said and walked him out to the mall. I pointed up at the sign over the store. “What does that say?” I demanded.

“Coles…” he said.

“Coles WHAT?” I asked.

“Coles, The Book People.”

“The BOOK People!!!” I screamed. “What makes you think store called “The Book People” would have cement?” I was ushered inside by my assistant manager and did receiving for the rest of the day. Which was fine by me and probably for the best.

Other times often we’d get the “I’m looking for a book and I don’t know the author, title or publisher, but I know it’s blue” customer. After dealing with this earnestly for a year or two, I started getting daring.

When they’d fumble out the question, I’d smile and say, “I know which one you’re talking about,” and I’d point vaguely at the far wall. “It’s right there.”

They’d wander over and spend a few minutes looking, then they’d look back over their shoulder in a helpless way. I’d pump my pointing finger up and down repeatedly like I was pressing a button and mouth “look down.” Nine times out of ten they’d look for a while longer and then leave.

Of course, it isn’t all stupid customers. Sometimes it’s stupid, or niaive, staff. Once, this pinch faced woman brought up a book to the counter called “The Yeast Connection”. I was standing with my assistant manager. I know now that the book was a self-help about yeast infections, and I also know now that my assistant manager was a lesbian, but at the time I was 15 and knew neither of these things.

I looked at it curiously and said to my assistant manager, “What kind of cookbook is this?” She snorted and then grabbed me roughly by the bicep. Guess what I did for the rest of the day? Receiving.

After an announcement that early sales of an Obama book would be offered solely through Amazon, brick retailers are fighting back by reducing orders.

Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said in a statement on Monday evening that the initial order “was based on the book being available to all booksellers simultaneously — an even playing field — which is common practice in book publishing.”

She declined to say how many copies the retailer ordered.

Katharine Walton, a spokeswoman for Chelsea Green, said Barnes & Noble was angry at being excluded and threatened on Monday afternoon not to stock the book.

Chelsea Green, a small Vermont-based company, decided to sell “Obama’s Challenge,” an admiring portrait of Mr. Obama, through Amazon’s print-on-demand service so that it could be available to attendees of the Democratic National Convention in Denver next week.

Can you even imagine? An ad on Craigslist is seeking people to make extra money by faking authors’ signatures.

The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book.

“You will need to be able to copy the look and style of both author’s signatures,” it says.

In return, the successful applicants will be paid $25 (£13) for 200 books signed.

The New York-based blog Gawker, which spotted the advert, has been unable to ascertain the identity of the publisher, or the authors involved. But they are clearly major players, judging by the scale of the operation.

The advert says the fake signing, to be held in Los Angeles, will run over two days at eight hours a day.

This just can’t be true. I mean, most authors can’t make money from their signature. How cruel would the universe have to be to let you know that even when no one lined up to get you to sign your own book, that somewhere in America some schmuck is making bucks faking the signature of someone else? Well, that’s it for me, folks. I’ll be handing out free samples of the new Jonestown-flavoured Crystal Light in the lobby after the show.

If this author can accept her marginality as a marketing tool then, dammit, so can I. Confession: I am a straight, white male between the ages of 25 and 45, a father of two with no physical or mental disabilities apart from being of Scots Irish descent.

I won’t be shoved into a box, shelved on a section, categorised and pinned to a board like a dead moth. I will flit and fly and occasionally land on a flower or a carcass. I will disguise myself as a butterfly and then trick you by coming out at night to hang around your lamp and disturb you with my fluttering. I am a flowing river marking the divide between two states in this split society of ours, a tsunami crashing through your preconceptions and obliterating the gender/genre notices in the bookshop. OK, maybe that last one was a bit much, but you get the picture. I am a lesbian author but I am so much more. In the words of the main character of my novel: I am not a cardboard cutout. However …

[Takes deep breath] There comes a point in the career of every author, unless unconcerned with book sales, where you have to bite the bullet, throw in the towel, judge your book by its cover, and accept the most clichéd of all clichés: the newspaper headline. The soundbite catchphrase that draws the readers’ attention to the fuller article cannot possibly be as long as the paragraph above, which barely scratches the surface of my identity. Publicity material will focus on that which is most likely to generate interest. “Author Josie Henley-Einion is Waterstone’s Welsh book of the month for August” is not half as eye-catching as “Lesbian Author Josie Henley-Einion …” Throw the word “lesbian” into any pot and the bubbles begin to rise.

I suppose you could count the red hair and mottled pale skin as a kind of marginality—-it does prevent me from picking blueberries for more than two hours in a row without reapplying sunscreen… Geez. Come to think of it, I’m TOTALLY marginalized. I got to get on this. I need to form my own brand of music and make some kind of fashion statement instead of just singing Violent Femmes off-key and wearing jeans with an untucked collared shirt.

An unlikely hero has landed a first-time novelist a bestseller overseas. I smell a movie.

In a quite unsuspected outbreak of literary cultdom, Firmin, the first novel by a retiring 67-year-old from South Carolina about the adventures of an erratic, paper-gobbling, self-pitying rodent, has spent the summer knocking Ken Follett and Stephen King from bestseller spots in Spain and Italy.

Such is the rat’s fame in Italy that La Repubblica felt able to begin a recent article with the words: “By now everyone must know Firmino, or have heard of him.”

“It’s been flat out,” admits Savage, with a laugh. He’s a tall, gaunt man with delicate features, a soft, cultured voice and an impressive flyaway beard that recalls, by turns, a hippy sage and a Greek philosopher.

“In Italy they changed the name to Firmino, so it sounded like a Mozart opera… I thought the book would sell in hundreds of copies, perhaps. I was very pleased with it, but I thought, well, this is an odd book, maybe it’ll be a good odd book. But I’m not writing bestsellers. I was thrilled, but it made me worry a little.”

A UK professor proposes and amnesty on phonetic spellings. UK? Excuse me, sir, but we rely on you UK prof types to be charmingly befuddled and outraged monocle-wearing elitists that keep the rest of the world in line by being outliers in the data that makes up the “average English” chart. If you let this battle go, I ax you pacificly: who gonna care for the healfth of our langwage?

THREE words. World. Hell. Handcart. It’s not often I despair of civilisation as we know it (okay, I despair rather more often than is good for my peptic ulcer, but that’s what comes from dedicating the best years of my life to the glorious Fourth Estate). But when a university lecturer proposes an amnesty on students’ 20 most common spelling mistakes, I fear things may have taken a turn for the apocalyptic.

“I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling,” moans Dr Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Buckinghamshire New University. Excuse me, doctor, but isn’t that your job?
…
Errors that would be featured in his proposed amnesty include ‘Febuary’ inst