October 31, 2003

Who are they fooling with this one?

Amazon says that, in the five days since it launched Search Inside the Book, sales of books participating in the program were 9% higher than those of books not participating.

Isn't there a confounding factor here? Couldn't it just be that the books participating are often recent, well-marketed books from major publishers? Those are bound to be more popular than older, less publicized ones. The more interesting comparison would have been between sales of the 120,000 books participating in the program over time i.e. before the program vs. now. In essence, there are two questions here: Amazon asked, "What difference is there in sales of books in the program and books not in the program?" when they should have asked, "What effect does Search Inside the Book have on sales?"

respite

It rained at long last earlier this morning and we have clouds like marshmallows and clean air and a wonderfully cool breeze and the fires are slowed if not tamed and there is hope yet.

October 30, 2003

clearing up the confusion

The shortlist for the Guardian First Book award has been announced. Earlier this week I had wondered why they deemed it a longlist when it had only five titles on it, but I can see that they kept two separate lists for fiction and non-fiction and then conflated them for the shortlist, so that Monica Ali's and DBC Pierre's novels will compete against histories of the Himalayas and others.

peck brouhaha

James Atlas' article on Dale Peck in the New York Times, which was mentioned on Moorishgirl earlier this week, led to this interview with Choire Sicha over at Gawker. When I read the interview the first time, I swear, I thought it was a spoof, because the answers seemed, so, well, dalepecky. Really, for someone who dishes out so much grief, he should be able to take some criticism from people without having to call them "ditch-dirty stupid." The Atlas article inspired a guest column by Steve Almond over at Moby, and some letters in response.

October 29, 2003

al franken wishes he could make this up

Faux nearly sued itself because it didn't like that one of its own strayed from their fair and unbalanced agenda.

wolff's latest

This review of Tobias Wolff's new novel, Old School, starts, oddly enough, with a mention of Wolff's brother, Geoffrey.

In the sometimes collegial, sometimes cutthroat hothouse of graduate creative writing instruction in California, two brothers exert a remarkable degree of influence. Directing UC Irvine's renowned master of fine arts program is Geoffrey Wolff, who has half a dozen novels and a recently published biography of "Appointment in Samarra" author John O'Hara to his name.
Kid brother Tobias serves as co-director of Stanford's no-less-prestigious curriculum, and has published several story collections and two memoirs, but no novel since his first -- 1975's long-out-of-print "Ugly Rumours" -- until now.

Then the reviewer comes to his senses and focuses on the book for the remainder of the article.

melhem at dutton's

D.H. Melhem will be reading from her sixth collection at Dutton's tonight. Since the L.A. Times has made its book calendar section for susbscribers only, you can go to the L.A. Weekly's readings list for other events

boyle on fires

T.C. Boyle writes about the California fires, for the New York Times:

It is dark here today, the generous golden sun of the Golden State reduced to a pink gumball hanging powerlessly over the treetops. Indoors, the house is a wash of strange, muted colors, the floors glowing red, the kitchen countertops thinly painted in the hue of vin rouge. Outside, the birds are holding their breath as fine threads of white ash roll down out of the sky and the distant thunder of aircraft rumbles through the leaves.

blog round-up

Old Hag has a new "skin." I'm envious. I need to get a facelift myself. Contact me if you'd like to donate cells.

La Muselivre is back at long last.

Maud had a strong cup of coffee. The entries and articles for this morning alone should tide you over till the evening.

October 28, 2003

guardian first book award

Why is it called a longlist if it only has five books on it? It's nice to see a collection of short stories get a nod. I haven't read A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, but I've heard it's pretty good.

halloween lists, new fielding

In honor of Halloween, some guy is listing the ten scariest novels. Really, it should just be called: Ten Scary Novels, leaving the superlative out. We're not particularly terrified. Bonus points for selecting the John Gray book, though.

Helen Fielding's new book, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, is only barely mentioned in this article, as the author spends most of his time talking about Bridget Jones' Diary, then adds:

Being funny is never as easy as it looks and very few women novelists find it possible at all. Almost every week a novel is published by a woman, for women, that we are assured will make us laugh out loud and at which one barely smiles. How many women novelists are capable of high comedy? Jane Austen. Helen Fielding. Who else? Nancy Mitford? Anita Loos? Certainly not the current crop of writers marketed under the title of Chick Lit.

It's the "women novelists" part I'm finding hard to swallow. Anyhow, I'm thankful for the clarification that the zygomatic muscles aren't connected to the vagina.

fire season

When it started we figured it was just the return of the annual fire season, but it's getting worrisome. We live close to the beach, almost 50 miles from the fires, and we've had hazy weather and falling ashes for three days. We've been trying not to breathe. It's been difficult.

October 27, 2003

chicken lit

Slate has a slideshow of artist Sloane Tanen's take on chick lit. Ridiculing chick lit is so, like, 1999, don't you think?

profile roundup

This weekend brought the usual crop of author profiles. The Guardian has an article on Alison Lurie.

This year she published a collection of essays, Boys and Girls Forever , in which studies of children's classics are linked under a thesis that the authors have "in some sense remained children themselves". The book follows on from her 1990 collection of essays, Don't Tell the Grown-ups, in which Lurie asserted that many children's classics were essentially subversive.

Lurie cites The Wizard of Oz and even Little Women in that category. The rest of the profile is about her birth and upbringing, and how she started writing.

There's also this profile of Toni Morrison, whose new book, titled Love, is coming out. I've seen mixed reviews of it, but the article is all sugar and spice and everything nice.

And VOA has a feature on Kavita Daswani, author of For Matrimonial Purposes. She used her and her parents' efforts to find her a suitable husband as the basis for the novel.

the guy with the axe

Dale Peck has a new book out. Dale Peck says he's "not going to write any more bad reviews." Any connection between these two statements would be purely coincidental.

it's not his fault

Poor, poor Woody Allen. You see, the memoir mess was really just another case of Allen being caught in "a power struggle between two women."
(Link via Publishers' Lunch)

ramadan mubarak

Today marks the start of Ramadan. The Muslim calendar uses a lunar system, which means that this holiday shifts by about ten days every year, so it's not entirely surprising that there's some disagreement about when the holiday starts. Some purists insist on relying on moon-sighting to predict the start of the month while others rely on scientific calculations. At least this year there seemed to be widespread agreement between the two camps that Ramadan starts today. So, Ramadan Mubarak.
Links for those who like to plan early: Eid stamps. Greeting cards.

October 24, 2003

philharmonic opening

The Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall opened yesterday. It's disheartening that Gehry's work is associated with Disney, but what the hell, this is L.A. We have a Staples Center for crying out loud. The Los Angeles Philharmonic performed Bach, Mozart, and others. The website doesn't show many photos of the hall, so you'll have to go here and here. Side note: For those of you who moan about the cult of the young and beautiful in publishing, rest assured that it's no different in other creative spheres. I remember well the kinds of articles that came out when Esa-Pekka Salonen became conductor for the L.A. Phil.

new amazon.com search

So everyone's talking about the new Amazon.com "Search Inside the Book." Jeff Bezos' front page memo picks a conveniently low-frequency word to demonstrate the usefulness of the feature: "resistojet," which, prior to the installation, returned no results, but now gives a nice set of 8 matches. Problem is, most users need to search for higher frequency words. Take for example the innocuous "morocco orphanage." You'd think this search would give a somewhat restricted result set. But I ended up with 1,200 hits. How do you sort through that many results? Not convenient. There should be a way to turn the feature on or off when searching.

thinking without words

Jerry Fodor, the man who wrote the seminal (and now outdated) The Modularity of Mind reviews a new book on thought processes, Thinking Without Words, by Jose Luis Bermudez.

sacco interview

The Guardian has an interview with Joe Sacco, the author of the acclaimed Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde. Sacco takes issue with the term "graphic novel":

"I have no problem with the term 'comics', but now we're saddled with the term 'graphic novel' and what I do I don't see as a novel," says Sacco, in a conversation that started over a couple of Jamesons in a downtown Portland bar and resumed at his home the following morning.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com has his book categorized, among other things, as...a graphic novel.

October 23, 2003

waldman profile

The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile on Ayelet Waldman, who's hoping to move from mystery to literary fiction with her new novel, Daughter's Keeper. The article makes the inevitable Chabon references, but also mentions Waldman's birth in Israel, her upbringing in the U.S, the years she spent in a kibbutz, etc. Of the Middle-East mess, she jokingly suggests:

"Green cards, green cards for all. The Palestinians and Israelis will open air- conditioning companies together in Los Angeles, and we will have an end to war."

The idea for Daughter's Keeper came to Waldman a few years ago, when she was working as an attorney in OC:

Waldman was defending a young man from Honduras named Felipe, just 20 years old and borderline retarded, who was mixed up in a methamphetamine deal.
"He'd gotten involved with a confidential informant who was a Mariel Cuban who had been found to be psychotic by the American physician who evaluated him when he came over on the boat-lift," says Waldman, breathlessly. Arrested for dealing cocaine in the United States, he parlayed that into a career as a confidential informant.
"This is too much for fiction," she says, "but he was also a Santeria priest. So people would come to him and say, 'My uncle is dying of cancer, can you help us?' And he would say, 'OK, sacrifice this chicken, do this methamphetamine deal and I'll cure your uncle.' And then they'd get arrested, because he was an informer."

You can also visit Ayelet Waldman's site.

tempest in a teacup

The Femina people are upset with the Goncourt judges.

confessions

How long has it been since your last confession? If, like me, the answer is something like "er...never" you might want to check out this*.

*Thanks, Leslie.

October 22, 2003

writer sites

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article on writers' websites (not necessarily blogs). The article hawks sites by the likes of James Patterson, Stuart Woods, and Catherine Coulter. No mention of other writers.

Writers' sites vary a little in sophistication and a great deal in friendliness. Some writers cheerfully talk about where they get their ideas and answer questions from readers in an uncondescending way.
Woods is not quite as patient.
One reader asks Woods about a specific character, Stone Barrington, who is rich. The reader wonders whether Woods' success and wealth have begun to "leak" into his fiction. "Why do you think Stone's lifestyle and mine are the same?" Woods responds. "And if they are, whose lifestyle should I write about, if not my own? It seems to me that most people are interested in reading about characters who are richer than they are."
Someone named Marie asks where she can get a complete list of his work. "Questions like this make me crazy, Marie," Woods writes. "I have received hundreds of e-mails from readers asking me to send them a list, in chronological order, of all the books."
He adds, "They are, apparently, too lazy to look in the front of the book they have just finished, or to consult the Web site, and they drive me nuts."

Stuart Woods: Forgive your fans for existing.

goncourt is announced

The Goncourt jury skipped the shortlist this year and announced its winner: Jean-Pierre Amette for La Maitresse de Brecht, which tells the story of a woman sent to spy on Bertolt Brecht.

paris review succession

The Paris Review has started looking for a new editor.

"It's going to be impossible to replace Plimpton," said a friend of the editor who asked not to be identified. "The magazine just so reflected him—it was eclectic, it was odd, but it was not snotty or pretentious or desperately hip. It's not a matter of keeping it going, but of holding on to it. It's a very fragile little roller coaster."
Or is it? A few years before Plimpton died, he sold the Paris Review archives to an anonymous friend for $500,000 and used the money to create an endowment that would allow the magazine to continue publishing after his death. (The anonymous friend, who sources identify as Paris Review publisher Drue Heinz, donated the archives to the Pierpont Morgan Library, where they are being cataloged for exhibition after the library reopens in 2006.) Plimpton proceeded to delegate power to a small circle of colleagues, much as the pope has been doing lately at the Vatican.

Is it just me or are they pushing it with the Il Papa comparisons?

ten thousand lovers

The shorlist for the Governor-General's Award has been announced, and beside the expected vets (Margaret Atwood for Oryx and Crake) and some quirky choices (Elizabeth Hay's Garbo Laughs, Douglas Glover's Elle, and Jean McNeil's Private View), the surprise nominee is Edeet Ravel, an Israeli-Canadian writer whose first published novel Ten Thousand Lovers is "a tale of love and terrorism set in Israel in the 1970s." Ravel is described as a woman who spends a portion of her time each year thinking of practical ways to promote peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

jockeying for votes

in Michigan... Several Democratic contenders met with Arab-Americans in Michigan a few days ago, but if the Arab American Institute gathering is anything to by, then Arabs (who tended to vote for Bush in 2000) are tilting to the left, and not just the Gephardt-Lieberman-Kerry types. They seem to like Howard Dean.

October 21, 2003

slush pile gem

We've heard this complaint before: Readers in charge of the slush pile bitch and whine about the manuscripts they are forced to "read." Grant Stewart was one of them:

Just to be clear, there's never anything publishable in a slush pile. My job was just to make absolutely sure, then send the lousy stuff back whence it came. My only regret was I wasn't allowed to enclose my own advice with the standard polite rejection. My 'compliments' slip would have read something like this: Dear Wannabe Novelist. Tips for your next submission (God help us). First, look at the covering letter you will send out with your opus. If it contains the sentence 'This is my life's work, it took me eight weeks!', get out of my sight.

Except he came across DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little (the Booker winner.) He writes about what it's like for a struggling author to discover someone else's gem of a book in the slush pile:

My second novel, The Octopus Hunter, was published, and sold as badly as my first. Then, to cap it all, even the slush betrayed me. They called him Pierre. I thrust the 30 sample pages in Clare's face. "Read this now! It's a masterpiece!! From the SLUSH PILE!!!" Clare loved it. Faber & Faber loved it and paid a small fortune to publish it.

Link via Moby.

October 20, 2003

book covers

John Mullan writes about the history of book covers, what they communicate, and how they are designed.

A revolution in publishing, especially of fiction, was heralded by the launching of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. Penguin expanded the market by producing cheap (though usually high-minded) books and relied on a distinctiveness of design to establish its series' identity. The first 10 titles sold at sixpence at a time when the cheapest hardbacks cost five times more. The products were simply colour coded: orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime. By today's standards, the early covers were positively austere. Only slowly were a few cautious engravings introduced to illustrate the covers, though Penguin's American subsidiary was much less restrained. In America, even highbrow paperbacks were designed to be sold in drugstores and airport bookstalls.

If you're a designer, you might like to check out the Guardian's book cover competition. They're looking for new book covers for The Sheltering Sky, The Master and Margarita, The Go-Between, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

necessary oh plug

Old Hag offers her thoughts on Kill Bill. Me, I'm still trying to figure out the bleeped name, the three flashing red dots, and how "entropy" can be used to talk about muscle paralysis.

you heard it here first

Salam Pax's cousin thinks that Bush is in for another term.

October 17, 2003

lit briefs

Arthur Conan Doyle's daughter is selling six of his manuscripts at Christie's this week, and the lot includes a novel that draws on one of Conan Doyle's marriage and a memoir about the Boer war.

The Washington Post has a transcript of a chat with a candid Charles Baxter:

When I first wrote "Saul and Patsy Are Getting Comfortable in Michigan" in 1983 I ended the story with an automobile accident. (It was an amateurish way to end a story--you can't end a short story with an accident because it never looks accidental; it looks arranged by the writer.) A month or so after the story appeared, a large woman at a Detroit literary soir?e came up to me, grabbed my lapel, and started shaking me. "You have your nerve," she said, "killing off that nice couple like that." I said, "They're not dead!" I suppose she had intimidated me and caused me to see the error of my ways.

Here's an excerpt from Diane Middlebrook's book on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Portrait of a Marriage.

one liners

BusyBusyBusy has the shorter Tom Friedman ("I trusted Bush to remodel my world and all I got was this lousy perpetual war") and the shorter Fareed Zakaria ("What Friedman said, and I'm not sorry either.")

October 16, 2003

booker winner interview

The Guardian has an interview with Booker winner DBC Pierre.

random paragraph

from Sam Smith's article in the October issue of Harper's:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

Read: The Revision Thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies.

NBAs

The NBAs have been announced. With the added coverage, expect fresh indignation at the medal Stephen King is getting. Actually, check out Moby's letters section for an ongoing series of rants on that very subject. Here's a brief overview of the nominees' works.

fictional bond

He could ski backwards, navigate a midget submarine, and undertake the riskiest parachute jumps.

But that's pretty much all that Retired Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job, the inspiration for Ian Fleming's character, had in common with James Bond. Dalzel-Job died yesterday in Scotland.

disclaimer

Don't hate me, I didn't vote for him.

October 15, 2003

fresh method for torture

"Images from Anne Geddes and songs from Celine Dion combine in MIRACLE, commemorating the bond of love that exists between a mother and her baby, to Andrews McMeel, for publication in October 2004. "
From Publishers' Lunch.

"he and i share a scandalous theory..."

El Commandante en Jefe writes about his friendship with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (whom he calls Gabo) and about the new Marquez autobiography.

October 14, 2003

we regret that it does not meet our particular needs at this time

You can read the Missouri Review's rejection of George W. Bush's poem here.

Link via Bookslut.

snicket feature

A quickie feature on Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler's tenth book, The Slippery Slope.

booker

The Booker is supposed to be announced today, but no word yet on the winner. Still, the BBC and others try to build up suspense.

Update: The award went to DBC Pierre.

new baghdad blog

Salam Pax isn't the only one blogging from Baghad. Thierry Robin is on a humanitarian mission to Iraq and he is blogging from there until October 22nd. The site is bilingual (French/English).

October 12, 2003

Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

Like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, with whom she will inevitably be compared, Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose fiction grapples with the political turmoil of her country. But while Adichie and Soyinka use satire to deal with these issues, Adichie chooses to highlight them through the subtle transformations that a small family undergoes during and after a military coup.

Purple Hibiscus tells the story of Kambili, a studious and dutiful teenager, and her older brother Jaja, a protective and bright young man, as they struggle under their father Eugene�s fanatical rule. Eugene is a very successful businessman and something of a local hero. He gives money to his church, helps people from his village, and, through the newspaper that he publishes, tries to uphold freedom of the press. He is �a man of integrity, the bravest man I know,� according to the newspaper editor he helps free.

But Eugene is also a controlling man, watching over every detail of his family�s life. His children must have free time penciled in on their schedules. He forbids them to speak Igbo outside the home. �We had to sound civilized in public, he told us; we had to speak English.� In addition, Eugene is a fundamentalist Christian who repudiates his elderly father because he still keeps traditionalist icons at home, beats his wife because she says she is too tired to visit the priest after mass, and slaps his daughter for breaking the Eucharistic fast (this, despite the fact that it was for medical reasons.) Eugene is precise in his religious requirements, brutal in his punishments.

Kambili and Jaja�s world is turned on its ear when they are unexpectedly allowed to stay for a few days with their Aunt Ifeoma, a lecturer, in the university town of Nsukka. Unlike her brother, Ifeoma allows her children to speak at the table, play music, watch television, agree and disagree with her. Being transplanted from a world in which life centers on religion to one in which freedom is in focus affects both Kambili and Jaja. The purple hibiscus of the title refers to an experimental variety of hibiscus �rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.� The themes of faith and freedom run steadily throughout the book, and Aunty Ifeoma summarizes hers and Eugene�s positions well: �Eugene has to stop doing God�s job. God is big enough to do his own job.� As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that, upon their return home, Kambili and Jaja are different people.

From its opening line (�Things began to fall apart,� possibly a nod to Achebe), to its harrowing end, Purple Hibiscus gives us characters we care deeply about. At times, some of them turn into mouthpieces, and the protagonist�s quietness borders on passiveness. Yet these minor faults are more than made up for by Adichie�s subtle handling of the characters' emotions. The writing is fluid, even lyrical, always sensuous.

Adichie has already made her mark as a short-story writer with haunting, deftly told pieces, like �Half of a Yellow Sun� or �The American Embassy,� the latter an O. Henry award winner. With Purple Hibiscus, she announces herself as a gifted novelist as well.

indonesian chick lit

Another article on Indonesian sastra wangi/chick lit and it sounds like the writers there are getting far more respect than they do here.

the min

John Carey, this year's Booker judge, writes about changes in literary tastes he's perceived over the last twenty years.

The most prolific growth in the past 20 years, and one that spans all these different forms and fashions, is the Moral Indignation Novel (MIN). It has been nourished by feminism and post-colonialism, but spreads far beyond the boundaries of these powerful movements. Its characteristic is to dwell on past atrocities and injustices. The iniquities of the slave trade, or the extermination of native peoples are the kind of subject that it relishes.

With the exception of the God of Small Things, he finds that the Booker hasn't "succumbed" to the MIN.

book fair news

The Guardian has a wrap-up of the major deals at the Frankfurt Book Fair, including the Woody Allen memoir. Should sell well in France. In other Frankfurt news, the Iraqi representatives at the fair talk about the difficulty of preserving manuscripts, selling books, etc.

October 10, 2003

cooler than thou

Someone thinks Moorishgirl belongs to a "Cool Lit Club," which he proceeds to bitch about, but he hasn't bothered to provide a live link. Now how on earth am I supposed to get hits from the truly cool crowd he represents?

Link via Bookslut.

peace prize

Iranian lawyer Shirin Abadi has won the Nobel Peace prize.

October 09, 2003

life of pi

is going to made into a movie, and it sounds like Shyamalan might direct it.

racial identity

The LA Weekly has an interesting piece (now also on Alternet) about a black man who takes a DNA test, and what the surprising outcome means for him: Black Like I Thought I Was. Here's an excerpt:

Like most other black folk, [Wayne] Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood.
(...)
when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian – and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify.

Read Erin Aubry Kaplan's article here.

they'll have to get up early

Slate has a compendium of George W. Bush gaffes and the reporters try to put them in context (read: defend.)

ahnold's agenda

for his first 100 days is dissected over at Daily Kos. It's interesting that Arnold's already talking about getting help from Bush which, if it helps to relieve our budget problems, could work in Bush's favor in 2004. All this hoopla makes me wonder whether we'll hear about Arnold's Enron secret.

mystic river

We went to see it last night. Sean Penn was, as usual, unbelievably good, and the rest of the cast wasn't bad at all (though I had a hard time believing in Kevin Bacon's character.) The movie was beautifully shot, and I was impressed by Eastwood's ability to deal with material so different from his usual fare. I thought the movie was pitch perfect until the last two or three minutes, which I found incredibly schmaltzy. But neither of the two reviews I read seem to have that problem.

October 08, 2003

booker speculation

It's a tradition, they do it every year. The Booker judges are saying that the bookies sometimes get it wrong.

it was a dark and stormy night

Here's a short piece on how the weather has been used in literature both as subject and to set the mood.

lahiri mania

How much more of this crap about what Jhumpa Lahiri wears do we have to put up with? It gets a little bit better after the intro, but only barely.

October 07, 2003

recall exit polls

Fuck. Game ovah*. Say hallo to Governor Ahnold.

Thanks, Alicia.

recall expires today

They're saying it's too close to call.

gaffes

From Publishers' Lunch:

Grove/Atlantic has been teased for turning a cover credit on the NEW SALAM PAX: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi for a blurb from Slate contributor Peter Maass into the deceased author of Serpico Peter Maas instead.

And Spike Gillespie's was surprised by the jacket for her SURRENDER (But Don't Give Yourself Away); Old Cars, Found Hope, and Other Cheap Tricks from the University of Texas Press. A bumper sticker on her car that reads "George W. Bush Is a Punk-Ass Chump" was artfully airbrushed out, along with other small details. Editor-in-chief Theresa May tells the LA Times, "The image was manipulated and enhanced, but it had nothing to do with the fact that it was an anti-Bush statement.... We didn't foresee that it would be controversial, because we didn't think anyone would be paying attention."

I'd link to the L.A. Times piece that was the source, but I can't stand their pop-up ads.

'alexander the great' news

Colin Farrell dropped his pants in a bar in Marrakesh. And Oliver Stone was a hit at the Marrakesh Film Festival.