March 31, 2004

Hannah Tinti's Animal Crackers

The eleven stories that make up Hannah Tinti�s new collection, Animal Crackers are engaging, often disturbing, yet compelling looks at what it means to be human in an animalistic world and what it means to be an animal in the world of humans.
The collection opens with the zookeeper in the title story reflecting on how people who work with large animals all have blessures de guerre. It�s part of the job, his colleagues say. �Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere.� But the same is true about the people in the story, their cruelty to one another often leaving physical marks behind, as is the case for the zookeeper and his wife. �Home Sweet Home� opens as a murder mystery, witnessed by a dead couple�s dog, but it slowly builds into an intense drama where the reader�s allegiances may switch several times as the story unfolds, without being resolved.
The characters in these ambitious and original stories are often lonely and crave human or animal contact, but Tinti�s eye is unsentimental. �Slim�s Last Ride,� about a woman, her son, and the rabbit given to him by his absent father, is a difficult story to read and yet impossible to put down. This is not to say that the writer doesn�t have warmth for her characters. For example, a filial relationship is keenly, tenderly observed in �Preservation,� where a young painter at the natural museum is in charge of finishing the work of her terminally ill artist father.

Mary takes out one of the prepared needles left by Mercedes, the hospice nurse, and pulls up his nightgown. With a grunt, her father turns, and she jabs the syringe into his small white flat buttock. Her father�s paintings hang in the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Large canvases of abstract blues and greens, enveloping the viewer with emotion. There have been two books written about his life. He taught her how to mix colors, how to create perspective, and how to live without a mother. Now he wears a nightgown and lives from shot to shot.

Parent-child relationships are also center stage in �Talk Turkey,� in which three teenage boys struggling with abusive, absent, or neglectful progenitors, run away to the other side of the country. Tinti�s prose is at once sharp and illuminating.

Joey�s mother was standing at the entrance of the kitchen and smoking a cigarette. She looked like a cake under glass, beautiful but tasteless.

A couple of the stories in this collection seem to be fillers, as though an animal was slipped into the tale as an afterthought. The result is clearly less organic, less impressive, as in �Hit Man of the Year� about a young boy who becomes a mafia killing machine but never loses interest in his childhood crush. In others, the animal is central to the story, but becomes more of a gimmick, as in �Reasonable Terms,� about a group of giraffes who decide to wage a strike to improve their living conditions at the zoo.
Despite this, Animal Crackers is a fantastic read. Tinti displays a lot of range, both in subject matter and style, and her striking new collection is a harbinger of bigger things.

March 30, 2004

Brand Spanking New

Since I started the blog in the prebloghistorical era of Oct. 2001, I've made quite a few changes in terms of direction. The focus has become increasingly (almost exclusively) literary, and is likely to continue in that direction. Besides the redesign last month, I'm going to be adding a bunch of new features, the first of which is a regular book review column on Wednesdays (and by all means if you'd like to contribute, I'd like to hear from you.) Mostly this is in response to the fact that fiction reviews are getting scarce and I doubt things will improve without some action on the part of fiction readers. Others in the blogosphere have been doing this for a while (The Complete Review is a great place to start, for example) and I see this as part of the same effort. In addition, I feel that even the fiction that does get reviewed tends to be of books that don't really excite me. Collections, for example, tend to get short changed. So look for a review tomorrow of the debut collection by Hannah Tinti, Animal Crackers. Meanwhile, you can always get the usual round up of literary links, posted below.

I Bet You Were Dying to Know...

what Chang-rae Lee ate for dinner the other night (second paragraph).

More on Lolita

A follow-up on those charges that Nabokov stole the idea for Lolita from a 1916 German novel. Several Nabokov scholars are quoted in this St. Petersburg Times article, offering arguments against the plagiarism charge. Some of these arguments include the assertion that Nabokov wasn't interested in German literature; that his German wasn't very good (this amused me--Nabokov liked to brag about his command of foreign languages, but I can't remember whether he ever did so with German); that the theme of a young temptress appeared in one of his earlier novels; that Nabokov was working on Lolita concurrently with his Lectures on Don Quixote, so there is that Dolores connection; and that Nabokov himself was plagiarized by others. The most compelling argument, though, was that the burden of proof should be on those who make the accusations.

Lesbian Writers Series

The Los Angeles Times has an article on the Lesbian Writers Series, a reading event started in 1984 by A Different Light owner Ann Bradley.

"This silence was very toxic, humiliating and ultimately degrading," Bradley said. As a result, she started her showcase at the bookstore with one rule: If you read at the Lesbian Writers Series, your name was announced on the publicity materials. You couldn't hide in the closet.

In related news, Newsweek reports that Lynne Cheney's lesbian book Sisters, is going to be re-released. No word yet from the Vice President's wife about how the book meshes with her husband's stance on gay matters. Newsweek link lifted from Maud.

Abbas Book

Ali Abbas, the teenage boy who lost both of his arms and thirteen members of his family, including his parents and sisters during the invasion of Iraq, is to be the subject of a book about his experiences, the BBC reports.

We're Back

Hopefully without the first-person plural. Dreamhost seems to have had a denial of service attack but now they swear that everything's back on track. We, I mean, I hope.

March 29, 2004

Dreamhost

is actually a nightmare. The site's been down all morning. Maud's been having similar experiences today, so yes, I want to switch as well.

March 28, 2004

Weekend Report

It was a busy weekend here at Casa Moorishgirl--read the new Karen Joy Fowler book The Jane Austen Book Club, heard that my story "The Covenant" will appear this summer in the new mag The Other Half, wrote a chapter of the novel, saw the new Coen brothers movie, and ate some great sushi at Mio on NW 23rd. I have some pre-posted links for you below, but come back again soon as new posts are likely to appear throughout the day tomorrow. (Oh, and if you're coming over from that Salon letter by a leading blogger, welcome.)

Authors Lounge

Amazon UK is launching an authors lounge, where author interviews will be featured. The lounge page is available here. You can watch John Le Carré pitch his novel Absolute Friends, which I read a few weeks ago. I thought the beginning was a little too didactic, but then once Ted Mundy is established as a character, the story became very smooth and utterly engrossing. In other Le Carré news, Le Monde interviews the author for their weekend edition.

Saramago's Latest

Jose Saramago's latest novel, Essay on Lucidity, is now out in Portugal. The book is about a right-wing government's reaction to an election in which 83 percent of voters cast a blank ballot.

Saramago's Portuguese publishers, Caminho, said the book will have a first print run of 100 000 copies, a record for a Portuguese novel. First editions of Portuguese books usually total just 5000 copies but sales of Saramago's works have soared both at home and abroad since he became the first Portuguese author to win a Nobel prize for literature in 1998.

The novel doesn't appear to be slated for publication in the U.S. at the moment.

She's On A Roll

Lizzie has another NYBTR review this weekend, for The Darkest Child. Check it out. Also, in the same issue is Peter Singer's review of the new bio of B.F Skinner, and Ron summarizes why the NYT missed the boat on this one.

Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka is profiled in the Sunday Observer* by Ken Wiwa. Soyinka is due to deliver the BBC's 2004 Reith Lectures. The theme of the lecture is "The Climate of Fear." (The first four lectures have already been recorded, the last will take place tomorrow at Emory University here in the States.) This last lecture is supposed to be about George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, whom the Nobel prize winner considers fanatics "of the same spore." That isn't going over so well with some people, and so Soyinka finds himself once again in the middle of a controversy. Yet, Wiwa says,

when Professor Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka speaks of fear we should listen. In a 'Letter to Compatriots' introducing his classic prison memoir, The Man Died, Soyinka wrote of 'power profiteering from the common disaster and mutual sacrifice of war'. The war in question was the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970. Soyinka spent most of that conflict in a Nigerian gaol and although his recollections of the period are parochial, they contain universal reflections on the nature of fear. 'The first step towards the dethronement of terror,' Soyinka concluded in his letter, 'is the deflation of its hypocritical self-righteousness.'

Soyinka was again in the news a few months ago, when he staged the play Ubu Roi (King Baabu) as a way of protesting Robert Mugabe's reign in Zimbabwe.
*Thanks, David.

Yardley on Dahl

Jonathan Yardley talks about lesser known Roald Dahl works, those he wrote for adults. Among these is the short story collection Someone Like You, which is now out of print.

The Satanic Nurses

For the book lover in your life, consider this: J.B Miller's Satanic Nurses, a book of literary parodies. The book is composed of short stories, written in the style of literary classics, but full of jokes that are apt to appeal to the literary crowd. Still, at least one reviewer remained underwhelmed:

The only problem with The Satanic Nurses, J.B. Miller's smart-alecky book of "literary parodies," is that you have to be uncommonly literate to get the jokes. You have to have read Hemingway, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Tom Wolfe, Tolkien, Rushdie, Salinger, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, J.K. Rowling, and a couple dozen others. You have to demonstrate erudite, almost obsessively bibliophilic tendencies, and remember obscure details that really don't amount to much: even if you've done your homework, you're apt to become disappointed.

Sample stories include: Vladimir Nabokov's Colita, Edward Albee's Annoying Play W/ Dog, Toni Morrison's Belabored, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Pest, and my favorite: Joyce Carol Oates' List of Works.

One Thousand and One Nights, in Hebrew

Israeli scholar Joseph Sadan has put together a new collection of stories based on The Thousand and One Nights. The author has written an introduction and an epilogue that attempt to explain the origins of the mythical stories and their various forms.

However, first of all, we must understand the nature of the link between "The Thousand and One Nights" and this "freshly baked" collection in Hebrew. "The Thousand and One Nights" are a collection of tales that began to coalesce in the ancient (Oriental) world, was reformulated during the Ottoman period and became an integral part of European culture in the first half of the 18th century - that is, an integral part of the Western canon. Nonetheless, as the introduction informs us, a universally accepted canonical text has yet to be formed with respect to these tales because they are an anthology of stories collected under a single rubric, or, to put it in "Sadanese": They are a "framework that, from time to time, changes its contents and swallows up various stylized batches of dough." What is more, in addition to the various popular versions of "The Thousand and One Nights," there is a chaotic wealth of anthologies bearing a similar style, which have been granted colorful titles such as "The One Hundred and One Nights," "The Thousand and One Days," and even "A Thousand and One Quarter-Hours." This collection is thus an additional "Thousand and One Nights" anthology based on the well-known narrative framework concerning Scheherazade, a narrative into which [Joseph Sadan] has "stuffed" tales that he has collected from various sources and periods (from the ancient era to the Ottoman period).

You can read the full Ha'aretz review here.

O'Connor Home

Flannery O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah (where she lived from her birth to her teenage years) is getting back some of the author's furniture. The home is also the site of a Spring lecture series. Another popular O'Connor site is Andalusia, the farm where she spent the last years of her life, raising peacocks and writing masterpieces of the short story form.

March 25, 2004

A Visit From Voltaire

The Santa Cruz Sentinel has a profile of Dinah Lee Küng, whose novel A Visit From Voltaire, is up for the Orange Prize, along with heavy-hitters like Toni Morrison or Jhumpa Lahiri. Küng's book, about a woman who experiences culture shock after moving to Geneva and who receives a visit from a man claiming to be the 18th-century French writer and philosopher, is unavailable here in the U.S.

Booklovers will have trouble finding "A Visit from Voltaire" locally. "The hardcover was beautifully produced but has sold out and, sadly, is no more," Küng said. The paperback version, published by Peter Halban of London, is available at Amazon.co.uk but not the American Web site. The online price is 6 pounds, about $11.

Here's a link to the novel from the UK website. But why, you ask, isn't the book out in the US? Kung is an American author, after all.

The problem is the novel was published in Britain and an American edition is unlikely. "Many publishers have said that a book starring any Frenchman isn’t going to sell in the U.S. this year," Küng said.

This is the kind of comment that sends me into a rage. Yes, sure, this isn't the kind of book that will compete with Dan Brown on the bestseller lists, but it can find its little niche. Didn't the same market gurus predict that Stupid White Men wouldn't sell? I hope that, with the Orange Prize longlist, the publisher might at least consider a small print run.
I do have a particular fondness for Voltaire. I remember getting an excerpt from Candide for one of my French orals in high school. Ah, the heady days of high school--boys, lipstick, rock music, Voltaire.
Related: Voltaire Society of America. Voltaire Foundation. A fan site dedicated to Voltaire.
Okay, sorry for the tangent. Seriously, why not order the book and show those publishers that there are readers in the US who might like to read it?

All Publicity is Good Publicity

Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties won't come out in the UK due to fears that the Saudi ruling clan might sue the author for libel under Britain's more stringent laws. Still, British readers can always order it on the Internet, and if the publisher can orchestrate a clever marketing campaign around the theme "the book the Saudis don't want you to read" they should be able to sell one or two copies.
Bookseller link via Sarah.

March 24, 2004

Nehru and Laine Books

Kitabkhana offers his perspective on the Shivaji-as-national-pride issue:

The thing is, Atal Behari Vajpayee is an honourable man. A while back, he'd obliquely criticised people who banned books and ravaged libraries, suggesting that they might choose to table their objections in more intellectual fashion. The thing is, it's the elections and he's campaigning in Maharashtra, also known as I Love Shivaji Central. The thing is, Laine hasn't said anything defamatory, or even especially inflamatory, about Shivaji, in his book. The thing is, our honourable PM has done the crowd-pulling bit and slammed Laine in general, foreign scholars in particular, just to get that applause going. The thing is, if anyone else had pulled a volte face like that, I'd have had no hesitation in calling him a two-faced wuss who lacked the courage of his convictions and was only too happy to sell intellectual freedom down the river in pursuit of votes. But the thing is, we're talking about Atal Behari Vajpayee here, and as everyone knows, AB Vajpayee is an honourable man. Isn't he?

And if you care to read the article quoting Vajpayee, here it is.

Just Wondering

Jessa seems to be rather upset with Daphne de Marneffe's article in Salon and her book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life. She clarifies her position here, though I'm still having trouble reconciling her disgust with de Marneffe with her general admiration for Caitlin Flanagan. To me, they both seem to be gleefully throwing guilt at working mothers.

Work In Progress

Terry has posted an excerpt from his upcoming book on Balanchine. It's from Chapter Five, which is about the choreographer's fourth wife, Tanacquil Le Clercq, whom he met while still married to Maria Tallchief.

But Balanchine’s eye had already started to wander—as had Tallchief’s. They agreed to separate after the London season (their marriage was subsequently annulled), and no sooner did NYCB return to Manhattan than Balanchine began seeing Le Clercq in public. "I just love you to talk to, to go around with, play games, laugh like hell, etc.," she told Robbins in a letter. "However, I’m in love with George. Maybe it’s a case of he got here first." Devastated by what he saw as her betrayal, Robbins made The Cage, a chillingly angry portrait of a tribe of insect-women who kill the men with whom they mate. And though Tallchief remained the prima ballerina of New York City ballet for a few years more, it was Le Clercq for whom Balanchine made La Valse (1951, music by Ravel), a darkly unsettling vignette about a beautiful young girl who encounters a black-clad man at a party. He offers her a pair of black gloves into which the girl heedlessly plunges her hands. Then they waltz together with mad abandon until she collapses and dies.

And you thought your life was like a soap opera.

March 23, 2004

Hadid Wins Pritzker

Slate has a profile of Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Some of Hadid's works can be seen on her website.

Another One Bites The Dust

Northeastern University is closing down its press.

Like many university presses, NU Press has always been subsidzed by the university. Over the past decade it has cost the school from $275,000 a year to a high of $450,000 this year -- about 40 percent of the press's budget, officials said. The subsidy grew this year because the press has been struggling with the economic downturn of the last couple years, said Jill Bahcall, associate director of NU Press.

Details here.

IMPAC Dublin Award

The IMPAC Dublin shortlist was announced today (the longlist was announced a couple of months ago). The finalists are:

The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Any Human Heart – William Boyd
Caramelo – Sandra Cisneros
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The White Family – Maggie Gee
This Blinding Absence of Light – Taher Ben Jelloun
Balthasar’s Odyssey – Amin Maalouf
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Earth and Ashes – Atiq Rahimi
House of Day, House of Night – Olga Tokarczuk

I'm delighted that the Moroccan Ben Jelloun is on the shortlist though I haven't yet read This Blinding Absence of Light. He's not a current fave (I prefer his earlier work, like Harrouda) but definitely one worth reading.

The Great American Novel Finally on Amazon?

In an otherwise uninteresting article about self-publishing, I came across this paragraph:

Publishing a book takes a year because everyone expects it to - not because it has to. Not surprisingly, Amazon is eyeing the self-publishing niche. The Web site has roughly 10% of the retail book market but nabbed 40% of Kessler's sales. Big self-published books mean big market share.

Is this true? It'd be interesting to see what happens to POD if Amazon throws its hat in the ring.

Work Woes

Depressed employees often avoid talking to colleagues and bosses about their troubles for fear of derailing their careers, a new study says.

That was Colin Attwood's chief concern. The 36-year-old information technology specialist from Manhattan said he is wary of seeking help for his depression at work.
"I don't want my mental state to be connected with me too closely," he said.

Um. Then talking to the NY Daily News about it might not be such a hot idea.

Writers: "They're Just Like Us"

The Village Voice's Vivek Narayanan reviews Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.

The lightly fictionalizing hybrid set pieces Cohen uses can occasionally be repetitive, and her digressions on, say, photographic theory are hardly original. Nostalgia seems unavoidable—her subjects are charismatic and beloved. Nevertheless, when her portraits are of figures that are clearly dear to either her or me, as the case may be, she can be very sympathetic and illuminating indeed. As Henry James once wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett, "The 'historic' novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness. . . . You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do." Similarly, these delicately wrought essays can be read as a kind of extended, irresistible People for the literary set.

Yeah, but where are the pictures?

Reader Mail

On Diversity: Shelley Ettinger writes in to say that, as little diversity as there is in UK publishing, the situation in New York "is probably even worse. And New York's population is mostly people of color, which in my view makes the situation here even more outrageous."

One Year On: The editor of an uninteresting e-zine, whose color approximates that of duck caca, and whose content could well be worse, sent some hate-filled rhetoric about the Iraq war. He also misspelt the blog's name.

March 22, 2004

Celeb Bios

I really hope the poor, poor woman who was assigned the job of reading all these celebrity bios was paid well for her troubles. I can't imagine being forced to read Geri Halliwell's work.

It is now dawn. The wrinkles have faded. It is time for therapy. It is time to exorcise the demons. It is time for Geri Halliwell. "Staring up at a cloudless blue sky, I can imagine just for a second that I am on a secret fantasy desert island," she says. Sadly, she is not. She is in Los Angeles. The Spice Girls "offered me hope in this darkness", she explains, but "I still knew I wanted to get off the rollercoaster. The Ginger character was my own invention, of course. It was like putting on a uniform. You don't have to think. You don't have to deal with being a human being."

Do you even want the link?

One Story

The New York Times has a feature on One Story magazine, and its editor, Hannah Tinti, whose new collection, Animal Crackers, is out with Dial Press.

On Diversity

You know how some people seem to believe that just because there's a Monica Ali or a Zadie Smith out there that somehow people of color have it easier? Rosemary Goring tackles the notion (the myth, really) of diversity in the publishing industry.

A survey published last week by The Bookseller, examining cultural diversity in book publishing UK-wide, found that only 10% of the 523 employees surveyed were from minority ethnic groups; that management was almost exclusively white; and that there were no minority ethnic authors in the top 100 books of 2003 (Monica Ali's Brick Lane was 179th). Given that the heartland of British publishing is London, 29% of whose population is from ethnic minorities, the under-representation is glaring. It grows worse when you realise that most of these employees are confined to jobs in production and administration.

In addition, says Goring, even those who get jobs in publishing often get them because of who they know. And that's true of authors, too.

Rushdie, for instance, got his break because he was a friend of Liz Calder, founder of Bloomsbury, who championed his second novel after the flop of his first, Grimus. His is a rare example of the patronage system working to the advantage of an Asian.

Link via Sarah.

Not A Good Week For Bush

Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, in which he asserts that the Administration refused to deal with the Al-Qaeda threat prior to 9-11, is doing well on Amazon at the moment. And Paul O'Neill, who served as the main source for Ron Suskind's book a little while ago, was cleared of wrongdoing in a probe of how he acquired sensitive docs.

March 21, 2004

The Collection, The Poor Parent

Edwige Danticat's work has always impressed me, whether it be in the form of the novel (like her fine The Farming of Bones) or short stories (Krik? Krak!). So I've been following the reviews generated by her new book, The Dew Breaker. I'm amused at the general confusion about whether it is a short-story collection or a novel. Knopf has it listed as a novel in its introductory page, but follow the link and you'll notice that the publisher is rather ambiguous about it, calling it a work of fiction. Then there are the reviews. Consider these excerpts (emphasis mine):

New York Times Sunday Book review by Richard Eder

The final and title story of ''The Dew Breaker,'' Danticat's new collection, makes a more direct approach to horror. Set in the 1960's during the reign of Francois Duvalier, it recounts, dry-mouthed, the hours spent by a Tonton Macoute (one of Duvalier's murderous agents) as he waits in his car for a dissident preacher to arrive at church.

New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani

Haiti's bloody and bitter history of violence, corruption and vengeance stalks all the characters in Edwidge Danticat's remarkable new novel, infecting their dreams and circumscribing their expectations. It is a nightmare they are all trying in vain to rewind and erase.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review by Ana Caban

From his right cheek down to his mouth, Ka's father has a blunt, rope-like scar - a reminder of his time in a Haitian prison. But her image of the prisoner father is shattered when he reveals that he "was the hunter, he was not the prey."
With that confession, Edwidge Danticat opens what at first seems to be a disjointed collage of Haitians living in New York. But with these vignettes, "The Dew Breaker" draws us deeper into Haiti's wounds as it weaves connections between the hunter and his prey.

San Francisco Chronicle review by Kate Washington

At the heart of her new book, which straddles the ever- thinner line between short-story collection and novel, is a family of three.

Times Picayune review by Kevin Rabalais

Expect to see and hear much more about Danticat, author of three previous works of fiction and a slim work of nonfiction ("After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti") with the appearance of her latest novel, "The Dew Breaker." Though it isn't billed as such, "The Dew Breaker" may best be described as a novel-in-stories. It is comprised of nine stories, or chapters, more than half of which were previously published.

All of this leads me to wonder whether the label of short-story collection has become something that people want to avoid at all costs. But, given the right push, a good collection can sell, whether it's by seasoned veterans (like Alice Munro's Hateship, which now has 160,000 copies in print) or by relative newcomers (like Adam Haslett's You Are Not A Stranger Here.) So why are people so worried about calling it a collection?

Stemming Globalization

In an effort to counter the growing globalization of the book industry, Scottish publishers need their own version of Amazon, says a Scottish Arts Council review.

Independent Spirits

Emma Hargrave, founder of Tindal Street Press, is selected by the Guardian as one of the few remaining arts and culture independents.

Tindal Street Press was formed out of a Birmingham writers' group that had been meeting for 20 years in response to the metrocentric attitudes of commercial publishers. One of their members, Alan Beard, found his short story collection repeatedly turned down by mainstream companies on the grounds that no one would want to read about the West Midlands; convinced that the collection would find a readership (it was later taken up by Picador), the group decided to put it out themselves. On a shoestring grant from the Arts Council, they pledged to publish six books over the first three years. Their breakthrough came last year when Clare Morrall's novel Astonishing Splashes of Colour was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Tindal Press is also the publisher of West Indian author Auston Clarke's The Polished Hoe .

The Not So Good Old Days

I've often wondered why people wax romantic about the good old days of publishing, so take a look at this:

Apparently the profits of booksellers and publishers should be enormous. And it is true that they are great, but only in the case of books that have a wide sale. For they are largely consumed in the publication of good and bad books--chiefly the latter--that have no sale whatever.
This is the explanation of the high prices that prevail in the literary business. When we buy a novel for $2.50, we are paying perhaps a dollar as an indemnity to publishers and booksellers for not buying their other novels. We are paying for the twenty-five copies of a travel book that are standing unsold on the shelves of the bookstore. We are paying the publisher for ten thousand copies of a widely advertised biography that are now gathering dust in his warehouse, before being "remaindered" for thirty cents apiece. We are paying for the ineffectiveness of his advertising. We are paying a bounty for the publication of the good books that nobody buys, the immature novels that nobody buys, and the failures of authors who are trying vainly to repeat themselves. We are paying an excessive price for our novel because the literary business, like the show business, is largely a game of chance.

Malcolm Cowley, writing in 1929 for The New Republic, where he served as literary editor.

From The Mel Gibson School of Marketing

Spark controversy, avoid interviews. Hey, it worked for Mel, so why not for Samuel Huntington? We at Casa Moorishgirl would send Huntington screaming--Just imagine: an Arab married to a Hispanic, and with distant relatives of both the Jewish and Christian persuasions.

Say It Isn't So

A German scholar claims that Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita may have more than a little in common with a novel published in 1916 by Nazi journalist Heinz von Eschwege. Someone should put this guy in touch with the two French men who say Molière's plays (comedies, mostly) were the work of the more serious Corneille.

Nehru Book Controversy Revisited

A propos of the Nehru book controversy mentioned below, reader David Frazer writes to point us to this Guardian article by William Dalrymple, about V.S. Naipaul's endorsement of the BJP (the far-right Hindu nationalist party.) Sir Vidia's anti-everything-Islam-stance is nothing new, but I suppose I'm pleased that this aspect of his otherwise fine work is getting scrutinized.

March 19, 2004

Nehru Book Controversy

A new controversy has erupted in India over a book penned by statesman Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, some sixty years ago. The BJP is upset at what they say is a poor portrayal of the 17th century warrior Shivaji. The BJP, you may recall, was also upset over John Layne's book on the same subject a few months ago, which resulted in OUP withdrawing the book from the Indian market. (The Complete Review has very thorough coverage on that issue.)

As If

A reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer (talk about worst newspaper name, Mark) complains about the fact that writers are becoming an extinct species in TV land.

But my beef with these shows is that they eliminate the writer. Reality TV only needs to set up a premise and turn on the cameras. The shows are cheap to produce because nobody has to pay writers.

Since when do writers' salaries come in at the top of a show's costs?

Head of Writers' Guild Resigns

Charles Holland, the head of the Writers' Guild of America, West, has resigned after his claims that he served as a Green Beret and played football on a university scholarship were disputed.

He made the claims in an interview with the guild's magazine, but subsequent searches of military and university records failed to substantiate either claim. Military records show that Mr. Holland served in the National Guard in Illinois and Massachusetts. The university had no record that he played football. But Mr. Holland, whose credits include writing for "JAG,'' maintained that he had not lied about his background.

So he made up stuff and then talk about it in the guild's own magazine? Que cojones.

One Year On

"Coalition" soldiers: 674
Iraqi Civilians: nearly 10,000.
Cost to taxpayers: up to $200 billion.
WMDs: 0
Domino Effect of Democracy: Null
Domino Effect of Terrorism: Casablanca, Madrid, Jakarta, Riyadh, etc.

So, was it worth it?

March 18, 2004

Undeterred

Laura Bush is having another literary symposium, this one about Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, and they will be introduced by Tom Wolfe, Bret Lott, and Elizabeth Spencer, respectively. Last year, you'll recall, there was a huge controversy over her cancellation of a poetry event after she found out that people wanted to read poetry that wasn't in line with her husband's policies.

PBF

With all that coverage of the London Book Fair, I didn't even realize the Paris Book Fair started today. China is the special guest of this edition.

Or They Could Just Hire My Mother

NASA says they have developed software that can (almost) read thoughts.

March 17, 2004

Centenary Celebrations

For the centenary of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, several events will be held in Buenos Aires, where the author lived for twenty-four years.

The Borges Cultural Centre's literary adviser, Alejandro Vacaro, told IPS that Gombrowicz and his works ”continue to be an enigma” for many Argentines, given that the now famous Polish writer ”cultivated amongst his peers the art of being unpleasant, and he did nothing to disseminate his writing,” which explains the local indifference towards him while he lived in Buenos Aires.
After leaving Argentina, Gombrowicz was the first to be surprised by his fame. He was soon acclaimed by his colleagues in Europe and Argentina alike, and in the 1970s was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Kundera has said that Gombrowicz's work was a precursor to the modern European novel, and has compared him to no less a figure than Czech author Franz Kafka.

Read the rest here.

Closer To Home

Of Mice and Men, The Martian Chronicles, and To Kill A Mockingbird are among the books that a Christian group, Crusaders for Christ, wants removed from schools' reading lists in Bartow County, Georgia.

Book Ban

An collection of essays on Tibet and its religious life has been banned by the Chinese government.

Book Marketing

Picking up on the themes that Sara Nelson mentioned in her article (linked to earlier today), I came across this:

When I set off on my own adventures into the trade-publishing world a year ago (as I chronicled in a previous column), I was humble enough not to expect the Dan Brown treatment. My book, like the vast majority of trade books published today (including Brown's previous books), will be counted a grand success if it sells 10,000 copies.
But I did expect that my main responsibility as an author would be to write a book of the highest literary quality; I assumed it was the publisher's job to market and promote it.

Then, of course, reality set in for James Lang, and he set about trying to promote his book, Learning Sickness: A Year With Crohn's Disease.

PR Work

You know that ad/article for Martin Amis in the New York Times last week? The International Herald Tribune picked it up. Looks like the PR people are trying hard.