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January 30, 2009

Kids and classics

Robert McCrum examines what makes a book a classic for kids and asks when’s the best time for the literary set to indoctrinate them.

Around our neighbourhood at the moment there are a lot of kids sitting exams. Inevitably, the conversation at the kitchen table has been turning to what they’re reading. The recent award of the Newbery medal (a major prize) to Neil Gaiman for his children’s page-turner The Graveyard Book makes this subject extra topical.

A straw poll of two 11-year-olds throws up these names: Jacqueline Wilson, Louis Sachar, Judy Blume, Melvin Burgess, Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz, Stephanie Meyer – and a hot debate about JK Rowling. Then someone mentions Anne Frank (see the excellent recent BBC TV adaptation) and all at once we’re spinning off into a discussion of classics for kids.

In this arena, several urgent questions crop up. Firstly, how soon should children be introduced to Austen, and Dickens? Secondly, and related to that, when the moment comes to launch into a classic from the English literary tradition, where should they start?

What’s with the backhanded compliment, guys?

Why did the Costa jury feel the need to wrist slap Sebastian Barry even as they gave him the prize? Sour grapes or something more?

All in all, despite Barry’s gracious acceptance of the prize, it must have been rather like getting a wonderful present, but one that had been hastily wrapped, with the receipt still attached and someone else’s name – hastily crossed out – left on the card.

Perhaps he won’t really mind: the important thing, apart from the cheque, is that he and his publishers can now emblazon “Winner of the Costa” on his exquisitely written book – which, I am told by a Barry fan absolutely delighted on his behalf, is surprisingly upmarket for this rather mainstream prize.

But it raises the question of whether the best thing for awards ceremonies of all kinds might be more honesty, rather than less. After all, one reason viewers have been deserting the Oscars in droves is that they have turned into a tiresome gush-fest.

Imagine if, as Kate Winslet picks up the Oscar for her part in The Reader, the citation reads not “Best Actress”, but “Best Actress in Really a Pretty Ropey Bunch”. Imagine, too, if Winslet then takes the opportunity not to sob, or wail endlessly on about all the people she needs to thank, but to admit: “Thanks, guys. I know you’re only giving this to me for being runner-up so many times before, and frankly this obsession of yours with the Holocaust is a little disturbing. But hey – beers are on me.”

Jane Austen, Left for Dead

Reader Glicky sends in this awesome link to Pride and Prejudice recast as a zombie bloodbath. I’m not even sure this is real, but I so hope that it is.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

Oh. My. God. Swoooooooon.

Profiles

What’s on tap for 2009

Allison Flood polls those in the know. Apparently the answer is “escapism”… We need to escape from the world. And since we can’t afford to visit it, we’ll have to read about visiting it. I can see that. But I really just need to escape from this office. I’ve fashioned a rope ladder out of bathroom hand towels, but I’ll have to hang jump the last 10 feet. Maybe if I toss all the coffee cups on my window sill onto the street, I can create a cushion on which to land.

Mike Jones at Simon & Schuster feels that as we “perhaps won’t be doing as much exotic travelling as we used to … books which bring alive the beauty and diversity of the British countryside, its landscape and its history may do well”; if only there was more to come from Roger Deakin.

And escapism is a tip from a couple of editors. “I have a feeling there’s changes in taste afoot: a move back to more ‘big’, airport novels; historical moving into different eras; a real reduction in ‘chic’,” says Trevor Dolby at Preface, while Marsha Filion at the independent publisher Oneworld is “betting [her] new fiction list on the hope that people will flock to pure escapism on a global scale”. She’s not after bonkbuster-style escape though: “With the pound down and unemployment at a high, we reckon a new generation of armchair tourists is about to be born with a keen appetite for books that whisk away readers to other lands and immerse them in other cultures.”

Roundup

January 29, 2009

This is your brain on fiction

Readers’ brains work like rats’, with each piece of fiction being built in a simulated environment like a maze map in a tiny little rodent brain. This means reading isn’t passive, but rather an active exercise for the old noggin. Ah, science. Thankfully we have you and your kooky, well-funded labcoat warmers to prove the things artists have been saying since forever first fucking began. Surely there must be some way to monetize this research or turn it into a bomb, right? Otherwise, how did it get funded?

“Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story,” says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

Roberto Bolaño: fake memoirist?

Did Bolaño exaggerate about his “Jimmy-Boy Frey” days? It’s like me and my tortured relationship with Spicy Thai Kettle chips. If I could only get that monkey off my back, I just might be happy.

But his widow, from whom he was separated at the time of his death, and Andrew Wylie, the American agent she recently hired after distancing herself from Mr. Bolaño’s friends, editors and publisher, are now challenging part of that image. They dispute the idea, originally suggested by Mr. Bolaño himself, endorsed by his American translator and mentioned in several of the rapturous recent reviews of “2666” in the United States, that he ever “had a heroin habit,” that his death was “traceable to heroin use” or even that he had “an acquaintance with heroin.”

At the same time, some of Mr. Bolaño’s friends in Mexico, where he lived for nearly a decade before finally settling down near Barcelona, Spain, are questioning another aspect of the life story he constructed for himself.

They say that Mr. Bolaño, who is rapidly emerging as the pre-eminent Latin American writer of his generation, was not in Chile during the military coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power, despite his claim to that badge of honor.

Regarding Mr. Bolaño and drugs, numerous Latin American and European critics and bloggers have taken the side of his widow, accusing American critics and publishers of deliberately distorting the writer’s past to fit him into the familiar mold of the tortured artist. Mr. Bolaño’s life and work have been made into “a trivial spectacle,” Julio Ortega, a Peruvian critic and scholar, wrote in El País, the leading daily in Spain.

Poet Silicate

Silicon Valley to get its own poet laureate? |And here I thought technology was killing our brainses. And that Christian was in Calgary not Cali… Hm.

The idea of granting a little poetic license began before the economy took a nose-dive last fall. But the board decided to go ahead.

“It does feel like a very positive move,” said Liz Kniss, president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. “We said we should have something that really does act as a counterpoint to this financial crisis that we’re in.”

Officials are looking to get their words’ worth out of the new laureate. They’re paying a small $4,000 stipend for the two-year post, using money from hotel taxes that already is dedicated to supporting the arts.

Candidates, who must be published poets and five-year residents of the county, will be expected to do more than come up with the write stuff. One of the new laureate’s duties will be to undertake a project to make poetry more available and accessible to people in their everyday lives.

Four lousy grand for two years? Are you kidding me? People in coffee shops tip that much there. Four thousand dollars isn’t a stipend, it’s the estimated worth of a skidmark on Bill Gates’ tighty-whiteys. Give me a fucking break you cheapskates. Why not buy them a sandwich and tell them you won’t give them money because you know they’ll just go spend it on metaphors or something and you don’t want to enable that kind of behaviour. What are you going to do, tie it to a string and drag it through the Bowery hoping someone will bite? GAWD!

100 beautiful words

An online dictionary has listed the 100 most beautiful words in the English language. It’s funny, because once when the Ceeb stuck a mic in my face at the Griffins and asked what I thought the most beautiful word was, I think I scrambled for a moment and then said one of these. That said, I’m pretty sure they missed a few. Like “lottery” and “Guinness” and “Lisa Loeb”. (Thanks, CP)

1 adroit Dexterous, agile.
2 adumbrate To very gently suggest.
3 aestivate To summer, to spend the summer.
4 ailurophile A cat-lover.
5 beatific Befitting an angel or saint.
6 beleaguer To exhaust with attacks.
7 blandiloquent Beautiful and flattering.
8 caliginous Dark and misty.
9 champagne An effervescent wine.
10 chatoyant Like a cat’s eye.
11 chiaroscuro The arrangement of dark and light elements in a picture.
12 cockle A heart-shaped bivalve or a garden flower.
13 colporteur A book peddlar.
14 conflate To blend together, to combine different things.
15 cynosure A focal point of admiration.
16 desuetude Disuse.
17 diaphanous Filmy.
18 diffuse Spread out, not focused or concentrated.
19 dulcet Sweet, sugary.
20 ebullient Bubbling with enthusiasm.
21 effervescent Bubbly.
22 efflorescence Flowering, the opening of buds or a bloom.
23 elixir A good potion.
24 emollient A softener.
25 encomium A spoken or written work in praise of someone.
26 ephemeral Short-lived.
27 epicure A person who enjoys fine living, especially food and drink.
28 epiphany A sudden revelation.
29 erstwhile At one time, for a time.
30 eschew To reject or avoid.
31 esculent Edible.
32 esoteric Understood only by a small group of specialists.
33 ethereal Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
34 etiolate White from no contact with light.
35 evanescent Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
36 exuberant Enthusiastic, excited.
37 felicitous Pleasing.
38 fescue A variety of grass favored for pastures.
39 foudroyant Dazzling.
40 fragile Very, very delicate.
41 fugacioius Running, escaping.
42 gambol To skip or leap about joyfully.
43 glamour Beauty.
44 gossamer The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk.
45 halcyon Happy, sunny, care-free.
46 hymeneal Having to do with a wedding.
47 imbricate To overlap to form a regular pattern.
48 imbroglio An altercation or complicated situation.
49 imbue To infuse, instill.
50 incipient Beginning, in an early stage.
51 ingenue A naïve young woman.
52 inglenook The place beside the fireplace.
53 inspissate To thicken.
54 inure To jade.
55 jejune Dull; childish.
56 lagniappe A gift given to a customer for their patronage.
57 lagoon A small gulf or inlet in the sea.
58 languor Listlessness, inactivity.
59 lassitude Weariness, listlessness.
60 laughter The response to something funny.
61 lilt To move musically or lively, to have a lively sound.
62 lithe Slender and flexible.
63 loquacious Talkative.
64 luxuriant Thick, lavish.
65 mellifluous Sweet-sounding.
66 missive A message or letter.
67 moiety One of two equal parts, a half.
68 mondegreen A misanalyzed phrase.
69 nebulous Foggy.
70 niveous Snowy, snow-like.
71 obsequious Fawning, subservience.
72 odalisque A concubine in a harem.
73 oeuvre A work.
74 offing That part of the sea between the horizon and the offshore.
75 onomatopoeia The creation of words by imitating sound.
76 paean A formal expression of praise.
77 palimpsest A manuscript written over one or more earlier ones.
78 panacea A complete solution for all problems.
79 panoply A complete set.
80 pastiche A mixture of art work (art or music) from various sources.
81 peccadillo A peculiarity.
82 pelagic Related to the sea or ocean.
83 penumbra A half-shadow, the edge of a shadow.
84 peregrination Wandering, travels.
85 petrichor The smell of earth after a rain.
86 plethora A great excess, overabundance.
87 porcelain A fine white clay pottery.
88 potamophilous Loving rivers.
89 propinquity An inclination or preference.
90 Pyrrhic Victorious despite heavy losses.
91 quintessential The ultimate, the essence of the essence.
92 redolent Sweet-smelling.
93 rhapsody A beautiful musical piece.
94 riparian Having to do with the bank of a river or other body of water.
95 ripple A small, circular wave emanating from a central point.
96 scintillate To sparkle with brilliant light.
97 sempiternal Forever and ever.
98 seraglio Housing for a harem.
99 serendipity Finding something while looking for something else.
100 surreptitious Sneaky.

Amazon to release Kindle 2: The Readening

Kindle 2 will make you a cup of cappucino to go with your Joyce Carol Oates, but still won’t let you fold down a corner. Rumour has it one lucky Kindle buyer will find get a commemorative Devil’s edition of the Kindle, which contains the uploaded soulds of Dan Brown, John Grisham and Daniel Steel, stored locally and viewable as PowerPoint files…

The Kindle, which is only available in the US, has been a moderate success – allowing Amazon to quickly take command of the small but much-heralded electronic book market. The current $359 (£253) model sports a six-inch screen and 256MB of memory, although its Whispernet wireless download system only works in the United States.

Some observers say they expect a thinner and more robust body and more user-friendly approach – but it remains unclear whether the gadget will ever be available to buy in Europe.

“We’re fairly sure that it will be a new Kindle, one that will feature a colour screen and better battery life,” electronics analyst Richard Doherty, of Envisioneering Group, told the LA Times.

Although sales figures for the first-generation Kindle remain unclear, industry analysts have regarded it as a good first step: the gadget sold out at launch, and demand has continued to outstrip the company’s inventory. Prospective buyers currently face waits of four to six weeks to get their hands on one.

Quiet little Jimmy, the strangely serene son of the WaPo family, finally picks up the axe he’s been staring at intently for some time and walks quietly to the Book World’s bedroom

Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine! Please ignore that axe in the corner! It’s for decoration only, really. The books section is fine. Really! No, we’re a perfectly happy family with no secrets to hi–GAAAGAHGHGHAGHAHGKKRRRPPTFFFEEEEmythroat!GGAAAGFFFssssssss….sss…sss…uhn

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

The last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. The Post said in a statement Wednesday that in the printed newspaper Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the commentary section, and Style & Arts. Book World will occasionally appear as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.

Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with The New York Times Book Review. The Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising. “The advertising in Book World didn’t justify the amount of space that we dedicated each week to books coverage,” Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Post, said in a phone interview. “But we write about books, and we will continue to write about books because they are important to our audience and our readers.”

Heard it. Sorry, I’ll take a books section any day over one article a day and a few rambling blog posts. Lots of commentary below this piece.

Book bits

Like Cheerios scattered on the floor below Baby Ninja, so are the info-bits of our lives…

January 28, 2009

Obama having some trouble communicating with staff

Apparently they don’t have the same cultural reference database.

President Barack Obama expressed frustration Wednesday after members of his cabinet failed to recognize his allusion to the 24th issue of the comic series Savage Sword Of Conan during their first major meeting together.

Obama, whose upcoming challenges include organizing a massive effort to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, was reportedly unprepared for the confused silence he received upon suggesting that his cabinet “team up with Taurus of Nemedia” to secure the necessary funding from Congress.

“If my inner circle of advisers can’t even communicate about the most basic issues, how are we going to tackle the massive problems our nation faces?” Obama said during a press conference. “When I tell my cabinet that getting bipartisan support is exactly like the time Conan got Taurus to help him steal Yara’s jewel, they need to understand what I mean.”

Actual book news

Budget crisis, Canada

[Enter political pundit armchair]

Well, the Conservative Canadian government that hijacked the country last year and essentially dissolved the government, junta-style, to avoid being ousted, has delivered a budget packed with spending designed to make them more palatable to middle of the road Canada, which usually votes centrist. This is a budget filled with opposition line items and it had to hurt chief dickwad and ultra-conservative religious nutbar Harper to approve it. It is also, of course, half economic necessity, given the times, as much as half political jockeying for power. If you’re either gullible or cynical, you might want to play with those percentages a bit. Anyway, after getting their pants pulled down by the culture vote in the last election, the wolves have decided get out their sheep costumes and try to buy a few votes back by playing nice. How nice? This is the question. Analysis seems to be confused in pinning down the amount. A good piece at the National Post (NaPo, Steven?) outlines the projects in question and puts the figure at $335M while the Ceeb, which seems increasingly a Conservative mouthpiece some days, is saying $438M. It’s funny to hear big business and conservatives congratulating the government on deficit spending when last decade they were screaming like babies at it. Another big question is how much of this will end up structural, meaning, there’s some question as to whether, given the likelihood of an extended recession, the Conservatives can ever dig us out of debt. How’s he going to reign in the tax cuts? And this is where you should look if you don’t trust their motives. I guess it doesn’t matter, so long as he gets power by playing to the suburban voters who may have been hesitant to buy his schtick last time. So, is this budget a vote-buy or a stimulus package? After months of saying don’t panic and that we were better off than everyone else in the world and that we were going to post a surplus, Harper sudddenly seems awfully ready to change his tune and spend spend spend into a huge deficit. Nearly losing power can change your perspective when you’ve got big plans for ramming right wing ideals through the moral sphincter of a centrist country. Yes, some of this money is good and overdue, but some is ill considered and ill spent (where’s the environment in here, in any sustainable way?) Tax cuts aren’t the way to go. And who gets left out? Quebec (all but ignored) and women (around equity and child care) are particularly neglected. But they don’t matter, do they, given that they’re statistically less inclined to vote for him in the first place. Perhaps there’s room in the budget for a dictionary so Harper can look up “karma”.

[Exit political pundit armchair]

John Updike Encomium

From the top front page story on CNN international (pushing aside war and Obama) to every small town newspaper in the western world, John Updike’s praises are being sung. It’s the biggest and saddest story of the year so far. How are the papers covering it? With everything from AP filler to celebrity author studded euologies. Here’s a sample.

January 27, 2009

RIP: John Updike

Author Updike, dead of lung cancer at 76.

Cruddy day roundup

I have to go in for some minor exploratory surgery today to make sure my insides aren’t riddled with pulsating tumours, ulcerous pixie stix-and-Coke caverns carved into my digestive walls by habitual sugar mainlining since age 3, or simply the bitter blackness that comes of being a poet in a world that only loves standup comics. One of these possibilities is more likely than the others. Of course, everything’s probably fine, but I’m not sure I’ll be posting tomorrow due to widespread aches and crankiness (as opposed to the daily performance of crankiness I do around here), and in my distracted state I can only offer you a list of links today. Wish me luck!

January 26, 2009

Scribilliteracy?

Is America facing a new kind of illiteracy? The inability to read handwriting? These kids today. Oy. No penmanship, no ability to read cursive. I tell you, if it’s not in Arial, they can barely understand it. Mind you, I implore Lady Ninja, she of the indecipherable chicken scratch, to continue communicating with me via word processor. If you ever get a chance to read one of her grocery lists, you should. It’s like experimental poetry. “Melh, butler, yoynurt, abbles, leltuce, tomaloes”. Man, that’s deep.

the problem of bad handwriting is not new. But as Kitty Burns Florey argues in “Script and Scribble,” a witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting, we have today reached a point of crisis. Typing and texting have caused cursive skills to atrophy, and schools regard standards of style and legibility the same way they regard standards of dress. There may even come a day when longhand writing can no longer be deciphered by ordinary people — you’ll have to bring those old letters in the attic to some fussy museum curator. In 2006 only 15% of students taking the SAT wrote out their essays in cursive script; all the rest — no doubt to the relief of the examiners — used block letters.

On stuttering and poetry

Last summer (I know, I’m way behind), Bookninja Magazine editor Kuitenbrouwer (code name: Special K) had assassin-for-hire Marianne Apostolides interview Jordan Scott, self-described “stutterer” and author of blert, a poetic text exploring the linguistic and poetic possibilities generated around his speech patterns. It’s a very interesting audio interview available here. Let us know what you think!

Is a successful book festival killing a town?

Hay-on-Wye’s book festival is, by any stretch of the imagination, a very successful event. But is it killing the town, which is a fantastic centre for second hand books?

The booksellers who put the town on the map 30 years ago are angry and fearful at collapsing sales, and are pinning the blame on the festival, which began 25 years ago, on the internet, and now on each other.

The chief culprit, to their minds, is the self-styled King of Hay, Richard Booth, who is credited with starting the whole Hay phenomenon and who used to run one of the town’s biggest book dealerships.

Mr Booth, they say, is no longer capable of attracting the publicity the town needs, nor of challenging the festival which, they argue, has become a corporate monster with sponsorship by Sky and The Guardian. They argue it sucks up the thousands of tourists who used to browse in the town’s second- hand book emporia but now no longer visit except to park their cars.

In response, the rebels have been condemned as “parasites feeding on [Booth's] success” by his loyal bookkeeper Eve Redway.

Twain teacher update

The Guardian has picked up the story we reported last week about the teacher in Seattle who wants to drop n-word books from the cirriculum because racism died on January 20th. Letters to the editor are generally incensed and, as usual, online comments are even worse.

His piece provoked an outpouring of enraged emails and letters to the paper. “What Foley wrote is indeed a lucid example of apostasy. Obama would be horrified if he knew this censorship was done in his name,” wrote Trudy Sundberg in a letter to the editor. “Now seems like an odd time to downplay the American tragedy of slavery and its linguistic legacy – the N-word,” agreed Molly Hackett. “There is nothing in American literature that more succinctly and directly attacks racial prejudice than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” said one respondent.

Foley’s reasoning is that Huck Finn “contain[s] the N-word and demeaning stereotypes”, while Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird sees Atticus Finch tell his daughter “not to use the N-word because it’s ‘common’” – a “hopelessly dated” attitude. Teaching Huck Finn and explaining that Twain wasn’t a racist “is a daunting challenge”, writes Foley, who teaches at a predominantly white school. Despite explaining that Jim, a black man, is the hero of the book, that Huck eventually sees the error of his ways and commits himself to helping Tom “steal that nigger out of slavery”, he says that “with few exceptions, all the black students in my classes over the years have appeared very uncomfortable when I’ve discussed these matters at the beginning of the unit”. And he never wants “to rationalise Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe”.

My book, my site

Increasingly, publishers want authors to have a significant web presence, both on their own e-commerce sites, as well as Facebook, MySpace, etc. But for those lucky few with a serious promotional budget or precocious 12-year-old newphew, a really rockin’ website is the perfect ticket to fame, birds, and dough. I used to actually do web design, well before it became TV-design-for-the-web, and I’ve created a few static pages for author friends, but this level of design is really something that costs thousands of dollars, and is likely out of your price range, unless you’re a trophy partner for someone rich. In which case, I congratulate you and encourage you to adopt me.

The task of the book Web designer can be a tricky one. “Book sites present challenges that fashion and other sorts of sites do not,” Rabb said in a telephone interview. Because of the nature of the book medium in general, and the hope of selling movie rights in particular, “any time I get too specific about the appearance of a character, people start to get very nervous,” he added.

Instead, Rabb aims to represent a book’s “gestalt,” as he puts it. His sites often include original material from the author, as in the one he created for “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet,” Reif Larsen’s much anticipated first novel about a young Montana prodigy obsessed with mapmaking. That site — which will be rolled out incrementally starting later this month until the book’s release in May — represents a failed “Smithsonian exhibition” of the title character’s work, with some 10 different “cabinets” documenting everything from a taxonomy of all the animals on earth to a map of the American West. It includes time-lapse videos of Montana landscapes, stop-motion animation of one of Spivet’s diagrams (which also appear in the margins of the book), the number for a “hobo hotline” where people can leave messages (which, of course, will later be placed on the site) and an audio collage based on the sounds of trains.

“When you’re writing a book, you’re certainly not sitting there thinking, ‘And wait till they see the Web site!’ ” Larsen said. “But it does offer a great opportunity to experiment with delivering character and narrative across different mediums.”

News roundup

January 23, 2009

Four step plan to publication

The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam lays it bare for those wishing to haul their asses into print. I sense an undercurrent of something here, but I have no idea what it is.

2. Blurbs

Blurbs are brief, upbeat endorsements from famous writers (”A roller coaster ride from beginning to end!” – Tom Clancy) who are generally much too busy to read your book, or even take note of your existence. Fret no more!

Blurbings.com offers you 10 blurbs, for free, plus they promise to plant a tree if you do business with them! Here’s my promotional quote they should feel free to use on their site: “Looks fishy, and they don’t answer e-mail.” – Alex Beam, The Boston Globe.

UK politicos call on government to protect independent booksellers

And ‘lo a chorus of angels appeared in the sky and opened their mouths in song, and from their lips flowed goodness and light, and yea though the wolves gathered ’round, they could not come within that circle of light, and the nerds below were spared.

An MP has called on the government to provide more support to small businesses after learning that an award-winning and much-loved local bookshop has been forced to close.

Kaydee Bookshop in Clitheroe, Lancashire, which was named independent bookseller of the year in 1992, has announced that it will be closing down at the end of this month after 60 years in business, with the loss of nine jobs. Its demise follows the news earlier this month that the UK’s only specialist crime bookshop, Murder One in London, will also close at the end of January, and adds to official figures that show the number of independent bookshops in the UK has plummeted by 22% in the last 10 years, with just 1,390 still open according to the most recent count last summer, compared to 1,774 in 1999.

Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, believes Kaydee’s closure is “symptomatic of current economic policy”. He has tabled an early day motion in parliament calling on the government “to ensure that small and medium-sized businesses get the support they both need and deserve in order that they may survive the recession”.

Kirsch on Alexander

Adam Kirsch considers the inaugural poem at The New Republic. A balanced assessment, I think—he starts off almost defending the choice of poet, but ends a bit harsher on the poem and entire institution of occasional poetry.

it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché (”Each day we go about our business”), before going on to tell the nation “I know there’s something better down the road”; and pose the knotty question, “What if the mightiest word is ‘love’?”; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.” The poem’s argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou’s, Williams’s, and even Robert Frost’s inauguration poems already proved: that the poet’s place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

The future of publishing?

Time Magazine has a wide-ranging piece speculating what will happen to publishing in the coming years.

We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses–among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company’s history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be “the worst year for publishing in decades.”

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done.

News out the wazoo

I just downloaded a clutch of Neil Young songs (sometimes I forget he used to be able to sing), so I’m rocking in the free world while working for the man on a day when I’d rather be writing. Ah, catharsis, my old friend, how you keep me from jail…

January 22, 2009

Random launches New Yorker festival for the Upper North Side

Random House is launching a literary festival in Toronto designed to be something like the New Yorker festival in Manhattan. It’s associated with the Globe and features mostly RH authors, but will expand, they say. Sounds like fun.

“A lot of us are New Yorker readers here and we know about that festival and we thought, ‘Let’s try a variation of it for Toronto.’”

At the same time, Sellers acknowledges the inaugural edition of the Toronto festival won’t be quite as ambitious as its inspiration. No “gastronomic walking tours,” in other words, or visits to art galleries or book-themed brunches.

These may come in the future, he says. “Right now, we’re still finding our way.”

Still, the agenda for the first-ever Globe and Mail Open House Festival and its roster of “acts” is impressive, details of which were released yesterday. Sellers has persuaded more than 25 writers, strategists, pundits and one politician (Toronto Mayor David Miller) to commit to the event. The participants include not only Canadians, such as Naomi Klein ( The Shock Doctrine), Margaret MacMillan ( Paris 1919), Elizabeth Hay ( Late Nights on Air) and thinker Thomas Homer-Dixon, but also international figures: Pulitzer Prize nominee Ha Jin, veteran New Yorker staff writers Calvin Trillin and Adam Gopnik, British novelist Zoë Heller ( Notes on a Scandal) and Oprah Book Club pick David Wroblewski ( The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), among others.

This year’s roster is heavily weighted toward individuals associated with Random House, Canada’s largest trade publisher, Sellers agrees. But “we want to do outreach in the years to come with other publishers.”

All the activities will be paid admission – proceeds are earmarked for PEN Canada and the Frontier College literacy organization – and occur at the University of Toronto. Tickets go on sale Feb. 21 through UofTtix and the U of T Bookstore.

News bits

Keyboard pr0n

This Scrabble keyboard has been making the rounds the last couple weeks, but I haven’t remembered to post it. I have to stay away from anything even remotely Scrabble-related the way a recovering junkie has to stay away from Parkdale in Toronto. Also included as a bonus is this hi-tek ergonomic unit.

Inaugural poem sells well despite fleeing crowds

Whatever you might think of the poem, it’s selling like hotcakes on Amazon, where Alexander’s publisher Graywolf has released a chapbook, is and dragging its author along with it. The bestselling book of poems on the web. And probably one of the classier mementos of the day, I would think.

The poem, only the fourth to have been read at an inauguration behind works by Miller Williams and Maya Angelou, who composed poems for Bill Clinton, and Robert Frost, who recited The Gift Outright for John F Kennedy, has not been received with universal acclaim, with the Los Angeles Times calling it “less than praiseworthy” and The New Republic describing it as “bureaucratic”. But Alexander’s publisher Graywolf Press is rushing out an $8 paperback of the poem on 6 February nonetheless, with a 100,000 first print run. With over two weeks to go before publication, the book is already the bestselling poetry book on Amazon.com; Alexander’s new-found celebrity has also sent another of her titles, the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, into the third spot.

Lesson learned

The Conservative Canadian government, leaning against a wall in an abandonned warehouse while gulping for air and cocking the last cartridge into its sawed-off shotgun, is all “ooohweLOVEthearts!” now that it had its ass beat down in the last election by the culture vote. Besides his sudden newfound love of playing the piano in sweater vests, Stephen Harper appears to also be into performance art. His first piece, entitled: “Wolf, Sheep’s Clothing”, mostly constitutes him standing uncomfortably straight with his hands at his side and a perma-smile laser etched into his robotic face until shortly after the next election. Mark my words, he’ll do anything to get into power and once he’s there with a majority, the knives will come out. The world has moved on without you, Harper. Your breed of nasty conservative anti-intellectual has gone back to its swampy cave in the US to scheme for eight years. Why don’t you go join them?

Moore suggested that arts and culture would be considered in the economic stimulus package the government plans to present.

“This is an incredibly important part of the Canadian economy. We often talk about arts and culture building value in communities and building networks and so bringing creativity,” he said.

“It’s a huge part of our GDP. It’s twice the size of all those who work solely in agriculture. It’s three times the size of our forest industry. So it’s a huge part of our economy and most importantly, in my view, is that arts and culture is about improving the quality of life of Canadians,” Moore said.

January 21, 2009

High school lit in an Obama world

A teacher in the US thinks books like Huckleberry Finn should be left off reading lists now that there’s a black president. I believe I can respond to this with just three letters: W. T. F. ?! Here’s the original op-ed piece.

John Foley figures he has pretty much maxed out on explaining to African American mothers why it’s OK to call a black man the N-word — as long as it’s in a novel that is considered a classic.

For years, English teachers have been explaining away the obvious racism in Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And for years, the book that perhaps best explains Americans’ genetic predilection for hitting the road, only to later find themselves, has stayed near the top of many high school reading lists.

However, with an African American about to be inaugurated as president, Foley wonders whether ‘Huck Finn’ ought to be sent back down the river. Why not replace it with a more modern, less discomfiting novel documenting the epic journey of discovery?

“The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms,” Foley wrote in a guest column this month for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go.”

Yeah, I guess racism is now a thing of the past. Like sexism, acid rain, deforestation, and that whole pesky AIDS thing. Who needs to learn about what bastards we were in the past when our president is black (and wearing a kevlar vest at all times)?

The continued decline of the books section

Looks like one of the last two holdouts in the States will soon be on the chopping block. Someone just noticed that the WaPo’s Book World has a little red laser sight dot on it and is about to have cap busted in its ass. And the response from the Post doesn’t seem to deny this might be the case, even though the spin-tastic quote seems to renew its commitment to books.

Washington Post honcho Marcus Brauchli tells us, “We are absolutely committed to book reviews and coverage of literature, publishing and ideas in The Post. Our readership has a huge interest in these areas.“  Fingers crossed.

Hm, where have we heard this kind of thing before? Bong! Bong! For whom does that bell toll?

Ciaran Carson

Poet Carson profiled at the Guardian.

He once wrote, in a piece about his postman father, that “within Ireland there was Northern Ireland; within Northern Ireland Belfast; within Belfast, the Falls Road; within the Falls Road, the Carson family, or Clann Mhic Carrain, a household with its own laws, customs and language”. It wasn’t the Catholicism, though his parents, he says, were “utter Catholics” (he himself is lapsed – “when I was 12, or 13, or 14, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know about all this,’” though he retains a love of the rituals, of incense and Latin). It was the fact that his parents had learned Irish. They met when his mother attended an Irish class taught by his father (”so they were in love with each other and the language”), and decided that only Irish would be spoken at home. It was a political choice (Irish wasn’t officially recognised in Northern Ireland until 1998), but in 1944 not the lightning-rod kind of choice it would become later; then, as far as they knew, they were one of only four families in all of Belfast who spoke mainly in Irish.

The five Carson children learned English playing in the street. Irish made them eccentric, but also gave them power, in that no one could understand what they were saying: “I think as a result of that I was always aware of language, how it operates. How if you say it in one language it’s not the same as saying it in another.” He remembers drifting off to sleep, aged four or five, “and at that time you could still hear horses [in the street], and I would think horse, and then the Irish ‘capall’, horse, capall, capall, capall.” He rolls it around on his tongue. “And the sound of ‘capall’, to me was horse, whereas ‘horse’ sounded exotic, and odd.”

Words eventually became objects to be picked up and admired from all angles, to be used for their shapes and technical specificities and etymological echoes.

RIP: John Fairfax

British poet, dead at 78.

A man of equability, handsomeness and charm, John avoided the poetry scene, quietly producing his own work – including Adrift on the Star-brow of Taliesin (1974) and Bone Harvest Done (1980), and co-authoring with Moat several guides to writing. His anthology of space poetry, Frontier of Going (1969), included Norman Nicholson and Edwin Morgan as “dreamers of the world, rhymers of moon and dune”, while as editor of the Phoenix Press he gave a platform to younger poets, including his partner from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, Sue Stewart. Latterly he collaborated on open air commissions with his artist sons Jo and Michael, and thus are his poems to be found from Chester-le-Street to Plymouth and, it is said, on a time capsule on the Moon.

Much gum-flapping about Alexander’s inaugural prose

Everyone’s got an opinion about the poem read yesterday, the vast majority of them (at least in print) seem to say it was too prosey for the occasion. There seems to be two schools of thought here: one, by people who have no investment or background in poetry: the fact that there was a poet at all shows Obama’s renewed focus on the arts as an instrument of change; and two, by those who hold the medium dear to their hearts: that the delivery and the poem itself constituted what the kids today call an “epic fail”.

I really feel for Alexander here. What a task, what a set of expectations. Sure, the poem wasn’t good, but it wasn’t THAT bad. It was mediocre and the victim of the day—and of following the world’s most eloquent leader. What was a servicable poem designed to be accessible to the widest number of people (ie, not alienate those who already fear poetry) is being pilloried as if it ruined hopes and dreams of the country.

But on the other hand, it kind of did, didn’t it? At least the part of the country that saw this as an opportunity to show people the nigh divine power of words with depth and resonance married to an occasion with dignity and significance. Is it excusable to fail here when someone like Derek Walcott so deftly nailed it with such power and skill it makes me want to emigrate?

I guess everyone’s thinking that if you were picked for this moment you were best suited to encapsulate the emotional and psychic state of the nation, of explaining us to us. And that’s not the case for most poets. Makes me think the poem should have been picked instead of the poet. If you’d seen them all laid out on paper and had recordings of the poets reading them to choose from, would anyone have chosen this poem? Given what else was written for the occasion, I suspect not.

Now, back to feeling sorry for Alexander. She did her best and it was competent, but not up to the moment.  But having been the one chosen, she rose to the task and did what she could. Unfortunately, she over-thought things and tried to cater to a wide audience that was too cold and disinterested to hear her out, rather than catering to the moment. The whole thing felt like it was written by committee. She needed fire and brimstone, shock and awe, a seesaw between the personal and the universal, to break through to the crowd and the world. Instead she had people waiting for a bus. Perhaps, for some of the two million there, a reminder it was time to go home.

January 20, 2009

I’m not saying… [updated]

I’m just saying. Despite the rousing speech, and the competent poem, I was a little disappointed to see everyone getting up to leave and lines of people streaming away as the inaugural poet took the stand. That’s got to be tough. I’m used to seeing people sneak out of poetry readings, but not in the thousands.

[I'm updating this with some comments I made below, qualifying my use of the word "competent" as well as a link to the text of the poem for those who missed it. That it's presented here as prose says much.]

The poem was competent in that it was a daunting task with far too much riding on it. I give her competent because a journal would have published it and no one would have blinked, but in the face of the history she was part of, it wasn’t really up to the task. But who really could have nailed it? We’re short on Robert Frosts these days. At least it wasn’t a Hallmark moment from Angelou. Had I been in her shoes, I likely couldn’t have written myself past the first line with all the weight of expectation on me, so bravo for the effort. But I can’t decide if it’s a sad or happy day when a poet following the president pales in comparison.

Naomi Wolf on film over print

Wolf has learned a hard lesson for a writer: there are better ways to reach the masses than with your lucid, intelligent prose. The rise of the documentary and YouTube as the medium of popular choice changes the whole game of political messaging. All hail the Forward button!

Every once in a while, a culture shifts. You feel like a Luddite until your new learning curve is complete. That is the experience I have been having recently, as my book The End of America has been turned into a documentary. Can political documentaries make a difference? For someone who lives mostly in the dimension of words, it is an exciting and scary question.

The End of America details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one. I took the message on the road, and one of those early lectures – at the University of Washington in Seattle, in October 2007 – was videoed by a member of the audience. Even with its bad lighting and funky amateur vibe, this video, posted on YouTube, has been accessed almost 1,250,000 times.

This was a humbling lesson. While a polemical argument in prose may reach tens of thousands of the usual suspects – formally educated people who like to follow such texts – the video version reached far beyond that audience. Everywhere I went, from the gas station to the nail salon, I ran into people who would have been unlikely to read a book of mine, but who were passionately supportive of the argument from having watched it on YouTube.

Status updates of the rich and famous

Fabulous and mind-numbingly brilliant Canadian experimental poets Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy have a long history of doing awesome things with computers and the web. Previously they created the Apostrophe Engine, which crawled Google looking for phrases and compiled them into a never-ending, hall-of-mirrors kind of poem. Now they’ve created “Status Update“, which crawls Facebook nicking people’s status lines and attributing them to famous writers. I see at least one of mine in there. It’s a little disconcerting, and puts a few things about fame, intent, and procrastination into perspective for me… Gee, thanks guys.

54 minutes ago

James Shirley is PG-13 for Thematic Material and Smoking.

52 minutes ago

Léopold Senghor will be watching! Will you?

50 minutes ago

Charles Bukowski says, “Yes, I can ! I can be a psychologist ! but first, I hvae to kick away the shit in my life.”

46 minutes ago

Srecko Kosovel knows if ever there were a time to savor the moment, this is the time, the moment savored. Nothing perfect, but enough is new, and new is a blessing.

43 minutes ago

Christopher Brennan is working on the backlog.

40 minutes ago

George Woodcock says, Oh-ho-ho, Mr. Weather… You think I’m stupid enough to fall for this again? We’ll just wait until tomorrow before I make any outwear storage decisions…

Hunter S. Thompson

Has the King of Gonzo become a victim of his own cult status?

What is it about Thompson that continues to fascinate? Is it his journalism? Is it that his writing bore so little resemblance to conventional journalism? Or, is it his “strange and savage life” as E. Jean Carroll described it in the subtitle of her 1993 Thompson biography?

If it is primarily his work, then what is his legacy, three and four decades after his best-known books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels, were published?

If it is primarily his life, are we simply perpetuating the modern celebrity freak show?

Obama fever reaching dangerous levels of awesome

Everyone about to soil themselves with love for Obama. And who can blame them? He seems so Christ-like and clean compared to the shrewd devilry and bumbling incompetence of the last eight years. It ’s kind of unfair to send a guy with such potential to run a war-weary, economically depressed, globally-hated country, but who else would you want doing it right about now? So here are some pieces feeding the mania  today, a great day of great days. Goodbye George W. Douche. Welcome Barack Obama.

The indefatigable Robert McCrum on “transitional English”: which language will Obama be speaking today? English or Globish?

I won’t refer to this very often, but for the past two years or so I’ve been working on a book subtitled The Making of Global English for the 21st Century, in which I’ve been exploring the how and why of the ways in which global English has become a supranational phenomenon. Its working title is Globish [pronounced Globe-ish] and I’m constantly on the look-out for examples of what I think of as contemporary Globish.

Last week, there were two. The first involved Obama, the second (to move from the sublime to the ridiculous) Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The magnificent Martin Levin on Obama’s reading list: HE READS WILLINGLY AND EAGERLY?????

Everyone — at least everyone in the world of books — is almost as eager to know Barack Obama’s reading habits as his plans for the economy or U.S. foreign policy.

I’m aware that Karl Rove is constantly trying to tell us how surprisingly well-read President Bush is (this is the last time I’ll need to capitalize the P in President when mentioning him). The former White House eminence grise claims that the Chief read 95 books in 2006 and 51 the following year. Excuse me, but I’m skeptical: When does somebody with that (presumed) workload have time to read a book-and-a-half a week? I can believe that many have been put in front of him, or that some staffer might have briefed him on them, but not that he read them all.

Unless they were comic books.

Plus, he simply didn’t talk about books, or refer to them. He doesn’t seem bookish. He might have been a something-stained wretch, but it was certainly not ink.

Obama, on the other hand, is eager to talk about books, books he’s read, books that have shaped him. And, of course, he’s written two bestselling books entirely unghosted, i.e., all by himself, a rarity among political figures.

The BBC on inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander: a tough job to have…

Previous inaugural poets have not had the most impressive track records. Indeed, Ms Alexander is only the fourth to fill the role. Robert Frost was the first, at John F Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. It wasn’t his finest hour, as the sun and wind dazzled him so much that he abandoned the poem he had written for the occasion, and instead recited “The Gift Outright”, which he knew by heart.

President Clinton, too, had mixed success with his choices of poet – Maya Angelou the first time and Miller Williams the second (you are forgiven for saying “who he?“). The Republicans, it seems, are poet-phobic.

Walt Whitman once said: “To have great poetry there must be great audiences, too”. He may have been talking about the quality of a poet’s readership, but tomorrow, Ms Alexander’s verse may well be broadcast to more people than any poem ever composed. Will such an historic occasion give rise to historic poetry? The public voice in American poetry of course has its roots in Whitman but, interestingly, the poet who struck a chord the most with Americans after 9/11 was W H Auden, with his chilling: “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night”.

News bits

January 19, 2009

A president built from books

I would have thought he’d be squarer. As part of the pre-inauguration Obama lovefest, Michiko even gets in on the act, reminding us that, against all odds, a literate, well-read man is going to be running the free world as of tomorrow. Sweet merciful crap. I can’t believe it. (I love how she spends the entire article calling him “Mr. Obama”. Last chance for eight years!)

In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Bolaño rocks and rolls from the grave… is he worth it?

Does he live up to his hype? Shortly after we posted our discussion on Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in The Magazine, he came to the peak of his fame as a posthumous superstar. Now, I’m not saying we’re responsible for this—God knows the writer had some itty bitty part in creating his own name—but I am saying, and I believe it constitutes a serious contribution to this discussion, is: if we hadn’t contracted David Orr, Marcela Valdes and Carmine Starnino to comment on Robero Bolaño to then I certainly wouldn’t be able to link to this page here.

After publishing a poetry collection, Reinventing Love, in 1976, Bolaño left for Europe. The idea, he told an interviewer years later, was “to live outside literature. In Mexico I lived a very literary life. I was surrounded by writers and moved in a world where everyone was either a writer or an artist.” In Spain, “I had some writer friends, but gradually I made other sorts of friends. I did all sorts of jobs, of course … And I thought it was wonderful.” He spent time in Barcelona, enjoying the reverberations of the “great sexual explosion” that followed Franco’s death, and travelled the continent doing menial work: washing dishes, picking grapes, being night-watchman at a campground. A co-written novel appeared in 1984. Otherwise, he fell off the literary map, publishing little and toughing out a “vagabond” life that’s now at the heart of his legend. English-speaking journalists have often attributed his quasi-marginal existence to heroin addiction on the strength of his mention of methadone treatment in a magazine piece called “Beach”. Bolaño knew a lot about drink and drugs, but his widow, his estate and his friend Enrique Vila-Matas have dismissed the junkie story as an “absurd biographical error”.

Even so, he was not in good health by the time he acquired a fixed address, a Spanish wife and a couple of infant children. Fatherhood made him start writing prose seriously in an effort to support his family, and after learning in the early 90s that he had a problem with his liver, he holed up in his home on the Costa Brava and started turning out books at an extraordinary rate. In 1995, a novel he’d submitted caught the eye of Jorge Herralde, the founder of Anagrama, Spain’s leading publishing house. Three years later, Bolaño was famous. (In the US and UK, similarly, his writing has made its way from small imprints to heavyweight corporate publishing outfits.) He had eight novels and three story collections in print when the wait for a liver transplant finally killed him, and was known to have been working on a colossal magnum opus, 2666, for years. In lectures, articles and interviews, he had also laid out his combative views on the state of world literature, saving his most withering lines for García Márquez’s imitators, who’d filled the 80s, he said, with “a magical realism written for the consumption of zombies”.

1000 novels you must read

A Guardian series. Parts one, two and three. Here’s hoping you’ve got time left for them all. Tick tick tick. Feel that cold, bony hand on your shoulder? Shh. Don’t turn around or make any sudden movement. On the count of three, I’ll push Cheney in front of him and we’ll make a break for it. GO!

How to NOT write a novel

What are you doing wrong with that novel you have in the drawer? Everything. I guess you take this list and do the opposite of it. Let me offer some additional advice: explosions. There, I said it. Now get busy.

Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.

The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other’s homes, all of which is described in detail.

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