Hi everybody. I’m not dead yet! Though I don’t know when things will get back on track. But as some of you know, and others may have guessed, I recently separated from my beloved Lady Ninja, on very amicable terms, but still sadly, and I have a new house now. So all you interns, publicists and assorted editors need to update your databases so I still get your flack and RCs, etc.  .

What better gift to you than Loretta Lynn and Jack White singing a song about getting pissed in Portland??

“For the love of all that is holy–why?”

4 minutes and 38 seconds of love on YouTube

I’m still running those Questionless Books Interviews over at Open Book Toronto, where I’m writer in residence this month. Check out the recent additions since I last rapped at ya about Margaret Atwood:

• Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
• Richard Nash
• Christian Bök
• Julie Wilson
• Alana Wilcox
• Andrew Pyper
• Sina Queyras
• Hannah Sung

Today’s QBI at Open Book Toronto as part of my writer in residence gig there is with Margaret Atwood. Fun!

At its core, Publishing is… making anything public.

As opposed to Editing, which is… at best, helping to improve the quality of writing.

A Publisher should always… do his/her best. Provide lunch.

As opposed to an Editor, who should always… do his/her best. Provide tea.

Hello, my pretties. I’ll be back here in the new year, hopefully with some young, fresh talent helping me out (but you have to APPLY for that, people!), but until then, I’ll keep you up to date on what I’m doing over at Open Book Toronto, where I am Writer In Residence for November.

So far I have Questionless Books Interviews from:

Publicity Pro Elana Rabinovitch

Giller-nominated novelist Kathleen Winter

Novelist and ‘Ninja alum Claire Cameron

Literary photographer John W. MacDonald

Novelist and Humber School for Writers Head Antanas Sileika

Poet and journalist Lynn Crosbie

Librarian Alexandra Yarrow

Novelist and ‘Ninja co-Founder Peter Darbyshire

There are a few neat surprises coming. Check back here and/or check out OBT for more.

After starting with novelist and Ninja Peter Darbyshire yesterday, I’d like to switch perspective on the same questionless questions and go with public librarian Alexandra Yarrow. A long-time friend of Bookninja, Alex is a Supervising Librarian at the Ottawa Public Library (Rideau Branch).

I am… a public librarian

I am known to… type and read very, very fast, devour novels while slouching in wingback chairs and then share them with library patrons, offer library tours and free coffee, and sing in a high voice for storytime.

I do this in… skirts.

I do this because… We’re the people’s university! I feel strongly about the need for excellence in our profession, and service to all members of our local community. When I was getting my Masters in Library Science, I had this quote from librarian Wendy Newman on my kitchen whiteboard, and it’s still a touchtone for me: “Universal access to the universe ideas.” That’s the business (I hope) I am in.

Hi guys. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m writer in res over at Open Books Toronto, and I’m interviewing a bunch of lit types about the state of the industry, the differences between literary identities, and the future of books without ever asking them a question. First up, of course, is my old Ninja pal, Peter Darbyshire, author of the amazing new novel, The Warhol Gang. Go buy it now, then read the interview.

At its core, a Writer is… Someone who sits down at the computer every day, or at least most days, and writes until his soul is gone.

As opposed to an Author, who is… Someone who seizes any opportunity to not write, such as answering interview questions.

A Writer is responsible for… Civilization.

As opposed to an Author, who is responsible for… The continuing profits of distilleries.

Hi all, I’ll be the writer in “residence” for OBT this month. Please feel free to wander over and check out what I’m posting there. I’ll try to put up links here as well.

To be clear, I’m not dumping Bookninja; I’m just looking for help. I need a couple of people to help share the burden, but I’ll probably run things in the background and post as well. I just can’t do it all any more. If the people who join work out, they may indeed inherit the site one day, but it won’t be tomorrow.

So until the tap turns back on, set your RSS feeds to Bookninja, or check back regularly, in case there are flurries of activity. It’s not going anywhere just yet.

Well, as you can see, my life is moving on. Between the pressures of my family, work, artistic, and social lives, I’m unable to dedicate the time I used to to good old Bookninja. Truth be told, it’s also been pretty fucking tiring playing this character for seven years. That said, I’d like to take one last stab at saving the beast by offering two or three lucky young, hungry would-be bloggers the chance to join Bookninja as part of the editorial team. You need to know the spirit and scope of Bookninja, have an eye for the absurd and unusual as well as a good grasp of what interests our primary readers (industry folks, writers, would-be writers, readers, and sexy sexy librarians). The ideal candidate will also have OCD and a fetish for the serial comma.

Send me your basic writing resume as well as links to your clips to the .

All positions are unpaid, except in the adoration of your readership, basic ninjitsu training, and the general knowledge that you can make or break your friends and enemies the way a capricious child might stack blocks into an inukshuk-like human form and then smash them down moments later in a fit of tyrannical rage.

Until then, a few; in apology for absence:

• Guy charged for reading at the wheel (Fight the Power, man!)
• Survey says?!: Most Ontarians believe arts and culture important to quality of life, yet they still vote in ranting, anti-arts neanderthals if they think they’ll save a dime or two on taxes
• Peggy gets graphic with her T-Pals
• I saw Ken right after he got this and he giddily told me about it and showed the picture… I think he was genuinely star-struck to talk to an astronaut

This just made me snort coffee from my nose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx5jOOiSfIA

(A masterclass in the art of the book trailer that involves mildly adult language).

George, the original ‘Ninja, launched his book Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms at the Dora Keogh Pub in Toronto last night. The evening was great. My photos are horrible (Annie Leibovitz can breathe easy), but I hope they do something to evoke the spirit of the event.

Glimpse is George’s 5th volume of poetry. It’s already a bestseller and it makes people giggle.

Salty Ink recently described the idea behind the book:

An aphorism is a poetry-philosophy fusion, and something more accessible than either. It is the core thought upon which language is laid to construct a poem … minus the poem.

George read from Glimpse. Many of the aphorisms are confusing for a moment. You hear the words, knit your brows and, after a pause, think ahhh. From the reader’s perspective, it’s a satisfying process because they make you work and reward you for doing so. Hearing them in George’s voice made it all the more fun.

Here’s the man in action.

ECW editor Michael Holmes introduces George while wearing Silly Bandz on his wrist (if you happen to live with anyone under the age of 12, you will understand the significance of this).

Literary power couple Sarah Dunn, publicist for ECW Press and Steven W. Beattie of the Q&Q and That Shakespearean Rag. They are not so blurry in real life.

The poets came bearing somosas, David Day, Caroline Szpak, Robert Priest and Albert Moritz.

The National Post books people, Ron Nurwisah and Mark Medley, show us how they cope.

And a final photo contributed by Sarah Dunn that is so much better. Do I need a new camera, or is this an example of user error?

Mark Luk from Anansi, Ron Nurwisah, Claire Cameron (that’s me) Mark Medley and George.

Congratulations George!

Hi Everybody! I’ll be busy today all day and then I fly to Toronto on Monday to start 8 days of book touring. That basically means my posting here will be a the whim of stolen internet/Advil taken like salted peanuts (to cover the bad breath and tamp down the alcohol). I don’t know whether I’ll get a chance to post, so please check back, but don’t send hate mail if I’m not here. A world teeming with wealthy poetry sugar daddies awaits, and baby needs a new pair of shoes. Here are some event links for me.

Wordsworth Books Small Press Extravaganza
(Natalee Caple, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Evie Christie, George Murray, Cordelia Strube, Gary Barwin, Sheila Heti)
Monday, Oct 18 7pm
Starlight Lounge (map)
Waterloo, ON

George Murray launches Glimpse in Toronto
Wednesday, Oct 20 7pm
Dora Keogh (map)
Toronto, ON

George Murray and Jason Camlot in Montreal
Friday, Oct 22 7pm
Drawn & Quarterly (map)
Montreal, QC

Poetry Cabaret, WritersFest
(Peter Norman, Sandra Ridley, George Murray, MT Kelly)
Monday, Oct 25 8:30pm
Mayfair Theatre, 1070 Bank St. (map)
Ottawa, ON

In between and around all this will be beers and chicken wings. Like foam packing peanuts in a box from Amazon. Get my pages all bent and my corners protected from mishandling. Or something. Anyway, hope you can make it out to one of the events. Come say hi, and tell me you’re a ‘Ninja reader!

It used to be that bookstores and publishers supported author readings as part of a set of publicity strategies aimed at getting books into the reading public’s hands. But what happens when those physical books disappear (and therefore bookstores? and publishers?) and we have one device that can accommodate any text? Well, turns out the device manufacturers step in. Through , I learned that Kobo would be sponsoring an event featuring Gregrory Levey and and Rachel Shukert tomorrow night in Toronto. That got me thinking: what are the fundamental differences between the publisher/bookseller hosted/sponsored event or publicity strategy and one sponsored through a universal reading device like Kobo? Is there a difference, or are the players just changing? I asked Kobo for comment how what they’re doing is different or similar, and here’s what I got:

At one level, we come at this as booksellers — we want to. But more and more we’re starting to explore the social side of reading. We’re asking questions like: in a world where every store has every book, is the best store the one with the most interesting readers, connected in the most interesting ways? By connecting them, can they find books they otherwise would never have found? Or read a book more deeply? Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of times when reading is totally immersive, solitary and focused. But other times, reading is about ideas that want to be shared or fought over or debated. With us, those debates can rage around the pages themselves, as they’re being read. We can connect those readers in a way that no publisher or bricks & mortar bookseller ever could.”

Michael Tamblyn
EVP Content, Sales & Merchandising

Interesting wrinkle #1: Ben McNally’s will be on hand at this event to sell paper books while Kobo presumably hopes to sell ebooks. Ben’s a big guy, Michael. Better watch out.

The NBA shortlists have gone up. Some great poetry titles and poets here, including my friend James Richardson, who kindly blurbed may latest book. Fiction and non-fiction look good too. Also nice to see some of the judges (Samuel Delaney!)

Poetry:

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)

James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)

C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)

Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Fiction:

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Damn, I wish I had one in that 1970s O-Pee-Chee format with the stick on the front and puck on the back.

The GG shortlists were announced today in Toronto. Fiction includes Kathleen Winter, Sandra Birdsell, and Emma Donoghue, while poetry includes Richard Greene, Daryl Hine, and Sandy Pool. In theatre, Newfoundlander Robert Chafe was nominated for Afterimage, which I saw here at the Hall. Nice! And Bookninja pal Karen Connelly is up again for her non-fiction title Burmese Lessons. Congrats to all listed!

Is Amazon employing sockpuppeteers to go around to comment boards discussing Kindle to lay astroturf spam? Moby’s all up in they’s grill.

All of the messages came in within minutes of each other, although they all cited different authors, gave different email addresses, and came from different IP addresses. But there was one notable thing beyond their similarity: they all cited the same url.

Who knows why someone would go through such a laborious effort and then flag their fakery for me like that. More important is the evidence this provides that Amazon, as I have suspected all along, either fosters or more likely employs astroturfers — that is, people to conduct a fake grass-roots campaign in support of the company and its products and tactics.

Atwood doc follows her “unconventional” tour

Rushdie working on memoir of days in hiding

Jacobson’s Booker win a win for humour

Ottawa hosts slam event

Kids’ comics big at con (we read a few titles at our house, but most prominent is that loveable group of do-gooders “The Superfriends”)

Michael Schaub on bloggers makes me laugh

Which celebrity memoirs will set the industry ablaze this fall? I’m positively TINGLING with anticipation

Moby considers the differing styles and scopes of the Booker and the Not-the-Booker prizes in a rant-y piece.

The Booker Prize should be remembered mostly as an occasion for faulty decisions, shameless compromise, and remorse. There is no perfect system to separate the wheat from the chaff, and no rarified council that can pluck diamonds from the dross.  Jordison’s denigration of the Not The Booker as a “wrangling contest” and praise for the Booker itself merely demonstrates how little he understands the true nature of the aesthetic battleground.

Do the best books win? Usually no. Does this mean that literary prizes are meaningless? Not necessarily. In the case of the Not The Booker, the prize means that The Canal and Deloume Road are novels that, for whatever reasons, attract extremely passionate, vocal, and loyal readers. That is all. And that is probably enough.

While at the NYer, Adam Gopnik wonders, with his usual wit and elegance, similarly around the Nobel

The real reason that literary prizes are so prized, however, is that prize-giving is intrinsic to the purposes of poetry. From birds to bards, the urge to outdo the other singer is what makes us sing. Since the first strum on the oldest lyre, literature has been about competition and the possibility of recognition. Pindar, the father of lyric poetry, took as his chief subject the winning of games, and the spirit of the end-zone dance has been with us ever since. Horace satirized everything except his own appetite for fame. Milton mourned Lycidas not because he stood beyond all prizes but because he died before the prizes could be won. The subtlest souls still show up in Stockholm to make the speech. Fame, honor, the laurel, and the bays, this more even than getting back at the girls, or the boys, who left you for another—the writer’s other great motivation—is the poetic passion. (Even the idea of posthumous fame is merely the thought of a prize given while we are sleeping, and have left our muttering to others.)

The Finkler Question takes the Booker.

Mr. Jacobson, 68, beat out “C,” by Tom McCarthy, widely considered the favorite to win.

The author of 10 previous novels, Mr. Jacobson, who was born in Manchester, England, was on the long list for the Booker Prize twice before, for “Who’s Sorry Now?” in 2002 and “Kalooki Nights” in 2007.

He accepted the award to unusually enthusiastic and sustained applause at an awards ceremony in London.

“I’m speechless,” he told the audience. “Fortunately, I prepared one earlier. It’s dated 1983. That’s how long the wait’s been.”

Does winning a major award like the Booker boost sales? Well, that depends. Are you Canadian? Emma Donoghue this year, and Yann Martel overall are the big winners. In Canada popular wisdom seems to hold that only the Giller has this bump effect (here’s me talking about just that). BookNet Canada, can you confirm?

Last year it was Hilary Mantel, who won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her historical novel Wolf Hall, which examines the life of Thomas Cromwell, an advisor to Henry VIII.

But does winning the Booker guarantee an author a boom in sales? Here at the Datablog we’ve pulled together Nielsen BookScan’s sales figures of all 43 winners of the title since its inception in 1969 (the prize was a tie in 1974 and again in 1992).

Nielsen’s data runs from 1998 onwards, so sales of older books aren’t directly comparable, but the runaway winner of recent years is Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which won in 2002 and has taken over £9m and sold 1.3m copies so far, more than twice as many as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in second place.

Are parents pushing their kids to read so early that picture books are going the way of the dodo? If there is a decline in picture book sales, I seriously doubt this is the main factor. Yes, my first son read at 3, but it was BECAUSE of picture books that he was reading Stuart Little at 4, not despite them or because of me (except in that my genetic material is like the grey matter equivalent of water from the Holy Grail, yo). We essentially significantly limited TV time and the boy craved narrative; therefore, we got an early  reader. It’s not that difficult to figure out what happened. And even now that he’s 7 and reading from the 9-12 wall at the store, we don’t eschew the picture books. When I left for work this morning, in fact, he was switching between a YA title, Silverwing, to a picture book by Jamie Lee Curtis (no shit). Yes, he’s read all of EB White and The Hobbit and the Ga-Hoole owls and Narnia and and and… but the picture book was his gateway there, not something we lept past. Booksellers, are you seeing similar trends at your stores? What do you think is the main factor, if so?

“So many of them [picture books] just die a sad little death, and we never see them again,” said Terri Schmitz, the owner.

The shop has plenty of company. The picture book, a mainstay of children’s literature with its lavish illustrations, cheerful colors and large print wrapped in a glossy jacket, has been fading. It is not going away — perennials like the Sendaks and Seusses still sell well — but publishers have scaled back the number of titles they have released in the last several years, and booksellers across the country say sales have been suffering.

The economic downturn is certainly a major factor, but many in the industry see an additional reason for the slump. Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.

Why does anyone even bother quoting stats from Scholastic in a piece like this? If picture books are down there, it’s probably because they’re making room for more TV-tie-ins and video games and plastic shit to sell to kids.

Booker tonight… McCarthy remains favourite—Guardian’s Not-The-Booker winners here

Orange prize drops new writers award in favour of online bookclub (not a joke)

Steig Larsson instigates fierce battle between cardinals and ordinals

Dilbert guy gives WSJ pointers on how to write comedy

JK tops list of Britain’s most influential women, driving up shares of cosmetics and industrial spackle companies worldwide

Bodleian Library rents a couple trailers at U-Store facility in western New Jersey

Desperate author tosses book at Obama—the real news story here being he wasn’t branded a terrorist and tased to a crispy pie-crust texture

Books you can’t help but devour (though in the case of Atlas Shrugged, I suppose you wouldn’t need a knife to divide it up, would you…?)

On Penguin’s new Allen Lane imprint

I wasn’t sure I wanted to open a link to this headline: “Seven authors who wrote while nude“… I should have listened to that little voice telling me not to

Bookninja may have originated the dissatisfaction at Canada Reads only including novels by asking readers to use their top 40 voting system to “write-in” poetry and short fiction candidates, but others have run with it. The National Post has launched a “Canada Reads Poetry” horserace that will be conducted online.

Canadian poets are the unsung heroes of Canadian literature. Novelists and short story writers are usually the ones recognized at galas and award ceremonies, get their work turned into movies and have celebrities talk up their books. Poets are lucky to get a grant or two or a free drink at the bar.

We at The Afterword want to change that. Which is why we’re announcing Canada Reads Poetry. Next month, we will run a series of essays, each one arguing in favour of a different poetry collection that the country should be reading. Think of it as a poetic version of a certain long-running battle of the books program.

A couple days ago I urged you to send a message to CBC by voting for something other than a novel in their Canada Reads books-of-the-decade poll, thereby using their own system to call for change. If you haven’t already done so, and you have no actual novel you feel strongly enough about to support over this symbolic protest, I urge you to drop by. Here’s what I wrote:

Inventory by Dionne Brand

This is one of the most important books of the last decade. It’s timely, timeless, and painfully beautiful. Brand is a master poet working at the top of her field, yet the worth of Inventory goes deeper than the beauty of the lyric and explores questions of social, environmental and emotional relevance.

Everyone in Canada should read this book. It’s not a novel. But why should Canada read only novels?

George Murray, Bookninja

Get on over and say something. And then encourage others to do the same on your own blogs/Twitter/Facebook accounts.

What is this mess? It’s a Harry Potter novel, done as a hand-written spreadsheet by Lord Volderowling herself, plotting out in advance the whole of Order of the Phoenix. Nice!

Mario Vargas Llosa gets the sidebar/critical whoisthisguy?/reappraisal treatment in virtually every set of arts pages today. Here are a few.

NYT

Guardian

LAT

NPR

National Post

The Globe is still running AP pieces.

Hunter S. Thompson’s cover letter in application for a job at the Vancouver Sun

Stan Lee dreams of NHL players in spandex—who doesn’t, right?

The National Post ran an aphorism contest last week in honour of my new book Glimpse… I judged it blind and the winners include some suprising names!

Google goes over big in Frankfurt

World’s biggest book is biggest book—in the world!

French pubs refuse to work with Andrew Wylie (played here by an over-acting Hugo Weaving)

Counterpoint is closing it’s NYC office (eek! They house not only Soft Skull, but also I think are Geoffrey Hill’s American publisher…!)

iPad now top-selling gadget ev-AR!

Jeanette Winterson: horror writer

Stanley Fish on Hollywood’s attempt at lit crit: Howl

Apparently the Brits have an entire day for poetry, which is about 1,439 more minutes than any other English-speaking country. Sigh. So what does a “poetry day” mean to you. Don’t ask me that. My answer may not be as spritely as some.

This guy uses a PDA and laser scanner to get real-time data on used books found at library sales, junk shops, and in used book stores and purchases the undervalued ones to resell at a profit. Is he doing something skeezy or just making a (quasi-ethical) buck? He doesn’t seem too sure himself.

My scanner lies at the end of a cartridge that is fitted into a Dell PDA—a species of technology now obsolete for nearly every purpose but this one. Anyone with a smartphone can scan barcodes on books, but these people aren’t the competition, exactly. Smartphone scanner applications, which interpret photographic images of barcodes and then look up the corresponding products on the Web, work too slowly to be tools for the professional. With the PDA and laser scanner, I work at the speed of the retail cashier.

My PDA shows the range of prices that other Amazon sellers are asking for the book in question. Those listings offer me guidance on what price to set when I post the book myself and how much I’m likely to earn when the sale goes through. The scan happens fast and the prices are stored locally, in a database that I download onto the device from a third-party company. If, according to the settings I’ve plugged in, a book is sufficiently valuable, the program shows me a green “BUY” bar across the top. If it’s a dud, I see a red bar: “REJECT.”

When I first started this work, I would wake up every morning with fingers stiff from prying apart books in order to get a better look, and a clear shot at the barcode. On average, only one book in 30 will have a resale value that makes it a “BUY.” One man’s trash is, of course, nearly always another man’s trash. When I find a good one, I get a little feeling of violent achievement, and I hide the book away immediately. (Sometimes resellers will carry blankets around to throw over their piles of treasures.)

Seamus Heaney has won the Forward Prize for his 12th collection, Human Centipede Chain. Heaney is really just about the best there is out there when he’s on, so no complaints here

Hughes poem about Plath suicide discovered

Tolstoy’s wife has story to tell

Hollowing out your books to store shit like a D&D obsessed 12-year-old tutorial

Australopithicine: the new sparkly heart-throb

Daily Dose of Digital

eBook piracy on the rise, yarrr

Does the future look e for Frankfurt?

Google editions lost in promise

(See what I did there?) The shit-eating-grinner pictured here is responsible for knicking Jonathan Franzen’s glasses and has got himself some ink in GQ. Where does he go from here? Next up: getting tased at a Tony Blair reading.

“We stumbled across this event whilst in a cab on the way through to Kensington and when stopped at the door, not quite dressed for the occasion, a bit of wavy hand rhetoric was enough to let us through into the private party. We sat drinking excessive champagne for a while and talking to some of the guests there until I realised just how dull it all was. If you’re going to gatecrash a party, the highlight of it surely can’t consist of several predictable nervous speeches and vacuous conversations. So I decided to do something.

I’d mentioned several times to my accomplice how much I admired Franzen’s frames and thought that they deserved to be the subject of a hostage-ransom situation. After getting a pen from the bar staff and some paper I devised a short ransom note and we vaguely mentioned to some of the guests what my intentions were. Without thinking about it for too long, I planned my escape route and then passed the ransom note along to be delivered to the victim once I’d made my move.

Surely deeper analysis and star-worship to come.

Nobel site

Guardian

NYT/AP

Amazon boldly charges more for some new ebooks than the paper

Cormac headed for a Nobel?

Enhanced ebooks are the new ebook

Paul Auster, now available for Playstation

Portable libraries of lighthouse keepers

Forget the galleys

Bookies close down betting on Booker after McCarthy tipped to win

Richard Nash’s Cursor launched

The lit world is abuzz with chatter of the Giller Shortlist, which is probably the healthiest vindication of a major award to come along in decades. It’s chockablock with exciting, dangerous, and unusual writing, it’s varied in form and spreads the recognition around like butter pushed out to the crusty edges of the publishing-sandwich’s seedy bread. I mean, the list even made Steven Beattie squee with delight. I’ve never even seen him smile.

Toronto Star

Globe and Mail

National Post

CBC’s annual horse race, Canada Reads, in which a panel of celebrity guests gather on the radio to pretend they’ve read the other celebrities’ championed books as well as their own, is celebrating it’s 10th year by compiling a list of 40 essential Canadian novels of the last decade, from which this year’s selections will be drawn. Why only novels? Why not “books”? Or  “fiction”? Or “fiction and poetry”? If you read the selection below, they indeed to seem to have conflated the word “novels” with the word “books”. Have the books of short stories and poems from the last decade been non-essential? Or are they just not “books”? This list will be compiled by public suggestion (which is so open to rigging from publicity departments it’s not even funny), so unless you have a specific novel in mind that you actually want to vote for, I’m asking you to use your vote to suggest a book of poetry or short fiction. Sure, it’s a throw-away, but like a write-in candidate or a purposely spoiled ballot, it sends a message. Hopefully they’ll notice.

But Canada Reads has also brought unexpected others — like the almost-forgotten classic Rockbound, the nearly out-of-print comedy King Leary by Paul Quarrington and the small press publication Fruit by Brian Francis — to the forefront of the Canadian literary landscape. Canada Reads is a battlefield, a mystery, a comedy and a tragedy, but, most of all (and most important), it’s a celebration. And who doesn’t like a good party?

So, this year, in honour of the many milestones Canada Reads and Canadian literature have celebrated in the past 10 years, we’re mixing it up. As Jian Ghomeshi announced on Q this morning, instead of giving the panelists free reign to choose whatever books they like, we’re going to give them a few parameters: it has to have been published in the past 10 years, and it has to be selected from a list: the top 40 essential Canadian novels of the past decade.

Hmm, a list you ask? How will this list be populated? Who gets to determine which books are “essential?” This is where you come in! Throughout the month of October, we’ll be soliciting people’s choices for the “essential Canadian novel of the past decade.” Again, it has to be a Canadian novel published after January 1, 2000, in English or translated into English. All books are game, even if they were already on Canada Reads!

Youngish, handsome author, named something like “Jonathan Franzen”, assaulted. Authorities initially stymied. BY LAUGHTER!

Around 8pm, two men, claiming to work for Puffin, gatecrashed the party at the Serpentine Gallery and approached Franzen. One snatched his glasses and escaped, before the other handed the stunned author a ransom note and also fled into Kensington Gardens.

The note read: “$100,000 – Your glasses are yours again!” and left a Hotmail address.

As news spread around an incredulous party, a police helicopter was tasked to search for the thieves, who had fled across the Serpentine. One of them was apprehended hiding in the bushes and Franzen’s glasses were returned to the author unharmed. Press Books m.d. John Bond said: “Franzen got his glasses back and will not be pressing charges as he sees it all as a harmless prank.”

Expect Frankfurt to dominate book news over the next little while, and expect me to ignore most of it. Unless it gets interesting, as here where Douglas Rushkoff talks about eschewing the middlemen and leaving Random House for a consumer-based sales model—selling books directly to people the way someone who had snatched the glasses from a famous author might directly sell them to people through an online auction website such as ebay.

DR: I’m not really privy to the marketing. From the surface, the publishers are selling to completely different constituencies. Random House is selling to Barnes and Noble while OR is direct marketing to consumers. So these are really different models, I’m sure. Random House has to think about a whole big picture — everything from Ingram to Amazon. John only has to think about the buy button on his own site. No sell-ins, no returns. He’s got an easier job, from that perspective.

The main differences for me have been my level of direct involvement, which with OR Books has been greater. For me, this is a good thing, because I’ve been in books for a while and think I make valuable contributions. I’ve gotten to influence everything from the cover and font to press release and the strategy approaching NPR.

Of course, they’re more free to involve me because there’s no corporate politics or set policy. People in “real” publishing have bosses and departments and methods. So editors aren’t told sell-in figures, publicists have to weigh booking one author vs. another on the same show, and people are doing a lot of their work blind.

The advantage, of course, is that when you work under a big corporate imprint, you get a network of salespeople to put you into stores, you get noticed by reviewers and publications who balk at independent presses, and you get the possibility of academic or other releases. Plus, you get paid before you write the book. The big publisher can fund a year or two of research and writing and that’s no small thing. And at just a few publishers — and I’d have to say Random House is one of them — you get to be part of the continuity of publishing culture. It took decades or more to be built, and there is a sense that you’re working in a tradition.

Whether I work with a big publisher or a little one, though, I know I’m largely responsible for getting the word out. It’s a different world than it used to be, and authors are responsible for making the contacts that announce the existence of a book. So far, independents are a little better at accepting this reality.

But consensually, of course. Davidar’s next novel will appear with his long time press, and my old motherland, McClelland & Stewart. And why not? His prose didn’t grope anybody—grope like a man might be forced to grope had his glasses been ripped from his face at a party and held for ransom before being retrieved from the bushes by police who had a helicopter in the air to find them.

On Monday, it was announced that McClelland and Stewart has acquired the former Penguin Canada president and publisher’s new novel, Ithaca. The novel, according to a press release, is “set in the international world of book publishing.”

It will be published in the fall of 2011, and must already be counted among the most-anticipated books of next year.

Davidar’s last novel, The Solitude of Emperors, which was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, was also published by M&S in 2007; Davidar and M&S president and publisher Doug Pepper have a long-standing friendship.

“We’re thrilled to be publishing Ithaca,” Pepper said in a statement. “With this book, David turns his keenly observant and passionate eye on a subject he knows well, giving us a rich, layered, and poignant novel about the publishing industry at a time of its greatest change in a century. Honest, witty, and edgy, the book’s message is ultimately hopeful, about the power of great story-telling and how it has endured and, despite the cataclysmic changes of the last several years, will continue to endure.”

Philip Roth says technology blurs the edges of our thinking—blurs it like the wearing of someone else’s glasses which have been snatched from their face at a party and are now being paraded about in front of a camera for the shits and giggles of people on Facebook, hopefully.

“The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people’s reach anymore,” he said.

Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted, he said.

“Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it,” Roth said.

Roth does not plan to buy any kind of e-reading device such as Amazon’s Kindle. “I don’t see what the point is for me,” he said. “I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can’t stand change anyway.”

Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers, “Nemesis” — clocking in at about 56,000 words — is Roth’s latest in a cycle of short novels.

You see, Roth noted humorously, “I am with the times.”

We have to be careful about our strategies around literature in translation—as careful as the quick-handed grab of one man stealing another’s glasses at a party full of shocked sycophants. Better yet, here is genius author Michael Cunningham examining the entire process of translation—examining as though peering through thick-rimmed spectacles that have yet to be ripped from his face.

Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.

The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.

Canada’s literary answer to the Oscars, the Giller Prize, has released its shortlist like a pack of starved hounds set loose in a nursery school. Chronic small press whiners silenced, short story writers placated, families torn assunder, prodigal sons returned. The drama is thicker than Jonathan Franzen’s glasses. (Also, four!? Methinks the jury hath some tension of its own.)

• David Bergen for THE MATTER WITH MORRIS, Harper Collins
• Alexander MacLeod for LIGHT LIFTING, Biblioasis
• Sarah Selecky for THIS CAKE IS FOR THE PARTY, Thomas Allen Johanna Skibsrud for THE SENTIMENTALISTS, Gaspereau Press
• Kathleen Winter for ANNABEL, Anansi

This is the day Bookninja was made for, kiddies. It’s like some giant hand of a god descended from the sky and handed me the most fun news story of all time and then left, stealing my glasses as it went. More soon when I have time to post.

You know, if the guys from my old judo dojo, where I used to take and teach many classes a week, heard that I had gone outside my house on Friday night at 3:30am to break up a fight in which an unconscious guy was being beaten and kicked in the street, and that in that moment I had been forced to take the batshit-crazy aggressor down with a shime waza (choking technique) called hadaka jime (naked choke), and just before the guy had gone out like a blown candle I had relented and asked if him he was ready to give up, and that he had said “Yes,” and that I then had said, “I’m going to let you up… Promise you won’t take a swing at me,” to which he had nodded again, and I had let him up and turned away to retrieve my glasses at which point he had hit me with a wicked punch in the left temple, and I was then forced to turn around and drop him, well, I think they’d shake their heads and say, George, you’re a fucking idiot. But that’s just speculation.

The dangers of the royal “we”

On awards and subjectivity

Rowling sets the pedophile world aflame with talk of more teenaged wand wagglers

Did Franzen’s HC people in the UK used the printer as a scapegoat for their fuckup?

A Guardian blogger calls for a return to opulence in the novel. I would add my voice to a return to oppulence in the advance for a novel. Or at least the advance for my novel.

Decadence has its roots in texts such as Petronius’s Satyricon, which date from as far back as the fall of the Roman empire. But the movement was picked up centuries later by the outlandish perversity of De Sade, Thomas De Quincey’s opium-induced chimeras, the Romantics’ cult of the individual and the Gothic morbidity of Poe, before finding its apogee in late 19th-century France and England, particularly in the writing of Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde. The defining work of this period is Huysmans’s Against Nature, famously thought to be the “poisonous French novel” referred to in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Toby Litt notes that its protagonist, Des Esseintes, a man whose life is given over entirely to the pursuit of sensual pleasures, is “more likely to attract one when one is an adolescent”; certainly as a teenager I found it hard not to love decadent literature, with its emphasis on artifice, deliberate perverseness, art-for-art’s sake, sensuality and degeneration. All of this, couched in frequently beautiful and sometimes frankly purple language, was heady indeed: a shot of absinthe courtesy of literature’s Green Fairy.

A century on, though, and where does its legacy lie? I know I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for those bejewelled, subversive, gloriously unhealthy texts. The wider culture is awash with artists inspired by them: Marc Almond, Pete Doherty, Baz Luhrman, Pedro Almodóvar and the Chapman brothers to name just a few. Casting around for an equivalent literary line of succession, however, proves more problematic.

Who gets hurt in the agency model of ebook pricing? Backlist authors (e.g. you).

Backlist authors are suffering as a result of the transition to the agency model in the US, according to the editor in chief of Authorlink.com.

Doris Booth warned more and more authors will defect to Amazon, and its 70% royalty rate as a result. The comments chime with those made at a Publishers Weekly panel earlier in the week, where Paul Aiken, executive director for the Authors Guild, argued that authors were losing out to publishers at current digital royalty rates.

It’s already tough enough to be a working mom in a society bent on ensuring you can’t do both things with any measure of success or respect, but try adding being a lit person to that. The Guardian’s wonderful Alison Flood, staring down the sights of maternity leave, ponders whether she’ll even get to read; while the LAT offers a guide for moms who want to write that book without shaking the baby.

So like any good working mother, I’m offering you a list of what I think you actually need. (You will notice this list doesn’t include “an idea”; I’m going to assume you have one of those.)

1. A supportive partner. I know single working mothers who write, and they are superhuman savants and out of my league. I couldn’t have done it without my husband, who is also a writer. Rejection makes it easy to quit, particularly when you already have a job, but after that second book did not sell, he forced me to give it one more shot. I told him I would need three hours every day to do it, and because I cannot think before 8 a.m., it would have to come in the evening. So for more than a year, I went off the Mommy clock at 8:30. Richard was in charge of bedtime, and I sat down at the dining room table and wrote until 11 or 11:30.

2. Kids who read. It helped that the children could understand what was making Mommy so cranky — she’s writing a book! (Frankly it made more sense to them than my job as TV critic, which they still refuse to consider work.)

3. Kids who are involved in activities that require practice of more than one hour. Somewhere in the editing process of “Oscar Season,” our third child came along and the nighttime schedule stopped working — Mommy can’t ignore a nursing baby no matter what time it is. So, much of “The Starlet” was written on soccer fields, gymnasium bleachers and during choir rehearsals.

It goes on to 10 points…

Ironically, it’s Technology Review website that’s arguing not to count the book out yet. The ebook backlash is coming. It’s not about dominating or disappearing, it’s about market share, say the tech gurus.

The backlash against ebooks by those who aren’t so in love with technology for its own sake has yet to begin, but it’s coming. Ebooks are adequate for reading novels, but the makers of the Kno, (in)famous for being the world’s most gigantic ebook, believe that their technology is the only way to replace the specialized class of books we rely on for our education — textbooks. If they’re right, the experiment in Clearwater, Florida is bound to run into problems.

And as for the death-by-2015 predictions of Negroponte, it’s just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. The reason is simple: unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it’s not immediately clear that an ebook is in all respects better than what it succeeds.

So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it’s that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That’s value that no ebook reader can unlock.