Some Links

• The Poetry Archive: "The Poetry Archive is the world's premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. You can enjoy listening here, free of charge, to the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past."
• A few days ago the New York Times released its usual 100 book "Notable" list, but now we get the really good stuff: the Times top ten of the year. The big surprise: an appearance by Curtis Sittenfeld's "calm and memorably incisive first novel," Prep.
• Scott and Ed and others have already noted this, but I just got around to reading it: the NYRB piece on our latest National Book Award winner, William T. Vollmann.
• Also noted by many litblogs, the ever-multitasking Bud has launched a sleek litblog network/aggregator/community: MetaxuCafe. Very cool.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:32 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Pete Lit's List

At the end of the year lots of newspapers and media outlets release "best of the year" lists. It's nice to have a record of the year's literary highlights, but the lists do not represent the experience of any real readers. Sure, we may read handful of brand new books each year, but these are likely to be outweighed by older books - books that we are finally getting around to or books that we have just discovered, books two years old and books 200 years old. All these books taken together represent a year in reading, and as a counterpoint to all of those "best of" lists, I've asked authors, bloggers and readers to send along the best of from their year in reading.

For today, I asked Pete from Pete Lit to share with us the best books he read this year and he sent back a nice list. Chicagoans may notice that Chicagoans are well-represented here. Says Pete:

My top choice is An Unfinished Season by Ward Just. The writing is just beautiful, and Just wonderfully evokes a bygone Chicago era.

Runners-Up:

• William Trevor, A Bit on the Side
• Joe Sacco, Palestine
• Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here

Honorable Mention:

• Stuart Dybek, I Sailed With Magellan
• Kirby Gann, Our Napoleon in Rags
• Ian McEwan, Saturday
• Davy Rothbart, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas
• Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
• John McNally, The Book of Ralph

- C. Max Magee @ 11:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Three bests from Language Hat

Last year I asked a bunch of people, "what was the best book you read all year?" And throughout the month of December I posted the responses. Well, I'm doing it again this year and it looks to be even bigger and better. This time around, we'll be hearing from authors, bloggers and readers. Our first batch of books comes from the impeccable language blog Language Hat, an essential read if you have an interest in languages, linguistics and words, or even if you think you have an interest in those things. Given his expertise, I asked that he include reference books in his picks.

The New Oxford American Dictionary is a delight to look at and to use. I especially appreciate the "core sense" system, which means that the first definitions given "represent typical, central uses of the word in question in modern standard English," far more useful than Merriam-Webster's historical ordering (which often leaves the unwary user thinking some obsolete sense is the basic meaning). It's an encyclopedic dictionary, meaning proper nouns are included along with all the other words; as they say, "names such as Shakespeare and Mississippi are as much part of the language as words such as drama or river." It tries to "break down the barriers to understanding specialist vocabulary," providing comprehensible explanations as the main definition and including technical information as subentries. And of course it draws on the extensive Oxford data collections. More at Language Hat.

Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language has its problems (mainly stemming from an ill-advised attempt to cram a technical hypothesis about the origins of the Semitic verbal system into a book for the general reader), but it's written with style and humor, and it was a real pleasure to read a book on historical linguistics by somebody who knows what he's talking about. If enough people read this book, I won't have to work so hard to introduce the basic facts of language change. More at Language Hat.

Maria Benet's Mapmaker of Absences mixes formal pleasure with lived emotion and exact perception; I've found myself returning to it often during some difficult times this past year. I prefer poetry that lets tradition inform the emotions and needs of the present, and I'm glad I can still find books that give me that pleasure. More at Language Hat.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:40 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More football books

Last week I wrote a brief post about football books and wondered why there aren't more of them, especially compared to baseball. In yesterday's Baltimore Sun, reporter Childs Walker takes that same idea and runs with it much farther than I did in his comprehensive article. Walker's impetus for writing the piece is a trio of recently released football books: John Feinstein's first pro football book, Next Man Up, David Halberstam's book about Bill Belichick, The Education of a Coach, and Allen Barra's bio of Bear Bryant, The Last Coach

Walker cites many compelling theories as to why baseball books dominate the sports literature landscape even though football is the more popular sport (at least in terms of TV ratings).

"It's funny how few good books get written about the passions of people who don't read books," Michael Lewis wrote in the New Republic. "There are vast tracts of human experience that, because of the sort of humans having the experience, go ignored by talented writers. Football is one of them."

Baseball is the older game, having risen to popularity at a time when the written and spoken word were the only ways for many fans to experience players and games. Football, by contrast, found much of its audience through television, and its early history feels cut off.

Walker goes on to run through several football books that are worthy of the mantle "sports literature," starting with the two books I mentioned last week, George Plimpton's Paper Lion and Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer, a guard for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, and Dick Schaap. Also mentioned are a pair of novels - progenitors of the Oliver Stone film Any Given Sunday, it seems - North Dallas Forty by former Cowboys receiver Peter Gent and Semi-Tough by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins. And finally several non-fiction books about football: H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger's book "of a Texas town's obsession with high school football" in Friday Night Lights (also recently a movie); Mark Bowden's study of the Philadelphia Eagles, Bringing the Heat; When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss' bio of Vince Lombardi and Mark Kriegel's bio, Namath. These books all sound like a great way to pass the time for those six days between Sundays.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The IMPAC very long list

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is unique in that the longlist (or pool of nominees) is not created from submissions by publishers. Instead libraries throughout the world nominate books, resulting in a very long longlist that spans many countries. Eventually, the list is whittled way down to a shortlist by a panel of judges who then goes on to name a winner. Another result of the nominating process is that, by the time the award is handed out on June 14th, 2006, the winning book could be as much as two years old. Despite all this, a look at the past winners reveals an engaging and diverse batch of books. Still, perhaps this award could be better than it is. The Literary Saloon identifies some possible improvements, including a way to cut out the nationalism that pervades the longlist.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

End of year book lists

With Thanksgiving come and gone, the end of year best book lists are beginning to arrive. The New York Times list is 100 strong as usual, and despite not being particularly exclusive, the accolade is sure to grace the covers of the paperback editions of many of these books. It's good marketing really. Something about that word "Notable" (along with the Times name, of course) on the cover of a book makes browsing readers want to pick it up.

The Guardian has a less conventional list up. For that list, a number of well-known writers share their favorite books of the year. Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black makes an impressive showing, cited by John Banville, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith. Mantel herself names John McGahern's Memoir and The Tyrannicide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson. The New Yorker ran a substantial piece on Mantel earlier this year. I love that the Guardian runs features like this, and I wish that there were an American paper that would do the same thing with American writers.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Upcoming books: Perlman, Japin, Lovric

Australian author, Elliot Perlman scored a minor hit last year with his novel Seven Types of Ambiguity, and now Riverhead is capitalizing on that success by putting out a collection of Perlman's stories, originally published in Australia in 2000, but yet to appear in the States. The book, called The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, contains nine stories. The title story of this collection was good enough to be included in the The Penguin Century of Australian Stories.

In his second novel, In Lucia's Eyes, Dutch author Arthur Japin, takes an episode out of Casanova and runs with it. The novel follows Lucia, Casanova's first love, who leaves him after she is disfigured by small pox, and, after years as a secretary, housekeeper and veiled prostitute, encounters Casanova 16 years later in Amsterdam. Japin's first novel, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, received a lot of praise. This new book has a different translator, and some early reviews - PW calls the translation "sometimes stilted" - wonder if In Lucia's Eyes is worse off for it. Knopf has an excerpt up.

Michelle Lovric's novel, The Remedy covers similar ground - a 17th century woman, the colorfully named Mimosina Dolcezza, traveling across Europe before encountering her true love. Dolcezza is enamored with Valentine Greatrakes, whose business is concocting the remedies that the book is named for. The Remedy was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, which had this to say about the book: "Funny, mischievous and thoroughly melodramatic, written by an author with a poetic way with verbs. And featuring a slew of original recipes so you can concoct eighteenth century remedies in the comfort of your own home." An excerpt is available here.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Clear Cut Press

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer points to a small press that is "one of the most intriguing additions to the Northwest literary landscape in recent years." Clear Cut Press in Astoria, Oregon, distinguishes itself by publishing books in "handy pocket-size editions, inspired by a popular Japanese format, and with detachable covers with arresting images," and by splitting profits 50/50 with its authors, a cut far higher than authors can expect to get at a typical publishing house. The Post-Intelligencer calls books like Matt Briggs' debut novel, Shoot the Buffalo worthy of more prominent presses. Clear Cut also put out a collection of essays, Orphans, early this year by Charles D'Ambrosio who frequently appears in the New Yorker.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The literary crush

The "My First Literary Crush" piece that Slate posted on Tuesday, in which various notable folks discussed the books that they swooned over in their younger years, has generated some great blog posts. Ed, Jenny and Liam (guesting at Old Hag) all wrote about their literary crushes. Before I get to mine, I noticed some entertaining juxtapositions in the Slate piece. In particular, it was interesting to see that George Eliot was a favorite of both Neal Pollack (who loved Middlemarch) and Christopher Hitchens (a fan of The Mill on the Floss).

My first literary crushes, in high school, were for Kurt Vonnegut, T.C. Boyle and John Irving. In college, I first read Ernest Hemingway and was quite taken. Feel free to share your literary crushes in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:28 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Short shorts in your inbox

Short short stories, that is. For nearly four years now, writer Bruce Holland Rogers has been offering an e-mail subscription to his short stories. For $5 a year, subscribers get 36 stories - 3 a month delivered by e-mail - that range in length from 500 to 1500 words. So far he's got 600 subscribers from about 60 countries. Rogers describes his stories as "an unpredictable mix of literary fiction, science fiction, fairy tales, mysteries, and work that is hard to classify." It's a neat idea and a good example of how writers can use the Internet to go directly to their readers rather than through publishers and literary magazines.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:49 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A football book

I've written often of books about baseball (especially ones by Roger Angell). Baseball values words over images - I prefer listening to games on the radio to watching them on television, for example - and so lends itself well to the page. Football is a different story, entirely. If one doesn't see these men bash each other on cold, gray Sunday afternoons, then what's the point really? Reading about a spectacle kind of defeats the purpose. And this probably explains why there isn't much "football literature" to speak of. The only football book I've ever read is George Plimpton's Paper Lion, which, though terrific, is really more about Plimpton than football. Most of the other football books I've seen have been the ghostwritten memoirs of retired Hall of Famers. But the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley, in his series which "reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past" recently wrote about a football book that deserves to sit amongst all those baseball books on the shelves of sports literature. Instant Replay was a collaboration between Jerry Kramer, a guard for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, and Dick Schaap, a sportswriter.

By unlikely but entirely happy coincidence, Kramer had been persuaded to keep a diary of his 1967 season by Dick Schaap, an uncommonly capable and convivial sports journalist. Schaap knew that Kramer was intelligent, literate, observant and thoughtful, and suspected -- rightly -- that he could provide a unique view of pro football from its innermost trenches: the offensive line.

The book sounds like a treat for any football fan, especially at this time of year.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Whitbread finalists

Sometimes it seems like all there is to write about is book awards. The National Book Awards are handed out, but wait, here are the Whitbread finalists. The Whitbread, Britain's second most prestigious prize after the Booker, is, it seems to me, at a disadvantage. Since the Whitbread comes out only a couple of months after the Booker, the selections are compared in the press. If the Whitbread too closely mirrors the Booker, it loses some of its punch, but if the judges pick a shortlist with no overlap with the Booker, the Whitbread is criticized for being too obscure. This year, the only overlap with the Booker is that they have both shortlisted Ali Smith's The Accidental. As was much remarked when the Booker list was announced, many well-known authors have books out this year: Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes, among others. None of those made the Whitbread list, a fact that seems likely to have prompted head judge Philippa Gregory's defensive sounding remark in the Guardian: "Our shortlist may confuse the book trade. We are not saying these are the only good books. They are books which happened to resonate powerfully with the judges of the moment." The list does include two notable names: Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown and Nick Hornby for A Long Way Down. Rounding out the fiction list is Cotton by Christopher Wilson (which, since it is going by a different title in England, has been much misrepresented in the press, as the Literary Saloon points out.) For the finalists in all the categories, visit the Whitbread site.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:41 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book bits - Sherlock, the Unbearable Dave Matthews, Renaming Google Print

Stanford "will rerelease a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine."

Maciej Ceglowski suggests that Milan Kundera "is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless." And offers up a number of Eastern European books that young lovers might give to one another instead of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Google Print has been renamed Google Book Search. "Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit -- which of course it won't."

- C. Max Magee @ 1:28 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Vollmann and Didion win National Book Awards

After a decidedly quiet run up to this year's National Book Awards, the winners have been announced. William T. Vollmann, known, it seems, more for his graphomania than any of his books in particular, has won for his novel, Europe Central. Back in April, when the book came out, Tom LeClair in the New York Times called Europe Central Vollmann's "most welcoming work, possibly his best book." In the next sentence, LeClair calls Vollmann "an off-putting writer, sometimes intentionally so," and perhaps the judges figured now, when Vollmann has written a more accessible (or shorter, though only for Vollmann could 832 pages be considered short) book, is the time to give him the plaudits he deserves.

The non-fiction award went, unsurprisingly, to Joan Didion for her heart-wrenching and much praised memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called it "a lacerating yet peculiarly stirring book."

The other winners are: for poetry, Migration by W.S. Merwin and for young people's literature, The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. You can see all the Finalists listed here.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Richard Nash of Soft Skull on Google Print

I've been writing a lot about Google Print lately. We know that the major publishers are not happy about Google's book-related efforts, but I wanted to know what small publishers thought about the chance to put their books online via Google. I decided to get in touch with Richard Nash, publisher of Brooklyn's Soft Skull Press. Overall he is pretty happy with the program, and while the revenue generated from the program is, at this point, nonexistent, Google Print seems to be a good tool for publicizing his books. I reached him via a-mail this weekend and asked him about his experience with Google Print:

The Millions: Did you approach Google or did they approach you or did your books just show up in their index one day?

Richard Nash: I approached them. For the program called Google Print for Publishers, it's all opt-in, so nothing will accidentally show up.

TM: Did you have any reservations about participating?

RN: None.

TM: Did any of your authors have any reservations about participating?

RN: I avoid author approval clauses on text-only electronic rights...author approval you get with foreign, mostly, but book club, anthology, photocopying etc, getting author approval would be really time-consuming and onerous. I'd be happy to pull any book the author might not want up, even though contractually I wouldn't be obliged to. But I'd certainly do my best to make the case for why it should stay and I'd be happy to do that--I think of myself as needing to be an educator for our authors, whether it's co-op, or reviews, or distribution, or Google Print for Publishers.

TM: According to Google Print, publishers share revenue from the ads displayed next to the book pages, are you seeing any money from this? If so how much?

RN: So far $6.74! And about 20,000 page impressions. But I've been in it for a year, and it's ramping up very fast. I'd also say that non-fiction accounts for about 90% of the action.

TM: Google Print also includes links to your Web site and other online booksellers for each book. Are you seeing any increased traffic from this? Is that traffic turning into sales?

RN: Difficult to know, in that we've been seeing substantial increases in traffic to our site over the last four months anyway. In October, Google generated 15000 hits to our site; last December it was 7000. Sales, I would have no way of establishing though. Our online sales are not a huge component of our overall sales...we don't really discount on our site.

TM: Are there any other small publishers that you've talked to about this?

RN: Not really, though I think absolutely everyone should do it. I've not yet heard a good reason not to, for anyone. I'd be a real advocate for it.

TM: Anything else you want to add about your Google Print experience?

RN: Oh well it would be nice to see more money faster, but certainly within a year I think it should reach Amazon.com referral fee level (of about $400 or so) and then keep ramping up. I'll basically go into any program that will have me for free and that is not high maintenance.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:07 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Google book rental

As the saga surrounding digitizing books gets ever more convoluted, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Google is interested in offering book rentals. Apparently, Google has approached publishers about offering to rent digital versions of books for a week at 10% of the cover price. According to a News.com article (the WSJ article is subscribers only), an unidentified publisher said that 10% was too low. It sounds like an odd idea to me. I can't imagine paying to rent a book, when I could "rent" it for free from the library, but I'm also somewhat astonished that a publisher would say that 10% of the cover price is too cheap. Google would be able to rent out an infinite number of each title, and people - if they are so inclined - would be paying for something that they can get for free. The upside here seems huge for the publishers.

(via)

See Also: Amazon's digital book initiative: paying by the page and The publishers' big blunder

- C. Max Magee @ 11:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What's it like to own the Penguin Complete Collection?

So who are the lucky people who own the The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, which costs nearly $8,000, weighs 700 pounds and is available exclusively through Amazon.com? Well, a New York Times article estimates that there's only about two dozen people who have purchased the mammoth set. According to the article, one of them is Kate Bolton an avid reader who lost her entire library when her house burned down in a forest fire. I'd love to own that collection, but I'd need a separate apartment just to house it.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon customer tagging

No, Amazon isn't tagging its customers, but apparently, customers are beginning to tag Amazon. (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, "tagging" is basically adding pieces of meta-data, descriptive keywords for example, to an object (in Amazon's case, books and electronics). Right now there are a lot of sites that let their audience do the "tagging," in an effort to harness the collective descriptive power of the community.) A few months back, I surmised that Amazon was entering the realm of tagging with features like "Capitalized Phrases" and "Statistically Improbable Phrases." Now they are allowing customers to add descriptors to book pages. Apparently Amazon is still testing this out, so if you can't see it yet (and you want to), go to Kokogiak where he's got the full rundown including links to screenshots.

I also noticed that Amazon has expanded slightly on its wildly popular "Amazon.com Sales Rank" feature. Now you can see where the book in question ranked yesterday compared to today. For example, as of this writing, The Kite Runner is ranked at "#16 in books," while yesterday it ranked "#17 in books."

- C. Max Magee @ 11:26 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What people are reading

There were a few readers among the sleepyheads on the train this morning. I have to say, I'm impressed with my fellow readers this morning for the caliber of the books they were reading. Here's what I spotted:

• Black Boy by Richard Wright (I read this book in high school. Still one of my favorites.)
• Sabbath's Theatre by Philip Roth (One of the books that made The Prizewinners list I put together last month.)
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• The Way of the Flesh by Samuel Butler (V.S. Pritchett called it "one of the time-bombs of literature.")
• Granta 91: Wish You Were Here (I love Granta. This issue includes Ismail Kadare, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally and James Lasdun.)
• Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt (For all the classicists out there.)
• Three Junes by Julia Glass

And a couple of bestsellers:
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

- C. Max Magee @ 9:40 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Breaking up isn't hard to do

Most fiction is about people breaking up, right? So why not collect a bunch of fiction together and call it what it is.

Two years ago Philadelphia based writer Meredith Broussard decided to do just this. She put together an anthology of stories about relationships gone wrong: 26 of them - arranged alphabetically - by various female authors. The result was The Dictionary of Failed Relationships, which includes stories by Heidi Julavits, Anna Maxted, Thisbe Nissen and Jennifer Weiner. Now Broussard is back with a follow up anthology from the men's point of view - again, 26 stories about love troubles arranged alphabetically - called The Encyclopedia of Exes with stories by, among others, Adam Langer, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Ames, Gary Shteyngart and Neal Pollack. Tou can find out more about both books at failedrelationships.com.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:10 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The big bestseller database

I think I may have mentioned the USA Today bestseller list before. It's fun because it ranks the top 150 books, not just the top 20 like most lists, and I also like it because it doesn't separate books by category, so you can see how those self-help books stack up against those mystery novels. I also think it's interesting to see which classic novels make appearances on the list. For example, this week - barring classics making the list due to movie tie-ins - we've got Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird at 93. I also recently noticed that you can use the search box at the top of the list to search its entire ten year history. For example, I now know that Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which happens to be next to me on the shelf) was on the list for six weeks in late 2003, peaking at 108. Interesting.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:02 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Book Scanner

In the midst of all the controversy surrounding digitizing the world's books did you ever stop to wonder how all these books are getting scanned? It turns out it's just regular folks making a few bucks an hour sidled up to some high-tech scanning machines. The job doesn't sound half bad, actually. Here's a profile of one book scanner in Toronto from the Wall Street Journal.

(via)

- C. Max Magee @ 5:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The challenges of digital magazine editions

An article in the Wall Street Journal talks up some of the drawbacks of the 8 DVD-ROM Complete New Yorker set:

Web-savvy users accustomed to navigating easily through online content find The Complete New Yorker a bit of an anachronism. Each page of content is literally a picture of a magazine page. Readers can't copy text from a story and paste it elsewhere. They can't search for keywords within the text of articles, only within titles and abstracts. If they want to jump from issue to issue, or article to article, they first have to go back to the index and sometimes change DVDs.

The problem obviously isn't the technology, it's the 1976 law that requires publishers to get permission from free-lancers before republishing their work in another medium. The lawyers have determined that anything before 1976 is fair game to be converted into a new format. And while most publishers negotiated away the rights of free-lancers in this realm in the mid-1990s, there still remains a legal limbo for material published in between the two dates. Based on case arising from a similar set put out by National Geographic in 1997, by simply creating digital versions of the magazine pages, publishers are in the clear, and this is the route that the New Yorker has taken. The article linked above also looks at how this issue is affecting similar archiving efforts by other venerable magazines like Harper's Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.

(via and via)

- C. Max Magee @ 5:30 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Even childrens books are going smoke-free

The Using Books blog points to a Kansas City childrens' book store, Reading Reptile, that is taking HarperCollins to task for allegedly doctoring the photo of Clement Hurd, illustrator of the childrens' classic Goodnight Moon, on a recent edition of the book. It seems that Hurd was once pictured holding a barely visable cigarette and now the cigarette has disappeared. The Reading Reptile folks have put together Goodnight Reality, a Web site to protest the "censorship." Though the comparisons to Stalin may be a bit over the top, I suppose you have to fight for what you believe in.

And lest I be accused of taking things too seriously, the Reading Reptile folks are probably being a little tongue in cheek about this. Judging from their "About Us" page, they've got a sense of humor.

Update: The New York Times looks at the Goodnight Moon cigarette controversy. HarperCollins plans to find a completely different photo of Clement Hurd for future printings of the book, so that no doctoring will be required.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:18 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Awash in awards

Joseph Epstein (Fabulous Small Jews, Snobbery) takes a look at the glut of awards, literary and otherwise in a Wall Street Journal piece: "All this prize-giving has made the field of culture rather like one of those progressive preschools where, on graduation day, even the most hopeless child is given a prize for not actually maiming his classmates."

- C. Max Magee @ 9:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Abebooks buys Bookfinder.com

Abebooks, the Canada-based book listing service has acquired Bookfinder.com, a search engine that compares prices of books from a variety of sources including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells and hundreds of other smaller stores. They also list books from Abebooks site. Bookfinder.com founder Anirvan, in his blog post announcing the sale, said

We will remain an independently operated and managed entity based out of Berkeley, but we'll now also be able to draw upon our Canadian friends' technology resources and industry expertise to help us develop our ideas, and make this an even more useful service for book buyers and sellers.

What's in this for Abebooks? Presumably Bookfinder.com generates a decent amount of affiliate revenue by referring shoppers to all of these different book stores. Abebooks will get that revenue and they won't have to pay Bookfinder.com referral fees any more. I'm guessing that Bookfinder.com generates a decent fraction of Abebooks' traffic. Abebooks will now have some control over that entry point. I know a lot of serious book people use both sites to help build their libraries, and I'm sure they're hoping that this partnership will result in more features not fewer.

Also, if you've never used Bookfinder.com before, you should give it a try. It's great for comparison shopping, and it covers books from all eras, including older books that typically aren't available through Amazon. I also use Bookfinder.com to price old books. Wondering what that old book you've been holding on to is worth? Search for it on Bookfinder.com and you'll see what various retail establishments around the world are selling it for.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Some links: Penguin Podcast, Lawyers on Google Print, Chicago Literature

Penguin Books UK has started a podcast. I've added it to my Literary Podcasts post. (via)

Law blog Groklaw has a good post explaining the Google Print project and the controversy surrounding it, and Lawrence Lessig has news of a program coming up at the New York Public Library on November 17 called "The Battle Over Books: Authors and Publishers Take on the Google Print Project."

Golden Rule Jones has a list of this year's Chicago fiction, and at Pete Lit, Pete tells us about Chicago Noir, a collection edited by Neal Pollock with stories by Adam Langer, Kevin Guilfoile and others.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:40 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Stomping Acorns

Ian Frazier's piece in last week's New Yorker is one of the oddest, funniest essays I've read in a long time. I laughed to myself as I read it the other day while sitting on the steps of the Art Institute in downtown Chicago (following an edifying meetup with fellow book bloggers Deep and Sam). The essay, "Pensees D'Automne," is about a grown man's passion for stomping acorns in the fall, and it contains many asides about things like health insurance and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Frazier, who has long written odd and funny things like this, has a new book out this week called Gone to New York: Adventures in the City. The book collects thirty years of Frazier's journalism about New York. From a review in the Sun-Times:

The non-linear way Frazier's mind works is a delight to follow on the page. And don't let the emphasis on New York City fool you. Frazier is one of us. In the introduction to Gone to New York, Jamaica Kincaid gets it right when she calls her pal "the authentic American," whose work "is meant to form an arc, an arc that has not yet begun its curve."

Kincaid and Frazier are also involved in another recently released book, this year's edition of The Best American Travel Writing. Kincaid is the editor this year and Frazier is joined as a contributor by luminaries like John McPhee, William T. Vollmann, and William Least-Heat Moon.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Plain Heathen Mischief by Martin Clark

At the center of Martin Clark's comic legal thriller Plain Heathen Mischief is Joel King, a fallen preacher from Roanoke, Virginia, who got in a little too deep with a young female parishioner. After a stint in jail, and facing a broken marriage and a life gone to shambles, Joel is taken under the wing of Edmund Brooks, one of Joel's former flock, a mysterious man whose dealings we quickly learn are rarely on the level. "I work the sag," Edmund explains, "Sag's the sneaky tax and the holdback and the cushion and the reserve and the contingency and the 'ol thumb on the scale." It's a whole lot of other things, too, but we soon discover that for Edmund, "working the sag" is mostly insurance fraud. Joel relocates to his sister's in Missoula, Montana, but by then, vulnerable and destitute, he has already been roped into Edmund's schemes. Edmund's co-conspirator is a Las Vegas lawyer of the slickest sort, Sa'ad X. Sa'ad, a smooth-talking con-man. Mischief would have been mundane as a straight thriller, but there's a comic aspect to the book that keeps it entertaining. The three co-conspirators play tough, each in his own way, but to certain degree they're each doing little more than playing the part of gangster, and part of the fun of reading this book is seeing through their big talk. Eventually the schemes and scams pile on top of one another and things spiral out of control, and while he has written Joel as an, at times, infuriatingly delusional character, Clark does a great job of untangling the Mischief in the end.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon's digital book initiative: paying by the page

As Google stokes controversy with its Google Print service, Amazon has unveiled its own digital book offering, one that's sure to make the publishers happy. Amazon is launching two services, Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. According to an AP story on the new products:

With its new Amazon Pages service, Amazon.com Inc. plans to let customers to buy portions of a book - even just one page - for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased. Both services are expected to begin next year.

CEO Jeff Bezos shared some addition details as well:

For Amazon Pages ... the cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference works. Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book could also look at the entire text online, at any time, for a "small" additional charge, Bezos said. For instance, a $20 book might cost an extra $1.99.

And Bezos offered up a quote that was most certainly directed at Google's recent run ins with publishers: "We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors." The story is also filled with positive comments from different publishers and an Authors Guild representative. Random House released a statement saying it plans to "work with online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals and other appropriate vendors to offer the contents of its books to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page-view basis."

So, it seems to me that a showdown between Amazon and Google may be shaping up in the digital books market. Will publishers opt out of Google Print en masse and back Amazon, who, in their eyes, seems to be offering a more secure revenue stream? More importantly, are people ready to pay for books by the page, and will they turn their backs on Amazon for trying to spoil Google's free books party?

Meanwhile, at the Official Google Blog, the Googlers are extolling the virtues of the public domain books that have recently been made available at Google Print. The post links to a number of searches that show some of the breadth of material that is now available at Google Print. Note that they are positioning this as "Preserving Public Domain Books."

Previously: The publishers' big blunder

- C. Max Magee @ 10:41 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

In Search of Bill Watterson

Inspired by the recent release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, podcaster Len of Jawbone Radio paid a visit to Bill Watterson's home town, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. He ended up interviewing Watterson's mom, laying eyes on some original Calvin and Hobbes artwork and sharing some interesting bits of trivia about the beloved strip.

via

- C. Max Magee @ 10:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Google presents public domain books

As Google battles publishers over copyright issues, an AP story out this evening announces that Google Print "on Thursday will begin serving up the entire contents of books and government documents that aren't entangled in [the] copyright battle." I don't think it's live quite yet as my searches failed to turn up anything interesting, but we'll see tomorrow. Here are some more details on what we can expect to see from Google Print (via the Washington Post):

The list of Google's so-called "public domain" works - volumes no longer protected by copyright - include Henry James novels, Civil War histories, Congressional acts and biographies of wealthy New Yorkers.

Google said the material ... represents the first large batch of public domain books and documents to be indexed in its search engine since the Mountain View-based company announced an ambitious library-scanning project late last year.

Update: So Google has rolled out the search function if you want to take it for a spin.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:50 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Collected Blurbs of Zadie Smith

A small but satisfyingly eclectic batch of blurbs from the pen of Zadie Smith. Prior to today, I don't think I'd ever seen the phrase "the mutt's nuts" printed on the back of a book.

On Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi - "This is an excellent comic book, that deserves a place with Joe Sacco and even Art Spiegelman. In her bold black and white panels, Satrapi eloquently reasserts the moral bankruptcy of all political dogma and religious conformity; how it bullies, how it murders, and how it may always be ridiculed by individual rebellions of the spirit and the intellect"

On Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives by Simon Goldhill - "It's great, and great fun... a sparkling, erudite and amusing remedy for our collective historical amnesia"

On Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford - "Arthur Bradford's stories are quite simply the mutt's nuts: One of the funniest, smartest, tallest writers working in America today."

On The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman "Ms. Fusselman's book, brief as it is, affected me deeply. Not only that, the talent displayed therein was somewhat unnerving."

On Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer - "The kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful."

See Also: The Collected Blurbs of Jonathan Safran Foer, The Collected Blurbs of David Mitchell

- C. Max Magee @ 10:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post