LibWorm.com provides a librarian RSS filtering service. Over 1500 RSS librarian sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest headlines from journals and sites in the Fiction interest group. http://www.libworm.com/rss/librarianqueries.php Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:50:27 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/03/09/book-group-reports/ As a new feature, MADreads is going to post reports of Madison Public Library book group discussions.  If you’re like us, you’re always on the lookout for that next great, discussable book.  Our inaugural report comes from the Sequoya branch. The Sequoya book group just read Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann which won the National Book Award.  While it was a good discussion, because of all the different characters and because it was so beautifully written, some people felt it was a bit hard to verbalize their thoughts.  The book opens with the tightrope walk across the Twin Towers so we started out the discussion showing just that portion of the video Man on Wire.  It was a great way to set the tone for the discussion as it was such an integral part of the story! There was much discussion about the symbolism of the towers and all the hints of 9/11 that were layered in the story.  A really good read!  Next up for us is Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. (Source: MADreads) Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:45:57 +0100 824979 http://lisnews.org/organizers_expecting_large_crowd_ca_lesbian_book_fest Organizers expecting large crowd at lesbian book fest A group of 100 followers of Lesbian fiction is expected to attend the Bold Strokes Books Authors Lesbian Book Festival this year. (Source: LISNews.org) Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:41:50 +0100 824910 http://www.librarystuff.net/2010/03/09/e-book-giveaways-correlate-to-higher-print-sales/ Wired – “Giving away an e-book seems to lead to at least a spike in sales of the print version, Researchers at Brigham Young University have found, especially for fiction. In research that monitored the sales of 41 print books in the eight weeks before and after a free version was released, study authors John Hilton III and David Wiley said they found “a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases.” (Source: Library Stuff) Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:00:56 +0100 824953 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/iNr50AOpMuM/punk-islam-tacwacores-cinema The Taqwacores is really a film about individualism – but attention is likely to focus on the music and its sexual contentThe Taqwacores, a film directed by Eyad Zahra based on the novel of the same name by Michael Muhammad Knight, is playing at the media and music extravaganza South by South West (SXSW) in Austin this March. It's exciting to imagine who will be watching at a festival that features guests such as Spike Lee, Chuck D and Devo.I had the pleasure of seeing the film at a sold-out screening at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah last month.Author and screenplay writer Michael Muhammad Knight and I first began communicating in 2005, when he originally reached out to me to play the character of Jehanghir in an adaptation he was scripting with a Brooklyn-based film-maker named Cihan Kaan. Budgeting issues proved fatal for that iteration, and Mike went through a few other directors before I left our fledging Taqwacore scene in America for Lahore.It's been surreal to come back to the US three years later to a complete film and cast. In an interview, the celebrated director of Night of the Living Dead George Romero mentioned how Hollywood vetoed his first script for Diary of the Dead because it had a non-white lead.I was reminded of Romero's words when I saw the vibrant, all-minority cast of Eyad's film. In many ways the book The Taqwacores should have been an impossible adaption to produce, with no major white characters, and its heavy ruminations on Islamic theology. In America and the UK, white audiences are not only unresponsive to minority leads, but overexposed to Muslims in particular.The odds are stacked against the film. Eyad has taken Knight's book and trimmed it into a clearer narrative – one that begins and ends with the main character Yusef, played faithfully by Bobby Naderi. The movie follows Yusef on his safari through punk rock in America, which will likely surprise audiences. ... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:30:00 +0100 824851 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/LHALGZXP4qw/reading-multimedia-overload I love all the new literary platforms filling my days with fresh pickings, but I also miss taking one book at a timeTwo years ago, I had a very straightforward reading pattern. Every few days, I'd read a book. I would immerse myself in its characters and storylines, swim in its style, snatch every opportunity throughout the day to return to its enveloping world. Then I would finish it, and start another one. Things were so simple then.I wish I could blame it on the Christmas eReader, but my evolution into schizophrenic multimedia literature butterfly started long before it landed in my lap – via iPod and Audible, Twitter and Gutenberg, and brick-like new-writing magazines that take weeks to digest. My reading has taken on a strangely driven, guilty quality, as I try to justify the cost of all those subscriptions and all that hardware by consuming fiction in an unprecedentedly multiplicitous and simultaneous way. Secretly, I long to return to a world in which I had a loving, stable relationship with one paperback at a time.A day in my life as a literary butterfly starts at 7.30am, with a few snatched paragraphs of the short story in last weekend's Sunday papers over a morning cup of tea. By 8.30am, I'm fully plugged into my latest audiobook as I stride to the station. On the tube, it's the rush to plough through the story and poems in the latest, expensively imported edition of the New Yorker, before next week's lands on my mat. Throughout the day, I might catch up on a Twitter novel every few minutes, or check out the latest freemium offering from an enterprising new author. Lunchtime, and it's this quarter's Granta, now so stuffed with good things it has become Bolaño-weight and lives on my desk, banned from travelling. Back on the tube, I crack out the eReader, scroll past the 100 free books I haven't even dipped into, and try to settle into the download I just had to buy to see if it worked. ... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:37:30 +0100 824853 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/VZOlhBb8sKc/finnegans-wake-nonsense Stop worrying if you find this legendary modernist masterpiece unreadable – I can sensationally reveal that the author couldn't make much sense of it eitherPeople often wonder, rather unfairly, what exactly academics do with their time; what purpose they serve for culture and society. And now we know: they spend three decades making minor adjustments to Finnegans Wake. Well worth the time and effort, I'm sure you'll agree. No, I'm joking – sort of. Certainly, it's good that there are still people like Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon in our world, who devote themselves to something as knotty, exhausting and defiantly uncommercial as their new edition of that labyrinthine book. It's good that some people still do things for the love of art.On the other hand, in this case, the fact is that all their labours won't make a lick of difference because James Joyce's famously unreadable novel will unquestionably remain, well, unread. Finnegans Wake has attained mythic status, not because of inherent greatness or influence but because most people are unsure if it actually exists, since they've never met, or even heard about, anyone who's finished it. Rose and O'Hanlon say the new version is a "smoother" read – but this is clearly a fib, because Finnegans Wake is not, and never will be, comprehensible to anybody outside of, maybe, God. Maybe. As I understand it, the book consists of one single word of approximately 550,000 letters. It's the work of linguistic gobbledegook that all other works of linguistic gobbledegook reverentially call "The Supreme Being". Within days of publication, an entire Finnegans Wake-based industry had sprung up in academia, with eggheads under such pressures of production that they had to sub-contract much of the meta-textual and semiotic analysis work to factories in the Far East. ... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:05:34 +0100 824854 http://lisnews.org/world_without_public_libraries On the whole, I'm not much of a book reader. Most of my reading is done online; I read a handful of books every year, mostly non-fiction, based on various whims. Right now, I'm reading The World Without Us, a captivating exploration about how the world would revert (or not revert) back to a pre-human emergence. Some of these things have been dramatized into a series on the History Channel by a different name, providing the added element of CGI to show how buildings would collapse, infrastructure would fail, nature reclaims the suburbs, and how all that would remain for future archeologists is our stainless steel cookware. For the scientist in me, it's fascinating to see everything humans have made becoming undone by the natural forces of this world. So, in touching upon the premise of the book, I thought, "What would the world be like without libraries?" How would our demise come? Unlike the book, which asks the reader to suspend disbelief and accept the total sudden disappearance of humankind, I cannot propose nor fathom asking the same for libraries. In attempting to avoid hyperbole, I think the mechanisms of the library’s demise have already proven themselves present. It will not come through lack of innovation or adoption of technology or practices; our relevance and willingness to change in this digital information age has certainly been established. No, the end will come as it has for some libraries over the past two years: through budget cuts. Funding for all library types (public, academic, school, and special) has hung in the balance for the last couple of years after budgets tighten and communities and companies look to trim their expenditures. You need go no further than typing in the words “library budget” in a Google News search to see the current toll that is being exacted.  One problem, as I see it, is that the library as a community service does not fit nicely into any government spending niche. ... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:47:19 +0100 824748 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/HnTYM1eZ1HA/solar-by-ian-mcewan Cape, £18.992000 He belonged to that Salman class of short, fat, ugly, clever men who were unaccountably attractive to women. But Michael Beard was anhedonic; his fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave as his philandering had ended the previous four. This time, though, it was his wife, Patrice, who was having an affair with Tarpin, a horny-handed Essex builder who knew nothing about cavity-wall insulation.Beard waited for Aldous to collect him. Gosh, how he hated the polar bear rug in the hall. Still, everyone would soon have one, he supposed, if the polar ice-cap continued to melt. Not that Beard was yet wholly committed to the climate- change agenda, but having won the Nobel prize for his Beard-Einstein Conflation on Photovoltaics, an idea he was very thankful he was never asked to fully explain, he had been happy to head the New Labour Climate Change Laboratory."I'm afraid it's not a Prius," Aldous said. "I'm not surprised, as they were only sold outside Japan in 2001," Beard replied. Aldous was one of his pony-tailed post-docs who was being forced into working on the New Labour cul-de sac of wind turbine energy. Beard nodded off. He was very familiar with the McEwan Conflation of cramming loads of dull facts about climate change into a book and calling it fiction."Tarpin hit me," said Patrice. "He hit me too," Beard replied as he went off to visit an endangered glacier in the Arctic for 30 pages. He returned to find Aldous in his flat. "I admit I'm having an affair with your wife," said Aldous, "but I've worked out that your Conflation can satisfy the world's energy needs." At which, Aldous slipped on the polar bear rug and died, a victim of climate change."I could make it look like Tarpin did it," McEwan thought. He had no real experience of writing comedy and the gags creaked as much as the plot. ... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:05:13 +0100 824698 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/QufuHfM8C64/2010-siba-book-award-long-list.html The 2010 SIBA Book Award "Long List" has just been released, containing a complete collection of all the eligible books nominated by Southern Independent Booksellers as favorites for 2009. The list features 101 different books in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, cooking, and children's/young adult that are either set in the South or by a southern author (or both!) and were published in 2009. The long list will be sent as a ballot to SIBA member stores, who will then vote to choose finalists in each of the four categories. A jury of SIBA booksellers will then choose winners in each category. Finalists are announced in April. Winners are announced July (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:07:36 +0100 824742 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/ac-mUARcbic/novelists-pull-a-roth Can we expect any other writer approaching old age hope to defy the odds as Philip Roth did with his American trilogy?In the space of a week two email exchanges ended with my correspondent saying practically the same thing. "Don't write him off," they said of two different English novelists. "He may yet pull a Roth." It was both a lamentation for an author's sad decline and a vain hope for a barely credible return to form. In the modern novel Philip Roth's case is unique. No one has come in from the cold in quite the way Roth did in the mid-90s. Or at least that's the official critical line.The fact is that Roth has always been a maddeningly erratic writer. The sequence of novels that began with Sabbath's Theatre in 1995 and ended with 2000's The Human Stain are books of howling rage and bitter elegy – genuine works of art. But they were not without precedent, even when Roth's career was commercially and critically in dire straits. The Counterlife in 1987, for example, may well be his best book. What critics feasted on was that most hateful of modern expression his "journey": the bad boy of letters, now realising his potential and becoming the greatest living American novelist. The second coming of Roth was as much predicated on the literary community's surprise that he had bucked the established writerly trajectory – an early establishing period, a peak in middle age, terminal decline – as it was on the undoubted quality of his work. Roth was, however, not quite of pensionable age when he wrote Sabbath's Theatre, and just 64 when he wrote his late masterpiece, American Pastoral. With the generation of Barnes, Amis and McEwan all approaching the same age, it doesn't now feel old at all. Roth may well have stood alone in the 90s, but perhaps his later phase will prove inspirational for other writers. Maybe they actually will pull a Roth. ... Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:12:19 +0100 824510 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/-XNuadafym8/spring-literature-quiz It feels, at last, as if spring is in the air. To celebrate, take our quiz on the pleasures of the sweetest season (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:05:48 +0100 824511 http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2010/03/while-reflecting-on-the-role-of-innovation-in-poetry-ron-silliman-pauses-to-offer-this-comment----i-have-written-before-tha.html While reflecting on the role of "innovation" in poetry, Ron Silliman pauses to offer this comment: I have written before that any history of poetry is inevitably a history of change in poetry, and that an inevitable consequence is that the well-wrought urn is almost invariably a trivial accomplishment. Indeed, it’s a trivial goal. The "Well-Wrought Urn" is of course the title of Cleanth Brooks's "Studies in the Structure of Poetry," as the book's subtitle has it. It is probably the most important critical work to emerge from the practice of "New Criticism," and it can still be read as a primer of sorts on that approach to literary criticism.  New Criticism was dislodged from its place as a dominant academic critical strategy long ago, but it continues to draw much abuse from those who associate it with an apolitical formalism or an almost religious reverence for the poem as "verbal icon" or, in Silliman's case, view it as a critical adjunct to the "school of quietude" in poetry. It is true that in invoking the "well-wrought urn" Brooks was trying to call attention to poetry as a verbal equivalent, a poem as an art object sufficient unto itself. But the trope can be dismissed as a "trivial goal"--indeed, as a "goal" at all--only if you assume that the urn is well-wrought because it successfully attains a level of "beauty" that conforms to pre-established formal requirements. Literary history as a series of such skillfully-fashioned verbal objects reinforcing aesthetic norms would indeed be a tedious procession, and the goal of adding yet one more "fine" work would indeed be trivial. But I don't see why "well-wrought urn" has to be taken in this way. ... Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 824651 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/CH9IkUVdYE0/where-god-love-book-review Anita Sethi applauds a collection of stories in which love triumphs over failings of the fleshLove hangs out in forbidden places in this short story collection: it steals into the heart of a woman for her friend's husband; it blooms in a brief affair between stepmother and stepson. Amy Bloom, author of a well-regarded book about gender, Normal, as well as several novels and story collections, here pushes the boundaries of socially accepted relationships, testing the concept of "normal" love, not only romantic but also parental and platonic.It is where love no longer hangs out, however, that proves most poignant, for this is a collection haunted with the raw pain of having lost what was most loved. There is a marked emphasis on physical deterioration, with foot problems proving a particular motif. William suffers from gout yet his lover, Clare, does not mind his "grotesquely" floundering foot, swollen and purple, nor does her affection diminish throughout her children's chickenpox, or the "dark smell" of her mother's dying. Clare, too, can't walk after spraining her ankle. Scattered through the pages are hypertension pills, indomethacin, cholesterol pills, Viagra. The test of love is to look after those in sickness as well as in health.The word "unbearable" recurs, for these sensitive stories each capture moments at which body or heart are at breaking point. "I felt the strings holding me together just snap," confesses one character. If Bloom exposes human fragility, she also depicts the strongest, most steadfast love – what it is to love the least lovable of people, unwaveringly, even after death or drug addiction do them part.The tonic against fallible human relationships is the daydream. In contrast to the humdrum reality through which they have stumbled, fallen and finally "given up all hope of ever walking on beautiful days", characters muse on stories of the great Greek gods. ... Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:15:01 +0100 824112 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/Fhrup2zjY6U/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-katrina Author, publisher and literary trendsetter: Dave Eggers is all those, and he's fast becoming the conscience of liberal America too. Here he tells how he went from 'staggering genius' to the man who gives a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessedI'm a little nervous of meeting Dave Eggers. On the way to San Francisco, where he lives and runs his groovy and influential publishing empire, McSweeney's, I consider his reputation. When Eggers published his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he mostly refused to do interviews except by email, and then his answers were spiky and oblique, and occasionally just a joke. He once railed against a journalist who he said had quoted him off the record with a fury that seems to me to have been just a touch disproportionate. Sure enough, before I leave London, I get an email from an assistant warning me that he will only talk about his new book, Zeitoun, and that it will drive him nuts if I ask him "what he had for dinner the night before last" (I reply that I have never asked anyone, ever, what they had for dinner the night before last and I certainly would not dream of flying half way round the world to pose such a question). As for his human rights work and many charitable projects, these things are so intimidating. Faced with such abundant goodness, I furtively examine my conscience and find it wanting.As it turns out, though, I am wrong. Entirely wrong. Granted, he is not big on self-revelation. But he is neither difficult nor mean. McSweeney's is in the Mission district of the city: it's like Camden only with wider roads and more second-hand bookshops. When I arrive, I'm led past the desks of half-a-dozen bright young things and into his office, which is small and gloomy and womb-like. Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. ... Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:08:07 +0100 824118 http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2010/03/06/the-isolates/ I am often in the market for an author I haven’t read before and to find one I sometimes troll the debut author lists in some of the journals.  That’s how I came across Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson. It starts in Maine, in the 1970s, where 7-year-old Asta and her 9-year-old brother Orion live with their mother, Loretta, in an isolated house in the country.  Loretta seems delightful at first; she acts out movies with the children, regales them with family stories, shares her Big Movie Book with them.  The kids don’t go to school, and do their lessons at home.   But it doesn’t take long to realize that something is pretty wrong in the household. Asta narrates the story.  As she describes her daily life, you gradually come to realize that Loretta’s crazy.  Asta and Orion believe everything Loretta tells them so they never venture outside in order to protect themselves from the plague out there and the dead bodies piled up on the side of the road.  Loretta locks them in the house when she goes to work and they entertain themselves with TV, their games, and for meals, choose from unlabeled cans of food.  They are used to, and like, the feeling of hunger as it is a sign that their bodies are keeping them healthy.  But Asta’s optimism doesn’t hide from the reader the fact that Orion is getting very ill, maybe even starving. Then one night, Loretta doesn’t come home.  The next morning the kids leave the house, in their mother’s boots and coats as they don’t have their own, to look for her.  They know so very little of the outside world, it’s amazing they manage.  Asta helps herself to some sweets in a store they come across and gets kicked out.  Eventually they get on a school bus, where a sympathetic driver figures out what’s going on and gets the police involved. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:18:29 +0100 824156 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/ZR-LtAMeW0w/ Wideman is a two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Wideman has been a National Book Award finalist and is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award. According to Publisher’s Weekly, he will be publishing his new book Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, a collection of short stories, through Lulu. Wideman wanted to be in charge and take more control over what happens to his book, the story says. He is also rebelling against what he calls the publishing industries “blockbuster syndrome”. The book is being published by an arm of Lulu that is trying to lure established authors to the self-publishing service. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:43:48 +0100 824043 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/i7VgC_TMrTQ/ What piece of technology most makes you feel like you’re “living in the future”? Laptop Magazine asked a number of speculative-fiction writers that question, including Jeffrey A. Carver, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and Tobias Buckell. Interestingly, most of them responded the iPhone (or in Scalzi’s case, the iPod Touch). Jeffrey Carver said, after the Star Trek-inspired nature of his flip-to-open cellphone: My second thought was eBook reader. I love reading on my Sony Reader and also on my Dell PDA, which I keep almost for the sole purpose of using as a book reader, especially for reading in the dark. And the new iPad looks about as much like the electronic reading slates on Next Generation as you can get. I agree with Scalzi: the iPod Touch epitomizes “futuristic tech” for me. If only Douglas Adams were still alive, he would be amazed at how completely his vision has been realized in this little pocket-portable information appliance. Even more so the iPhone (though I don’t have one of those yet). What gadget says “I’m living in the future” to you? Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:15:00 +0100 824045 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/EFmothrmsKQ/ One of my favorite op-ed columnists is Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald. I don’t always agree with him, but like certain other columnists (Froma Harrop, Paul Krugman, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, Linda Chavez, and George Will), I always read his opinion piece. Some people are worth reading and their opinions worth considering, whereas lining the litter box is the proper place for certain other columnists (Michelle Malkin comes readily to mind) – they simply lack any pretense to intelligent conversation. (If I want to be harangued, my wife and kids can do the job expertly.) In a recent column, Pitts observed: “But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it’s a wall. And you shouldn’t have to hit it to find that out.” This made me think of the ebook war between ebookers and publishers. Each side in this war has firm positions and beliefs from which they seemingly will not bend. eBookers expect low prices, no DRM, no geographical restrictions, near-perfect editing and formatting; publishers expect high prices, DRM, and good-but-not-perfect editing and formatting. Pricing and DRM are the hot button issues (along with geographical restrictions for those ebookers living outside the United States). The reality for ebookers is that in the near term DRM is going to remain. Bang your head against that wall as often as you like, but until publishers find a way to minimize their financial gamble and until authors feel confident that ebookers will pay and not pirate, DRM will be part of ebooks. The financial stakes are simply too high for some publishers and many authors to give it up. Even the ebookers’ “friend” Amazon hasn’t been touting a non-DRM world for ebooks. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:09:57 +0100 824046 http://lisnews.org/former_book_designer_says_good_riddance_print A recent blog post by Craig Mod, a self-titled computer programmer, book designer and book publisher, offers a thoughtful and distinctive perspective on the move of books from paper to interactive devices like Apple’s iPad. Mr. Mod summarizes his argument in the subtitle of his post: “Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused. Good riddance.” Mr. Mod divides content broadly into two categories: content where the form is important, such as poetry or text with graphics, and content where form is divorced from layout, which he says applies to most novels and non-fiction. This kind of thinking makes a key point: instead of arguing about pixels versus paper, as many book lovers tend to do, it is more useful to focus on whether the technology is a good match for the content. Full article at the NYT Bits Blog (Source: LISNews.org) Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:47:44 +0100 823843 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/GhiFur-3RQc/ian-mcewan-solar The novelist explains to Nicholas Wroe why he's chosen to grapple with climate change in his new book, SolarJust inside the front door of Ian McEwan's London home, the one in the shadow of the BT Tower made famous in his novel Saturday, is the obligatory recycling box full of paper, plastic and glass. "Of course we recycle," he laughs. "Who doesn't? And I'm all in favour of cutting 10% off our carbon. And of domestic solar panels. Anything that slows our consumption is useful. But ultimately I don't really think the bottle bank is going to get us out of this. And being virtuous is not going to get us out of it either. Civilisation is going to need another energy source."McEwan's own view – having been persuaded by thinkers such as Stewart Brand, and despite his own long-held suspicions of the industry – is that nuclear energy is probably our best bet in the medium term. Michael Beard, Nobel prize-winning physicist, glutton and the protagonist of McEwan's latest novel, Solar, has an even more technologically complex solution. His work in the field of artificial photosynthesis as a way of harnessing the sun's power has made him rich and famous. Beard got his Nobel for "modifying Einstein's photovoltaics", and McEwan enthusiastically explains that the bleeding-edge science in the book is real, if some way from practical application. "If you go to America the amount of ingenuity being deployed, and the private capital – until this present recession – being invested in nanotechnology and solar energy is astonishing."For McEwan science is the road not taken, and he talks slightly enviously about his geneticist son's work and training. At the age of 16 he "agonised" at school over the arts or science route. "My maths was actually pretty mediocre, but I did love science and eventually even 'got' calculus, although I always felt if I so much as sneezed I would probably lose it again. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:08:11 +0100 823792 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/_MUaNW4lwVI/trespass-rose-tremain Rose Tremain's latest novel is a cautionary tale, says Alex ClarkReaders of Rose Tremain's 11th novel who find themselves inspired to rush off to the French countryside she lovingly conjures will hardly be able to claim they haven't heard the warnings of "buyer, beware" that nestle between the vivid descriptions of brooding hilltops and babbling streams, particularly if they feel inclined to take their chequebooks with them and acquire a prime piece of real estate. In her first novel since the Orange prize-winning The Road Home, which told the story of an eastern European's journey through a bewildering and inhospitable contemporary Britain, she turns to the mountains and villages of the Cévennes to bring us a different vision of cultural collision and the experience of the outsider.The most significant outsider is Anthony Verey, a once-renowned antiques dealer from Chelsea who finds himself in the shadow of "a universal letting-go" – of fame, money, vigour and desire. Sitting in his forbiddingly elegant shop, kept permanently chilly to lengthen the life-span of "the beloveds", the collective name he bestows on the acquisitions he fears he will miss most in death, he is a man in need of escape, which obligingly arrives in the shape of his ever-dependable sister Veronica. A garden designer enjoying a late-flourishing love affair with Kitty, a mediocre watercolourist in southern France, Veronica has admitted few passions into her life aside from Susan, the horse which mitigated the miseries of her childhood, but Anthony is one of them; and when he decides that what will transform his old age is a splendid house in the Cévennes, Veronica throws herself into making his sketchy dreams a reality.Such a bond of sympathy and co-operation does not exist, however, between the narrative's mirror brother and sister. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:08:08 +0100 823793 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/oorfhJoFeB0/everything-is-illuminated-safran-foer Week one: John Mullan on the author as characterDescribe the construction of Everything Is Illuminated and you risk making the novel sound like an exercise in narrative ingenuity fit only for the seminar room. It is split into three strands. In one, Alex, a linguistically inept translator, describes his journey across Ukraine with an American called Jonathan Safran Foer to find the shtetl of Trachimbrod, where, half a century earlier, Jonathan's grandfather escaped a Nazi massacre. In the second, episodes in the lives of the Jews of Trachimbrod since the 18th century are imagined in a novel that Jonathan is writing. In the third, Alex writes letters to Jonathan, who has now returned to America, commenting on the portions of this novel that he has been receiving, and asking for advice about the writing of his own account.It is, literally speaking, the author-as-character who holds this all together. Though he never directly addresses the reader, he alone is there in every section. Yet he is the opposite of a godlike figure of narrative authority. "It is a mammoth honour for me to write for a writer," says Alex in his first letter, "especially when he is an American writer, like Ernest Hemingway or you." Crucial to the comic effect of these letters is the fact that we do not have Foer's letters to Alex, in which, we infer, he has gravely dispensed advice. In Alex's replies, you can hear the soi-disant wisdom of the tyro novelist. "I also attempted to be not obvious, or unduly subtle, as you demonstrated".So it may be a nerve to feature yourself as a character in your first novel, but the effect is disarmingly self-mocking. Just as well, for readers are by now well used to the device. Ever since some readers of Martin Amis's Money were irritated by the meetings between the magnificently grotesque narrator John Self and a writer called Martin Amis, there have been protests against its use by literary novelists. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:06:48 +0100 823797 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/vFBriwVFK0s/hanif-kureishi-collected-stories-tayler A sense of urgency makes up for a lack of range in Hanif Kureishi's stories, says Christopher TaylerDuring the 1980s and early 90s, Hanif Kureishi's screenplays, novels and plays made him not only a famous writer but a talismanic figure to young Asian Britons and metropolitan liberals of anti-Thatcherite stamp. Like Philip Roth, with whom he was friendly, he served as a glamorously provocative pin-up to second and third-generation immigrants brought up to be unassuming and well behaved. In his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), pop music, sex and cultural self-invention were lined up against Tory England and suburban self-denial, with little doubt about which side Kureishi favoured.His novel The Black Album (1995) and the story "My Son the Fanatic", which he adapted into a movie, also tackled the confluence of Islam and identity politics. By the late 90s, though, ageing, divorce and disillusionment were increasingly becoming his stock in trade. Patrice Chéreau's film Intimacy (2001), adapted from Kureishi's writings, distils some of the key ingredients of the later, sadder work: forlorn drug-taking, affectless extra-marital sex, grimy London locations.The pieces gathered in Kureishi's enormous Collected Stories date exclusively from the later part of his career. The book reprints the collections Love in a Blue Time (1997), Midnight All Day (1999) and The Body (2002), adding only a slim volume's worth of new material. In consequence, it has a hung-over feel; in spite of the sexual charge to many of the stories, Kureishi's past as a greedy celebrant of urban transgression is mostly a rueful memory.Again and again, the characters look back on their 70s radicalism and 80s prosperity with a mixture of nostalgia, bewilderment and regret. ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:06:45 +0100 823798 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/jP_zlcl9htc/ Editor’s Note: I’m a big comics fan. I have a complete collection of Pogo, Peanuts and many others. Pearls Before Swine is right up in that category. Imagine my glee when its author, Stephan Pastis, personally, replied to my request to reprint this. I’ll never wash my monitor again. His blog is always worth reading. PB I bought three William Faulkner books and forced myself to read them all. One of them had a family trying to move their dead mom all over town. One of them had somebody looking for the father of her kid. And one of them was called The Sound and the Fury. If you ever want to be so confused that your brain starts to ooze out your ears, read The Sound and the Fury. I defy you to make one bit of sense out of that monstrosity. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different character, one of whom is mentally retarded (or, in the parlance of today, an “individual with an intellectual disability.”) You could pour words out of a bucket and end up with a more comprehensible book than that. So thanks to William Faulkner, I am now done reading fiction. Now I have moved on to watching movies by famous directors. One of those directors whose films I am now watching is Howard Hawks. One of his movies is The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Yesterday I watched The Big Sleep. I followed the plot for about ten minutes. Then the thing exploded into the most ridiculously complicated storyline I have ever seen, involving twenty-five different characters, all of whom are lying and killing and lying about the killing. By the end, I didn’t care who killed whom. I just wanted them all to die so that the film would end. Mercifully, after what seemed like the better part of three days, it did. So at the end of the movie, I checked the credits. ... Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:44:34 +0100 823868 http://blog.booklistonline.com/2010/03/05/a-real-lulu-john-edgar-wideman-to-self-publish/ It’s one thing when a first-time author self-publishes a book — it can be a great way to get noticed, as we learned from David Carnoy. It’s another thing entirely when a well known and widely respected author turns from traditional publishing to self-publishing. But that’s exactly what John Edgar Wideman (Fanon, 2008) is doing. (And, come to think of it, I asked Carnoy about that very same prospect.) According to a press release on Lulu.com, Wideman — a National Book Award finalist and the winner of other noteworthy honors — will publish Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind on March 14, exclusively on Lulu. (A free preview is available now.) According to the release: “I’ve been thinking about alternatives for a long time,” said Wideman, whose works of fiction and non-fiction include the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire and Fanon. “Lulu seems to represent a very live possibility as the publishing industry mutates. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach. “I have a very personal distaste for the blockbuster syndrome,” Wideman continued. “The blockbuster syndrome is a feature of our social landscape that has gotten out of hand. Unless you become a blockbuster, your book disappears quickly. It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish.” Wideman will also make several backlist titles available. It will be interesting to see how all this pans out, of course, but right now I have only one question: will this literary lion succumb to the temptation to give himself a good review? (Source: Likely Stories) Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:25:03 +0100 825040 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/-DzB-m9oW3w/ Yesterday we covered Penguin CEO John Mackinson engaging in a fair amount of hyperbole concerning the future of the e-book in a post-iPad world. “The definition of the book itself, as far as we can see, is up for grabs.” Now blogger Craig Mod, a six-year publishing-industry veteran, goes into more specifics, at considerable length, about what the iPad might mean for the format of electronic books. This is a long and thoughtful article with plenty of illustrations that is definitely worth a read. Formless vs. Definite Content Mod divides books into categories of Formless and Definite Content. Formless Content is your average fiction book, or non-fiction without many illustrations and tables. The text is the all, and it does not matter how it is paginated or reflowed—it still reads the same on any device. Definite Content is designed and formatted to be read in a particular way, with pictures and charts embedded in text at specific places. Textbooks are a good example. Devices such as the Kindle or iPhone, Mod says, have historically had trouble presenting works Definite Content due to the black-and-white nature of the Kindle, or the small screen size of the iPhone. But the iPad presents new possibilities for e-book formatting, and not just in the tired old “add video to it” multimedia sense. Mod observes that the page-turning metaphor could be entirely abandoned. Books could scroll continuously horizontally or vertically, or scroll horizontally for new chapters and other divisions then vertically within that chapter or division. Ending the “Disposable Book” Mod thinks that, in the end, all Formless Content and some Definite Content will end up on the iPad or devices like it. He feels this could mean the end of the “disposable book”— The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet. ... Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:15:00 +0100 823643 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/_moUTni26A8/everything-is-illluminated-jonathan-safran-foer The critics praised its 'startling originality', but Everything Is Illuminated is nowhere near equal to the sum of its borrowed partsFew debuts have been so fulsomely praised as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. My Penguin edition comes with page after page of orgasmic appreciation: a tidal wave of "impressive", "smart", "wildly exuberant", "wonderful", "extraordinarily brilliant", "extraordinarily moving", "achingly heartbreaking", "shocking", "linguistically brilliant", "rambunctious tour de force of inventive intelligent storytelling". This flood of adjectives reaches its spate in the reviewers' attempts to convey just how fresh and new the book is. It isn't just original, it's "of startling originality" (that from both Jay McInerey and Nicci Gerard writing separately in the Observer). It's "dazzlingly imaginative", "marvellously inventive", "intensely inventive". This hymn-sheet-singing is – as just about every broadsheet critic of the book would express it – "extraordinary". Time after time the same sentiments and words and adjectives crop up – and time after time, as far as I can see, they bear little relation to the poor book. The question of originality is the most striking. Safran Foer (who is clearly a well-read, intelligent and sensitive writer) must have wondered what the hell was going on. Here he is, diligently weaving a tapestry of other people's stories, styles, ideas and imagery. And there is the critical mass claiming never to have read anything like it. It's weird. Foer has taken from everyone from Lawrence Sterne to (oh mercy) Dave Eggers: there's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism; there's a plotline plundered from William Styron; there are repeated borrowings from the Tin Drum (right down to having a character hide under someone's skirts). ... Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:30:02 +0100 823576 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/Rn9XxaiRYAo/fresh-parallel-world-fantasy Stories of other worlds adjacent to our own are perennially popular, but the latest generation are refreshingly recognisableParallel-world and portal fantasies, involving characters who step into worlds beyond, are perennially popular, especially with children. As in CS Lewis's Narnia, or Alan Garner's grittier Elidor, the young protagonists often discover that they've breached the gap in order to fulfil a prophecy, and have heroic clean-up roles to play. Subsequently, they may return home safely, or even wind up as royalty - or both. Perhaps portal fantasy goes down so well with children because the idea of being a fate-sent hero in another world contrasts pleasingly with the reality of being a homework drone and washer-up in this one. And teenagers already inhabit the parallel world of adolescence, where all the colours are brighter but the greys and blacks are quicksands of despair. But the Narnia books are falling out of favour, not only because of the Christian only-just-subtext but because of the insidious suggestion that death and sweet fruit in Aslan's country are preferable to growing up and developing an adult sexual identity. Current variations on the theme of travel between worlds seem to be moving away from chivalric escapism, encouraging the reader to see their own world newly vivid instead.China Miéville's UnLunDun, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, features a contiguous fantasy capital, UnLondon, alongside the everyday one. Miéville's poetic, cartographic imagination produces an uncity defended by broken brollies ("unbrellas"), a half-ghost love interest, Hemi, and a contemporary, pollutant villain – the Smog – and his UnLondon is a far cry from Neverland or bucolic Narnia. The fantasy convention he has most fun with, though, is the idea of the prophesied Chosen One (or, in UnLondon, the "Shwazzy"). Of the two 12-year-olds drawn into UnLondon, it's charismatic Zanna who's supposed to be the Shwazzy. ... Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:02 +0100 823577 http://santafelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/03/fantastic-fiction.html One of the most frequently asked question I hear at the Reference Desk is: “what comes next in this series?” Often you can open to the front and see a listing of the books, and very often you will be able to search by the series title in our catalog, but another option is a great site about books and authors called Fantastic Fiction.This site, which comes out of England, is a great way to see what series a particular author has written—and in what order you should read the books—get some information about the author (including a picture), as well as some suggestions on who else you might like if you enjoyed this author’s books. It also has lists of upcoming books, most popular books and specific genres. I find it very user-friendly.by KS @ LF (Source: ICARUS... the Santa Fe Public Library Blog) Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 823647 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/W3eKAvtaaPE/return-full-makeup Forget the natural look. Fully made-up faces are all the rage. It may take patience and planning, says Hilary Mantel – but it's worth itIt's no longer news that false eyelashes are back, for the street and not just for the catwalk. You can have almost any shade you like – a flitter of plum, a waft of steel-blue. But if you haven't patience for the application, you can fake it; rather than advertising a natural look, new mascaras aim to make your own lashes look artificially extended. In fact, makeup this season is all about creating a finished look. It requires work and dedication, but with an icy winter behind us, and who knows what for spring, we are all feeling delicate, in need of the contrivances of civilisation, of art and not nature.There is something smug about women who insist they go for the natural look – and something deeply annoying about men who say they like women without makeup: are they sure they have ever seen one? The "bare" face is far from effort-free, except for the very young who have no problems with uneven skin tone. Forty may be the new 30, and 60 the new 40, but the honest woman admits to what sunshine and lifestyle have done, and reaches for a little help.The old axiom was that you privileged either eyes or lips, not both – a mean suggestion, on the lines of "have fun, but not too much". The full-face need not mean jammy overstatement in the old Hollywood mode. It can be refined and subtle; but defined lips need defined eyes – otherwise it looks as if you have been interrupted half way through re-making yourself, tumbled out into the early morning by a fire alarm.This year, fully made-up faces are all around us, in fact and fiction. Joan from Mad Men reigns supreme with impeccably coloured lips and a heavy swoop of eyeliner. Cheryl Cole – is she fact or media fiction? – pays equal attention to strong eyes, strong lips, strong cheeks. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:00:00 +0100 823397 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/ZY_5eiGXJCs/ Do word choices matter? Do word choices misspelled matter? Is there a difference between break and brake? Not if you read some of the ebook novels I have read recently! Yes, I’m complaining about authors who don’t see the value in hiring a professional editor, authors who think they can both write a compelling story and either self-edit it or hire the next door neighbor to give it the editorial once over, and the publishers that encourage this type of thinking. Professional editors do serve a purpose and the more I read fiction ebooks, the more concerned I become about what will happen to readability, understanding, and literacy in the Age of eBooks.I do not intend to rehash the difference between types of editing (see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor) or the difference between an amateur and a professional editor (see Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 1) and Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 2)). Nor do I intend to rehash the link between declining publishing standards and declining literacy (see Parallel Decline: Publishers & Educators). You can revisit those posts if you want. Instead I want to focus on the unfounded assumption by many ebookers that authors can do it all themselves — writing, designing, editing, marketing, selling, and whatever other “ing” is needed — in the ebook world, thereby doing away with publishers and other middlemen, yet increasing quality and decreasing cost and price. Let me be clear: It is not that the author cannot do all these tasks; rather, it is that few authors can do each task well and few authors either have the financial resources to hire these services directly or, if they do have the resources, the willingness to gamble their own money on the success of their book. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:00:30 +0100 823472 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/aqM2YLCtc38/evolutionary-psychologists-romantic-fiction Darwinian mating instincts are apparently behind prevalence of cowboys and doctors in Harlequin's titlesWhy are women attracted to books with titles such as The Texas Billionaire's Pregnant Bride and The Nurse's Brooding Boss? It's because they portray the embodiment of female desires, evolved over centuries, according to two Canadian researchers who analysed more than 15,000 Harlequin romance novels to see if they bore out evolutionary psychology.Theorising that mating instincts, developed over thousands of years, mean that women want a wealthy, fit, fertile, committed man, the researchers speculated that titles published by Harlequin – the owner of Mills & Boon – would be heavy on words such as baby, father and paternity; wealth, tycoon and billionaire; marriage, engagement and bride; and handsome, attractive and athletic.Analysing a total of 15,019 books, Anthony Cox from the Centre for Psychology and Computing in Dartmouth, Canada and Maryanne Fisher from the department of psychology at St Mary's University in Nova Scotia found that "love" was the most frequently used word in Harlequin romance novel titles (occuring 840 times), followed by "bride" (835), "baby" (696), "man" (672) and "marriage" (612). Other frequently used words included "cowboy" (314), "night" (340) and "nurse" (224). Delving deeper, into the most popular professions in the romance books, they found that "doctor" topped this count with 388 making it into titles, followed by "cowboy" (314), "nurse" (224) and "boss" (142). "Prince", "rancher", "knight", "king", "bodyguard", "sheriff", "pirate" and "midwife" all came in behind."The 20 most frequent words clearly suggest long-term commitment and reproduction are important to readers. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:58:29 +0100 823401 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/aYyvu3eGia4/ryszard-kapuscinski-angola Ryszard Kapuściński's work may drift into fiction – but adherence to fact in war reporting can start to feel impossible and pointlessWere he neither dead nor the author at issue, Ryszard Kapuściński could have written beautifully about the battle that continues to rage over his work. He might even have quoted himself: "The war these parties waged among themselves was sloppy, dogged, and cruel."So begins the second paragraph of Another Day of Life, a brilliant, hell-bent account of the Angolan civil war on the eve of the country's independence in 1975. I read the book 23 years later in Angola, where I had been posted as the BBC correspondent. The parties had barely stopped warring during the two decades that followed Kapuściński's visit. His observations, made in that same paragraph, remained as relevant: "Everyone was everyone's enemy, and no one was sure who would meet death. At whose hands, when, and where. And why."A friend, an Angolan journalist, advised me, "Of course you don't want to believe a word of it – he made half of it up – but you won't read a more accurate account of the Angolan war and the flight of the Portuguese. Not even from the pen of an Angolan."When Kapuściński died, those who distrusted the Polish reporter's accounts came out in force. Michela Wrong, an outstanding investigative journalist, wrote that "he was shockingly silent on, or paid only lip service to, many of the forces that have shaped African history: apartheid, Aids, the IMF and the World Bank, for example". Six years earlier, in the Times Literary Supplement, John Ryle had noted that the writer was "regarded less favourably, by readers in Africa itself, and by Africanist scholars and reporters who have come to doubt his adherence to fact". One of the most vocal doubters of Kapuściński's greatness has been the courageous and entertaining writer Binyavanga Wainaina. In 2005, he described him as "a fraud. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:00:01 +0100 823402 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/4lpXTBKP-Ck/best-advice-writers-read Reading is essential for writers – it instructs, inspires and offers a blissful escape from the blank pageIn an interview last year, the Portuguese Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago was asked about his daily writing routine. His answer was, "I write two pages. And then I read and read and read."Saramago didn't say how long it took him to write those two pages, but he did emphasise the reading part of his routine and it made me wonder: do most writers devote more time to reading? Or do they write more than they read? In today's world, unless a person is serious about writing and dedicated to reading it can be difficult to find the time to do either. People today have many commitments and the world offers many distractions. Once a commitment to writing is made it can be a long time before a person starts writing anything of quality and, as a consequence, young writers often spend years escaping into other people's fiction in lieu of writing themselves. Then, magically, they might develop a talent for expressing their ideas in language; their ideas might not be any good, but the practice of constructing sentences around those ideas becomes far less painful. At this point, a writer might start writing more and more each day, and reading a little less. I was talking about this recently with the American novelist Elise Blackwell. She said, "I think heavier reading is essential for young writers, but, like you, I moved into more writing than reading. The balance of my reading and writing shifts across the year, and I suspect I'd read four hours a day if I didn't have a day job. In the summer, when I'm not teaching, my reading and writing very nearly even out at four and four. When I'm teaching though, both are reduced – the reading by a much larger amount. The pattern also varies by where I am in writing a novel. I tend to read very little when combing the final draft and of course much more right after I've finished. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:30:01 +0100 823250 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infoisland/~3/6-v63Jh708I/ The Future is Now Conference On Friday and Saturday, March 5th and 6th, there will be a conference focusing on libraries and museums in virtual worlds. “The Future is Now” will bring together dozens of people from around the world to explore and discuss current activities and future possibilities. Three keynote addresses will be given by the team of Sharon Tettegah and Cynthia Calongne, co-authors of the 2009 book, Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments; Marilyn Johnson, author of the new book, This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All; and Tom Atkinson, chair of the Virtual Worlds Committee with AECT. Conference organizers include the ALA VCL MIG (Virtual Communities and Libraries, Member Initiative Group), the ACRL VW IG (Virtual Worlds Interest Group), the Alliance Library System, and TAP Information Services. The Gold Sponsor of this conference is LearningTimes, and Compendium Library Services is sponsoring the keynote series. More info about the conference is at http://www.opal-online.org/finindex.htm. The Sci-Fi & Fantasy Portal hosts its March Film Discussion Sunday, March 7 at 1 pm this month. (This coming Sunday, not Saturday.) DR. WHO Yes, that Dr. Who…the British Sci-fi television program presenting the adventures of the mysterious humanoid alien known as “The Doctor” or “Dr. Who”. The Guinness World Records lists it as the “longest-running science fiction television show in the world”. It began in 1963. It’s become a cult television favorite in the British Isles, quickly spread to other countries, and has influenced generations of TV professionals. Eleven actors have portrayed The Doctor. The transition from one actor to another is written into the plot as a regeneration, whereby the Doctor takes on a new body, and slightly different personality (complete with individual quirks). ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:24:49 +0100 824685 http://epist.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/e-book-for-the-classroom-of-the-classroom-and-by-the-classroom/ Today I had my mental model* of the e-book completely shook up. I went to a brown bag presentation here on the UIUC campus called “Encounters with E-Texts“.  Catherine Prendergast from the Undergraduate Rhetoric Program talked about the adoption of an in-house developed e-textbook for the freshman composition classes.  Here’s the description that went out to campus listservs: “Cathy Prendergast discusses the process of adopting an e-text from preliminary research and implementation to student evaluation and feedback. Join us for a peek between the pages of teaching with e- textbooks.” My notes below from the brown bag might not be entirely accurate, so please keep a look out for the video of the talk which will be up on the brown bag website eventually. The Undergraduate Rhetoric Program: 4,000 students per year 65 Teaching Assistants (graduate students) 27 Adjunct Instructors new paper textbooks every 3 years, roughly students usually have to pay about $130 for the paper textbooks Prendergast devoted a year and collaborated with several campus departments to develop a UIUC-centric textbook that would work better for the Rhetoric Program, be accessible, be cheaper for the students, be more flexible and allow more creativity. Now, when I first saw the brief description for this brown bag, I imagine the kind of e-books I’m used to reading on my iPhone:  basic epub files that I downloaded from Feedbooks.com or Project Gutenberg, mostly fiction that doesn’t have any fancy formatting, looks pretty much just like a paper book. The e-textbook for the Rhetoric Program, however, is a different animal altogether.  The keywords here are *flexible* and *interactive*.  I don’t mean the old-fashioned “ooo, we have hyperlinks” interactive. ... Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:08:48 +0100 824189 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/DeFH3c_3jXI/a-week-without-books She reads in bed, on the bus, while cooking dinner. So what happened when she went cold turkey?Going to the loo without a book! It is a profound shock. Instead of reading, I stare at the walls and notice that there are still two empty nails on which I meant – a year ago – to hang pictures. Also, I notice the dust on the floor and the cobwebs on the ceiling. I sense that I will be doing a lot more housework than usual this week.Going to bed is bizarre. If there is one time of day I always, always read, it is in bed before I go to sleep. On the first night of my week without books, I download Being Human on the iPlayer and give my nail polish some quality attention. But when the programme finishes and I try to shut my eyes, my head is buzzing. My eyes keep bouncing open again. Boing. Boing. Boing.I decided to try giving up books for a week because I have come to the point where I wonder if they are holding me back. On the whole, the world seems to think that books are always a good thing, that you can never get too much of them. People admit to being bookworms in the same way they admit to being "just too tidy really", or "a bit of a workaholic". But if you are a compulsive reader like me, who reads walking down the road, and while she's making her children's dinner, and on the loo and in the bath and in bed and on the bus, and at every other possible second of the day, and if what you're reading is mostly . . . well . . . pulp, then sometimes you end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round. Sure, there's a smattering of literature and high art-type stuff in there, but mostly it is whatever I have fished off the shelf at my nearest Oxfam that morning – detective stories, romances, horror, sci fi . . . any kind of fiction that I can gulp down in large enough, quick enough bites.I am usually reading three, sometimes four books, with a pile of books waiting in case I run out. ... Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:00:01 +0100 823252 http://146.74.224.231/archives/2010/03/read_and_learn_1.html Kids - would you like to hear a story and learn some cool new facts? Try reading along with Bookflix, an online resource that pairs classic video storybooks with related non-fiction eBooks to build a love of reading and learning. Watch and read today! Find Bookflix on the Library's website in the Electronic Library 24/7, on the Kids page, or click here. (Source: Santa Clara County Library - The Latest SCCoop) Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:40:48 +0100 823245 http://blog.booklistonline.com/2010/03/03/david-carnoy-self-publishing-is-minor-league-and-thats-good/ Way back in December 2008, I wrote about an article by David Carnoy, called “Self-Publishing a Book: 25 Things You Need to Know.” An editor at CNET, he was sharing useful lessons he’d learned while self-publishing his novel, Knife Music. I checked in with him the following month, asking about his experience purchasing a book review from Kirkus Discoveries, and meant, throughout 2009, to check in again to see how his experiment was going. At some point last fall, I noticed that his book had been taken down from Amazon–which, I assumed, meant that he had sold it to a traditional publisher. I was proven right when, last week, I saw a galley for Knife Music, to be published in July by Overlook Press, in the offices of Booklist. There’s still some experimenting going on–Carnoy and Overlook are allowing readers to vote on the new cover. (If you’d like to weigh in, you can do so on Facebook.) Thinking that Carnoy might have useful insight into the relationship between self-publishing and traditional publishing, I fired off the following questions via e-mail, and the obliging Carnoy fired his answers right back. How long did it take before a traditional publisher offered to publish your self-published novel? Were there other offers besides the one from Overlook?   About four months. NY1 (a local TV station in NY that also syndicates its content nationally) did a piece on the book (”Self-Publishing Is Not a Last Resort for Authors“) and it sparked some interest from publishers (there’s nothing like the power of TV to validate success). I was in the somewhat unique position of already having a major agency, Trident Media, behind the book. My agent was in discussions with other publishers, but Overlook was the first to make an offer. It was a two-book deal, which was appealing. ... Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:46:09 +0100 823229 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/bxe4_Bf8djU/canadian-library-association-announces.html The Young Adult Services Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2010 Young Adult Book Award. This award recognizes an author of an outstanding English-language Canadian work of fiction (novel, collection of short stories or graphic novel), published in 2009, that appeals to young adults between the ages of 13 and 18. The winner of the award, and the Honour Books, will be announced prior to the Canadian Library Association National Conference and Trade Show. The award will be presented at the conference in Edmonton, Alberta on June 3, 2010. The finalists for the 2010 CLA Young Adult Book Award, in alphabetical order by author, are:* Poster Boy by Dede Crane (Groundwood)* Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant (Alfred A. Knopf)* Not Suitable for Family Viewing by Vicki Grant (HarperCollins)* Haunted by Barbara Haworth-Attard (HarperCollins)* Girl on the Other Side by Deborah Kerbel (Dundurn)* Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston (HarperCollins)* The Gryphon Project by Carrie Mac (Puffin)* Dragon Seer by Janet McNaughton (HarperCollins)* Vanishing Girl by Shane Peacock (Tundra)* The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade (HarperCollins) (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:36:39 +0100 823075 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/XjW7hcnMds8/abdo-khal-arabic-prize Abdo Khal's satirical Saudi Arabian novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles wins $60,000 'Arabic Booker'A satirical Saudi Arabian novel exploring the devastating effects of limitless wealth has won the International prize for Arabic fiction.Saudi Arabian writer Abdo Khal's Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles – the title is a Qu'ranic reference to hell – is set in Jeddah, where the author lives. It depicts the seductive powers of a palace and those who have become its puppets, telling "the agonising story of those who have become enslaved by it, drawn by its promise of glamour", said the organisers of the prize, which is known as the Arabic Booker.Khal, who studied political science in Jeddah before becoming a novelist in 1980, told local press that winning the prize was "like a medal on your chest". "Although I was chosen among the finalists, I did not expect to win," said the author, whose books are not sold in Saudi Arabia. In 2004, he claimed this was due to the fact that they "address the sacrosanct trio of taboos in the Arab world: sex, politics, and religion". He defended his subject-choice at the time, saying "these are the things that make up people's lives".Khal was unveiled as winner of the $60,000 award yesterday evening in Abu Dhabi, where Kuwaiti writer Taleb Alrefai, chair of the judges, called his book "a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state". "Through the eyes of its two-dimensional protagonist, the book gives the reader a taste of the horrifying reality of the excessive world of the palace," said Alrefai.Khal beat five shortlisted authors to win the prize, which is run with the support of the UK's Booker prize foundation and funded by the Emirates foundation with the aim of finding a wider readership for Arabic literature. ... Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:01:21 +0100 823029 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/3T72Sf0zcMg/shakespeare-and-company-bookshop Long after Hemingway and the Beats, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop is still encouraging Paris to read and writeI've been to Paris many times. But, while I invariably wind up at La Belle Hortense for a browse over a glass of red, I'd yet to sample the charms of legendary English bookshop Shakespeare and Company. The first Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach at rue de l'Odéon, was the base for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the gang, but closed in the second world war. In 1951 George Whitman opened his own shop, Le Mistral, in a former 17th-century monastery overlooking Notre Dame. It became the base for Beat generation writers such as Burroughs and Ginsberg. He changed the name after Beach's death in 1962.I stand outside. Its Seine-side location is idyllic, even on a freezing February morning, with workmen on ladders outside its bottle-green facade, mending the electricals, and a skeletal tree wreathed in a string of bulbs. Summer must be wonderful here: there are empty garden chairs strewn between trays of hardy books. 28-year-old Sylvia Whitman, George's daughter, has agreed to show me round. Signs at the entrance marked "Beat" and "Lost" are a reminder of both stores' heavyweight associations. A wishing well, around which a handful of customers shuffle, glistens with pennies.Her father, Sylvia says, hoped to work until he was 100 but, forced to retire at 93, now lives on the second floor. He no longer gives interviews. We wander past shelves devoted to fiction, biography, art and French interest. "It's more organised that it looks," she says, with a laugh. Paperbacks line red wooden steps leading upstairs to what Sylvia calls the "non-commercial" floor: a library in which you could lose yourself, with one rule: books mustn't leave the premises. Here, as on the ground floor, single mattresses lurk between the shelves, and, in the children's section, a bunk bed. It's on these that young authors sleep each night. ... Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:30:01 +0100 823034 http://memphisreads.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-review-going-coastal-by-wendy.html FictionAndrea King reviews GOING COASTAL, by Wendy French (Forge Books, 2005)This work of fiction is about karma--the simple belief that “what goes around will come around.”Jody Rogers, a 27-year-old waitress, has had enough. Tired of customers sexually harassing her and not having a future at what feels like a dead-end job at Dean’s Ocean Galley Restaurant, she finally snaps after seven years. Abruptly quitting in the middle of her lunch shift, Jody trudges home to tell the news to Chris, her live-in boyfriend of two years.Not expecting Jody home for a few more hours, Chris is busted, literally, with his pants down. To add another fly in the ointment, Jody finds Chris in the shower with her cousin, Beth! So, on top of a horrible day at work, Jody has found her longtime boyfriend cheating on her--with her cousin! Jody attempts to move back home with her parents, after hastily deciding to move out of Chris' house.Strike three! Her parents have converted her old childhood bedroom into their arts and crafts room, leaving Jody virtually homeless.In the course of 24 hours, Jody is jobless, boyfriend-less, and homeless. What could be the icing on this proverbial cake? Of course, it would be the invitation to her ten year class reunion!All of these unfortunate events would harden anyone else, but Jody’s spunk and determination keep her afloat. Jody is no “Pollyanna” but she is a resourceful and sympathetic character.In the end, anyone who has wronged Jody sees the errors of their ways. (Spoiler alerts: Chris gets cheated on, the harasser from Dean’s moves out of town, and Jody gets re-hired with a promotion!)I liked Jody because she has a good heart and tries to make the best of her situation. Going Coastal is a lighthearted, end of the summer read that this reviewer finished in one day!Andrea King, Poplar-White Station (Source: Memphis Reads) Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 824779 http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2010/03/in-her-recent-consideration-of-dalkey-archives-anthology-best-european-fiction-2010-ruth-franklin-wonders----other-than-th.html In her recent consideration of Dalkey Archive's anthology, Best European Fiction 2010, Ruth Franklin wonders: Other than the language in which they write, is there anything that unites [writers such as Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and Nathan Englander]—all of whom have spent long periods of their lives living in places other than the United States—as definably American? This immediately seems to me rather insipid. In taking full measure of all writers' work, "the language in which they write" is everything. If the language is English, then whatever is "definably American" about the work can only reach us through the Americanized version of this language. (Luckily the reach of English into many countries and cultures gives us Americans additional direct access to the work of many non-American writers, although I would still maintain that American readers are going to respond most fully to American fiction simply because they "know" the language as inflected by American culture, just as Australians will respond most strongly to Australian fiction. This does not seem to me a matter of "preferring" one's national literature to translated literature. It's simply a matter of fact.) As to what else might mark a writer as "definably American": Who cares? It's an exercise for an American Studies scholar, perhaps, but otherwise not a question relevant to the our encounter with the text. I have written before that I feel comfortable engaging in literary criticism, at least that form of it I generally favor, close reading, only of English-language fiction or poetry. ... Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 822900 http://sanchezkisser.com/blog/2010/03/02/the-story-thus-far-part-6-words-words-words/ The single best writing day I ever had was when I was writing The Machine of the World. I wrote 7000 words in a span of 8 hours. I took a half an hour break for lunch but otherwise wrote for an entire day. This was exhilarating in itself, to see that I was capable [...] (Source: The Invisible Library) Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:03:44 +0100 823281 http://www.lisnews.org/what_do_%E2%80%9Clast_train_hiroshima%E2%80%9D Blog post at Swiss Army Librarian: I’m sure libraries across the country are asking this same question. My library purchased Last Train from Hiroshima, but haven’t put it out yet because we’re divided over how to handle it. Based on revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post, I’m opposed to just shelving this book in non-fiction. There are a lot of requests for it, so I do want to make it available for people to read, but I would like to include a note of some kind stating there are significant known inaccuracies in the book. Full post (Source: LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:40:58 +0100 823785 http://lisnews.org/what_do_%E2%80%9Clast_train_hiroshima%E2%80%9D Blog post at Swiss Army Librarian: I’m sure libraries across the country are asking this same question. My library purchased Last Train from Hiroshima, but haven’t put it out yet because we’re divided over how to handle it. Based on revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post, I’m opposed to just shelving this book in non-fiction. There are a lot of requests for it, so I do want to make it available for people to read, but I would like to include a note of some kind stating there are significant known inaccuracies in the book. Full post (Source: LISNews.org) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:40:58 +0100 822924 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/2010/03/02/mit-panel-death-of-the-news-32-530-7-p-wong-auditorium-e51/ Not too long from now, a panel discussion at MIT explores Death of the News?. “Death of the News? Journalism is in a crisis; newspapers are going out of business; editors and reporters are losing their jobs. In a vanishing era of traditional media, will the news vanish with it? A panel discussion about the rise of online media and its impact on global society with the following experts: Maria Balinska (BBC), Susan Glasser (Foreign Policy), & Jason Pontin (Technology Review) Tuesday, March 2 | 5:30p – 7:00p Wong Auditorium (E51)” On my way to the forum, I did a double-take at a fellow walking down the sidewalk who resembles Bob Stepno, whom I could imagine would appreciate this talk. I should look into what he thinks about the changes in journalism professions. Jason Pontin began by saying he imagines many of us have statements because responses to the topic are often highly opinionated. His summary provides a grim look at the present news industry and included statements about how many organizations have lost significant money and shut down. “So something happened and we’re going to explore what.” And, of course, any discussion about media must mention Jay Rosen. The panelists must answer who they are and from where they are coming. Susan Glasser is unhappy with the panel title because it is pessimistic. “As long as there are people interested in accountability, people will be interested in journalism.” Maria Balinska says she’s in audio journalism instead of being in radio journalism these days because of how the Internet has changed things. “None of us can predict what’s happening because of how things are changing. … I’m convinced there is a hunger for understanding the world around us …” The days of strong national papers might be behind us. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:55:49 +0100 822912 http://blog.booklistonline.com/2010/03/02/2010-golden-kite-winners-named/ The Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators has named winners in four categories: Fiction Sea of the Dead, by Julia Durango Nonfiction Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life’s Song, by Ashley Bryan Picture Book Text The Longest Night, by Marion Dane Bauer, illustrated by Ted Lewin Picture Book Illustration Gracias Thanks, illustrated by John Parra, written by Pat Mora For a complete list of winners and honorees, visit the SCBWI website. (Source: Likely Stories) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:26:40 +0100 823231 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/03/02/popular-book-collection-at-oregon-st-university-library-and-the-increasing-demand-for-kindles/ From the Article: For students looking to temper sober textbook readings with a literary escape into the world of vampires and zombies, Oregon State University is loaning out Amazon Kindle electronic readers stocked with the latest in popular books. The Corvallis, Ore.-based university has found it too expensive to fill its Valley Library shelves with fiction and nonfiction books that students would read for fun, not homework assignments or upcoming exams. So in November, the university began lending Kindle eReaders to students and faculty willing to part from traditional page flipping and embrace a technology being tested on campuses nationwide. [Snip] Because the library sign-up sheet now includes 189 students and faculty members waiting for their turn to use the Kindle, officials shortened the borrowing period from three weeks to two, and they bought 12 more Kindles in February to add to the original stock of six eReaders. Access the Complete Library Source: eSchoolNews See Also: Oregon St. University Kindle Request Form (Source: ResourceShelf) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:54:50 +0100 822847 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/bYBI38EGmo8/ This is part 5 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 ,Part 2 , Part 3, Part4. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews.  The mobile phone is emerging as an important way for people to read; indeed, in Asian countries, authors are already writing specifically for phone owners. The challenge is writing in smaller chunks — so the reader is not required to read for extended periods on a smaller screen and can easily resume where he/she left off. For poetry, this isn’t a problem, but what about fiction? Does limiting chapter length to (for example) 400 or 500 words reduce the dramatic or literary potential for the story writer?  I don’t know — I like the rhetorical short jab (Obama mastered it by dropping his voice to briefly pause after every 5 to 15 words, suggesting conclusiveness, authority & mastery of the material, & this unfortunately got him elected). As for the technical modifications: I’m at a loss. I like to tell people that I’m still getting used to electric lights. A touch of hyperbole there, but I also collect antiquarian books. Do you think the ideas that led to your stories (and novels) could have been repurposed into bite-sized chunks for a cell phone? Only in the sense that a story’s or novel’s key situation can sometimes be contracted into one or two sentences. I once wrote a condensed version of Petronius‘ Widow of Ephesus in 200 words (see below). This works beautifully for what it is; for what it is not (i.e., a fully textured narrative), it doesn’t. Sound like double talk? Yes & no. THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS (From the SATYRICON, as retold by Jack Matthews. Read the original version by Petronius). ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:44:55 +0100 822829 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2010/03/02/what-to-do-with-last-train-from-hiroshima I’m sure libraries across the country are asking this same question. My library purchased Last Train from Hiroshima, but haven’t put it out yet because we’re divided over how to handle it. Based on revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post, I’m opposed to just shelving this book in non-fiction. There are a lot of requests for it, so I do want to make it available for people to read, but I would like to include a note of some kind stating there are significant known inaccuracies in the book. One argument is that it’s not a library’s place to censor books, and if people want to read it we should provide access. However, we do censor resources and information simply by the act of selection, and by choosing which websites to link to based on their factual accuracy and reliability. Mainly I want to protect school kids and other unknowing people from taking portions of this book as fact - which is what the library is confirming by shelving it in non-fiction. But so far, neither the Charles Pellegrino (author) nor the Henry Holt (publisher) has issued an easy-to-print statement to include in the book. As of today, the book is still being promoted on the publisher’s homepage, but the author has addressed the issue in a forum posting linked to from his website. So, what are libraries doing with this book? Shelving it as usual? Not shelving it at all? Including a note inside or on the cover? Putting it in fiction? We still have Million Little Pieces in non-fiction, but I think there’s a difference between a memoir and a book about World War II. (Source: herzogbr.net blog) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:13:03 +0100 822864 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/irb_0ilYC-8/ One of the blessings of ebooks is that they are digital files that are easily corrected (note I said easily, not inexpensively), unlike the printed book, which once published becomes a fiscal nightmare if it is error laden. This problem, and what to do about it, came to mind as the result of a recent New York Times article, “Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb.” The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino was published in January 2010 by Henry Holt to acclaim. Alas, there may be a major problem: The technical details of the mission are based on in-person recollections of someone who was not there. So the question becomes: What is to be done? [Update: According to today's New York Times, the publisher, Henry Holt, has decided to recall all 18,000 copies of the book. Apparently other issues have arisen, including whether the author truly has a doctorate degree and whether other sources actually exist. Here the publisher is acting as a gatekeeper and warranting the quality of the book; what would be the case if the book had been self-published?] If this were an ebook the choice would not diminish in either importance or problems. To correct the ebook would lead to versioning and a never-ending attempt to always keep a book accurate and up-to-date — the never-ending rewrite. In one sense, this is good; in another, it is a scholarly nightmare: How will a scholar ever be able to cite or quote an ebook as a source? (Which is another interesting question: Can ebooks be reliably cited?) But failure to correct a major error, one that calls into question the validity and credibility of the book and author, as occurred in The Last Train from Hiroshima, is equally problematic. And what happens when three years from now another history-changing error is found? Clearly this is not much of a problem in fiction. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:15:40 +0100 822833 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/2WjIuu1Qo0c/audiobooks-classics-audible Audible is publishing lesser-known classics, including Shusaku Endo's Silence, as audiobooks for the first timeA trio of titles by acclaimed Japanese author Shusaku Endo, who was described by Graham Greene as one of the finest writers of the 20th century, are being published as audiobooks for the first time.Endo's Silence, a 17th century-set story of two Jesuit priests who go to Japan to spread the gospel, and his novels The Samurai and Deep River, are all being made into audiobooks by provider Audible as it launches a new publishing programme looking to unearth old classics and produce the unabridged audio exclusively as downloads.Audible is also bringing out the first-ever audiobook of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian novel that was banned on publication in 1928, and five unabridged titles by Eric Ambler, who was once described as "the source on which we all draw" by John Le Carré."Although we've got 40,000 titles on the site we felt we wanted to be increasing the rate at which we added new titles, and we were feeling a little bit disappointed at how few titles were making it from print into audio," said Audible UK managing director Chris McKee. "We've been trying to find a seam of interesting titles where we can acquire the audio rights, because very often publishers are reluctant to let them go. These titles are just slightly below publishers' radars, so we can get in, get the rights and create exciting titles which otherwise wouldn't get into audio."Audible is also publishing downloadable audiobooks of Napoleon Bonaparte's novella Clisson and Eugénie: A Love Story, and six titles by respected British mystery writer Michael Francis Gilbert, with plans to continue to expand the programme with "dozens of new titles" over the next year, McKee said. "It's very easy to just say that what's selling in print should make it into audio, but we like to delve deeper, to look at titles which are timeless. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:14:49 +0100 822732 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/y0lbkpE2U1Y/world-book-day-hobbit-at-bodleian-uk.html "The Bodleian Library is taking part in World Book Day 2010 by exhibiting a selection of J.R.R. Tolkien's original artwork which was used to illustrate The Hobbit, as well as a unique manuscript of Hobbit doodles and a rare first edition of the book. This free-of-charge one-day display will take place in the Divinity School of the Bodleian Library on Thursday, 4 March 2010. The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937 with all fifteen-hundred copies of the first edition being sold out within three months. It received generally enthusiastic reviews, and after the success of the American edition in 1938 the book became one of the world's best-selling single works of fiction, now translated into nearly forty languages" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:25:20 +0100 822769 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/PQyvGO0vhy4/aba-announces-finalists-for-2010-indies.html On Monday, March 1, the American Booksellers Association unveiled the finalists for the 2010 Indies Choice Book Awards. Booksellers at ABA members stores will cast ballots to choose the winners in eight categories - Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Adult Debut, Young Adult, Middle Reader, New Picture Book, Most Engaging Author, and Picture Book Hall of Fame - throughout the month of March. The Indies Choice Book Awards reflect the spirit of independent bookstores and the IndieBound movement. The winners, to be announced in April, will be honored at BookExpo America 2010 in New York City (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:33:23 +0100 822772 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/PIhFyGETg-o/ O’Reilly Media is launching O’Reilly Digital Distribution. It will be a new division offering a complete ebook publishing service to publishers. O’Reilly will over free conversion and distribute and market books to 24, and eventually 40, ebook distribution channels. The service can convert into any format. The fee will be 25% of sales and there will be no charge until the ebooks are actually in the distribution channels. O’Reilly says that the service is aimed at all types of books, not just technical ones, and they are looking towards even poetry and fiction. You can find more information here. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:55:02 +0100 822839 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/fefT23z9gF4/shooting-star-barry-hannah-dies Award-winning author of nine novels and four short story collections passed away at home in Oxford, MississippiAcclaimed US author Barry Hannah, who won the William Faulkner award for his debut novel Geronimo Rex in 1972, died on Monday, age 67.According to the University of Mississippi, where Hannah taught creative writing for more than 25 years to students including The Secret History author Donna Tartt, the writer passed away at his home in Oxford, Mississippi. He had been diagnosed with cancer 15 years ago, and his death appeared to be due to a heart attack, according to his son, the university said.Born in Clinton, Mississippi in 1942, Hannah was the recipient of a host of literary prizes for his nine novels and four collections of short stories. Geronimo Rex, set in the American south of the 1950s and 1960s, was nominated for the National Book Award as well as taking the William Faulkner, while his 1978 short story collection Airships, about the Vietnam war, the civil war and the modern south, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction award.Fellow novelist and Mississippi native Richard Ford told the Associated Press that Hannah was "a shooting star". "Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself," Ford said, telling the newswire that the two friends often discussed the nature of "southernness"."We circled the whole issue of southernness differently," said Ford. "I think he embraced it in a way that he took sustenance from. He chose to live in William Faulkner's town, chose to stay in the south, to his great strength and credit. But he was not a regional talent. He was much larger than that. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:23:03 +0100 822734 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/pMtjm8_kLWw/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner John Brunner's dystopian vision of 2010 may not be completely accurate – but his grungy world is brilliantly describedThere are huge inequalities in wealth and resources between rich and poor nations. There are equally unfair distributions within those nations. Vaguely sinister corporations are making vast profits thanks to the algorithmic predictions of their computer systems and they have a turnover that dwarfs plenty of African states. Most people in the developed world are unhappy with their lot, but are kept under control thanks to a steady diet of tranquillising drugs and reality TV.Sound familiar? If it does, a fair number of John Brunner's predictions for 2010 (the year in which he set his 1969 Hugo winner Stand on Zanzibar) can be counted correct. Of course, he didn't get everything right. In the novel, there's only one giant computer instead of a world wide web – a computer that is cooled by helium, "falls in the megabrain range" and prints out its findings on green and white computer paper. Rather than vacuous celebrities, the stars of the reality TV programmes are the viewers themselves, who have uploaded images of themselves that get beamed back to them doing exciting things in exotic locations. The title, meanwhile, refers to Brunner's dire – and thankfully not quite accurate – predictions about the population problem he thought we'd be suffering – and the drastic measures we'd have to take as a result. Apparently when Brunner was young it was thought that if everybody in the world were to stand shoulder-to-shoulder they would take up an area the size of the Isle of Wight. Looking at population growth figures, Brunner postulated that by 2010 the same trick would necessitate an island the size of Zanzibar. Hence the title. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:00:01 +0100 822735 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/9CAdWFKDH6c/don-delillo-writing-fiction Don DeLillo's fierce, complex love of language should inspire all of us who are struggling to write fictionAbout a year ago my wife wrote to Don DeLillo on my behalf, and without my knowledge. I was in that periodic slough of despond familiar to unpublished novelists: that witches' brew of angst, lethargy, self-doubt, self-pity. She asked the greatest American writer of his generation to gift me a few words of encouragement, something to rekindle the creative spark. To my amazement and huge gratitude, he responded. What he wrote is between us; the fact that he wrote is what counts. His letter suffused me with renewed energy and determination; and especially, a belief in the importance, beauty and elemental, intoxicating, limitless power of words. It made me want to write again. Because Don DeLillo, above all else, is a writer. This might sound self-evident; let me explain. I mean, he is defined by the act of writing. He doesn't teach or commentate or critique or appear on TV talking-heads shows. He writes. This is what he does, and this is what he is. If life is an ongoing process of self-actualisation, DeLillo realises his fullest, truest self through the act of creating sentences, paragraphs, spectacular worlds of language. Medium and message are equally important in his work. Of course, he is a deeply serious writer, and there is a rare profundity and thematic ambition to his novels (although there is playfulness, too). His books are broad and complex and fiercely intellectual: mapping the hidden currents and flows of our time; pondering the obliqueness and strangeness of existence; marking those points where individual lives meet grand historical narratives. But more than this, DeLillo is, I think, in love with language, enraptured by the pleasure and potential of the simple process of putting words with words. He himself phrases it beautifully: "Fiction… is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:00:01 +0100 822737 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/iowa-short-fiction-award-winners.html The Iowa Review has announced the 2009 Short Fiction Award Winner, "All That Work and Still No Boys" by Kathryn Ma, and the 2009 John Simmons Short Fiction Award winner, "How to Leave Hialeah" by Jennine Capó Crucet. (Source: NewPages Blog) Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 824218 http://bclyaknow.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-fiction-for-march-in-like-lion.html Well, not exactly. Then again, here in the northwest, Spring comes in more like a pussycat anyway. In keeping with that non-conformity, this latest new fiction has shown up like a zombie. And a dead person. And a freak. Mermaid anyone? Take your pick! Of course, there are always more on our New Book shelves in the Teen Room.I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It by Adam Selzer (Fantasy)YA Selzer, AAlgonquin “Ali” Rhodes, the high school newspaper’s music critic, meets an intriguing singer, Doug, while reviewing a gig. He’s a weird-looking guy—goth, but he seems sincere about it, like maybe he was into it back before it was cool. She introduces herself after the set, asking if he lives in Cornersville, and he replies, in his slow, quiet murmur, “Well, I don’t really live there, exactly. . . .” A few more curiosities unfold after they start dating, to which she is of course blinded: he never changes clothes, his head is a funny shape, and he says practically nothing out loud. So, there’s sincere goth, and then there’s zombie! Time to break up! Turns out, zombies aren’t very good at that. At the same time she learns that vampires don’t think much of music critics who make fun of vampires in reviews. . . .Don’t expect Batman to come to the rescue on this one kids!Walk of the Spirits by Richie Tankersley Cusick (Supernatural)YA Cusick, R.Something is cloying at Miranda Barnes. Something lonely and sad and . . . very pressing, which she can't escape. Whispers when she's alone, shadows when no one is there to make them, and a distant pleading voice that wakes her from sleep. Like her grandfather before her, she seems to have a special gift of communicating with spirits who still walk the town of St. Yvette, Lousiana, with its moss-draped trees and above-ground cemeteries. And no matter where she turns, Miranda feels bound by their whispered pleas for help . . . unless she can somehow find a way to bring them peace. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 822926 http://hedgehoglibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/03/wee-reads-mid-session-update.html Checking back in as we've gotten through Week 4 of this first session of Wee Reads. Overall, I'd say it's going swimmingly--the kids keep coming, they're having a good time, and no one has melted down at the idea of separation.  I lost one kid because he and dad weren't quite ready for a separation storytime, but they are attending a family storytime elsewhere. The other parents are right out the door, celebrating the idea of running across to the adult fiction section for a book by themselves.For those playing the home edition (and yes, I'll have a Google Doc of Reading Recommendations when this is all over)Week 2:We started off with Diary of a Fly by Doreen Cronin. The "Diary" series are wonderful because there is a TON of biology and fun facts dangled before you without really beating you over the head with pedantics of "this is a fly, it has wings."Once you start with the Diary of a Fly, one must then have Fly Guy! Tedd Arnold's books are delightfully gross and small children this very unusual pet.We did more ribbon dancing and then into our chapter book, continuing with Knights of the Kitchen Table by Jon Sciezska. So far, they'd knocked down a knight. Week 3:I had to squeeze a bit more in this week because my "back up" book was due. I always try to keep at least one back up book in the room in case something goes wrong, falls though, isn't working, or turns into a 30 second read. We started with Melanie Watt and Chester. This went okay...Chester is a bit more of a one-on-one I think...there is so much going between the characters and in the artwork. Perhaps it we'd had a bit more time to slow it down and talk it through...Next was a classic Berenstain Bears. There are a lot of these in our easy readers: Inside Outside Upside Down and The Bear's Vacation. I'm not a big fan of how Papa Bear is portrayed in a lot of the books, so I opted for The Spooky Old Tree. ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:25:00 +0100 822665 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/XA8ZlFPkNLM/fish-farming-standards-scottish-salmon The industry is highly regulated and the fish have ample room to swim freelyJonathan Safran Foer's opinions on the salmon industry are misguided ('No fish gets a good death', 23 February). "Factory-farmed chickens, turkeys and cattle all suffer in fundamentally similar ways. So, it turns out, do fish," he says, adding: "'Aquaculture' – the intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement – is essentially underwater factory farming."I am chief executive of the representative body for 95% of Scottish farmed salmon production, which is recognised as a leader in animal welfare best practice. Last month the RSPCA reported that Scottish farmed salmon was top of its Freedom Food charts, with an impressive 60% of production participating in its stringent animal welfare scheme which includes standards for husbandry, stocking density and harvesting.Of the 532 million farm animals that are reared under the RSPCA scheme, some 440 million are Scottish farmed salmon. More broadly, salmon farming is one of the most highly regulated sectors of the food industry, complying with national and international legislation as well as with retailer standards and the independently audited Code of Good Practice for Scottish Finfish Aquaculture.Contrary to Foer's claims that "salmon spend their lives in the equivalent of a bathtub of water", the average underwater pen is, by volume, the size of two Olympic swimming pools – meaning that fish have ample room to swim freely. As salmon only occupy a maximum of 2% of the space available in the pen, the remaining 98% of water is available for swimming. Therefore it is simply not true to imply that salmon are somehow packed into a confined space and constricted in their movements.Foer describes the marine environment in which salmon are grown as "filthy water" and goes on to suggest that "animals' eyes bleed from the intensity of the pollution". ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:05:18 +0100 822541 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/DNRPGGopRYU/ryszard-kapuscinski-accused-fiction-biography New book claims journalist repeatedly crossed boundary between reportage and fiction-writingHe has been voted the greatest journalist of the 20th century. In an unparalleled career, Ryszard Kapuscinski transformed the humble job of reporting into a literary art, chronicling the wars, coups and bloody revolutions that shook Africa and Latin America in the 1960s and 70s.But a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up.In a 600-page biography of the writer published in Poland yesterday, Artur Domoslawski says Kapuscinski often strayed from the strict rules of "Anglo-Saxon journalism". He was often inaccurate with details, claiming to have witnessed events he was not present at. On other occasions, Kapuscinski invented images to suit his story, departing from reality in the interests of a superior aesthetic truth, Domoslawski claims.Domoslawski told the Guardian: "Sometimes the literary idea conquered him. In one passage, for example, he writes that the fish in Lake Victoria in Uganda had grown big from feasting on people killed by Idi Amin. It's a colourful and terrifying metaphor. In fact, the fish got larger after eating smaller fish from the Nile."He added: "Kapuscinski was experimenting in journalism. He wasn't aware he had crossed the line between journalism and literature. I still think his books are wonderful and precious. But ultimately, they belong to fiction."On another occasion, the writer reported vividly on a massacre in Mexico in 1968. Although he was travelling in Latin America at the time, Kapuscinski did not witness it, despite asserting "I was there", Domoslawski alleges.The biographer, a correspondent with Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest paper, said he did not want to debunk Kapuscinski, whom he described as "my mentor". ... Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:05:09 +0100 822542 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/03/01/february-2010-most-downloaded-ebooks-and-audiobooks-based-on-libraries-using-overdrive/ The February rankings of the most downloaded eBooks and audiobooks have been released by OverDrive. Note: At the bottom of the rankings page (in the small print) you can learn more about the methodology used to compile the lists. On the same web page, you’ll find the Top 10 eBooks and Audiobooks in several categories. We’re only going to list the number one title here. Download Audiobooks – Adult Fiction 1. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown (Books on Tape) Download Audiobooks – Adult Nonfiction 1. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (Hachette Audio) Download Audiobooks – Juvenile Fiction 1. The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan (Listening Library) Download Audiobooks – Juvenile Nonfiction 1. Night, by Elie Wiesel (Audio Bookshelf, LLC) Download eBooks – Adult Fiction 1. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) Download eBooks – Adult Nonfiction 1. SuperFreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (HarperCollins) Download eBooks – Juvenile Fiction 1. Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) Download eBooks – Juvenile Nonfiction 1. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson (Penguin USA, Inc.) Access the Complete Rankings Source: OverDrive (Source: ResourceShelf) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:19:06 +0100 822604 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/KHSoKqcaoKI/ The most inspiring session I attended at last week’s Tools of Change conference was by Bob Pritchett, President/CEO of Logos. What was so special about Bob’s presentation, “Network Effects Promote Premium Pricing“? Two words: content and value. It’s causing me to stop looking at individual ebooks and start thinking much bigger. I downloaded the Logos iPhone app during Bob’s talk so that I could have a better feel for what he was describing. You might think it’s nothing more than an ebook reader like Stanza but there’s more to it than that. It comes with a number of books built in, including a few Bibles. If you’re using one translation and you wonder what the same verse looks like in another translation, just touch the verse number, select one of your other Bibles and the app takes you right to that same verse. Seems pretty simple, right? That’s just the start. Curious to learn more about a person, place or word in the Bible? Just touch and hold and the Logos app lets you search for it throughout the Bible or in a seemingly endless list of other Logos products.This is the “network effect” Bob referred to in his session’s title. You start reading the Bible in the Logos app but before you know it you’ve hopped to several other resources, clicking from one link to the next, learning more and more along the way. It’s similar to when you start researching something in Bing or Google and a couple of hours later you realize you’re 20 links deep; you have no idea how you got there but every link has added to the journey. When was the last time you had that feeling with an ebook or app? Have you ever had that feeling in an ebook? I haven’t, and that’s because most publishers are just selling an individual ebook, not a network of content. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:00:20 +0100 822454 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/EVTdh4gi1Y0/ This is part 4 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 ,Part 2 , Part 3. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews. I just finished HANGER STOUT, AWAKE  (which you published in 1967, to some acclaim). This simple naive voice plus the subject matter (cars, girls, and an unusual contest) makes me wonder if the ideal reader should be an 8th grade boy. Did you write this with the intention of attracting a younger audience? In a way, an 8th grader could respond to it. Years ago I bought the plates from Harcourt and paid to have 3000 copies printed, which I sold out easily. Most of them sold to colleges and high schools, and I remember doing a phone interview with students at a high school in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In another sense, however, I think someone like Hanger (i.e., any young person) would be far less privileged in understanding the novel. The distance of age is required to understand much of his innocence and brave integrity (cf. McLuhan’s "I don’t know who discovered the ocean, but I know it wasn’t a fish.’) It’s all a matter of perspective. I regard Hanger as more character-driven than plot-driven. But as I read, I had no idea what details were important or what was going to happen next! You finished Hanger at an interesting place — with many things left unresolved. Were you tempted to ratchet up the melodrama or continue the novel past where it ends? Good. I toyed with the idea of doing a sequel, but decided against it. In my privately printed edition, published a decade or so after the novel came out, I wrote that I didn’t know what Hanger was then doing or how he was getting along, but I figured he’d be all right. In short, he is a survivor, to use the fashionable term. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:55:54 +0100 822456 http://www.powells.com/partner/18/review/2010_03_01.html?utm_source=overview&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_overview&utm_content=Black%20Elvis%20(Flannery%20O'Connor%20Award%20for%20Short%20Fiction) Black Elvis (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) by Geoffrey Becker, a review from Rain Taxi by Jaspar Lepak. (Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:00:08 +0100 822403 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/iRcS/~3/7gouAAdYX9k/crimefest-2010.html "CRIMEFEST is a convention for people who like to read an occasional crime novel as well as for die-hard fanatics. Following the hugely successful one-off visit to Bristol in 2006 of the American convention Left Coast Crime, the hosts were encouraged to continue with a similar annual event and created CRIMEFEST. First organised in June 2008, CRIMEFEST is quickly becoming one of the most popular dates in the crime fiction calendar. The annual convention draws top crime novelists, readers, editors, publishers and reviewers from around the world and gives delegates the opportunity to celebrate the genre in an informal atmosphere" 20-23 May, 2010 - Bristol, UK (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:43:37 +0100 822417 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/8S_5GkMRTFM/yann-martel-break-pm-new-novel Having sent Canadian premier Stephen Harper a book every fortnight since 2007, the Booker winner is putting his campaign on hold to concentrate on the launch of Beatrice and VirgilSeventy-six books and three years after Yann Martel began his quest to get Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper reading, the Booker prize-winning author of Life of Pi has announced that he's planning to take a four-month break from his mission as he sets off to promote his own new novel, Beatrice and Virgil.Martel, whose tale of a boy and a tiger, Life of Pi, has sold more than 7m copies worldwide, first decided to try to influence Harper's attitude to the arts in Canada by sending him a book every two weeks in March 2007. Starting with Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych ("not a moment of dullness, yet no cheap rush of plot either"), he has kept this up for the last three years, very occasionally receiving a response from Harper's office but more usually sending the books – from Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart – into a void.Today, Martel wrote to Harper informing him about "a temporary change in our little book club" as he leaves for a four-month trip to mark the publication of Beatrice and Virgil, a dark allegory starring a donkey and a howler monkey, in June.Sending the prime minister Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ("a searing indictment of what Stalin did to his own people"), the author says he "was worried that the logistics of getting a book and a letter to you every two weeks while on tour would be too much of a strain", so he decided to "invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey"."This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you? My knowledge of the book world is very limited. Why not plumb the literary depths of other writers?" Martel told Harper. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:26:00 +0100 822397 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/uXIHzrg4rJc/best-contemporary-japanese-novel-manga The ingeniously satirical Legend of Koizumi tells you far more about the country, far more entertainingly than any novel of recent yearsShortly after the first episode of The Legend of Koizumi anime is broadcast in Japan on 26 February, UK readers – whether fans of the manga genre or baffled by its appeal – shall have cause to rejoice. Not only does the TV series promise to be entertainingly ridiculous (never has "Let's delegate!" sounded so imperiously badass), but the added attention will likely spur a proper English translation of the parody manga on which it's based. And it's one of the most brilliant ever written.The manga stars former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, may his mane ever ripple. Portrayed by author Hideki Owada as Japan's last action hero, Koizumi settles matters of international diplomacy with slavering, corrupt world leaders from Kim Jong-Il to "Papa Bush" over histrionic, blood-spattered sessions of the ancient game of mahjong – often while bleeding himself, and occasionally stopping to singlehandedly shoot down nuclear missiles over the Japan Sea. Poised to become a legend in its own right, this serialised comic published by Takeshobo has been a wild success with Japanese readers. But it also appeals to a foreign audience in a way few other manga can. The reason for this is that you can learn more about contemporary Japan's psyche in 15 minutes spent reading The Legend of Koizumi than you could in 15 hours with recent Japanese novels. In this respect, it's a great example of how the highly visual manga format can integrate cultural threads seamlessly with a speed a novel would struggle to match. Consider what you can learn from just the first three chapters.  Within pages, it's clear the manga is simultaneously channelling and mocking the widely held Japanese idea that politics is a game played out between warring egos on a scale that dwarfs the common man. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:49:36 +0100 822401 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/carpe-verbum-fiction-contest-winners.html The newest edition of Carpe Articulum features winners of the Carpe Verbum Novella/Long Short Fiction Contest:First - Carol HowellSecond - Aashish KaulThird - Eric WassermanIn Curso Honorum - Lisa Ni BhraonainHonorable Mentions: Paul Fahey, Brian Duggan, Chellis Glendinning, and Loree WestronThe editors write of the contest: "The Novella Award was a new addition to Carpe Articulum this year. Many (Source: NewPages Blog) Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 824222 http://southlakelibrary.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html#1551549951650856076 1400 Main Street, Suite 130Southlake, Texas 76092Phone: (817) 748-8243http://www.southlakelibrary.org/"The March wind roars, Like a lion in the sky, And makes us shiver, As he passes by. When winds are soft, And the days are warm and clear, Just like a gentle lamb, Then spring is here." ~Author UnknownShe came roaring in with wind and rain, like a saucy woman who demands our attention. Be sure to have a good book in your lap, the next time March let's it pour. FICTION HARDCOVERTHE LAST SURGEON, by Michael Palmer. (St. Martin’s, $26.99.) A surgeon and a nurse track a killer whose specialty is murders that don’t look like murder. Call #: F PALBRAVA, VALENTINE, by Adriana Trigiani. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) An Italian-American shoemaker faces challenges at work, in her family and in love; the second book in a trilogy. Call #: F TRITHE MIDNIGHT HOUSE, by Alex Berenson. (Putnam, $25.95.) Who is killing members of a secret unit that interrogated terrorists? The C.I.A. agent John Wells is on the case. Call #: F BERPOOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL, by Jackie Collins. (St. Martin’s, $26.99.) Hollywood murder, three beautiful 20-something high school friends, a hot New York club owner. Call #: COLWINTER GARDEN, by Kristin Hannah. (St. Martin’s, $26.99.) After their father’s death, two sisters must cooperate to run his apple orchard and care for their difficult mother. Call #: F HANWORST CASE, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) A New York detective raising 10 children alone investigates a string of kidnappings and killings of teenagers by a villain with unusual motives. Call #: F PATKISSER, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam, $25.95.) Stone Barrington, the New York cop turned lawyer, pursues a case of financial fraud on the Upper East Side. Call #: F WOOTHE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $25.95.) A Swedish hacker becomes a murder suspect. Call #: F LARTHE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday, $29.95. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0100 823552 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/pJ0r4OQdYMg/sharon-osbourne-politics-literature-ozzy She doesn't want to be Charles Dickens, so she's modelling herself on Barbara CartlandSharon Osbourne will be two hours late for her interview. A photo shoot is overrunning says her marvellously named assistant, Silvana Arena. As we enter the Osbourne mansion in Hidden Hills, a gated estate off Interstate 101 above Los Angeles, there is a fight going on unchecked in the hall. Two leettle dourgues from Osbourne's vast collection of over-groomed life forms are doing snarly battle, possibly for mastery of the pile of poo that lies mid-floor.In the living room the world's largest television is pumping out the All-American Shouting Channel. Ozzy Osbourne is in residence, sprawled on a vast sofa like a negligent emperor with that benign-but-bewildered look that impressionist Jon Culshaw nailed so well.Silvana parks me on a sofa in her office and swivels back to work at her desk. Which local sushi takeout joint, she asks down the phone, is the one that Sharon hates and which is the one she loves? Tough gig.While I wait, the Osbournes' staff are at my disposal. A nice Geordie assistant brings his compatriot a proper pot of tea and a plate of biscuits. Silvana sweetly supplies bowls of low-fat cheese puffs called Pirate Booty. I start to nod off.Yapping wakes me up. Sharon Osbourne has sidled on to the neighbouring sofa and the leettle dourgues are paying obeisance. Maybe she's been talking for a while, because we seem to be mid-conversation. "The grinning twat – he needs to be tarred and feathered that motherfucker. And she's a fucking motherfucker too," she says. Osbourne proves so implacably foul-mouthed and so gamely broad-ranging in her hatreds during the interview that she could be talking about anybody – Brangelina, Bennifer, SuBo or Simon Cowell. But no, she's talking about Tony Blair and, quite probably, Cherie Booth.She's been watching Blair give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. ... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:05:00 +0100 822247 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/ZhAzjA0umkw/ This is part 3 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 and Part 2 . Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews. What do you do or where do you go to get away from writing and literature?  I collect old and rare books. When I was younger, I jogged, but quit after a bone spur in my heel talked me into it. And I’ve always loved to drive — years ago, I calculated that at that time I had actually driven over a million miles in cars.  One of your bios mention that you and your wife used to store your book collection in an old saloon, "bought for that purpose and located in a small southeastern Ohio mining town." What’s the story behind that? Do you still own the saloon? We’ve just, in the past month, sold the old place on a land contract. Before that, I sold the books in the store (about 10 to 15 thousand at each sale) to Mike Riordan, a  friend from Hell, Michigan (yep, that’s where he was from). He’s  the retired captain of a nuclear sub who’s now crazy about the book game; the last I heard, he had accumulated over 300,000 of them. (He and his wife  Janet  have moved to Colorado.)  I realize that your wife is a book nut too, but has she ever suggested getting rid of half of the books in your house to free up space? My dear wife has the typical housekeeper’s passion for cleanliness & order, so she’s occasionally exasperated by my own passion for scooping up books. Her own collecting is rather passive; but she has a special interest in children’s books & Gone with the Wind stuff.  You extol book collecting as a kind of recreational activity, almost like gambling. ... Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:55:54 +0100 822158 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/HQFdXW7qwjI/ (Here is a brief excerpt from  WORKER’s WRITEBOOK, an unpublished notebook  about writing fiction  which Jack Matthews prepared for  his  Ohio U. creative writing students in 1994.   See also the interview with Jack Matthews ( Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)  and  Jack Matthews (an introduction) and Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting ). Creativity finds its natural expression in the generation and testing of hypotheses. Actually, it has more to do with the generation than the testing, but we’ll leave the testing part in, for-like the Background to the Opening Scene phases in a story, it cannot be easily distinguished from the generation. Even as we spin an idea, a cadre of analysts in the mind’s bureaucracy are busily probing it and assessing it for its worth. The words "What if" signal the release of a question or hypothesis, and with it, the imagination. "What if a man awakens one morning to find that his wife has left him?" Is this a good idea?  Well, possibly. It’s hard to tell. Why is it hard to tell? Because it’s too vague. Already, dullness has crept in. Rather, nothing has crept in, and nothing has yet come alive. Why not? Because the idea remains too abstract, too featureless. So what is one to do? Well, several things are possible. No two writers will bring this idea to life in the same way, and what might be perfect for one, will be deadly dull for the other. Still, there are changes and additions that will unquestionably improve it. Consider this one: "What if Burton Fife, a 78 year old retired fireman, awakes one morning to find that his wife, Phyllis, has left him?" Is this better? It is. It’s more real, more concrete, more precise. ... Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:26:43 +0100 822159 http://obpl.blogspot.com/2010/02/march-book-discussions-monday-march-8.html March Book DiscussionsMonday, March 8 at 7:00 p.m. The Ladies Night Out Book Club will discuss Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen.Thursday March 18 at 7:00 p.m., The Original Book Discussion Group will be discussing Journey Through Genius by William Dunham.Thursday, March 25th at 7:00 p.m., The Science Fiction Book Discussion Group will be discussing Stories Of Your Life And Other Stories by Ted Chiang.Send comments to: OBPL (Source: Old Bridge Library Weblog) Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 823006 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/p6CkufEBTOQ/the-kindly-ones-book-review The author puts himself in the shoes of a Nazi SS officer in this remarkable and unsettling novelThis remarkable and controversial novel tells the story of the Holocaust and Nazism through the eyes of one of the executioners, an SS officer on the Eastern Front. Littell inserts his narrator, Max Aue, into a landscape of impressive historical exactitude; the pages describing Stalingrad are especially rich in pace and clarity and there are superb fingernail sketches of senior Nazis, including one of Hitler in his bunker. But this is also a gripping military adventure story, a study in collective pathology and, above all, a sophisticated exploration of issues of morality, evil and luck. Littell told interviewers that the character of Aue allowed him to examine what he himself might have done had he been born in different circumstances at a different time. The novel as a whole brilliantly shows how "ordinary men" become killers. Though it has its flaws - the copious scatological and sexual references may strike some readers as excessive, and the subplot is overwrought and far-fetched - Littell has undoubtedly succeeded where many ambitious writers have failed. The Kindly Ones reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever. As Aue states with typically brutal clarity: "I am a man like other men, I am a man like you."FictionHistoryJason Burkeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:08:02 +0100 821970 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/fTMB-byHJJY/reality-hunger-book-review Sean O'Hagan is intrigued by a bold book that rails against the confines of traditional fictionDavid Shields is bored by the novel. As a form, he argues, it tends to be too hidebound by plot, too traditional and old-fashioned to reflect the speed of 21st-century culture. He is particularly bored by the well-wrought, beautifully written literary novel, as exemplified by Ian McEwan's Atonement and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections."I read these books and my overwhelming feeling is, you've got to be kidding," he told the Observer recently. "They strike me as antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian novel mode. In no way do they convey what if feels like to live in the 21st century. Like most novels, they are essentially works of nostalgic entertainment."What Shields wants essentially is less plot – less fictionalising, in fact – and more reality in all its messy "truthiness". He sees himself at the vanguard of a still unfocused literary movement that celebrates the "raw", the "seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored and unprofessional". One wonders, at times, if he has heard of the blogosphere.Reality Hunger, though, is not just a manifesto for a new kind of genre-blurring 21st-century prose, it is also a series of short, sharp provocations: 617 in all, arranged under alphabetical, rather than numerical, chapters. Chapter a is entitled "overture"; chapter b, "mimesis"; chapter c, "books for people who find television too slow". You get the picture. Or maybe not. For all its supposed 21st-century cut and thrust, Reality Hunger reeks of a certain kind of endlessly referential, post-modernist lit-crit theory from the 1980s that briefly made Barthes and Baudrillard fashionable names to drop whether or not one had read their books.Which is a shame, because there is much here that is thought-provoking. ... Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:07:56 +0100 821972 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/04BCO6hSUJA/ireland-exile-culture The loss of young people to other countries is rarely mentioned in political life, but is one of the dominant themes of Irish cultureWhen Mary Robinson became president of Ireland in 1990, one of her first, and most symbolic, actions was to light a lamp in the kitchen window of her official residence to acknowledge the many millions of Irish people overseas. Until then, Irish emigration had been one of the great unspokens of political life, while simultaneously being one of the great themes of Irish drama, fiction and poetry.Robinson's inspiration was a poem by Eavan Boland called The Emigrant Irish. "Like oil lamps," it begins, "we put them out the back – of our houses, of our minds." The generations who left for a new life in Britain and America haunted Irish writing and song throughout the 20th century.Both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the two towering modernists of Irish literature, chose exile, the former famously describing Ireland as 'the old sow that eats her farrow". Joyce also wrote that the Irishman was more respected abroad; "the economic and intellectual contradictions that prevail in his own country do not allow the development of individuality".It was Beckett who gave voice to the exile's dilemma of not belonging. "It is suicide to be abroad," says a character in All That Fall, "but what is it to be at home?… A lingering dissolution."This sense of spiritual as well as cultural displacement was evoked, too, by the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who walked the streets around Ealing Broadway in 1953 willing himself to remember his native Monaghan "until a world comes to life – morning, the silent bog". In the second half of that same decade, an estimated half a million people left Ireland to begin their lives all over again, abroad.In the 1960s, a new generation of dramatists made emigration a central theme in their work. ... Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:07:45 +0100 821973 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/XJqzwJ6pfnk/revenge-sharon-osbourne Sharon Osbourne's debut novel is hot on sex and drugs but a little skittish on psychological depth, says Julian ClaryI'm not sure what the correct etiquette is for one celebrity novelist reviewing another. We must be supportive, I feel. And this is the debut novel of Sharon Osbourne, no less. You don't mess with Sharon. I don't want a turd through the post, thank you very much. I've just had new carpets fitted.So. Revenge is a sparkling affair. Literally. The black hardback glitters and shimmers and the title is in shiny hot pink, above a picture of a bleeding heart with a sword through it. The words "Two sisters. One Dream. Winner takes all" get us in the mood for what is to follow. It helps if you imagine these words spoken in the husky manner of a cinema trailer.There's never a dull moment. This book is action-packed. It's a rare page that doesn't have a sex scene, birth, suicide, rape, platinum-selling album or at least a line of top-quality cocaine in it. It's so intent on being a gripping holiday read that my sofa in Camden Town transformed itself into a sun lounger. Here's a book that screams SPF 20. It's so Magaluf I went for an STD test when I'd finished reading it.And racy? Strewth! I had no idea heterosexuals got up to such shenanigans: "He could hear her heart hammering on his tongue as he licked the sweat between her breasts." Blimey. I thought straight couples just sat in front of the telly eating food covered in breadcrumbs as they watched Top Gear.The story starts with Margaret, an ambitious girl from Sheffield who moves to London to become a star but doesn't have "it", unfortunately. She gets knocked up by a handsome rogue called Derek but marries his gay brother George after Derek runs off with her flatmate. George needs a "beard" for career reasons. She gives birth to Chelsea. ... Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:07:36 +0100 821975 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/CjsZz9-DgDc/ (See also: Jack Matthews: An Introduction, and Interview with Jack Matthews (Part 1 and Part 2). Many authors rail against  the inanities and injustices  of the literary marketplace; Jack Matthews plays it like  a  game. And if you’re playing, it’s a lot more fun to play as a book collector than as an author. The book collecting sport is part treasure hunt (Matthews calculated  that over his lifetime he had driven more than    a million miles in search of books) and part casino. Which books are likely to appreciate in value and which ones are likely to plummet? These are fundamentally economic and recreational questions, not literary ones. Jack Matthews is a cheerful capitalist (delightfully bargaining people down and unapologetic about showing up at estate sales to buy rare books from clueless relatives of the deceased). Although Matthews is primary a fiction writer,  his 1977  best selling book Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit is a practical guide for how to turn an expensive hobby into an occasionally lucrative pastime. First and foremost, Matthews believes that books are economic creations: Even the finest, most beautiful, most desirable books have cost money; they have been paid for at sometime, by someone; even if they were lovingly constructed by one man, from the papermaking to the designing and casting of the type, and then bestowed upon others as gifts, somebody had to pay for the raw materials and previous workmanship. We live in that kind of world. It is, among other things, an economic world, and any object that possesses – or is considered to possess – value is likely to wear some kind of price tag. Whatever has a price tag shows some character and potential as an investment. (CRBFPAP, p 55) When he once asked author and bookstore owner Larry McMurtry what he thought about investing in rare books, McMurtry replied, “We don’t like customers who regard books as investments. ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:37:20 +0100 822021 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/C3YgcARFITs/ This is part 2 of a 4 part interview with Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 . Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction) and Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting . Can you talk about authors who have influenced you during various stages of your life? What was the first literary work that really made an impression on you? I remember having Joseph Conrad’s late novel, THE ROVER, assigned in a high school English class, but reading it anyway, & while reading it, pausing on a page to contemplate how wonderful it must be to create such realities. (When I mentioned that in a biographical essay, my editor got back to me about the word "anyway" saying that sounded like I wouldn’t normally have read it. I told her that was correct — for I was a relaxed under-achiever as a student). Earlier influences? No particular author, with perhaps the exception of Kenneth Roberts, whose historical novels I greatly enjoyed when I was a pup.  Later, however, I was greatly moved/influenced by reading the novels of Balzac. Then, of course, Mark Twain (I have a pretty good Twain collection of 1st editions, ephemera, etc.). Still more recently, I’ve loved the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels (I’ve included "A Sheep In Wolfe’s Clothing" in one of my books on bibliophily; and of the 20 or 25 books I’ve re-read, a half dozen are Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries). Most recently, I’ve gotten to collecting the 1st editions of Christopher Morley — a wonderful writer , woefully neglected by English Departments. I published an essay on his writing in the ANTIOCH REVIEW a year or so back, and just recently got a letter from a "kinsprit" (CM’s neologism) in the Czech Republic, sharing his own enthusiasm for CM (he’s not a native of the Czech Republic, but an American living there). ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:18:19 +0100 822022 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/wTQfJlTbtEE/ Earlier this month, as a guest writer on Charlie Stross’s blog, Elizabeth Bear wrote an essay about “the future of web publishing,” centering around the “hyperfiction environment” called Shadow Unit in which she takes part. I couldn’t help but be amused by the subject of the post. You see, history repeats itself. Bear et al may very well be right about being part of the “future” of Internet publishing—but in the format in which they are writing, they have also stumbled squarely onto its past. To note, I do not mean this in any derogatory sense. Though I have not read through the Shadow Unit stories myself, it sounds very much like an excellent setting with a lot of hard work put into it, and like the writers and fans alike are having a lot of fun. What amuses me is how precisely Bear’s description of the setting also fits all those other settings that have come before, even if the Shadow Unit writers were not aware of them. Hyperfiction and Shared Universes To summarize the post, which is itself well worth reading, “hyperfiction” can be non-linear (written out of order and with branching side-stories, rather than being a linear narrative), interactive (whereby people following along can adopt in-setting personas and “(role-)play along”), multimedia (text, images, audio, video, etc.), confusing (with no clear story order and all that branching and supplemental material, people can easily get lost), self-funded (Shadow Unit takes donations but does not sell advertising), and extraordinarily rich (many people working together can create a remarkably well-realized world). Bear may call it “hyperfiction,” but in actuality no new name was really needed. As described, Shadow Unit is a perfect example of what we who have been writing them for years now call “collaborative fiction” set in a “shared universe”. Collaborative fiction on the Internet has a rich history. ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:15:00 +0100 821906 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/l6Ws0nutgn0/ A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change website that I wanted to cover, but it was so long that I never actually got around to looking at it in the detail I needed, until now. Fortunately, the article is still no less timely. This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is a hallmark of today’s Internet. It’s a fascinating article, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. After the jump, I will discuss it and bring up some supporting examples. A Collaborative Cursor As Nash explains it, the intent of Cursor is to create the sort of peer-review writing circles that should be familiar to anyone who has written amateur or fan fiction on the Internet. So far, these circles have more or less evolved naturally, when a ‘net writer finds a few fans whose opinion he trusts and starts circulating his material by them for opinions prior to releasing it. (I’ve been part of several such groups, as writer or reader.) What Cursor plans to do is to make it possible to create that kind of collaborative environment—essentially, to identify or build a community around a writer’s work, then get that community as involved as possible in every aspect of creating that work. There is scope, definitely, for more classic collaborative writing. We’ll certainly permit that. But our instinct at the moment is that most writers want to write what they write individually. That collaboration is certainly useful here and there. It’s a great writing workshop tool. But basically, it’s designed to help individuals to write individual works. ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:15:00 +0100 821907 http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/2010-penfaulkner-award-for-fiction.html Judges Rilla Askew, Kyoko Mori, and Al Young have selected five books published in 2009 as finalists for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction. The nominees are Sherman Alexie for War Dances (Grove Press); Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (Harper); Lorraine M. López for Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk Press); Lorrie Moore for A (Source: NewPages Blog) Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 822070 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/bT9GAz5lCLo/peter-carey-interview 'If I could edit my past, I'd get rid of all the commas'Peter Carey was born in 1943 in Victoria, Australia, where his parents ran a car dealership. He worked in advertising and wrote fiction in his spare time. Four of his novels were rejected before his short story collection, The Fat Man In History, was published in 1974 and made him an overnight success. He went on to write two Booker prize-winning novels, Oscar And Lucinda in 1988 and True History Of The Kelly Gang in 2000. His new book is called Parrot And Olivier In America. Married for the third time, Carey has two sons and lives in New York.When were you happiest?Now.What is your greatest fear?That I will be compelled to drive across the Severn bridge.Which living person do you most admire, and why?My sister, for her meringues.What was your most embarrassing moment?Being beautifully praised by [the New York critic] Daphne Merkin, only to realise she thought I was Ian McEwan.Property aside, what's the most ­expensive thing you've bought?A gorgeous Jørgen Kastholm Grasshopper lounge chair – stainless steel, canvas and beaten-up black leather.What is your most treasured possession?An oil painting by my friend James Doolin, who died in 2002. He taught me as much as any writer I have ever read. From his place on my wall, he teaches me still.What would your super power be?Something sexual.Who would play you in the film of your life?Liam Neeson.What is your most unappealing habit?Having an answer for everything.What is your favourite word?Silky.Is it better to give or to receive?I can only admit to the latter.What is your guiltiest pleasure?Viscous, ice-cold Poire William.What do you owe your parents?Humour, energy, will, limitless fear.What or who is the greatest love of your life?She knows.What does love feel like?A salty sea.What is the worst job you've done?Correcting my own spelling.If you could edit your past, what would you change?I'd get rid of all the commas. ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:32:53 +0100 821873 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/zfeCofPol4E/childrens-book-doctor-julia-eccleshare Q Do you have any suggestions for getting an 18-year-old boy on to adult books? He has enjoyed Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and the Alex Rider books.A Finding what to read next is always a challenge and it is especially so when crossing from clearly labelled and strongly marketed children's books to adult fiction. Full of action and strongly plotted, the books your son enjoyed were key titles in a resurgence of high concept children's fiction which became bestsellers. They were published within four years of each other and were utterly of the moment; your son's enjoyment was probably enhanced by the fact that his friends were reading them, too. Since then there have been many "crossover" novels designed for all ages from early teens onwards. Realism from Melvin Burgess and Kevin Brooks and fantasy adventures such as Cornelia Funke's Inkheart or Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines or any of Terry Pratchett's titles are easy steps on the way to classic cult ­titles such as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Alex Garland's The Beach or, most topically, JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.Q My grandchildren are four and two. Of course, my first instinct is to give them the books I loved sharing with my own children, but I do realise that times have changed. Can you help?A If you have books in your home which they can enjoy when they come to visit, they will appreciate them as being particular to you. The books will already feel specially selected since you have kept them over the years. And, though they may be from a previous generation of childhood, a remarkable number will still be available today; Pat Hutchins's Rosie's Walk, John Burningham's Mr Gumpy's Outing, Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar are titles which are now in their 40s and still going strong. But, of course, you are right that that books published right now are, in important respects, different. ... Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:12:04 +0100 821876 http://plablog.org/2010/02/books-the-top-5-of-the-top-5-program-added-to-pla-virtual-conference.html Floundering at the desk when someone asks you for a book or author you haven’t read? Would you like a ‘go-to’ list for books/authors you may not be familiar with? During this PLA 2010 program, a panel of Readers’ Advisory experts will showcase five top genres (Women’s Fiction, Humor, Horror, SF/Fantasy, and Mystery) and what every librarian should be familiar with about the genre, including the top five authors, books, up-and-comers, and trends. This program will be held during the upcoming PLA National Conference, in Portland, Oregon and also will be featured as part of the PLA Virtual Conference. The PLA Virtual Conference is a great way to participate in and enjoy conference, even if you can’t be there in person. The Virtual Conference will consist of live programming on Thursday, March 25 and Friday, March 26 and will include five hour-long, live programs on each day. Programs are chosen from among the highest rated in PLA’s session preference survey. Each day also will include a lunchtime author interview and a closing session ‘happy hour’ event for attendees to get together and discuss the day’s programming. Get more information here. (Source: PLA Blog) Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:54:46 +0100 822208 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/2SZ2NozjNCo/david-shields-reality-hunger-advice-writers In this week's podcast we discuss Reality Hunger, David Shields's controversial manifesto for a new literature based on fact rather than fiction. He tells us how theft can be more creative than invention, why collage is the artform of today, and why the lyric essay has more to offer the modern age than that old-fangled form, "the novelly novel"...We also debate the issues raised by last week's much-talked-about feature, Ten Rules for Writers, with novelist and creative writing teacher Toby Litt. Will Self, Anne Enright, Sarah Waters, Elmore Leonard and Richard Ford are among the authors whose "rules" we interrogate.We learn what David Hare thinks of literary fiction. Plus we get a glimpse into what the process of filming Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity taught director Stephen Frears about the structure of novels.Reading listReality Hunger, by David Shields (Hamish Hamilton)10 Rules of Writing, by Elmore Leonard (Weidenfeld)Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande (Pan)Journey to the Moon, by Toby Litt (Penguin)I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay by Toby Litt (Penguin)Claire ArmitsteadSarah CrownLisa AllardiceToby LittScott Cawley (Source: Guardian Unlimited Books) Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:40:51 +0100 821717 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/qYlP8ybicqA/ This interview was conducted via email in  Summer, 2009 just  after Jack Matthews’ 84th birthday.  Throughout  the process, Matthews had  a lot of fun with it:  answers were sometimes full of deliberate misspellings and archaic contractions.  After I assembled his answers into a  rough draft (where I replaced  ampersands in his answers  with the spelled out word  “and”),  Matthews protested;  punctuation was for him a religious matter; I later learned he had once published  an essay “Philosophy of the Comma” to explore (among other things) the question of whether the “frequency of semi-colons in a prose text is a clear and accurate measure of the author’s intelligence.”  Sometimes I would be disconcerted by the superficiality  of an  answer   (only to   learn later that he had already  written an essay about the same topic or devoted a chapter to the subject  in his  unpublished 1994 A WORKER’S WRITEBOOK).  This is Part 1 of a 3 part interview. See also: Jack Matthews: An Introduction. The Author and his craft How long does it take a serious writer to learn brevity? Mastery of form? The ability to produce a deep aesthetic enjoyment? This is an interesting question — like the others, indeed, but not as answerable as they. I think one strives to generate meaning as energy; it’s like a demonstration in classical mechanics in physics: we say we are “moved” by a story, for example. So if there is a quantum of meaning expressible in 20 words and you express it in 10, you’ve doubled the power of the sentence. (This quantification is very crude, of course, and doesn’t do justice to the beautiful complexity of a good sentence). You once said, “most stories fail through under-invention. ... Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:52:00 +0100 821798 http://wiredforbooks.org/mp3/JackMatthews1984.mp3 (See also: Jack Matthews Interview  Part One. (Parts 2 and 3 will appear in the next week). My introduction to short story writer Jack Matthews could not be more accidental. Between 2007 and 2008, I had been downloading and listening to a series of author interviews conducted by Don Swaim during the 1970s and 80s. Don Swaim did a series of 3 minute interviews with CBS Radio Services called Book Beat, presumably when authors showed up in NYC for a book tour.  Swaim shot the breeze with authors for an hour, talking about random things, and later found enough material for the three minute segment that actually aired.  But he saved the audio from the full interviews, digitalized them and put them online. The Wired for Books  interviews themselves are unpredictable, unrehearsed, meandering, sometimes dull and sometimes overly focused on topical irrelevancies (See Note below). Unlike the erudite interviews of  the KCRW Bookworm podcast, (which Michael Silverblatt conducts like a graduate student eager to show off his profound understanding of an  author’s oeuvre),  the exigencies of a radio schedule gave Swaim little time to do real preparation.  Over the decades  Swaim interviewed a number of literary greats (both recognized and unrecognized). At the same time, he interviewed a lot of popular authors, biographers, historians  and celebrities who had no business writing books. Sometime in 2008, I was listening to a random mp3 while doing housework.  It was a fascinating interview with a man who collected rare books and had recently published a book about book collecting. Midway through the interview, I realized I had already heard the same interview while driving from San Antonio to Houston. I remember making  a mental note to look the author up, but never did. His name was Jack Matthews, and the interview was done  in 1984. (Listen to the mp3). ... Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:49:44 +0100 821800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/6VCAVbvvjMU/ An interesting Reuters article yesterday about an author, Yves Smith, who wrote a non-fiction book that was published by an imprint of Macmillan. Since his book price has been increased he has been getting more one star reviews on the basis of pricing alone. He says: You know my base skews heavily toward the type that buys on Amazon, and to top that off, as you would imagine, my book promotion is going to be more than usually web oriented, so that will maintain that skew. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of the time, if I see a book with an Amazon rating of fewer than four stars, I won’t buy it. And it does not take many one stars to drag an average down. Felix Salmon, author of the article, sympathizes with the author and Amazon here, but doesn’t think that the reviews matter a great deal. Read here for more. Thanks to Aaron Pressman for the heads up. Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. (Source: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home) Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0100 821568 http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2010/02/riaa-news-roundup.html Joel Tenenbaum filed a final brief on Feb. 18, 2010 in Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The link is to his attorneys' thoughtfully posted PDF of the brief. In sum, the lawyers are arguing for relief from the statutory damages of $150,000, stating that the company's lost profit is about 35 cents. Apparently, it's also substantially similar to the amicus brief filed in the same case and linked above by the attorneys, on May 18, 2009 by the Free Software Foundation. On January 4, 2010, Tenenbaum's lawyers also filed this motion arguing that the $675,000 awarded in damages by the jury was violative of Tenenbaum's constitutional due process rights. The motion asks for a new trial or remittitur. (Remittitur means reducing the damages)For all the RIAA matters, an excellent source of full text materials online is the Electronic Freedom Foundation (eff.org). For any of these if you use their excellent and very simple search function to look for the defendant's name (Joel Tenenbaum for instance, or Jammie Thomas) you can pull up a history of the case and lots of full text motions and briefs from what they call their DeepLinks Blog. So, what about Jammie Thomas-Rasset, that other high-profile downloader sued by the RIAA and slapped with huge damages? She allegedly downloaded and shared 24 songs. A federal jury returned a verdict for the RIAA in 2006 for $222,000, or $9,250/song. The judge, however, Michael Davis, found that he had given a mistaken instruction to the jury, telling them that making the songs available to others constituted copyright infringement regardless of whether the friend actually downloaded and listened to the song. So a second trial had to be held, with correct instructions given to a new jury. But that jury returned a verdict against Thomas-Rasset for $1.92 million, or $80,000/song. ... Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 821833 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/0XrtROD6FdI/kreutzer-sonata What links Tolstoy, Beethoven, a virtuoso violinist and a young, married Czech woman? The inspiration for the elderly Janacek's string quartetsOpera and leider com­posers have always drawn inspiration from literature. Instrumental music, meanwhile, often makes reference to natural phenomena – Beet­hoven's Pastoral Symphony and Debussy's La Mer – or tells a story, as in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and Smetana's autobiographical quartet, Aus Meinem Leben. But there are not many instru­mental works based on great literature. Mendelssohn's incidental ­music to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Tchaikovsky's overture to Romeo and Juliet come to mind. And the slow movement of Beethoven's quartet Op 18 No 1 is said to depict the tomb scene from Shakespeare's tragedy of star-crossed lovers.But I know of only one composition derived from a literary work that was itself based on an earlier musical opus.Beethoven's heroic sonata for violin and piano, Tolstoy's dark and disturbing novella, and Leos Janacek's intensely descriptive and often frenetic first string quartet are all linked by the same name: the Kreutzer Sonata. Rodolphe Kreutzer, a French violin virtuoso who ignored Beethoven's dedication and never performed the original sonata (apparently declaring it unplayable), is known today for a book of useful violin studies, but primarily for these three great works that bear his name, and whose value he could have barely imagined.In Tolstoy's 1889 novella, a woman who is trapped in a loveless marriage plays Beethoven's sonata with a dashing violinist, and seems carried away by the music's passion. Her husband, plagued by jealous fantasies, cuts short a business trip and comes home unexpectedly, well after midnight. He finds her together with the violinist in the dining room, fully clothed but involved in an intimate conversation. Convinced she has betrayed him, he kills her in a fit of jealous rage. ... Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:35:01 +0100 821513 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FlaJobline/~3/MrIa7s_OyEg/collection-management-project-assistant.html The Spruce Grove Public Library is seeking an enthusiastic, organized, and highly motivated candidate for the exciting summer position of Collection Management Project Assistant in Children & Youth Services. The goal of this project is to transform our juvenile and easy non-fiction areas into easily accessible, current, high quality information sources for young people. The measurable outcome of this project will be demonstrated by increased circulation of non-fiction collections.This is a 16 week full-time (35hr/wk) position reporting to the Manager of Children & Youth Services.Hourly Rate: $13.00/hr paid bi-weekly.DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Participate in training sessions to learn skills required for generating reports and using the integrated library system (Polaris).Organize juvenile and easy non-fiction collections into subject-based neighborhoods. Complete shelf-reading and weeding, verify call numbers, identify gaps in collections and make purchase recommendations.Create pathfinders and a labeling system to facilitate quick and easy retrieval of materials.Evaluate the success of implemented changes by administering surveys to patrons and staff. QUALIFICATIONSEnrollment in a post secondary Library Technician or MLIS program.Experience in collection management is desirable.Knowledge and understanding of the Dewey Decimal System.Competency with library software and technology, including all Microsoft Office programs.Excellent communication and interpersonal skills are crucial.Demonstrated project and time management skills are required.The terms of this position are conditional upon funding from the Summer Temporary Employment Program (STEP). Eligible applicants must have been in school full-time during the previous 12 months. For a full description of the STEP program see www.employment.alberta. ... Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:15:21 +0100 822051 http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/books/rss/~3/ii7QClY-jbc/john-grisham-thriller-children Thriller writer John Grisham reveals that new children's series will feature a teenage legal maverick, Theodore BooneIf his success with young readers is anything like his achievement with adults, horsehair wigs for kids may soon be ousting Harry Potter merchandise from the shops. John Grisham, whose legal thrillers have shifted more than 250m copies to adult readers, is set to move into the children's market with a new series of novels about a 13-year-old "who knows more about the law than most lawyers" and gets caught up in a murder trial.Grisham's move, revealed on the Bookseller website today, will begin with his first serial character, teenage legal maverick Theodore Boone. He has signed a two-book deal with Hodder (not his usual publisher) for the Boone novels, the first of which will be published on 10 June this year.Oliver Johnson, who was Grisham's editor at Century and now works for Hodder, told the Bookseller the Boone books were a "terrific new project". He said: "Theodore Boone is vintage Grisham: great legal drama, a lovable hero who brought a smile to my face and a really satisfying ending, all delivered at breakneck, page-turning speed."Many a literary name – from Ted Hughes and TS Eliot to Booker winners Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Ian McEwan and Peter Carey – has written for children in the past. Big-name commercial novelists going after the youth market are rather rarer, although James Patterson, perhaps inevitably given his presence everywhere else in the book market, established the Maximum Ride series for young readers in 2005, and has already published five books, with a sixth due out next month.In 2007, Nick Hornby published Slam, about a teenage skateboarder. In the same year, Joanne Harris published a fantasy novel reworking Norse mythology for young readers, Runemarks, and a sequel is promised. ... Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:37:27 +0100 821338 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/teleread/KHnj/~3/chuDqe82DIU/ Competition is a good thing. Lately, I have found that between Fictionwise, Sony, Amazon, and Kobo there is always a promo code or coupon out there somewhere. It used to be that I would only buy from Fictionwise; I got very attached to their reward system and would buy new releases at high prices because they had a large rebate and then spend the rebate on dozens of other books. I am at the point now where there is just too much in my to-read folder, and I am realizing that a large portion of it isn’t stuff I really care about. I would rather spend less money on just the book I want than spend more money on a book I maybe want, and five others I don’t care about! So, with the arrival of The Promo Code Wars, I have been investigating other ebook stores. Here is a round-up of how I’ve been doing. 1) Amazon I haven’t bought from them yet (except a replacement for my Kindle’s on-board dictionary) because there is no Kindle for Mac software yet and I prefer to manage all my books through there. But I think that once Mac support is available, Amazon may become more of a destination for me because their prices are often cheaper than anyone else’s. I also like the idea of synching with my iPod Touch and being able to start a book there if I am traveling light, and then resume it at the point I left off when I move to the Kindle later 2) Fictionwise I still buy a lot of books from them. Their multi-format titles are affordable and in my opinion, the way an ebook purchase should be: when you buy it, it’s yours and you can download it in any format you wish, as many times as you need to. So, I can download a copy right onto my iPod Touch using the eReader app, then download a Kindle version and transfer it via USB. It couldn’t be easier. I also love their magazine subscriptions. I subscribe to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock; both are excellent short fiction magazines. ... Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:21:42 +0100 821430 http://rabid-librarian.blogspot.com/2010/02/interesting-article.html The Chemist's War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences The author discovered the government's agenda--and the New York medical examiner's records and opposition to it--whilst researching her new book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Here's the product description: Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. In The Poisoner's Handbook Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days when a pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Drama unfolds case by case as the heroes of The Poisoner's Handbook-chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler-investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, Barnum and Bailey's Famous Blue Man, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and Norris and Gettler work with a creativity that rivals that of the most imaginative murderer, creating revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue. Yet in the tricky game of toxins, even science can't always be trusted, as proven when one of Gettler's experiments erroneously sets free a suburban housewife later nicknamed "America's Lucretia Borgia" to continue her nefarious work. From the vantage of Norris and Gettler's laboratory in the infamous Bellevue Hospital it becomes clear that killers aren't the only toxic threat to New Yorkers. Modern life has created a kind of poison playground, and danger lurks around every corner. ... Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0100 821582