Men of wealth and taste

Wandering through the CBC's site, there are bits about Eckhart Tolle, latest winner of the Oprah makeover (3.5 million copies shipped from the publisher in four-week span) and rapper Eminem, whose autobiography "will contain never-before-seen photographs and original drawings along with details of his personal and professional life," according to his publisher.
Okay fine, but the Slash biography and Nikki Sixx's Heroin Diaries are still best sellers, so somebody out there needs to do some parenting.

Posted by Dave

Day Four-Canada Reads

I suck at this. Canada Reads has voted off Brown Girl in the Ring, which leaves Timothy Findley, Paul Quarrington and Thomas Wharton as what's left.
If it was tough to get excited about the lineup for Canada Reads before, I find it impossible now.
I don't have a dog left in this fight, so I can mention how damn good the lineup for the real Tournament is just one more time.

Posted by Dave

It's a good group

The Morning News has the gatekeepers lined up for the 2008 Tournament of Books.
I'm particularly interested in what Elizabeth McCracken has to say. She wrote a beauty a few years back. A couple of my favourite bloggers are in play as well.

Posted by Dave

but this was before their Accountability Act

Harbour Publishing (great small press, folks) has quite a coup coming soon.
"The widow of former B.C. MP Chuck Cadman says two Conservative Party officials offered her husband a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote to bring down the Liberal government in May of 2005.
The offer, which was summarily rejected by the dying man, is outlined in a biography of Mr. Cadman by Vancouver journalist Tom Zytaruk that is due to be released on March 14. A copy of the manuscript, including an introduction by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, has been obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is quoted in the book, Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, as confirming that a visit took place, and that officials were "legitimately" representing the Conservative Party. But he says any offer to Mr. Cadman was only to defray losses he might incur in an election."

Mmmm....classy.

Posted by Dave

Oh well

Day Three of Canada Reads shows what I know.
It's not like Lisa Moore isn't one of the coolest people in this country or anything.
Ah, crap.

Posted by Dave

in case of a knockdown, go to the corner I tell you to...

Day One of the Canada Reads gabfest is nicely summarized here.
I've always been of two minds on Canada Reads. It's not a bad idea, but it seems like the program takes forever to get started once the list is announced, and like most lists
it's only the winner that sees a spike in sales.
But with Lisa Moore advocating for Mavis Gallant, I think we may have our winner.
Go with Brown Girl in the Ring as an outside chance, it says here.

Posted by Dave

unsafe at any speed

Ah hell, somebody buy Ralph a Pinto.

Posted by Dave

No refunds, Giuliani supporters!

Well my morning is shot.

Huffington Post has the mother of all setups around who gave how much to which candidate in the election. Searchable by city, occupation, last name etc.
Writers are going heavy for Obama or Clinton, publishers a bit more even and if these numbers hold up there isn't a poet in America giving what little they have to any Republicans anywhere.
I love this stuff, and the best single donation I stumbled on so far?
Right here.

Who knew Pauly Shore even had a thousand dollars?
Having said that, it probably doesn't reflect very well on me, either.

Posted by Dave

Booker of Bookers redux

Fifteen years after winning the Booker of Bookers to acknowledge the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Booker, the committee is running it up the flag pole again.
"Winners since 1993 who might pose a threat to Rushdie include Margaret Atwood with The Blind Assassin (2000), Arundhati Roy with The God of Small Things (1997) and The Life of Pi by Yann Martell (2002)"

This is a decent idea, but Ben Okri's win for The Famished Road did a bit to open up African literature, and acknowledging it in this way may not be a bad idea.

Posted by Dave

Mary Swan

Boys in the Trees continues Mary Swan's penchant for punching above her weight.
Her short story "The Deep" won the O Henry Award in 2001 and garnered international attention.
Her new book is a paperback original (smart move) from Henry Holt, and is getting lots of love as well.
A few of the Words Worthies are reading it now, and she'll be in town Mar 3.

Posted by Dave

It's like sports except drug free and more fun

The 2008 Tournament of Books is up and it' s a hell of a lineup.
Go Junot Diaz, but really, what a good group.
I've read seven of the sixteen here, and heard much good about most of the rest,
Roberto Bolano in particular.
Anyway, Diaz to win if blogger favourite Joshua Ferris doesn't take it.

Link via Bookslut

Posted by Dave

Whatever it takes

This is the second time a Richard Yates revival has been heralded as being upon us, and I'm glad for the replay.
Yes, everyone talks about (or should) Revolutionary Road as being a legitimate stab at the Great American novel, but damn it, it is. Less well known perhaps are The Easter Parade and the collected short stories published years ago during Yates revival 1.0.
Britain is getting into it now, perhaps to coincide with a film of Revolutionary Road.
The story of a couple of newly minted New England suburbanites whole lives take a few nasty turns to reveal an unforgettable ending, is going to look great on screen (if the principals stay true to it) and should introduce Yates to a time that's kind of looking made for him if John McCain and Stephen Harper win the next elections. Uh, he's pretty dour, you know.
As an aside, I wish I liked Nick Hornby's books more than I do. The first couple were fine, and then I didn't think much of the rest. But he has excellent taste and the Guardian article is worth following through to get his thoughts.
Some of the finer stuff is here.

Posted by Dave

The South, by way of California

That is to say a saavy American publisher is carving out a niche as an authentic voice of the American South.
From San Francisco.

"Poindexter (publisher of MacAdam/Cage) has what today would be called a maverick approach to publishing. He befriends his authors, often by flying them out to San Francisco so they can meet the staff and thus begin a true working relationship. He is committed to fostering the entire career of an author rather than trying to coax out best sellers and then abandoning the writers who fail to produce them. Above all, his ambition is to publish literature and contribute something meaningful to the culture in which he lives.
He's certainly making some damn fine books. I'm blown away by this at the moment, but I've liked everything from the press so far.

Posted by Dave

E is for eventually

The latest (of approximately fifteen billion) articles predicting the rise of the soon to be viable e-book suggests that any day now this bird will fly.

"Some other books have been published online, but they have remained a minority, mainly because the technology has been inconvenient, requiring the viewer to scroll down a computer screen to read a page. But publishers believe the public may at last be willing to accept computerised books following the success of the technology in America."

I try to keep up with developments on the future of the book, and so far I'm just confused.
To summarize, it's very difficult to stay afloat in the publishing/writing game because of costs and work to get damn near any book out into the public consciousness.
It's been true forever and it's getting harder of late.

At bottom, I lie awake some nights over the rise of the non-reader more than the rise of someone who may someday gravitate to a new gadget not made of paper and glue.
No reader, no need for a gadget. And eventually, not much of anything else.

Posted by Dave

Because it takes a drink to open the book in the first place

The "misery memoir" now has a first cousin.

"Meet the growing clique of "hic lit" authors who have forsaken the demon drink and are saving themselves fortunes in therapists' fees by writing about their travails."
Says Scott Pack, former buyer for Waterstone's in the U.K,
"These are the sort of books that are popular with people who don't buy books very often. You can be snotty and think it's not great literature but it gets people reading. Plus real-life stories are more interesting than anything you can make up and these sorts of books are often written unpretentiously."
Presumably, Pack was loaded when he said something this nonsensical.
For God sake, who will tell the children about Frederick Exley?

Posted by Dave

Chris Turner at Princess Cinema

Words Worth's first author event of the coming spring kicks off on Tuesday February 19th at

7 p.m.

All the specs and a bit about the book is here.

Tickets are moving pretty quickly at the shop, so please call Tuesday or show up at the door Tuesday evening.

Posted by Dave

internetus interuptus

It's odd how a simple $4 phone jack can go south and disable the Internets, but that's what happened.
The NYT and more importantly Francine Prose is loving Susan Choi's new novel; that I'm about fifty pages away from finishing.
I'm distracted by William Gay's novel Twilight. I missed this book when it came out over a year ago, and it may be a Cormac McCarthy knockoff but there's nothing wrong with that.

As it happens, if this comes to pass, I'll be pretty easy to please for awhile anyway.

Posted by Dave

I suppose it could be worse

It's too damn cold to do anything lately. I'm not generally one for stepping out, but it might be nice to have the option once in awhile.
I kind of know how this guy feels, but still.

Posted by Dave

Roy Scheider...

passed away yesterday.

Roy Schieder was of course best known for Jaws in 1975, but it was his portrayal of Harry Mitchell in 52 Pick-Up that worked for me.
Scheider played an industrialist being blackmailed by a trio of sleazy skin trade players after they pick up the scent of Mitchell's extramarital affair.
John Frankenheimer directs an Elmore Leonard novel with a great cast, especially Clarence Williams as Bobby Shy and John Glover as the hideously evil Alan Raimy.
It was the first time in my young life that I'd ever seen crime set as simultaneously gritty, noirish and yet with a light touch. (Of course Elmore Leonard has come to define that)
But this opened the door to Leonard, Donald Westlake, and later Chris Brookmyre, George Pelecanos and on and on.

It's not top drawer, but here's a trailer for the film.

Posted by Dave

That's my boy

A very good review in the New York Times for one of my favourites this year.
Hari Kunzru is a guy who's often compared to Zadie Smith and it's not a bad gambit.
They're both Brits who seem comfortable anywhere, they both wrote very solid first novels followed by less successful second efforts, (although I liked Transmission well enough) and they both end up in the Guardian pretty much every week.

Posted by Dave

Texas is perfectly fine to mess with itself

You could read several national newspapers, the columns of most major pundits or just swear at the TV after a weeks worth of buffoonery on CNN to get a sense of the train wreck America can emulate sometimes. (Yes Jon Stewart works, too) but all elements of what makes America both squeamish and authoritarian are contained in this little beauty here.

"When an English translation of The Savage Detectives, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, was published last year in the United States, New York Times critic Richard Eder judged the work "complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable." In the Sunday Times Book Review, James Wood, a famously exacting literary critic, compared Bolaño's novel favorably to the work of Stendhal and Gide. The literary thriller's content, however, falls outside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's publication-review guidelines as spelled out in its Offender Orientation Handbook (see excerpts on Pages 2 and 3)."

Inmate No. 1385412 is my new hero, if for no other reason that on the outside people generally wait for the paperback. And it not like my hero is going anywhere because, well it's Texas.

Posted by Dave

and then the sun comes out....

and all's right with the world.
As I've said, I'm going to try to stay positive, but when others point out the glaringly obvious, suddenly I feel like an idiot.
I've read much of the narrative in the last few years around the challenges in the trade, and I've come to believe some of the negativity, the generation that doesn't read anymore, the dominance of Amazon and the chain stores, books are too expensive blah, blah, blah...
Then the Written Nerd comes along and finds something that makes the whole mindset sound completely nonsensical.
Her "rant" is spot on and she's had a hell of a month, so she knows a thing or two.

"When a restaurant closes, it doesn't usually occur to anyone to say, "well, that's because people just don't go to restaurants to eat anymore," or "this just reflects the sad decline of the food industry, and we should all be better people and go out to eat more." More likely, their comments reflect on what might have caused the failure of this specific business: a less-than-prime location, poor business planning, sub-par service, unexciting food, or just bad luck. Yes, everyone knows that lots of restaurants close -- but lots also open. Success and failure happen on the individual business level, not on the industry level -- there's no shortage of restaurants, and many still provide wonderful experiences while remaining profitable ventures.So why, I ask you, is it that whenever a bookstore closes, it's because bookstores are a thing of the past, and no one buys books or read anymore, and those who do buy their books online, and if we were all better people we would support those quaint indie stores (whether or not they're doing a good job)? And why, when a new bookstore opens, is it seen as a wonderfully naive venture, suitable for Don Quixotes or those who have money to "prop up" such a business? And why, when a bookstore is successful and has been around for 3, 10, 30 years, is it always a surprising exception to an otherwise sad state of affairs?"

This comes from a reporter asking The Nerd why she'd open a bookstore in Brooklyn, "when everybody knows independent bookstores are on the decline."
I really did buy into a lot of the death rattle on this, despite seeing our place continue to thrive.
It's nice to be reminded that my stacking diet books at a Wal-Mart somewhere isn't necessarily an inevitability, or that the novel becomes something that only James Patterson writes.

The preceding paragraph doesn't reverse any concerns I have around the future, and it's still a tough time for independent retail of any stripe, but Jesus, I feel better.

Posted by Dave

Dumbocracy

Anyone whose ever been to New Jersey understands why the state is used as a punchline.
I promise not to do that any more.

It's a short piece, but the highlight is the poor woman's rationale.

I'd tee off a lot more on this, but Canadians showed up on time to vote for Stephen Harper.

Anyway, go Barack!!!

Posted by Dave

A Person of Interest

This is looking good so far. I'm not swayed by jacket blurbs too often, but Joan Didion says Susan Choi's new novel works, so that's good enough for me.

Cheers for a good looking author site, too.

Lydia Millet still rules 2008, though.

Posted by Dave

Pierre Trudeau, fictional inventor of poutine

I'm not especially beholden to anyone's flag, but I shudder every time the Dominion Institute releases a poll.
We Canadians don't know much about ourselves and given that the surveys rarely move in a good direction, we seem almost comfortable in our ignorance.
We're almost as clueless as the British.

Link from one of my favourite Americans.

Posted by Dave

Richard Price..

is interviewed in a neat little piece in which Price talks about his involvement with HBO's The Wire, his upcoming novel Lush Life, and Clockers, his breakout book that's being re released next month to coincide with the new book.
"But around the time of Clockers, it was like the end of days. With crack, the projects had become terminals. In the projects, generations always moved on from the generation that was born in the projects. Now you had generations stacked up in the same apartment. Drugs were devastating that world—completely ghettoized. All the white people had fled. Jobs weren't there, and drugs were the only viable alternative. So either people were dealing drugs—but that's not true. There were people doing drugs, there were people dealing drugs—that's the way that people made money, and that's what you saw. But there were probably just as many kids who were going to school, but those kids didn't make the papers. You don't wind up in the newspaper for graduating from high school with a B- average and going to a community college. It's just not newsworthy. That was the great invisible in there—all these kids that weren't succumbing. I tried to capture that too in Clockers. But the drama and the nihilism of that era was the ascension of crack, and the devastation."

Great book, along with Freedomland.

Link via Sarah

Posted by Dave

And he draws a crowd, too.

I've always liked Charles Simic. His poetry is direct, unadorned and perfectly American.
Now I know he's a decent fellow as well.

'Did you vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary last month?"

"Yes, for John Edwards. I like a lot of things that he said. Greed is going to do us in — stupid, selfish greed. We have essentially squandered the wealth of this country and forgotten the whole idea of the common good. Now, I know he doesn’t have a chance."

Less so, now.

Posted by Dave

because being beaten by Alice Sebold's novel is less painful than reading it

Too many titles, and too few sales to go around. Canada seems to read more than our American cousins, though other surveys suggest otherwise, but a study summarized in the Globe today suggests that the number of titles have increased from 12000 Canadian titles in 1998 to 17000 today. Thus, "a growing number of books are contending for the attention of roughly the same number of book buyers, a situation amplified,” the report notes, by the growth in stores selling used and remaindered books (out-of-print or overstocked titles sold at steep discounts), the growth in online sales, and “an increasingly saturated media environment.” One result is that “both the average sales per title in Canada and the average print runs in many title categories have been falling in recent years.”
On the retail side, the important quote from the story is that due to discounts from box stores or Amazon,
“purchases are more informed by price and less by the unique aspects of the individual book, including its literary or artistic merit.”
And so the rise dominance of a slew of similar titles priced to move at the expense of a whole lot of diverse, smaller and most certainly better books that die fast and quiet. 'Twas ever thus, but now the trend accelerates to the point where,
"Publisher friends tell me they sell about the same number of books they used to sell in the old days, except back then, if they sold, say, a million copies of ten titles, the big best-seller topped the list with 500,000 copies, the runner-up sold 200,000, and the other eight titles shared the remaining 300,000. These days Harry Potter sells 990,000 copies and the others share the 10,000 that’s left, says George Jonas from the National Post.
Adjust for hyperbole, and he's close to right. I've only read a handful of the books on the current best seller lists, and as usual for good reason.
(is anyone reading that Tom Cruise biography? It's gathering dust, creepy weird dust at our place.) I've got no quarrel with anything on there as such, but there's little point reading much on it because my opinion of the Kite Runner really doesn't add much. If I can put a few more copies of this out there though, well it still doesn't add much, but it does broaden the national menu a bit, and that's the impact of what Jonas and much of the report is on about.
I also wonder if chain stores are playing such an "important role in presenting a wide selection of Canadian titles to consumers” then why are sales flat?
That's a question that Ursula K Leguin answers pretty well in the February issue of Harpers. It's behind a subscription wall, but it's a provocative essay that takes a pragmatic look at the alleged decline in reading as well as putting blame for the numbers discussed in the Globe story where it belongs.


Posted by Dave