Vocabulary > Arts > Books, Literature

The Guardian        Technology        p. 5

3.11.2005

Inside IT

Off the shelf and on to the web

The Open Library will soon allow people to print out

genuine-looking pages from a vast online archive

Quinn Norton        The Guardian        Thursday November 3, 2005
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1606813,00.html

Readers digest

The Guardian        Review        p. 5

30.12.2006
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1979958,00.html

Readers digest

The Guardian        Review        p. 6

30.12.2006
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1979958,00.html

Punctuation personified: or, pointing made easy, by Mr. Stops.

London: J.Harris,

1824.

Shelfmark:12804.ee.12
http://www.bl.uk/collections/britirish/chilgallery.html

write
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/audioslideshow/2009/jan/29/johnupdike
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/12/john-mortimer-why-write-rumpole

writer

crime writer
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/arts/14gores.html

writing

crime writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/nov/04/pd-james-life-in-writing

original writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/original-writing

author
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/books/21mcguane.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-01-30-sidney-sheldon-obit_x.htm

Martina Cole > Britain's bestselling author
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/28/martina-cole-queen-of-crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/31/martina-cole-books

literary establishment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/31/martina-cole-books

The Paris Review, American literary magazine        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/10guinzburg.html

woman of letters
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/books/09jenkins.html

literary greats > The Times obituaries
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/system/topicRoot/Authors_topic_page/

literary feuds
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1864322,00.html

literary fraud
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1879314,00.html

literary agent > Pat Kavanagh
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/21/publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/21/2

literary legend > Ray Bradbury
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html

Ben Sonnenberg Jr., founder of literary journal Grand Street        USA        1936-2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/books/26sonnenberg.html 

pioneering feminist author > Amber Reeves
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1450322,00.html

novelist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/25/andrew-miller-interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/19/james-frey-final-testament-bible
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7867988/Dame-Beryl-Bainbridge-75-dies-of-cancer.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/24/neil-gaiman-carnegie-graveyard-book
http://books.guardian.co.uk/orange2008/story/0,,2273745,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1823595,00.html

satirical novelist
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/books/david-bowman-author-of-let-the-dog-drive-dies-at-54.html

writer

pulp writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1823595,00.html

mystery novelist / writer > Donald E. Westlake
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/books/02westlake.html

science fiction writer / author > Arthur C. Clarke
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article3593458.ece
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2266501,00.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3579120.ece
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Deaths.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSCOL14093220080319
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKL1838067920080319

online writer
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1745535,00.html

ghost writer

travel writer > Patrick Leigh Fermor
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2025178,00.html

philosophical and revolutionary writers

thinkers and revolutionarie

storyteller
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20frank.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5607242.ece

the Beats
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/books/columbia-u-haunts-of-lucien-carr-and-the-beats.html

type
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2025178,00.html

typewriter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/01/typewriters-fine-writing
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/alan/photos/08.html

Key workers: writers at their typewriters - in pictures
Since Mark Twain became the first author
to submit a typed manuscript with Life on the Mississippi in 1883,
authors have been devoted to their machines.
As manufacture of typewriters comes to a close,
we look back on some of the iconic images of creators at their keyboards
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2011/may/11/authors-typewriters-in-pictures

scribe
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1265005,00.html

book
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/02/beautiful-book-covers
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/books/10-best-books-of-2011.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/22/are-books-dead-ewan-morrison
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2010/dec/14/books-of-the-year-2010
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/

bookaholic
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/01/puffin-childrens-books-penguin-archive

Puffin books
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/01/puffin-childrens-books-penguin-archive

Wordsworth Editions' £1.99 classics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/09/cheap-classics-boom-book-trade-struggles

adult book

award-winning book
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jul/03/philip-hoare-leviathan

Google > Book search
http://books.google.com/
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

book fair
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/03/insider-guide-book-fairs

London Book Fair        2008
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2272871,00.html

bibliophile
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/books/01friedlaender.html

copy

series

instalment
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2130181,00.html

follow-up
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/15/dan-brown-lost-symbol-sales

book burning
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1936862,00.html

Domesday book
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1837773,00.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/08/03/1086_and_all_that.html

blook
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1745535,00.html

Sadamitsu Fujita        1921-2010

graphic designer who used avant-garde painting and photography
to create some of the most striking album covers of the 1950s,
and who designed the visually arresting book jackets
for “In Cold Blood” and “The Godfather”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/arts/design/27fujita.html

jacket design
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/02/beautiful-book-covers

pictorial book jacket

read

good read

reading
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/books/review/the-creator-of-hbos-girls-shares-her-reading-habits.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/news/0,10608,1229417,00.html

reader
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/books/steve-jobs-biography-and-other-hot-titles-bookstore-lures.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/booksoftheyear2005/story/0,,1675581,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1979958,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1979959,00.html

casual reader

avid reader

readership
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/15/dan-brown-lost-symbol-sales

skim over

JK Rowling
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2227179,00.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2784397.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2781919.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2702644.ece
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2196148,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2007-07-20-potter_N.htm
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2131221,00.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2106646.ece
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2130181,00.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/07/harry_potters_big_con_is_the_p.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2128891,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2129724,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2126717,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2044781,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-07-24-potter-paperback_x.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1484318,00.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/0,10608,515823,00.html 

The Guardian > Special report > Harry Potter
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/0,,520918,00.html

word

foreword

afterword

sentence

flyleaf

page

page-turner
http://books.guardian.co.uk/samueljohnson2008/story/0,,2290991,00.html

line

part

passage

chapter

plot
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/fashion/24PLOT.html

Ordinary brilliance ...
An opening from the Macclesfield Psalter, on show in Cambridge

The birth of British art
It took £1.7m to save the Macclesfield Psalter for the nation.
It's worth every penny, writes Jonathan Jones

The Guardian > G2        pp. 12-13        28.7.2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1537603,00.html

manuscript
http://documents.nytimes.com/looking-over-the-shoulder-of-charles-dickens-the-man-who-wrote-of-a-christmas-carol#p=1
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/nytint/docs/l
ooking-over-the-shoulder-of-charles-dickens-the-man-who-wrote-of-a-christmas-carol/original.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/1000-novels-lost-manuscripts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/03/jack-kerouac-exhibition-birmingham

illuminated manuscripts glossary
http://prodigi.bl.uk/illcat/glossary.asp

illuminations

psalter / book of the psalms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1537603,00.html

book
http://books.guardian.co.uk/0,5917,420031,00.html

folio
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1819939,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1819243,00.html

volume

the Book

miniature missal prayer book

papyrus

landmark book
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,1340357,00.html

bookworm

book lover
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26mcohen.html

literary collector

comic book
http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,6109,99682,00.html 

picture book
http://www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site/gallery/2012/apr/02/picture-books-easter-gallery
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html

Art Spiegelman

Maus (I)
http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/maus1_4.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/maus1.html

library

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/libraries
http://www.loc.gov

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/08/aberdeen-university-library-architecture
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/04/libraries-imperial-age
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/queens-libraries-serve-59-languages.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/18/library-closures-local-people
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/the-secret-life-of-libraries
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/18/library-most-borrowed-books
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/04/protests-save-our-libraries-day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2011/feb/04/save-libraries-protest-posters-cuts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/03/hands-off-our-libraries
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/04/libraries-dvds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2011/feb/01/we-love-libraries-video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2011/feb/01/library-protests-map
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/27/philip-pullman-defend-libraries-web
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/realestate/31scapes.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/27libraries.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/opinion/l04library.html
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/nyregion/23fiction.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2175023,00.html

British Library

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/17/british-library-books-mein-kampf

librarian

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26mcohen.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1931587,00.html

library users

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/18/library-most-borrowed-books

borrow

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/18/library-most-borrowed-books

ban

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/12/brave-new-world-challenged-books

book

in-print books

out-of-print publications

bookshop
http://www.murderone.co.uk/ 
http://www.foyles.co.uk/foyles/default.asp 
http://www.blackwell.co.uk/http://www.blackwell.co.uk/
http://www.talkingcities.co.uk/london_pages/shopping_books.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/bookshop/independent-bookshop-directory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/29/borders-bookshops-independent-lutyens-rubinstein

booksellers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksellers

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/george-whitman-paris-bookseller-and-cultural-beacon-is-dead-at-98.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/books/08brown.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1299710,00.html

independent booksellers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/04/collapse-independent-booksellers

independent bookshops
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shoptalk/story/0,,1780436,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1780401,00.html

Charing Cross
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2009/jan/31/charing-cross

Charing Cross > Murder One
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2009/jan/31/charing-cross

84 Charing Cross Road
http://www.84charingcrossroad.co.uk/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A710056
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090570/

walk-in bookshop
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1396997,00.html 

bookstore
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/business/barnes-noble-taking-on-amazon-in-the-fight-of-its-life.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/books/steve-jobs-biography-and-other-hot-titles-bookstore-lures.html

mega-bookstore
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,912384,00.html

bookseller > Barnes & Noble Inc.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/barnes-and-noble-inc/index.html

bookfest
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/guardian-hay-festival
http://www.hay-on-wye.co.uk/bookshops/frameset.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/04/hay-festival-diverse-international-theme
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay/story/0,14559,1228721,00.html

audiobook
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/arts/16gibson.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1232839,00.html

bookworm

literary competition

book prize

The Pulitzer Prize
http://www.independent.co.uk/
arts-entertainment/books/news/frank-mccourt-author-of-angelas-ashes-dies-1753207.html

Samuel Johnson prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/samueljohnsonprize

Booktrust teenage prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booktrustteenageprize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/01/gregory-hughes-booktrust-teenage-prize

Man Booker Prize        2007
http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2007/story/0,,2192570,00.html

The Booker prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booker-prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/26/booker-prize-shortlist-breaks-sales-records
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/12/howard-jacobson-the-finkler-question-booker
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1936862,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1920237,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1892438,00.html

Booker prize        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booker-prize-2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/books/julian-barnes-wins-the-man-booker-prize.html

The Booker shortlist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2011/oct/11/booker-prize-shortlist-2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/26/booker-prize-shortlist-breaks-sales-records
http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2004/0,14182,1127217,00.html 

shortlists

be shortlisted

the Blooker Prize
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1745535,00.html

the Turner prize
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1812815,00.html

win the award

win the Booker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booker-prize

the Big Gay Read
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1772003,00.html

the Whitbread Book of the Year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,7369,1313010,00.html

the Romantic Novelists Association prize
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1758240,00.html

the Carnegie medal
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/06/in_praise_of_the_carnegie_priz.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1767860,00.html

the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize
http://books.guardian.co.uk/samueljohnson2008/story/0,,2290991,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1797887,00.html

National Book Award        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/books/19awards.html

Book Awards        USA
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-11-15-book-awards_x.htm

paper

monograph

newspaper

literature

Scotland's literature
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/

"the chewing-gum of American literature"
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1823816,00.html

literary

on the London literary scene

the literary world

Literary America
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/land/ 

Hay Festival        2008
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2008

Guardian Hay festival
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay/0,14559,1215862,00.html

Izhar Cohen

Guardian Review        p. 3

12.3.2005

classic

literature

Victorian literature
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/victoria.html 

story

novel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/1000novels
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1890228,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1784465,00.html

novelist

biography
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/books/virginia-spencer-carr-literary-biographer-dies-at-82.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/books/09jenkins.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2169433,00.html

biographer
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/books/virginia-spencer-carr-literary-biographer-dies-at-82.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2169433,00.html

character
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5533223.ece

fictional characters
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/22/crime-fiction-harrogate-writing-festival

protagonist
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1823816,00.html

hero

sleuth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/may/19/david-suchet-poirot-agatha-christie

narrator
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Meloy-t.html

viewpoint

the setting

Izhar Cohen

The Guardian Review        p. 3

2.4.2005

genre
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/28/science-fiction-genre

literary genre

tale

fairytale
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2227179,00.html

adventure tale

fiction

science fiction        SF
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/may/24/alan-moore-league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen#

young adult fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site/2011/apr/04/cat-clarke-top-10-teens

non-fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books

essay
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/21/zadie-smith-essay-guardian-review

essayist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/21/zadie-smith-essay-guardian-review

drama

play

playwright

anthology / anthologies

poem
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/poemoftheweek
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/12/politics-carol-ann-duffy-poem

Mrs Scrooge
A new poem written for Review by Carol Ann Duffy.
Illustrated by Posy Simmonds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/20/mrs-scrooge-carol-ann-duffy

The Parting Shot by Simon Armitage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/25/armitage

A London Symphony by Jo Shapcott
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/24/poetry1

On Somme by Ivor Gurney        1890-1937
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/ivor-gurney-on-somme

Victorian working class > political protest poems
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2034425,00.html

poet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/dec/03/poet-christopher-logue-dies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/16/shakespeare-sonnets-don-paterson

poet laureate
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2340506,00.html

 Carol Ann Duffy - first female poet laureate        2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/carol-ann-duffy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/12/politics-carol-ann-duffy-poem
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/12/carol-ann-duffy-politics-laureate
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/01/carol-ann-duffy-poet-laureate

Portraits of the poet laureate through the ages
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2009/mar/13/poet-laureate-carol-ann-duffy?picture=346536534

makar - Scotland's national poet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/19/liz-lochhead-makar-scotland-national-poet

poetry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry
http://books.guardian.co.uk/links/areas_of_interest/poetry/front/0,6135,96457,00.html

sonnet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/16/shakespeare-sonnets-don-paterson

line

rhyme
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988921,00.html

First World War poetry
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/remembrance/poetry/wwone.shtml

Forward prize for poetry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/forwardprizeforpoetry

TS Eliot prize for poetry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/0,6961,,00.html

Benjamin Zephaniah > Gangsta Rap
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1303080,00.html

fiction
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-05-michael-crichton_N.htm
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/salman-rushdie-fiction-saved-my-life-807501.html

teenage fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/25/teenage-fiction-death

non-fiction
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-10-08-grisham_x.htm
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1882456,00.html

contemporary fiction

Le Carré's fiction

science fiction, fantasy and horror
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror

science fiction        SF
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/23/anne-mccaffrey-pern-dies-85
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/16/favourite-sf-novel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/09/hannu-rajaniemi-quantum-thief
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/24/neil-gaiman-carnegie-graveyard-book

fantasy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/13/george-rr-martin-game-thrones

fratire - a new style of paperback written by legless lotharios
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1758950,00.html
http://www.tuckermax.com/
http://www.maddox.xmission.com/

ghost story
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/27/kate-mosse-top-10-ghost-stories

gothic novel

spy novel

crime writing / crime fiction / crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/nov/04/pd-james-life-in-writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/22/crime-fiction-harrogate-writing-festival
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/28/martina-cole-queen-of-crime

crime
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/front/0,,95683,00.html

 true-crime
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1712237,00.html

detective fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/10/pd-james-detective-fiction-review

thriller
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14koontz.html

techno-thriller
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/dec/03/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.michaelcrichton

psychological thriller
http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,,2046639,00.html

whodunnit

pulp fiction
http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1823760,00.html

shoot-em-up crime novels
http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1823306,00.html

science fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/20/1000-science-fiction-fantasy-novels
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-05-michael-crichton_N.htm
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2266501,00.html

fantasy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/24/neil-gaiman-carnegie-graveyard-book
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/20/1000-science-fiction-fantasy-novels

adventure fantasy books
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/06/17/arts/entertainment-us-trueheart.html

biography
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1922888,00.html

memoir
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/world/europe/09blair.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1888560,00.html

fake memoir
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867437,00.html

letter
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2540141,00.html

philosophical text

reference book

short story
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14koontz.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07child.html

short story > Irish writers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/06/anne-enright-irish-short-story

collection of short stories

satire

pastiche
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviewbookclub/story/0,12286,824142,00.html

comic novel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/13/10-best-perfect-comic-novels

prose
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5607242.ece

study

survey

translation

oeuvre

trilogy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/30/american-library-association-banned-books

tetralogy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/audioslideshow/2009/jan/29/johnupdike

copyright

public domain

subject matter

an extract from his new novel

excerpt

hardback

paperback
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/business/media/mass-market-paperbacks-fading-from-shelves.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-07-24-potter-paperback_x.htm

pocket version

reissue

come out

International Standard Book Number        ISBN
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/iso/tc46sc9/isbn.htm

International Standard Serial Number        ISSN
http://www.loc.gov/issn/issnbro.html

TLS
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/

George Worsley Adamson        1913-2005

George Adamson:

Prolific illustrator of children's books and irreverent magazines

The Guardian        p. 21        2.4.2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1450619,00.html

this novel is about...

it starts in...

the conclusion may be sombre, but...

it is a metaphor for...

cliché

at 466 pages, the book is overlong

amazingly readable book

this is an exhilarating book

compelling reading

entertaining

moving

riveting

publishing industry

publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/publishing

publisihing        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/books/barney-rosset-loved-breaking-publishings-rules.html 

publisher
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/business/media/08zacharius.html

Barnet Lee Rosset Jr.        USA        1922-2012
flamboyant, provocative publisher
who helped change the course of publishing in the United States,
bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to Americans’ attention
under his Grove Press imprint
and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/books/barney-rosset-loved-breaking-publishings-rules.html

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/barney_rosset/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/24/barney-rosset
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/books/barney-rosset-loved-breaking-publishings-rules.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/arts/barney-rosset-grove-press-publisher-dies-at-89.html

publisher > Penguin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/30/penguin-books-75th-birthday

The iPod effect creates new markets for publishers        2006
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1813742,00.html

editor
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/arts/14cavin.html

audible.co.uk
http://www.audible.co.uk/aduk/site/wallGarden/browseWG.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=Yes

reject
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2006/story/0,,1787374,00.html

print

reprint

reprint

out of print
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/realestate/17scape.html

new edition

masterpiece
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html

be hailed as his/her masterpiece

digital audio book
http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp

electronic publisher

academic publisher
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/index.html

censor
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/arts/barney-rosset-grove-press-publisher-dies-at-89.html

censoring

censorship
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/arts/barney-rosset-grove-press-publisher-dies-at-89.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/29/philip.pullman.amber.spyglass.golden.compass.banned

banned books
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/02/steinbeck.joyce.lawrence.sewell.voltaire

editing

excised
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,1340357,00.html

abridged

book deal
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1780287,00.html

blockbuster
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/dec/03/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.michaelcrichton
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2106646.ece
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1816293,00.html

blockbusting bestsellers
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1464572,00.html

bestseller
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/21/elif-batuman-bestseller-life
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2006/story/0,,1787374,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/24/obituaries/roald-dahl-writer-74-is-dead-best-sellers-enchanted-children.html

hit
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/world/europe/09blair.html

hit book
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/21/elif-batuman-bestseller-life

Da Vinci Code
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1819887,00.html

the father of the Indian novel in English
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1315202,00.html 

Granta, the magazine of new writing
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2233133,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1317191,00.html 

Roald Dahl        1916-1990
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1368681,00.html 
http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,1320329,00.html 

Lake District > William Wordsworth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1243759,00.html 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1348039,00.html

Barbara Cartland
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1349581,00.html

Festival America, Vincennes, Paris, France
http://www.festival-america.com/

Encyclopedia Britannica

halts print publication after 244 years

The paper edition of the encyclopedia ends its centuries-long run,
but is it a victim or beneficiary of the digital age?

Guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 13 March 2012 22.18 GMT
Tom McCarthy
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 22.18 GMT
on Tuesday 13 March 2012. It was last modified at 23.00 GMT
on Tuesday 13 March 2012.

Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity's achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.

And now it's going out of print.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the last. Future editions will live exclusively online.

For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die. Neither view quite captures the company or the crossroads.

Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, suggested that the encyclopedia was already something of a relic within the company itself, which has long since moved its main business away from its trademark publication and into online educational tools.

"The company has changed from a reference provider to an instructional solutions provider," Cauz said. He projects that only 15% of the company's revenue this year will come from its namesake publication, mostly through subscriptions and app purchases. "The vast majority" of the remaining 85% of revenue is expected to come from educational products and services, said Cauz, who declined to provide dollar amounts but said the company was profitable.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, is owned by the Swiss banking magnate Jacqui Safra. The company's websites, which include Merriam-Webster dictionaries, attracted more than 450 million users over the course of 2011, according to internal numbers.

If the company's move over the last decade into the education market is an impressive example of corporate versatility, the competitive difficulties the encyclopedia faces are easy to grasp.

Wikipedia English has 3.9m articles. The comprehensive Britannica has about 120,000. Wikipedia is free. The DVD Britannica, which includes two dictionaries and a thesaurus, costs $30 on Amazon. Individuals will also be able to sign up for an annual $70 subscription (universities will be charged about $1 per student).

Cauz said the product was worth the price.

"We may not be as big as Wikipedia. but we have a scholarly voice, an editorial process, and fact-based, well-written articles," Cauz said. "All of these things we believe are very, very important, and provide an alternative that we want to offer to as many people as possible. We believe that there are 1.2 to 1.5bn inquiries for which we have the best answer."

Asked whether the decision to end the publication's monumental run had not caused a backlash inside the company, Cauz said the opposite was true.

"The transition has not been that difficult," he said. "Everyone understands we needed to change. As opposed to newspapers, we felt the impact of digital many years ago – we had a lot of time for reflection. Everyone is very invigorated.

"We are the only company that I know of, so far, that made the transition from traditional media to the digital sphere, and managed to be profitable and to grow."

But what of the kids who will no longer grow up in the beneficent shadow of the physical volumes, or be guided in their learning by happy chance, as when they go looking for "kookaburra" and accidentally encounter "komodo dragon" on an adjacent page?

"I understand that for some the end of the Britannica print set may be perceived as an unwelcome goodbye to a dear, reliable and trustworthy friend that brought them the joy of discovery in the quest for knowledge," Cauz wrote in a company announcement. The product will improve, however, when it finally leaves the space constraints and black-and-white finality of print behind, he said.

"Today our digital database is much larger than what we can fit in the print set. And it is up to date because we can revise it within minutes anytime we need to, and we do it many times each day."

    Encyclopedia Britannica halts print publication after 244 years, G, 13.3.2012,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/13/encyclopedia-britannica-halts-print-publication

Defied Censors, Making Racy a Literary Staple

February 22, 2012
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Barney Rosset, the flamboyant, provocative publisher who helped change the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to Americans’ attention under his Grove Press imprint and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89.

His son Peter said he died after a double-heart-valve replacement.

Over a long career Mr. Rosset championed Beat poets, French Surrealists, German Expressionists and dramatists of the absurd, helping to bring them all to prominence. Besides publishing Beckett, he brought early exposure to European writers like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

Most of all, beginning in high school, when he published a mimeographed journal titled “The Anti-Everything,” Mr. Rosset, slightly built and sometimes irascible, savored a fight.

He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature published in the United States. He did the same thing on movie screens by importing the sexually frank Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).”

Mr. Rosset called Grove “a breach in the dam of American Puritanism.”

Beyond being sued scores of times, he received death threats. Grove’s office in Greenwich Village was bombed.

In 2008 the National Book Foundation honored him as “a tenacious champion for writers who were struggling to be read in America.”

Other mentions were less lofty. Life magazine in 1969 titled an article about him “The Old Smut Peddler.” That same year a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post showed him climbing out of a sewer.

Mr. Rosset was hardly the only publisher to take risks, lasso avant-garde authors or print titillating material. But few so completely relied on seat-of-the-pants judgment. Colleagues said he had “a whim of steel.”

“He does everything by impulse and then figures out afterward whether he’s made a smart move or was just kidding,” Life said.

Simply put, Mr. Rosset liked what he liked. In an interview with Newsweek in 2008, he said he printed erotica because it “excited me.”

A Counterculture Voice

In 1957 he helped usher in a new counterculture when he began the literary journal Evergreen Review, originally a quarterly. (It later became a bimonthly and then a glossy monthly.) The Review, published until 1973, sparkled with writers like Beckett, who had a story and poem in the first issue, and Allen Ginsberg, whose poem “Howl” appeared in the second. There were also lascivious comic strips.

Barnet Lee Rosset Jr. was born into wealth in Chicago on May 28, 1922. His father owned banks, and though the elder Mr. Rosset had conservative views, he sent his son to the liberal Francis W. Parker School. The school was so progressive, Mr. Rosset told The New York Times in 2008, that teachers arranged for students to sleep with one another.

“I’m half-Jewish and half-Irish,” he told The Associated Press in 1998, “and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic. From an early age my feelings made the I.R.A. look pretty conservative. I grew up hating fascism, hating racism.”

He called his 17th year his happiest. He was class president, football star, holder of a state track record and, he said, boyfriend of the school’s best-looking girl. He circulated a petition demanding that John Dillinger be pardoned. In 1940 he went to Swarthmore College, which he disliked because class attendance was compulsory. After a year he transferred to the University of Chicago for a quarter, then to the University of California, Los Angeles. A few months later he joined the Army and served in a photographic unit in China. After the war he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He joined the Communist Party but soon rejected it, he said, after visiting Eastern Europe.

Initially interested in film, he spend $250,000 of his family’s fortune in New York to produce a documentary, “Strange Victory,” about the prejudice that black veterans faced when they returned from World War II. The film was poorly received, and afterward he headed for Paris with Joan Mitchell, a former high school classmate who became an acclaimed Abstract Expressionist painter. They married in 1949 and returned to New York, where he studied literature at the New School for Social Research, earning another bachelor’s degree in 1952.

Told that a small press on Grove Street in Greenwich Village was for sale, he bought it in 1951 for $3,000. His goal almost from the beginning was to publish Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” an autobiographical, sexually explicit novel that had been published in Paris in 1934 and long been banned in the United States.

But he decided first to publish “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had originally appeared in Italy in 1928. He theorized that though it was also banned in the United States, it commanded greater respect than Miller’s book.

Arthur E. Summerfield, the postmaster general, lived up to Mr. Rosset’s expectations and barred the book from the mails — Grove’s means of distribution — in June 1959, calling it “smutty.” But a federal judge in Manhattan lifted the ban, ruling that the book had redeeming merit. The reasoning pleased Mr. Rosset less than the result: as a foe of censorship he was an absolutist.

A Free Speech Advocate

“If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech,” he said. He faced a new round of censorship after buying the rights to “Tropic of Cancer” for $50,000 in 1961, the agreement having been struck by Miller and Mr. Rosset over a game of table tennis. Mr. Summerfield again imposed a ban but lifted it before it could be challenged in court.

Nevertheless, the book was attacked in more than 60 legal cases seeking to ban it in 21 states, and Mr. Rosset was arrested and taken before a Brooklyn grand jury, which decided against an indictment. Grove won the dispute in 1964 when the United States Supreme Court reversed a Florida ban, bringing all the cases to a halt. Grove sold 100,000 hardcover and one million paperback copies of “Cancer” in the first year.

In 1962 Grove released “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs, a series of druggy, sexually explicit vignettes first published in Paris in 1959. Mr. Rosset had already printed 100,000 copies and kept them under wraps while the “Cancer” case was still in the courts. Almost immediately a Boston court found “Naked Lunch” without social merit and banned it. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed that judgment in 1966.

Many more Grove books proved controversial. One was “Story of O,” a novel of love and sexual domination, by Anne Desclos writing under the name Pauline Réage. But lawsuits dwindled. It was the film “I Am Curious (Yellow),” the rights to which Mr. Rosset bought in 1968, that sparked the next firestorm. He saw it as an exploration of class struggle, he said, but its huge audiences were clearly attracted by the nudity and staged sexual intercourse.

When a theater refused to show “I Am Curious,” Mr. Rosset bought the theater. He then sold it back after showing the movie. The authorities in 10 states banned it entirely.

After Maryland’s highest court ruled that the film was obscene, the matter went to the Supreme Court. In 1971 it split, 4-to-4, on whether the film should be banned everywhere. Justice William O. Douglas had recused himself because an excerpt from one of his books had appeared in Evergreen Review, which he said could be perceived as a conflict of interest. The deadlock meant the Maryland ruling would stand, although it had no weight as precedent.

By that time Grove had made $15 million from the film, doubling the company’s revenues.There were other run-ins over films. Ruling on a suit by the State of Massachusetts, a Superior Court judge in 1968 banned further showings of another Grove release, “Titicut Follies,” Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing film about the abuse of patients at Bridgewater State Hospital.

There were triumphant moments, like Mr. Rosset’s late-night Champagne session in Paris with Beckett in 1953 that led to his acquiring the American publishing rights to “Waiting for Godot.” It sold more than 2.5 million copies in the United States. Beckett was just one winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature published by Grove; others included Harold Pinter and Kenzaburo Oe.

At Grove’s peak in the late 1960s, Mr. Rosset ran what he called “a self-contained mini-conglomerate” from a seven-story building on Mercer Street. Mr. Rosset was adept at spotting potential best sellers. “Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis,” by Eric Berne, spent two years atop the Times best-seller list and has sold more than five million copies.

But he also made mistakes. Mr. Rosset turned down J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” saying he “couldn’t understand a word,” and a planned trilogy of films based on short works by Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter was never completed, though it did lead in 1965 to an unusual art-house film, “Film,” starring Buster Keaton with a script by Beckett. In 1967 Mr. Rosset sold a third of the common stock of Grove to the public, retaining the rest himself. As a businessman he stumbled when he diversified into other fields, including real estate, film distribution and Off Broadway theater programs modeled on Playbill.

A violent blow occurred on July 26, 1968, when a fragmentation grenade, thrown through a second-story window, exploded in the Grove offices, then on University Place. The offices were empty, and no one was hurt. Exiles opposed to Fidel Castro took responsibility, angry that the Evergreen Review had published excerpts of “The Bolivian Diary,” by Che Guevara, the former aide to Mr. Castro who had been executed by Bolivian troops less than a year before.

Protests in the Office

To Mr. Rosset, things turned decidedly against him in 1970 when employees, led by a feminist activist, tried to unionize the editorial staff. He was accused of sexism, and some said his publications were demeaning to women. When protesters took over the office, Mr. Rosset called in the police. The union proposal was voted down.

Mr. Rosset sold Grove in 1985 to Ann Getty, the oil heiress, and George Weidenfeld, a British publisher. Part of the deal was that he would remain in charge. But the new owners fired him a year later. He sued, contending that the dismissal had violated the sales contract. The dispute was settled out of court.

After leaving Grove, Mr. Rosset published Evergreen Review online and books under a new imprint, Foxrock Books. After discovering a trove of suppressed 19th-century erotic books, including “My Secret Life,” he started Blue Moon Books, which published those as well as newer titles. He also took up painting and filled a wall of his Manhattan apartment with a mural. Grove’s backlist was acquired by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993. The combined entity today is Grove/Atlantic.

After his marriage to Ms. Mitchell ended in divorce, Mr. Rosset married four more times. His subsequent marriages to Hannelore Eckert, Cristina Agnini and Elisabeth Krug also ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Astrid Myers; his son Peter, from his second marriage; a daughter, Tansey Rosset, and a son, Beckett, from his third marriage; a daughter, Chantal R. Hyde, from his fourth marriage; four grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.

Algonquin Books plans to release an autobiography Mr. Rosset was writing, tentatively titled “The Subject Was Left-Handed.” A documentary film about his career, titled “Obscene” and directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, was released in 2008.Mr. Rosset liked to tell the story of how he had responded to a Chicago prosecutor who suggested that he had published “Tropic of Cancer” only for the money. He whipped out a paper he had written on Miller while at Swarthmore (the grade was a B-) to demonstrate his long interest in that author. He won the case.

“I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home,” he told The Times in 2008. “It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ ”

    Defied Censors, Making Racy a Literary Staple, NYT, 22.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/arts/barney-rosset-grove-press-publisher-dies-at-89.html

George Whitman,

Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon,

Is Dead at 98

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MARLISE SIMONS

PARIS — George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98.

He had not recovered from a stroke he suffered two months ago, his daughter, Sylvia, said in announcing his death.

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed.

Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet, Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. “Perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.”

George Whitman was born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, N.J., and grew up in Salem, Mass. His thirst for travel was awakened when his father, a physics teacher, took the family to China for a sabbatical year at Nanking University. After majoring in journalism at Boston University and graduating in 1935, Mr. Whitman began traveling in earnest, taking extended walking trips across North America and through Central America while writing and exploring, coming home only after getting bogged down in a swamp in Panama.

After enrolling at Harvard, he enlisted in the Army in 1941, serving as a medic for several months at an outpost in Greenland.

With the end of the war he resumed his travels, exploring Europe before settling in Paris in 1946. There he used his G.I. Bill benefits to start a small lending library in his windowless room in the Hotel de Suez near the Sorbonne, where he studied for a time.

After moving his English language books to a kiosk, he opened his store, first calling it Le Mistral. It was said to be named after the Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral, whose work Mr. Whitman admired.

Mr. Whitman, who had called himself a frustrated novelist, poured his energy into selling and lending books and moving in literary circles.

How Le Mistral became Shakespeare & Company has been a matter of some debate. Some accused Mr. Whitman of pilfering the name. But Clive Hart, a Joyce scholar, wrote in a recent e-mail that he attended a gathering in 1958 in which Sylvia Beach “announced that she would like to offer George the old name of Shakespeare & Company.”

“George was of course delighted,” Mr. Hart wrote.

Mr. Whitman adopted the name in 1964, to honor Ms. Beach on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the bookstore said. He named his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, born in 1981, after her.

Ms. Whitman, who now runs the store, is Mr. Whitman’s only child. She said that while he had many romantic attachments, he was married only once, and briefly, to her mother, Felicity Leng. He is also survived by a younger brother, Carl.

For all the romanticism surrounding the bookstore, Mr. Whitman went through difficult times. He was closed for a year, in 1967, for lack of a proper license, but with the support of friends he continued lending books and published the first issue of The Paris Magazine, which he called “the poor man’s Paris Review,” a reference to the literary journal founded in 1953 by George Plimpton and others. Mr. Whitman’s magazine carried work by Jean Paul Sartre, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Marguerite Duras.

It has come out only sporadically since then. A fire once destroyed almost 5,000 volumes in the library above the store.

Mr. Whitman was famously frugal and expected the bibliophiles residing in his store to work a few hours every day sorting and selling books. Yet he also invited uncounted numbers of people for weekly tea parties to his own apartment, or for late-night readings enriched with dumplings or pots of Irish stew.

Some guests later described him as a kind and magnetic father figure to needy souls but also as a man who could throw tantrums and preside over the store’s residents, sometimes up to 20 people, like a moody and unpredictable dictator.

Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least concerning his life’s work. “I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions — just a few old socks and love letters, “ he wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, “and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

    George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at 98, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/george-whitman-paris-bookseller-and-cultural-beacon-is-dead-at-98.html

The Dog-Eared Paperback,

Newly Endangered in an E-Book Age

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

These are dark and stormy times for the mass-market paperback, that squat little book that calls to mind the beach and airport newsstands.

Recession-minded readers who might have picked up a quick novel in the supermarket or drugstore are lately resisting the impulse purchase. Shelf space in bookstores and retail chains has been turned over to more expensive editions, like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the sleeker, more glamorous cousin to the mass-market paperback. And while mass-market paperbacks have always been prized for their cheapness and disposability, something even more convenient has come along: the e-book.

A comprehensive survey released last month by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.

“Five years ago, it was a robust market,” said David Gernert, a literary agent whose clients include John Grisham, a perennial best seller in mass market. “Now it’s on the wane, and e-books have bitten a big chunk out of it.”

Fading away is a format that was both inexpensive and widely accessible — thrillers and mysteries and romances by authors like James Patterson, Stephen King, Clive Cussler and Nora Roberts that were purchased not to be proudly displayed on a living room shelf (and never read), but to be addictively devoured by devoted readers.

“In those days, you could easily ship out a million copies of a book,” said Beth de Guzman, the editor in chief of paperbacks for Grand Central Publishing, part of the Hachette Book Group. “Then shelf space started decreasing and decreasing for mass market, and it has especially declined in the last several years.”

For decades, the mass-market paperback has stubbornly held on, despite the predictions of its death since the 1980s, when retail chains that edged out independent bookstores successfully introduced discounts on hardcover versions of the same books. The prices of print formats are typically separated by at least a few dollars. Michael Connelly, the best-selling mystery writer best known for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” said he worried that book buyers would not be able to discover new authors very easily if mass-market paperbacks continued to be phased out.

“Growing up and reading primarily inexpensive mass-market novels, it allows you to explore,” he said. “I bought countless novels based on the cover or based on the title, not knowing what was inside.”

The growth of the e-book has forced a conversation in the publishing industry about which print formats will survive in the long term. Publishers have begun releasing trade paperbacks sooner than the traditional one-year period after the release of the hardcover, leaving the mass-market paperback even further behind.

Cost-conscious readers who used to wait for the heavily discounted paperback have now realized that the e-book edition, available on the first day the book is published, can be about the same price. For devoted readers of novels, people who sometimes voraciously consume several books in a single week, e-books are a natural fit.

“It’s a question of, do you still want to wait for the book?” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “The people who used to wait to buy the mass-market paperback because of the price aren’t going to wait anymore.”

That could be good news for authors who make up for a loss in mass-market sales with increases in e-book sales. Generally speaking, authors make more royalties on an e-book than on a paperback.

E-book best-seller lists are packed with the genre novels that have traditionally dominated paperback best-seller lists.

“In some ways, the e-book is yesterday’s mass market,” said Matthew Shear, the executive vice president and publisher of St. Martin’s Press, which currently has books by Janet Evanovich and Lora Leigh on the paperback best-seller list in The New York Times.

Mass-market paperback sales have been sliding since giant bookstore chains and later Amazon.com started heavily discounting hardcovers in the 1980s and 1990s. The decline has deepened in the last two years, said Kelly Gallagher, the vice president of publishing services for Bowker, a research organization for the publishing industry.

“You can’t list a single thing that has caused its demise,” he said. “But as e-books become more affordable and better aligned to the mass-market reader, I would have to say that I don’t think there are encouraging signs that print mass-market books will rise again. When all these things align against a certain format or category, it’s hard to recover.”

Ms. de Guzman said that Barnes & Noble used to keep a large display solely for mass-market paperbacks in the front of its stores, but that has disappeared. Borders, once a strong seller of mass-market paperbacks, especially romance, is in the process of liquidating all of its stores.

Several publishers said Wal-Mart, a major seller of mass-market paperbacks, has been quietly revamping its book selection to include fewer mass-market paperbacks and more trade paperbacks, which have higher production values: better-quality paper and larger covers.

Even airport stores, traditionally a mainstay retailer of mass-market paperbacks, are shunning them more frequently in favor of hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

Sara Hinckley, the vice president of book-buying and promotions for Hudson Booksellers, said that the stores had gradually decreased their selection in recent years, while increasing their array of hardcovers and trade paperbacks. Sales in trade paperbacks, she said, have continued to increase in recent years. Last fall, in 60 of its stores, Hudson cut the display space for mass-market paperbacks in half.

“With less demand and less retail shelf space for the format, and higher retails on the trade papers, there simply isn’t as much publishing into the format, which in turn creates declining sales,” Ms. Hinckley said in an e-mail.

Some publishers have responded by releasing books in trade paperback format before the mass-market edition. Grand Central Publishing plans to release trade paperback versions of “The Sixth Man” by David Baldacci and “Lethal” by Sandra Brown — the first time those authors’ thrillers have been published in trade paperback.

After 20 years as a best-selling author, Mr. Connelly will experience a first this fall: his latest legal thriller, “The Fifth Witness,” will be released as a trade paperback by Grand Central.

“From my standpoint, which is probably pure vanity, the trade paperback edition is often the way of publishing more literary novels,” Mr. Connelly said. “So for me, it’s a cool ego thing — I get to be in the trade edition. But beyond that, I’m hoping it works.”

    The Dog-Eared Paperback, Newly Endangered in an E-Book Age, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/business/media/mass-market-paperbacks-fading-from-shelves.html

Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included

October 1, 2009
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.

But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

And in early September Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel — published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version — in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.

Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading.

“There is no question that these new media are going to be superb at engaging and interesting the reader,” said Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” But, she added, “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?”

The most obvious way technology has changed the literary world is with electronic books. Over the past year devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader have gained in popularity. But the digital editions displayed on these devices remain largely faithful to the traditional idea of a book by using words — and occasional pictures — to tell a story or explain a subject.

The new hybrids add much more. In one of the Simon & Schuster vooks, a fitness and diet title, readers can click on videos that show them how to perform the exercises. A beauty book contains videos that demonstrate how to make homemade skin-care potions.

Not just how-tos are getting the cinematic work-up. Simon & Schuster is also releasing two digital novels combining text with videos a minute or 90 seconds long that supplement — and in some cases advance — the story line.

In “Embassy,” a short thriller about a kidnapping written by Richard Doetsch, a video snippet that resembles a newscast reveals that the victim is the mayor’s daughter, replacing some of Mr. Doetsch’s original text.

“Everybody is trying to think about how books and information will best be put together in the 21st century,” said Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, the Simon & Schuster imprint that is releasing the electronic editions in partnership with Vook, a multimedia company. She added, “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”

In some cases, social-networking technologies enable conversations among readers that will influence how books are written.

The children’s division of HarperCollins recently released the first in a young-adult mystery series called “The Amanda Project,” and has invited readers to discuss clues and characters on a Web site. As the series continues, some of the reader comments may be incorporated into minor characters or subplots.

Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, predicted that “there is going to be a popular kind of literature where the author is seen as the leader of a large group and will pick and choose from these suggestions” by readers.

Bradley J. Inman, chief executive of Vook, said readers who viewed prototypes of “The 90-Second Fitness Solution” by Pete Cerqua or “Return to Beauty” by Narine Nikogosian “intuitively saw the benefits of augmenting how-to books with video segments.” Mr. Inman said readers then “warmed to” the fictional editions.

Jude Deveraux, a popular romance author who has written 36 straightforward text novels, said she loved experimenting with “Promises,” an exclusive vook set on a 19th-century South Carolina plantation in which the integrated videos add snippets of dialogue and atmosphere.

Ms. Deveraux said she envisioned new versions of books enhanced by music or even perfume. “I’d like to use all the senses,” she said.

Brian Tart, publisher of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, which released “Level 26,” said he wanted the book’s text to be able to stand on its own, but the culture demanded rethinking the format. “Like everybody, you see people watching these three-minute YouTube videos and using social networks,” Mr. Tart said. “And there is an opportunity here to bring in more people who might have thought they were into the new media world.”

Readers of “Level 26,” which Mr. Zuiker wrote with Duane Swierczynski, have had a mixed response to what the publisher is marketing as a “digi-novel.”

“It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” commented Fred L. Gronvall in a review on Amazon.com. The videos, he wrote, “add to the experience in a big way.”

But another reviewer, posting as Rj Granados, wrote, “Do you really think cheesy video vignettes will IMPROVE the book?”

Some authors believe the new technologies can enrich books. For his history of street songs in 18th-century France, Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, will include links to recordings of the actual tunes.

But Mr. Darnton, author of “The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future,” warned that reading itself was changing, and not necessarily for the better. “I think we can see enough already to worry about the loss of a certain kind of sustained reading,” he said.

Mr. Doetsch, the author of “Embassy,” said the new editions should not replace the traditional book. He has written a forthcoming novel, “The 13th Hour,” that he thinks is too long to lend itself to the video-enhanced format. The new editions, he said, are “like dipping a novel into a cinematic pool and pulling it out and getting the best parts of each.”

Some authors scoff at the idea of mixing the two mediums. “As a novelist I would never ever” allow videos to substitute for prose, said Walter Mosley, the author of “Devil in a Blue Dress” and other novels.

“Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow,” Mr. Mosley said. “And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”

    Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included, NYT, 1.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01book.html

Urban Fiction Goes From Streets to Public Libraries

October 23, 2008
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

In one book, the hero spirals toward a violent death dealing drugs on the streets of Laurelton, Queens, witnessing, along the way, a baby ripped apart by bullets. In another, a convict plots the seduction of his prison psychotherapist.

And then there’s Angel, a Versace-clad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Louis Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here.

All these characters, and the novels they populate, are favorites of Shonda Miller, 35, a devoted library-goer who devours a book a day, enforces a daily hour reading time for her entire family and scours street stands and the Internet for new titles. She also acts as an unofficial guide and field scout for the Queens Library as it builds its collection of a fast-growing genre, written mainly by black authors about black characters and variously known as urban fiction, street lit or gangsta lit.

It’s not the kind of literary fare usually associated with the prim image of librarians. But public libraries from Queens, the highest-circulation library system in the country, to York County in central Pennsylvania, are embracing urban fiction as an exciting, if sometimes controversial, way to draw new people into reading rooms, spread literacy and reflect and explore the interests and concerns of the public they serve.

“We’ve got people who are reading for the first time. We’ve got people coming into our building asking for Teri Woods” — the creator of Angel — “who have never come here before,” said Lora-Lynn Rice, the director of collections at the Martin Library in York County, which held a weeklong symposium on urban fiction during National Library Week in April. “Why would we not embrace this?”

Urban fiction’s journey from street vendors to library shelves and six-figure book deals is a case of culture bubbling from the bottom up. That is especially true in New York, where the genre, like hip-hop music, was developed by, for and about people in southeast Queens and other mostly black neighborhoods that have struggled with drugs, crime and economic stagnation.

Writers like Mark Anthony — who at 35 is Ms. Miller’s contemporary and the author of “Paper Chasers,” based on his youth in Laurelton — found themselves being rejected by agents and publishers. So they paid to self-publish their books, with rudimentary design and cheap bindings, and sold them on 125th Street in Harlem, or on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, around the corner from the borough library’s main branch. Soon, a stream of people — high-school students, first-time library users, the library’s own staff — were asking for the books. And the librarians went out on the street to buy them.

“If there’s some cultural phenomenon going on out there and it’s not in here, we want to know why,” said Joanne King, a spokeswoman for the Queens Library.

As a teenager in Far Rockaway, Queens, where she still lives, Ms. Miller read gritty novels set in urban black neighborhoods of the 1960s and ’70s, by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Then there was a dry spell. She made do with Jackie Collins until a new generation of urban fiction sprang up in the late 1990s.

“I read what I can relate to,” she said. “They’re writing about what I’ve experienced. It’s easier than reading about Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive.”

Which is not to say Ms. Miller, a mother of four, has ever murdered anyone, worked as a prostitute or been draped in diamonds by a drug-dealing boyfriend. (Her husband of 19 years, an ex-Army man, is a garbage collector.) What she recognizes are the characters’ fashions and pleasures (door-knocker earrings, clubbing), their problems (few jobs, drug dealers offering your children fast cash, people you know getting shot or stabbed) and their aspirations (striving for a better life).

So she has made it her mission to bring more urban fiction into the Queens libraries, which she visits as many as five times a week, checking out books she reads on her subway rides to Manhattan to visit her son Tad, 17, who has been hospitalized for four years with brain damage from a near-drowning.

Her oldest, Raishon, 19, reads his favorite urban titles aloud to Tad. Some nurses blush at the profanity and sex; others ask to borrow the books.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘How can you let him read that?’ ” she said. “He lives it every day. This is cotton candy compared to what they hear out there. And it shows him there are consequences to living such a fast life.”

And besides, she said, when she makes her husband and children read every day from 5 to 6 p.m., at home in the Ocean Bay housing project, “I don’t care what they read — I only care that they read.”

Librarians tend to agree. But many libraries are only now catching up to their public, which has already made urban fiction big business. Writers like Ms. Woods, from Philadelphia, and Vickie Stringer, who writes about her former life as a drug dealer and madam, have started their own publishing companies.

Mainstream publishers saw dollar signs and jumped in. St. Martin’s Press now publishes authors from Mr. Anthony to the rapper 50 Cent — another Queens native, born Curtis Jackson — and a subgenre of black erotica led by the writer Zane.

The genre has spawned best-selling authors like Omar Tyree and the rapper Sister Souljah, whose novel “The Coldest Winter Ever” has sold a million copies; a long-awaited sequel, "Midnight," is due out Nov. 4. It has also spawned literary feuds: Kwame Teague, the convict whose life story was featured in Ms. Woods’s “Dutch” and “Dutch II,” broke with her to publish the third volume himself.

And, of course, it has spawned a backlash, which has complicated its reception in libraries. Its street language, graphic sex and violence — not to mention covers featuring scantily clad models, often brandishing weapons — are controversial in black literary circles, where critics say it perpetuates stereotypes and lament that it is shelved next to literary writers like Toni Morrison, a Nobel laureate. Mr. Tyree himself has declared that he’s not going to write any more of it.

“There are black librarians who hate the genre, because they feel like it’s an embarrassment culturally,” said Vanessa Morris, an assistant teaching professor of library sciences at Drexel University.

But she says the genre tells the stories of African-Americans who survived the 1980s drug wars: “This is about documenting history, or, I should say, collective memory.”

Librarians point out that Harlequin romances, the Bobbsey Twins and even paperbacks were once considered too lowbrow for libraries — and that Stephen King and Ms. Collins also trade in sex and violence.

Ms. Morris credits the genre for a jump in circulation at the Widener Library in North Philadelphia, where she began a book club for teenagers in 2005 and found that three years later, many had expanded their interests to read science fiction and biography.

At Q-Boro Books — Mr. Anthony’s publishing company, with offices over a Jamaican-Chinese restaurant in Jamaica, Queens — the library’s embrace has been great for business, since libraries buy multiple copies and reorder when they wear out or disappear. The company, which he says has revenues of over $1 million, was recently sold to Urban Books. based in West Babylon, on Long Island. Q-Boro has already published 100 books, including “The Moanin’ After” by L. M. Ross, with a gay theme that Mr. Anthony says reflects Queens’ diversity, and Mr. Anthony’s coming “Queen Bee” — renamed after Wal-Mart balked at the original title, “Promiscuous Girl.”

At the Far Rockaway library, one of the busiest spots on the neighborhood’s faded commercial strip, a stream of commuters heads to the urban fiction shelf at the end of the workday. The head librarian there, Sharon Anderson, who said she grew up on Mr. Goines and was now obsessed with spy novels, says some readers start with urban fiction and branch out to histories of the civil rights movement, or to “The Godfather.” Sometimes she recommends something harder: “If you want sex, dirt and murder, read Shakespeare! We have the CliffsNotes!”

Urban fiction has influenced a generation of library staffers, too. Down the street at a special library branch for teenagers, the librarian Sandra Michele Echols wrote her bachelor’s thesis at New York University comparing street lit to slave narratives.

Barbara Orlandi, a lifelong Far Rockaway resident who was checking out “Little Black Girl Lost II,” said she moved out of the Redfern housing project at age 11 and has not gone back since. But she reads about the dangerous life she remembers — some books even mention specific Far Rockaway streets — on her subway rides to her night shift as an AirTrain dispatcher.

“It actually helps you to understand what’s going on around you,” she said, “instead of walking around blind.”

    Urban Fiction Goes From Streets to Public Libraries, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/nyregion/23fiction.html

Why Libraries Are Back in Style

It's Not Because of Books;
They're 'Memory Rooms'
Or TV-Free Private Spaces

September 12, 2008
The Wall Street Journal
By JUNE FLETCHER
Page W8
 

In the library of her 5,800-square-foot house in Glen Cove, N.Y., Linda Teitelbaum keeps trophies from dog shows, needlepoint pillows of bulldogs and gold-framed photos of family. Though the plaid-papered room has a scattering of books, she often retreats to it not just to read but to remember the dogs she used to breed, to nap, or to get away from the TV. "It's my veg-out room," Ms. Teitelbaum says.

Reading rates are down and Americans say they love casual living. And yet, one of the most popular rooms in big new houses is a library. Rather than being about books, their appeal is often about creating a certain ambiance. "Libraries connote elegance and quality," says New York architect and interior designer Campion Platt, adding that most of his wealthy clients want one, even if they do most of their reading online.

Libraries have become so fashionable that this month, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey featured the one in her Santa Barbara, Calif., home on the cover of her magazine; it contains first editions collected for her by a rare-book dealer.

In the latest annual National Association of Home Builders consumer survey, 63% of home buyers said they wanted a library or considered one essential, a percentage that has been edging up for the past few years. Many mass-market home builders are including libraries in their house plans, sometimes with retro touches like rolling ladders and circular stairs.

A RETURN TO THE CLASSIC

Jeani Ziering, an interior designer in Manhasset, N.Y., says the newfound popularity of libraries is part of a general movement toward traditional design and décor. "When the economy turns bad, people turn to the classics," she says. Libraries are especially appealing during anxious times because they project coziness and comfort, she adds.

The Journal's June Fletcher discusses the resurgence of libraries.What can make libraries more soothing than other formal rooms isn't so much books but the framed family photographs, awards and mementos that share the shelves and define a family's interests and identity, says McLean, Va., architect Chris Lessard. "They're memory rooms," he says. Because libraries are public rooms, oftentimes the books are purely decorative and don't say as much about the family who lives there. The books that people really read, like paperback novels and how-to guides, often are kept out of sight elsewhere in the home.

Even in a downturn, U.S. adult hardcover and paperback book sales reached $16.6 billion last year, a slight increase from the year before, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a New York trade group. But crammed schedules and the Web have slashed the amount of time people spend reading books. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 5% of Americans said they read literature in 2002, the latest survey data available, down from 14% in 1992.
 

HIS AND HERS LIBRARIES

Still, some homeowners are book lovers. Michael Burkitt and his wife, Roberta, own an estimated 9,000 books, all hardbound, which they keep in two formal libraries in their new, 5,800-square-foot home in Reno, Nev., and their 3,800-square-foot vacation house in Newport Coast, Calif. Mr. Burkitt, 65, the recently retired co-owner of a structural-plastics firm, says he's been too busy working most of his life to read even a fraction of them. But he enjoys relaxing among them in what he considers his "sanctuaries" -- one paneled in dark wood, the other in white -- free from distractions like computers. "They're the wombs of my homes," he says.

Tucson, Ariz., interior designer Terri Taylor says she spends a lot of time scouring flea markets and bookstores for books with fancy bindings for her clients' bookshelves. She selects books to match color schemes rather than for their content. She once was ecstatic to find a stash of beautiful, leather-bound books at the bargain price of $20 apiece -- never mind that they were written in German, a language her clients didn't read. "I bought cases of them," she says.

For home builders who are scaling back the size of houses to make them more affordable and cheaper to construct, libraries are a more functional way to create an upscale look than the "old, crazy massive foyers and 'Gone With the Wind' staircases," that characterized houses a few years ago, says Memphis, Tenn., architect Carson Looney.

In some mass-market builders' plans, libraries are replacing dens, which have become redundant in the age of huge family rooms. A home plan called the Monterey Mediterranean offered by Toll Brothers, of Horsham, Pa., has 5,183 square feet, and includes a family room and a library with double glass doors off the foyer -- but has no den.

Neither does the 4,289-square-foot Blue Harbor Plan 4 house that John Laing Homes of Irvine, Calif., sells for nearly $1.3 million in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. In addition to a wine room and a family room with fireplace, it puts a library on a landing between the first and second floors, which allows the ceiling height to be extended for more bookshelf space.

Of course, selling built-in bookshelves is a way for builders to pump up their bottom lines, especially if buyers choose custom-made shelving in exotic woods and frills such as secret doors hidden in paneling. About half the clients of London Bay, a Naples, Fla., builder whose prices start at just under $1 million, order such upgrades, at a cost ranging from $30,000 to $300,000. Lately, says Mark Wilson, the builder's chief executive officer and president, there's even been demand for "his and hers" libraries for spouses who like to keep their books, collections and alone-time separate.

JAY MCINERNEY'S PHILOSOPHY

Some builders are also creating mini-libraries scattered throughout the house. Popular spots are under the stairs, in lofts, in alcoves near master bedrooms and along entry hallways. Gary Stefanoni, senior executive vice president of Orleans Homebuilders in Bensalem, Pa., says that for the past few years, he's seen demand for bookcases in children's playrooms, since kids often have more books, trophies and collections than their parents do. "They want to display them in their own space," he says.

Dan Poag, a shopping-center developer, is putting a dedicated library and built-in bookcases in nearly every room of the 10,000-square-foot house he's building in Memphis. He doesn't know how many books he owns -- he estimates several thousand -- but has kept nearly everything he's purchased since college, as well as his three grown sons' college textbooks, a collection of science fiction, and children's books that his five grandchildren read when they visit. Since nearly every wall of his current house is filled with books, his decorator urged him to re-cover them so their multicolored spines wouldn't clash with the décor. He refused. "The books are my priority," he says.

Similarly, author Jay McInerney and his wife, Anne Hearst, happily mix dog-eared paperbacks with first editions of Fitzgerald and Joyce in the overstuffed bookcases of both their Manhattan apartment and their Hamptons house. Mr. McInerney thinks the visual jumble of thousands of mismatched books is appealing. "If you're not reading what's on your bookshelves, you should find something else to decorate with," he says.

    Why Libraries Are Back in Style, WSJ, 12.9.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122117550854125707.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

And the Plot Thinned ...

July 24, 2008
The New York Times
By CATHY HORYN

TRUMAN CAPOTE said of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” his classic novella of a New York glamour girl, that he was trying to prune his writing style, achieve a more subdued prose. Of course, Holly Golightly became the lodestar to designers as well as to millions of young women who have been enthralled by her single-minded spirit and by the image evoked by Audrey Hepburn in the opening shot of the film, as the cab races up Fifth Avenue and deposits her in front of Tiffany’s.

Holly is now 50 — as hard as that is to believe. This realization lends a certain poignancy to the many new books in the past year, most of them in the chick-lit category, that have attempted to graft her legend. There are: Lauren Weisberger’s “Chasing Harry Winston,” Kristen Kemp’s “Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s,” Michael Tonello’s “Bringing Home the Birkin” and James Patterson’s “Sunday at Tiffany’s.”

You don’t have to read these books to imagine the outcome: girl meets guy; girl gets guy but first she has to discuss him endlessly with her gal friends and perhaps Mother, who is typically a dragon or an ex-supermodel or both. Subdued they are not. (Mr. Tonello’s inspired book, a memoir of his experiences thwarting Hermès’s wait-list strategy for its coveted Birkin bags, is more on the order of guy gets handbag ... and scores!)

Romantic summer novels are silly, to be sure. What is fascinating about the current batch, which includes “The Beach House,” by Jane Green, is how faithfully they are informed by the values and brands of the fashion world and its parallel universes of entertainment, media and publishing. Ms. Green has made Nantucket real estate a theme of her book. And while she may not know the island well enough to know which direction a character is facing — she has a Spenderella named Jordana gazing at the ocean when it is actually a harbor — she has recognized a clear shift in the East Coast status game.

As her editor, Clare Ferraro, the president of Viking, said, “It’s almost as if real estate has become an accessory,” adding, “It says something about who you are.”

Maybe. But a pair of lizard Jimmy Choos does seem to pale in novelty and conversation value next to a $12-million Nantucket house.

On some level, though, it is terrible to imagine what these books say about ourselves, as escapist as they are meant to be. Ms. Ferraro thinks that such books provide a kind of balm for hard times, in the same way that glamorous movies did during the Depression. Readers, she said, “will be living gratuitously through these books.”

To a large extent, they already are. Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, notes that the audience for novels with a heavy quotient of clothes and Page Six dander isn’t made up of East Coast sophisticates. Rather, he said, “The audience is Middle American women looking to buy a taste of the glittering East Coast experience, with all the silliness.”

He also pointed out that the most successful of these books distill the best bits of the fashion world — the clothes, the famous brand names, the over-the-top characters — instead of dwelling in a fashion house or idling too long backstage. Could the travails of designers be a bore? It seems so.

Ms. Weisberger’s 2003 novel “The Devil Wears Prada” was, after all, about a powerful, latte-demanding fashion editor. And since most people knew that her roman à clef was based on her former boss, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, that added to the intrigue. Despite the exposure the fashion world got from shows like “Sex and the City,” the inner sanctums of the business were still largely unknown to people. “The Devil Wears Prada” was followed a year later by Plum Sykes’s “Bergdorf Blondes,” which Mr. Burnham edited, releasing, it seemed, cataracts of labels and apple-martini-swilling socialites in hot pursuit of equally delish sex.

There is no question that certain brands, like certain summer resorts, have a talismanic effect. And if you can weave a romantic comedy around the Chanels and Sub-Zeroes, as Ms. Green has done — with the sentimental addition of a chic old coot named Nan presiding over a rundown beach house — you might have a best seller.

But this summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well. Is that all there is? Has the fashion plot thinned to such a degree that it’s just about presenting life as a blue velvet ring box or a giant Birkin bag?

When I got done turning down the corners of the pages of Mr. Patterson’s novel that mentioned a brand name or a stylish place (he, too, transports his characters to Nantucket), my copy looked severely riddled. His heroine, a successful if mildly self-loathing playwright named Jane Margaux (as in the wine, Margaux Hemingway?), fairly chokes on the array of contemporary anxieties, observing of her boyfriend, “While Hugh flirted with an obnoxiously pretty and pathologically thin fashion model who had seen HIS play four times, I pretended to study the dessert menu, which, sadly, I knew by heart.” This is, clearly, late-stage withdrawal from fashion.

If Capote mentioned a famous label at all (Mainbocher turns up on a page), it was to merely establish that his glamour girl had good taste.

But fashion wasn’t important to Holly. Despite the Paris wardrobe in the movie version, she made it clear she thought the whole thing was something of a wonderful joke, a bore. Take it or leave it. That was her appeal. As she said, explaining why she didn’t stick around Hollywood and become an actress, “My complexes aren’t inferior enough.”

But the references in most of the new books don’t so much inform us about the pop-fashion world as much as remind us how hideola, to use Holly’s term, it is. “Using all those brand names is sort of bizarre,” said Ms. Sykes. “At the time that ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ came out, it seemed so modern. Now it seems old-fashioned.”

Ms. Sykes, who writes for Vogue, brought a thorough knowledge of fashion, as well as a Mitfordish humor, to “Bergdorf Blondes.” To her, the most successful of these types of books, like the most successful socialites, are those that “acknowledge that they are in on the joke” that fashion’s over-the-top spectacle presents.

Married and now 38, Ms. Sykes is dubious about trying to come out with another trendy novel. “You can’t write a fashionable comedy about married girls who have two children and are approaching 40,” she said. “For one thing, they can’t wear the clothes.” This does not mean she thinks the form has been tapped out. On the contrary. She fully expects a young person to come along and imagine fashion and New York from his or her generation’s perspective. Maybe with pruning shears.

Ms. Weisberger’s latest novel has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 13 weeks. It seems obvious that with “Chasing Harry Winston” she has put more effort into the development of her characters — three successful gal pals approaching 30, without a dream guy on the hook — than she did in her previous book.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to have a glitzy, double-entendre title (is Harry a man or a rock, or, gosh, does it matter?) and a dust jacket design that recalls “The Devil Wears Prada,” both deliberate decisions, according to Marysue Rucci, her editor at Simon & Schuster. That’s just good marketing, and any fashion dunce understands that.

    And the Plot Thinned ..., NYT, 24.7.2008, http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/fashion/24PLOT.html

Tasha Tudor, Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 92

June 20, 2008
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Tasha Tudor, a children’s illustrator whose pastel watercolors and delicately penciled lines depicted an idyllic, old-fashioned vision of the 19th-century way of life she famously pursued — including weaving, spinning, gathering eggs and milking goats — died on Wednesday at her home in Marlboro, Vt.

She was 92, if one counts only the life that began on Aug. 28, 1915. Ms. Tudor frequently said that she was the reincarnation of a sea captain’s wife who lived from 1800 to 1840 or 1842, and that it was this earlier life she was replicating by living so ardently in the past.

Her son Seth confirmed the death. He suggested that his mother’s more colorful remarks might be taken with a pinch of salt.

A cottage industry grew out of Ms. Tudor’s art, which has illustrated nearly 100 books. The family sells greeting cards, prints, plates, aprons, dolls, quilts and more, all in a sentimental, rustic, but still refined style resembling that of Beatrix Potter.

In her promotion of such a definitive lifestyle, Ms. Tudor has been called a 19th-century Martha Stewart. Books, videotapes, magazine articles and television shows illuminated her gardening and housekeeping ideas.

For 70 years her illustrations elicited wide admiration: The New York Times in 1941 said her pictures “have the same fragile beauty of early spring evenings.”

Her drawings, particularly the early ones, often illustrated the almost equally memorable stories she herself wrote. Some details: Sparrow Post, a postal service for dolls with delivery by birds. Birthday parties featuring flotillas of cakes with lighted candles. Mouse Mills catalogs, for ordering dolls clothes made by mice, who take buttons for pay.

The Catholic Library World said in 1971 that Ms. Tudor shed “a special ray of sunshine” with pictures that carry “the imagination of children into history, into the human heart, into the joys of family life, into love of friendship itself.”

Two of Ms. Tudor’s books were named Caldecott Honor Books: “Mother Goose” (1944) and “1 Is One” (1956). Ms. Tudor was just awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association.

But it was her uncompromising immersion in another, less comfortable century that most fascinated people. She wore kerchiefs, hand-knitted sweaters, fitted bodices and flowing skirts, and often went barefoot. She reared her four children in a home without electricity or running water until her youngest turned 5. She raised her own farm animals; turned flax she had grown into clothing; and lived by homespun wisdom: sow root crops on a waning moon, above-ground plants on a waxing one.

“It is healthful to sleep in a featherbed with your nose pointing north,” she said in an interview with The Times in 1977.

Starling Burgess, who later legally changed both her names to Tasha Tudor, was born in Boston to well-connected but not wealthy parents. Her mother, Rosamond Tudor, was a portrait painter, and her father, William Starling Burgess, was a yacht and airplane designer who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller.

Ms. Tudor could not remember a time when she did not draw pictures or make little books. She was originally nicknamed Natasha by her father, after Tolstoy’s heroine in “War and Peace.” This was shortened to Tasha. After her parents divorced when she was 9, Ms. Tudor adopted her mother’s last name.

In an autobiography she wrote in 1951, Ms. Tudor said she did not start school until she was 9, although other biographies say she began as early as 7. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a year, but said she learned painting from her mother. Her art was often framed by ornate borders like those from a medieval manuscript, but more whimsical.

Partly to protect her from Jazz Age Greenwich Village, where her mother had moved, Ms. Tudor was sent to live with a couple in Connecticut, drama enthusiasts who included children in the plays they put on. She soon developed a love of times past and things rural, going to auctions to buy antique clothing before she was 10. At 15 she used money she had made teaching nursery school to buy her first cow.

In 1938 she married Thomas Leighton McCready Jr., who was in the real estate business. A fiddler played the wedding march. Mr. McCready encouraged his bride to put together a folio of pictures and seek publishers. She was repeatedly turned down before her first published book, “Pumpkin Moonshine” (1938), was accepted by Oxford University Press. It was the start of a flood, many still in print.

Ms. Tudor’s favorite of all her books was “Corgiville Fair,” one of several she wrote about the Welsh corgi dogs she kept as pets, sometimes 13 or 14 at once. Her 1963 illustrated version of “The Secret Garden,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, tells of children enraptured by a mysterious garden. The volume of Clement C. Moore’s “Night Before Christmas” that she illustrated remains popular.

She rebuked those who said she must be enthralled with her own creativity.

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “I’m a commercial artist, and I’ve done my books because I needed to earn my living.”

She and her husband moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in New Hampshire that lacked electricity and running water, but did have 17 rooms and 450 acres. Ms. Tudor painted in the kitchen, in between baking bread and washing dishes. She created a dollhouse with a cast of characters, two of whom were married in a ceremony covered by Life magazine.

Ms. Tudor was divorced from Mr. McCready, who later died, and from a second husband, Allan John Woods. In 1972 she sold the New Hampshire farm and moved onto her property near her son Seth in Marlboro.

In addition to Seth, Ms. Tudor is survived by her daughters Bethany Tudor of West Brattleboro, Vt., and Efner Tudor Holmes of Contoocook, N.H.; another son, Thomas, of Fairfax, Va.; eight grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and her half-sister, Ann Hopps of Camden, Me.

Ms. Tudor, who could play the dulcimer and handle a gun, once promised a reporter for The Times that she could find a four-leaf clover within five minutes and came back with a five-leaf one in four minutes. She kept a seven-leaf clover framed in her room.

She told The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk in 1996 that it was her intention to go straight back to the 1830s after her death.

    Tasha Tudor, Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 92, NYT, 20.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/books/20tudor.html

Salman Rushdie: 'Fiction saved my life'

Symbol, victim, blasphemer, target – Salman Rushdie, it seems, is anything people need him to be.
As his new novel is published, the writer talks to Boyd Tonkin

Friday, 11 April 2008
The Independent


In Salman Rushdie's tenth novel, the great Mughal emperor Akbar conjures up his favourite wife by the sheer force of imagination alone: "The creation of real life from a dream was a superhuman act, usurping the prerogative of the gods." Non-existent, but still solid enough to breed fiery resentment from her rival queens, Jodha in The Enchantress of Florence can stand for all the heretical coups and stunts of story-telling magic that have peppered Rushdie's fiction for the past 30 years. Yet this grand master of the power of fantasy has suffered as its slave as well. More than any other writer alive, he has found himself transformed into a character – ogre, joker, beast and, just occasionally, hero – in other people's scripts and stories.

"Sometimes," he says, his voice tinged more by sadness than anger, "I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them." They become "things, not people" – a status and a plight that, outside global politics and showbiz, Rushdie has sampled at a length and depth unparalleled in modern times.

Even if you try hard to treat the novelist as a professional author, not a symbol, a slogan or a cause, the buzz of fantasy kicks in. My particular Rushdie delusion endows him with the Jodha-like ability to materialise out of thin air. At a Booker Prize dinner in the mid-1990s, with the Iranian fatwa that followed The Satanic Verses in 1989 still a clear and present danger to his life, the shifty-eyed ox in a tux seated next to me promptly vanished as the first course arrived. The next time I turned my head, the target of several deadly serious assassination plots (and Ayatollah Khomeini's judgement, remember, was suspended but not rescinded by Tehran in 1998) had slipped in to replace his ever-watchful bodyguard. Not long ago, I went to dinner at a friend's, looked away to grab a crisp – and, abracadabra, there he suddenly sat.

Now, I push through an open door at his agent's eerily silent offices, wander into a seemingly deserted room – and find him standing alone, near a shelf of books by another quizzically subversive spellbinder, and one of his true heroes: Italo Calvino.

Everyone, fan or foe, invokes their own imaginary Rushdie. We dream him up, and he duly takes shape: as blaspheming apostate for many still-outraged Muslims; as cocky subcontinental pseud for old-school British racists; as martyr to free speech for liberal literati. With the announcement of his knighthood, last June, this parade of straw men swelled to a seething carnival of prejudice and projection. From one corner, the pious haters swung into action: the parliament of Pakistan passed a motion against the honour as an insult to Islam. From another, the gossip-sheet haters seized on rumours of an impending divorce to renew their attritional campaign of "attacks on my physical appearance, as if I've ever invested anything in how beautiful I am". From yet another, the kneejerk-leftist haters matched them all in bile: The Guardian ran a defamatory rant from a Cambridge English don that grossly misrepresented his books, his politics and his ideas with a recklessness that would shame a GCSE-level duffer.

"Truthfully, I don't get it," says this hard-working 60-year-old writer, clad in a writer's comfy sweater, mulling over his burdensome double life as multipurpose scapegoat. "I just don't understand it. I think I've led a serious creative life. All that I've tried to do for over 30 years is to be the best writer that I know how to be... It's as if people don't see that in some way, and that's distressing."

The flesh-and-blood author has never wanted to make a mystery of himself. Even in the perilous depths of the fatwa, he proved easier to contact than many shy sages with no price upon their heads. Now, he is about to launch the fourth season of the World Voices festival in New York: a crowd-pulling array of global authors that Rushdie has energetically fronted and boosted from the start. With his friends Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa, he will re-stage the "Three Musketeers" gig that proved so popular in the 1990s. And, for a month every year, he makes time to teach modern fiction (including such colleagues and contemporaries as Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi) at Emory University in Georgia: "There's something very enjoyable about sitting in a room with 16 intelligent young people, talking about a book."

So ordinary life, and ordinary talk, carries on regardless. The Indian-origin family who run a gas station he uses in New York were "thrilled and proud" at the knighthood. Most people have responded "very sweetly" to it, he says: they understand "that real life is not the same thing as what's in the newspapers. If you know that, it's a way of dealing with what appears in print." Still, he admits: "I don't get over it. It hurts me and, like anybody else who gets hurt, you have to try to heal."

So is work a good way to heal? "Yes. Last year was a horrible year for me in many ways because of the end of my marriage" – his fourth, to the model, actress and TV presenter Padma Lakshmi – "and I don't know how I got inside this book, really." Hard on the heels of the knighthood furore, reports of their split brought another media shot of the sour cocktail of mockery and malice that had greeted the start of the couple's relationship. "It wasn't straightforward" to plunge into the therapeutic toil of fiction, he says, "considering the enormous amount of upheaval. But I do think it saved my life, this book. It reminded me of who I've always wanted to be, and who I think I am. And it was a matter of enormous pride to be able to do it and, at the end, to think, 'Not so bad.'"

The Enchantress of Florence returns Rushdie to the roots of his craft, and his gift. From Midnight's Children in 1981 to Shalimar the Clown in 2005, his strongest fiction has explored and enacted the interchange of history, memory and myth – as comedy, as tragedy, and often as a brand of fantasy that dances with, and through, recorded facts. The new novel sticks to two connected sectors of the past: the early 1500s in Florence, and the later 16th century in the new (but soon to be abandoned) Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri. So India and Italy embrace in a tale of two cities.

The book teases out the strands that bind two types of Renaissance, two types of humanism, and two types of magic. Via Rushdie's narrative alchemy, one woman, the "hidden princess" Qara Köz, knits the entire plot in her westward drift from court to court across (and beyond) the known world. Driven by the Hitchcock-style V C "McGuffin" of a blond stranger in Akbar's city and his tall tales of a genealogy that weds East and West, the story unspools irresistibly like a roll of brightly coloured ribbon, full of the virtues of "lightness and swiftness" that Calvino taught, and Rushdie admires. "I just had the most good time writing it," the author purrs, "and it's slightly given me the appetite for doing it again."

"For me," he says, "one of the most interesting discoveries of this book was how similar the two worlds were. In my starting-point idea," which drew on the Indian princess who plays a leading role in Ariosto's Renaissance epic poem Orlando Furioso, "I thought, 'Here are these two worlds that have very little contact with each other, and yet are both at a kind of peak.' But the more I found out about it, the more I found that, actually, they were surprisingly alike: in the interest in magic, in the remarkable hedonism of both worlds – the very open debauchery of both cultures." "Florence was everywhere and everywhere was Florence," thinks the Tuscan scamp turned Ottoman warlord Argalia, one of the novel's self-seeking bridge-builders and go-betweens who bind East and West.

Rushdie says that "how the world adds up, and how this part connects to that part, is something I've been trying to explore for a really long time now. The Satanic Verses is a novel about migrations, but in the last three or four books, I've been trying to write about how over here connects to over there." He adds: "I'm not trying to say they're identical, but human nature is identical. It's interesting to see that human beings were everywhere alike... I'm not a relativist. I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us."

So the arch-Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli (whom Rushdie commends as "a profound philosopher of republican humanism") seeks for the "hidden truths" about society and politics behind the official smokescreen of doctrine and dignity. Two generations later, in Fatehpur Sikri, the Emperor Akbar slips slowly away from mainstream Islam to harbour dreams of a synthetic, humanistic faith with "man at the centre of things, not God".

All of this actually happened. I have visited the riotously carved pavilion in the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri ("a most enchanted place," says Rushdie), where the questing, tolerant Akbar welcomed spokesmen for different creeds to debate the nature of God, and man, in a mood of mutual goodwill and respect. For Rushdie, "I myself don't think that Akbar ever really moved outside Islam... However much he experimented with all these ideas, I don't think he ever ceased to be a believing Muslim. But he had this pantheistic idea: that, in the end, all religions are one."

The author stresses that he deals in historical fiction, not topical allegory or coded polemic. "When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got." His novel may feature a prince who hopes that "in Paradise, the words 'worship' and 'argument' mean the same thing", but he has no particular message for believers, or unbelievers, today. "My impulse was not didactic. It was the novelist's impulse: to bring things to life in an interesting way. I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way."

Rushdie did plenty of new learning for The Enchantress of Florence ("I've never done so much research in my life") and he slips in a seven-page bibliography. During a rough passage, history offered both an escape and a homecoming. "It felt like returning to a use of my mind, a place where I hadn't been for a long time," says the history graduate of King's College, Cambridge. He remembers that a favourite tutor there, Arthur Hibbert, told him that "you should not write history until you can hear the people speak. I've always thought that was quite a good piece of advice for fiction, too. For me, this book was that act: trying to understand the people well enough so that I could hear them speak."

These princes, whores, scholars and warriors, Rushdie insists, live in their own times, on their own terms. He worries that the gossip-hounds invariably treat his fiction as "disguised autobiography". In this yarn of a glamorous incomer from India who seduces Italy, many will seek for echoes of his former wife, once a prime-time host on Italian television. But Qara Köz cannot be Padma Lakshmi: "No – she's 400 years older!" More seriously: "The reason why none of these characters can be equated to modern characters is that their processes of thought are not modern. They don't make choices or understand the world in the way that people in our day would. They are genuinely, I hope, of their time."

Like people in our time, though, they voyage across the world in search of fortune, passion or adventure. Born in Bombay to a Kashmiri Muslim family; a schoolboy at Rugby, a student at Cambridge; the 1980s superstar of a fresh, border-hopping brand of cosmopolitan English-language fiction; then, after the fatwa, the fugitive proof of the downside of fame before he came to rest in Manhattan: Rushdie could hardly dodge migration and cultural mingling as a recurrent motif in his work.

Yet, he thinks, the art of passing frontiers feels harder now. "Because of the kind of life I've had, of being bounced around the planet quite a lot... I've had constantly to be aware of likeness and unlikeness. And so it becomes a subject for me." However, compared to 20 years ago, "the world has changed in that people are more troubled" about human flux and flow. It used to be "easier to imagine mass migration as a positive force, a liberating force, both for the migrant and the culture into which the migrant came... Now, I think there are big question marks around that idea because people are scared. The element of fear has arrived in a way that wasn't there before, because of the violence of the age."

In such a climate, the pleasures of story-telling rather than punditry beckon. "Because of all the things that happened to me, there are people who think of me primarily as some kind of political animal. I began to feel it was getting in the way of people being able to read my books as books should be read." So Rushdie won't be drawn far into the electoral drama unfolding in his adopted home. "If I had a vote, I'd probably vote for Obama. But one of the things I've been doing in America is: keeping out of it. It struck me that if an American writer living in England began to start sounding off about who we should vote for, people wouldn't take kindly to it. There was that long period when Roth was living here. If Philip had started sounding off about whether you should vote for Margaret Thatcher, it wouldn't have gone down well."

Back in his Renaissance, East and West, the power-plays of the past bewitch him now, however fantastic they feel. "A lot of the stuff people might think is most obviously made up is true," he says of The Enchantress of Florence, where we meet not only Akbar and Machiavelli, but a bloodier icon. "The Ottoman campaign against Dracula actually took place. Dracula's decision to impale 20,000 people on stakes to put off the Ottoman army really happened. That's not magic realism, although it sounds like it... It comes from the memoirs of a Serbian janissary who took part in that campaign. There it is, gruesomely described in great detail. I couldn't believe my luck when Dracula showed up."

In the minds of his diehard antagonists, Rushdie often figures as a near-demonic blend of Dracula and the mythical (if not historical) Machiavelli. Yet he writes and acts much more like his benevolent but baffled Akbar, showing through the story-teller's unarmed might that "human nature, not divine will, was the great force that moved history"; and hoping that "discord, difference, disobedience" might turn out after all to be "wellsprings of the good".

Though enemies will continue to sharpen their stakes for him, the writer has found his way back into a not-so-secret garden of fictional delights. With The Enchantress of Florence, "there was an unexpected joy in the writing for me. I loved doing it, and I felt that there is some sense of release into literature in the book. It was a lot of fun, at a time that wasn't fun."
 

'The Enchantress of Florence' is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). Salman Rushdie appears in International PEN's Free the Word! festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, on Sunday at 7.30pm

    Salman Rushdie: 'Fiction saved my life', I, 11.4.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/salman-rushdie-fiction-saved-my-life-807501.html

Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction

March 4, 2008
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers, Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first gun as a birthday present when she was 14. Ms. Seltzer told The Times last week, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

“There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative-writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.

In April 2005, Ms. Bender submitted about 100 pages to four publishers. Ms. McGrath, then at Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, agreed to a deal for what she said was less than $100,000. When Ms. McGrath moved to Riverhead in 2006, she moved Ms. Seltzer’s contract.

Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Seltzer’s sister, Ms. Hoffman, 47, said: “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” Referring to the publisher, she added: “I don’t know how they do business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east-central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

She said that although she returned to Campbell Hall, she remained in touch with people she met at Grant and then began working with groups that were trying to stop gang violence. She said that even after she moved to Oregon, she would often venture to South-Central Los Angeles to spend time with friends in the gang world.

In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.

Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said in an interview that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central, where “I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not.”

“I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I did not do it right. I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.” Ms. McGrath said that she had numerous conversations with Ms. Seltzer about being truthful. “She seems to be very, very naïve,” Ms. McGrath said. “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.”

    Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction, NYT, 4.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html?hp

Page Turner

A Good Mystery: Why We Read

November 25, 2007
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

PERHAPS the most fantastical story of the year was not “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” but “The Uncommon Reader,” a novella by Alan Bennett that imagines the queen of England suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in life.

At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the forces of MySpace, YouTube and “American Idol,” the notion that someone could move so quickly from literary indifference to devouring passion seems, sadly, far-fetched.

The problem was underscored last week when the National Endowment for the Arts delivered the sobering news that Americans — particularly teenagers and young adults — are reading less for fun. At the same time, reading scores among those who read less are declining, and employers are proclaiming workers deficient in basic reading comprehension skills.

So that’s the bad news. But is all hope gone, or will people still be drawn to the literary landscape? And what is it, exactly, that turns someone into a book lover who keeps coming back for more?

There is no empirical answer. If there were, more books would sell as well as the “Harry Potter” series or “The Da Vinci Code.” The gestation of a true, committed reader is in some ways a magical process, shaped in part by external forces but also by a spark within the imagination. Having parents who read a lot helps, but is no guarantee. Devoted teachers and librarians can also be influential. But despite the proliferation of book groups and literary blogs, reading is ultimately a private act. “Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing,” said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

In some cases, asking someone to explain why they read is to invite an elegant rationalization. Junot Díaz, the author of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” vividly recalls stumbling into a mobile library shortly after his family emigrated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey when he was 6 years old. He checked out a Richard Scarry picture book, a collection of 19th-century American wilderness paintings and a bowdlerized version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sign of Four.”

So what about those three titles turned him into someone who is crazy for books? “I could create a narrative explaining the creation myth of my reading frenzy,” Mr. Díaz said. “But in some ways it’s just provisional. I feel like it’s a mystery what makes us vulnerable to certain practices and not to others.”

Such caveats aside, there are some clues as to what might transform someone into an enduring reader.

“The Uncommon Reader” posits the theory that the right book at the right time can ignite a lifelong habit. (For the fictional queen, it’s Nancy Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love.”) This is a romantic ideal that persists among many a bibliophile.

“It can be like a drug in a positive way,” said Daniel Goldin, general manager of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee. “If you get the book that makes the person fall in love with reading, they want another one.”

Most often, that experience occurs in childhood. In “The Child That Books Built,” Francis Spufford, a British journalist and critic, writes of how “the furze of black marks between ‘The Hobbit’ grew lucid, and released a dragon,” turning him into “an addict.”

But what makes that one book a trigger for continuous reading? For some, it’s the discovery that a book’s character is like you, or thinks and feels like you. In accepting the National Book Award for young people’s literature for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” earlier this month, Sherman Alexie thanked Ezra Jack Keats, author of “The Snowy Day,” a classic picture book. “It was the first time I looked at a book and saw a brown, black, beige character — a character who resembled me physically and resembled me spiritually, in all his gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation,” Mr. Alexie, a Spokane Indian who grew up on a reservation, told the audience.

In an interview, Mr. Alexie said “The Snowy Day” transformed him from someone who read regularly into a true bookhound. “I really think it’s the age at which you find that book that you really identify with that determines the rest of your reading life,” Mr. Alexie said. “The younger you are when you do that, the more likely you’re going to be a serious reader. It really is about finding yourself in a book.”

Of course that doesn’t account for reading for information, enlightenment or practical advice. And for others, it’s not so much identification as the embrace of the Other that draws them into reading. “It’s that excitement of trying to discover that unknown world,” said Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” the best-selling memoir about a book group she led in Iran.

Sometimes the world of reading is opened up by a book that goes down easy. Mr. Bennett said he chose “The Pursuit of Love” for his fictional queen because it happened to be the first adult novel that he read for pleasure. He said that for him, as with the queen’s character, the book was a stepping off point into more heavyweight literature. “There are all sorts of entrances that you can get into reading by reading what might at first seem trash,” Mr. Bennett said.

And certain books that become phenomena — like those in the Harry Potter series or “The Da Vinci Code” or, to a slightly lesser extent most books recommended for Oprah Winfrey’s book club — can, in tempting people to read in the first place, create habitual readers. Perhaps more often, however, those readers just wait for the next “hot” book.

Indeed, even after Ms. Winfrey recommends a title, sales of other books by the same author don’t necessarily match those of the book that bears her imprimatur. “What I find with readers today is they don’t go off on their own to another book,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “They wait for the next recommendation.”

It may also be that for some, reading is a pursuit that, like ballet or baseball, simply requires practice. “I think for a lot of people, reading is just something you do,” said Paula Brehm Heeger, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association. “And you eventually realize that you really like it.”

Book sales in general are growing only slightly: According to the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade association, the number of books sold last year, 3.1 billion, was up just 0.5 percent from a year earlier.

The question of whether reading, or reading books in particular, is essential is complicated by the fact that part of what draws people to books can now be found elsewhere — and there is only so much time to consume it all.

Readers who want to know they are not alone are finding reflections of themselves in the confessional blogs sprouting across the Internet. And television shows like “The Sopranos” or “Lost” can satisfy the hunger for narrative and richly textured characters in a way that only books could in a previous age.

But books have outlived many death knells, and are likely to keep doing so. “I’m much more optimistic than I think most people are,” Mr. Díaz said. Reading suffers, he said, because it has to compete unfairly with movies, television shows and electronic gadgets whose marketing budgets far outstrip those of publishers. “Books don’t have billion-dollar publicity behind them,” Mr. Díaz said. “Given the fact that books don’t have that, they’re not doing a bad job.”

    A Good Mystery: Why We Read, NYT, 25.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25rich.html?ref=books

Harry Potter First Edition Auctioned

October 26, 2007
Filed at 11:27 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- A copy of J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel sold at auction Thursday for almost $41,000.

The copy of the hardback first edition of ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,'' published in 1997 and signed ''Joanne Rowling'' on the back of the title page, was sold to an anonymous private bidder for $40,326 at Christie's auction house.

At a London auction in May, a copy of ''Philosopher's Stone'' inscribed with a personal dedication to the owner sold for more than $55,000, including buyer's premium.

The book was published by Bloomsbury PLC with an initial print run of about 500 copies. Many were purchased by libraries, making copies in good condition extremely rare.

It was published in the United States in 1998 as ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,'' and the boy wizard soon became a publishing phenomenon.

The seventh and final installment in Harry's adventures, ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' was published in July. The seven books have sold nearly 400 million copies and have been translated into 64 languages.

    Harry Potter First Edition Auctioned, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Books-Potter-Auction.html

J.K. Rowling Outs Hogwarts Character

October 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds ''true love.''

''Dumbledore is gay,'' the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. ''Falling in love can blind us to an extent,'' Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was ''horribly, terribly let down.''

Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his ''great tragedy.''

''Oh, my god,'' Rowling concluded with a laugh, ''the fan fiction.''

Potter readers on fan sites and elsewhere on the Internet have speculated on the sexuality of Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past. And explicit scenes with Dumbledore already have appeared in fan fiction.

Rowling told the audience that while working on the planned sixth Potter film, ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,'' she spotted a reference in the script to a girl who once was of interest to Dumbledore. A note was duly passed to director David Yates, revealing the truth about her character.

Rowling, finishing a brief ''Open Book Tour'' of the United States, her first tour here since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a ''prolonged argument for tolerance'' and urged her fans to ''question authority.''

Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.

    J.K. Rowling Outs Hogwarts Character, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Books-Harry-Potter.html

J.K. Rowling Gives Rare U.S. Reading

October 16, 2007
Filed at 3:55 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling made a rare U.S. appearance, reading at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood in front of scores of wand-clutching would-be wizards and witches.

Seated on a gold throne with plush red cushions, Rowling read Monday from the seventh and final of her novels on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.''

She then took a dozen preselected questions from the dressed-up and dazzled kids and teens.

To accommodate a crushing demand for tickets for her first American appearance since 2000, Rowling's American publisher sent a ''sorting hat'' like those used to divide students into houses in the novels to 40 randomly selected Los Angeles schools. Forty students from each school were then selected from the hat.

Rowling said the gimmick was meant to avoid the sort of madness she faced in her last U.S. appearance seven years ago.

''Things had gotten a little unmanageable signing-wise in the terms of the numbers who were turning up,'' she said, ''but I really missed being able to interact directly with readers.''

All 1,600 students received a signed copy of ''Deathly Hallows.''

Rowling, a former schoolteacher, took the stage to a thundering, shrieking ovation, then said: ''It wasn't like this when I was a teacher. If it had been, I might never have left.''

When inevitably asked what she might be writing next, Rowling said only that it would not be another supernatural epic.

''I think probably I've done my fantasy,'' she said. ''I think because Harry's world was so large and detailed and I've known it so well and I've lived in it for 17 years, it would be incredibly difficult to go out and create another world.''

The reading was part of a weeklong visit by Rowling to the states known as the ''Open Book Tour.''

She also makes stops in New Orleans on Thursday and at New York's Carnegie Hall on Friday.

    J.K. Rowling Gives Rare U.S. Reading, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-People-JK-Rowling.html

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH and SARAH LYALL

Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, today won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with an honorarium of 10 million Swedish crown, about $1.6 million.

Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through her voracious reading. She was born in 1919 to British parents in what is now Iran, raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and currently resides in London. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction and two volumes of her autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

Ms. Lessing learned of the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned from visiting her son in the hospital. “I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually,” she said. “My name has been on the short list for such a long time.”

With the sound of a phone ringing persistently from inside her house, Ms. Lessing said that on second thought, she was not as surprised, “because this has been going on for something like 40 years,” referring to previous times she has been on the short list for the Nobel. “Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or not at all.”

Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, Ms. Lessing excused herself after a few moments to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”

Although Ms. Lessing is passionate about social and political issues, she is unlikely to be as controversial as the previous two winners, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey and Harold Pinter of Britain, whose views on current political situations led commentators to suspect that the Swedish Academy was choosing its winners in part for nonliterary reasons.

Ms. Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook.” In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.”

Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should abandon their own lives to marriage and children. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was in some ways Ms. Lessing’s alter-ego.

Because she frankly depicted female anger and aggression, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response, Ms. Lessing wrote: “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”

Although she has been held up as an early feminist icon, Ms. Lessing later denied that she herself was a feminist, earning the ire of some British critics and academics.

Clare Hanson, professor of 20th century literature at the University of Southampton in Britain and a keynote speaker at the second international Doris Lessing Conference this past July, said: “She’s been ahead of her time, prescient and thoughtful, immensely wide-ranging.”

Ms. Lessing debuted with the novel “The Grass is Singing” in 1950, chronicling the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. In her earliest work, Ms. Lessing drew upon her childhood experiences in colonial Rhodesia to write about the clash of white and African cultures and racial injustice.

Because of her outspoken views, the governments of both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a “prohibited alien” in 1956.

Ms. Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in what was then known as Persia (now Iran). Her father was a bank clerk and her mother was trained as a nurse. Lured by the promise of farming riches, the family moved to Rhodesia, where Ms. Lessing had what she has described as a “painful” childhood.

She left home when she was 15. In 1937 she moved to Salisbury (now Harare) in Southern Rhodesia, where she took jobs as a telephone operator and nursemaid. At 19, she married and had two children. A few years later, she felt trapped, and abandoned her family. She later married Gottfried Lessing, a central member of the Left Book Club, a left wing organization, and they had a son together.

Ms. Lessing, who briefly joined the Communist Party, later repudiated Marxist theory and was criticized for doing so by some British academics.

She divorced Mr. Lessing and she and her young son moved to London, where she began her literary career in earnest. When “The Golden Notebook” was first published in the United States, Ms. Lessing was still unknown. Robert Gottlieb, then her editor at Simon & Schuster and later at Knopf, said that it garnered “extremely interesting reviews” but sold only 6,000 copies. “But they were the right 6,000 copies,” Mr. Gottlieb said by telephone from his home in New York. “The people who read it were galvanized by it and it made her a famous writer in America.”

Speaking from Frankfurt during the annual international book fair, Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, which has published Ms. Lessing in the U.S. and the United Kingdom for the last 20 years, said that “for women and for literature, Doris Lessing is a mother to us all.”

Ms. Lessing’s other novels include “The Good Terrorist,” “Martha Quest,” and “Love Again.” Her latest novel is “The Cleft,” published by HarperCollins in July.

In a review of “Under My Skin,” the first volume of Ms. Lessing’s autobiography, Janet Burroway, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said: “Mrs. Lessing is a writer for whom the idea that ‘the personal is the political’ is neither sterile nor strident; for her, it is an integrated vision.”

On her doorstep, Ms. Lessing said she was still writing, “but with difficulty because I have so little time,” referring to the regular visits she is making to the hospital to visit her son.

Motoko Rich reported from Frankfurt and Sarah Lyall from London.

    Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature, NYT, 11.10.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html
 

Harry Potter Author Talks About Ending

July 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Less than a week after the release of the final Harry Potter book, author J.K. Rowling is giving hints about its conclusion.

Before publication, Rowling pleaded for secrecy about the ending of ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.'' But in an interview broadcast Thursday on NBC's ''Today'' show and in one published Thursday in USA Today, she discussed Harry's fate.

THOSE WHO DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ALL TURNS OUT FOR THE BOY WIZARD SHOULD STOP READING HERE.

''I'm very proud of the fact that as we went into this book, many, many readers believed it was a real possibility that Harry would die. That's what I was aiming for,'' she said on NBC.

In the book, Voldemort meets his end and Harry lives. But Rowling said Harry's survival was not always a certainty.

''In the early days, everything was up for grabs,'' she told USA Today. ''But early on I knew I wanted Harry to believe he was walking toward his death, but would survive.''

The last volume of Rowling's fantasy series, ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' was released Saturday to international fanfare as millions read to find out whether Harry lived or died. More than 10 million copies sold over the weekend.

In a prerelease interview with The Associated Press, Rowling acknowledged that she had no control over discussions about the book once it went on sale. But she said that she hoped readers would finish the book to find out what happens, rather than to peek at the ending.

''It's like someone coming to dinner, just opening the fridge and eating pudding, while you're standing there still working on the starter. It's not on,'' she said.

She also told the AP that after finishing the last book, she ''felt terrible for a week.''

''It was like a bereavement, even though I was pleased with the book. And then after a week that cloud lifted and I felt quite lighthearted, quite liberated,'' she said.

''It was this amazing cathartic moment -- the end of 17 years' work,'' she told NBC.

When asked if she felt like she had to say goodbye to Harry, she said, ''Yes and no. He'll always be a presence in my life, really.''

She acknowledged that the final Potter installment leaves some loose ends.

''It would have been humanly impossible to answer every single question that comes up,'' she told NBC. ''Because, I'm dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry's great, great grandparents.''

Rowling, whose seven Potter books have sold more than 335 million copies worldwide, said she plans to take time off to be with her family and will continue writing. She told USA Today she has two writing projects -- one for children and one for adults.

But whether she will write about her young wizard again, she said: ''I think I've kind of done the wizarding world. ... I have done my Harry Potter.''

    Harry Potter Author Talks About Ending, NYT, 26.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Harry-Potter-Rowling.html

Long Lines and Wide Smiles Greet the Final Volume of ‘Harry Potter’

July 21, 2007
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

There has never been anything quite like it, and nobody knows whether there ever will be again.

The Harry Potter phenomenon reached its tumultuous climax this morning as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the hugely popular series by J. K. Rowling went on sale at 12:01 a.m.

Parties to herald the arrival proliferated around the city and across the country. At the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan, lines snaked around the block as police officers ordered fans off the street. Downtown in SoHo at the McNally Robinson Bookstore, an adults-only group swilled “magic punch.” And at the Borders at Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, fans who had been given numbered wristbands earlier in the day thronged around the front of the store at midnight. “Are we ready for Harry Potter?” yelled the manager. “Yea!” the crowd screamed back.

Pilyoung Yoo, 41, won a raffle for the first place in line. “It’s so amazing,” she said. After snagging their copy, her son Ted Yoo, 9, opened it to page 705. He wanted to find out how it ends.

In London, where the book went on sale five hours before New Yorkers could get their hands on a copy, Tineke Dijkstra, a 15-year-old fan from the Netherlands, had waited in line outside the Waterstone’s in Piccadilly Circus for two days to ensure that she was one of the first ones to buy the book. “I slept three hours in the last two days in the rain,” she said after emerging from the store with her copy. “I’m going to go and read one chapter and then go to sleep.”

Throughout the day in New York and elsewhere, booksellers readied for their biggest party of the year by putting the finishing touches on cauldrons, replicas of series locales like Diagon Alley, and Potter-themed snacks and drinks like “golden snitch” balls and butterbeer.

It was a day when fans lined up for hours, dressed up as their favorite characters, and braced for all-night reading sessions of the final volume in the series that has chronicled the magical adventures of the boy wizard, his education at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and his epic battles against the evil Lord Voldemort.

In London, nearly 500 fans wrapped around several city blocks by 8 p.m., waiting to get into Waterstone’s, many eating pizza and chanting, “Good will prevail!” By 11:30, the mob had worked into a pandemonium of excitement, shouting, “Only half an hour to go!” and singing, “J.K., J.K., thank you!” The street outside the store was so clogged with revelers that cars and buses could only pass through one lane.

In SoHo in Manhattan, Chelsea Logan, 17, and Leah Wickman, 18, two recent high school graduates from Santa Rosa, Calif., arrived at 7:30 a.m. yesterday to sit on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, up the block from the headquarters of Scholastic, the United States publisher of the series, to mark their places as first in line to buy their copies of “Deathly Hallows.”

“We were terrified that we were going to get here and there would be, like, this line,” said Ms. Wickman, sporting a T-shirt with the crest of Gryffindor, the Hogwarts house where Harry and his closest friends have lived for most of the series.

Two years after the sixth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” set sales records, the publishers were expecting “Deathly Hallows” to do it again. Scholastic, the United States publisher (Bloomsbury publishes it in Britain), has printed 12 million copies, and Barnes & Noble and Borders each had pre-orders of 1.5 million copies; on Amazon.com, nearly 2.3 million copies had been ordered worldwide.

Over the decade since the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” appeared in Britain (as “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”), the series has become a publishing sensation. More than 325 million copies have sold around the world, spawning movies, collectible figurines, souvenir candies and most of all, a passionate fan base that is about to conclude what for many of them has been the greatest reading experience of their lives.

“I am quite bereft at the fact that it’s over,” said Lauren Calihman as she waited for a wristband that would give her a priority place in line at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan. “I began reading when I was in fifth grade, and now I’m a sophomore in college, so it’s been a lifelong friendship.”

Ms. Calihman, 19, was decked out in Potter regalia, with owlish glasses and her version of a Hogwarts uniform: a button-down shirt, gray sweater dress and necktie. During a week in which spoilers leaked across the Internet, photos of the entire book appeared on file-sharing sites, and some newspapers, including The New York Times, published early reviews, Ms. Calihman studiously avoided any blogs or news reports that featured spoilers about the book. “I cover my ears when people talk about it,” she said.

But down at “Harry Potter Place,” a cobblestone stretch of Mercer Street in SoHo that Scholastic had turned into a street fair with jugglers, face painting and a huge model of the Whomping Willow, Renesandy Diaz, 15, confessed that he had read the ending of “Deathly Hallows” online earlier this week and learned who died. “I was upset, because I know how hard J. K. Rowling’s worked and it’s disappointing to see pirates put the book online,” he said. He still planned to buy a copy and read it through “until I drop.”

The “Harry Potter” books have not only transported a generation of children, but charmed adults, too, who got into the spirit of the Friday-night parties. In Peninsula, Ohio, where the entire town had transformed itself into a Potter-themed village, Stacy Sadar, 39, an executive recruiter from Richfield, Ohio, dressed up as Lord Voldemort and brought her horse, Moonshine, costumed as Voldemort’s snake sidekick, the Basilisk.

So what did Ms. Sadar think would happen to her character in “Deathly Hallows?” “Oh, I’m going to die,” she said. “I’m not even going to live through the night. I’m very upset about that.”

On the West Coast of the United States, the Pacific time zone was working against readers who wanted to remain in the dark on the plot (“Deathly Hallows” went on sale there three hours after its debut in New York). At Cover to Cover, an independent bookstore in San Francisco, Mark Ezarik, the owner, said most fans were trying to figure out how to avoid spoilers. “Fans are trying to stay away from the Internet,” he said. “They don’t even want to talk to anyone. Everyone is terrified about learning what happens even before they have the book.”

For booksellers, the new “Harry Potter” is clearly the biggest release of the year. But because of major discounting, many will not make a huge profit on the book. But while margins on “Harry Potter” are thin, “it brings a whole lot of people into the store,” said George L. Jones, the chief executive of Borders Group, as staff members at the chain’s Time Warner Center store prepared for its huge shindig. “It entices them to buy something else.”

With the series drawing to its much-heralded close, it was clear that future generations will come to the books without the hoopla that has defined them since 2000, when the publishers first set a midnight release for the fourth installment, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

“I think there is something that is extremely special about having lived through the first wave,” said Arthur A. Levine, the Scholastic editor who first bought the United States rights to “Sorcerer’s Stone” in 1997 for $105,000. “But when I read Jane Austen for the first time, I didn’t feel like ‘Darn, I wish I’d been there when Jane was out there letting them go for the first time.’ ” At the end of the day, he said, a reader’s “experience is a special, one-on-one intimate experience whenever you have it.”

Melena Ryzik and Emilyn Sosa contributed reporting from New York, Sarah Lyall and Ariana Green from London, Christopher Maag from Cleveland, Dan Frosch from Denver and Carolyn Marshall from San Francisco.

    Long Lines and Wide Smiles Greet the Final Volume of ‘Harry Potter’, NYT, 21.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/books/21pott.html

Wait for Harry Potter Finale Has Ended

July 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Anna Todd and Kelsey Barry, both 20, jumped up and down, screaming and hugging as they touched their Harry Potter books and smelled them as if handling a newborn baby. ''It smells like fresh parchment,'' said Barry, among the first in line at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan's Union Square. ''It smells like magic.''

For the last time, Potter dust sparkled worldwide. Like castles lowering their drawbridges, bookstores across Britain and the United States and as far away as Singapore and Sydney, unveiled their copies Saturday of ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' the seventh and final volume of the young wizard's adventures.

Eager readers, many of whom had lined up for hours, rushed from the tills, opening the thick hardback book to take in the opening words: ''The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.''

Inside were answers readers have waited long to learn and that J.K. Rowling and her publishers have labored, more than they desired, to keep secret. Will Harry kill evil Lord Voldemort, or die in the attempt? Who will be slain in the battle between the good guys and the wicked Death Eaters? And what are deathly hallows, anyway?

After obtaining a copy at a Singapore bookstore, Adela Lim, 16, flipped right to the end of the book, scanned the text furiously and exclaimed to her friends, ''Oh my god! Oh my god!''

''I am aghast at the ending,'' she said. ''I've waited since the first book all the way until now, so I can't wait anymore, I just want to find out the ending.''

Rowling, who a decade ago introduced her magical character in ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,'' was giving a midnight reading to 500 competition-winning children in the grand Victorian surroundings of London's Natural History Museum. Now richer than the queen, she sat in a large wing-backed chair and read the opening pages -- description of a mysterious assignation, a clandestine meeting and important news for Voldemort.

For many of the hardcore Potter-maniacs, the place to be was Waterstone's bookstore on Piccadilly in central London. More than 5,000 people lined up for hours before the midnight opening, in a festive, colorful line stretching around the block. Among the fans from as far away as Finland and Mexico were dozens of witches and wizards, a couple of house elves, a pair of owls and a woman dressed as Hogwarts castle.

Ken Zwier, 42, from Phoenix, Ariz., grew and bleached his hair to achieve the golden tresses of villain Lucius Malfoy. His wife and two daughters were in costume, too. The family planned to read the book aloud to one another on their flight back to the United States on Saturday.

Waiters at a bookstore in downtown Rome served customers colorful Potter-themed cocktails, a green one called ''Serpeverde'' -- Italian for Slytherin -- and an orange one named ''Grifondoro'' -- Gryffindor.

The passion for Potter was almost life-threatening. In Canberra, Australia, a 21-year-old man jumped into the frigid waters of Lake Burley Griffin on Friday afternoon to retrieve a pre-order voucher he had dropped. Paramedics found the man shivering and distressed -- and without the voucher, Emergency Services spokesman Darren Cutrupi said. He was given another voucher by the bookstore.

Rowling's books about the bespectacled orphan with the lightning-bolt scar have sold 325 million copies in 64 languages, and the launch of each new volume has become a Hollywood-scale extravaganza.

''Deathly Hallows'' has a print run of 12 million in the United States alone, and Internet retailer Amazon says it has taken 2.2 million orders for the book. Britain's Royal Mail says it will deliver 600,000 copies on Saturday; the U.S. Postal Service says it will ship 1.8 million.

Potter-mania spread throughout the globe. Tel Aviv's Steimatzky bookstore was due to open at 2:01 a.m. local time Saturday, defying criticism from Orthodox Jewish lawmakers for opening on the Sabbath, when the law requires most businesses in Israel to close.

Phnom Penh's Monument Books -- Cambodia's only outlet for the book -- expected its allotment of 224 copies to sell out within hours.

Portland, Maine, was going all-out with a 12-hour Mugglefest to celebrate the book's launch. Fans wearing cloaks and carrying wands were riding the Hogwarts Express into a re-creation of King's Cross station, and an old red-brick warehouse foundry along the city's waterfront was converted into the magical shopping street Diagon Alley.

Security for the launch was fist-tight, with books shipped in sealed pallets and legal contracts binding stores not to sell the book before the midnight release time.

But despite pleas from Rowling and leading fan sites, spoilers sprouted on the Internet in the days before the release, including photographed images of what turned out to be all 700-plus pages of the book's U.S. edition.

In France, the daily Le Parisien revealed how the final installment ends, in a small article which it printed upside down. The book's French publishing house, Gallimard Jeunesse, condemned the newspaper's revelation, saying it showed ''a total lack of respect for J.K. Rowling'' and ''disdain for readers.''

As many as 1,200 copies were shipped early in the United States by an online retailer, and two U.S. newspapers published reviews Wednesday, more than two days ahead of the official release.

Rowling said she was ''staggered'' by the embargo-busting reviews and called on fans to preserve the secrecy of the plot.

But she had little reason to complain about what critics actually said. ''Deathly Hallows'' has received universal raves, with The New York Times and The Associated Press among those praising it as a worthy conclusion to a classic series.

Fifteen-year-old Patrick Atkins of Twinsburg, Ohio, thought Harry would survive the final book, believing Rowling would come up with an unexpected ending. He avoided the Internet spoilers, as did Wayne Kelley, who walked through downtown Hudson, Ohio, dressed, quite convincingly, as snide Severus Snape.

''I will wait until I have the actual book in my hands,'' he said.

Associated Press writers Jill Lawless, Lindsay Toler and Romina Spina in London, Colleen Long in New York and correspondents around the world contributed to this report.

    Wait for Harry Potter Finale Has Ended, NYT, 21.7.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Harry-Potter.html

Harry Potter and the man who conjured up Rowling's millions

As the last Hogwarts book appears, the author's multi-millionaire agent will stay in the shadows

Sunday July 15, 2007
David Smith
The Observer


When midnight strikes on Saturday, there will be no missing the star of the show. JK Rowling, the world's most successful author, will be the centre of attention for 1,700 children at London's Natural History Museum as she signs copies of the seventh and final Harry Potter adventure.

Throughout the canny construction of 'Brand Potter' - books, films, video games, and now even stamps - one figure has been ever present, like a shadow glimpsed in the cloisters of Hogwarts school.

This enigmatic but utterly crucial influence is Christopher Little, literary agent, fierce protector of Rowling and, thanks to the boy wizard, now a millionaire many times over.

Little has masterminded Rowling's career, from the moment he spotted the potential of her first manuscript to this week's publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which guarantees him yet another jackpot. Amazon, the online retailer, has already sold a record 1.8 million advance copies.

Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury, held a ballot for the launch at the Natural History Museum, which drew applications from 90,000 children. The first 500 names out of the hat will hear Rowling read from the new book at midnight - webcast live around the world - while a further 1,200 will receive signed copies. Simultaneously, 279 branches of Waterstone's will open their doors, and there will be numerous other launch parties at independent bookshops up and down the country. This week the Royal Mail is issuing a commemorative set of Harry Potter stamps.

Little, a 65-year-old grandfather, has been content to remain behind the scenes, rarely speaking in public and seldom photographed. But when he first signed up Rowling, he reportedly struck a deal under his usual terms: 15 per cent of gross earnings for the UK market and 20 per cent for merchandising rights, for film, for the US market and for translation deals. With the author's fortune now standing at more than £540m, Little's return has to be estimated as at least £50m.

'He was the luckiest agent ever - when something like that falls in your lap it is luck, but he made the most of it,' said Ed Victor, a leading literary agent. 'He has run the brand admirably. He had to build up an organisation to defend and promote and advance his author's rights and it's all been done very tastefully. He's a charming and affable fellow, but made of steel underneath.'

The son of a coroner who served as a First World War fighter pilot, Little grew up in Liversedge, West Yorkshire, and gained five O-levels at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, only to leave during the sixth form to join his uncle's textile business in 1958. The fledgling entrepreneur had impressed his headteacher, EJ Baggaley, who wrote: 'My impression is that he is well suited for a business career - sales management, for instance.'

He spent most of the Sixties and Seventies in the shipping industry in Hong Kong before returning to London to set up a recruitment consultancy called City Boys. His switch to the literary world happened by accident in 1979. A schoolfriend and fellow Hong Kong trader, Philip Nicholson, had written a thriller and was seeking representation. Little agreed to take him on and the book, Man on Fire, was published under the pseudonym AJ Quinnell. It went on to sell 7.5 million copies worldwide and become a Hollywood film.

In his only press interview, in 2003, Little recalled: 'The literary agency was really a hobby which started through an accident. I was helping an old friend in his writing career. I had been running as a full-time business for about six years when Harry Potter arrived.'

The agency, run in 'cramped' and 'near-Dickensian' offices in Fulham, south-west London, was cash-strapped until touched by Potter's magic wand. Literary folklore has it that Rowling, then a penniless 29-year-old single mother, walked into a public library in Edinburgh, looked up a list of literary agents and settled on the name Christopher Little because it sounded like a character from a children's book.

Bryony Evens, his office manager at the time, has said that it went straight into the reject basket because 'Christopher felt that children's books did not make money'. But its unusual black binding caught her eye, prompting her to read the synopsis and show it to Little. He recalled: 'I wrote back to JK Rowling within four days of receiving the manuscript. I thought there was something really special there, although we could never have guessed what would happen to it.' He managed to sell it to Bloomsbury for £2,500, but later reaped huge rewards from international rights and has won a reputation as a brilliant deal-maker who puts Rowling first.

According to those who know him, the 6ft 3in Little, divorced with two sons, is unchanged by his wealth and a breed apart from the flamboyant agents and literati who frequent West End restaurants. But he reportedly spent £250,000 on his 60th birthday party at the Chelsea Physic Garden and has admitted: 'I do love sailing, but I rent the boats when I want them - it does save a lot of hassle.'

Ian Chapman, chief executive of Simon & Schuster and a friend of Little for 20 years, said: 'He's very Yorkshire, very northern, very honest and ... still the same simple fellow he's always been.'

The Deathly Hallows: a sneak preview In a trailer for the forthcoming ITV documentary, A Year in the Life... J K Rowling, the camera lingers long enough on a printed manuscript of the novel, dated 23 October 2006, to make the opening visible to the eagle eyed. It reads:

'Chapter One. The Dark Lord Ascending. The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands pointing at each other's chests: then, recognising each other, they stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and set off, side by side, in the same direction.

"News?", asked the taller of the two.

"The best," replied Snape.'

Harry in numbers

5 seconds between each pre-order on Amazon website - 1.8 million in total.

279 branches of the book chain Waterstone's holding launch parties at the stroke of midnight on Saturday.

2,000 people expected in the queue at Waterstone's on Piccadilly, London.

24 hours and 1 minute: running time for the audio edition.

90 countries in which the book is being published.

7/4 odds from Ladbrokes on Harry Potter committing suicide at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

    Harry Potter and the man who conjured up Rowling's millions, O, 15.7.2007, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2126717,00.html

Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits

July 11, 2007
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series’s United States publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the eagerly awaited seventh and final installment due out at 12:01 a.m. on July 21.

But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”

Educators agree that the series can’t get the job done alone.

“Unless there are scaffolds in place for kids — an enthusiastic adult saying, ‘Here’s the next one’ — it’s not going to happen,” said Nancie Atwell, the author of “The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers” and a teacher in Edgecomb, Me. “And in way too many American classrooms it’s not happening.”

Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles). What parents and others hoped was that the phenomenal success of the Potter books would blunt these trends, perhaps even creating a generation of lifelong readers in their wake.

“Anyone who has children or grandchildren sees the competition for children’s time increasing as they enter adolescence, and the difficulty that reading seems to have to compete effectively,” Mr. Gioia said.

Many thousands of children have, indeed, gone from the Potter books to other pleasure reading. But others have dropped away.

Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. “We’d sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns,” recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.

But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When “Deathly Hallows” comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: “I don’t really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee.”

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

Many parents, educators and librarians say that despite such statistics, they have seen enough evidence to convince them that Harry Potter is a bona fide hero.

“Parents will say, ‘You know, my son never spent time reading, and now my son is staying up late reading, keeping the light on because he can’t put that book down,’ ” said Linda B. Gambrell, president of the International Reading Association, a professional organization for teachers.

In a study commissioned last year by Scholastic, Yankelovich, a market research firm, reported that 51 percent of the 500 kids aged 5 to 17 polled said they did not read books for fun before they started reading the series. A little over three-quarters of them said Harry Potter had made them interested in reading other books.

Before she discovered Harry Potter, Kara Havranek, 13, spent most of her time romping outside in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland, or playing video games like Crash Bandicoot.

But four years after struggling through “Sorcerer’s Stone,” Kara has read and reread all six books, decorated her bedroom with Potter memorabilia and said she could hardly wait for “Deathly Hallows.”

But although Kara said she has enjoyed other books, she was not sure what lasting influence the series would have. “I probably won’t read as much when Harry Potter is over,” she said.

In a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies (the film version of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth in the series, just opened) heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.

Until Harry Potter, “I don’t think kids were reading proudly,” said Connie Williams, the school librarian at Kenilworth Junior High School in Petaluma, Calif. “Now it’s more normalized. It’s like, ‘Gosh we can read now, it’s O.K.’ ”

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.

He had read the first three Harry Potter books, but said he had no particular interest in reading more. “I don’t like to read that much,” he said. “I think there are better things to do.”

Neema Avashia, Aaron’s English teacher, said it was rare for the Harry Potter series to draw reluctant readers to books. “I try to have a lot of books in my library that reflect where kids are coming from,” Ms. Avashia said. “And Harry Potter isn’t really where my kids are coming from.” She noted that her class is 85 percent nonwhite, and Harry Potter has few characters that belong to a racial minority group.

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.

Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.

On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.

“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”

“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”

    Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits, NYT, 11.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/books/11potter.html?hp

Iran Cleric: Rushdie Fatwa Still Stands

June 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- An high-level Iranian cleric said Friday that the religious edict calling for the killing of Salman Rushdie cannot be revoked, and he warned Britain was defying the Islamic world by granting the author knighthood.

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami reminded worshippers of the 1989 fatwa during a sermon at Tehran University, aired live on state radio. Thousands of worshippers chanted ''Death to the English.''

Khatami does not hold a government position but has the influential post of delivering the sermon during Friday prayers once a month in the Iranian capital. He did not directly call for the fatwa to be carried out.

''Awarding him means confronting 1.5 billion Muslims around the world,'' Khatami said. ''In Islamic Iran, the revolutionary fatwa ... is still alive and cannot be changed.''

Then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989, calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie because his book ''The Satanic Verses'' was deemed insulting to Islam. Rushdie was forced into hiding for a decade, and the edict deeply damaged Britain's relations with Iran. In 1998, the Iranian government sought to patch up ties by declaring that it would not support the fatwa but that it could not be rescinded.

Queen Elizabeth II's decision to knight Rushdie drew a complaint from the Iranian government and protests around the Muslim world.

About 2,000 people rallied in several Pakistani cities on Friday, calling for Rushdie to be killed and for a boycott of trade with Britain.

A leader of Pakistan's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party compared Rushdie's award to the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published last year in a Danish newspaper, which provoked protests and rioting in Muslim countries.

''Earlier they had published cartoons of our Prophet, and now they have given an award to someone who deserves to be killed,'' Abdul Ghafoor Hayderi told a crowd of about 1,000 people in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

Pakistan is a close ally of the United States and Britain in the war on terror, but it has condemned Rushdie's knighthood.

In India's Muslim-majority Kashmir region, a strike over Rushdie's honor closed most shops, offices and schools in the summer capital, Srinagar.

Mufti Mohammad Bashir-ud-din, head of Kashmir's Islamic court, said Rushdie was ''liable to be killed for rendering the gravest injury to the sentiments of the Muslims across the world.''

Britain has defended its decision to honor Rushdie, one of the most prominent novelists of the late 20th century. His 13 books have won numerous awards, including the Booker Prize for ''Midnight's Children'' in 1981.

Muslims angered by Britain's decision protested in London on Friday.

''Rushdie is a hate figure across the Muslim world because of his insults to Islam,'' said Anjem Choudray, protest organizer. ''This honor will have ramifications here and across the world.''

The award, announced Saturday, was among the Queen Elizabeth II's Birthday Honors list, which is decided on by independent committees who vet nominations from the public and government.

Some analysts have expressed surprise his award was approved.

''There is an impression they really didn't consider the potential reaction,'' said Rosemary Hollis, director of research at London's Chatham House think tank. ''But there is a sense that showing too much sensitivity is to kowtow to radicals.''

Associated Press writers David Stringer in London and Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India, contributed to this story.

    Iran Cleric: Rushdie Fatwa Still Stands, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Rushdie-Protests.html

Big Ten Joins Google Book Project

June 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:44 p.m. ET
The New York Times

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) -- Twelve major universities will digitize select collections in each of their libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project. The goal: a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.

The partnership involves the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference (yes, there are 11): Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

''We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world's printed treasures,'' said Northwestern Provost Lawrence Dumas.

The committee said Google will scan and index materials ''in a manner consistent with copyright law.'' Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books.

Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries. But Google still faces a lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over its plans to incorporate parts of copyrighted books.

------

On the Net:

Committee on Institutional Cooperation: http://www.cic.uiuc.edu

Google Book Search: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html

    Big Ten Joins Google Book Project, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-TechBit-Google-Big-Ten.html

Mo. Man Burns Books as Act of Protest

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:26 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's ''The Hunt for Red October'' and Tom Wolfe's ''Bonfire of the Vanities,'' to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910, didn't sell. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

''This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,'' Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply -- estimated at 20,000 books -- is exhausted.

''After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction,'' he said. ''And it's a good excuse for fun.''

Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

Kansas City has seen the number of used bookstores decline in recent years and there are few independent bookstores left in town, said Will Leathem, a co-owner of Prospero's Books.

''There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books,'' Leathem said.

Dozens of customers took advantage of the Sunday's book-burning, searching through those waiting to go into the fire for last-minute bargains.

Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.

''I think given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it,'' Bechtel said. ''(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it.''

    Mo. Man Burns Books as Act of Protest, NYT, 28.5.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Book-Burning.html

Author Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

April 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- In books such as ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' ''Cat's Cradle,'' and ''Hocus Pocus,'' Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound. Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut's more than a dozen books, short stories, essays and plays contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.

In a statement, Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut as ''a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. ... I would salute him our own Mark Twain.''

''He was sort of like nobody else,'' said another fellow author, Gore Vidal. ''Kurt was never dull.''

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim (''Slaughterhouse-Five'') and Eliot Rosewater (''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'') as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

Like ''Catch-22,'' by Vonnegut's friend, Joseph Heller, ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' was a World War II novel embraced by opponents of the Vietnam War, linking a so-called ''good war'' to the unpopular conflict of the 1960s and '70s.

Vonnegut lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

''He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important,'' said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Some of Vonnegut's books were banned and burned for alleged obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

''I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial,'' he told The Associated Press in 2005. ''It's as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We're just about to run out of petroleum and there's nothing to replace it.''

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

''I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,'' Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the German city.

''The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,'' Vonnegut wrote in ''Fates Worse Than Death,'' his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

After World War II, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, ''Player Piano,'' in 1951, followed by ''The Sirens of Titan,'' ''Canary in a Cat House'' and ''Mother Night,'' making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially ''Cat's Cradle'' in 1963, in which scientists create ''ice-nine,'' a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the Earth.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with ''A Man Without a Country,'' a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration (''upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography'') and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book's success ''a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.''

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

''When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,'' Vonnegut told the AP.

''My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children.''

Associated Press writers Michael Warren,

Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.

    Author Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84, NYT, 12.4.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Vonnegut.html

Secret of Horror Writer's Lineage Broken

March 17, 2007
Filed at 1:58 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) -- Joe Hill knew it was only a matter of time before one of the publishing industry's hottest little secrets became common knowledge. He just wished he could have kept it under wraps a bit longer.

But when Hill's fantasy-tinged thriller, ''Heart-Shaped Box,'' came out last month, it was inevitable that his thoroughbred blood lines as a writer of horror and the supernatural would be out there for all to see.

After 10 years of writing short stories and an unpublished novel under his pen name, Hill knows that the world is now viewing him through a different prism -- as the older son of Stephen King.

Hill, 34, took on his secret identity to test his writing skills and marketability without having to trade on the family name.

''I really wanted to allow myself to rise and fall on my own merits,'' he said over breakfast in this coastal city. ''One of the good things about it was that it let me make my mistakes in private.''

The moniker he chose did not come out of the blue. He is legally Joseph Hillstrom King, named for the labor organizer whose 1915 execution for murder in Utah inspired the song, ''Joe Hill,'' an anthem of the labor movement. His parents, who came of age during the 1960s, ''were both pretty feisty liberals and looked at Joe Hill as a heroic figure,'' he said.

''Heart-Shaped Box,'' a title drawn from a song by the rock group Nirvana, is a fast-paced tale of another man with dual identities. Judas Coyne, born Justin Cowzynski, is an over-the- hill heavy metal rocker with a strange hobby: amassing ghoulish artifacts.

When Coyne learns that a suit purportedly haunted by a ghost is up for grabs on an online auction site, he can't resist adding it to his creepy collection. Things turn ugly fast after Coyne learns that the suit's occupant is a spooky spiritualist bent on vengeance following the death of his stepdaughter.

The book has drawn good reviews, with The New York Times' Janet Maslin calling it ''a wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror'' that is ''so visually intense that its energy never flags.'' And with its cinematic, and bloody, ending, Warner Bros. snapped up movie rights six months before the book hit the market.

As excitement percolated about ''Heart-Shaped Box,'' so, too, did lingering questions about its author. Inklings about Hill's family background started appearing in online message boards in 2005 when his collection of short stories, ''20th Century Ghosts,'' was published in Britain.

Similarities in subject matter and appearance -- Hill has his father's bushy eyebrows and the dark beard he sported decades ago -- were enough to stir suspicion among followers of the horror genre.

''It got blogged to death,'' Hill recalled. But only when his identity was trumpeted in Variety last year did he realize that the secret was gone for good. ''That was really the nail in the coffin,'' he said.

Still, his pen name had a good ride. The editor of ''Heart-Shaped Box'' was unaware of the King connection and Hill's agent remained in the dark for eight years before the author spilled the beans two years ago.

Hill's decision to follow his father's career should come as no surprise. His mother, Tabitha King, has been turning out novels for decades. His younger brother, Owen King, came out in 2005 with a well-received novella and short story collection that is more literary than horrific and laced with absurdity.

Like Hill, Owen King wanted to cut his own path and his book did not mention his parentage. But he decided against a pen name, figuring it would be too much trouble to try to go by an alias when meeting people or having an agent, manager, publicist or personal assistant handle details of his professional life.

The only sibling who has yet to make it into print is Naomi King, oldest of the three, who has switched careers from restaurateur to Unitarian minister. But Hill said his sister is working on a nonfiction project: a book-length study of the sermon as literary text and its place in American culture.

The King children's interest in books and writing took root early on. ''It sounds very Victorian, but we would sit around and read aloud nightly, in the living room or on the porch,'' Hill recalled. ''This was something we kept on doing until I was in high school, at least.''

In an era of celebrity worship, the family has prided itself on being able to maintain as normal a lifestyle as possible despite Stephen King's fame and fortune. Hill and his brother attended public high school in Bangor, Maine, before going on to Vassar College, where they overlapped for one year.

After graduation, Hill and Owen King collaborated on a couple of screenplays. They sold one, but it has yet to be made into a movie.

The first half of ''Heart-Shaped Box'' is set in New York's Hudson Valley, the area around Vassar, where Judas Coyne lives with his latest Goth girlfriend, who 30 years his junior, and two devoted German shepherds.

At first, Hill envisioned his tale of a suit with a ghost attached as grist for a short story. But as he added depth and back story to his characters, it ballooned into a novel 10 times longer than what he originally planned.

The choice of title was pure serendipity. Hill's initial idea, ''Private Collection,'' went by the wayside when the 1993 Nirvana song popped up on iTunes as the author was getting ready to write the episode in which UPS delivers the haunted suit to Coyne. It was then that Hill decided to package the suit in a heart-shaped box.

''Coyne is fiction and (Kurt) Cobain was a real guy,'' he said, ''but I felt that the song fit very well with the book. The song is about a guy who feels trapped and desperate, and the book is about how someone uses music as a hammer to beat at the bars of his own cage.''

Hill and his wife, whom he met at Vassar, live in southern New Hampshire with their three children. He is reluctant to say much about his private life, recalling how a crazed fan broke into his family's home in Bangor in 1991 and threatened his mother, a frightening episode that evoked the plot of King's earlier best seller, ''Misery.''

Stephen King declined a request for comment on his son's novel. ''He's trying to go along with Joe's wishes and let him do this on his own,'' said his spokeswoman, Marsha DeFilippo.

But at a recent panel discussion in New York, King told a questioner that he wouldn't rule out a collaborative book project with his son.

''I guess anything's possible,'' he said. ''I took them on my knee, read them stories, changed their diapers, and now they're all grown up and they have become writers, of all things. I am really proud of them. I guess we'll see what happens down the road.''

Associated Press Writer Colleen Long in New York contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

http://www.joehillfiction.com

    Secret of Horror Writer's Lineage Broken, NYT, 17.3.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Books-Joe-Hill.html

‘Echo Maker’ Wins Book Award for Fiction

November 16, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

“The Echo Maker,” an enigmatic novel by Richard Powers that tells the story of a young man who develops a rare brain disorder after an automobile accident, won the National Book Award for fiction last night.

“The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” by Timothy Egan was the surprise winner of the top prize for nonfiction.

In the book, Mr. Egan, a former New York Times reporter who remains a frequent contributor to the newspaper, gives an account of the dust storms that descended on the Great Plains during the Depression.

“Abraham Lincoln said we cannot escape history, but this history of the Dust Bowl nearly escaped us,” Mr. Egan, a third-generation Westerner, told a crowd of more than 700 publishers, writers and editors.

As in recent years, the fiction category raised eyebrows in the publishing industry for its lack of commercially known nominees in a year of big-name authors.

The awards were presented at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan at a black-tie ceremony, a splashy event drawing many of the most prominent names in the book publishing industry.

Fran Lebowitz, the writer and humorist, was the evening’s host, appearing in her trademark tuxedo and white pocket square, and drawing loud cheers when she paused from poking fun at the show’s organizers to tweak President Bush and his Iraq policy.

Winners each receive a bronze sculpture and $10,000, although the award’s greatest benefit is often in increased sales, especially when little-known authors are suddenly thrust into the spotlight. In addition to Mr. Powers, this year’s finalists for fiction were Mark Z. Danielewski for “Only Revolutions” (Pantheon), Ken Kalfus for “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” (Ecco/HarperCollins), Dana Spiotta for “Eat the Document” (Scribner/Simon & Schuster) and Jess Walter for “The Zero” (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins). “The Echo Maker” was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Joining Mr. Egan as finalists for nonfiction were Taylor Branch for “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68” (Simon & Schuster); Rajiv Chandrasekaran for “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” (Alfred A. Knopf); Peter Hessler for “Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present” (HarperCollins); and Lawrence Wright for “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (Alfred A. Knopf). Mr. Egan’s publisher was Houghton Mifflin.

Since 1989, the awards have been presented by the National Book Foundation, but the prizes were first given in 1950, when Nelson Algren won the fiction award for “The Man With the Golden Arm” and Ralph L. Rusk won the nonfiction prize for “The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

In the intervening decades, the roster of winners has included Ralph Ellison for “Invisible Man” in 1953; Norman Mailer for “The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History” in 1969; Saul Bellow for “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” in 1971; William Styron for “Sophie’s Choice” in 1980; and Philip Roth for “Sabbath’s Theater” in 1995.

Among last year’s winners were William T. Vollmann, who took the fiction honors for “Europe Central,” and Joan Didion, who was given the nonfiction prize for her memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

The winners are decided during a judges’ luncheon on the day of the awards. To be eligible for this year’s awards, books must have been published between Dec. 1, 2005, and Nov. 30, 2006.

M. T. Anderson received the award for young people’s literature, for “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party” (Candlewick Press). The award for poetry went to Nathaniel Mackey for “Splay Anthem” (New Directions Publishing).

Last night, the foundation also gave two lifetime achievement awards.

Sharing the Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community yesterday were Robert Silvers and, posthumously, Barbara Epstein, co-founders and editors of The New York Review of Books. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, presented the award.

Mr. Remnick called The New York Review of Books “never more necessary,” adding that it is “a guide, an interpreter and a political inspiration in the darkest of times.”

Adrienne Rich, the author of several nonfiction books and nearly 20 volumes of poetry, received the foundation’s medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. In 1974, she won the National Book Award for poetry for “Diving Into the Wreck.”

In her acceptance speech last night, Ms. Rich rebutted what she called the “free market critique of poetry,” that the genre is unprofitable, and therefore useless. But “when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder,” she said, “we can be, to almost a physical degree, touched and moved.”

    ‘Echo Maker’ Wins Book Award for Fiction, NYT, 16.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/books/16books.html
 

A Quirky Superhero of the Comics Trade

November 12, 2006
The New York Times
By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

YOU may not know a little publishing company called Dark Horse Comics, but if you are a fan of Concrete (whose brain was transplanted by aliens into a stone body), Hellboy (he of the sawed-off red horns, satanic red tail and gargantuan red fist) or Sin City (the violent, edge-of-desperation town where people and principles are routinely bought and sold), then you certainly know its characters and its comic books.

And if you are a Dark Horse aficionado with an insatiable appetite, the company has more in store for next year. A new comic book series about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on its way, written by Joss Whedon, who wrote and helped produce the popular television series of the same name. Dark Horse will also release “Star Wars: Legacy Vol. 1,” chronicling the distant future of the Jedi, as well as “300: The Art of the Film,” an account of the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book mini-series about an ancient, epic battle between Spartan and Persian soldiers.

By nurturing and backing a quirky, brooding and inventive stable of writers and artists, Dark Horse has spent the last 20 years carving out and maintaining its place as a scrappy comic book franchise in an industry dominated by Marvel Entertainment and DC Comics.

Dark Horse, which is privately held, has endured in an industry where many small publishers last less than a year. It has thrived, its owners say, by sharing financial success with its artists and taking its role as an independent publisher very, very seriously.

“Every comic we do, whether we ask to share the film or toy rights or not, we publish because we think it’s a great comic,” said Mike Richardson, who founded Dark Horse 20 years ago and is the company’s president. “We want to survive far into the future, but we also want to leave a legacy.”

The Dark Horse approach calls for protecting the creative and financial rights of its contributors — including giving them a cut of the profits — and publishing comics that are well out of the mainstream (meaning fewer capes and cowls).

Based in Milwaukie, Ore., Dark Horse entered the game thanks to the birth of the direct sales market in the 1980s, which moved comics beyond newsstands and into specialty stores. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a small-press, black-and-white comic, became a hit in 1984 and started a boom that Dark Horse also enjoyed. But quick-hit comics publishers introduced a glut of ill-conceived characters and the market collapsed, taking many companies down with it. Dark Horse, however, avoided the debacle.

At the time, Mr. Richardson was a member of a community of artists and writers aspiring to make their marks in comics. Some of them created the stories in Dark Horse Presents No. 1, the company’s first comic book. “Later, I created a list of artists and writers that we thought were the best in comics and started calling them,” Mr. Richardson said. His sales pitch included promises of competitive pay and ownership of the work. The pitch worked, giving Dark Horse access to some of the most original and creative minds in the comics business.

Dark Horse later branched out to produce licensed comics devoted to the “Star Wars,” “Aliens” and “Terminator” films. It was also among a small group of pioneers that began importing Japanese comics, also known as manga (pronounced MAHN-gah).

Delving into everything from romance and adventure stories to science fiction and horror, manga have developed a large following in America and are commonly sold in bookstores. One of Dark Horse’s biggest manga successes has been the 28-volume Lone Wolf and Cub, about a wandering samurai and a young boy. The most violent and gory manga titles that Dark Horse reprints are shrink-wrapped.

“We’re reprinting them as they were published in Japan,” said Neil Hankerson, Dark Horse’s executive vice president. “We publish as is or we don’t publish it at all.”

COMIC books — sealed in plastic or not — were only the beginning. By 1991, Dark Horse had set up a unit to develop toys and later began a film division and a publishing imprint for decidedly noncomics products, including collections of Playboy interviews and a series of novels chronicling the early years of Tony Montana, the character played by Al Pacino in the 1983 film “Scarface.”

Today, Dark Horse is the third-largest publisher, behind the much larger Marvel and DC, in the direct market, which includes the specialty shops that cater to comic book fans. That market produced more than $500 million in sales last year, according to Milton Griepp, the publisher and founder of ICv2, an online trade publication that covers pop culture for retailers.

According to Diamond Comic Distributors, the world’s largest distributor of English-language comics, Marvel had 36.9 percent of the market last year and DC (owned by Time Warner) had 32.9 percent; Dark Horse came in at 5.6 percent.

At the heart of Dark Horse’s varied efforts is Mr. Richardson, 56, who is also its president. “I’m sure some people would like me to have less of a hand in things,” he said in an interview. “But clearly I like to control the direction of the different divisions.” He said Dark Horse, with about 100 employees, had $30 million in revenue last year.

Mr. Richardson grew up in Portland, Ore., reading the adventures of a certain caped crusader and a spectacular wall-crawler. “My preschool fascination with comics meant that I could read by the time I entered the first grade,” he said. “I had boxes of comics in my closet and collected every one I could get my hands on — even the recruiting comics you could get at the Air Force recruiting stations.”

It became a lifelong passion. Mr. Richardson began to write comics for an amateur press association and, after graduating from college, established a chain of comic book stores in Oregon. The success of his stores, where writers and artists often appeared to sign their work, and his contacts with other industry professionals paved the way to the founding of Dark Horse.

“There was a recurring complaint that the people who created the comics couldn’t own their own work if they worked for the major companies,” he said. “There were so many horrible stories of people who signed the back of the check and lost the rights to their characters.”

Perhaps the most famous example goes back to Superman himself. Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the men who created the man of steel, sold their comic strip, and the rights to the character, for $130 in 1938. Superman, of course, would go on to both inspire countless champions and fill DC’s coffers. Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster would have to fight for decades to be recognized and compensated. Although they never won a court award, in 1975 Warner Communications agreed to give both men lifelong pensions worth about $38,000 a year.

“We built our publishing platform around creators’ rights,” Mr. Richardson said. “Our pitch was, ‘We’ll match the rights that you get from other companies and we’ll let you own the work.’ ”

Dark Horse pays by the story or the page, and shares profit generated by comic books and related merchandise. That is different from the standard work-for-hire arrangement at DC and Marvel: creators are paid for a specific story and perhaps receive royalties from collected editions, but the bulk of the revenue, and all of the merchandising opportunities, remain with the companies.

In fact, a group of artists, primarily from Marvel, set up their own company, Image comics, in 1992 because they were disenchanted with corporate-owned characters that generated profits for their bosses but not for them.

“It is always a blow to any organization when you lose talented people,” Dan Buckley, the publisher of Marvel, said. “However, we were able to fill those shoes with other talented artists.” He added that Marvel “now has more creative opportunities under its umbrella, inside and outside of the Marvel universe.”

At DC, the president and publisher, Paul Levitz, said the company does not adhere to a rigid compensation model and has made “many types of arrangements.” He said that “different deals appeal to different creative talent at different times, but we have no shortage of great people wanting to do new series for us or work our star characters.”

PAUL CHADWICK is the writer-artist behind Concrete, one of Dark Horse’s early successes. Mr. Chadwick chronicles the struggles of Concrete, a k a Ron Lithgow, as he learns to cope with and take advantage of his cement-block body while championing environmental causes or scaling Mount Everest.

Concrete first appeared in an eight-page story in Dark Horse Presents No. 1 in 1986. It was a runaway hit. “We were hoping to sell 10,000 copies, and it sold 50,000,” Mr. Richardson said.

Thanks to their participation in APA-5, an amateur press association devoted to comics and pop culture, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Richardson were already acquainted when Mr. Chadwick joined Dark Horse.

Other APA-5 members who are part of the Dark Horse family constitute a virtual Who’s Who of the comics industry; they include Randy Stradley, the company’s vice president; Mr. Miller, one of the comic world’s superstars; and Mark Verheiden, a writer for the TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” who has written Dark Horse comics like Aliens, Predator and Timecop.

Mr. Chadwick first shopped the Concrete concept around in 1983. “I was pretty roundly turned down,” he recalled. A few years and some improvements later, he tried again, with different results. “I had eight offers, including one from Dark Horse, which was just starting up,” he said. “They matched Marvel’s offer and were so enthusiastic that it caused me to go with them, which turned out to be very good for me.”

The Concrete stories would win several Eisner Awards, among the most prestigious honors bestowed upon comic book creators. Mr. Chadwick’s next installment of the continuing saga begins with Concrete suffering from amnesia after being struck by lightning in a desert in Colorado. His memory loss makes him even more uncertain of his place in the world.

Dark Horse is also patient with contributors like Mr. Chadwick. Unlike those who work for DC or Marvel on a Batman or Captain America, which are monthly publications and are generally expected to arrive without fail every 30 days, Mr. Chadwick works at his own pace. “I go mini-series by mini-series,” he said. “The last one took me — gulp — six years. I’m hoping to cut down on that on the next one.”

Mr. Richardson accepts uncertain timetables. “Creators who are doing very personal work can’t crank them out on a regular basis,” he said. “We support the creator and the rate they can produce it. We want them to be special; sometimes that’s not possible to produce on a 30-day schedule.”

Such support generates intense feelings of loyalty. When asked what it would take to offer Concrete to another publisher, Mr. Chadwick is quick with his answer: “A plane going down with Mike Richardson on it. Mike’s done a lot for me. It would be the height of disloyalty to go somewhere else.”

Mr. Richardson does not see the ebb and flow of the publication cycle as a creative issue. “The fans understand a creator-owned work,” he said. “They wouldn’t just want to see us crank something out.”

To fill the sales gaps caused by unpredictable publication, Dark Horse licenses characters from popular films, novels and video games and builds comic books around them.

Attention to quality played a role in this business strategy, too. Dark Horse discovered “a way to do licensed comics successfully,” Mr. Griepp said. “Marvel and DC haven’t found a formula that worked. It never really clicked.”

At Dark Horse, “they put a higher grade of talent on the books,” Mr. Griepp said. “They didn’t take the tack that the license is going to sell these books.” He also said the company made the comics easier to repackage by focusing on shorter story lines.

Licensed books, unlike creator-owned titles that can be as tame or as daring as a publisher desires, may have to observe some outside restrictions. “Our basic guidelines are: ‘Don’t do anything in the comics that you wouldn’t see in the films,’ ” said Mr. Stradley of Dark Horse. “It’s an easy rule to follow.”

Dark Horse approaches the licensed titles as sequels to the films, not simply repeating the same story. Its Aliens adaptation was a hit, selling more than one million copies. In a twist, Dark Horse’s first Predator series was adapted into the story for the film sequel, Predator 2. In turn, in order to protect its license, Dark Horse adapted that film back into a comic. “So a comic was adapted into a movie which was then adapted into a comic,” Mr. Richardson said.

The success of space-creature comics led Dark Horse to deploy a well-worn industry tactic: the team-up. Thus Aliens vs. Predator was born — the comic and then the film. “That two-way street with Hollywood makes Dark Horse stand out,” Mr. Griepp said. “They were able to do it in a way that their larger competitors could not.”

Dark Horse’s success in Hollywood has been relatively fast and furious. It began in 1992 with “Dr. Giggles,” a film about a mental patient posing as a doctor; the company was a co-producer. Next was a blockbuster: the Mask, one of Mr. Richardson’s creations, whom he describes as “a Tex Avery cartoon come to life.”

In 1994, Hollywood turned the Mask into a film starring Jim Carrey; it captured around $120 million domestically. In 1994, Dark Horse turned another of its properties, Timecop, into a film; the box-office take was almost $45 million. Just like that, “I was in the film business,” Mr. Richardson said.

Dark Horse has come a long way from the day in 1986 when Mr. Richardson and Mr. Stradley put the company’s first issue on the counter of a comic book shop. At the time, all Dark Horse could offer contributors was a print outlet and its dedication to creator rights. Today, it can offer access to the worlds of toys, film and animation.

DARK HORSE also remains hungry and productive, sometimes inspired by comic book properties, sometimes not. Next year, it will publish “Bottomfeeder,” the cartoonist B. H. Fingerman’s first novel, about a vampire in New York who meets others of his kind in several unusual cliques.

In January, it will publish Hellboy Animated Vol. 1: The Black Wedding, timed to the DVD release of the title character’s first animated foray. Its roster of original films includes “My Name Is Bruce,” in which Bruce Campbell, a popular B-movie actor, is kidnapped to protect an Oregon town from monsters. And the veteran horror director John Landis will make “Gone,” a thriller that takes place in a haunted house.

“A lot of companies have sprung up trying to do what I’ve done,” Mr. Richardson said. “They try to take comics and cruise them into films.” But there is often “a long period between a sale and when a film gets made,” he added. “If your comics can’t stand on their own, they may not last very long.

“If the comic deserves to be taken into another media,” he said, “that’s a bonus.”

    A Quirky Superhero of the Comics Trade, NYT, 12.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/yourmoney/12comic.html

William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81

November 2, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

William Styron, the novelist from the American South whose explorations of difficult historical and moral questions earned him a place among the leading literary figures of the post-World War II generation, died yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he had a home. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, coming after many years of illness, his daughter Alexandra Styron said.

Mr. Styron’s early work, including “Lie Down in Darkness,” won him wide recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Sophie’s Choice,” he transcended his own immediate world and moved across historical and cultural lines.

Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner. His peers included James Jones, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

“I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power,” Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a telephone interview a few years ago. “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac.”

For Mr. Styron, success came early. He was 26 when “Lie Down in Darkness,” his first novel, was published in 1951. It was a brooding, lyrical meditation on a young Southern girl’s suicide, as viewed during her funeral by members of her family and their friends. In the narrative, language plays as important a role as characterization, and the debt to Faulkner in general and “The Sound and the Fury” in particular was obvious. A majority of reviewers praised the novel for its power and melodiousness — although a few complained of its morbidity and its characters’ lack of moral stature — and the book established Mr. Styron as a writer to be watched.

Although elated by the response, Mr. Styron balked at being pigeonholed as an heir to Faulkner. “I don’t consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is,” he told The Paris Review in the spring of 1953, during one of the earliest of that magazine’s celebrated Writers at Work interviews. “Only certain things in the book are particularly Southern.” The girl, Peyton, for instance, “didn’t have to come from Virginia,” he said. “She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from.”

Besides, he could have added, he had been reared in Newport News, Va., a city of the New South, whose leading industry was the shipyard where Mr. Styron’s father worked. And it was an area that Mr. Styron wanted to escape, with a rich history that he wanted to explore from afar.

To the North and Europe

So after moving North and writing “Lie Down in Darkness” in, and just outside, New York City, he traveled to Paris in 1952 and wrote a novella based on his experiences in the Marines. Published in 1953 in the first issue of the journal Discovery under the title “Long March,” it appeared as a Vintage paperback in 1955 as “The Long March.”

After a year in Italy, in 1954 he moved to Roxbury, Conn., and set about completing his second novel, “Set This House on Fire.” A technical advance over “Lie Down in Darkness,” this novel was richer in its storytelling and, full of the latest in Continental existentialism, distinctly not Southern.

It sold well. But still it remained a somewhat melodramatic portrait of a group of Americans in Italy, and while it was admired in France, it got largely negative reviews in the United States.

In 1960, Mr. Styron returned home in his imagination by undertaking a project he had contemplated since his youth: a fictional account of an actual violent rebellion led by the slave Nat Turner that occurred in 1831 not too far from where Mr. Styron grew up.

The timing of the book was superb, appearing in 1967 on the crest of the civil rights movement. Mr. Styron prepared for it by immersing himself in the literature of slavery.

The reaction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner” was at first enthusiastic. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr. Styron’s right to inhabit his subject’s mind, to speak in a version of Nat Turner’s voice and to weave a fiction around the few facts known about the uprising. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called the book “a fiction of complex relationship, of the relationship between a present-day white man of deep Southern roots and the Negro in today’s whirlwind.”

The book sold well all over the world. It won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 1970 William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But as the social turmoil of 1968 mounted, a negative reaction set in. Influential black readers in particular began to question the novel’s merits, and Hollywood, reacting to the furor, decided against making a movie version. In August, some of the angrier criticisms were published in “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” a book edited by the African history scholar John Henrik Clarke.

Mr. Styron was accused of having misunderstood black language, religion and psychology, and of having produced a “whitened appropriation of our history.” In the furious debate that followed, several admirers of “Nat Turner” recanted, and the question was raised whether white people could even understand black history — a position that to some seemed racist in itself.

Embittered, Mr. Styron withdrew from the debate and gradually moved on to his next project, “Sophie’s Choice,” a novel about a fictional Polish Catholic woman, Sophie Zawistowska, who struggles to survive the aftermath of her wartime internment in Auschwitz.

Thorough Research

Once again Mr. Styron read extensively, beginning with Olga Lengyel’s memoir of her family’s internment in Auschwitz, “Five Chimneys,” which had haunted him for decades. Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” suggested the central plot development. After reading the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the actual commandant of Auschwitz, Mr. Styron made him a character in the novel.

Working slowly and deliberately, Mr. Styron evolved a complex narrative voice in the novel, more Southern and garrulous than any he had used before. The voice ranged so widely that Mr. Styron was able all at once to answer the critics of “Nat Turner” and to document his extensive reading of Holocaust literature while distancing himself ironically from a youthful, somewhat callow version of himself in the book, a central character who somehow mixes up his revelation of Sophie’s tragedy with the comic rite of his own sexual initiation.

Once again, Mr. Styron achieved commercial success and won prizes. “Sophie’s Choice” rose to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, won the 1980 American Book Award for fiction and was made into a successful movie, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and an opera by the English composer Nicholas Maw. And once again, a Styron project aroused controversy.

The initial reviews were mixed. Some critics seemed to find the complexity of the narrative troubling. But in time, critics focused on two particular objections. One was that the Holocaust so surpassed moral comprehension that it could not be written about at all; the only appropriate response was silence. The other was that even though non-Jews had also been victims of the death camps, for Mr. Styron to write about one of them, a Polish Catholic, was to diminish the true horror of the event, whose primary purpose, these critics pointed out, was the destruction of European Jewry.

Mr. Styron stood his ground. To the criticism that the Holocaust was beyond art, he told an interviewer that however evil the Nazis were, they were neither demons nor extraterrestrials but ordinary men who committed monumental acts of barbarism. To the comment that he was wrong to write about a non-Jew, his response, in an Op-Ed essay in The Times, was that the Holocaust had transcended anti-Semitism, that “its ultimate depravity lay in the fact that it was anti-human,” he wrote. “Anti-life.”

William Clark Styron Jr. was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, the only child of William Clark Styron, a shipyard engineer with roots so deep in the Old South that his mother had owned two slaves as a child, and Pauline Margaret Abraham Styron, whose ancestors were Pennsylvanians.

Mr. Styron’s childhood was close to idyllic. Doted on by his family, an early reader fascinated with words, he made friends easily and happily explored the waterfront and environs of Newport News. In 1940, his father sent him off to Christchurch, a small Episcopal preparatory school in West Point, Va., for his last two years before college. He graduated in 1942.

World War II shaped his college career. Enrolling in the Marines’ reserve officer training program, he started at Davidson College, a conservative Christian school. But unhappy with the school’s strict religious and academic standards, he was transferred to Duke University by the Marines in June 1943.

Active duty followed in October 1944, and after nearly a year of hard training, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in late July 1945 and assigned to participate in the invasion of Japan. A month later, the atomic bomb attacks forced Japan’s surrender, and he was discharged in December, relieved yet frustrated by his lack of combat experience.

He returned to Duke in the fall, where he renewed his friendship with Prof. William Blackburn, who had become his writing mentor. Graduating in the spring of 1947, he came away disdaining academic criticism and determined to be a novelist.

He moved to New York City. “I just found intellectual life here more congenial,” he told an interviewer years later. After completing “Lie Down in Darkness,” he put in a second, three-month stint, in the Marines in the summer of 1951. When the novel won the Prix de Rome, which entailed a year’s expenses-paid residence at the American Academy in Rome, to begin in October 1952, he spent the preceding summer in Paris.

This interlude involved him in the founding of The Paris Review; made him lifelong friends among the expatriate literary set there, among them Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton and Irwin Shaw; and gave him the time to write “The Long March.” The year in Italy provided him with the material for “Set This House on Fire,” and it was in Rome that he became reacquainted with Rose Burgunder, at the American Academy, after having been introduced to her the previous fall in Baltimore, her hometown.

They were married in Rome in May 1953. She survives him. Besides Alexandra Styron of Brooklyn, Mr. Styron is also survived by two other daughters, Susanna Styron of Nyack, N.Y., and Paola Styron of Sherman, Conn.; a son, Thomas, of New Haven; and eight grandchildren.

When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut farmhouse and began a family, his life became the ideal of any aspiring writer: productive yet relaxed, sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his workroom, he tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

An Unusual Regimen

The precept seemed to work for him, but it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.

With Rose to guard the door, run the household, organize their busy social life and look after the children, Mr. Styron followed this routine over the next 30 years. He turned out his novels slowly, yet he found time not only for occasional short stories, novellas, a movie script and a play about his wartime scare with venereal disease, but also for essays, reviews and occasional pieces, the best of which he collected in “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings” (1982).

His life seemed to expand outside the door of his workroom as well. In 1966 he bought a house on harborfront property on Martha’s Vineyard, where the family regularly vacationed and where he began to live from May through October. His circle of friends grew over the years to include Lillian Hellman, Art Buchwald, Philip Roth, James Jones, James Baldwin, E. L. Doctorow, Candice Bergen, Carly Simon, John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mike Wallace and even Norman Mailer, with whom he had feuded fiercely early in their acquaintanceship.

He traveled abroad frequently, especially to France, where he continued to be admired.

Yet if the aura of his life was golden, it was also bordered with dark shadows. At only 13, he suffered the trauma of his mother’s death, which, perhaps because of the time and place he lived in, he was never allowed to mourn properly. A predisposition to depression was evident in his family’s emotional history. For whatever reasons, suicide is a recurrent theme in his fiction. By his own admission, he drank heavily partly to ward off ghosts.

In the summer of 1985, when he turned 60, he suddenly found that alcohol no longer agreed with him. But giving it up brought on mood disorders for which he had to be medicated. These drugs in turn produced destructive side effects, and he was dragged into a deep, prolonged suicidal depression that did not lift until he was hospitalized from December through early February 1986.

He recovered and wrote a harrowing account of his experience, which began as a lecture and became the best-selling book “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness” (1990). Three years later he collected three stories previously published in Esquire magazine in a volume titled “A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales From Youth” (1993). Each treats the confrontation of mortality, and the title story deals with the death of his mother.

Depression continued to stalk him, and he was hospitalized several more times. In “Darkness Visible,” he concluded, referring to Dante: “For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.”

    William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81, NYT, 2.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/books/02styron.html

Selling Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle

November 2, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

Most customers at the Anthropologie store in SoHo come for the delicately woven knits and the ultrafeminine floral dresses. But these days at least some are coming for the books.

Last Sunday the merchandise and books were coordinated with near-perfect precision. Resting beside a black sweater ($68) and a jet-black skirt with orange embellishments ($118) were copies of Annie Leibovitz’s “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005,” big and black and gleaming, for $75. A pop-up book called “One Red Dot” echoed a display of polka-dotted canvas sneakers, while another title, “The Persistence of Yellow,” perfectly matched a strategically positioned yellow knit sweater.

Books are turning up in the oddest places these days.

With book sales sagging — down 2.6 percent as of August over the same period last year, according to the Association of American Publishers — publishers are pushing their books into butcher shops, carwashes, cookware stores, cheese shops, even chi-chi clothing boutiques where high-end literary titles are used to amplify the elegant lifestyle they are attempting to project.

What began as a trickle of cookbooks in kitchen shops and do-it-yourself titles in hardware stores has become, in recent months, the fastest growing component in many major publishers’ retail strategies.

“It’s a way for the book business to stay alive,” said Abby Hoffman, the vice president of sales and marketing for Chronicle Books in San Francisco, which sells most of its 350 offbeat titles each year to places like high-end grocery stores, children’s clothing stores and wineries. “Anyplace that sells merchandise is a place to sell books.”

When Starbucks got into the book business last month, it hitched its brand to Mitch Albom’s latest inevitable best seller, “For One More Day,” helping propel it to the top of the lists. But the shift in the business can more clearly be seen in the sale of lower-profile authors in lower-profile settings, where the right title in the right location can make all the difference for a book that might otherwise sink without a trace.

Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, for instance, has sold more than 4,500 copies of Ann Volkwein’s “Arthur Avenue Cookbook” at $25 each. That book otherwise sold only 8,000 copies nationwide, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales at major book chains, independent bookstores and online retailers, but not at places like Mike’s. But it sold so well at Mike’s that David Greco, the deli’s owner, began stocking more titles, including “The Italian American Cookbook” by John Mariani and “Con Amore: A Daughter-in-Law’s Story of Growing Up Italian-American in Bushwick” by Bea Tusiani.

Mr. Greco says he must factor in at least one expense that bookstores don’t: “When you deal with salami and mozzarella, its a little greasy. So we keep the books in plastic bags.”

After years of concentrating on big-box retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble and online retailers like Amazon, many major publishing houses are retooling their tactics to take advantage of this new frontier.

Simon & Schuster, one of the industry’s largest publishers, is urging its sales representatives to punctuate their bookstore rounds with impromptu pitches at promising shops and markets they spot in their travels. The Time Warner Book Group routinely changes the color or design of book jackets at a store’s request so the book will color-coordinate with merchandise. And HarperCollins plans to design books for its spring catalog in shades of “margarita and sangria,” greens and reds that store owners have told the publisher will dominate that season’s color palette, said Andrea Rosen, vice president for special markets.

At Penguin Group, sales representatives have begun pushing into rural areas that are short on big bookstores, selling at cattle auctions, among other places.

The total number of books sold outside bookstores is impossible to discern. BookScan’s sales figures typically account for 60 percent to 70 percent of a book’s sales, but those figures do not include copies sold in nontraditional places.

Nonetheless, publishing houses know how it has affected their bottom line.

In the last four years Simon & Schuster’s special market sales, as they are called, have grown by 50 percent, surpassing total sales to independent bookstores, said Jack Romanos, the publishing house’s president and chief executive.

“The publisher now has a responsibility to put books in front of more eyeballs,” Mr. Romanos said. “The market was always there, but I don’t know that most publishers were as aggressive about trying to develop it 10 years ago as they are today.”

Some placements make intuitive sense: publishers sell a baby book to a specialty store like Buy Buy Baby; cookbooks go to Williams-Sonoma and other cookware outlets; glossy fashion books to clothing boutiques; design books to stores like Restoration Hardware. But some matches may not be so obvious. Even Bath & Body Works, at Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, N.J., for instance, sells a half-dozen titles on subjects including weddings, gardening and travel to Provence.

With the proper placement, a book displayed at a national chain like Urban Outfitters can easily sell more there than at any other retailer, including blockbuster stores like Barnes & Noble. A recent article in Publishers Weekly noted that one surprise fall hit, “Wall and Piece,” written by the graffiti artist Banksy and published by the Century imprint of Random House in Britain, saw its biggest sales at Urban Outfitters and independent bookstores.

The point, publishers say, is to follow customers who might not otherwise visit bookstores into the places where they do shop, rather than waiting for customers to show up at bookstores or click on Amazon.com and other online sales sites.

People who buy books at farm-supply stores, for instance, are a prime potential market because there may be no bookstores in their rural communities, said Barbara O’Shea, president of nontrade sales for Penguin. “There is nobody selling books, so we’ve gotten these places to sell books,” she said.

The phenomenon is an urban and suburban one, as well.

Martin & Osa, a new clothing retailer aimed at 25-to-40-year-olds, stocks dozens of titles in its four stores and is planning to add more, including a “reading list” of graphic novels, fiction and nonfiction for customers. “We try to offer them things that aren’t mainstream, more unusual, more unique,” said Arnie Cohen, the chief marketing officer.

At Anthropologie on Sunday, Ruth Rennert lounged among the throw pillows on a mustard-yellow sofa — not far from that display of yellow sweaters and books — leafing through “Jackie: A Life in Pictures,” about the former first lady. Shopping for books in a setting like this, she said, is preferable to enduring the hustle and bustle of big bookstores.

While the bulk of books sold in some of these places are novelty titles — like “Bruce Aidells’s Complete Book of Pork” from HarperCollins, now in hundreds of butcher shops — in recent months a broader list of titles has also begun to emerge.

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is for sale at Urban Outfitters, for instance. Staples, the office-supply chain, began carrying business books several years ago, but more recently has added titles like “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential,” by Joel Osteen.

And publishers have stumbled on advantages that often come with this territory: outside of a bookstore, a title enjoys less competition, a more inviting display space and the store’s implicit stamp of approval.

“You walk into Restoration Hardware and you want the couch and the vase and the nightstand, and then you want the two books that are on the nightstand,” Ms. Rosen said. “The books complete the story.”

    Selling Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle, NYT, 2.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/books/02books.html

Technology Rewrites the Book

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By PETER WAYNER

When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.

“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular — I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”

Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover, and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just for that buyer.

The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

As the technology becomes simpler, the market is expanding beyond the earliest adopters, the aspiring authors. The first companies like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse and others pushed themselves as new models of publishing, with an eye on shaking up the dusty book business. They aimed at authors looking for someone to edit a manuscript, lay out the book and bring it to market.

The newer ventures also produce bound books, but they do not offer the same hand-holding or the same drive for the best-seller list. Blurb’s product will appeal to people searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.

Blurb.com’s design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template — say, the position of a page number or a background color — the changes affect all the pages.

The software is markedly easier to use — although less capable — than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book. Prices start at $29.95 for books of 1 to 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages.

Blurb, based in San Francisco, has many plans for expanding its software. Eileen Gittins, the chief executive, said the company would push new tools for “bookifying” data, beginning with a tool that “slurps” the entries from a blog and places them into the appropriate templates.

The potential market for these books is attracting a number of start-ups and established companies, most of them focusing on producing bound photo albums. Online photo processing sites like Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Snapfish and Shutterfly and popular packages like the iPhoto software from Apple let their customers order bound volumes of their prints.

These companies offer a wide variety of binding fabrics, papers, templates and background images, although the styles are dominated by pink and blue pastels. Snapfish offers wire-bound “flipbooks” that begin at $4.99. Kodak Gallery offers a “Legacy Photo Book” made with heavier paper and bound in either linen or leather. It starts at $69.99. Apple makes a tiny 2.6-by-3.5-inch softbound book that costs $3.99 for 20 pages and 29 cents for each additional page.

The nature and style of these options are changing as customers develop new applications. “Most of the people who use our products are moms with kids,” says Kevin McCurdy, a co-founder of Picaboo.com in Palo Alto, Calif. But he said there had been hundreds of applications the company never anticipated: teachers who make a yearbook for their class, people who want to commemorate a party and businesses that just want a high-end brochure or catalog.

Picaboo, like Blurb, distributes a free copy of its book design software, which runs on the user’s computer. Mr. McCurdy said that running the software on the user’s machine saves users the time and trouble of uploading pictures. The companies that offer Web-based design packages, however, point out that their systems do not require installing any software and also offer a backup for the user’s photos.

As more companies enter the market, they are searching for niches. One small shop in Duvall, Wash., called SharedInk.com, emphasizes its traditional production techniques and the quality of its product. Chris Hickman, the founder, said that each of his books was printed and stitched together by “two bookbinders who’ve been in the industry for 30 or 40 years.” The result, he said, is a higher level of quality that appeals to professional photographers and others willing to pay a bit more. Books of 20 pages start at $39.95.

Some companies continue to produce black-and-white books. Lulu.com is a combination printer and order-fulfillment house that prints both color and black-and-white books, takes orders for them and places them with bookstores like Amazon.com.

Lulu works from a PDF file, an approach that forces users to rely on basic word processors or professional design packages. If this is too complex, Lulu offers a marketplace where book designers offer their services. Lulu does offer a special cover design package that will create a book’s cover from an image and handle the specialized calculations that compute the size of the spine from the number of pages and the weight of the paper.

A 6-by-9-inch softcover book with 150 black-and-white pages from Lulu would cost $7.53 per single copy.

These packages are adding features that stretch the concept of a book, in some cases undermining the permanent, fixed nature that has been part of a book’s appeal. The software from SharedInk.com, for instance, lets a user leave out pages from some versions of the book. If Chris does not like Pat, for instance, then the copy going to Chris could be missing the pages with Pat’s pictures.

Blurb is expanding its software to let a community build a book. Soon, it plans to introduce a tool that would allow group projects, like a Junior League recipe book, to be created through Blurb’s Web site. The project leader would send out an e-mail message inviting people to visit the site and add their contributions to customized templates, which would then be converted into book pages.

“Books are breaking wide open,” Ms. Gittins said. “Books are becoming vehicles that aren’t static things.”

    Technology Rewrites the Book, NYT, 20.7.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/technology/20basics.html

'Da Vinci' as a Brand: From Soup to Nuts

May 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

If you, like more than 100 million readers around the world, enjoyed "The Da Vinci Code," marketers are betting that you might like the "Da Vinci" video game for PlayStation2 and Xbox, too. Or a "Da Vinci Code" paint-by-number. Or "The Da Vinci Fitness Code," a diet book based on the Fibonacci sequence.

With the movie opening this weekend, "The Da Vinci Code" has already spawned a mini-industry unto itself that encompasses video games, cookbooks, walking tours of the Louvre, even pornography. And despite the film's mostly scathing reviews, more products are likely to add to the "Da Vinci" collection.

Dan Burstein, the author of "Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind the Da Vinci Code (Client Distribution Services, 2004)," estimates that "The Da Vinci Code," in all its permutations, has already generated some $1 billion in sales. And that number will only rise with the movie, even if it proves less than the superblockbuster that Sony Pictures has been counting on.

"We're talking about something that over time will be a multibillion-dollar brand business," Mr. Burstein said. "This movie is going to be seen all over the world; it's going to be debated and discussed all over the world; it's going to have large DVD sales. It has a very long tail on it."

Most of the merchandise and services surrounding "Da Vinci" are offered by independent operators unaffiliated with the movie or book. And a lot of it can be found on eBay. There are more than 2,000 entries for "Da Vinci Code"-related items on the site, including a "vintage" Da Vinci Code bracelet ("Super for going out clubbing!" promised a seller in Hong Kong). And don't forget the 9-inch wall clock featuring "code, ciphers and symbols" on the dial, which is being offered by a seller in Guthrie, Okla.

No matter what happens to the movie, the merchandise and travel tied to the brand will stay strong, some marketing experts said.

"Very rarely does the merchandise succeed if the underlying property doesn't succeed," said Marty Brochstein, the executive editor of The Licensing Letter, a newsletter published by EPM Communications in New York. "That said, the popularity of 'Da Vinci Code' is based on the book and how many people loved the book, not the movie."

The film, which opened in general distribution yesterday, is expected to take in perhaps $70 million or more in the United States this weekend. While Sony has already been moving to damp outsize expectations, that kind of opening could still put "The Da Vinci Code" not far behind some of the biggest box-office openers of all time, according to Exhibitor Relations, a company that tallies box-office receipts.

"Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" collected more than $88 million in its opening weekend in November 2002. (The biggest box-office opener of all time was "Spider-Man," with an opening gross of $114.8 million that stretched over a slightly longer period.)

Of course, at the core of the "Da Vinci" brand is the book, which has 60.5 million copies in print and has been translated into 44 languages since it was first published. The book has produced roughly $400 million in revenue so far in worldwide sales.

The book industry has already produced dozens of titles that tie into the themes of "Da Vinci," from explorations of Opus Dei to biographies of Biblical figures.

Most of the books tied to "Da Vinci" are unrelated to the official franchise, but capitalize on the interest in the book's religious and historical themes.

Among them are "The Templar Legacy (Ballantine Books, 2006)," by Steve Berry, the story of a former Justice Department operative who is searching for the secrets of the medieval Knights Templar; "The Secret Supper (Simon & Schuster, 2006)," a novel centered around an investigation of Leonardo da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper," by Javier Sierra; and "Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church (Doubleday Religion, 2005)," by John L. Allen Jr.

In March, Random House published "Fodor's Guide to The Da Vinci Code," a travel book that traces the steps of the novel, which takes place in Paris, London and Rome, among other places. Random House printed 100,000 copies of the book, which Rachel Lieberman, a spokeswoman for Fodor's, called "the largest print run in recent memory" for a Fodor's guide.

But few groups have benefited from "Da Vinci" as much the travel industry has. The film's release has even enticed more Americans to plan trips to Europe this summer, according to a survey released on Thursday by AAA, formerly the American Automobile Association. AAA travel agents, according to the survey, have reported a 25 percent increase in bookings to Europe.

One tourism company, Cross-Culture Journeys in Amherst, Mass., is offering 14-day all-inclusive tours that trace the book's events in sequence, beginning in Paris and ending in Edinburgh, for $8,895 a person. The trip includes stays at the Ritz in Paris (the dwelling of Robert Langdon, the character played by Tom Hanks in the film) and the Hotel Bernini Bristol in Rome.

The frenzy over "Da Vinci" travel is not just for die-hard fans, said Ati Jain, the president of Cross-Culture Journeys.

"You've been to London, you've been to Paris, you've been to Rome and now you can add a different perspective to it," Mr. Jain said. "It's allowing people to look at things in a different light."

A typical tour in Paris, sponsored by the travel company, Paris Vision, offers a guided visit of eight and a half hours to sights from the book, including the Church of St. Sulpice and the Musee d'Orsay, for about $208.

Even the normally staid Louvre has capitalized on the "Da Vinci" frenzy. Last year, the novel helped lure a record 7.5 million visitors to the museum on the right bank of the Seine in the heart of Paris. Hoping to undercut private tours, the Louvre is sponsoring an audio tour of its own, "Step Inside the Da Vinci Code," narrating a walk down the parquet floors where the fictional murder takes place, setting off a chase surrounding the main character, the Harvard scholar Robert Langdon.

And the film has gotten its share of free publicity from television documentaries and specials devoted to the subject. Last week was Da Vinci Decoded Week on the History Channel, which ran more than a dozen programs exploring the book and related topics. In the end, the makers of the film may eventually cash in on lucrative merchandising, which they have avoided so far. Mr. Burstein of "Secrets of the Da Vinci Code" said they may be waiting for the controversy surrounding the film to die down.

"This month, you couldn't get McDonald's to have Robert Langdon action figures," he said. "But in the future, there's going to be reality shows; there's going to be treasure hunts; there's going to be cellphone downloads. Everything."

    'Da Vinci' as a Brand: From Soup to Nuts, NYT, 20.5.2006,     http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/business/media/20code.html

The Bookseller Joel Rickett

on the latest news from the publishing industry -

12.3.2005

The Guardian Review

• More than a third of adults in the UK never buy books. That is the most worrying statistic to emerge from "Expanding the Market", a research project funded by publishers and the Arts Council into those elusive "light and non book buyers". The survey found that a quarter of people do not feel welcome in bookshops, which they see as elitist or off-putting. Many who only buy a few books a year are daunted by the vast range on display, and don't trust newspaper reviews or "pretentious" quotes on novel jackets. Instead they are reliant on recommendations from family and friends, and to a lesser extent mass media such as Richard & Judy's Book Club. Books are still viewed as overly expensive by 21% of people, yet extensive discounting of new hardbacks has also devalued them as gift purchases. There are still many who maintain that they will never buy books, but half of light buyers said that they would buy more if books were available more widely and cover prices came down.

• The survey shows that the industry has done a superb job selling more books to existing readers — those who buy more than 11 books a year — but largely failed to reach out further. A rich output of at least 100,000 titles a year actually alienates much of the potential audience: light readers see books as a major investment of time, and resent it when they are "mis-sold". Publishers have cut back lists over the last few years, but have they gone far enough? With children's books, people are put off by the difficulty of choosing the right reading level; publishers are now working on an age-range banding scheme to aid selection. They also need to experiment with fresh formats. Most literary novelists are still pub­ lished in hardback, with the more appealing paperback receiving a fraction of the publicity and losing momentum. Could they be better served through a single concerted publication?

• One barrier to book reading is low literacy levels: 12m adults in the UK have a reading age below that expected of a 13-year-old. Random House chief executive Gail Rebuck says: "The problem is all around us — and the irony is that those of us who read can't see it. Our job is to take emergent readers and make them addicted readers." Next year the industry will aim to change this with a series of short, easy £2.99 books from big-name authors including Maeve Binchy and Joanne Trollope. Buyers can also use a £1 voucher to be distributed through government literacy programmes and a BBC campaign. The scheme aims to echo the runaway success of World Book Day for children: last week sales of the six WBD £1 books soared a fifth higher than 2004, with Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry's Bedtime finally ousting The Da Vinci Code from number one. Bookshop events and the backing of Tesco helped the overall book market grow 15%.

• One author who has single-handedly expanded the market is Dan Brown, with The Da Vinci Code and his backlist appealing to hundreds of thousands of new readers. But fans will have to wait until 2006 for Brown's next opus. His publisher, Transworld, had hoped for a Christmas blockbuster, but it has now accepted that the freemasonry thriller — provisionally called The Solomon Key — will not be ready in time. The challenge is to convert new Brown readers to other authors — without alienating them by flogging pale imitations.

    The Bookseller Joel Rickett on the latest news from the publishing industry,
    The Guardian, Review, p. 38, 12.3.2005.

An instinct for the future

George Orwell:

The Age's Adversary, by Patrick Reilly (Macmillan, £27.50)

April 10 1986

From The Guardian archive

April 10 1986
The Guardian

1984 unloosed an Orwellian flood of truly Biblical proportions. Here in 1986 the flood starts again. 'The world's evolution,' says the author, 'has placed him at the heart of our present complexities, and we go to his writing not in any spirit of aloof research but to find solutions to existing problems.'

This is a wonderful book. Orwell-lovers, Orwell-haters and any benighted Laodiceans left in the middle should all read it. Socialists should read it, democratic Socialists; the rest have no right to defile the name.

Who can doubt that 'the collapse of the vision of Socialism' has been 'one of the great intellectual traumas of the West,' and that therefore the means whereby Socialism is to be revived both as 'an idea and ideal' is 'for many in Europe the key question'?

To attempt the task while spurning Orwell is worse than mere arrogance or folly: it is, almost certainly, an act of cowardice too, the very same charge which Orwell levelled at so many of his contemporaries.

Patrick Reilly will have none of the nonsense that Orwell himself had deserted the Socialist cause; he knows his Orwell much too well. True, he could dabble in patronising references to individual workers or the working class he came to honour or love. Usually he detected these lapses before anyone else and was quick to make amends. Usually he paid everyone the compliment of offering the same kind of personal relations. Only the real underdogs got special treatment.

And sometimes he could see much further, in the interests of his adopted class, than many of their authentic spokesmen. In the 1930s he realised how insulting it might be to transfer slum dwellers into working-class ghettos where they couldn't bring their community ethos. He alone, or almost alone, saw the horror of tower blocks when they were no more than a malign glint.

Moreover, the lone prophet needed an escape from the wilderness and a pay packet. He needed them most when all Establishment doors were being slammed in his face, when he could at first find no publisher for Animal Farm, when no newspaper for which he wanted to write would publish what he wrote — except Aneurin Bevan's Tribune. Orwell himself judged Homage to Catalonia his best work and many will concur. 'The intimacy never fully achieved with the English working class is miraculously and movingly consummated on the opening page.'

Altogether, what made Orwell such a challenge to all the massed orthodoxies — what still makes him — was the moulding into one of his art, his character, his message.

Michael Foot

    From The Guardian archive > April 10 1986 > An instinct for the future > George Orwell: The Age's Adversary, by Patrick Reilly (Macmillan, £27.50), G, Republished 10.4.2007, p. 30, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/04/10/pages/ber30.shtml

November 24, 1972

Berger turns tables on Booker

From The Guardian archive

Friday November 24, 1972
Guardian

John Berger last night accepted the Booker Prize - Britain's biggest annual literary award - and said that he would use the £5,000 to help the Black Panthers to resist "further exploitation". He said his object was to turn the prize against its sponsors, Booker McConnell. "Booker McConnell have had extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for more than 180 years," Mr Berger said.

"The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation. One of the consequences of this poverty is that hundreds of thousands of West Indians have been forced to come to Britain as migrant workers. Thus my book about migrant workers would be financed directly out of them or their relatives or ancestors."

Mr Berger (who has also won this year's Guardian fiction prize) was speaking at the Cafe Royal, Regent Street, London, where he accepted the prize from Mr Roy Jenkins, MP, for his novel "G".

The book was chosen from a list of 50 by Cyril Connolly, Elizabeth Bowen and George Steiner. Mr Connolly said the judges chose "G" for "its human and intellectual distinction, its grasp of modern history and sympathy with the oppressed."

Michael McNay

Berger's statement: "The industrial revolution and the inventions and culture which accompanied it and which created modern Europe was initially financed by profits from the slave trade. And the fundamental nature of relations between Europe and the rest of the world, between black and white, has not changed.

"Before the slave trade began, before the European de-humanised himself, clenched himself on his violence, there must have been a moment when black and white approached each other with the amazement of potential equals. The moment passed. And henceforth the world was divided between potential slaves and potential slavemasters.

"The historical destiny of our time is becoming clear. The oppressed are breaking through the wall of silence which was built into their minds by their oppressor. And in their struggle against exploitation and neocolonialism - but only through and by virtue of this common struggle - it is possible for the descendants of the slave and the slavemaster to approach each other again with the amazed hope of potential equals.

"This is why I intend to share the prize with those West Indians in and from the Caribbean who are fighting to put an end to their exploitation."

    From The Guardian archive > November 24, 1972 > Berger turns tables on Booker, G, Republished 24.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1956020,00.html

November 4, 1960

Jurors unbind Lawrence and Chatterley

From the Guardian archive

Friday November 4, 1960
Guardian

Sometimes the Lady Chatterley trial seemed like a setpiece confrontation between all that is good in England and all that is bad. Sometimes one could not keep a straight face at all those skilful men seriously arguing whether it was safe for people to read words they all know describing things they all do. Something died at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, some bad old strand in our culture, and the manner of its going was sometimes funny, sometimes ugly.

Treasury counsel spouting stereotypes from the Authoritarian Personality, while all that he stood for was sinking into the waters of oblivion, was an imposing phenomenon. "There are, are there not, certain standards...", "After all, restraint in sexual matters..." Here prosecution counsel reached inevitably for his copy of Criminal Statistics, which was ruled out by the Judge. The idea that a decrease in sexual restraint will give rise to an increase in criminal activity can only be entertained by one particular temperament, that which believes that all or most sexual appetite tends towards criminal actions.

One should not, perhaps, have doubted the issues. Here was a barrister asking human beings alive now, not the patriarchs of ancient Israel, whether this was a book they would like "their wives and servants" to read, always referring to lovemaking as "bouts", using a contrived philistinism, and finally, trying to panic the jury with an innuendo of buggery in the book. And strangest effect of all, unaware that he himself was obliterated by the fire of Lawrence's writing.

At first it was hard to keep still and silent, so painful was that flat, grinding voice coming between us and the words. But then the voice seemed to vanish; it did not matter who was reading and I for one was brought to realise that those tremendous pages of level and open eloquence had for years been living unremembered in my head as surely as the Authorised Version or Shakespeare themselves.

Lawrence reared up from his grave, sheltered goodness, truth and beauty, and annihilated prosecutors, judges, guardians of taste, fusspots, sadists and all the runners of grey lust with the single cautery of clean English prose.

The hero among the [defence] witnesses was Richard Hoggart. I think he made history. In his evidence, using the word in its correct and proper sense, he said the point Lawrence made was : "Simply, this is what one does. One fucks." If ever the English language comes to be at peace with itself again, the credit will be Lawrence's first, but Hoggart's soon after.

Wayland Young

   From the Guardian archive > November 4, 1960 > Jurors unbind Lawrence and Chatterley, G, Republished 4.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1939385,00.html

5 February 1932

The Guardian / From The Guardian Archive

Mr Aldous Huxley prophesies

Brave New World. By Aldous Huxley. London: Chatto and Windus. Pp. 306. 7s. 6d. net.

There are few more brilliantly clever writers to-day than Mr. Aldous Huxley. Yet the title which he gave to one of his earlier books, "These Barren Leaves", is applicable to very much that he has written. He has been persistently drawn to dissect the body of a decaying civilisation, and, although he has often incidentally thrown light upon the principles of life and even at moments almost wistfully affirmed them, he has been obsessed by the processes of death. For him all our immediate yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death – the death of false refinement, of sexual perversity, and of self-conscious isolation.

In "Brave New World" he projects his death-consciousness into all our to-morrows. And the death which he portrays here with an extraordinary fertility of invention and an almost diabolical wit is not the death of morbid introversion but of indistinguishable superficiality, and sameness.

He transports us into a world in which every human being is manufactured according to plan in a labo ratory. Mr. Huxley's description of the fertilising, the bottling and the social predestination rooms is a really brilliant tour de force.

The result of this application of mass-production of biology is to produce an entirely stable and sterile civilisation, a world in which people are happy because they have no individuality to be unsatisfied. And if the delusion of happiness momentarily fades, there is "soma", a drug which transports whoever takes it into a holiday world of absolute conviction.

Mr. Huxley manages very skilfully, however, to discover in this world characters who are both automata within the prescribed limits and appreciably human. And one of them, Bernard Marx, through some error in his "conditioning", has an unhealthy and unsocial desire to be not somebody else but himself. And he in turn brings back from an expedition to the New Mexico Reservation a young man born and reared in a primitive and pre-Fordian manner. The story turns upon the reactions of the "savage" to a civilisation sterilised not only against every physical and mental disease, but every experience of spiritual value.

The book suffers from Mr. Huxley's characteristic inability to believe really in anything. There is nothing which he can imaginatively affirm. The dread of sentiment and the habit of disillusionment are too strong for him. It is easier to exploit the possibilities of mental death than to meet the demands of creative life. H. L'A.F.

    Mr Aldous Huxley prophesies, G, 5 February 1932, republished 5.2.2009, p. 36, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2009/02/05/pages/ber36.shtml, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/05/aldoushuxley

January 17 1928

The Guardian / From The Guardian Archive

A Dorset farewell to Thomas Hardy

Dorchester, Monday. Today the heart of Thomas Hardy was laid to rest in a little country churchyard on the Wessex Downs. This seemed to those who saw it infinitely more important than what was happening in the Abbey, for these were his own people, and to them his heart, untouched and sentient, was Hardy.

There lie in all of us old primitive beliefs and unremembered dreams ready to seize upon our consciousness. Hardy, with his knowledge of the workings of the human mind, would have understood why the people returning from distant towns, and those who still clung to their hamlet homes nearby, who filled the church or waited by the deep and narrow grave, felt — as probably their remote ancestors would have done — that when his heart remained among them, he remained.

The Stinsford churchyard, sloping eastwards, was sheltered from the westerly wind that fluttered the half-mast flags in Dorchester.

To the visitors who knew Hardy from his books the village was Mellstock of "Under The Greenwood Tree". But to the people coming in twos and threes from the town or from the hamlets along muddy, winding lanes, past the thatched farm buildings whose pungent, earthy smell was wafted to the churchyard gates, it was the parish church of their childhood and Hardy was one of themselves, the old inhabitant whose forefathers had worshipped in the church.

The church was filled. Silently the people in the doorway made way for an old man whose journey up the aisle was attended by his doctor. It was Thomas Hardy's younger brother Henry. His cousin, Miss Teresa Hardy, who had intended to be present, was too unwell to travel the short distance from her cottage.

A few seats behind was [an] old man who remembered Hardy as a child, and who sent a handful of Wessex earth from his garden to the Dean of Westminster asking that it might be placed with the buried ashes.

The casket was placed on a small, sun-bleached stool at the end of the open grave as the vicar uttered the first sentences of committal. Then he gave it to the sexton, who placed it far down in the chalky ground before the words "Earth to earth and dust to dust" were pronounced. Mr. Henry Hardy threw a handful of flowers into the grave and then was led away greatly distressed.

Miss Teresa Hardy said, "I was too upset by the idea of Tom's heart being separated from his body that I think I should have fainted if I had gone to the service."

    A Dorset farewell to Thomas Hardy, January 17 1928, The Guardian / From The Guardian Archive, republished 17.1.2008, p. 34, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2008/01/17/pages/ber34.shtml

June 20, 1924

A novel where India examines EM Forster

From the Guardian archive

Friday June 20, 1924
Guardian

A Passage to India By EM Forster, London: Edward Arnold 7s 6d net

The first duty of any reviewer is to welcome Mr EM Forster's reappearance and to express the hope that the general public, as well as the critics, will recognise his merits and their good fortune.

The second is to congratulate him upon the tone and temper of his new novel. To speak of its "fairness" would convey the wrong impression. This is the involuntary fairness of the man who sees.

Mr Forster, in fact, has reached the stage in his development as an artist when, in his own words about Miss Quested, he is "no longer examining life, but being examined by it." He has been examined by India, and this is his confession.

There can be no doubt about the principal faculties which have contributed to its quality: imagination and humour. It is imagination in the strictest sense of the world as the power of seeing and hearing internally, without any obligation to fancy.

His characters draw themselves, and mainly in their conversation. More remarkable even than his vision is Mr Forster's power of inner hearing; he seems incapable of allowing a person to speak out of character, and Dr Aziz strikes one as less invented than overheard.

Equally pure is Mr Forster's humour. His people, British or native, are not satirised or caricatured or made the targets of wit; they are simply enjoyed.

The story is, essentially, that of the close contact of east and west in the persons of Dr Aziz, a Muslim, assistant medical officers of the Chandrapore hospital, and Mr Fielding, principal of the college. In them it is as close as blood itself allows. So far as affection is concerned they are friends, so that the interplay of east and west is along the very finest channels of human intercourse - suggesting the comparison of the blood and air vessels in the lungs; but the friendship is always at the mercy of the feelings which rise from the deeps of racial personality.

Mr Forster leans, if anywhere, towards his own race in his acute sense of their difficulties, but not more than by the weight of blood; and, again, fairness is not the word for his sensitive presentation. It is something much less conscious; not so much a virtue as a fatality of his genius. Whether he presents Englishman or Muslim or Hindu or Eurasian he is no longer examining life, but being examined by it in the deeps of his personality as an artist.

    From the Guardian archive > June 20, 1924 > A novel where India examines EM Forster, G, Republished 20.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1801526,00.html

July 24, 1916

A mythology is the work of a race

From the Guardian archive

Monday July 24, 1916
Guardian

The Titans by Charles M. Doughty
London: Duckworth

This is an epic dealing with the creation of the world, the battle of Titans against gods, their defeat and their final subjugation in the service of man.

One does not find fault with Mr. Doughty for writing an epic. No literary genre, once established, is ever outworn. But mythology is dangerous literary material.

It should be a mythology in which the author more or less believes or a mythology in which some people once believed. A mythology cannot be created for literary purposes out of whole cloth; it must be the work of a race.

Mr. Doughty's mythology lacks outline, it lacks tradition, and it lacks concreteness. The theme suggests Milton and Keats. But Milton and Keats at their best communicate a feeling, the one of titanic revolt, the other of titanic silence and despondency.

When they fail they suggest Mr. Doughty. Mr. Doughty's Titans have bulk without meaning. They have violence, but no passions.

Leaned to time-fretted cliffs/ Is entered weariness, in each marble corse.

In Hyperion the weariness is made actual; here it is stated. Bios and Kratos in Prometheus Bound succeed because they are boldly and intentionally abstract, in contrast with a passionate suffering human being. Eschylus never fell into the error of the vague.

As for Mr. Doughty's style, one is puzzled. He aims at the ruggednes of the Saxon tongue. If he were consistently Anglo-Saxon he might arrive at giving a total impression, even employing, as he does, words of which one does not know the meaning.

But there are heavy Latinisms too. One turns from the harsh "From the mount's knees, up to his frozen breast:/ Eotons [sic] and time-giants strive mainly and sweat"

to "... the adamantine Elements couched indivisible particles ...".

One can enjoy a style of excess - Sir Thomas Browne,or Lyly, or Mr. Wyndham Lewis, or Browning - if it is excess in a peculiar and exclusive direction.

Mr. Doughty's style is not archaic; it is not the style of any time or the style of any intelligible pose; it is eccentric, but not personal. Thus it recalls several writers without being imitative of them.

It recalls especially Blake, not the Blake of extraordinary creations of phrase springing at a leap from the unconscious, but the Blake of such verse as America."

T. S. E.

[In 1916 the poet TS Eliot, aged 28, was teaching at a Highgate school and was a year away from publishing Prufrock]

    From the Guardian archive > July 24, 1916 > A mythology is the work of a race, G, Republished 24.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1827495,00.html

July 2 1913

Lawrence the poet as a novelist

From The Guardian archive

July 2 1913
The Guardian

"Odi et amo" should have been on the title-page of Mr. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (Duckworth and Co., 6s). The book may be said to contrast filial and maternal love with the kind of love which is called amour.

A good many amours are described, involving several markedly diverse persons; but all the affairs are unanimous in one matter — whatever kind of love it may be, some kind of hate is mixed up. A simultaneous passion of love and hatred is a well-known psychological fact; and Mr. Lawrence makes its appearance in his story curiously credible. But it is not a very pleasant fact; is it not a weakness of vitality, a kind of failure — life failing to appreciate itself, hating itself because it cannot appreciate the splendour of its own fate? Whether or not, it is a fact one can easily have too much of.

If Mr. Lawrence thought to give intensity to the whole length (the very considerable length) of his story by this mingling of contrary passions, he miscalculated seriously. The constant juxtaposition of love and hatred like all obsessions soon becomes tiresome. You begin to look out for the word "hate" as soon as you have read the word "love,". "Odi et amo" does marvellous well in an epigram; in a novel of four hundred odd pages it is a bore.

The book has no particular shape and no recognisable plot; themes are taken up, and dropt. Everything that happens is an extraordinarily long time about it, and sometimes it takes a very long time for nothing at all to happen.

Faults like these ought to swamp any virtues the book may possess. So, perhaps, it would, if Mr. Lawrence were simply a novelist. But he is one of the most remarkable poets of the day; and these faults are of no more account than the soot of a brilliant, vehement flame. You find yourself protesting that this thing or that thing bores you, and eagerly reading on in spite of your protestations.

You decide that the old collier, the father, is a dirty brute; and then perceive that he profoundly has your sympathy. The mother is a creature of superb and lovable heroism; and yet she is sometimes downright disagreeable. You think you are reading an unimportant scene; and then find that it has burnt itself on your mind. The "Odi et amo" of the main theme, in fact, is only an exaggerated instance of the quality which runs through the whole book.

"Sons and Lovers" [stands] out from the fiction of the day as an achievement of the first quality.

L.A.

    From The Guardian archive > July 2 1913 > Lawrence the poet as a novelist, G, republished 2.7.2007, p. 34, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/07/02/pages/ber34.shtml

September 30 1902

Mr Kipling's taste but  dilute

The Guardian
From The Guardian Archive

Just So Stories for Little Children, by Rudyard Kipling.

One's first feeling after reading quickly the book of stories that Mr. Kipling publishes to-day is one of disappointment. The Kipling taste is in your mouth, but it is dilute Kipling.

You are inclined to grumble at being put off with tobacco so heavily watered and spirits so much below proof. Was it for this that our literature was enriched with the smell of the smokeroom? Why, this scarcely smells at all.

His first disappointment over, the adult finds it occurring to him that Mr. Kipling has actually written a children's book meant to be liked by children, and not merely to be called by grown-up people a book that children are sure to like. This much grasped, you begin to feel that the absence of everything that you had been missing is a proof of artistic self-denial.

A writer fanatically, almost telegraphically terse, he has not flinched from the litanies of verbal repetition, the Homeric otioseness of fixed epithets that children exact so severely from candidates for the honour of amusing them.

He who has penetrated to the heart, if not of human wisdom, at least of young mannish knowingness, has bent his spirit to say of a man inside a whale that on his entry:

He stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped...

And, of the whale itself, that before trying this uneasy diet:

He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.

Such things are not written with the heart's blood, but children will not have them otherwise, and if Mr. Kipling can bring himself to give his special powers so complete a rest for the delectation of the nursery, it is not for critics to forget the rule of judging every work of art in the light of its intention. As a book truly intended for children this one is very good.

Tragic death of M. Zola. Paris.

M. Emile Zola was this morning found dead in his house
from accidental asphyxiation by poisonous gases emitted from a stove,
the pipe of which is stated to have been fitted badly.

    Mr Kipling's taste but dilute, G, September 30 1902, republished 30.9.2008, p. 36, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2008/09/30/pages/ber36.shtml

December 10 1895

The Guardian archive

Jude the Obscure

To all admirers of Mr. Thomas Hardy's genius Jude the Obscure (Osgood and McIlvaine, 8vo, pp.517, 6s.) can only bring keen disappointment. We have gained so much positive delight from him in the past that we had come to regard the appearance of a new book as an event of unmixed pleasure.

To be shown by a master hand the essential and characteristic loveliness of English landscape, to be amused and interested by a flow of racy talk which, if not the actual talk of the real agricultural labourer, was yet always appropriate and in close artistic sympathy with the painted scene, to have our literary sense pleased by a style which, though occasionally exuberant, was always picturesque — these are the pleasures we have learned to expect from Mr. Hardy.

It is true that in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" there was, for the first time, an introduction of a controversial as opposed to an artistic purpose. But though discussion might rage at the time as to whether Tess was or was not "a pure woman," the point must ultimately be lost sight of in the beauty of those descriptions of the Blackmoor Vale and the Upland Farm which alone would suffice to keep the book alive.

It is unfortunately not so with "Jude the Obscure". The purpose is so strong, so insistent, so polemical as to swamp everything else. There is not in the whole 517 pages of this dreary production one single paragraph which makes for pleasure. Beauty, to which in all its forms Mr. Hardy has hitherto shown himself so sensitive, is conspicuous only by absence.

For human beings the accumulated experience of centuries has shown the institution of marriage to be pre-eminently well suited. Let us see what plea Mr. Hardy offers for so tremendous an iconoclasm as its destruction. Reduced to its lowest terms, the thesis of the book may be expressed in these propositions — (1) It is always irksome, often tragic, for a man and woman to be tied to one another after passion is dead; (2) if compulsion were withdrawn and marriage made terminable at will, passion might have a longer life. In other words, the whole object of relations between men and women should be, according to Mr. Hardy, the maintenance of a state of emotional excitement.

Such is the plea upon which we are asked to do away with marriage, that great school of character, to whose inexorable discipline the best men and women have gladly owned themselves indebted for all that was soundest and sweetest in their lives. We are afraid Mr. Hardy will have to find another and a better one before he can hope to get serious people to listen to him.

    Jude the Obscure, The Guardian, December 10 1895, Republished December 10 2008, The Guardian archive, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/dec/10/1

May 3, 1864

Dickens and his old horror of the dark river

From The Guardian Archive

Tuesday May 3, 1864
Guardian

Our Mutual Friend By Charles Dickens: Chapman and Hall

Mr Dickens, who has so long been accustomed to let his novels dribble forth in weekly instalments, is carrying us back to old times by bringing out a story in monthly parts.

In much which those thirty pages contain, we recognise the beginnings of original ideas which have not had their development in any previous novel. Especially we recognise the easy mastery of language and the fanciful style which distinguishes all of Mr. Dickens's writing.

Quaint adjectives which embody an idea as vividly as a gleam of sunshine will reveal a landscape, and a richness of imagination which is playfully poured out over every subject he treats, may always be observed in any utterance by the great author of "David Copperfield".

Mr. Dickens's old horror of the dark river comes out again in the very first sentences. A man who gets his living fishing for dead bodies in the Thames is the first personage introduced.

In the mystery concerning the disappearance of a certain Mr Harmon, who was to come over from the West Indies to inherit a large fortune and marry a young lady left to him under the will, there is already a good deal of interest.

It is a body which is supposed to be his which is found by the river searcher when we first see him at his work. The clothes on it are identified and everything appears to show that the body is really that of Mr. Harmon, but perhaps some persons inclined to speculate will think that it may not be Mr. Harmon after all.

In the opening passages, Mr. Dickens's early style reappears :

"... A boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, kept an eager look-out. He had no net, hook or line, and he could not be a fisherman; and he could not be a waterman ... but his eyes watched every little race and eddy. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror."

For some time to come there will be a new interest in the first of each month, for a new novel by Dickens is a literary event.

    From The Guardian Archive > May 3, 1864 > Dickens and his old horror of the dark river,
    G, Republished 3.5.2006,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1766272,00.html

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