2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Sana Krasikov recently won the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, along with $100,000, for her debut short story collection, One More Year. According to the press release, the Sami Rohr Prize "is the largest monetary prize of its kind in the Jewish literary world, and one of the largest literary prizes worldwide." Allen Hoffman, one of this year’s fiction judges, commented:

[Krasikov's] characters are often alienated and confused, but her stories are always clear and precise, because Krasikov deeply understands her characters' aspirations, fears, and stubborn passion for survival. Her elegant, revealing narratives imbue their fragile, vulnerable lives with an imposing dignity.

I read One More Year last year and gave it a 4.5 out of 5. It was one of the best books I read all year.

Books are "Alien and Unattractive" to Some

As reported by TheBookseller.com, research conducted in the UK by HarperCollins, the Trade Publishers Council, and the National Year of Reading (NYR) suggests the book trade is "too intimidating" for lower income, non-professional families. The research found that many such families, numbering up to 20 million, view books as "alien and unattractive" and consider reading as "an anti-social activity for people who don't know how to live."

NYR project director Honor Wilson-Fletcher said: "[I]ntentionally or otherwise, a lot of people involved in the book world are conveying the impression that reading is associated with a particular area of society and lifestyle."

Even Amazon Isn't Immune

For the first time since 2006, Amazon will close three distribution centers. Amazon says it's closing the centers--located in Munster, Indiana, Red Rock, Nevada, and Chambersburg, Pennslyvania--as "part of a reorganization of its fulfillment network" to move capacity to larger warehouses that can "better balance product mix and customer orders." The 215 workers at the three warehouses slated for closure will receive pay through May 25, receive benefits through May 31, and get a minimum of 3 weeks severance pay, according to Amazon spokesperson Patty Smith. Also, certain "eligible" workers will be offered the chance to transfer to other U.S. distribution centers.

Oddest Book Title of the Year

TheBookseller.com announced that the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year goes to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais, published by Icon Group International. The online voting for the Prize resulted in just over 5,000 votes, and World Outlook garnered about 32% of those votes since the shortlist was announced on February 20th. Runners-up include Baboon Metaphysics and Curbside Consultation of the Colon, finishing with 22% and 18% of the votes, respectively. The remaining shortlisters include Strip and Knit with Style, The Large Sieve and its Applications, and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.

Literary Saloon points out that the joke's on us. Apparently, World Outlook is not a real book but a fake, computer-generated book.

Christian Book Expo Falls Flat

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, the Christian Book Expo, "a first ever 'fan event' for evangelical Christian book lovers, drew only about 1,500 people to the Dallas Convention Center." Other sources report the event organizers were expecting 15,000-20,000 fans. Lack of sufficient marketing appears to be the root cause of the disappointing turnout.

Tournament of Books

The 2009 Tournament of Books is quickly coming to a close. In the semifinals last week, Tom Piazza's City of Refuge defeated Roberto Bolano's 2666 in a big upset (at least in my opinion). In the other semifinal match-up, Toni Morrison's A Mercy defeated Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country (another upset in my book since I think A Mercy is overrated).

The two winners of the semifinals now must survive the "Zombie Round" where they're matched up against books that received the most votes in the "Zombie Poll" but lost out in an earlier round of the tournament. Basically, this is a last chance at resurrection for those books. In the first Zombie match-up, Tom Piazza's City of Refuge defeated the Zombie choice of E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. The second Zombie match-up will happen tomorrow between Toni Morrison's A Mercy and Roberto Bolano's 2666. I'm very interested in this match-up because I think there's a significant chance 2666 will be resurrected and will move into the final match against City of Refuge, which is a repeat of the semifinal match-up but which may have a different outcome since it will be judged by all the judges rather than a single judge.

Indiespensable Vol. 10

Powell's has just announced the 10th installment of Indiespensable, its book subscription club. This installment, which includes a signed special edition of A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick, looks good. I particularly love the red full-cloth slipcase. If you're interested, sign up quickly. Indiespensable volumes tend to sell out.

2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees

The 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees have been announced. These prestigious awards are "the highest honors for food and beverage professionals working in America" and cover many categories, including Broadcast Media, Journalism, Book Awards, Design and Graphics, and Restaurant and Chef. Check out all the nominees here. The three nominees in the Writing and Literature Category include: Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, and Betty Fussell's Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef.

Picador's New Twitter Book Club

Picador has announced its plans to start a Twitter book club:

Every Tuesday we'll announce a new book club pick -- it might be mystery, literary fiction, work in translation -- and in two weeks we'll discuss the book on the following Friday. We'll try and pick books for every taste and reader. And to sweeten the pot, we'll even give away copies of the book during its announcement.

The first book selection is Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, and the discussion will begin on April 10th. Personally, I can't imagine how a discussion composed of "tweets" of a maximum of 140 characters each will be satisfying, but maybe I'm missing the point.

The Dead Need Not Apply

In an essay at the Harvard Crimson, Sanders Bernstein opines that literary awards should be reserved for living authors. His essay was sparked by the recent posthumous bestowal of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Bernstein's primary argument is that book prizes are "supposed to encourage further production of literature," which cannot be accomplished by dead authors. If the posthumously awarded prize happens to carry a monetary award, that award is squandered on the dead author's family rather than awarded to a living author who might use the funds to continue producing worthy literature. Bernstein asks: "How does this serve to promote the arts? ... How does it serve to inspire new creative works?" Bernstein concludes that "in the cash-strapped world of letters, it is more important than ever that the moneys within are channeled to the warm bodies that can produce the next White Whale and not to skeletons that will merely rest in the muck."

In response to Bernstein's essay, the Literary Saloon says this is "the kind of argument that drives us nuts." Their primary point: "The product should be rewarded, not the producer (hence also our annoyance with those headlines that read, e.g. 'Bolaño wins NBCC Prize'; Bolaño did not win the NBCC fiction prize, 2666 did)."

Although I sympathize with Literary Saloon's ideals, I also understand the practicalities raised by Bernstein. There's not much prize money and publicity to go around, so doesn't it make sense to use those resources in the way most likely to support future production of great literature?

Some of the Dead are Still Breathing by Charles Bowden (a review)

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future
3 out of 5: Some of the Dead are Still Breathing is a collection of journalistic musings about the troubled state of the world and humanity's (mainly negative) impact on it. Bowden is a study in contraries. He lives in the world of drugs, whores, crime, and seedy motel rooms, but at the same time, he carefully observes the habits of a pair of cardinals living in his yard and worries about elephants in captivity. Bowden is an ecologically sensitive Hunter S. Thompson with a poetic bent:

I am part of a species where many find it forbidden to cross religious lines. Or race lines. I want to cross blood lines. I was to risk my life for another organism, I want to shed my culture and join another culture, to meld with the beasts, to destroy the notion of parks and zoos and reserves and flow in a river of blood off some Niagara and be pounded into another life in the red pool below, the pool that churns and roars with spray and licks one's being with an overwhelming undertow.

Readers who like structured essays or stories will be frustrated by Bowden's free-flowing, and sometimes self-indulgent, style. Those who embrace free association and haphazard thought experiments are likely to find Bowden to be a charming, if eclectic, tour guide to today's complex world.

Espresso Book Machine

Conversational Reading has an embedded 5-minute video showing how the Espresso Book Machine works. The machine can "publish" single copies of paperback books on demand. Very interesting.

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (a review)

The Lazarus Project
4 out of 5: The Lazarus Project documents Vladimir Brik's trip back to his Bosnian homeland to research the life story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Bosnian who immigrated to the US in the early 1900s and was killed by the Chicago police chief, allegedly for being an anarchist. Mixed with Brik's modern journey is Lazarus's own story and the stories told by the writer's traveling partner, a Bosnian war photographer named Rora. The Lazarus Project is a novel, but much of it is based in truth. On March 2, 1908, the Chicago police chief actually killed an alleged anarchist named Lazarus Averbuch, and, like Brik, Hemon is an American writer from Bosnia. These shades of truth, mixed with Rora's photographs that appear at the beginning of each chapter, create a book that feels more like a memoir than a novel.

As Brik delves into Lazarus’s story, tracing his immigration to America in reverse, Brik examines his own story of immigration and attempted assimilation and uncovers an internal conflict he's spent years trying to ignore. This excerpt illustrates Brik's disillusionment with America and also Hemon's casually beautiful prose:

In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of [telling stories]--Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a story telling code of solidarity--you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth--reality is the fastest American commodity.

Many slender threads weave this book's several narratives together in a way that is subtle but powerful. Names are shared by multiple characters existing hundreds of years apart, suggesting cosmic connections. Certain themes echo across time and place in the same formulations (“Home is where somebody notices your absence” or “There has never been a time when nothing happened”). Although the plot is occasionally sluggish and disjointed, the subtle play between Brik's journey of self discovery and Lazarus's story make The Lazarus Project a remarkable accomplishment.

Discovery Sues Amazon Over Kindle Technology

The Wall Street Jounal reports that Discovery Communications (the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, the Science Channel, etc.) has sued Amazon.com, alleging that the Kindle and Kindle 2 infringe on an e-book encryption patent owned by Discovery. According to Discovery, the patent covers an "electronic book security and copyright protection system." Discovery is requesting triple damages and royalties. The encryption system at issue is used by other e-readers, but Amazon was singled out because of the Kindle's popularity.

An Interesting Sort of Rebellion

The Telegraph reports that, "on the eve of national strikes, the French have found a new way to show their dislike of Nicolas Sarkozy: by reading a 17th century tale of thwarted love that the president has said he hates." Sarkozy has often expressed his disdain for La Princesse de Cleves by Madame de La Fayette, published in 1678. According to the Telegraph, "French readers have adopted the book as a symbol of dissent: as Mr Sarkozy's popularity falls, sales of the book are rising."

The Book of Unholy Mischief by Elle Newmark (a review)

The Book of Unholy Mischief: A Novel
2.5 out of 5: The Book of Unholy Mischief is historical fiction with a mysterious twist. A street orphan in early-Renaissance Venice lucks into an apprenticeship in the kitchen of a high-ranking city official. The city is obsessed with finding a secret book rumored to contain the secrets to eternal life, everlasting love, and alchemy. Political intrigue ensues. Sumptuous descriptions of the city's markets, neighborhoods, and festivals, along with descriptions of the executive chef's dishes, comprise this books primary pleasures. There's not enough action to build much suspense, but you'll be so busy thinking about your next meal or planning a trip to Venice that you won't care. This is a nice airplane or vacation book when you don't want to worry about remembering complicated plot lines or deciphering a challenging writing style.

Coverage of the Man Booker International Prize

The Literary Saloon has a nice essay about the list of "Contenders" for this year's Man Booker International Prize, including some interesting statistics like this one: "Ugrešić - born in 1949 - is the youngest author; three are in their eighties." If you're interested in reviews of the Contenders' works, the Literary Saloon also has a round-up of their reviews.

George W. Gets $7 Million for Book

Now that he's not "running the country," George W. Bush is "writing" a book, tentatively titled Decision Points. Unlike a traditional memoir, the Daily Beast says the book will focus on twelve difficult personal and professional decisions Bush made over the course of his life, including giving up drinking and picking Dick Cheney as his vice president. The rumors suggest Bush got $7 million for the book, which is scheduled for a 2010 release by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. Bush told reporters: “I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get a sense of how decisions were made and I want people to understand the options that were placed before me.”

2009 Orange Prize for Fiction Longlist Announced

The 20-book longlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was just announced. You can see the entire list here. I’ve read only four of the longlisted titles: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, and Miriam Toews’s The Flying Troutmans.

This list is usually a good place to find your next read. If you don't have time for all 20 and want someone else to narrow down the list for you, the short list will be announced on April 21st, and the winner will be announced on June 3rd.

The Orange Prize for Fiction is open to any full length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality, provided that the novel is published for the first time in the United Kingdom between April 1st of the year before the prize is awarded and March 31st of the year in which the prize is awarded.

Contenders for Man Booker International Prize Announced

The Man Booker International Prize is awarded to an author every two years for the purpose of “highlight[ing] one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.”

The list of "Contenders" for this year’s Prize has just been announced:

• Peter Carey (Australia)
• Evan S. Connell (USA)
• Mahasweta Devi (India)
• E.L. Doctorow (USA)
• James Kelman (UK)
• Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
• Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
• Alice Munro (Canada)
• V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
• Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
• Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
• Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)
• Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
• Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

Interestingly, the US is the only country with more than one “Contender.” The winner will be announced in May.

Tournament of Books: End of Round 1

The first round of this year's March-madness-style Tournament of Books is now over. Some unlikely contenders are moving on to the second round, and some of my favorite books from last year have already been eliminated. Here are the books (The Great Eight) are progressing on to Round 2:

• Roberto Bolano's 2666 (beating Fae Myenne Ng's Steer Toward Rock)
• Louis de Bernieres’s A Partisan’s Daughter (beating Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland)
• Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised (beating Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger)
• Tom Piazza's City of Refuge (beating Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth)
• Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country (beating E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks)
• Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project (beating Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency)
• Toni Morrison's A Mercy (beating Keith Lee Morris's The Dart League King)
• Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (beating Marilynne Robinson's Home)

Free Book Inside

Cheerios announced they are now accepting children’s stories for their third annual New Author Contest. Entries are due by July 15, 2009. The winning story will be distributed inside cereal boxes. Other rewards include $5,000 and consideration by the children's editors at Simon & Schuster. See all the rules here. This is the kind of cereal box prize I can get behind! (Via GalleyCat)

Alleged New Shakespeare Works Discovered

The Telegraph reports that “independent researcher and psychotherapist” Dr John Casson claims to have discovered Shakespeare's first published poem, first comedy, and first tragedies. Casson has just published his findings in a book, titled Enter Pursued by a Bear. In his book, Casson book also alleges that certain works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by aristocrat Sir Henry Neville.

The Future of ARCs = eARCs?

I just discovered NetGalley, an online service that offers electronic copies of Advance Review Copies (ARCs) to book reviewers, journalists, librarians, literary bloggers, and other “professional readers.” At Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has a lengthy interview with Fran Toolan of NetGalley. Toolan describes NetGalley’s service, which is free to book reviewers, as follows:

NetGalley is a service for people who read and recommend books. Publishers upload their galleys, plus any marketing and promotional information; then invite contacts to view their title on NetGalley. Readers can also find new titles through NetGalley’s Public Catalog, and request to review those titles from the publisher.

What a great idea for saving the costs of printing and shipping all those ARCs, many of which go unread. It’s also an easy way for publishers to ensure their ARCs don’t make it out into the market (via used book stores, book swap sites, eBay, etc.) to compete with sales of finished books.

The Birth of Returns (and do they need to die?)

Today I was reading Volume 2 of Albert Boime’s A Social History of Modern Art: Art in an Age of Bonapartism 1800-1815, and I came across this description of the birth of the returns practice in the late 1700s:

At that time, publishing and bookselling were not two separate enterprises but usually combined. German booksellers met twice annually at Leipzig to trade their publications. Money seldom passed directly between hands, and if the books did not balance at one fair, the difference was carried over to the next. …Previously, book dealer-publishers could not return works they had taken from other publishers; if a book were unsellable they had to absorb the loss themselves, and this encouraged a great caution in purchases. The publishers realized that their sales suffered due to the early exhaustion of the bookseller’s limited stock, and, by way of experiment, they handed out, in addition to the purchase copies, a certain number on consignment. If unsold these could be returned. This custom caught on, and eventually almost all direct purchases were discontinued. All risk of loss now shifted to the shoulders of the publishers, and bookselling received an extraordinary stimulus.

What was good for the publishing industry in the 1700s doesn't seem to be working anymore. An article published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few years ago explains why the returns practice is "the dark side of the book world." The practice forces publishers to print and ship large quantities of books they expect to be bestsellers. Those that fail (and even those that don't), often come back in large quantities. In 2003, 34 percent of adult hardcover books were returned to publishers. This system creates huge inefficiencies at every point in the cycle suggesting it's time to rethink this outdated business model.

Untranslatable Chinese Novel?

Over at Paper Republic, Bruce Humes posted about Jess Row's unflattering review of Yu Hua's Brothers in The New York Times Book Review, and Row responded to the post. Row believes that Brothers is, essentially, untranslatable for an Anglophone audience:

The larger point I wanted to make with this review was that part of the problem with the reception of a novel like this in the Anglophone world is the level of fundamental ignorance here about basic touchstones of Chinese culture. If I may, I’d like to illustrate this with a very small example from Brothers. On page 615 of the uncorrected galleys, which I read for my review, there is a sentence, “Who knew that Baldy Li was such a Lin Daiyu?” I seized on this in my review as evidence that Yu Hua was building a parallel between the love triangles in Brothers and in Hongloumeng: a parallel that would be obvious to a Chinese reader but which would mean nothing at all to a typical Anglophone reader. This, I would say, is exactly the kind of problem that no translator can fix without an elaborate, and counterproductive, scholarly apparatus. When I saw the final published edition of Brothers, the line had been changed to “Who knew that Baldy Li was such a sentimental heroine?” That, to me, seems to be the story of this whole translation: it’s trying to find English equivalents for Chinese concepts that just don’t resonate with readers who have no exposure to Chinese culture.

Interesting. (via Literary Saloon)

A Vision of the Future: Antique E-Books

Pogue's Posts in the Technology section of the New York Times imagines a future dominated by e-books. In such a future, antique e-book stores will serve those looking for older books, like those that are weeks old:

The [antique e-book] store would only sell e-books that are more than two weeks old — adamantly not selling new e-books. The store would be located in a converted old house with a creaky front door. As you walked in, you would know right away that you’re in an antique e-book store. In the front window of the store would be two antique e-book-loving cats. ... The store would carry no e-book more than six months old. For that, you would need to go to a museum.

Bolaño Wins 2008 NBCC Award for Fiction

In a decision not altogether surprising, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 has been awarded the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. It's nice to see a work in translation win this prestigious award, but, as I posted about yesterday, it's interesting to consider that this may be an incomplete work.

At Three Percent, Chad Post reminds us that the last translation to win a NBCC award was Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, which won the nonfiction award in 2005. You can check out all the 2008 finalists in all the categories here.

Other 2008 winners include:

• Excellence in Reviewing - Ron Charles
• Criticism - Children's Literature: A Reader's History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer
• Nonfiction - The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
• Poetry (2 winners) - Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler and Half the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera
• Biography - The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
• Autobiography - My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar

Update on Collapsed Archive Building in Cologne

As I mentioned in a recent post, the archives building in Cologne, Germany collapsed last week burying people and tons of irreplaceable documents under a pile of rubble. Since learning of this tragic event, I’ve tried to find some follow-up information about the missing people and the condition of the documents. Information in English continues to be scare, but I did find an article in DW-World reporting that a 17-year-old apprentice baker is the only confirmed death so far. The apprentice was asleep in an apartment complex that collapsed along with the adjacent archives building. A 24-year-old design student, also a resident of the apartment complex, is still missing. As for the documents: “Trucks hauled away to safety those manuscripts that were not damaged because they were in an annex, while firemen used their bare hands to recover individual documents from the rubble.” Clearly, certain documents will be entirely irrecoverable or severely damaged.

You Only Thought You'd Finished...

As reported in the Guardian, two previously undiscovered novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño - titled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer - have been found in Spain among papers Bolaño left behind after his death. And for all of you feeling self-satisfied after wading through 2666, Bolaño's 5-volume novel published last year, Bolaño's papers have revealed "what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666." I suspect it won't be long before this sixth volume will be conveniently available for purchase so you can complete your collection.

Pilot Scores $3.2 Million Book Deal

As reported by GalleyCat, Captain Chesley Sullenberger now has a $3.2 million two-book deal with HarperCollins' William Morrow imprint. The book will be "a memoir that climaxes with his miraculous airplane landing and a book of 'inspirational poems.'" I'm skeptical about the "inspirational poems" part of this endeavor.

More Upsets at the Tornament of Books

I think the judges must be trying to create controversy in this year's March-Madness-style Tournament of Books. A couple days ago Louis de Bernieres’s relatively unknown novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, won over Joseph O’Neill’s critically-acclaimed novel, Netherland. Yesterday, Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised beat Booker Prize Winner The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. To continue in the spirit of controversy, Tom Piazza's City of Refuge beat Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth in today's match-up. If you're interested in judge Mary Roach's reasoning, read the full report.

The Way We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (a review)

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
4 out of 5: The Way We Eat is an in-depth exploration into the ethics of our food choices. To illustrate their arguments, co-authors Singer and Mason use the eating habits of three families as case studies: a typical suburban family looking for low-cost, convenient food choices at their local Wal-Mart; an upper-middle class family that chooses organic foods whenever possible and shops at places like Whole Foods; a vegan family that is very tuned into food ethics.

Singer is an ethicist, and this book includes detailed analyses of the ethics implicated by eating meat in general, eating meat and from factory farms, eating farm-raised fish, choosing organic and free-trade foods, buying local food, and other food choices. For people already sensitized to the ethics of food choices, this is a great book for diving deeper into the subject. It's well-written and well-researched. Newcomers to the issue, however, should start with something less dense like Michael Pollan's fabulous primer, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

When Acknowledgements Go Too Far

Over at the American Spectator, Jonathan Black has a lot to say about those pesky Acknowledgments pages that seem to be getting longer and longer every year. His theory: "The Acknowledgments page cannot make a bad book better, but it can ruin a good one." While that might be going a bit far, I agree with Black that Acknowledgements pages have become a bit too self-important over the years. Black lists the common entries in a typical page:

Names upon names. Artists' colonies. Intrepid editors. Copy editors. Mentors. Foundations. Librarians. The upstairs neighbor. Research assistants. Personal assistants. People who read drafts. The mom who sparked the great endeavor. The dad who would have been proud. The agent, brilliant and prescient, as well as the best friend any writer could have. ... And finally—drum roll, please—the spouse. Longsuffering, dreams of medical school up in smoke. These husbands and wives are saints!

For more, including a brief history of "A-pages" and rules of thumb if you're lucky enough to be writing your own A-page, check out the article.

Tragedy Befalls Historic Archive

As reported in the Times, the archives building in Cologne, Germany collapsed last week. The mysterious collapse undoubtedly destroyed some of Germany's most valuable documentary treasures, including:

• The private papers of the Nobel prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, one of Germany's most famous postwar writers
• Manuscripts of essays and articles written by Karl Marx when he was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in the 19th century
• Letters written by the philosopher Hegel
• Lyrics and notes written by the composer Jacques Offenbach
• Edicts issued by Napoleon and King Louis XIVth
• The personal papers of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first Chancellor and former mayor of Cologne
• Minutes of all town council meetings held since 1376, a remarkable resource for legal historians

The Times reports that the "earliest document stored in the building dated back to 922, and there were hundreds of thousands of documents spread over six floors, some of them written on thin parchment. A total of 780 complete private collections and half a million photographs were being stored." The collapse was nearly instantaneous: "Workers on the rooftop heard a cracking noise and immediately alerted the 26 people using the archives at the time. Less than three minutes later later, the building was flat."

We Lie About What We Read

A new survey commissioned by the organizers of World Book Day reveals that two-thirds of people have lied about having read a book. Although the survey was based in the UK, I suspect the results apply to the US as well.

As reported in the Telegraph, Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, had this to say about the survey's results: "Research ... suggests that the reason people lied was to make themselves appear more sexually attractive. People like to be seen to be readers. It makes them look good. They said they were prepared to lie about what they'd read to impress people, particularly when it came to potential partners."

The good news: People still think it's sexy to read books. The bad news: People aren't actually reading the books.

The top 10 books we lie about reading:

• 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
• Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
• The Bible (24%)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
• In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

Even more frightening is the list of the top 10 authors we actually enjoy reading:

• J K Rowling (61%)
• John Grisham (32%)
• Sophie Kinsella (22%)
• Jilly Cooper (20%)
• Mills & Boon (18%)
• Dick Francis (17%)
• Robert Harris (16%)
• Jeffrey Archer (15%)
• Frederick Forsyth (13%)
• James Herbert (12%)

O'Neill's Netherland Eliminated in Round 1

In today's match-up in the Tournament of Books, Louis de Bernieres’s relatively unknown novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, wins over Joseph O’Neill’s highly vaunted post-9/11 novel about cricket (among other things), Netherland. Judge Kate Schlegel explains what she likes about A Partisan's Daughter:

The simpler plot and characters let the lovely writing and story shine through. And that makes all the difference.

See the full report here. Tomorrow's match-up pits Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised against Aravind Adiga's Booker-Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger.

The Boat by Nam Le (a review)

The Boat
3.5 out of 5: The Boat, Nam Le's debut short story collection, starts predictably enough with an autobiographical story about a Vietnamese student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop hosting his father for a visit. This story has everything we've come to expect from such stories: the tension between Westernized children and their more traditional parents, the pressures to assimilate conflicting with the desire to retain individuality, and the feelings of not truly belonging to any particular culture or people. Despite these clichéd elements, this first story, titled Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, is the best in the collection. Le uses familiar themes to perfectly craft a story that is both heartbreaking and shocking.

After the first story, everything familiar evaporates. The second story, Cartagena, takes place in the Columbia slums and is told from the perspective of a sicario (an assassin) who has been ordered to assassinate a friend. The next story is told by an aging artist in New York City, confronting his bodily failings and attempting to come to terms with the fact that his grown daughter doesn't want to see him. Other stories in the collection cover the globe, including Australia, Japan, Iran, and the South China Sea.

The Boat illustrates Le's agility with language and his mastery of the short story form. Clearly, Le has talent in spades, but something is lost in this blatant display of virtuosity. As we're racing around the world, we're left wondering what Le's really trying to say besides "See what I can do?" A couple of the longer stories (e.g., Halflead Bay and Tehran Calling) read like fragments from novels rather than fully realized short stories. Despite these (mostly) minor failings, The Boat is an impressive debut from a writer to watch in the future.

David Foster Wallace's Unfinished Novel

If you're a David Foster Wallace fan, check out the March 9 issue of the New Yorker for a story discussing the novel DFW was working on at the time of his suicide. The unfinished manuscript, titled The Pale King, will be published by Little, Brown early next year. The story is a nice overview of DFW's work and career.

According to Little, Brown, The Pale King is set "at an IRS tax-return processing center in Illinois in the mid 1980s" and is the story of "a crew of entry-level processors, 'wigglers' in IRS jargon (for their similarity to newly hatched tadpoles), and their attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium and bureaucratic malevolence. The novel's main character, David Wallace, is newly arrived at this job and learning from all around him amid epic institutional confusion." Apparently, the novel will include notes, outlines, and other non-typical formats.

Tournament of Books Begins

As I mentioned in a previous post, it's time for this year's March-Madness-style Tournament of Books. Today's match-up between Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Fae Myenne Ng's Steer Toward Rock is the first of many daily match-ups. Not surprisingly, 2666 won. The humorous play-by-play concludes:

Steer Toward Rock doesn’t even reach for the ball this time. She’s got an interesting story to tell, but she can’t be heard above the din of this five-book extravaganza. With a sigh, she ambles back to the locker room—toward a smaller, safer tournament—confident in her ball-handling, but wondering if her moves are fast enough to carry her to the pros.

See the full report here.

Indies Choice Book Awards

The finalists have been chosen in seven categories for the first Indies Choice Book Awards, the successor awards to the Book Sense Awards. The categories are annoyingly ambiguous: Best Indie Buzz book (fiction), Best Conversation Starter (nonfiction), Best Author Discovery (debut), Best New Picture Book, Best YA Buzz Book, Most Engaging Author, and the Picture Book Hall of Fame. The fact that the first three categories require parenthetical explanations proves my point, I think.

The Best Indie Buzz Book (fiction) finalists are:

• City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Viking)
• The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (Dial)
• Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill (Pantheon)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
• Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)

The Best Author Discovery (debut) finalists are:

• Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central)
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (Algonquin)
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
• The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block (Random House)
• White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

See the finalists in the other categories here. The finalists were selected from titles appearing on the 2008 Indie Next List Great Reads and Book Sense Picks. The winners will be announced in late April.

The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca (a review)

The Passive Vampire
4 out of 5: The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca was originally published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest. Thanks to Twisted Spoon Press and translator Krzysztof Fijalkowski, this important work of surrealist literature is now available in English in a beautifully designed edition, including 18 full-page photographs of Luca's Objectively Offered Objects (surrealist sculptures comprising strange combinations of symbolic objects).

In Fijalkowski's informative introduction, he explains that the Romanian Surrealist Group, which existed from 1940 until 1947 and of which Luca was a key member, stood for "a reinvention of the surrealist imagination" through:

a critical approach to dreams, the eroticisation of the proletariat, the poetic appropriation of quantum physics, and the perpetual re-evaluation of surrealism through the negation of negation.

The Passive Vampire falls squarely within these professed values and is divided into two halves: The Objectively Offered Object and The Passive Vampire. In the first half of the book, Luca explores how his gift of an object transforms his relationship with the recipient:

When offering an object to someone, external causality responds more rapidly to internal necessities. Erotic relations between myself and other individuals are more quickly established though the mediation of the object.

In the case of an object Luca intended to offer to André Breton, the object

began to murmur a black-magical language between myself and Breton, one that was very close to dream and to primordial language. This secret and mysterious communication lasted uninterrupted for several days.

In creating his objects, Luca chose his materials based on their inner meanings and their harmony with subconscious emotions. The actual substance of his materials was unimportant: "In the world of dreams where I choose to operate, celluloid is flesh and paper is water."

The second half of the book is a poetic evocation of Luca's surrealist philosophies and imaginative visions. The imagery in this section is dark, brooding, and often very strange:

I close my eyes, as active as a vampire, I open them within myself, as passive as a vampire, and between the blood that arrives, the blood that leaves, and the blood already inside me there occurs an exchange of images like an engagement of daggers.

In this half of the book, Luca reveals his pessimistic view of humanity:

It is dawning on [the people] at last that they have long since ceased to live, that the corpses they show to the outside world, having taken the form of the useful, the beautiful, and the goo, have transformed the magnificent rotation of the Earth around the Sun into the funereal procession of a slowly decaying hearse as it approaches the ruins of a cemetery.

The Passive Vampire ends with a love story, but it's a gloomy love story that only "darkened the darkness" for Luca. Though challenging to decipher, this segment of the book is beautifully and powerfully written.

The Passive Vampire had an original print run of only 460 copies, and, until its recent reissue, Fijalkowski explains it had become "something of a lost legend within surrealist literature, rarely referred to and almost never seen other than in jealously guarded private libraries." We are lucky to have access to this "lost legend" in English, which will surely become a rediscovered classic and a "must read" for anyone interested in surrealism.

Top 10 Cuban Novels

Leonardo Padura, author of The Havana Quartet (translated by Peter Bush) has annointed the top 10 Cuban novels. The Guardian reports that Padura's list "looks beyond the Cuba we think we know to introduce some of the island's more hidden literary treasures." Many of Padura's top 10 are available in English translations (and two were written in English). Here's the list, but the summaries of each work included in the Guardian article are worth reading:

• Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier (1962, trans. John Sturrock)
• Cecilia Valdés Or El Angel Hill (Cecilia Valdés) by Cirilo Villaverde (1882, trans. Helen Lane)
• Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1967, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner)
• Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (1974, trans. Gregory Rabassa)
• The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) by Alejo Carpentier (1953, trans. Harriet de Onís)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952, in English)
• Temporada de ángeles, Lisandro Otero (1983, not translated)
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Óscar Hijuelos; in English
• Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca) by Reinaldo Arenas (1990, trans. Dolores M. Koch (1993))
• El negrero by Lino Novás Calvo (1933, not translated)

Tobias Wolff Wins Story Prize

Short story writer Tobias Wolff just won the $20,000 Story Prize for his 2008 short story collection Our Story Begins. The Story Prize is an annual book award for short story collections written in English and published in the U.S. during a given calendar year. The other two finalists were Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (which I loved) and Joe Meno’s Demons in the Spring.

The judges (Daniel Menaker, Rick Simonson, and Hannah Tinti) had this to say about Our Story Begins:

The previously uncollected pieces by Wolff in this new collection show an increasingly severe insistence on the most telling and specific detail as the author creates entire worlds, entire life stories, out of eloquent molecules of narrative. The emotional impact of these lapidary stories is specific and powerful. ... It is this great sense of the human condition, combined with the close detailing of everyday life that makes Tobias Wolff such an exceptional writer. He deserves The Story Prize, not only for his early work showcased in Our Story Begins, that many of us have studied and read and learned from in the past, but for the ten new stories included, that show he is still at the top of his game.

Ishiguro Novel to be a Movie

GallyCat reports that Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go is slated to be made into a movie, and actress Keira Knightley will play the lead. Work on the production will begin in April under the direction of Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo).

Philip Roth's Next Novels

The Guardian gives us some details about two upcoming novels by Philip Roth. The Humbling, scheduled for release this fall, is the story of an ageing stage actor who has "lost his magic, his talent and his assurance." Roth's UK publishers calls The Humbling a "shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation. ... In this long day's journey into night ... all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life's performances – talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation – are stripped off." The Humbling is just 112 pages, consistent with the trend set by Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation.

The second novel, Nemesis, is promised to be a return to the historical fiction of The Plot Against America and will involve "a polio epidemic during the summer of 1944, and the effect it has on a Newark community." It's scheduled for publication sometime in 2010.

Global Translation Statistics

Chad Post at Three Percent analyzes a recent study by Ruediger Wischenbart (consultant to the global publishing market) on global translation statistics. A couple interesting paragraphs from Chad's analysis:

First of all, there’s no real surprise in terms of which languages are most often translated—looking at the global market, books originally written in English represent approx. 60% of all translations around the world. This number has increased dramatically over the past quarter century, rising from just over 50% of all translations in 1979 to almost 64% in 1999. When you look at the graph in the report, it’s almost shocking to see the English line rise and rise while all the other languages remain muddled at the bottom of the chart, fluctuating slightly, but not nearly as dramatically as English . . .

It’s also not that surprising, but the second and third most translated languages are French and German, respectively. Put together, these three top languages represent around 80% of all the translations published globally. The next five most translated languages are (in descending order): Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch. And taken as a whole, the top 8 languages account for 90% of all translations. (It’s like a wealth pyramid!)

For those of you interested in more detail, check out a 44-page draft of the Diversity Report (beware, it's a massive PDF file).

Freeing the Book

Publisher Thomas Nelson is "freeing the book" on a few of their upcoming titles. Anyone who buys one of these NelsonFree titles will also get free access online to downloadable audio and e-book versions, includnig EPub, MobiPocket and PDF formats.

The first two NelsonFree titles appear later this month: Scott McKain's Collapse of Distinction and Michael Franzese's I'll Make You an Offer You Can't Refuse. Ten more titles will appear during the rest of the year.

Joel Miller, publisher of Nelson's business and culture division, explains the thinking behind the new program:

The book is, in a sense, trapped by its format, and so is the consumer--locked into choosing one format over another or shelling out scarce funds for the same book in different wrappers. By freeing the book we free the reader to get greater use and enjoyment of our titles.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. Read the hefty hardcover when you're at home, and switch to the audio format for your commute. If your reading is interrupted by airplane travel, no problem. Just switch to your portable e-reader. At the end of the day, you'll still have that nice hardcover reading experience to look forward to when you get home. Shelf Awareness has the full story.

The Quarterly Conversation

Issue 15 of The Quarterly Conversation is now available. This issue is loaded with interesting reviews and articles. A few examples:

• On the Demise of Publishing, Reading, and Everything Else
• Ten Theses on the Nature of Metafiction
• Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer

The Quarterly Conversation is perhaps the best journal available (in any format) for readers interested in international literature available in English.

Netherland Wins 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Joseph O'Neill has won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his novel, Netherland. The three judges considered nearly 350 novels and short story collections by American authors from 2008. The other four finalists were Susan Choi's A Person of Interest, Richard Price's Lush Life, Ron Rash's Serena, and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

Judge Randall Kenan commented that Netherland "is about the new and continuing immigrant story, about New Americans and the making of new American traditions, which has always been New York's function in the world. O'Neill has created a powerfully entertaining novel, but also a new emblem for our time."

Check out my review of Netherland.

Amazon Gives Back Audio Rights

As I've mentioned before, the Kindle 2's new read-out-loud feature is controversial. Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, claims the Kindle 2 doesn't "have the right to read a book out loud" because "[t]hat's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Bowing to pressure, in a statement published in the NY Times, Amazon explained that they will offer publishers the choice of turning off the audio feature: "We are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled."

In other words, Amazon did its legal research.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

I don't have a good excuse for why it's taken me so long to post about this, but better late than never, right? As reported at TheBookseller.com, the Arts Council England has announced the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The £10,000 prize (£5,000 for the author and £5,000 for the translator) celebrates a work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English and published in the UK in the last year. Out of 126 contenders, 16 titles made it onto the longlist. The 6-title shortlist will be announced on April 1st, and the winner will be revealed on May 14th. I like the fact that the prize money is split equally between the author and the translator. Generally, translators get short shrift, so this is a nice change.

Here's the longlist:

• My Father's Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia Books)
• The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello Books)
• Voiceover by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) (available in the U.S. here)
• The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) (available in the U.S. here)
• Night Work by Thomas Glavinic translated by John Brownjohn from the German (Canongate) (available in the U.S. here)
• Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew from the Chinese (Chatto) (available in the U.S. here)
• The Siege by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos from the Albanian (Canongate) (available in the U.S. here)
• Homesick by Eshkol Nevo, translated by Sondra Silverston from the Hebrew (Chatto) (almost available in the U.S. here)
• The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder from the Japanese (Harvill Secker) (available in the U.S. here)
• The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish (Maclehose Press)
• The Blue Fox by Sjon, translated by Victoria Cribb from the Icelandish (Telegram) (available in the U.S. here)
• Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad from the Norwegian (Harvill Secker)
• How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic, translated by Anthea Bell from the German, (Weidenfeld) (almost available in the U.S. here)
• A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann, translated by Sarah Death from the Norwegian (Picador) (available in the U.S. here)
• The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish (Bloomsbury) (almost available in the U.S. here)
• Friendly Fire by A B Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman from the Hebrew (Halban) (available in the U.S. here)