Twitterers take on Ulysses: Forget about Ashton Kutcher. James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most difficult novels in English, is on Twitter. Two devotees of Ulysses have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Called Wandering Rocks, the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business. [Independent]

Kindle Joins a Literary Ritual: Authors Can Autograph It: A recent reading in Manhattan at the Strand bookstore by David Sedaris, whose most recent book is “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” may have offered a glimpse of the future. A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” [NYT]

Bloomsday: Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, is a fine day to remind yourself of his genius. Test your knowledge with our 16 questions for 16 June. [Guardian]

Keeping It Real on Dictionary Row: On Wednesday, a Texas-based media consulting firm announced the birth of the millionth English word, which arrived on June 10, 2009, at 10:22 a.m., Stratford-on-Avon time. The lucky lexeme? “Web 2.0,” which edged out “slumdog,” “octomom” and “N00b,” a disparaging term for video game newbies. Language experts, when asked for comment, found themselves reaching for other words, some of them unprintable. [NYT]

Christian group sues for right to burn gay teen novel: In a scene which appears to have been lifted straight out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a group of Christians in Wisconsin has launched a legal claim demanding the right to publicly burn a copy of a book for teenagers which they deem to be “explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian”. The offending book is Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. [Guardian]

The literary antecedents of ‘Up’: The title of the new Disney/Pixar movie “Up,” as well as its signature image of a house floating beneath thousands of tethered balloons, reminds us how frequently the theme of Lightness appears in children’s literature. From Mary Poppins to Peter Pan, from Tarzan swinging on vines to Harry Potter scooting on his broomstick, children’s stories seem to feature the quick, the lithe and the aerial. [Los Angeles Times]

June 19th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Top Ten Literary Tear Jerkers [Independent]

Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon: In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. [NYT]

Dave Eggers offers personal ‘buck up’ to anyone worried for print culture: Author gives out email address and promises hopeful reply to any readers gloomy about decline of literary culture [Guardian]

JD Salinger starts legal action against sequel author: JD Salinger has started legal proceedings against the writer, publishers and distributor of a sequel to his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye. [Telegraph]

Forgotten authors No 35: Mazo de la Roche: Roche was a lonely and often unwell child, the daughter of a struggling salesman, and like many children in similar situations, she became the creator of a rich fantasy world. In Roche’s case, however, this world was populated and coloured in a detailed, complex vision that led her, belatedly, to write romantic fiction. [Independent]

Haruki Murakami fans snap up latest novel 1Q84 after five-year wait: Five years of pent-up anticipation found release in bookstores across Japan this morning with the publication of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84. [Guardian]

Declining Book Sales Cast Gloom at an Expo: The numbers confirm a litany of dreary news that has emerged from the publishing industry since last fall, when booksellers began seeing significant declines in store traffic. The trend has not abated this year, as publishers have continued to report double-digit sales declines. [NYT]

June 5th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Book Of A Lifetime: Mindblast, by Dambudzo Marechera: Mindblast (1984), the last book printed during his life, is unforgivably neglected. It is a literary scandal that it has never been published outside Zimbabwe. [Independent]

George Orwell: a life in quotes: “Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books involves constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.” [Telegraph]

Once a pariah, now a favorite son: Seventy-five years ago a local boy named John O’Hara published his first novel – Appointment in Samarra – and left his former friends and neighbors fuming because it chronicled in great detail the business, brand-name, and bedroom preferences of the people in a town he called Gibbsville. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Amos Elon, Israeli Author, Dies at 82: Amos Elon, an Israeli essayist and author who examined his society’s flaws and myths, explored some of its greatest figures and became for many years its most renowned public intellectual, died Monday in Italy, where he had made his home since 2004. [NYT]

Forgotten authors No. 34: John Collier: In some ways, Collier feels like a natural successor to Saki. His simple, sharp style brought his tales colourfully to life. “The Devil, George, and Rosie” starts: “There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey.” [Independent]

June 4th, 2009 at 3:13 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Iran arrests ‘Agatha Christie serial killer’: Woman accused of drugging, suffocating and robbing her victims was inspired by classic crime novels, police claim [Guardian]

Tough Love for the Humanities: Kass argued that we only benefit from studying the humanities if we do so “in search of the good, the true, and the beautiful” — and that most institutions of higher learning today are teaching nearly the opposite. [Inside Higher Ed]

We still believe in Sherlock Holmes, even in the age of DNA: I can’t, alas, think of a single modern murder that could have been cleared up by a man with a magnifying glass and a remarkable capacity for reasoning. It’s the size of the DNA database that delivers modern criminals to justice. [Telegraph]

Frank McCourt treated for cancer: Angela’s Ashes author undergoing chemotherapy for melanoma and ‘doing pretty well’ [Guardian]

Elsie B. Washington, a Novelist, Dies at 66: Elsie B. Washington, whose 1980 book, “Entwined Destinies,” is widely considered the first black romance novel, died on May 5 in Manhattan. [NYT]

Forgotten authors No.33: HRF Keating: Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating was born in 1926 near Hastings. A lifelong mystery novel lover, he was the crime books reviewer for The Times for 15 years, and is the author of 24 Inspector Ghote mysteries, which are set in the old offices of the Mumbai CID. Keating did not visit India until a full decade and nine Mumbai novels had passed – proof that you don’t always need to write from direct experience. He actually felt that the books were harder to write after his visit. [Independent]

Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies: Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it. [NYT]

May 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

The ten best film adaptations: [Independent]

The giant of modern literature? It has to be The Gruffalo: The Gruffalo, currently the subject of many 10th birthday celebrations and a forthcoming movie, is based on a Chinese folk tale but its word-of-mouth success speaks to the great tradition of British storytelling for children, a tradition that flourishes today as vigorously as ever. [Guardian]

Steal This Book (for $9.99): Now, in the evolving Kindle world, $9.99 is becoming the familiar price. But is that justified just because paper has been removed from the equation? [NYT]

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut: Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks). [NYT]

50 Top Women in Book Publishing: From multimillion-dollar acquisitions to multimillion-dollar best-sellers, powerful women stand at every pivotal, decision-making point in the book publishing process. [Book Business]

Book Of A Lifetime: No Other Life, By Brian Moore: Sentiment in Kingsley Amis is hardening, but there’s no obvious rallying around Brian Moore, the Irish-born novelist who died ten years ago. At one time, he was the “greatest living author”, according to Graham Greene, no doubt because Greene shared his preoccupation with Catholicism and the spiritual travails of his heroes. [Independent]

A Book Author Wonders How to Fight Piracy: The specter of piracy of my books materialized for me several weeks ago when I typed the four words “wayner data compression textbook” into Google. Five of the top 10 links pointed to sites distributing pirated copies. (And now, it’s six.) [NYT]

Catcher in the Rye sequel published, but not by Salinger: The last we saw of Holden Caulfield, he was in a mental hospital in California, reminiscing about the days he spent roaming New York City, watching his sister Phoebe ride a carousel. Now JD Salinger’s much-loved teenage misanthrope is back, thanks to an unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, which sees a 76-year-old “Mr C” flee a nursing home to journey again through the streets of New York. [Guardian]

Palin Signs Deal to Write a Memoir: Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who felt maligned by much of the news coverage of her unsuccessful vice-presidential bid last year, is writing a memoir. [NYT]

Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web: Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. [NYT]

May 19th, 2009 at 10:56 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Martha Mason, Who Wrote Book About Her Decades in an Iron Lung, Dies at 71: Martha spent the next year in hospitals before being sent home in an iron lung. Doctors told her parents she would live another year at most. She survived, she later said, because she was endlessly curious and there was so much to learn. [NYT]

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell: In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell’s torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book [Guardian]

Jodi Picoult attacks ‘poorly written’ Da Vinci Code: Bestselling author of family dramas turns on Dan Brown’s religious conspiracy tale [Guardian]

Malcolm Pryce’s top 10 expatriate tales: From Graham Greene’s novels to Thomas Cook’s timetables, the novelist settles on the best rootless reads [Guardian]

Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press: Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens. [NYT]

A Writer’s Violent End, and His Activist Legacy: Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. [NYT]

John Michell, Counterculture Author Who Cherished Idiosyncrasy, Dies at 76: Three years ago, Mr. Michell surprised friends and family by marrying Denise Price, the Archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids, after a courtship of less than a month. Mr. Goodwin said that two months later, “she threw him out.” In the Observer interview, Mr. Michell summed up his life: “My pursuits are a joke in that the universe is a joke. One has to reflect the universe faithfully.” [NYT]

May 15th, 2009 at 10:38 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Carol Ann Duffy named as Poet Laureate: The new Poet Laureate was named today as Andrew Motion’s 10-year tenure comes to an end, with Carol Ann Duffy becoming the first female to hold the title. [Independent]

Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled: Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began. [NYT]

Bertrand Russell’s mathematical quest adds up to unlikely graphic novel hit: First published in Greece last year, where it has become an unexpected bestseller, Logicomix, subtitled An Epic Search for Truth, is the brainchild of maths expert and novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, who was admitted to Columbia University at the tender age of 15. [Guardian]

Earliest-known book jacket discovered in Bodleian Library: A librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian Library has unearthed the earliest-known book dust jacket. Dating from 1830, the jacket wrapped a silk-covered gift book, Friendship’s Offering. [Guardian]

A very hungry caterpillar found a hungry readership: “He’s very good at remembering how he felt as a child,” says Carle’s longtime editor, Ann Beneduce. “I can’t remember kindergarten at all, but he can go back to his childhood and feel it. He remembers that fear, when you change grades: ‘Will I have a friend?’ ” [LA Times]

Book Of A Lifetime: The Poetics of Space, By Gaston Bachelard: This is what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “the poetics of space”, and his highly original study of the magical “cosmos” of the childhood home and its imaginary spaces is one of the few literary texts that architectural students are required to read. [Independent]

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London: Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait [Guardian]

Unesco Puts World’s Major Works Online: “The Tale of Genji,” an 11th-century Japanese romp that is sometimes called the first true novel, is among about 1,250 books, maps, artworks and other cultural items that went on display online Tuesday in an international library supported by Unesco and the U.S. Library of Congress. [NYT]

Prince Charles to publish attack on big business in eco book and film: The book, called Harmony, due to be published in 2010, calls on our ‘duty of stewardship of the natural order of things’ [Guardian]

May 2nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

The Ten Best Poetry Books [Independent]

‘The Elements of Style’ Turns 50: William Strunk Jr. wrote and self-published the famous “Little Book” as a professor of English. White, his student at Cornell in 1919 and later an author and essayist, first revised the text four decades later after returning it to prominence with an essay in The New Yorker. [NYT]

In Religion Publishing, Sex Is Hot: This new readership wants a fresh look at healthy sexuality,” Leep explains. “In Kiss Me, David wonders where we got the idea that between two and 10 years after getting married the passion and sizzle goes away. He explains how you can have a passionate marriage your entire life, not just the honeymoon phase, and bases everything on The Song of Songs, which has some pretty steamy stuff.” [Publishers Weekly]

When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper: In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience. [NYT]

Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal: Agents and publishing houses can’t get seem to get enough of these quickie humor books, which sell for $10 to $15 in gift shops and hip clothing stores like Urban Outfitters as well as traditional bookstores. [NYT]

April 28th, 2009 at 10:12 pm

This article is filed under Blog.

Book returned to library 145 years overdue: $52,000 fine waived after book stolen during Civil War is given back to Virginia university [Guardian]

British thriller writers mount challenge to US ‘production line’: British thriller authors have joined forces to challenge what they are calling “the reign of the production-line American thriller writers” such as James Patterson, John Grisham and Dan Brown. [Guardian]

Lit Critics Who Peer Under the Covers: NOW that colleges have created gender-neutral housing and bathrooms, and gay couples can be married in Iowa and Connecticut, it may be hard to understand the uproar that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work caused when it first appeared in the mid-1980s. [NYT]

Designers create places to curl up with a book: The architect and designer Claudio Colucci conceived a lounge sofa made from carbon fibre for the James Bond writer Ian Fleming. “I have always liked the fantasy element in design,” he said. “Too much function bores me. I thought of creating an amphibious car, but that already exists, so I designed a lounge-sofa for drinking champagne, for two, of course.” [Independent]

JG Ballard dies aged 78: The 78-year-old author, who was best known for the award-winning Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1984, and his controversial novel, Crash, later adapted into film by David Cronenberg. [Guardian]

Scrolling Down the Ages: All the same, there’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes. [NYT]

Kite Runner joins gay penguins on top 10 books Americans want banned: Khaled Hosseini has joined the illustrious ranks of Philip Pullman and the authors of a story about gay penguins, after his novel The Kite Runner became one of the books that inspired most complaints in America last year. [Guardian]

Book Of A Lifetime: Minotaur, By Tom Paulin: Minotaur: poetry and the nation state, Tom Paulin’s collection of critical essays, was published in 1992 at a significant and, for many, alienating moment in literary history. [Independent]

April 20th, 2009 at 10:59 am

This article is filed under Blog.

Socialite, 85, shocks New York with sex novel: Gloria Vanderbilt, whose family name is one of the most famed in Manhattan history, has written Obsession, the story of a woman who becomes entranced by her dead husband’s affair with a dominatrix. [Guardian]

The poetry, and wisdom, of Seamus Heaney: The Irish Nobel laureate may be on to something with his notion that the arts can help people through troubled economic times. [LAT]

The man who stood up to Orwell: Collins was one of the few people who can be said to have taken on Orwell in a quarrel and emerged his moral superior. [TLS]

Amazon Is Developing Bigger-Screen Kindle: The new Kindle could debut before the 2009 holiday shopping season, they said. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on what he called “rumors or speculation.” [WSJ]

Why is modern literature obsessed with history?: Contemporary novelists are so busy writing about the past, they’re neglecting the times they live in. [Independent]

If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone: Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. [NYT]

About That Book Advance … : Yet despite the economic downturn, and the fact that 7 out of 10 titles do not earn back their advance, the system doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. [NYT]

Forgotten authors No 31: Dorothy Whipple: JB Priestley once described her as “the Jane Austen of the 20th century”. Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) was massively successful in her day, joining the ranks of Waugh and Greene with her second novel, Greenbanks. [Independent]

April 19th, 2009 at 11:32 am

This article is filed under Blog.