Leaders who seek readers: Realistically, any politician who has time to produce a book while occupying or seeking high office is either employing a ghost writer or is shirking more important duties through an egotistical desire to see their name lying vertically in a library. Yet the continuing belief that the electorate will be impressed by a glossy oblong talking up the candidate means that those who are running soon run towards a publisher. [Guardian]

Drawing Power: What I want to know is: How did this formerly ghettoized medium became one of the rare publishing categories that’s actually expanding these days? [Washington Post]

Michael Baxandall changed my life: This week was a sad one for art history with the death at 74 of Michael Baxandall, one of our most acute commentators on painting and sculpture. His Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy is a life-changing book that makes even the most apparently banal Renaissance painting spring to life. [Telegraph]

Biden Book, Once Forgotten, Now a Best Seller: A day after Senator Obama chose Mr. Biden as his running mate for the Democratic ticket, Mr. Biden’s “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics” was in the top 10 on Barnes & Noble.com and in the top 40 on Amazon.com. [NY Sun]

August 25th, 2008 at 2:59 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Which Authors Are Faking Their Autographs?: At two authors and $25 per 200 books, one would have to churn out a convincing fake signature every 9 seconds just to earn the advertised $25 per hour. And you’re supposed to visit their office on spec to prove your abilities first! It’s not clear on behalf of which authors the ad was posted. [Gawker]

Japan: Marxist book turns bestseller 79 years on: A 79-year-old tale of rebellion among a fishing boat crew has become an unlikely summer hit among young Japanese people facing economic decline and rising poverty. [Guardian]

Hollywood Still Going After Fitzgerald: In December, audiences will see Brad Pitt and Cate Winslett appear in the David Fincher-helmed adaptation of the author’s little-known short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” And, with Hollywood options on several other Fitzgerald properties, there may soon be a swell of material about, and by, the romantic and doomed Jazz Age writer. [Publishers Weekly]

Novel pulled from bookshops after Muslim protest: The Serbian publisher of Sherry Jones’s controversial novel about the child bride of Muhammad has withdrawn the book following protests from an Islamic pressure group. Publisher BeoBook yesterday pulled 1,000 copies of Jones’s The Jewel of Medina from bookshops across Serbia and apologised for its publication. [Guardian]

Signing off: the weird world of book signings: To some authors, the book-signing is a curse. What could be more excruciatingly dull, to the sensitive creative mind, than to sit for hours in a festival tent or bookshop, inscribing your name on several hundred copies of your new masterpiece? [Independent]

My first language: Before becoming a novelist, Eva Hoffman studied the piano in her native Poland and dreamed of becoming a professional musician. Here she explores the complex relationship between music and literature - and how they have both shaped her life. [Guardian]

August 23rd, 2008 at 12:19 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Porn claims outrage German Kafka scholars: The German-speaking world of Kafka scholars hit out yesterday over a British academic’s claims that the writer had a penchant for hard porn. [Guardian]

Dylan’s Poetic Pause in Hollywood on the Way to Folk Music Fame: Barry Feinstein, the rock ’n’ roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s. And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan. [NYT]

I love you, Lord Byron: How the poet’s postbag bulged with female admirers’ letters: Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, was one of the first celebrities to receive a deluge of fan mail from anonymous women whose amorous epistles he treasured, research has revealed. [Independent]

WAGs and war on terror invade dictionary: WAGs, carbon footprints and the credit crunch are now so much a part of everyday life that they are being included in the Chambers Dictionary. New words included in the 11th edition of the book, out on August 22, have a strong green focus, with food miles, green tax, eco-village and electrosmog - the potentially harmful electromagnetic fields from computers and mobile phones - also making it into the dictionary for the first time. [Guardian]

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ comes to the screen: Screenwriter Joe Penhall’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel opens with the two survivors of some unspoken earthly catastrophe enduring an earthquake, witnessing a forest fire, stepping around a severed human leg and discovering a family of three who have hanged themselves — all before Page 8. [LA Times]

Book Of A Lifetime: The Barracks, by John McGahern: Although I still have that first copy of the book, I can’t tell whether I brought it out from Ireland or if I picked it up somewhere along the way. What I do know is that I first read John McGahern’s The Barracks as a student in the early 1980s, when I was travelling through Europe for the summer. [Independent]

August 18th, 2008 at 11:26 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

“Mad Men” Gives O’Hara a Boost: It’s not unhead of for a TV show to boost sales of a book, but poetry titles don’t often get the spotlight treatment. Not so anymore. Meditations in an Emergency by poet and cult figure Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), published by Grove Press, has received a noticeble bump in sales after an appearance on the much-lauded AMC drama, Mad Men. [Publishers Weekly]

Public vote to find the oddest book title of the past 30 years: Contenders include: 1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press) [BookBrowse]

Fact vs. truth: The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell didn’t let the former get in the way of the latter: Joseph Mitchell, his shoe leather beaten and his ears bent by stories, the reporter’s reporter, the finest The New Yorker ever produced (then and now, and possibly forever), “the paragon of reporters” (so sayeth Calvin Trillin) whose writing “stood firmly and cleanly in your mind, like Shaker furniture” (Roger Angell), the pale-skinned son of North Carolina, the wandering eye of New York back alleys and crannies, the chronicler of the Bowery and the bearded ladies of Broadway and the rats on the waterfront and the epic fabricators of Greenwich Village, would have turned 100 this summer. [Chicago Tribune]

Call for compensation after shelving of Islam novel: The lawyer who was threatened by terrorists whilst acting for Salman Rushdie has said that Random House US should pay “substantial compensation” to Sherry Jones, whose novel about Muhammad’s child bride Aisha was dropped by the publisher over fears it could provoke terrorist attacks. [Guardian]

Book Attacking Obama Hopes to Repeat ’04 Anti-Kerry Feat: In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book attacking Senator John Kerry’s record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry’s war credentials as he sought the presidency. [NYT]

Yiddish Policemen triumph at Hugo awards: Chabon beat British science fiction authors Charles Stross and Ian McDonald to take the prize, which is voted for by fans. The win marks Chabon’s second science fiction prize this year and sees him join a roster of former winners including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. [Guardian]

August 15th, 2008 at 9:27 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Problem: Boys Don’t Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross: The book’s main character slaughtered his victims by running them through with sharp stakes. He once left hundreds dying slowly on a hillside while the soil grew “muddy with blood” and “blackbirds flocked around the corpses, fighting for a meal.” [WSJ]

Remembering a Native Son: Richard Wright’s friend and confidant recalls his last years in Paris and one quick, final novel. [Washington Post]

Mahmoud Darwish, Leading Palestinian Poet, Is Dead at 67: Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. He was 67. [NYT]

The ‘next Satanic Verses’ shelved for fear of stirring up Islamic extremists: A novel about the child bride of the Prophet Mohamed has been withdrawn by Random House, which said it feared that publication of the book could “incite acts of violence”. Critics, however, have accused the publisher of abandoning the principle of free speech and caving into pressure from extreme Islamist elements. [Independent]

Overlooked gems?: Some authors recommend their favorite underread and unappreciated books. [Chicago Tribune]

August 11th, 2008 at 9:23 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Simon Gray, Playwright, Dies at 71: Simon Gray, who wrote bitingly comic plays like “Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged” and “Quartermaine’s Terms” about the educated British middle class and whose almost manically confessional late-in-life memoirs turned his sardonic intelligence upon himself, died on Wednesday in London. He was 71. [NYT]

Demons Inner and Outer: If contemporary novelists have not produced a comparable book about the terrorists we face today, the reason may be that the variety of evil that confronts us is so unalluring. There is hardly an American of any political persuasion who sympathizes with Al Qaeda’s vision of Islamic theocracy. Dostoyevsky’s lesson is that it is when evil comes to us wearing the mask of goodness — as it has so often in the past, and certainly will again the future — that we have to be most on our guard. [NY Sun]

Book Of A Lifetime: The Viceroy of Ouidah, by Bruce Chatwin: By rights, I should really hate this rather rococo novella, because its obsession with the ugly side of humanity and its brutal depiction of Africans is almost without redemption. Instead, I find myself swooning at its excesses, and rereading it every time I start writing a new book, in the hope that some of its genius will rub off on me. [Independent]

August 8th, 2008 at 10:35 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Essay: On the writer William Saroyan: Like Mark Twain and Henry Miller, he was an American sport, hiding the necessary suspicion of monstrousness under his yelling love and optimism. He was merry and bright. Life handed him deep griefs, as it does to most of us. [San Francisco Chronicle]

The Arrow and the Poem: In the last decade, a new library of translations from Sanskrit has begun to appear. It is called the Clay Sanskrit Series, named after the generous donor who has made it all possible, John P. Clay, who took a degree in Sanskrit from Oxford University many years ago. More than thirty volumes have already appeared in this extraordinary project, with another twenty or more in the pipeline. [The New Republic]

Living without ‘isms’: As Gao said in 2000 when he became the first (and only) writer in Chinese to win the Nobel prize for literature, “it was only during this period, when literature became utterly impossible, that I came to comprehend why it was so essential.” [Guardian]

Russia’s literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life’s work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. [Guardian]

August 5th, 2008 at 9:31 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Barn fire in Bucks County destroys 30,000 books: In 50 years of book collecting, Ben Cavanaugh amassed everything from the rare to the ubiquitous. For every first-edition John Steinbeck there were dozens of Tom Clancy military thrillers stored in bookcase after bookcase in Cavanaugh’s 1740s stone barn. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Book Of A Lifetime: Everyman, by Philip Roth: Philip Roth’s Everyman draws on the “virtuous journey” of the 15th-century allegory in which God summons Death, his messenger, to go to Everyman and bid him come to heaven to be judged. This is a wise book which will unsettle you. Are you ready for this book? I have read it a few times and am still not sure that I am. [Independent]

Italy: Infernal row flares over Florence council’s plans to pardon Dante: Florence council was to have healed the 700-year rift with the poet by presenting the city’s golden florin to Count Pieralvise Serego Alighieri. The count, however, believes the Florentines are not sorry enough. [Guardian]

Against the Day: David Lebedoff on Orwell and Waugh: If Evelyn Waugh might be described as a social alpinist, clambering up one aristocratic pinnacle after another, George Orwell, his exact contemporary — both were born in 1903 — was a spelunker, burrowing ever deeper into the seamiest depths. [NY Sun]

Rowling’s Rare Book to Hit Shelves in December: Just when it looked to be a dull summer with no Harry Potter hoopla, the boy wizard’s fans have something new to celebrate on this, Harry’s (and J.K. Rowling’s) birthday. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of wizarding fairy tales handwritten and illustrated by Rowling, will be published on December 4 by Children’s High Level Group, the English children’s charity co-founded by Rowling and Emma Nicholson. [Publisher's Weekly]

The rise and rise of the first novel: To look at the rise of the first novel is to look into the eyes of a culture that is always restless, always hunting around for the next big thing, no longer sure what or where the action is. [Guardian]

August 1st, 2008 at 9:13 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

The Big Question: Do electronic books threaten the future of traditional publishing?: Not in the short term, because sales of e-book readers will only cannibalise a tiny proportion of physical book sales for the foreseeable future. In fact, evidence from the US suggests that dedicated book readers who use the electronic readers also continue to buy books. The long-term danger for publishers is if they don’t invest in digital technology for their content. [Independent]

Online, R U Really Reading?: As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. [NYT]

The 10 most popular misconceptions about Oscar Wilde [Guardian]

More Bang for the Book: In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. [NYT]

July 28th, 2008 at 9:10 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Digital Dickens: How Scott Sigler is changing the way we read: But what makes Sigler groundbreaking is that most of his novels have never appeared in print. They are broadcast via a small cubicle containing an Apple Macintosh and some recording equipment. That is pretty much all Sigler has needed to become the world’s most famous podcast author. [Independent]

Mormon who put new life into vampires: Teenagers across the world are anxiously awaiting the next instalment of author Stephenie Meyer’s vampiric series of novels. [Guardian]

Brutal beginnings: Writers of fiction like to say they ply their trade by telling lies, but Tobias Wolff really was a liar. He would not be where he is today if he hadn’t been. Terrorised by a violent stepfather, dependent for refuge on his floundering mother, he made up stories in order to survive. [Guardian]

LA Times to Fold Standalone Book Review: According to a former staffer, the Los Angeles Times is folding its standalone Sunday book review section, laying off two dedicated book editors. [Publishers Weekly]

Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate: “I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.” [NYT]

Kick over the Scenery: And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick. When he died in 1982, Dick was a cult figure, admired unreservedly in the science fiction subculture, and in the American counterculture as a chronicler of psychedelia and fringe religion. [LRB]

‘It was a gift for my kids’: former hotel clerk tops best-seller lists: As a first-time author William P Young had no illusions about his book. A former hotel night clerk and odd-job man who was raised partly among a stone-age tribe in New Guinea, he had written it mostly as an exercise in self-therapy with little thought of publishing. If his children would read it, he’d be happy. [Independent]

July 22nd, 2008 at 8:50 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.