If you combined all the public readings GalleyCat readers have attended, you could probably piece together a lifetime worth of literary lectures. What can we do to make them better?

Earlier this week, Maisonneuve published an essay bluntly entitled, "Why Are Literary Readings So Excruciatingly Bad?" Among the many points explored in that article, GalleyCat appreciated this meditation on literary bars:

"Bars and cafes become the preferred locations, because the availability of alcohol makes attracting people a bit easier and, generally speaking, writers like to drink. But bars are not always ideal settings either: the music in the adjoining room, the chatter of televisions, the rattle of the cash register."

Intrigued by this topic, we asked author and bar expert Alan Black to list his favorite literary drinking establishments. His answers follow in this video interview at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City. Add your favorite literary watering hole in the comments section. (Via Tomorrow Museum)

The Napster of textbooks has closed. Just like the music sharing site, Textbook Torrents gestated on university campuses and threatened an industry--but it appears that publishers may have won the first round by shuttering the file sharing site.

"TextBook Torrents won't be coming back," the site administrator Geekman told TorrentFreak. "We got word from several credible sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally," he explained. In the comments section, a number of readers bemoaned the loss of the site, pointing to a hunger for cheaper digital books.

In July, The Chronicle of Higher Education examined Textbook Torrents, a pirate website that "promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations." One publisher estimated that between 60,000 and 250,000 different textbook files were available for download on such site. In June, the site had 70,000 members. (Via TeleRead.)

Yesterday, GalleyCat interviewed Chad W. Post from the University of Rochester's Open Letter Books about the new Nobel Prize winner.

Post noted that French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio would be a tough sell in the current book market, and criticized Slate author Adam Kirsch for writing that "America should respond [to anti-American bias] ... by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become." His comments touched on a couple hot button issues for American writers, trying to access our literary place in the world during these turbulent times.

The interview generated some passionate responses from readers. One wrote: "Defending one--or a very few--of America's broad, deep writers is NOT 'gross nationalism'... There was a time, not that long ago, when Mr. Le Clezio was published and reviewed in a major way in America."

A reader named Kerstin replied with some biographical notes:

"[Nobel] wanted the prize to go to a writer involved in the human condition and in giving the reader hope. No easy combination ... Unable to find a job in France [Le Clezio] had to travel widely and has settled in Albuquerque where he was offered a position to his liking. (God bless America)."

For a complete round-up of national and international reactions to the Nobel announcement, Literary Saloon has the best round-up.

Earlier this week, former Sopranos cast member Carl Capotorto held a party at Country Club to celebrate the publication of his a new memoir based on his one-man stage show, Twisted Head (the literal translation of his family name). Among the colleagues who showed up to wish him well: Ray Abruzzo, John Costelloe, David Marguiles, executive producer Ilene Landress, and director Alan Taylor.

Speaking of memoirs and book parties, the French Culinary Institute hosted a bash honoring Marcella Hazen for the publication of Amarcord. Guests there included FCI founder Dorothy Hamilton, playwright Larry Kramer, and chef Alice Waters.

We finally got a chance to take a close look at this year's Publishing Trends survey of industry professionals—half of us enjoy the work for the intellectual challenges, and the free books don't hurt, either!—and a full 81.5 percent of those surveyed say "publishing jobs in general are less secure than they were a year ago," while more than 33 percent are worried specifically about hanging on to their own jobs. Asked to reflect further on their future, the number of people who'd like to quit their jobs and become agents is nearly equal to the number of people who are happy where they're at... but 28 percent say they can't decide until they find out who's going to be running the country for the next four years. On the off chance that you can't already guess how their hopes skew, 86 percent say they're voting for Barack Obama.

Not all the survey questions made it into the newsletter report, so the Publishing Trends blog is running additional results, from which you can learn that red wine is favored over white wine 2-to-1, and word of mouth is overwhelmingly the most frequent way publishing industry pros land staff jobs. More such tidbits are promised throughout October.

Megabestselling author Nora Roberts came up to New York earlier this week, and she and Berkley Books threw a tea party in the penthouse suite of her hotel to lay the promotional groundwork for "The Bride Quartet," a series of novels about the women who run a Connecticut wedding planning agency that kicks off with Vision in White next May. "I wanted to go back and do some straight romance, which I haven't done in a long time," explained Roberts (center, flanked by Writers House agent Jodi Reamer and Berkley publisher Leslie Gelbman). She'd had so much fun being involved in the preparations for her youngest son's wedding that the concept came to her pretty quickly, and soon she'd sketched out the four characters— the photographer, the florist, the pastry chef, and the event planner—and chose the Connecticut setting, rather than some place close to her home in Maryland, partly for the huge estates but also because it made it much easier for the women to run into New York City.

If these books take off, we wondered, would Roberts go beyond the fourth book, which is scheduled for publication in 2010? (Even as we asked this, we were mentally chastising ourselves: if a Nora Roberts book takes off? Gee, you think?) No, she said, any time she's written a series, it has a definite ending, and that'll hold true here.

It's been a little over a year since we first told you about the rumors of a Jonah Hex movie, and now the big-screen adaptation of DC Comics's weird western might be ready to film sometime soon. Rumors were circulating yesterday that Josh Brolin might star as the disfigured bounty hunter whose only two companions are death and the acrid smell of gunsmoke—although there seems to be some dispute about that.

Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells says the film is "some kind of sci-fi western with CG up the wazoo," which doesn't match what he was able to learn about Jonah Hex on Wikipedia, but given that the plot has Hex "tracking down a voodoo practitioner," it seems safe to assume that the film's tone will match that of the graphic novels pulp fiction master Joe R. Landsale wrote for DC in the 1990s.

(artwork: DC Comics)

Want to sell your memoir about touring with Hootie and the Blowfish or start writing your book-length investigation into Middle Western cafeteria food?

No matter what your project, you're going to need help with your non-fiction book proposal, the magical document that communicates your idea to publishers. Dust off your idea at MediaBistro's Nonfiction Book Proposal Workshop on Monday, October 13.

"In this one-night workshop -- limited to 12 students -- you'll learn what publishers and agents are looking for and the finer points of writing a book proposal that sells. We'll spend most of the class workshopping your proposal-in-progress."

Follow this link to apply, just send a brief letter of interest and a description of your non-fiction masterpiece (or a draft of your proposal). The night costs $125 ($100 for AvantGuild members).

Following the news that French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (pictured) won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, GalleyCat asked Chad W. Post from the University of Rochester's Open Letter Books if his international publishing imprint would look at the newest Nobel winner.

"I am going to check his books out for Open Letter Press," Post replied. "I just talked to an editor at a big house who doesn't think any of the commercial houses will go after him. Even with the Nobel, there are too many books, many of which still wouldn't sell well enough to justify this."

Earlier this week, Post blogged about how Slate author Adam Kirsch called the Nobel process a sham and urged America to secede from the contest. GalleyCat asked if the Le Clezio award would stir this controversy. Post replied:

"Adam Kirsch will be all over this, pointing out that once again an "unknown author" won, instead of realizing that an author known throughout the world (an author that maybe we should know) won. The gross nationalism behind Kirsch's comments (in Slate and on NPR) horrifies me."

2008 is a particularly bad year to go looking for jobs after a creative writing MFA program. As the recession pounds everybody from newspapers to publishers, three struggling MFA graduates are chronicling this dark year in group blog.

At the Three P's of Post-MFA, Kelly Ferguson, Trina Burke, and Laurie White visit job fairs, wait for applications, and try to get back into academia--capturing the economic headaches ("Ph.D's, publications, and panhandling") facing young writers.

Most recently, Burke, a 33-year-old MFA graduate and former editor, wrote this bleak line:

"Now if they can only tell me what defect in my brain chemistry led to the decision to pursue poetry rather than, say, astrophysics or nursing or some other, more-conducive-to-cash-flow vocation, we'll be all set. If they can come up with a drug to combat the aforementioned defect, that's even better."

A couple weeks back, we got a copy of a letter that had been sent to the McCain campaign by a publicist at Workman Books, whose name and phone number and email had been blacked out. The basic gist of the letter was that Republican presidential candidate John McCain probably wasn't as computer illiterate as his detractors had been making him out to be: "LIke millions of Americans, he probably just needs a little help catching up," the letter said, and wasn't it a nice coincidence that Workman was the publisher of Is This Thing On?, and could make the author, Abby Stokes, available for "a special one-on-one training session" at Sen. McCain's convenience? Cute, we thought, but unless he took her up on it, we didn't really see much of a story, even if Politico did.

Instead of arranging for that lesson, though, it appears the McCain campaign may have leaked a copy of that letter to right-wing blogger Jeff Emanuel over at Red State. That copy was not redacted, so Emanuel knew it was sent by Workman's Oleg Lyubner, and he decided to teach Lyubner a lesson in humility by writing a big, nasty blog post calling the publicist a "media whore" who must have been making fun of the injuries McCain suffered when he was being held captive by the VietCong. (No, really, that's his logic.) To hammer the point home, Emanuel printed Lyubner's work phone number and email address and pointedly invited Red State readers to make use of them.

continued...

We've never been to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and that's not going to change this year, but as long as crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, we might as well issue a call to GalleyCat readers who are lucky enough to go to Germany next week: If you see something, say something! To us, that is. Which we can then tell everybody else. Oh, and pictures, if you've got a digital camera you're carrying around for some reason.

Same goes to anybody who's headed to Baltimore for the World Mystery Convention this weekend: We'd love to hear from you!

According to the Nobel website, the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature. The judges wrote that he is an "'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization'."

CNN reports that he produced 30 novels, and that "His work reflects ecological concerns, rebellion against the intolerance of Western nationalist thought, and his fascination with Native Americans."

Earlier this month, gamblers had placed the best odds for the $1.4 million prize on Italian author Claudio Magris and Joyce Carol Oates. Despite GalleyCat's protest, the committee followed Horace Engdahl's grim outlook and snubbed American literature: "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining," said the Nobel secretary. (Photo via CUNY).

Little, Brown announced yesterday afternoon that it was creating a new imprint for veteran editor Reagan Arthur called, simply enough, Reagan Arthur Books. In her seven years at Little, Brown, Arthur has acquired a wide portfolio of writers, from National Book Award nominee Josh Ferris (pictured) to Scottish crime masters Ian Rankin and Denise Mina to last week's multimillion-dollar pickup of Tina Fey. (Observers who scoff that the publisher must have overpaid for that project should remember: Arthur's the editor who snagged Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian for a reported $2 million.)

In a press release announcing the launch, publisher Michael Pietsch noted that "[Arthur's] association with a book has come to signify a work of quality with a clear commercial hook, and by emblazoning her name on the book itself our goal is to carry that imprimatur of quality to the reading public." (Which, as one observer noted, is ironically pretty much the goal FSG had in giving Pietsch's immediate predecessor, Sarah Crichton, her own imprint, where she introduced Ishmael Beah to the reading public and was the editor for the late Doug Marlette's last novel.) Knowing that the first Reagan Arthur Books books were scheduled to come out in late 2009, we caught up with Arthur at her office and asked if she knew what they were yet. "I have a pretty good idea," she told us, "but we're still finalizing."

Two months ago, we told you about the glossy new bible coming to America, produced by advertising executive Dag Söderberg. Söderberg came to New York recently to do some advance publicity for his magazine-style Bible Illuminated edition of the New Testament, which he hopes to sell to secular readers much as he did in his native Sweden, although Illuminated World, the publishing company set up to sell the book here, will also be working with religious leaders to drum up awareness. Larry Norton, the company's president, added that their status as non-religious publishers "allows us to be credible when we say we're not promoting any one religious point of view," but aiming to make believers and non-believers alike aware of the extensive role the scriptures have had in shaping Western cultural values, including but not limited to the ethical and moral realms.

So, we asked Söderberg, after spending all this time with the various books of the Bible, which was his favorite?

"In the New Testament, I think Revelation is a real story," Söderberg said, explaining how powerful its vision was following the gospels, which essentially present four different versions of the same story. "The world is destroyed; it's destroyed by us. Even for people who don't believe, it's still mind-boggling that someone wrote that 2,000 years ago and we're seeing it happen now in modern pictures. That gets you..." He discussed the thinking that went into the last photograph to illustrate that part of his New Testament, a crowd shot representing the 144,000 people described in St. John's vision as chosen for final redemption. "If you look at the clothes they wear, you don't recognize them as 'Christian people,'" he explained. "In my book, they're just clothes. It's man, mankind—what's inside the clothes—that's important." Focusing on the commonalities shared by people in all the world's religions, he continued, ideally weakens our tendency to make superficial judgments about other people based on their appearances.

In the Old Testament, which has not yet been prepared for an English-language edition, he especially liked the story of Esther, but had an even greater appreciation for the Song of Songs: "It's about love, a very intimate love, very pure... The Old Testament is very much about war, very much about death, then it's a relief to have those songs there." (We admit some partiality to Job lately, but don't read anything into that; it's because we're fans of the alt.country band Dolorean, who turned the words to the 28th chapter into a wonderful song called "The Search," which you can download for free from C-Net).