• Maud Newton covers the BBC's "End of Story" contest.
• The Literary Saloon looks at syndicated book reviews, and the "unaffiliated reviewers who also get around."
• Tingle Alley prolongs her obsession with David Foster Wallace and his lobsters.
• The new lit blog Connolly100 examines the 100 key texts Cyril Connolly chose to represent "the Modern Movement."
• The Booker shortlist comes out tomorrow. Keep refreshing 3 AM Magazine's Man Booker blog for updates.
• Is TMFTML jumping ship? Will the internet now sink? Our mood already has.

As her husband lay in [the] hospital, Tabitha King, who is also a writer, bought the battered truck, not - as many stories have had it - so he could later beat it with a baseball bat, but because at that stage, she was convinced he would die in hospital and didn't want it to wind up on eBay billed as the vehicle that killed America's most popular novelist.

– from "Dark rider," the Guardian's interview with Stephen King (via Ed's Return of the Reluctant)

Jonathan Coe offers career advice for writers in the Guardian:

More than anything else, you need to be driven, nowadays, if you are going to make any headway as a writer. While newspapers may occasionally regale us with stories of a single mum on a council estate who has just been paid £90m for a story she wrote on the back of her old P45s, or an 18-year-old Oxford undergraduate who only this morning had an idea which has already been translated into 47 languages, this will not be the experience of most aspiring authors. There is a reason stories like this become headline news, and it's because they hardly ever happen.

Instead, for most of us, you need a solid core of self-belief - which is not the same as self-confidence, incidentally. (The former is intrinsic, the latter superficial.) The kind of self-belief a writer needs is childlike in its intensity and impermeability.

An inverted relationship, the Washington Post argues, has emerged between the size of books and the size of books' readership. "Step into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders and you will see shelves sagging with supersize works, some so back-breakingly heavy they are shipped in boxes with plastic handles ...The illogic of this phenomenon speaks volumes -- ever-expanding volumes -- about the state of reading in contemporary civilization." "Perhaps," the piece continues,

books are not just books any more, but symbols. Totems. Artifacts.

If reading trends continue to slide downward, today's books could be tomorrow's fossils. In the way that horse plows and tractors are winding up in agriculture museums while still being used occasionally on family farms, books can be showcased in art galleries and library foyers while still being read by the shrinking faithful.

What strikes GC about this article is not its accuracy or its insight. Rather, it reminds GC that, even as newspapers archive our history and culture, they enact our culture's historical amnesia. "Perhaps books are not just books any more," WP's Linton Weeks writes -- as if bookstores and cheap paperbacks appeared minutes after the first writings. Before Gutenberg, were books -- rare, expensive, owned exclusively by churches, universities and noblemen -- not books? And haven't libraries, for some time, owned, displayed, and guarded bulky and expensive volumes?

The real "illogic" here, then, might be that -- even as publishers put out more books than ever before, and the demand for large, novelty, books increases -- culture writers continue to bemoan the death, and approaching "fossilization," of book culture.

• The Missouri Review presents "The Novelist in Hollywood," a web-exclusive.
• The Age compares expectations for books and their adaptations.
• The New York Times Magazine talks to Arthur Miller about Marilyn -- or, as Mailer put it, the union between ''the Great American Brain'' and ''the Great American Body.''
• The crime novelists behind HBO's The Wire give interviews to the Baltimore Sun and New York Times. (via Confessions)
• The race to adapt Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell begins.

As Sarah Weinman and the Literary Saloon pointed out earlier today, Kirkus Reviews is now offering a pay-per-review service for self-published writers. Here's some snippets from the service's FAQ; GC's favorite phrases are underlined:

Since our inception in 1933, premium subscribers have turned to Kirkus to market books, purchase paperback and foreign rights, and option and buy film rights-all based on the trusted and independent voice of our reviews.

Now, for the first time in 71 years, Kirkus is offering a new review service-an opportunity for rights and acquisition agents to pick up your self-published, e-published and Print-On-Demand book.

Welcome to Kirkus Discoveries, from the publication that, for seven decades, has lent its brand's credibility, integrity, and pedigree to nearly 5,000 books a year. Kirkus is now offering the same service to self-published, e-published and POD authors.

The Kirkus brand has long been trusted by the publishing industry as an indispensable tool to promote and build awareness of deserving books. Now it's your turn: Let Kirkus help ensure your books are Discoveries.

At first, GC read the FAQ as an excercise in irony: "independent" translates into "bribable," "Discoveries" turns into "Sponsors." The qualities Kirkus means to entice buyers with are the exact qualities the purchased service undermines; but, then, the FAQ doesn't just read like an excercise in irony, but a circumlocutory suicide note.

On September 27, Amy Fisher will appear on Oprah to promote her new book, If I Knew Then, which she is self-publishing through iUniverse. September 27, Publishers Weekly reports, "is also the day iUniverse president Susan Driscoll and Kirby Best, CEO of Lightning Source, hope will usher in a new production model for the industry."

Although Driscoll is confident there will be lots of interest in Fisher, she is not sure how many people will want to buy her book. Because iUniverse has no warehouse and is more familiar with handling small print runs, Driscoll approached Best about having Lightning manage the printing for Fisher's book, which Driscoll said could have demand ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of copies. Best saw If I Knew Then as the "perfect book" to test the viability of mixing print-on-demand with traditional offset printing as a way to keep initial printings low, yet guard against missed sales.

... Driscoll said Fisher decided to publish with iUniverse because she was interested in maintaining editorial control over the book and wanted to retain all sub rights. iUniverse used a sales consultant to sell the book into the national accounts and worked with Ingram to promote it to independent booksellers, who, Driscoll acknowledged, have a "modest" interest in the book.

Publishing News Online reports on a new dating service that sounds a lot like an undergrad lit seminar, sans the hot kids:

Jo Dodd, of Worm Holes Bookshop in York, has a highly original way of getting customers into her shop. Her Book Dating concept involves single people coming to the store for a specially-arranged evening, and, as in speed dating, having a few minutes to speak to someone about a book they have read, before moving on to the next person. If two people are intrigued by each other’s responses to a book, there is an opportunity for them to meet up on another occasion.