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Friday, November 19
Litterbox
Canada Reads
In Canada, even celebrities do it:
A new edition of Canada Reads, CBC's "battle of the books," was launched Thursday, introducing five works of Canadian fiction and the corresponding celebrity champions who will duke it out in the annual literary battle.
The lineup for the fourth edition is:- Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, defended by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright;
- Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, defended by Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow;
- Frank Parker Day's Rockbound, defended by author Donna Morrissey;
- Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair, defended by Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay;
- Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (translated by Sheila Fischman), defended by author and former National Librarian Roch Carrier.
These five literary combatants will defend their chosen books beginning Feb. 21 on CBC Radio and CBC Newsworld. At the end of each half-hour episode, they will be asked to vote out one title until only a single book remains, triumphant, on Feb. 25.
The Big Bad Wolfe
Page Two of GC's I Am Charlotte Simons Cheatsheet
Possible Defenses for Liking Wolfe's New Novel:
1. Haven't read it.
The Orlando Sentinel, at the very least, will buy it:
Fellow writer Gay Talese says Wolfe's work is important because he is not afraid to take risks.
"I can tell you he is a very contrarian observer and a courageous writer and that is why he is read," Talese says.
Talese hasn't read Charlotte Simmons yet.
2. Cliches endure when art doesn't.
Virginia Heffernan, writing for Slate, spells it out: ... Somewhere, maybe 10 years ago, I came across a winning essay arguing that Henry James' characters' shortcoming is that they cannot break out of his symbolic order and live freely in our imaginations; they're like helpless preemies and unviable without James' thick prose to keep them breathing (and even then, they're hyperventilating).
..... But what is good for characters--the repetition of their names, the physical descriptions, the tedious shorings up of what each one means ("male low on the masculine pecking order," etc.)--may not be good for an author's reputation. James gets to be first-rate because his characters are subordinated to his style. Wolfe gets pushed around by critics because he lets his characters take center stage, and thus seems weak. Or, as the Philadelphia Inquirer puts it: "Any definitive seizure in art of a man, institution, or slice of life must deliver cliches, or realism goes out the window." (And whoever said seizures weren't painful?)
3. It's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel.
Defending one is much, much harder. So why not keep yourself mentally challenged?
Should Suicide How-To's be Banned?
Websites listing methods of suicide are regularly sued and publicly condemned, but, until now, online booksellers had managed to escape similar targeting. The BBC reports: A coroner is asking the online retailer Amazon to stop selling a book about suicide after the death of a 19-year-old Lancashire woman.
Preston coroner Howard McCann made the appeal after the death of Sarah Cherry, from Penwortham, who killed herself after reading it, an inquest was told.
"I was shocked that such a book should be readily available," said Mr McCann.
But Amazon said removing the book because its message was "repugnant" amounted to censorship. Notice that the BBC, on the other hand, manages to report on the controversy without once mentioning the book by name.
The Big Bad Wolfe
Page One of GC's I Am Charlotte Simons Cheatsheet
Dupont University, the novel's setting, is ...
"... a land grant school crossed with the Thunderdome." [Slate]
"... a brothel attached to a sports arena." [Washington Post]
"... a merger of Harvard, Princeton, Sodom College and Gomorrah Tech." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Women at Dupont ...
"... dance their decadent dance around a cauldron filled with the blood of nice Southern virgin girls." [City Pages]
"... [nightly] cake on makeup and crawl, in an abject drunken stupor, up to lacrosse players, begging them for psychic validation in the form of brutally commitment-free sex." [Slate]
"... [are] wallflowers, ballbreakers or sluts, with sluts predominant - all, at least, apart from Charlotte Simmons." [Telegraph]
Reading I Am Charlotte Simons is ...
"... like watching your father trying to break dance: cringe-inducing and excruciating ..." [Baltimore Sun]
"... about as enlightening as staring at a hotel atrium." [Salon]
Account Book
- Publishers Weekly surveys the new "teen chick lit" sub-genre (sub req'd).
As McAden at HarperCollins described the heightened competition, "It's not enough that a girl meets a guy and writes hilariously in her diary about it. She also needs to have a quirky job and a gay best friend and a mom who ends up dating the dad of the guy she's into, and on top of all that the writing really has to shine. But," she added, "don't send me that book, because I already have three like it under contract!"
- Do ads sell books? Various industry types weigh in at BookAngst 101.
- Blogger John Kremer reports on e-books' new marketing capacities.
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves author Lynne Truss's next book, according to the Independent, will concern itself with manners: Truss "will be as zero-tolerant of overlooked Ps & Qs as she was of the misplaced commas in her punctuation bible." Publishers Marketplace (sub req'd) confirms a fall 2005 publication date.
- Among the sillier deals recently reported by PM: Benrik (AKA, Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag), author(s) of This Book Will Change Your Life and This Book Will Change Your Love Life, have sold a third installment in the series to Trena Keating at Plume. This time, the book's titled This Book Will Change Your Life -- Again -- casting doubt on the efficacy of the first book, while making it required reading for the third (-- how else, Again?).
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