Gaiman to Write Episode of Doctor Who

Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods, Coraline) has indicated he will be writing an upcoming episode of the British television series, Doctor Who.

From BBC News:

During his acceptance speech for best comic at the SFX Awards, Gaiman said: “As anyone who’s read my blog knows, I’m a big fan of a certain long-running British TV series. One that I started watching -- from behind the sofa -- when I was three.

“And while I know it’s cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now -- which is to say, not in the upcoming season but early in the one after that -- it’s quite possible that I might have written an episode.”

The BBC News items is here. January Magazine’s 2001 interview with Gaiman is here.

New Today: Brigid of Kildare by Heather Terrell

Terrell’s latest novel (after The Map Thief and The Chrysalis) weaves the historic tale of Ireland’s beloved Saint Brigid with a contemporary thread involving an appraiser of medieval relics.

While readers who like their history pure will chafe at the modern bits in Brigid of Kildare (Ballantine), Terrell handles these parts as ably as she does those that introduce us to Ireland’s only woman bishop. The resulting novel is likely more palatable for the uninitiated than a straight-up history might be.

Interestingly, Terrell graduated magna cum laude, focusing on art history, from Boston College. She was also called to the Bar, and spent over a decade as a litigator with several Fortune 500 companies. It’s refreshing to read a novel by a successful lawyer set outside of the courtroom. The world doesn’t need another Grisham, but I can’t imagine anyone reanimating Saint Brigid with quite Terrell’s deftness and delicacy.

Non-Fiction: The Locavore Way: Discover and Enjoy the Pleasures of Locally Grown Food by Amy Cotler

So many people are talking about green issues these days, alternative lifestyles have gotten to be mainstream. Long gone are the days when a hostess could plunk a steak down in front of dinner guests without first asking about food preferences and considering the social and moral implications of such an act. In the West, we are critically concerned with the consequences of our actions and while, in broad strokes, that’s a good thing, on a micro level, it can get a little cloying. And you’ve encountered those books. Self-righteous finger-pointers waggling correctively at us while we choke on the meat fiber that would otherwise have been enjoyed.

Amy Cotler’s The Locavore Way (Storey Publishing) isn’t that book. Quite the opposite, in fact. Cotler brings the uninitiated joyously into the fold, while taking those already moving towards a slower food lifestyle more deeply into a world she is comfortable with: both to travel in and to share. She explains herself and her mission succinctly, then shows us how to get to where she’d like us to go: to a place where fresh food is simply cooked and joyously shared. She makes this sound like an attainable place. She makes it sound like Nirvana:

Imagine a healthy landscape, dotted with small farms raising food without ravaging the land, water and air, promoting better-nourished communities and local economies, and creating less dependence of the fossil fuels needed to transport food from afar.

As idyllic as she makes it sound, in subsequent pages she demonstrates that this is more than a distant vision. For many people, it’s a growing reality. With stories, profiles, recipes and tips, Cotler engages us with possibilities and ideas.

Here, from a slender book filled with great real-world examples of how to bring local and organic into your life, a list that breaks things down to its most essential components (something this author does very well):

Why Bother?
10 Reasons to Eat Locally Produced Food:

1. For the sheer pleasure of it.
2. To connect.
3. For the health and safety of your family and yourself.
4. For the health of our planet.
5. To boost the local economy, community and region.
6. For an open, working landscape.
7. To maintain biodiversity.
8. To support our neighboring farms and farmers.
9. To prepare our culinary heritage.
10. To give us a just choice.

New This Week: The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock

It’s impossible not to compare debut novelist Nicholas Ruddock’s The Parabolist (Doubleday Canada) to Vincent Lam’s Giller Award-winning debut from 2006, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. And not just because Lam has offered up a blurb for Parabolist’s cover: “An inventive, poetic and thoroughly wonderful novel,” Lam offers. In some ways he’s right though, certainly, The Parabolist isn’t a patch on Lam’s very wonderful book. Here’s why: both books include some really graphic and disturbing medical details as a device to move narrative forward in ways that are somewhat new and interesting. (I say “somewhat” because, with both books, there were whole passages I actually couldn’t read for fear of loss of lunch.) And both writers employ a distant, detached narrative voice. From The Parabolist:

A few days after the poetry class, Roberto Moreno called Valerie Anderson. She was in the phone book. There were lots of Andersons but not too many V’s.

Perhaps we can spend the day together, he said.

Sure, she said, okay.

But where Lam’s use of distance seemed intentional -- a creative choice, perhaps used to draw our attention from some of the horror that he showed us -- Ruddock’s storytelling style here is obtrusive. One finds it difficult to let the words just flow away because, every time they do, he jolts us back with a reminder of the distance he is creating.

The story is likewise occasionally awkward and not fully realized. There are problems with the timeline: parts of the story seem to move ahead with an almost blurring speed, while others drag on for months. And while it’s fun to run into familiar faces -- a young Gwendolyn MacEwen, for example, gets a cameo and lots of Canadian literary figures have some sort of role, even if off-camera -- their inclusion provides another off-note. Some sort of distant homage: an inside joke, never fully explained. And those are never fun.

The story takes place in Toronto in 1975. A group of medical students are befriended by a Mexican poet, assigned to add culture to their scientific lives. On a night of drunken revelry, one of the students and the poet prevent a rapist from killing his victim and, in the process of their intervention, the rapist is killed. That sounds like a spoiler, but it is not. All of this happens early enough in the book that it is part of the set-up for the events that will follow.

There are some beautiful moments in The Parabolist and readers with a passion for poetry will be especially entranced. There are some great philosophical thoughts here and, actually, some pretty remarkable original poetry. Students and fans of contemporary Canadian fiction will find much here on which to comment. But, for this reader, some of the choices Ruddock made to tell this story were impossibly off-putting. I wanted to love The Parabolist, and though there were parts that I admired, the book seemed never to really allow me to let go and forget and join in.

Crichton’s Art Collection to Go Under the Hammer

Christie’s auction house has announced that the extensive art collection owned by the late author Michael Crichton will be sold in May.

The author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery and many other books had a significant collection of art. It is expected to bring 20 million pounds -- roughly 30 million U.S. dollars -- and includes works by Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Pablo Picasso.

Christie’s Brett Gorvey told the BBC that the London exhibit of the works to be sold represent “an incredible insight into the mind and personal journey that Michael Crichton made as a collector.”

The BBC piece is here. January Magazine noted Crichton’s passing in 2008 here.

Google and Amazon Trying to Take Over the World? Shut-Up, Please. I Just Want to Read.

Even mainstream news agencies are carrying news about the Google book deal and the Amazon Macmillan electronic rights wars. I’ve read a lot of misinformed articles and cock-eyed assessments of both situations in the last week -- both in the world and on the Web. I’ll bet you have too.

With a few exceptions, we’ve been resisting the urge to comment on either story at January Magazine, other than with the broadest of strokes. This is because, in a very real sense, both stories are outside of our mandate.

January has always been about the celebration of books and reading. There are other -- many other -- publications and blogs whose mandates seems to be to comment on the business end of publishing. It seems to us that, in some ways, there is very little about the publishing industry that has anything to do with books other than making, distributing and selling them. Certainly the appreciation of the written word -- what makes a good book, what ignites that fire in the soul -- has very little to do with the industry of publishing. They are connected thoughts, sure. But they are not the same.

While it can be argued that, in the end without the industry, there can be no books, we would argue back that this is simply not true. These two current situations seem very dire. And to some people, I suppose they are. In the big picture, however, I assure you, they will not be.

I’ve said this before, will likely say it again: when it comes to books, I want my full body immersion. Everything else is just a lot of noise. The industry will go ahead and work out the details and, in a perfect world, everyone will be happy when they do.

When the dust settles -- and it will -- there will be books for us to read. Someone will be publishing them. They might be on paper, they might be electronic. Those involved will make a certain amount of money, or they will not. But, here’s the thing, when I sit near my hearth, or at the beach or under a tree in the summer time, and I have a book in my hand, it will make the world go away. And all of this noise? It doesn’t have a lot to do with that.

New This Week: In My Sister’s House by Donald Welch

The cover is ridiculous. Lurid and garish, it looks more appropriate to a steamy romance novel best read at the beach. In My Sister’s House (Ballantine/One World) is not that book. Rather it is a sharp and realistic representation of life in urban America. It might not be high art, but neither is it the low brow escape that the cover would suggest.

Skylar Morrison owns a hot Philadelphia nightclub called Legends. As the book begins, her sister, Storm, is released after three years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Determined to get what she feels is hers, she storms Legends in an effort to get half of the nightclub, a share to which she feels entitled. Trouble ensues.

This is actor/singer/playwright Donald Welch’s second novel. The first, 2008’s The Bachlorette Party, was based on one of Welch’s more successful plays. The trouble with Welch’s novels are not with the books themselves. One very much gets the feeling that this talented writer is telling the stories that move him. The trouble is with a marketing department that seems a little unsure of how this clear-eyed, sharp-voiced writer should be shared with the world. One can’t help but think that some of the decisions that have been made in that regard will keep Welch from the part of his potential audience that would appreciate him most deeply... and never mind the existing fans that likely feel the need to keep this book covered if they read on the bus.

Meanwhile, Welch’s fans in the Los Angeles area will want to take note that the hit gospel musical stage play Hallelujah Mahalia!, written and directed by Welch, opens at the the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on February 27th.

New Literary Prize Honors Historical Fiction

A new prize will honor the memory and literary passion of Sir Walter Scott with a significant prize:

He is seen as the father of the historical novel, so it’s perhaps only fitting that a new literary prize honouring the genre is to be launched in the name of Sir Walter Scott.

The £25,000 award is being set up by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scott. They hope the award will help to “properly honour” the author’s “immense achievements”, and “place as one of the world’s most influential novelists”.

The prize will be presented in June. The Guardian offers up full details here.

New Today: Blackout by Connie Willis

Though I’m not much on novels of alternate history, Connie Willis’ latest epic, Blackout (Spectra), is really something more. A time-traveling thriller with cultural and scientific implications. Blackout is big, muscular, thoughtful and altogether terrific: a novel quite worthy of the eight year wait for the latest words from the six-time Nebula and 10-time Hugo Award-winning author.

In Blackout we meet the same time-traveling Oxford historians first encountered in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. This time they pop from the mid-21st century they call home to London and area during The Blitz where they become stranded at the worst possible moment.

Blackout, then, becomes the novel that shouldn’t work. The book with something for everyone that ends up working on every level. It is adventure. It is history. It is science. It is, indeed, thrilling. And it is unforgettable.

Death of a Crime Writer

(Editor’s note: In the two weeks since author Robert B. Parker suddenly passed away, there’s been a significant outpouring of appreciation for what he contributed to the detective-fiction genre. Most of that has come from American writers, but not exclusively. The following tribute was penned by Jim Napier, a mystery and crime fiction critic who lives in Quebec, Canada, and contributes to the Sherbrooke Record.)

In the literary landscape of crime fiction, Robert B. Parker stood as tall and proud as a Sequoia, firm and never wavering, impossible to miss and commanding our admiration and respect. But on Monday, January 18, the 77-year-old Parker died of a heart attack while sitting at his computer in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, working on the most recent of his numerous novels. Although it came far too soon for his many readers, it was a predictable and fitting end to an impressive life.

Over the preceding 37 years, Parker had written 74 books, some award-winning, almost all of them bestsellers. The bane of creative-writing instructors, he was famous for writing without an outline or notes, even without a story line when he started a book; instead, he would begin with a simple opening premise and just see where it led him. Yet Parker was a disciplined writer, turning out five pages a day (others have said 10) for 50 weeks per year, giving his readers up to three novels annually. As he put it, “I don’t get better by taking my time. My second draft is not an improvement, so I don’t do one.” Hardly good advice for most aspiring writers, but in Parker’s case it served him well.

After a stint with the U.S. Army in Korea during the 1950s, Parker entered Boston University, where his doctoral thesis -- written in just two weeks -- explored the world of such hard-boiled crime-fiction writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. He might easily have remained an academic, but Parker chose instead to swim in the deep end of the pool: he abandoned teaching to turn out increasingly subtle yet readable novels that both developed the detective-fiction genre and entertained millions of fans for the next four decades.

Well into his writing career, Parker was approached by the administrators of the Raymond Chandler estate, who asked him to complete Poodle Springs, a manuscript left unfinished at the time of Chandler’s death in 1959. He did so (the resulting book was published in 1989), and then followed that up with an entirely new Philip Marlowe novel, Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to Chandler’s 1939 first novel, The Big Sleep. Both are tributes to his mentor, affectionately and impeccably written.

Although firmly in the hard-boiled camp, Parker gave the literary world a kinder, more romantic and far more complex hero than had most of the writers who came before him. His 37 tales about a Boston private eye known only as Spenser (which inspired a popular late-1980s TV series) include subplots that revolve around the P.I.’s private life, and show a gentler, nuanced figure (though he could be tough when he had to be) who treats women as women rather than as objects, and knows his way around a kitchen. And as society evolved, Parker transformed along with it: when his two sons acknowledged that they were gay, Parker found a way to explore that fact through his novels, and did so with insight and sensitivity.

While continually adding to the Spenser oeuvre, in the late 1990s Parker began to pen a couple of other series, including half a dozen stories featuring Sunny Randall, a female Boston ex-cop turned gumshoe. Although some people criticized the protagonist as merely Spenser in drag, after awhile the series took on a unique persona, and now stands on its own.

Branching out in other directions, Parker also wrote nine rather darker novels about Jesse Stone, a flawed small-town police chief based in New England, and more than a dozen standalone works.

Let’s be clear: Parker’s books don’t qualify as great literature, whatever that may be. But they are well-written, entertaining yarns that often raise important issues, which is all Parker ever sought or claimed for them. If his plots sometimes seem a bit mundane, it’s because he dealt with events involving believable people caught up in the ebb and flow of real life. And his seemingly light, breezy style often masks some tough questions more frequently found in so-called literary novels. Parker’s skillful use of a first-person viewpoint and sharp, witty dialogue recalls the best of the American hard-boileds, yet his books are unmistakably of our time. In the last Spenser novel published before his death (2009’s The Professional), the hero never uses his gun, and only uses his fists once, to avoid having a conflict escalate into gunfire. True to the hard-boiled mantra, the resolution of the conflict is by cosmic, rather than legal, means: a killer is made to pay for his crimes and justice is served, but in a way that the judicial system could never accommodate. It is a book that profoundly explores manipulation, guilt and accountability in the context of shifting social mores.

Not only did he receive two Edgar Awards for his novels, but in 2002 Parker was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor he shared with such luminaries as Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, John Le Carré, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Stephen King. The event acknowledged his place in the pantheon of great crime writers. Yet throughout his career he remained approachable and helpful to emerging authors.

Parker’s influence in the crime-writing fraternity has been enormous. With Spenser he liberated the character of the hard-boiled protagonist from the one-dimensional portrayals of the 1930s and ’40s, and transformed him into a likable, even admirable figure: an ex-boxer with an addiction to cinnamon doughnuts, who was also an accomplished cook, a dog lover, and not least of all, a man who could admire beautiful women while staying true to his partner -- all without weakening his hero’s masculinity. This opened the door for other writers to take similar paths, adding to the richness of the genre. Parker’s impact has been acknowledged by such renowned crime writers as Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben. In a 2007 interview with Atlantic Monthly, Coben said that “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

Survived by his wife, Joan (to whom he dedicated almost all of his books), and his two sons, David and Daniel, Robert B. Parker left the literary world a legacy that, happily, will continue to shape detective fiction for a very long time.

(Author photo by John Earle. Used with permission.)

Prizes Lost, Heroes Found

In a week that seems likely to be filled with book news of the maddening kind, it’s fun to come across a story that celebrates books and reminds us of the excitement they can bring.

The announcement of Lost Man Booker, seems designed to help us refocus on what's really important about books and how they can influence our culture and our lives in beautiful and meaningful ways.

Here’s the setup: two years after the Booker Prize began, it was no longer awarded as a retrospective. According to the Man Booker foundation, it became, “as it is today, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. At the same time, the date on which the award was given moved from April to November. As a result of these changes, there was whole year’s gap when a wealth of fiction, published in 1970, fell through the net. These books were simply never considered for the prize.”

And what a wealth it was, too. When you look at the longlist, which has just been announced, the mind reels with possibilities and wonder. There is, quite literally, something here for everyone: for every reading taste in the English language:

The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation. He comments, "I noticed that when Robertson Davies's Fifth Business was first published it carried encomiums from Saul Bellow and John Fowles both of whom judged the 1971 Booker Prize. However judges for 1971 said it had not been considered or submitted. This led to an investigation which concluded that a year had been excluded. I am delighted that, even in a Darwinian way, this year, with so many extraordinary novels, can now be covered by the Man Booker Prize."

Though the poll has still to be posted, you’ll get the chance to vote on the shortlist via the Man Booker Web site. The shortlist will then be announced in March, while the winner will be announced in May.

Here’s the longlist:

• Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
• H.E.Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
• Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
• Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
• Christy Brown, Down All The Days
• Len Deighton, Bomber
• J.G.Farrell, Troubles
• Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
• Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
• Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
• Susan Hill, I’m The King Of The Castle
• Francis King, A Domestic Animal
• Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
• David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
• Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
• Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
• Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
• Joe Orton, Head To Toe
• Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
• Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
• Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
• Patrick White, The Vivisector

SF/F: El Borak and Other Desert Adventures by Robert E. Howard

Don’t get me wrong: I’m confident that 2010 will be filled with fantastic new books and even new voices in the twinned genres of science fiction and fantasy. Even so, I think it’s going to be tough for me to get as excited about another book as I am about Del Rey’s release this month of El Borak and Other Desert Adventures by the tragic and doomed Robert E. Howard, the prolific pulp writer-of-all-trades who, in 1936, died tragically and by his own hand when he was just 30.

That alone gives me pause. When you consider both Howard’s incredible output as well as the legacy he left, it’s very sad to think what he would have achieved had been given -- had he taken -- another 30 years. Our loss.

Howard was one of the most influential pulp authors of the 20th century. He is credited with the creation of the sword and sorcery sub-genre. In El Borak and Other Desert Adventures we are treated to a really terrific collection of Howard’s stories, highlighted by one of his best-known creations, the Texan adventurer Xavier Gordon, known as El Borak and set on adventure in the deserts of the east.

Almost as special as this resurrection of some of Howard’s most important stories are the illustrations that have been created for this volume. The art of Jim and Ruth Keegan and Tim Bradstreet are well known in SF/F and the inclusion of specially commissioned work here contributes to making this volume feel like much more than the republication of Howard’s stories: it feels like a respectful celebration of his electric, irreplaceable voice.

Amazon Capitulates

Well, it looks as if Amazon has blinked first in its big e-book battle against mega-publisher Macmillan. An announcement posted this evening by the “Amazon Kindle team” reads:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

No need to rub Amazon’s nose in it. Let’s just call this good news for all those Macmillan authors whose work will once more be easily available through the giant online retailer.

READ MORE: “Looking Like a Fool with Your Foot in Your Mouth,” by Sandra Ruttan (On Life and Other Inconveniences).

How to Publish, Not Perish

It sounds like a spam come-on, not the headline on an article in the blog of one of the most respected newspapers in the world:

How to publish your own book online -- and make money

Yet there it is: in backlit black and white, on The Guardian’s technology blog. Technology and economics columnist -- and fledgling poet -- Victor Keegan takes a very personal approach to the topic of self-publishing for fun and profit in a piece that clearly comes from outside of the book industry and approaches the matter at hand from many angles.

It doesn't have to be an embryonic bestseller because self-publishing is best suited to limited editions. Anything over 1,000 copies and you would be better off going to a traditional printer to take advantage of economies of scale. I know a lot people who are self-publishing a record of their own lives together with memories of their parents and grandparents as a bit of family history. That's not vanity publishing, just a great way to preserve memories for future generations and add to the archive of local history. Self-publishing is ideal for that.

Despite Keegan’s clear-eyed approach, I’m still not convinced you can do what the man said and “publish your own book online -- and make money.” But if self-publishing is something you might take a run at, you could do worse than Keegan’s primer.

The Guardian piece is here.

Amazon’s Kindle Not Ready to Lie Down

The day after Apple released the device some industry watchers are expecting to help kill Amazon’s Kindle e-book reading device, Amazon released a statement seemingly set to diffuse the iPad’s early impact:

“Millions of people now own Kindles,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books -- free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It's been an exciting 27 months.”

As much as that sounds like bravado to some jaded ears, the Los Angeles Times seemed to have no trouble rounding up a group of users who are standing fast by their Kindles:

Since the Kindle was launched in late 2007 its advocates, including Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, have said that to reproduce the quiet, solitary experience of reading a book, e-readers should not tempt users with a panoply of digital distractions.

The iPad, on the other hand, is by design a multimedia device, equipped with dozens of entertainment features and primed to offer thousands more in the form of add-on applications.

Critics say that's not going to help anyone get to the end of the chapter.

“If you like your kids, get them an iPad so they can play games,” said Russ Wilcox, the head of E Ink Corp., which created the digital paper technology used by the Kindle and many other e-ink-based readers. “If you love them, get them an e-reader so they can actually read.”

The L.A. Times has much more to say, and it’s here.

J.D. Salinger Dead at 91

Almost 60 years after the publication of his only novel, the seminal Catcher in the Rye, the mysterious and reclusive Jerome David Salinger is dead, just a few weeks after his 91st birthday. The New York Times obit is here:

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Last year, Salinger's name came up on these pages quite often in relation to an unauthorized sequel to Catcher that generated comment around the world. We talked about it here, here and here.

Today, the world mourns Salinger, possibly as much for the novels we never saw as much as anything else: it's not as though we, as a culture, knew him as well as we would have liked.

Time magazine writes about Salinger here. The CBC is here. The National Post is here. The Guardian here. Expect many, many more still to come.

What the iPad Might Mean for Book Publishing

Into a sea of stories on Apple’s new iPad yesterday, covering everything from specs to speculation, the New York Times’ Motoko Rich piped up with some book-related facts and figures:

When Steven P. Jobs announced the new iBooks app, he said five of the six largest publishers -- Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster -- had signed on to provide e-book content for the new tablet.

In negotiations with Apple, publishers agreed to a business model that gives them more power over the price that customers pay for e-books. Publishers had all but lost that power on Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader.

Rich’s piece is here. January’s entry into the sea of introductory iPad pieces is here.

Eat, Sleep, Poop Will be DreamWorks Feature

DreamWorks Entertainment has plans to make a feature-length comedy out of a witty work of non-fiction by a Beverly Hills pediatrician. Scott W. Cohen’s Eat, Sleep, Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby's First Year will be published by Scribner at the end of March. From Reuters:

Nonfiction guidebooks on birthing and parenthood are hot in Hollywood. Two weeks ago Lionsgate and Phoenix Pictures teamed to bring pregnancy series “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” to the big screen.

The Reuters piece is here.

iPad, iBook, iBookstore: the Works

Last week we asked if the much anticipated Apple Tablet would kill Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. The beast was unveiled this morning. We now know it looks just like a giant iPod Touch, it’s called the iPad (shown at right with optional keyboard), it costs about half as much as expected and the answer to the question is, “probably yes.”

Everyone’s talking about the iPad, of course, but PC Mag is best at boiling stuff like this down, and they do:

After years of rumors, speculation, and leaks, Apple today announced its long-await tablet, the iPad.

Chief executive Steve Jobs complemented the introduction of the new device with a new e-bookstore, called iBooks, together with partnerships with four major publishers, and showed off new versions of its iWork application and third-party applications.

Jobs kicked off the company's launch event in San Francisco on Wednesday by highlighting the history of the company's mobile products. "We're the largest mobile device company in the world," he told the audience, showcasing the iPhone and the company's line of MacBook products.

The full piece is here.

Louis Auchincloss Dies at 92

Louis Auchincloss (The House of Five Talents, Last of the Old Guard), the Wall Street lawyer and prolific author best known for his books about the waspier bits of America, died last night of complications due to stroke, according to his son, Andrew.

Born in Lawrence, New York, in 1917, Auchincloss was both well regarded and widely celebrated. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965, received the National Medal of Arts in 2005 and held honorary degrees from New York University, Pace University and The University of the South.

From The New York Times:

“Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and book chatters from actual power that those who should be most in this writer’s debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class.”

More from the Times here.

Crime Fiction: The Bricklayer by Noah Boyd

Lee Child spawned a new type of protag when he introduced former military cop Jack Reacher. Well, new but old. With roots in Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, Reacher is the contemporary drifter hero, a guy not really tied to law enforcement, but out to do justice nonetheless. Of course, that justice has some strange definitions. Lately, we’ve seen Matt Hilton with his ex-British Army “problem solver,” Joe Hunter, and even Child’s younger brother, Andrew Grant, with his renegade MI6 op, David Trevellyan, emerge as the modern cowboy, the one writing his own rules because the system’s rules just don’t work.

Which brings us to newcomer Noah Boyd’s The Bricklayer (Morrow). In it, a clever killer has set up a plot to frame the FBI for slayings he commits in the name of a bogus terrorist organization, the “Rubaco Pentad.” A reporter who blew the lid off corruption in the Bureau’s Los Angeles office is murdered. Then, when the FBI attempts to pay the Pentad extortion money, the agent sent on that errand is also done in. Another one disappears, apparently part of this growing conspiracy to disgrace the Bureau.

What’s a beleaguered FBI director to do?

In Boyd’s tale, he rehires an agent who had been fired for his inability to respect authority. Steve Vail was canned not for political reasons, but because he preferred to see a cop-killer go to prison rather than take down a superior so obviously guilty of manufacturing evidence. Vail has since found employment as a Chicago bricklayer, a job that requires little supervision or human interaction. However, he is lured back to the Bureau by an attractive former colleague, now the FBI’s deputy assistant director, Kate Bannon.

Vail soon begins to justify his rehiring. But he isn’t satisfied with his success. He hates loose ends. Rather than congratulate himself on solving a case when everything falls into place, he pulls on the investigative strands that remain unconnected. His wariness keeps him from being killed when the Pentad demands a nearly impossible money drop in an abandoned L.A. subway tunnel. Thinking three steps ahead of his foes, Vail realizes they’ve booby-trapped the drop.

In the wake of his survival, Vail looks more closely at who might stand behind this escalating mayhem and apparent revenge. There’s a lot of pesky evidence leading to the involvement of that missing FBI agent. Yes, the agent is now dead, an apparent suicide. Vail, though, doesn’t like that solution.

“Too neat,” he says.

Author Boyd flirts with giving Vail superhuman intellect, but manages to balance his aptitude by simply making him shy of accolades. While the rest of the Bureau’s L.A. field office is celebrating what they think is the end of the Pentad case, Vail is still asking himself the meaning of one unaccounted-for piece of the puzzle.

Thanks to Bannon’s presence here, Vail is not just another lone wolf outsmarting a stupid bureaucracy. Even a rival admits to Vail that the FBI is a bit rigid in its thinking. With Bannon, this is a double-edged sword. Vail’s loose-cannon approach to the case is something she admires, but it also underscores trust issues that infuriate her. At one point, Vail is even fired and wanted by the cops for theft.

And let’s be honest, it’s not like Vail is invincible. Escaping death by the slimmest of margins quite often hurts like a mother, and both Vail and Bannon come out of the experience physically scarred.

There are certainly weaknesses in The Bricklayer. The presence of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tie Delson is somewhat annoying, as she throws herself at Vail, kind of like the office coworker who can’t hide her crush on the new guy. Her ardor for Vail is eventually explained, but it strains the story in places.

Still, the person behind the Pentad is one of the more clever villains I’ve seen in a long time. He’s not really all that brilliant, but he is just smart enough to anticipate what the FBI will do next, and foil its efforts. Eventually, even Vail makes mistakes. Indeed, there’s a place in this tale where he should have been killed.

Boyd’s writing is solidly paced with few, if any, inconsistencies. Probably his greatest strength is in conveying through his writing the action and tension of a Jason Bourne movie or Casino Royale. Taut, rapid-fire and relentless.

Biography: Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

Clarrisa Dickson Wright is one half of British television’s Two Fat Ladies cooking team. When her autobiography was first published in the UK in 2007, it was met with wide acclaim. It’s not hard to see why.

The first official U.S. edition becomes available this month from Overlook Press and it’s a surprisingly complete book. In a way, Spilling the Beans has everything: fame, celebrity, addiction, heartbreak... and, of course, food. Lots and lots of food.

The only reason I can think of that it’s taken this long for Spilling the Beans to get to this side of the water is the very real possibility that a lot of people in the U.S. have never heard of Two Fat Ladies, or at least, had not until 2008 when the series that ended in 1998 after the death of Dickson Wright’s cooking partner, Jennifer Paterson, was released here.

Spilling the Beans recounts some of that time but the Fat Ladies years are only a small part of Dickson Wright’s journey to date. At its core, Spilling the Beans is a story of redemption. About the little rich girl -- Dickson Wright, of course -- with an abusive, alcoholic father. She grows to be a brilliant young woman (and ends up being the youngest woman in the UK ever called to the bar), a dilettante (she ends up partying away a significant fortune), her recovery through AA, then traveling the English countryside in the sidecar of a motorcycle with the late Paterson.

This is a well told, joyous memoir that, for me, is all about finding your way back. Even those largely unfamiliar with Dickson Wright will enjoy her humor and wit.

Dictionary Banned for “Oral Sex”

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition joins an illustrious group of books banned from some American schools, including selected titles by Maya Angelou, Maurice Sendak, Toni Morrison, Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Isabel Allende, John Steinbeck, William Golding and many, many others.

This newest ban comes after a parent in a Riverside, California, school district complained of a “sexually graphic” entry in the dictionary. The Guardian sums things up:

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex”.

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

That local paper indicates that not all parents are happy with the decision to pull the book:

“Censorship in the schools, really? Pretty soon the only dictionary in the school library will be the Bert and Ernie dictionary,” said Emanuel Chavez, the parent of second- and sixth-grade students. “If the kids are exposed to it, it’s up to the parents to explain it to them at their level.”

Board member Rita Peters questioned why one parent’s complaint would lead the district to pull the dictionaries.

“If we’re going to pull a book because it has something on oral sex, then every book in the library with that better be pulled,” she said. “The standard needs to be consistent ... We don’t need parents setting policy.”

Meanwhile, the fate of the dictionary in that school system remains uncertain, while most of the thinking world laughs quite loudly, here, here, and here as well as other places.

A Final Good-bye to Parker

Just a week after the unexpected death last week of detective novelist Robert B. Parker at age 77, The Rap Sheet has posted more than 70 tributes from Parker’s professional colleagues, friends, and critics. This collection was put together by Cameron Hughes and comes in two sections. Part I appears here. Part II can be found here.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf

The writer Virginia Woolf was born on this day in 1882. According to Garrison Keillor’s wonderful Writer’s Almanac, the former Virginia Stephen “never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library.”

She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. That moved her to write her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

The Writer’s Almanac item is here. While you’re there, you might choose to contribute to support the Almanac. If you do, a $75 contribution will earn you “the official The Writer’s Almanac mug. The mug features Garrison’s signature sign off -- Be Well, Do Good Work & Keep in Touch.” Complete information on contributing is here.

Children’s Books: F2M: The Boy Within by Hazel Edwards and Ryan Kennedy

Eighteen-year-old Skye is a member of an all-girl punk rock band. Skye has never felt like a girl. Inside, (s)he is Finn, a boy. Making the decision to let Finn be outside as well as in involves a lot of work. How do you tell your family and friends and the members of your feminist rock band that you’re going to undergo female-to-male treatment and surgery? Fortunately, there’s a family precedent: great-uncle Albert ... or is that great-aunt Alberta?

Skye/Finn could easily be a victim, but refuses. It isn’t going to be easy for anyone, but (s)he decides, finally, that family, friends and rock band will just have to live with it. And they do.

F2M: The Boy Within (Ford Street) goes into enormous detail about the procedures involved in what is known as FTM. It’s a lot less common than the other way around -- male to female -- although it has been in the news in the last couple of years, when a man who had kept his female “equipment” had a baby because his wife couldn’t. I knew a female-to-male myself. Unlike Skye, Jan became “David” in her/his 40s. Nobody, but nobody dared to call Jan a woman, even when she was! And David’s family and friends accepted it as Finn’s family do in the novel. F2M: The Boy Within also explores the punk rock sub-culture, which is interesting in its own right.

Ford Street Publishing has become known for taking on controversial subjects. It probably needs an author as well-known and respected as Hazel Edwards to get away with this one. Ryan Kennedy, her co-author, is himself an FTM, so knows what he is talking about.

F2M: The Boy Within is well-written and answers a lot of questions. It will certainly appeal to those teenagers who are asking themselves questions about their own gender identities. There are some likable characters in it and some nice touches of humour. There’s even the whimsical presentation of a couple who are a female-to-male and a male-to-female. Who are, incidentally, managing just fine. Finn doesn’t like the FTM, Rodney, but hey, he doesn’t have to.

Whether or not it will have appeal for ordinary teenagers I am not sure. I suspect they will be uncomfortable with it, though this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be out there. Will kids who say, “That is so gay!” about anything negative get enthused about characters who are not actually gay but have gender issues? I won’t know until I have put this in my library and seen how the students react. Watch this space.

NBCC Shortlist Is No Reader’s Choice

The finalists for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced Saturday night in New York. Once again, the titles that made NBCC’s final cut seem to comprise a list more intended to make a small group of people feel erudite rather than making a large group feel passionate about books and reading.

On the other hand, these are not the people’s choice awards. But then, neither is the National Book Award. So where is the place where the passion of readers and the choices of critics can come together? And isn’t it time that the two become somewhat reflective of each other?

According to the NBCC’s Web site, the organization was “founded in 1974 at the Algonquin, is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization consisting of some 600 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns.”

Some people feel that conversations about books are dwindling and, certainly, the inches offered to book reviews in newspapers are shrinking. What can we do -- what can all of us do -- to make discussions about books more vibrant and more relevant to an audience that seems to not be entirely convinced? I’m not sure of the answer, but I know that it isn’t esoterica.

Here are the finalists in the fiction category:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

Others shortlists are here.

Green Gables Author Suffered Depression, Suicide

A book of essays to be published mid-2010 by the University of Toronto Press will look at Lucy Maud Montgomery’s best known work, as well as pieces of her own tortured life. From CanWest News Service:

The scholarly collection of essays, co-edited by Ryerson University professor Irene Gammel -- Canada research chair in modern literature and culture -- follows a recent revival of interest in the Anne Shirley phenomenon with the 100th anniversary of the 1908 publication of author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s landmark work.

In Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, to be published this year by University of Toronto Press, contributors probe the “global industry” in Anne tourism, the multitude of film, television and stage productions inspired by the story, and the “timeless and ongoing appeal of L.M. Montgomery’s writing” nearly 70 years after her 1942 suicide by a drug overdose at age 67.

The full piece is here. January looks at Gammel’s 2008 biography of Montgomery here and Budge Wilson’s 2008 Before Green Gables here.

Crime Fiction: Gone ’til November by Wallace Stroby

Readers (especially the American variety) have grown accustomed to seeing villains in crime fiction portrayed in starkly negative terms, or else given such repulsive quirks that whatever humanness they manifest must be considered suspect. So Wallace Stroby runs some risk in making his killer for hire, Nathaniel Morgan, the most engaging character in Gone ’til November (Minotaur).

African American, 57 years old, and the veteran enforcer for Mikey-Mike, a New Jersey drug dealer whose wares just aren’t as high-grade or in demand as they once were, Morgan has a girlfriend half his age, a vintage Monte Carlo he loves almost as much, and musical tastes that run to the rhythms of Sam Cooke, Walter Jackson, and the Impressions. He also pops Vicodin at an alarming rate, because he’s suffering from a rare form of cancer that may take him down long before any of his “business rivals” get their shot.

Lacking health insurance or even the prospect of appealing for limited social aid (how would he answer, after all, the application’s request for “current occupation”?), Morgan has made rather desperate plans for his future. He wants to ditch New Jersey, his girlfriend and her son in tow, and find a doctor somewhere far away who can administer the medical treatments he needs. If Mikey-Mike or his hired pistol-pushers try to track him down, Morgan figures “he could deal with that, too, protect what was his. What he’d earned.” All he needs before putting his plan into action is more money to add to the savings he has already hidden away. And that requires him taking on a last assignment for his narcotics-king boss.

Meanwhile, in far-off Florida, a late-30s sheriff’s deputy named Sara Cross has come to the aid of a fellow officer, Billy Flynn, who’s shot and killed a well-dressed young black man, Derek Willis, on the edge of a cypress swamp in the middle of a steamy night. Willis was driving a car with Jersey plates, and according to Flynn, when he pulled Willis over and asked that he open his trunk, the younger man made a break for it. Flynn thought his fleeing suspect had a gun, so plugged him three times in self-defense. Sara finds a zippered bag crammed with firearms and ammunition in the vehicle’s trunk, which might indeed have justified Willis’ actions. And though she has doubts regarding the incident -- why was there a baby seat in Willis’ car? Why didn’t Flynn call for backup before he approached the driver? -- she attests to her fellow officer’s account of the proceedings. It looks like a “clean shoot.”

However, as the immature Flynn -- who used to be Sara’s lover as well as her partner on the sheriff’s squad, but now has a new and jealous girlfriend -- tries to reignite their relationship, our heroine’s suspicions about the Willis shooting mount. Exacerbating them is the appearance of Willis’ “wife,” the mother of their child together, who comes to collect his corpse and “raise hell, most likely.” She tells Sara that Willis “never carried a gun in his life,” which is enough to provoke the conscientious sheriff’s deputy to look a bit further into the provenance of the dead man’s revolver.

Then there’s the mysterious guy who Sara thinks is following her, but whose face she can never quite make out in passing automobiles. She wonders what his role is in all of this -- not knowing that in fact it’s Morgan behind the wheel. His last job for Mikey-Mike, the one that’s going to give him his nest egg for a new life, turns out to be retrieving $350,000 that had been secreted in the car driven by Willis, who was also on Mikey-Mike’s payroll. Why were the weapons discovered, but no reports of all that cash? Morgan wants to know where the money went -- and whether he can steal it for himself, add it to his nest egg. Accomplishing that, though, will put him in dangerous contention with a couple of trigger-happy twins and the considerably more competent Sara Cross.

Stroby, a former editor at Newark, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper and the author of two previously praised crime novels, The Barbed-Wire Kiss (2003) and The Heartbreak Lounge (2005) -- both starring quondam state trooper Harry Rane -- is meticulous in entwining his narrative threads here, reaping drama, originality and suspense from what seem at first to be Gone ’til November’s familiar themes. But it’s his chief adversarial pair who keep one turning these pages: Morgan, the professional gunman who treats killing like any other occupation, and sees no percentage in surplus deaths; and Sara -- brave and smart, but flawed and too much on her own, struggling as her county’s only female deputy sheriff while she cares for a 6-year-old son whose life is as much at threat from leukemia as Morgan’s is from cancer. The older protagonist is certainly the more engaging -- it was worth every risk to make Morgan a nuanced, sympathetic figure -- but Sara Cross demonstrates potential for growth. That’s good, because her appearance here isn’t her last. As Stroby says, “there will be at least one more book about her, though it won’t be [my] next one. Beyond that, I can’t say, but she’ll definitely be back.”

Swiftly told but suspenseful, filled with moral choices and a bit of welcome ambiguousness at its end, Gone ’til November is a small story with a hell of a kick.

Paul Quarrington Passes Away at 56

Award-winning Canadian author (Whale Music, The Spirit Cabinet) and musician died on Thursday of lung cancer. He was 56.

From his Web site:

In May 2009, Paul was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. From May 2009 to January 2010 he channeled his prodigious creative energy into the completion of many artistic endeavours, included his first solo CD release, the third PorkBellys Futures CD release, his memoir for Greystone Books, “Cigar Box Banjo,” the documentary film inspired by the book, “Life in Music”, and much more.

His brave battle ended on January 21, 2010. He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family. It is comforting to know that he didn’t suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him.

Contributions to the Quarrington Arts Society are being accepted in his honor.