Friday Book News: 7 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break (4/1/11)
Mir celebrates Dr. Seuss' birthday at the bookstore
Happy April Fools’ everyone! And it feels like the universe is playing a bit of an April Fools’ joke over here–it’s been snowing on and off since last night, and there are driving warnings about the snowy conditions in effect until 2pm.
Back home in Sydney, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle too–John Le Carré has tried to withdraw his name from the list of finalists for the Man Booker International Prize. The emphasis here is on “tried,” because the committee, while acknowledging his wishes, has doggedly refused to remove Mr. Le Carre’s name. Never heard of the international prize? Here’s the short version, via The Economist’s Prospero blog:
Unlike the better known annual Man Booker prize for fiction, which has been going for more than 40 years, the international prize is relatively new: it is awarded every two years to a living writer with a body of work available in English. There are no submissions from publishers, authors or agents, and anyone caught jockeying for position is swiftly punished.
And here’s the shortlist (via The Man Booker Prizes):
- Wang Anyi
- Juan Goytisolo
- James Kelman
- John le Carré
- Amin Maalouf
- David Malouf
- Dacia Maraini
- Rohinton Mistry
- Philip Pullman
- Marilynne Robinson
- Philip Roth
- Su Tong
- Anne Tyler
Remember the furore over Amy Chua and her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Here she is explaining the differences between her style of parenting and helicopter parenting, alongside her husband, Jed Rubenfeld. (via The Wall Street Journal).
Also at The WSJ, a pie chart of responses to the news that the OED has accepted “LOL,” “FYI,” and “OMG” into its hallowed pages. Galleycat has details on the additions.
The New York Times has a piece about the new David Foster Wallace novel, The Pale King. The novel, from Hachette, is apparently a strict-on-sale for bookstores, which means it can’t be sold prior to a certain date (in this case, April 15th). But Amazon and BN.com, it seems, are already shipping the book. While it might seem like the four horsemen of the apocalypse are tearing up bookstores everywhere, this kind of double standard is a Very Bad Thing. I’m hoping there’s more to the story than we’ve seen so far, and that it’s not just a colossal flub fest.
Over at The Book Smugglers, a review of Chime, by Franny Billingsley (wow, that’s hard to type, even with coffee). Ana and Thea make it sound like a must-read, especially since the book has its own original mythology, “with nary a vampire, werewolf, fairy in sight.” (It actually sounds loosely based on old Celtic tales to me, though). Here’s the opening line:
I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.
Forgive the bad pun, but that really is a killer first line, one of the best I have ever read.
Next up, The Guardian has a fun April Fools’ quiz–on fools in literature.
Over on The Guardian’s Book Blog, David Barnett writes about Jacqueline Howett & how “the internet has finally removed the line in the sand between reviewers and authors.” He includes a few other examples of poorly received bad reviews, too.
And finally, at GalleyCat, blogger Derek Sivers has reproduced a series of story grids Kurt Vonnegut made during a New York City lecture. Check out the GC post for details and hashtags for GalleyCat’s NaNoEdMo festivities, or go straight to the story grids. I think I’ll be trying this out for my own work–charting ecstasy and misery is much more interesting than a plain old narrative arc!
That’s all, folks! Have a great day!
ETA 9:25am: note about Jed Rubenfeld in the above video.
Read MoreMonday Book News: 6 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break
Death Cloud, by Andrew Lane
Good morning, book people! It’s daylight savings in Massachusetts now – and this is the second day we’ve slept in! Of course, it can’t all be blamed on daylight savings–there were several hours’ worth of screaming toddler, too. And now for something completely different…
Author Maureen Johnson ran a hugely successful campaign–over $14,000 worth of successful–to raise money for disaster relief in Japan this weekend. Although her campaign is now closed, you can still donate to Shelterbox. Never heard of Shelterbox? Here’s why they’re awesome:
We respond instantly to natural and manmade disasters by delivering boxes of aid to those who are most in need. Each box supplies an extended family of up to 10 people with a tent and essential equipment to use while they are displaced or homeless.
In January The Hunger Games movie was given a release date–and now it may have its lead actress. Variety is reporting that Lionsgate is close to reaching a deal with blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned actress Jennifer Lawrence. I’ve written about why The Hunger Games needs an actress who’s closer to Katniss in terms of physical description in the past–and I stand by that now. Lawrence may be a skilled actress, but casting someone who’s clearly not “olive-skinned” to play Katniss is a Big Deal. Why? From my original piece (at PopMatters):
Although physical description is, generally speaking, a less-significant detail, Katniss’ status as a non-white heroine is important because she’s that rare commodity: a big time, mainstream non-white heroine.
Over at the Blue Rose Girls, a bit of fun - pictures from a children’s book bar! The murals are by Ludwig Bemelmans, the original illustrator for the Madeline books. I love Madeline – and the pics are definitely worth a look.
At The Guardian, David Barnett fills us in on the latest genre wars – as in last year’s Franzenfreude, the fracas is all about marginalization. Author Stephen Hunt is accusing the BBC of bias against his genre, science fiction. He’s taken his crusade one step further, though, and has launched a petition for one genre “to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” Do you think SF (and its counterpart, F) are marginalized?
Graham Moore at The NYT has a review of Death Cloud, Andrew Lane’s attempt “to update and adapt Sherlock Holmes for a new generation, much the way Guy Ritchie has done with a swashbuckling Sherlock on screen.” The book follows 14 year old Sherlock, and sounds like a fun read. (I’ve read the entire Holmes series several times over, and will definitely be picking this up.)
And finally, at The WSJ, Helen Schulman writes about the process of constructing a novel: Write. Rewrite. Obsess. Repeat. Go read it now, especially if you’ve ever tottered at the edge of the Great and Terrible Abyss of Writerly Indecision.
And that’s all for now! I’ll be back later with the next installment of Cover Notes.
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