NewPages Blog

What Are Independent Bookstores Really Good For? Not much. By Tyler Cowen, Slate. NewPages.com does not share the statement made in the title of this article, but I think it’s only fair to read and reflect on it.

“Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation—a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. “

Cody’s Books on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley to close its doors. In 1989, after a minor firebombing, the store announced that it would continue to sell Salman Rushdie’s controversial “Satanic Verses” — a decision that Ross called “our finest hour.”

“Rushdie came to the store once, a surprise visit when he was still in hiding,” Ross said. The author gave the bookstore 5-minutes notice to announce that he was in the store and would sign books. “There’s a hole above the information desk from the bombing. Someone scribbled ‘Salman Rushdie memorial hole.’ When Rushdie was here, he looked up and said, ‘Some people get statues, others get holes.’ “

Jhumpa Lahiri on PEN’s World Voices. Interview by Suzanne Dottino, KGBBarLit. SD: One of PEN’s principle missions is to defend free expression, something that’s not only relevant but also crucial in today’s global state of affairs. “Faith and Reason” is a provocative theme for PEN International New Voices Festival. What’s to be learned in its exploration and perhaps more practically speaking, what impact can writers truly have to make inroads in cultures where free speech has never been valued? What can literature do to ensure that that freedom isn’t eroded in others?

JL: The fundamental impact any writer can have on the world is to write honestly and well. And in order to aspire to write in such a way, the writer must be able to express himself or herself in an absolutely uncensored, unhindered environment, and to obey no authority other than what the work demands. This is true in any culture, and for all literary traditions.

Soft Skull Press According to Richard Nash & Richard Nash According to Susan Chi. By Susan Chi, KGBBarLit. “What we’re trying to do with fiction is kind of a three pronged model, the first of which is obviously to find new writers, and the second of which is to breakout lower mid-list writers. There’s essentially two kinds of mid-list writers, the ones the big publishers want to publish and the ones the big publishers don’t want to publish…There’s a whole cohort of writers, tending to be on the younger end, the 35-50 age group, who have published a few books and despite a far amount of critical appreciation, they’re not selling in numbers that allow the editor to show up at the editorial meeting and say this can sell 15,000 copies, because they’ve only sold 2000 copies each time round.”

Rustbelt Roethke: A Professional Writers’ Workshop. July 9-15, 2006. “Recharge your batteries, pick up new ideas and techniques, make friends and influence people, write and work with a discerning group of peers at Rustbelt Roethke, a professional-level writers’ workshop with a comfortable, egalitarian atmosphere at a modest cost.”

Hollywood Star Robbins Blasts US Media Ignorance of ‘High Crimes’ in Iraq. By Tim Harper, Common Dreams. Acclaimed American actor/director Tim Robbins blasted the US government’s policy on terrorism — and the US media’s failure to examine it critically — at a news conference in Athens promoting his stage version of George Orwell’s “1984”.

Interview with George Saunders. Boldtype 31. BT: You pick up on a sort of campy but unsettling beauty in the way we all agree to talk in conversation, in meetings, on TV. How do you go about making that literary?

GS: I never had a sense of what literary language should be like, and when I tried to do it, it always came out like Thomas Wolfe on quaaludes — where you describe the same thing three times. …Even when I overhear somebody on their cell phone up here on campus. If you forget the phone, and just think of it as a poem, it’s unbelievable: “Mom, I told this fucking guy I was too hungover! What are you talking about, Mom? I was too wasted, I couldn’t call you.” The idea is that you have to listen, and then you purify it a little bit.

Human Rights Tribune – Special Issue on Migration Introducing the new format and layout for the Human Rights Tribune. This issue of the online publication is a special focus on migration. Each issue of the Tribune features timely articles about important events and issues affecting human rights, as well as the people and organizations involved in the promotion and protection of these rights.

Small Publishers Book Big Rewards. Nonmainstream presses generated $14 billion in 2005 — more than half of all book sales — by targeting niche readers. By Stacy Perman, Business Week. …small presses are championing new voices, focusing on niche markets or subjects and genres that have either been ignored by the big houses or simply deemed unprofitable — such as poetry and foreign authors. They are creating whole businesses by reissuing out-of-print classics and maintaining the tradition of printing literary fiction.

Archipelago publishes 8 to 10 titles a year. As a non-profit, the house relies on donations from foundations and individuals. “I knew we couldn’t make it if we relied only on sales,” Schoolman says. That way the house can stick to its mission and plow any profits back into publishing. And that allows Schoolman to bring unknowns such as Croatian writer Miljenko Jergov

Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner — President Not Amused? Editor & Publisher. Addressing the reporters, he said, “Let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction.”

Daniel Clowes Talks Confidential. By Jason Silverman, Wired News. WN: Has there been any progress for literary comics in the 20 years that you’ve been writing?

Clowes: It’s hard to see it objectively. The news articles that have been written about me have changed. It used to always start, “The bang-zoom comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” … The shift came when (journalists) didn’t have to put me in the context of a world that they figured nobody understood.

…WN: Do you read comics online?

Clowes: I don’t read much of anything online. It’s not an enjoyable experience for me to read something with light projected through it. I like to read comics sitting down, looking at this piece of paper that can’t do anything else.

A Sour Note on Modern Times. By Tony Long, Wired News. To listeners weaned on pop tunes running 2:48 (with guitar solo), a 15-minute adagio can be daunting. Some of Bruckner’s stuff, especially when played under a heavy baton, must seem excruciating to modern ears. But that isn’t Bruckner’s fault. His music was geared to his world, not ours.

Life is a sprint these days. So maybe the right solution for the purveyors of the classics is to take a work of 40 minutes and cut it to 10, giving you time to catch a quick listen before moving on to the next big thing in your day.

From Emerging Writers Network, An Independent Book Store Looks for Help. I received a letter yesterday that I’ll pass along here. It comes from the current owners of Burke’s Book Store, Corey and Cheryl Mesler. Burke’s Book Store has been around since 1875 in the Memphis, TN area, and appears to have been run as a family owned store for just over 100 years.

Faking It: How America Lost Politics. Joe Klein explains why politicians think you’re stupid, how the presidency lost character and how we can bring it back. By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet.

The dirty little secret about many political reporters and columnists is that we’re romantics. I don’t do it to watch politicians screw up, although that’s sometimes fun. I do it for the moments when they do something inspirational, challenging or give me something new to think about. I realized that during my career, those moments had been rapidly disappearing, particularly over the last 10 years. I wanted to think about why that had happened and write a book about it to make people aware of this in the hopes that things can get better again.

What Neil Young, Springsteen, Pearl Jam and the Dixie Chicks have in common. By Don Hazen. AlterNet. Anti-war albums and songs are topping the charts with sky-rocketing sales. It’s likely never, ever happened — as Randall Wallace pointed out this weekend, four of Amazon’s top-ten selling records on April 30th have real anti-war songs!

Listen to Neil Young’s new music at http://www.neilyoung.com/

Ferlinghetti’s beat definitely goes on. Legendary poet still draws crowd. By David Abel, Boston.com. One of the last legends of the Beat Generation, Lawrence Ferlinghetti left his enclave in North Beach, San Francisco, last week to accept the New England Poetry Club’s Golden Rose, which club officials say is the nation’s oldest literary prize.

New batch of literary magazine reviews posted.

Death is the new sex. Sandra M. Gilbert’s new book takes an unflinching look at the last taboo. By Kal Munger, Sacramento News & Review.

Death’s Door is very personal; Gilbert returns again and again to her own loss as she surveys Western attitudes toward death. But her examination–including the institutionalization of the dying and the medical and technological attention given to a passage that once took place in the home–always returns to poetry. “We’re always struggling to control death,” she said. “Poetry reminds us that we can’t.”

…Gilbert believes the study of literature is necessary to understand death “because poets and writers are the ones who refuse to believe that there’s any kind of control over death, and they are not embarrassed by that lack of control.”

One Reason Not to Join The Military. You may be ordered to kill civilians. By Paul Rockwell, Metro Santa Cruz. Article is adapted from the forthcoming book 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military, edited by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, published by New Press.

A Marine who recognizes the humanity of the people whose country is under occupation makes an ineffective killer. Repelled by the indiscriminate carnage, the visible suffering of the Iraqi people, who only deserved to be left alone by outside powers, Jimmy repudiated the war. He refused to participate in apparent war crimes. He defied authority, and his commander called him a coward and put him under a “kind of house arrest.” Jimmy, a real fighter, eventually won his honorable discharge.

Some Poet. In the 50 years since his first book was published, John Ashbery has led the avant garde”s poetry coup d”etat. By Andrew Varnon. Valley Advocate.

Today, with formalist poet Dana Gioia as head of the National Endowment for the Arts and Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser the Poet Laureate of the United States, there is again a call for accessible poetry. I asked Ashbery about this. “I myself have always enjoyed things that it seemed to me were inaccessible, that have the promise of giving you something that you have to work hard to find out what it is,” he said. “I like the challenge of, say, Proust or even Gertrude Stein, to use one of the most obvious examples, rather than poetry or literature which is all available at one viewing or reading.”