**Interesting Articles on Books, Authors, Reading, etc. - November/December 2010

Wow, the year is almost over.

Words Without Borders current issue is featuring a lot of translations from Persian, Turkish, and Urdu: http://wordswithoutborders.org/current-issue/

Belle, Issue 8 is up.

http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue8/index.php

Take a peek. Books to add to your TBR piles! Reviews from some of your favorite LTers:-)

Not an article, but I got an e-mail that the Dalkey Archive is having a holiday sale: 10 books for $70 or 20 books for $125. I probably won't buy any since I still haven't read any of the batch I bought the last time they had a sale, but these are certainly good deals.

>3 rebeccanyc: I got that also. Trying to resist.

Not an article, but about publishing, and fascinating to me: have you been following the "Cook's Source" internet blowup? Briefly, a small, advertising-supported magazine in Western Massachusetts stole a recipe from a student (using her name, but without permission or payment), and its editor then lectured the victim in email, claiming that anything on the internet is public domain. The student had a prominent friend, who got involved. Moral:

Never plagiarize.

Especially never plagiarize from someone who knows a moderately prominent writer, who is read by much more prominent writers.

Really.

(Many of these are NSFW, bad language)

>3 rebeccanyc: Uh-oh. I've never heard of the Dalkey Archive. Let's pretend I haven't yet, since it's already sale day. I'll just surprise myself next time.

Just posted - The winners of the National Book Awards.

Oh my, so many links I've been collecting.

Amy Sackville wins John Llewellyn Rhys prize for The Still Point The Still Point sounds incredible and has shot to the top of the TBR list.

My book cull: a loss of shelf esteem - An author struggles to dispose of 2,000 books and finds no one wants them; along the way, he questions the value of having a personal library.

Translator Maureen Freely, who translated some of Orhan Pamuk's books into English, talks about how translators get no love, despite the valuable work they do

A tome-like interview with Margaret Atwood

Incidental Comics : Confessions of a Book Fiend
(actually from September, but I just found it)

http://thoughtballoonhelium.blogspot.com/2010/09/confessions-of-book-fiend.html?...

This is entirely frivolous and of no redeeming value, but...

http://mortal.peril.org/lars/2003-04_benji/benji.html

>10 RidgewayGirl:: Frivolous, perhaps, but it amused me greatly. My own cats have savaged a few books in their time, I'm afraid. Particularly amusing, despite its horrific, book-damaging nature, is their tendency to selectively choose certain authors as targets of their clawed wrath, even when the books being located in different places, in different editions, at different times. They seem to want to make a particular target of Stephen R. Donaldson (which is entirely understandable from a literary criticism point of view; he writes rather turgid fantasy novels) and Douglas R. Hofstadter (which is just baffling, unless perhaps have strong convictions about the implausibility of artificial intelligence). And then there was the time I went off to Australia and left them alone for two weeks (with someone to look in on them, obviously) and returned to find that they'd pulled my copy of Cats for Dummies off the shelf -- the middle of the shelf! -- and shredded it mercilessly. I was laughing so hard at that as an apparent statement of their annoyance that it was hard to even be angry about it.

"This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force."
-Dorothy Parker

#10, my dogs have a preference for Lord of the Rings. They've gone through the first two books.

And, post #9 was in no way frivolous, but a very serious issue. I'm personally quite concerned about the last row, 3rd column.

The New York Times' list of 100 notable books of 2010.

Edited to correct embarrassing error.

Er, Rebecca...

Shouldn't that be "...of 2010"? :)

Yes -- thank!!!

NYT article about researchers who have put together a database of the titles of every work published in England during the 19th century and are trying to use statistical analysis of terms to determine what Victorians cared about.

Here's the link for anyone interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&ref=books

I think it's certainly an interesting idea, but I think the whole endeavor has got to be taken with a grain of salt. I loved how one researcher was talking about how she got really excited when she saw that there were so many instances of the terms "syntax" and "prosody" (on which she was doing research), only to realize that it was because these were the names of popular racehorses!

I also think this point is great: "Scholars should also remember that the past contains more than the written record, Mr. Bevis said in an interview. Fewer references to a subject do not necessarily mean that it has disappeared from the culture, but rather that it has become such a part of the fabric of life that it no longer arouses discussion."

I think certainly it a great resource to have these texts easily accessible (right now it is apparently just titles, but the plan is to create a digital library of the full texts). I just hope that the research done is a bit more sophisticated than merely counting instances of the word "cheese" and deciding that the word's presence or absence reveals something deep about the Victorian psyche.

And, anyway, we already know about the importance of cheese to the English psyche because we've seen Wallace and Gromit. :-)

>18 dukedom_enough:, :D "cheese, Grommit!"

#19 - Ha ha!

In case anyone is interested (this is a great deal):


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We've been hearing from people that they missed the announcement for our holiday sale this year. We are extending the sale through this Sunday, to give everyone who wants to a chance to take advantage of the deep discount and free shipping.

DALKEY ARCHIVE'S HOLIDAY SALE

Going on now through December 12, 2010 on our website.

Choose:

10 books for $70
20 books for $125

Offer applies to all trade paperbacks and issues of the Review of Contemporary Fiction published before November 2010. Does not include scholarly titles.

FREE SHIPPING in the US.*

Choose one copy of several books, or up to 5 copies of a single title.

WHILE SUPPLIES LAST - in case we run out of stock, we will contact you and request that you choose a substitute title.

*International shipping also available - Contact Melissa Kennedy with inquiries.
kennedy@dalkeyarchive.com | 217.244.5700

--------------------

If one is unfamiliar with Dalkey Archive Press (from their wikipedia page): Modeled on such publishers as Grove Press and New Directions, Dalkey Archive's emphasis is decidedly upon literary fiction, usually of a modernist or postmodernist bent. In the publisher's own words, Dalkey Archive "places a heavy emphasis upon fiction that belongs to the experimental tradition of Sterne, Joyce, Rabelais, Flann O'Brien, Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes." One of the publisher's primary goals is to keep all of its books in print, regardless of their commercial success, in the interest of maintaining the availability of works that it deems culturally and educationally valuable.

Alas, I haven't read any of the 10 Dalkey Archive books I bought the last time they had this sale, so I think I"n safe this time!

Translation as Literary Ambassador - about foreign governments trying to increase the number of books from their respective countries that are translated and published in the US

How fun is this?

http://tomandlorenzo2.blogspot.com/2010/12/olympia-le-tan-handbags.html

Very fun, until I got to this quote:

"In the house I grew up in, all the walls were covered in books. I just felt that some of them were so amazing that they had to be turned into something even more special." (Italics added by me.)

Right. A handbag is more special than a book?

Kinda cool if your into that sorta thing, but I hope that's not all she thought of doing with the books.

National Public Radio's Morning Edition had an interesting piece on the resurgence of independent bookstores in the US, in contrast to the struggles that the large chain stores (Borders and Barnes & Noble) are currently experiencing:

End Of Days For Bookstores? Not If They Can Help It

>23 fannyprice: ha ha, the Rebecca mentioned in that article is the person who got me on LT (she has since left LT). They've been getting a lot of attention for their new bookstore.

Here's a rant against genre fiction. The argument is interesting, but I found the author of the article so pretentious and dull that I:

1. Determined to avoid his novels, and

2. Ended up being convinced of the opposite of what he was saying. Is that because I'm reacting to his attitude? Does anyone agree with him?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward...

>30 RidgewayGirl:, Oh god, I read this article too. It really annoyed me on so many levels. I'm not a huge fan of most so-called "genre fiction" - I've never liked mysteries, crime novels, romance, fantasy - but this article was obnoxiously elitist. It just seemed like such a bunch of broad generalizations.

"...even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this..." This ignores the extent to which "literary fiction" also plays by a set of rules and is constrained by certain conventions. The best authors - of any kind of fiction - find ways to subvert the reader's expectations.

For a counterpoint - read Laura Miller's response to this article:
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/12/14/docx

>31 fannyprice:. Good point, "This ignores the extent to which "literary fiction" also plays by a set of rules and is constrained by certain conventions."

It's like when anti-conformist, form their own groupings, in which to conform to, but if their fighting the "mainstream" they'll never see the extent of their own hypocrisy. I would think I guy like that would turn off a lot of potential readers. I suppose he doesn't really care, because what he produces is "art" not meant for the ignorant masses like me.

I like this author. I wonder whether I should read any of her books.

Robert

Robert, I loved Lord of Misrule and have two more of her books on order from the Book Depository (cheaper in this case than Amazon). It is a fascinating, ambitious, and slightly flawed book.

I may have to read it then.

Thanks,

Robert

>36 avaland: I think you need to save this for a discussion in the new year on Club Read 2011. I knew the author's name was familiar - I started to read his novel The Calligrapher some years ago but couldn't get into it. P.D. James has some good answers to his idea of "formula" in her recent book about crime writing. There is so much that could be said around what he has said in his article but I just don't have the time right now.... (a very juicy subject though)

Wikileaks is something one might read, right? Here's Bruce Sterling's take on Cablegate. Somewhat long; Chairman Bruce is unhappy.