Blog-Jacking: The Guardian UK

Ooh, that looks better
Originally posted on 10/29 by Aida Edemariam
In response to fears that publishers are trying to dumb down literary fiction, one blog asked readers to take it that little bit further and redesign their favourite classic as a trashy bestseller. Here are a selection of some of the entries.



To see the rest, click here.

Tuesday's Tip for Flailing Writers: A Story Idea -- Ripped From Today's Headlines!

News item, care of livescience.com:
Oddly, Americans Fear Snakes More Than Disease
Diabetes affects 24 million Americans and an increasing number of children. It can lead to limb loss and heart attacks. Yet people are more afraid of snakes and flying.
In an online survey by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), conducted in August and released today, people revealed far greater fear of events that are much less likely to affect them. Percentage of respondents who fear:
* Being in a plane crash: 16 percent
* Snake bites: 13 percent
* Being hit by lightning: 5 percent
* A shark attack: 4 percent
* Getting a disease: 5 percent.

Story Idea:
Title: Snakes on a Plane...Crash!
Plot: A group of diabetic reptile wranglers are flying across the Atlantic when their jet is struck by lightning, stranding them and their snakes in the middle of shark infested waters. Carnage ensues....and a love story is awkwardly shoe-horned in...copious flashbacks are used to try and flesh out one dimensional characters...footnotes detailing unusual trivia about various marine animals are used to try and bring the book to 'proper novel length'...oh, and Sam Jackson is in there somewhere, dropping eff-bombs like autumn leaves. The end.

Book News, In Brief

A new book, The Dracula Dossier, speculates a link between Jack the Ripper and Bram Stoker. This is, of course, complete and utter horseshit, but kudos to the author for finding an effective hook. If only he'd chosen to feature a pouty, pale, teenage Dracula on the cover, TDD would've been a bestseller for sure.

November 1 marks the start of National Novel Writing Month. The ridiculous idea behind this shameless software sales gimmick is this: Write a novel -- from start to finish -- in just one month. Then spend the next eleven months sending unread query letters to uninterested agents, editors and publishers.

And I thought Obama was geek-chic. Via AFP: Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso complained on Sunday he cannot find enough time to devote himself to his lifelong hobby -- reading comics. Aso, who takes comics on trips abroad, said he finished reading two weekly magazines last week but has yet to find time to read two others.

Book News, In Brief(a.k.a.: Are You There Oprah? It's Me, Inkwell)

Et tu, Oprah? It's official. Amazon's e-book, the Kindle, is Ms. Winfrey's "favorite gadget". And over at her Oprah's Book Club website, she's giving out $50 off coupon codes to all interested parties.

But wait -- didn't Oprah see that article in the LATimes about Amazon.com listing their Obama mask under the heading "terrorist"? Well, if she didn't, someone really oughta spam her about it. There's a reason liberals shop locally, O!

While they're at it, would this unspecified, spamming someone also whisper into the Big O's ear that she needs to bug Simon & Schuster for an advance readers copy of Chis Cleave's Little Bee? This fictional account of a young Nigerian refugee in modern day London contains everything Oprah looks for in one of her book club picks: social/political relevance for today's readers; a fresh literary voice; a lead character who overcomes hurdles without and within; and a role for Danny Glover in the inevitable film adaptation. Inkwell's own Kathleen says, "This is going to be the book of the year. I know it."

Grant Morrison Reflects Upon His Recently Completed All Star Superman

Click here and here for parts one and two of a soon-to-be ten part interview.

Need more? Click here for what is arguably the best review/dissection of the series thus far.

Book News, In Brief

The publishing world gasps as the inevitable occurs: The internet drives book sales in China.

A new study shows that the Teen Lit sales boom is not the product of page-turning pubescents, but of Forever 21-shopping adults who wish every night was prom night.

Libraries, worried that they're becoming nothing more than a pit stop for stingy internet users and DVD borrowers, are preparing to try something drastic. They're going to stock the books that people actually want to read. Via The NYTimes: Urban Fiction Goes From Streets to Public Libraries

Speaking of libraries, have you heard about the librarian who was fined $500 for promoting a Shakespeare comic book that his daughter did? S'true. Via UPI.com: Robert Grandt was forced to admit he violated the city's ethics code when he placed copies of his daughter's book on a library display table at Brooklyn Technical High School and recommended it in a newsletter. Silly librarian. You need to quit that public service job and join one of the many branches of the publishing industry. Nepotism is de rigeur here!

Why Do I Want to Hump J.K. Rowling?Let Me Count the Ways...

1. Because for every corny thing she does: "J.K. Rowling will help launch The Tales of Beedle the Bard by hosting a tea party." she then goes and does something infinitely cooler: "Rowling has waived her royalties for the book, with net proceeds from the sale to go to the charity she co-founded, the Children's High Level Group, which works with vulnerable children in eastern Europe."
2. And then there's the glasses. Hot!

(Quotes lifted whole from the Shelf Awareness daily email.)

Tuesday's Tip for Flailing Writers:A Story Idea -- Ripped From Today's Headlines!

News item, care of WAPT, Missouri:
White Women Push Suicide Rate Higher
The suicide rate in the U.S. is on the rise, according to a report from Johns Hopkins University. Researchers found that the overall rate rose 0.7 percent from 1999 to 2005. But the rate for white women ages 40 to 64 rose 3.9 percent.

Story idea:
Title: Suicide and the City
Plot: Four professional, narcissistic, middle-aged, White women jump Manolo Blahniks first into this season's crazy new fad: killing themselves. (Okay, so this one's going to need a bit of padding out if it's going to fill a mass market, but how tough could it be to script twenty-some-odd chapters of their sex, booze and shopping exploits?)

Starf**king: Cinematic Bookstores

From TheStarOnline:

We walk past the Fairmont and down two steep blocks of Mason Street to enter the Argonaut Book Shop, at 786 Sutter St. Based on their study of production notes from the film, Leventhal and Kraft are certain that this shop was the inspiration for the Argosy Book Shop in "Vertigo," where Scottie meets old Pop Leibel, proprietor, California history buff and explainer of Madeleine's family secrets.

"My dad knew Hitchcock," explains Argonaut owner Robert Haines Jr., who, like Pop, specializes in rare books on the Gold Rush and old California. He says his father, Robert Haines Sr., who founded the store on Kearny Street, was the director's model for Pop Leibel.

"There's a scene where Pop pulls out a Zippo and taps a cigarette - and that's just what my father did," he says. "For the last 40 years, I've had people coming in here, asking, 'Is this the shop where Alfred Hitchcock' did so and so?' "

"And it is," Leventhal says. "Hitchcock once said, 'This is what a bookshop should look like,'" referring to the original shop on Kearny.

To read the entire article, click here.

(A tip of the cyber chapeau to RareBooksNews.com for the initial heads-up.)

Comic Book News, In Brief

Derik A. Badman (please tell me that's not a nom de plume!) lists The Seven Pleasures of Reading Comics. Unlike the usual lists of this ilk, this is one that you could use to convince your parents/lovers/professors of the artistic value of four color floppies.

Has Craig Thompson's Carnet De Voyage opened the door to a new breed of American comics: the travelogue? According to The Comics Reporter's interview with French Milk author/artist Lucy Knisley, it has. Oh, and in the very last paragraph of the interview, Knisley drops a hint as to the untapped genre door she plans to kick open: the cooking comic.

Over in the NYTimes, Douglas Wolk (author of last year's esteemed Reading Comics) has a nice write up of two new Hernandez Bros. comics -- The Education of Hopey Glass and Love & Rockets New Stories Vol. 1. Bonus gift tip: If you have a special someone embarking upon a career in the teaching profession, get them The Education of Hopey Glass, a.s.a.p.! They'll thank you for it.

Book News, In Brief

Nothing sells like success catastrophe. Via The Guardian UK: The publishing deals struck at the Frankfurt Book Fair set the tone for the books trade all around the world...Publishers may still be bullish about their prospects, but the credit crunch is already driving big deals for books with a financial flavour.

The title of the piece is 'Locally and nationally, public libraries are searching for new ways to stay relevant,' but The Star-Telegram buries the reason for this way down in paragraph seven: Libraries are increasingly shifting their focus to new services that can entice younger users, many of whom are less interested in all those shelves of books. Kids: Just one of the many reasons I'm pro-choice.

Semi-related, via The Chicago Tribune: The percent of 17-year-olds who do not read for pleasure has doubled in the past 20 years, according to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts..."We're talking [about reading] a play, short story, novel or poem in the last 12 months...It's a low bar. We're not even saying you had to complete the book," said Sunil Iyengar, the group's director of research and analysis. (Editor's note: To have your faith in children magically restored, click here.)

My Menu For A Fictional Dinner

Yesterday I linked to a list of 'The Best Books That Never Existed' from The Guardian UK's David Barnett. It was a brief catalog of some of the cooler works of fiction that exist only in other works of fiction -- sort of like the contents of Dream's library in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman or of the lighthouse in Dylan Horrock's Hicksville . Anyway, it was so popular with our staff that I decided to leach off Barnett's brilliance and come up with a similar shtick for today's blog post.

(Don't be mad, David. I saved you a seat at the kids' table.)

Let's start with the dinner rolls:
Most manga fans will agree that no book has ever made bread sound better than Yakitate!! Japan (Takashi Hashiguchi). It's the story of Young Kazuma, a bakery prodigy with one dream: creating 'Ja-pan,' the ultimate bread for Japanese taste buds. (Fun fact: 'Pan' means bread in Japanese.) For those of us too far gone to worry about counting calories, why not add a little butter from the churns of the Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)?

Alternate choice for finicky fictional eaters:
Lembas bread from the LOTR trilogy (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Soup:
Um, I'm not a huge soup sipper, so I'm gonna dedicate this one to Mr. Bennet and his British brethren: The mysterious 'white soup' served at the Netherfield ball in Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen).
Actually, you know what? I want to change my order. 'White soup' sounds like it's gonna look like wheat paste and taste like something from my days in the all-boys' school. Is it too late to get a bowl of Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez) instead?

Alternate choice for finicky fictional eaters:
Chicken Soup for the (insert random, self-diagnosed malady here) (Insert random, shameless author's name here)

Appetizer:
Let's see...do I get an appetizer or do I save room for dessert? Who am I kidding? I do both. In fact, I'm gonna go American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis) and order an entree -- lobster with caviar and peach ravioli -- as my app.

Alternate choice for finicky fictional eaters:
Salad from Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
(Okay, so no one in A&C actually talks about salad, but the expression "salad days" is used by Cleopatra.)
(And yes, I did have to resort to Googling blindly to find this one.)

Main course:
For my 'real' entree, I'll have the orgasm inducing 'Quail in Rose Petal Sauce' from Like Water For Chocolate (Laura Esquivel). Oh, and my advice for the fellas: Put your napkin in your lap before tasting.

Alternate choice for finicky fictional eaters:
Wilbur from Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)

Dessert:
I'm gonna have go with one of those giant banana splits that Jughead used to always order at Pop's Malt Shop in Archie Comics (various), with a side of maple syrup so I can drown the sundae in it. (This is a super stretched to the limit reference to the scene in To Kill A Mockingbird where Alabama redneck Walter Cunningham pours syrup all over his dinner. Truth be told, I often do the same damned thing.)

Alternate choice for finicky fictional eaters:
Madeline cakes from In Search of Lost Time and/or Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust)
Note: I'm giving myself +5 blogger points for finally referencing a college level work of fiction. We now return you to your regularly scheduled dumb shit, already in progress.

Now it's at this point -- before the plaque settles and the semen stains -- that I'd politely excuse myself from the table, run into the bathroom, and brush my teeth with the toothpaste from The Toothpaste Millionaire (Jean Merrill & Jan Palmer). This goopy amalgam of household items is the brainchild of a poor kid who decides that store bought toothpaste costs too much so he recruits a group of his neighborhood pals to make and market their own. (Oh, and the best part? The packaging. They sell the shit in in old baby food jars.)

Voila! My belly is full (Jim Aylesworth & Wendy Anderson Halperin) and my teeth are white (Zadie Smith). While I clear the dirty plates, why don't y'all give me your ideas for alternate dishes in the comments section.

Author Du Jour: Emma Bull

Biography:
(stolen whole from Wikipedia)
Emma Bull (born 13 December 1954) is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. She has participated in Terri Windling's Borderland shared universe, which is the setting of her 1994 novel Finder. She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2007 Bull released Territory, a radical retelling of the shootout at Tomstone's O.K. Corral involving tough minded widows, battling wizards, and a bungled stagecoach robbery.

Bibliography - Novels
(again, thanks to Wikipedia)
War for the Oaks (1987)
Falcon (1989)
Bone Dance (1991; nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards)
Finder (1994)
The Princess and the Lord of Night (1994)
Freedom and Necessity (1997, with Steven Brust)
Territory (July 2007)

Selected Interviews
w/ Backstage Live
w/ Bookslut
w/ um...herself, at the Magical Musings blog

To read the free e-book of War for the Oaks, click here.

Care to see an author sing? Emma Bull sings western ditties below.

Book News, In Brief

Embarrassed by the fact that no one in the U.S. had heard of this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, NPR has whipped up a list of The Best Foreign Books You've Never Heard Of. (Bonus! With NPR's streaming audio, you'll learn how to properly pronounce the writers' names. Now you'll not only appear enlightened, but edge-u-ma-cated as well!)

The Guardian UK's David Barnett has followed up his 'Night Out in Fictional Pubs' piece with a new one: 'The Best Books That Never Existed.' (Kids take note: Not only are Barnett's articles fun to read, but he's figured out the perfect way to write for a national newspaper without doing any actual research. That's what the repetitious call a 'win-win.')

Can I get an un-ironic 'Yee-haw' from all the indie-rockers rocking cowboy hats? Alt-country magazine No Depression is back -- as a 'bookazine.' Via Newsobserver.com: No Depression will feature the longform music journalism the magazine was known for, but it will be published in a large-format paperback book. The bookazine will be sold primarily in bookstores and without any advertising in its pages.

Not At All Book Related

(unless you're connecting the book industry's sagging sales to the worldwide economy crisis)
(and really, why wouldn't you?)

Via The AP: Don't Assume You're Too Rich For Aid: Financial-Aid Tips For Well-Off Families. Wait, wasn't giving rich, white folks unnecessary financial breaks what got us into this mess in the first place?

Via Time Magazine: Is it okay to pray for your 401K? A Whitman's sampler of spiritual scam artists/sound byte whores theologians provide advice to zealots worried about their earthly rewards.

Via The Guardian UK: Are people becoming addicted to sex because of the financial crisis? Answer: No. The press is just killing time, running 'Investors Jumping Into Bed' stories until the 'Investors Jumping Out Of Windows' stories start pouring in.

Recommended Viewing:Lynda Barry in San Fransisco

Yes, it's choppy. And yes, it does start and stop at random. But Barry is an engaging and entertaining speaker, and it's a helluva lot better than Two Girls & A Cup.
Parts 2 & 3

Book News, In Brief

Marie Toulantis, former head of Barnes & Noble.com, will be receiving over $1 million as part of her "termination agreement." Psst, Barnes & Noble. Fire me!

Money-centric website The Motley Fool has chosen the following three retailers as candidates for foreclosure in the coming year: Circuit City, Talbots, and...wait for it...Borders! Hmn...I wonder what the severance pay-offs will be like for the executives of this big box bookstore? (Hint: $$$) And for the worker bees? (Hint: --- )

Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! In Brady Bunch babe Maureen McCormick's new memoir, Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice, the actress admits to being nervous about singing the song It's a Sunshine Day, the awkwardness of hanging out with Micheal Jackson, and, oh yeah -- trading sex for drugs.

Top 5 Prison Books(because even the most relaxed rectum won't hold six)

Cast the First Stone
Chester Himes
From enotes.com: Cast the First Stone (1952) is another of Himes's semi-autobiographical novels. The main character, Jim Monroe, is a white man, but seems to represent Himes as is evidenced by their similarities: both attended college, suffered a serious back injury, and were sentenced to 25 years for armed robbery. The novel focuses on the growth that Monroe experiences while in prison, and is notable for its direct treatment of homosexual relationships in prison.

Escape from Colditz; The two classic escape stories: The Colditz story, and Men of Colditz
P. R Reid
From Iron Gumby: Escape from Colditz is a factual book which reads like a fictional work. P.R. Reid who wrote the book is the main character who is narrating, and participating in the story. The book tells how the Prisoners of war during World War Two lived in confinement and how they used their surroundings to make their escape using replicated German uniforms, and a glider constructed of bed frames and fabric hidden in the attic of a chapel. The prisoners are all bent on escape and the story is how these men plan to flee to Sweden.

Papillon
Henri Charriere
From dooyoo.co.uk: In a nutshell, this book is a tale of Papillons many escape attempts to get away from the penal settlements in French Guiana (many of which were sucessful in the short term) and the amazing lengths he went to to avoid spending the rest of his life repenting a crime he was innocent of. In the end he only served 13 years of his sentence, but to survive 13 years in the environment he found himself in was an accomplishment it itself. He continually escaped, was re-captured, escaped again, was re-captured again and it goes on and on. His escape attempts were daring as he said he'd rather die trying to be a free man than carry on living in the living hell he was in. His final escape was made from Devil's Island, riding the biggest wave that hit the island chained to a sack full of coconut shells.

Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Davis
From Political Affairs Magazine: Just a little over 30 years ago the entire prison population stood at 200,000 in the US; that is a tenfold jump in just one generation. In California alone, 3 prisons were built between 1852 and 1952; from 1984 to the present, over 80 facilities were constructed that now house almost 160,000 people. While being jailed or imprisoned has become “an ordinary dimension of community life,” according to Davis, for men in working-class Black, Latino, Native American and some Asian American communities, it is also increasingly an issue women of these communities have come to face.
Davis points to the increased involvement of corporations in prison construction, security, health care delivery, food programs and commodity production using prison labor as the main source of the growth of the prison-industrial complex. As prisons became a new source of profits, it became clear to prison corporations that more facilities and prisoners were needed to increase income. It is evident that increased crime is not the cause of the prison boom. Davis writes “that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profits helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling.”

Arkham Asylum: Living Hell
by Dan Sloott and Ryan Sook
From Jorge: This book is good, creepy fun! Much like the old HBO show OZ, this is the story of all the inmates in a prison, but this time around it's the prison for all of Batman's villains. We follow an all new character, the Great White Shark (a white collar criminal), as he is thrown into the loony bin with the rest of Batman's bad guys. Will he make it out alive? How will this experience change him? Or is he possibly a new Bat-villian in the making? Those are the questions that keep you flipping page after page in this book.
The first half of the book is some of the best Batman/Gotham City stories I've read in a long time. What makes it even more impressive is that Batman is barely in it! And most of the characters (Humpty Dumpty, Death Rattle, Jane Doe, and Junkyard Dog) are new. But they FEEL like they've been Batman characters for YEARS. That's where this book really excels. I had to go online and make sure that there weren't Batman stories that I'd missed over the years. And that, right there, is something very special that the writer and artist pulled off effortlessly. I bought that these were longstanding Bat-villains. And they are SO good, that I hope future Batman writers incorporate them into future stories.
The second half of this book takes a drastic and sudden turn into, what I feel, is a wrong direction. The rug gets pulled out from under us and the prison drama we were reading suddenly turns into a horror film. It's the same drastic turn like the movie Dusk Till Dawn. And, in this case, it really doesn't work.
However, even in the later half of the book, there are STILL priceless Bat-villain moments-- like the Joker's escape, his subsequent palindrome crimes, and his eventual "run in" with Batman. With that in mind, I'd recommend buying this book. Because even though it takes a wrong turn and slightly stumbles, even then it's still better than most of the Batman books out there. And the first half of the book (especially the Humpty Dumpty issue) when everything's working, Arkham Asylum: Living Hell is some of the best Batman work I've ever read!

Book News, In Brief

Everybody knows that having a prominent politician name drop your book will give sales a boost. But what happens when an aw-shucks Alaskan VP candidate attempts to ban your book? The online auction asking price skyrockets to $500+!

Hmn...I wonder what Palin's gonna think of Bible Illuminated: The Book. It's a Swedish repackaging of the so-called 'Good Book' which pairs "intense photo essays" -- including shots Martin Luther King Jr. and Angelina Jolie -- with passages from the New Testament. In Sweden, where Bible sales average 60K per year, Bible Illuminated has already sold 30K. A US release is due later this month.

The folks on the Nobel literature jury suspect that the name of this year's pick -- Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio -- was leaked early. Why? The surprising number of online bettors who picked Le Clezio to win. For those of you us who have never heard of J.M.G.L.C., click here for his Wikipedia entry. For those of us you who didn't know you could bet on the Nobel prizewinners, click here.

Two brothers created two online bookstores. One bookstore was a "wide site," featuring links that kept browsers close to the homepage. The other bookstore was a "deep site," which allowed browsers to navigate through countless links, bringing them further and further away from the homepage. The point of this? To find out if the ol' 'hunter/gatherer' stereotypes about men and women proved true on the internet. To read the results, both men and women may click here.

I've Gone To Canada to Visit Librairie Premiere-- My Fourth Favorite Combination Comic Book Shop/Used SF Bookstore in The World!

I'll be back on Monday the 13th.


Until then, entertain yourselves with this...
Blog-Jacking: IO9
Scientists Pick The Greatest Books And Movies Of All Time
Originally posted Oct 1 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
At last, the most important works of science fiction are being determined scientifically. New Scientist magazine is doing a special science fiction issue on Nov. 15, and the magazine is polling its science-boffin readers as to the greatest books and movies in the genre. The magazine's own staff have already voted, and you might not be surprised by the books they put first. But you may have some issues with their most hated movies and books.

It's hard to quibble with their picks for best movies and books. Being mostly Brits, the New Scientist group put Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy at the top of the novel heap. Iain M. Banks would have won, but his vote was split among a few of his books. (Including Feersum Enjinn. Really?) Frank Herbert's Dune also came close to winning. The best movie, according to the NS crew, was Blade Runner, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Serenity.

To read the picks for Worst SF, click here.

Book News, In Brief

The home of The Jewel of Medina's English publisher was firebombed this weekend. While the the US publishers have temporarily closed their offices ("a precautionary measure"), they're still planning to release the book on October 15.

The Guardian UK makes this bold statement: Respect for religion now makes censorship the norm. When publishers are too intimidated to print even novels that may offend, it shows how far we've lost our way on free speech. To read the screed, click here.

John Bemelmans Marciano, grandson to Madeline author Ludwig Bemelmans, has announced his plans to write and draw the first new Madeline book in over fifty years. Yes, this is clearly a case of cashing in, but considering yesterday's announcement from the granddaughter of Anne of Green Gables author, who's gonna complain?

Got A Half Hour To Kill?

Check out The Comics Reporter's super-enjoyable The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs.
(Hell, even if you're not a comics fan yourself, you can use it as a cheat sheet for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa presents this holiday season!)