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During a Dallas-area writers’ conference over the weekend, Nan Talese, the publisher of James Frey’s "A Million Little Pieces," was asked about the ordeal involving Frey’s book during one of the sessions. Talese didn’t hesitate to respond, lamenting the way that she and Frey were treated when they appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," saying the host has "fiercely bad manners." The media are buzzing with her comments: "You don’t stone someone in public," Talese also said of the way Winfrey grilled them.
You may recall that when Talese appeared with Frey on "Oprah" in January 2006, she appeared calm and even somewhat sympathetic to the host’s distress. At the time, she called the entire mess over Frey’s fabrication of events in his memoir a "very sad" affair; she also tried to explain to Winfrey and millions of TV viewers her firm belief in trust between editors and writers when it comes to the facts. Winfrey would have none of it, but Talese was guarded in the face of the talk show diva’s fury. Not anymore. You can find her comments around the Web. The gossip site Gawker finds that Talese’s continued support for Frey’s memoir is completely wrong, but she does receive points for standing up to Winfrey’s self-righteous attitude and--a silly way to end their post--for having "those great teeth."
Time magazine online suggests that Talese was well-prepared--even expecting--to make comments directed against Winfrey during the conference. At one moment, she "pointedly turned toward the C-SPAN crew that was filming the event" and the rest of us may get a chance to view her remarks on C-SPAN’s Book TV by this weekend.
Nick Owchar
Must the Brits always have the fun first?
This fall, in the United Kingdom, Vintage Classics is bringing out what they’re calling "Twins" editions, paperbacks in which two works of literature--one classic, one contemporary--are wrapped together into a single volume. At the Guardian’s book blog, Giles Foden is a bit skeptical about the whole enterprise although he does find good merits in this new line.
What sorts of pairings are we talking about? At one of Random House’s U.K. websites, you’ll find books grouped under brief explanatory labels, like "Crime" for Patricia Highsmith’s "Ripley’s Game" and Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment," "Lust" for Martin Amis’ "The Rachel Papers" and Henry Fielding’s "Tom Jones," and "Love" for George Eliot’s "Middlemarch" and A.S. Byatt’s "Possession."
Of course, it’s a marketing strategy that can lead to some bizarre matchups: I’m not sure what Dante’s "Inferno" really has in common with Philip Roth’s "Sabbath’s Theater" (they’re presented under the diffuse title "Sin"), but, heck, there it is on their list of forthcoming fall releases.
On the other hand, if this gets some people to appreciate classic works and to think of them as being in dialogue with modern novels, is that so bad? No word yet from Vintage on when the twins will appear in U.S. bookstores.
Nick Owchar
You almost never hear the name Herbert Marcuse anymore, but 40 years ago, he was a leading critic of American economic and political life, as controversial as Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. A self-professed Marxist, he escaped Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and became an American citizen in 1940. Although he taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis, it was when he went to UC San Diego in the mid-1960s that he became a counterculture superstar, inspiring many members of the New Left.
Marcuse died in 1979, at 81. But a number of his books remain in print, and now a new collection, “The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse,” edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Beacon: 250 pp., $20 paper), seeks to distill the essence of his work. It’s not easy reading, but what makes it interesting is the way that, at his best, Marcuse looks past theory to an almost utopian sense of possibility.
In his day, this got Marcuse in trouble; his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which argues that tolerance can be a negative social force by making room for (and, indeed, empowering) oppressive ideologies, was widely criticized on all sides when it appeared in 1965. And yet, there’s something undeniably compelling about such a notion, especially in a culture in which so many public debates are dominated not by the best and the brightest but by the loudest and the most uncouth. What is the nature of society? In what kind of world do we want to live? There may be no definitive answers to such questions, but one place to start, Marcuse suggests, is by thinking for yourself.
David L. Ulin
 Yesterday, in its ThursdayStyles section, the New York Times ran a piece by Anna Jane Grossman about parents who are upset about the use of misspellings and improper grammar in Barbara Park’s popular “Junie B. Jones” series for young readers. In case you’re among the uninitiated, Junie B. Jones is a first-grader with attitude, a good kid who can’t help getting in trouble on occasion and definitely has a hard time sitting still. Children love her; according to the Times, the 27 Junie B. books have more than 43 million copies in print.
And yet, this article informs us, there is now a backlash among some parents because the character, who narrates her own stories, doesn’t use grammatical English or even (necessarily) proper words. “In 2004,” Grossman writes, “Park was selected as one of the American Library Assn.’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck.”
Can we be blunt? This is ridiculous, a fundamental misapprehension about how reading and writing work. Books do not exist to teach us proper grammar but to draw us into an experience, to share with us a piece of the world. As it happens, our cover piece in this Sunday’s Book Review is about the very same issue: Chris Abani reviews the anthology “Rotten English,” which gathers 200-plus years of vernacular literature. The idea, Abani argues, is that the language, and by extension the literary canon, is in a constant state of evolution, transformed and broadened by outsider voices and forms. Mark Twain wrote in vernacular, as did William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, even Chaucer and Shakespeare. Without vernacular, in other words, we wouldn’t have an English language or a literature.
As for Junie B.? “I think she’s in kindergarten and first grade,” my 8-year-old daughter says, “and she should talk like that.” I agree. But more to the point, we ought to stop looking for reasons to take books away from kids. It’s hard enough, in a culture that offers endless flashier entertainments, to convince young readers that books are a viable outlet for their curiosity. When we find a book that resonates with our children, shouldn’t we just get out of the way?
David L. Ulin
J.K. Rowling may be taking a little breather after the release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” her seventh and final book in the wildly popular series, but she’s already started two new writing projects.
“I’m sort of writing two things at the moment,” Rowling told USA Today. “One is for children, and the other is not for children. The weird thing is that this is exactly the way I started writing ‘Harry.’ I was writing two things simultaneously for a year before ‘Harry’ took over. So one will oust the other in due course, and I’ll know that’s my next thing.”
The Scotland-based writer says that she’ll also “probably” pen an encyclopedia of all things Harry — drawing from more than a decade worth of notes to flesh out plot points and details about characters that didn’t make the final cuts.
“I suppose I have [started] because the raw material is all in my notes,” Rowling told “Today” show host Meredith Vieira and fans in an interview from Edinburgh Castle.
But don’t hold your breath.
“What’s quite uplifting is that in the middle of all this sadness I feel about ‘Harry’ ending — and I do feel a lot of sadness about it — is the thought that financially I don’t have to publish immediately,” she tells USA Today’s Carol Memmott. “So I can take my time. And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss. Heaven. No pressure.”
Kristina Lindgren
 Last week, when I posted an item about Ross Macdonald, I had no idea he was so much with us once again. Then, another new Macdonald volume arrived — “The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes” (Crippen & Landru: 352 pp., $25 paper), edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan (who is an occasional contributor to Book Review).
What Nolan has gathered are 12 stories, mostly from the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as 11 additional story fragments — the “Case Notes” of the subtitle — that, for whatever reason, Macdonald left incomplete. (Much of this material comes from the author’s papers, which are at UC Irvine.) That makes the collection something of an inside job: constructed as a detective’s notebook, complete with a “biographical sketch” by Nolan that frames Archer as a real person, born in Long Beach, marked by war and police work, defined by his times.
I love a hard-boiled short story, but what intrigues me more are all those false starts and near-misses, the glimpses of Macdonald at work. Too often, we think of writing as inevitable, unyielding as stone. Yet, every author starts with a blank page (or a blank screen) and no real idea how to fill it in. Here, then, Nolan offers us the clues to such a process, evidence of Macdonald’s writing life laid bare.
David L. Ulin
Comic-Con International is undeniably one of the biggest comics events of the year. On the streets of San Diego this week, you’ll see impressive-looking banners depicting the mask of Iron Man, whom Robert Downey Jr. portrays in a forthcoming movie. Although you’ll find plenty of coverage at The Times' blog for the convention, here at Jacket Copy one can’t help but report another interesting item about the ways that comic books--like traditional books of prose--are getting pushed and prodded into new technological formats. Sean Demory and Steven Sanders, creators of the comic book adventure "Thunder Road," are releasing their story, which presents a bleak alternative history of the modern world, in an unexpected way: completely, exclusively, on cellphones.
"A lot of people just kind of want to fix the current [print comic book] industry," Sanders says in a recent interview. But while many are trying to "just get more readers to go along with the current system" of comic books in print, he and Demory are hoping to attract fresher audiences by giving them a riveting story that they can enjoy on the go.
To read the story, cellphone users must press the right-left arrows on their phones to scroll through images from the story, which GoComics.com says is now available on all major carriers, including Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.
Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel "The Road," the story looks at the fanatical, desperate state of the world--and its survivors--after 50 years of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Nick Owchar
At 11:15 p.m., bookstore owner Doug Dutton, dressed in a hooded monk’s robe of rough brown fabric tied with a rope, welcomed guests to the “longest running Harry Potter publication party west of the Mississippi.” The store had actually thrown a party for the second book, although this wasn’t a midnight extravaganza — that started with book number three. The difference this year was the level of anticipation. The party officially started at 11, but by 9, a crowd was gathering in the courtyard.
The countdown clock was running: 39 minutes to midnight.
A little later, Dutton appeared again, to lay out rules for the evening:
1. The use of exploding money is strictly prohibited.
2. No apparating to the front of the line.
3. No sliding down the banisters. Sliding up the banisters was okay.
Manning a divination booth in the courtyard were a pair of 16-year-old girls who have formed a Harry
Potter club at their school and consider themselves experts on HP trivia. They were challenging all
comers, and it was amazing how many really young kids could come up with details from all six books.
By 11:45, there were hundreds of people in the courtyard, and the line for pre-paid copies snaked around the planters, under the stairs and out to the parking lot. The countdown was thunderous, and the press at the tables where books were being exchanged for vouchers was staggering.
Bookstore employees dashed back and forth from the back room, wheeling dollies loaded with boxes marked “Harry Potter: Do Not Open Until July 21.”
You knew people were happy because, despite the hideous traffic jam getting out of Dutton’s parking lot, there were no incidents of road rage.
On the way home, one of our kids opened the book right away and started reading; in the other car, the audio book wrapper was unceremoniously shredded and a disk stuffed into the dashboard in an effort to hear as much of the story before sleep took over. Parking, we encountered several families dragging home with humongous books under their arms.
We all smiled sleepily at each other and turned in.
Sonja Bolle and Liz Dubelman
Pegasus Books has scored a coup that it hopes will put the year-old publishing house on the map. On Sept. 12, it will release Alexandre Dumas' lost novel, "The Last Cavalier," a lavish swashbuckler in the tradition of his greatest works.
"If we get the proper media attention, I think it can be a big success," Pegasus publisher Claiborne Hancock told Publishers Weekly.
The manuscript, the third in Dumas père' trilogy on the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, was unearthed in the archives of Paris' National Library by noted Dumas scholar Claude Schopp, who completed the book’s final chapter based on years of research. First published in 2005 as "Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine," the novel spent 12 weeks on bestseller lists in France, where it sold 250,000 copies.
It's the story of Hector de Sainte-Hermine, the last in a line of French aristocrats who is released from prison in 1804 to serve as an enlisted man in Napoleon’s army, bent on revenge for the death of his family. "An Aramis as powerful as Porthos, a D'Artagnan wise as Athos," Le Monde wrote of the chevalier.
It's the second treat this year for Dumas fans, who have a sexy new translation of "The Three Musketeers" from Viking to devour.
Kristina Lindgren
For us, the Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore Harry Potter party is a family affair. We’re here with Liz’s husband Paul and nine-year-old daughter Grace, as well as Sonja’s mother and nine-year-old son Luke.
We’ve read every Harry Potter book several times, beginning when our kids were five. For Luke and Grace, Harry has been an almost continuous family experience: He has made up a good deal of bed-time reading, occupied a large portion of travel time (listening to the extraordinary Jim Dale read), and offered an incentive to learn to read themselves.
The kids feel very prepared for tonight, having gone through all the books again over the past few months — all 3,341 pages. Don't think they can’t quote the number. And yes, they’re in costume: Grace as a Mundunga Fletcher, heretofore unknown niece of Mundungus — her robes open to reveal an assortment of aids to pranksters — and Luke as Albus Dumbledore, withered hand and all. Dutton’s has planned a “stump-the-experts” trivia booth, manned by local teenagers; the kids are dying to give it a try … but they’ve been rejecting question after question, saying, “Oh, they’ll know that!”
We began the evening watching J. K. Rowling online as she read the first chapter at midnight in Britain. She read flawlessly for 20 minutes. The kids fled, shrieking that they didn’t want to hear it. They wanted to read it for themselves.
The Dutton's cafe is serving butter beer, pumpkin juice, fire whiskey, cauldron cake, Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans, Cockroach Clusters, Licorice Toads. And it’s all free!
Muggles, wizards and mudbloods are lining up to exchange their pre-paid receipts for vouchers that will get them books at the witching hour, even as dozens more are paying now. We have to say, the butter beer tastes like what they probably drink in Hogsmeade, but the fire whiskey seems to be Red Hot candies soaked in something sweet, maybe ginger ale.
Sonja Bolle and Liz Dubelman
The Overlook Press is delivering a mythical one-two punch with the publication of a biography of epic novelist John Cowper Powys next month followed by an unabridged version of "Porius," his Arthurian epic, in September. So, I know what I’ll be soon reading. But still I need to ask a very important question:
How the heck do you pronounce his name?
Is it as obvious as it seems?
"Cowper," it turns out, is pronounced as "Cooper"--the name links him to his distant kin William Cowper, English poet of depression (see his famous poem, "The Castaway"). "Powys" is trickier: It’s an ancestral name that should be pronounced as "Pow-iss"--at least that’s the consensus on the web.
One person online offers the snotty reply to a request for help on pronouncing the name: "Just the way it’s written." Thanks for that.
All of this leads me to think of the many author names that can break your heart. I’m not talking about obvious landmines--Uzodinma Iweala, for instance--but seemingly easy ones that aren’t easy after all.
Patrick McGrath. Simple, right? His last name, he tells interviewers, should be pronounced "McGraw" even though he’ll answer to the more obvious version. Or that fine biographer of things British, Jenny Uglow, who just published a book on an 18th-century engraver--is her name "ugg-glow" or "yew-glow"?
Here are a few to consider:
Gioconda Belli: Does the Nicaraguan poet say "belly" or is it "bell-EYE"?
John Betjeman: Is the "j" silent in this poet’s name? What the devil is it doing there?
T. Coraghessan Boyle: Born Thomas John Boyle, his middle name wasn’t fancy enough, so he adopted another.
Michael Chabon: CHAY-bun or Shah-BONE or something else?
J.M. Coetzee: No idea
Edwidge Danticat: It’s this Haitian-born American author’s first name that worries me
Thomas Kinsella: The proper Irish pronunciation, I’m told, is "Kin-SAH-la"
Rick Riordan: This children’s author says it is "RYE-or-dan"
Nick Owchar
Most readers probably didn’t come to H.G. Wells’ two books of history, "The Outline of History" and "A Short History of the World," via his science fiction but through John Updike. You may remember that Wells’ "Outline" is integral to Updike’s early story "Pigeon Feathers."
T he reissuing of the works of H.G. Wells by Penguin Classics continues this month--not with "Outline" but with the book he published two years later, "A Short History" (Penguin: 372 pp., $15 paper). Written in the wake of World War I, both books were a reaction to the war, which Wells had hoped would signal the beginning of a brighter, new global order. Bitterly disappointed by the outcome, he turned to world history, which, with exasperation, he called nothing but a "race between education and catastrophe."
"An Outline" seethes with spleen: No wonder it stuns and traumatizes Updike’s young main character, David, in particular when he reads about Jesus. Updike characterizes Wells’ handling of Christ in this way:
"Then, before he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells’s account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident."
This trivialization sends David into a youthful existential crisis that subsides only when, in studying the delicate design of a pigeon’s wings, his belief in a Creator of all things is restored (the epiphany comes, though, after first blasting several pigeons in the family’s barn before they ruin some furniture stored there).
If young David had been reading Wells’ "Short History" instead, the crisis might have been averted (and we’d lose a beautiful story, an early demonstration of Updike’s brilliance!). For "Short History" is much calmer, without the same tone found in the earlier book (notably when it comes to Jesus). Wells ends on a grudgingly hopeful note: "What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do."
Nick Owchar
I’m the kind of person who can’t go away for the weekend without bringing half a dozen books. So when I take a vacation, I stockpile books for weeks beforehand: books I’ve read, books I’ve meant to read or books I never knew I wanted to read until they came across my desk.
Vacation is still a month away for me, but here are a few titles I’ve already set aside:
“The Violent Bear It Away” by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 244 pp., $14 paper). O’Connor’s second novel, originally published in 1960, is the story of two cousins adrift in a world of faith and false hope. I read it in my early 20s, as part of an extended O’Connor binge, and it changed the way I thought about belief and illusion, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. I’m a bit wary, I must admit, about returning to the novel; this past winter, I re-visited O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel, “Wise Blood,” and liked it less than I remembered, finding it contrived in places and (although it pains me to admit it) very, very young. This is one of the risks of re-reading — that the books that moved us once might not do so any longer, that we may discover just how distant we have grown from our younger selves.
“The Way Some People Die” by Ross Macdonald (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard: 246 pp., $12.95 paper). Macdonald represents a hole in my reading — a Southern California noirist I’ve somehow overlooked. This early novel (it first appeared in 1951) looks like a good place to make his acquaintance; it’s a missing-persons caper that takes Macdonald’s hard-boiled detective Lew Archer from Santa Monica to San Francisco on the trail of a young woman who doesn’t want to be found. If I like it, I’m going to try a second early Macdonald, 1952’s “The Ivory Grin” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard: 240 pp., $12.95 paper), the story of a theft that leads not just to murder but also to corruption. This is, of course, nothing if not the ideal trajectory of noir.
“John O’Hara’s Hollywood” by John O’Hara, edited and with an introduction by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carroll & Graf: 384 pp., $17.95 paper). My favorite O’Hara novel is “Hope of Heaven,” the 1938 story of a relationship between a screenwriter and a local girl. It’s not a Hollywood novel per se, but it does get the ins and outs of life in Southern California as deftly as any piece of fiction that I know. That’s why I’m looking forward to this collection of O’Hara’s Hollywood stories, which span 40-plus years, beginning with 1932’s “Mr. Sidney Gainsborough: Quality Pictures” and running through “Malibu fFrom the Sky.” O’Hara is one of the few novelists of his generation who really understood Hollywood, seeing it as not just a place to cash in but as a template for a larger set of stories — stories that have everything to do with the nature of American life.
David L. Ulin
There are few books I look forward to receiving as much as “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.” Each year when it arrives, I think about the influence of a single volume, the way one person’s name can become a household word.
The 2008 edition (Signet: 1,630 pp., $9.99 paper) will soon hit bookstores, and, as ever, it adds several hundred listings to the 17,000-plus entries already in the mix. But what I find most compelling — other than the sheer heft of all those motion pictures — is not so much the comprehensive nature of the effort as the idea that it is like an almanac, a record of the storms and weather systems of the cinema, and, even more, of the viewing habits of Maltin and his team.
In this year’s introduction, Maltin thanks his “loyal readers,” not only for embracing a reference book but also for believing that such a work “has value in the computer age.” He’s got a point, I suppose, but then again, what is the “Maltin Guide” if not a reference book for the computer age? Here, we have a work that’s personal, idiosyncratic, an epic catalog of one person’s fascination and expertise. In other words, it’s like an elaborate movie database — or better yet, a 1,600-plus-page blog.
David L. Ulin
Salon.com's Machinist blog reported Tuesday that the entire text of the final installment in the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" — in the form of digital photographs of each page — had been leaked online.
Columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that he had downloaded the complete novel, and even quoted snippets from the book to prove his claim. By late afternoon, the news had been picked up by such newspapers as Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
Most interesting, I find, are the responses to the item, many of which beg Salon not to give anything away. "[P]lease don’t tell me what happens," pleaded poster "GeorgeSmiley."
In response to angry Potter fans, Manjoo posted: "I appreciate you guys not wanting to read any of it. But as you'll notice, I didn't post any of it, nor did I give away anything that happens. I didn't even link to the site where you can get it. . . . if you don’t want the book spoiled, you’re in luck, because all you have to do is nothing."
What it all comes down to are technophiles' bemoaning how technology might — or might not — be used to proffer stolen goods. Call me crazy, but I'll bet only a handful of people who want to read the book are going to do so on the Web. Sure, there are people who just want to find out what happens — and even those who want to spoil the surprise for everybody else. For the rest of us, though, what we really want is to read the book the way it was meant to be read.
On paper.
— Orli Low
"Tintin in the Congo," the children’s comic book to be published for the first time in the United States this fall, will be shelved in the adult section of Borders bookstores because of content that could be viewed as racist, Publishers Weekly reported Tuesday.
Borders' British stores earlier this month yanked the book from its children's sections and placed it with graphic novels after the Commission on Racial Equality denounced it for depicting black Africans as "savage natives" who "look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles," according to the Telegraph.
"Tintin in the Congo," first published in 1931, is was the second in a series by Belgian artist Hergé to chronicle the international adventures of a quick-witted young reporter and his fluffy white dog. The book was redrawn by the artist in 1946 to remove references to the Congo’s being a Belgian colony, but was excluded from reprinting in Britain until recently because it still contained such images as a black woman bowing to Tintin and saying: "White man very great. . . . White mister is big juju man!" The book will be included in a boxed set of 24 volumes to be reissued by Little, Brown in November as part of a centenary celebration of the birth of Hergé, the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi.
Borders' U.S. spokeswoman Ann Binkley told PW's Karen Holt that the retailer is "committed to acting responsibly ¼ and with sensitivity to all of the communities we serve" by placing "Tintin in the Congo" in the adult graphic novel sections. "We believe adults have the capacity to evaluate this work within historical context and make their own decision whether to read it or not. Other 'Tintin' titles will remain in the children's section."
Meanwhile, U.S. publisher Little, Brown says on its website that the book "reflects the colonial attitudes" of the period and that the reissued volume will seek to "contextualize" the stereotypes held about black African people at the time.
— Kristina Lindgren
Last week romance publishing said goodbye to Kathleen Woodiwiss, who died at 68. When I was a kid, I didn’t have any idea how revolutionary "The Flame and the Flower" was, but I knew that my mom and all her friends were reading it. After one of my mom’s coffee klatches--an informal book club, circa 1978--I found her paperback copy on the kitchen table next to an ashtray, several scattered cups and saucers and a half-eaten strudel.
With that book, Woodiwiss showed romance writers how to write tingly love scenes. After hearing of her death, I found my mother’s copy, all yellowed and taped up, on a shelf by the fireplace. I cracked it open to search for one of those panting scenes that critics say  made Woodiwiss a pioneer in the romance novel field. It wasn’t difficult to find one:
"She moved her arm out of the way, and Brandon paled as she moved guilelessly between his knees. There was an ugly scratch marring the white skin of her underarm, and a long vicious-looking pin protruded from the material at the side of her breast, but the head of the pin was inside her gown and it couldn’t be freed from without. Most reluctantly he reached up and slid two fingers inside her bodice against the soft warm flesh of her breast as she stood obediently motionless and watched him with trusting eyes. His gaze caught hers for a second, and amazingly his face flushed red.
" ‘What the hell!’ he thought angrily. ‘She has me blushing like an unsullied virgin!’ "
Woodiwiss made her blushing readers feel the same way.
When I left my mom’s house with the book in hand for this column, she said something that I’ve never heard her say before when I’ve taken a book: "Hey, when you’re done with it, I want it back."
Nick Owchar
Literary magazines, summer issues: On newsstands are new issues of some fine literary magazines you may--or may not--have heard about. The Stinging Fly is the leading literary magazine and publisher for young Irish writers. Its editor, Declan Mead, is something of the kingpin of the young writers’ scene in Dublin. The new issue includes an interview with M.J. Hyland as well as new stories by A.L. Kennedy and poems by Graham Allen, Mary Rose Callan, Noel Conneely and others.
The centerpiece of Paris Review’s summer issue is an interview with Norman Mailer; the issue also includes fresh fiction by André Aciman and poetry by some newcomer named Charles Baudelaire.
The New England Review, out of Middlebury College, includes an excerpt from Gino Segrè’s new book "Faust in Copenhagen," published by Viking, as well as Francis-Noel Thomas’ thoughts on mortality, prompted by his reading of Julien Green’s diary.
 The delightful Poetry, founded long ago by Harriet Monroe, in 1912, continues to present a mix of new and familiar voices. But there’s also the unexpected: sports journalist Michael Lewis’ essay "Poetry in Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants" as well as David Orr’s delightful classical meditation on summer beach reading which leads us to an image of Menelaus’ battle with Proteus in the "Odyssey."
Reviews that make you say "ouch": Patrick Anderson, this week in the Washington Post, didn’t find much to praise in the crime novel "Self’s Deception" by Bernhard Schlink, translated from the German by Peter Constantine. Among his comments were: "This is one of the most discursive novels I’ve ever read. Let us note that Schlink has been both a judge and a law professor: This is a writer accustomed to captive audiences."
Kerouac contentiousness: As the 50th anniversary of the publication of "On the Road" nears (on Sept. 5), Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia is charging the estate of Jack Kerouac and the publisher Viking with attempting to erase his contributions to our understanding of this singular American writer.
Bacon as a writer’s motivation: Almost missed this one, a posting earlier this week on Bookslut about Peter Ho Davies and a method he once used to get himself motivated to write. He’s since given this up because, in the long run, eating too much bacon isn’t good for you.
Nick Owchar
Just in time for the renewal of the war debate in Congress, the University of Chicago Press has released "The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual" (420 pp. $15 paper), a thick guide to strategy--both military and otherwise--with forewords by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James F.  Amos. It’s a nifty volume, not only because it gives you a sense of what our most highly regarded military theorists are thinking, but because sometimes what they’re thinking is the last thing you’d expect. Especially interesting is a section called "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations," in which the "Field Manual" tells us: "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction" and "Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is."
In conjunction with the "Field Manual," University of Chicago has also put out "Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II" (44 pp., $10)--a historical oddity that sheds a certain unintended light upon our current woes. Among its suggestions? "Manners are important"; "Avoid offering opinions on internal politics"; and "No preaching." Most of all, "use common sense on all occasions. And remember that every American soldier is an unofficial ambassador of good will."
David L. Ulin
 At the expense of J.K. Rowling, a little bit of virtual space should be given to a novelist whose difficult situation has been forgotten in all the Harry Potter hype: Salman Rushdie. Our media columnist and book critic Tim Rutten wrote about the public’s stunning indifference to renewed Muslim threats against Rushdie’s life after the British crown announced his knighthood last month.
Now, Sign and Sight is posting among today’s items that a German writer is seeking permission to hold a reading of Rushdie’s 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses" -- which led to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a fatwa calling for his death -- in a Cologne mosque after its construction is completed. Journalist and author Günter Wallraff ("The Undesirable Journalist," "Lowest of the Low") casts this reading as a crucial part of an open dialogue between East and West that would have "an extremely liberating effect. Just imagine the scene in the mosque: The reading takes place, some find what they hear to be not bad at all, and some even laugh. That would open a lot of doors."
Nick Owchar
Poor Anne Hathaway. William Shakespeare didn’t even mention her in his will, leading generations of scholars to deduce that his wife was, at best, insignificant to the great playwright’s life and work.
 Germaine Greer begs to differ. From the spelling of her name--Ann, not Anne--to Shakespeare’s treatment of love and marriage in his writings, the 68-year-old author of the ground-breaking "The Female Eunuch" argues persuasively in her forthcoming book that the farmer’s daughter from Stratford-upon-Avon was indeed a force.
Greer’s "Shakespeare’s Wife" will be published Sept. 3 in Britain by Bloomsbury and in spring 2008 in the United States by HarperCollins.
"Making use of exhaustive first-hand research and combining literary-historical techniques with extensive documentary evidence, Greer presents a contentious, yet convincingly argued set of hypotheses about the wife of William Shakespeare," Bloomsbury editor Digby Halsby writes.
"The much-wronged Ann Hathaway finds her rightful place in history, thanks to Germaine Greer’s fascinating reconstruction of her life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women," says Terry Karsten, executive editor and senior vice present for HarperCollins.
Kristina Lindgren
I’m not sure what FourStory really is — a website dedicated (in its own words) to “fact-based housing advocacy with a human perspective” or an online magazine. The site, which went live Sunday, features a manifesto and a few loose personal pieces about the vagaries of city living, but the real draw is the first installment of “The Underbelly,” a new serialized crime novella by Gary Phillips, author of the Ivan Monk mysteries (among other books) and a longtime activist in L.A.
“The Underbelly” is not political fiction per se — except in the sense that all of Phillips’ work is political, deeply rooted in his own sense of community — but it does encompass both downtown development and grass-roots advocacy, all filtered through the story of a Skid Row murder that reverberates in unexpected ways.
It’s not clear how often new installments will appear, but it’s worth checking out because Phillips is a true Los Angeles original, a local, born and raised, with a nuanced sense of the layers of the city, of how it works at the level of its neighborhoods. (Full disclosure: He has written, on occasion, for The Times and Book Review.)
His writing also offers a compelling example of the way fiction can touch on larger concerns. I don’t know what this means in terms of “gentrification, tenants’ rights and smart growth,” as FourStory frames it, but if “The Underbelly” has anything to tell us, it’s that Los Angeles remains a character in its own ongoing drama, a city (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler) “no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”
David L. Ulin
“The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II” (Picador: 528 pp., $16 paper) may not be out until the end of October, but here’s a little tidbit to whet our appetites. Among the conversations in this new collection is one from 1956 with William Faulkner, who begins by explaining why he hates to be interviewed — “I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” — before going on to talk at length about his own efforts and his sense of literary art.
The most difficult book for Faulkner to write, he tells interviewer Jean Stein, was “The Sound and the Fury,” which he had to compose “five separate times ... to rid myself of the dream which would continue to anguish me until I did.” Yet for all that, he asserts, the very issue of authorship may itself be moot.
“If I had not existed,” Faulkner says, “someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is ‘Hamlet’ and ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ — not who wrote them but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.”
David L. Ulin
"He wrote page after page under pressure from his publishers, who were always demanding more. Maquet sent him the material in bulk by post, and Dumas would complain about the delays. . . . For half a century he was the voice of Europe. Boats were sent over from the Americas for the sole purpose of bringing back consignments of his novels. They were read just as much in Cairo, Moscow, Istanbul, and Chandernagor as in France. . . . "
This passage about Alexander Dumas and his collaborator comes from Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s 1997 bestseller "The Club Dumas." I couldn’t help thinking about it--about anxious Parisian crowds devouring new installments of his work, of messengers on horseback waiting outside Dumas’ door--as I read Publishers Weekly staff writer Claire Kirch’s story on the secrecy surrounding the final Harry Potter novel.
Kirch describes how copies of the book have been wrapped in black cellophane and reports on the sounds of mysterious midnight trains moving through Crawfordsville, Ind.--where the book, her article reports, is being printed for U.S. distribution. Frustrating as the security is for members of the media (hey, we’re just trying to prepare some good advance material), it is exciting that a book can still stir the kind of frantic energy typical in Dumas’ day.
Nick Owchar
There’s nothing square about Wendy’s restaurants’ new promotion with their kids’ meals. According to Publishers Weekly, the fast-food chain is giving away one of four children’s audiobook CDs with every kids’ meal purchased.
The promotion, which ends later this month, features titles from Random House Audio’s Listening Library: "Arthur’s Mystery Envelope" by Marc Brown, "Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark" by Mary Pope Osborne, "Junie B. Jones Has a Monster Under Her Bed" by Barbara Park and "The Curse of the Cheese Pyramid" by Geronimo Stilton. Each audiobook also comes with puzzles and games.
Orli Low
Brits opening up the Guardian’s book pages today will find an interesting piece by John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, about the decline of American culture and the displacement of books by other forms of media.
Certainly not a new subject for an essay, of course, but this time the argument is framed in response to the enormous success of HBO’s "The Sopranos." The series, Freeman writes, has been praised in lavish terms once reserved for novels, and its creator, David Chase, has been called "the Dickens of our time." This troubles him. He writes that readers are being stolen by a medium that "does the imagining; our eyes need only follow." Too many things compete for the public’s attention, he argues (rightly), and the time required to revel in a novelist’s vision just doesn’t fit into most people’s calendars anymore. So it’s no wonder that the series captivated many people who once would have spent their evenings reading Philip Roth or Norman Mailer.
Even though much is familiar in these arguments, I don’t mind reading another lament over the state of American readership; in fact, I agree with Freeman (who has written for us on occasion) on several points: How often have I heard people say they just don’t have time to read books and, what’s more, don’t care? But "The Sopranos" is hardly in the same category as TV entertainment that creates easy images and does the thinking for mindless viewers. Freeman doesn’t exactly say that, but he blurs the distinctions. The widespread debate over the meaning of the show’s final scene, of course, won’t be resolved anytime soon (unless Chase has mercy on us all and one day explains what he had in mind). Throughout the series, there are elusive scenes that prompt a "What just happened?" response and an analytical effort--worthy of Harold Bloom--to figure it out. Freeman writes that "the screen is destroying the page"; I understand why he believes this, and I feel somewhat the same way--but then I remember all those dreadful three-decker novels that stole readership from the Victorian greats, who managed to survive nonetheless.
Freeman’s piece is wonderfully insightful on why "The Sopranos" appealed to so many of us. Check it out. His evaluation is one more indication that Chase has raised the bar on storytelling and reminded writers that they can’t take their audiences for granted.
Nick Owchar
 A paean to simple family rituals, Dan Yaccarino’s "Every Friday" (Henry Holt: $16.95, ages 3 to 8) lyrically recounts the pleasures of setting aside a little time to spend, one- on- one, with a child, and making it a family tradition. "Friday is my favorite day," begins this book, because this is the day the narrator and his father walk to the neighborhood diner for breakfast. "Everyone is rushing, but we’re taking our time," reads a page on which Yaccarino’s soft-toned illustrations show the contrast between the harried morning comm uters and the pair strolling along peacefully, the boy proudly imitating his father’s bearing.
The text is simple, observing the plainest details along the way that are beloved simply because they occur every week, rain or shine. It’s only a few blocks, but it takes a while to arrive at the diner, where they’re well- known. "Pancakes, right?" asks the waitress. "While we eat, Dad and I talk about all sorts of things," the boy says. What this book captures is the kind of intimacy that flourishes only when given a little breathing room--the kind of unrushable intimacy we could all make a bit more time for.
Sonja Bolle
Yes, C-SPAN2’s "Book TV" can be good viewing for readers who have consumed a couple of quarts of coffee. But who has the time on the weekends--and the stamina--for 48 hours of nonfiction programming? Thankfully, "Book TV" announced earlier this week the launch of a new and enhanced web site to help time-pinched viewers know what’s coming.
Nick Owchar
The Associated Press is reporting that Ron Goldman’s family has purchased the rights to "If I Did It," the book canceled by HarperCollins in which O.J. Simpson presented a hypothetical explanation of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The family is said to be interested in doing what Simpson failed to do--get the book published.
What the details in the early reports also suggest--indirectly--is something about the ongoing nature of grief, especially after a catastrophic loss. The family is said to be interested in changing the book’s title to "Confessions of a Double Murderer." The message behind this is dramatic, unmistakable. The Goldmans are also said to own just about everything else related to the book: "the copyright, media rights and movie rights...Simpson’s name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book," AP reported, citing court documents.
Nick Owchar
What’s the deal with Harvey Pekar? The former VA file clerk from Cleveland, who became an underground comics star with his long-running series "American Splendor," has made himself ubiquitous over the last year-and-a-half, publishing five (count ’em, five) full-length books and reviving "Splendor" with DC comics. (Yet another book, "Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History," is scheduled for publication in January 2008.)
To be fair, Pekar has been toiling in the trenches for more than 30 years, and it was only in the wake of the 2004 film of "American Splendor" that he achieved anything like real acclaim. Clearly, he has some catching up to do.
But while I'd be the last to begrudge him his moment, I can’t help thinking that he’s begun to dilute the brand. His most recent book, "Macedonia" (Villard: 170 pp., $17.95 paper)--a collaboration with Heather Roberson and artist Ed Piskor--reads like work for hire, the story of someone else (Roberson) filtered through Pekar’s sensibility, and similar problems plagued his last effort, "Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story," which also traced a life other than the author's own.
It's too bad, for Pekar is comics' great autobiographical chronicler, who more than anyone proved that mundane daily experience (going to work, buying a loaf of bread at a bakery) can be the stuff of transcendent art. Yet if the saga of his life continues to be compelling, the sheer glut of recent work makes me wish he would slow down.
David L. Ulin
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