Novels in search of authors

The arrival of the movie "The Other Boleyn Girl" in theaters today (Kenneth Turan reviewed it for the Times) reminded me of something Philippa Gregory, author of the novel, said about the source of the idea for the book when she was touring through Southern California about a year ago.

As she was researching another novel, she came across the name of a ship, named for Mary Boleyn, and was startled. Another Boleyn? What happened to her? "Imagine if I had entrusted this work to a researcher," she said. "Imagine what I might have lost!"

Just imagine. It’s true what some authors say: Novels find them, not the other way around.

It was the same for Nicholas Delbanco, whom I talked to this week during an L.A. visit. His next novel, coming in May from Dalkey Archive, is about Count Rumford.

Never heard of him? He was an inventor and visionary of the same level--and the same time--as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. But the reason few know him in America though they enjoy the results of his ideas (such as the drip coffeepot and many other domestic conveniences), Delbanco explained, is because the former Benjamin Thompson, a native of Massachusetts, sided with the British in the Revolution. Rumford fled America to Europe where his inventions and theories were celebrated.

Delbanco wouldn’t have known him either if he hadn’t stumbled across his work back in 1969. He purchased an upstate New York house with a fireplace that smoked miserably and provided little heat. Then, someone saw the fireplace and gasped, "You have a Rumford fireplace!"

"A what?" Delbanco said. He cared less about its creator than about heating his home.

Eventually the fireplace worked splendidly--the wood had to be stacked differently than in traditional fireplaces--and the shallowness of the design caused heat to radiate sevenfold back into the house. That experience, and several other unexpected encounters with Rumford’s name and accomplishments over the years, eventually led to his writing the forthcoming "The Count of Concord." The novel seemed to insist on being told. If it weren’t for chance encounters, just imagine, as Philippa Gregory might say, what some writers would miss.

Nick Owchar

Why we do it in New York

Last night, at a ceremony at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in Manhattan, the finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced. Before I was hired on at The Times, I believed this event should be re-invented; why was a Los Angeles newspaper announcing its book prize finalists in New York? It seemed like a blatant case of provincialism. Over the last few years, though, I’ve come to see this as a matter not of provincialism but of necessity--or perhaps it’s just reflective of the provincialism of the publishing industry.

After all, despite significant growth in regional imprints, American publishing remains rooted in New York City, much as the movie business is in Hollywood. In fact, I’ve always found significant similarities between the two industries--their clubbiness, their small-town love of gossip--with the exception that in Hollywood, there’s real money to be made. Certainly, that was one of the hot topics at last night’s reception: the financial instability of the writing world, which seems to cut across the grain from publishing to journalism. Four experienced editors were recently laid off as a result of the Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin merger, and with Publishers Weekly up for sale and 120 job cuts announced yesterday at Newsday, the landscape seems very insecure indeed.

For The Times, then, throwing a book party in New York offers a way of connecting with the industry, of presenting ourselves to a roomful of editors, writers, publishers and journalists all in one place. It’s also a way of celebrating books and book culture--which is, by its nature, national or international in scope. The Times’ Book Prizes are not limited to authors in the U.S. but are open to everyone; this year’s finalists include Per Petterson and John Banville (oops, sorry ... Benjamin Black).

As to why this is important, well ... like any small, insular industry, publishing can have a very narrow vision; it can be difficult to see outside the fishbowl of New York. You can bemoan this, or you can deal with it, but either way, that’s how it is. If the mountain won’t come to you, in other words, you have to go tell it on the mountain, which is why we announce the Book Prize nominations in New York.

David L. Ulin

Gone, but not forgotten

Andrew Malcolm remembers William F. Buckley (and that's some memory).

TC Boyle remembers Dutton's Brentwood (and that's some mid-90s style in the photo).

The Guardian remembers literary activist Ronald Segal, who founded the Penguin African Library, and Robin Moore, whose book The Green Berets spawned the John Wayne movie and a not-at-all-peace-and-love 1966 pop song.

The great alt-country music chronicler No Depression Magazine will pass into memory, come spring.

Who remembers a 1947 Robert Frost conversation with Dartmouth students? Transcripts of the long-forgotten lecture and Q&A will be published by Literary Imagination.

Carolyn Kellogg

Things come together

"Things fall apart, things come together," Colum McCann said Tuesday night from the stage at New York’s Town Hall, not quite halfway through the PEN American Center tribute to Chinua Achebe and the 50th anniversary of his revolutionary novel, "Things Fall Apart." When Achebe’s first novel was published in 1958, African literature was nonexistent territory; by looking at the effects of colonialism on tribal culture, he literally dreamed an entire genre into being.

McCann was just one of a number of writers who came to Town Hall to pay homage to the work. Chris Abani--like Achebe, a Nigerian--opened his remarks by speaking in Ibo before switching to what he called "the more primitive language" of English. Abani recalled that, as a boy, his brother hand-copied "Things Fall Apart" into a notebook to impress a girlfriend with the novel; it was the first time, Abani said, that he ever understood the aphrodisiac power of the written word.

The tribute’s most affecting moments were almost entirely personal: Edwidge Danticat noted that Achebe was the first writer she’d ever came across with a name as strange as hers; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked about growing up in Nigeria and identifying with the white boys and girls in her English children’s books, as if it were inconceivable that her own stories could ever exist on the written page.

This is one of the key legacies of "Things Fall Apart," that it offered permission to a half-century’s worth of writers, declaring forcefully and without apology, that literature could encompass any and all stories, that everyone should have a stake. Fifty years later, it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that without Achebe’s novel, we would be a literary culture with fewer voices, less engagement, less of a sense of how wide a world that writers can (and ought to) engage.

The Asterix and Obelix of literary magazines

By which I don't mean one is smart and one is dumb, but rather one is little and the other is big. I'm talking about One Story and Ninth Letter, two topnotch literary journals that inhabit opposite ends of the form-and-function spectrum.

Let's start with One Story, the little one. Every issue is, quite simply, one story. At 5 by 7 inches, as many pages as it takes to finish the story, each issue fits in a jacket or jeans pocket, or even a little purse. They're terribly efficient: text only, stapled, the back page for an author bio and inside back cover for credits. One Story arrives about every three weeks, and features both debut authors and big cheeses; the current issue is by Ron Carlson, author of nine books of fiction and director of the grad fiction program at Irvine.

For me, One Story is brilliant for three reasons. The first, as the editors proclaim, is that "everyone has time to read one story." Maybe that time is while standing in line at the post office, or grabbing a quick lunch -- which leads me to the second reason -- it's so portable. Other magazines are portableish - they don't fit in pockets, they get crumpled in big bags, they have weird inserts that make them fold funny. One Story is grab-and-go. So you can bring it with you and, when caught waiting someplace, pull it out and use that time to read a story. The third thing about this little genius is that it's also -- and I feel bad saying this -- disposable. It's easy to leave. Read the story, hand it off. For the next person who grabs that seat at the lunch table, or to the friends whose couch you crashed on (yes, I do this regularly, in case you offer me a couch). When you're done, you're done -- which means that the writing actually has the potential to circulate more than if it were in a big shiny package.

Not that there's anything wrong with big shiny packages. Ninth Letter is very big and very shiny and very literary, too. Put out by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a joint project of the English department and School of Art and Design, Ninth Letter is different not just issue to issue, but page to page. It's 9x12 inches, full bleed, so the images on each page stretch to the edge of the paper, without margins, and this issue clocks in at more than 200 pages. I haven't seen anything this wildly, perfectly beautiful since the dear departed Nest (a home design magazine that went beyond shelter porn to the heart of mad inspired design). By "perfectly" I  don't mean it's without flaw so much, as the design perfectly fits/completments/informs its fiction/poetry/nonfiction content.

In the latest issue, a story by Dan Chaon features a 20-something narrator who's slowly coming apart instead of fixing up the house his parents owned; the pages' backgrounds are big blurry photos, tinged with institutional green, of broken lightplates and bathroom corners creeping with decay. There is a pull-out nonfiction piece by Matt Roberts called "Pre-Vasectomy Instruction No. 7," which, quite frankly, I'm afraid to detach and unfold, for fear of what I might find. And remarkably, a minimally-illustrated piece by William Gaddis -- yes, that William Gaddis -- written in 1947, never before published.

The differences between Ninth Letter and One Story are all the more interesting when you learn that both are less than five years old. Launched in the face of publishing industry pessimism, both magazines seem to have taken their own genius to an extreme that works. Ninth Letter comes twice a year, One Story, 14 times or more, and a subscription to either one runs about $20.   

Carolyn Kellogg

When bookstores die

  For Dutton’s Brentwood:

" ‘Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.... "
" ‘This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands.’ "
                       (from "The Shadow of the Wind: A Novel" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon)

The guardians will be busy after April 30. Best of luck to Doug and his crew.

Nick Owchar

The end of the book world as we know it. Have a cuppa.

Stay away from tea, because it’s easy to read the end of literature in the tea leaves if you try. The NEA is in the habit of releasing reports about the demise of reading. In Los Angeles, the venerable bookstore Dutton’s Brentwood announced yesterday that it’s closing its doors (also here, here, here and here), without plans to relocate or reopen.

But if you stick to coffee, you might just think books are doing OK. Starting today, you’ll find "Beautiful Boy" by David Sheff for sale in more than 7,000 Starbucks nationwide. It’s the fourth book offered by the coffee giant, which seems to have figured out a winning formula. Two of the earlier books –- Mitch Albom’s "For One More Day" and “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah -- sold more than 100,000 copies in the chain’s shops. That alone is a respectable sales number, from what I hear, and of course the books continue to sell in more traditional venues, like bookstores (as long as they stay open). Who knows what Sheff’s book –- which is about addiction -– will do with the compulsively-caffeinated crowd lining up for their lattes.

If you want to hear more of David Sheff, he’s on Leonard Lopate’s radio show tomorrow –- Lopate is on WNYC, but you can catch him on the internet live at 9am Pacific -– right about the time you get to your desk with your coffee – or tea -- in hand.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo by Michael via Flickr

Diablo, JT and Pinky, oh my

Diablo Cody, who won the Oscar for best original screenplay last night for "Juno," is fast becoming the Dita Von Teese  of screenwriters: She’s a sexy, photogenic bad girl (in a smart-hot kind of way). She’s got a knack for fame, and she’s blogging her swift ascent.

One of the coolest things about getting O-nommed is the nominee luncheon, where everyone gets together to schmooze, pose for a "class photo" and receive honorary certificates suitable for framing. (We also got Oscar logo hoodies -- no joke! I'll be sporting that thing unnecessarily for years to come. "Hmm, it's a little crisp outside -- BETTER PUT ON MY OSCAR NOMINEE HOODIE.")

Swaddled inside that hoodie, and inside Diablo Cody, is a woman who was once Brook Busey-Hunt. When she quit her day job –- to become a stripper, then memoirist, now screenwriter –- she shed Brook for Diablo. Her previous blog had a dirty, dirty title, and I guess it’s obvious that Brook doesn’t have Diablo’s sassy flair.

Pen names have a long history, which I don’t know nearly as much about as I should. I do know that George Eliot ("Middlemarch") was actually Mary Ann Evans, publishing under a masculine pseudonym. Mary Ann thought George’s work would be taken more seriously than hers; Brook might not be able to say everything Diablo can. Crafting a writerly persona seems perfectly acceptable.

Unless you take that persona too far, a la Laura Albert. The woman behind JT LeRoy is featured in a long article in the latest LA Weekly. JT LeRoy, an abused teen with drug and gender issues, was a total fabrication. Laura Albert went beyond writing books in his name; she tried to prove he existed, maintaining phone friendships as JT with literary luminaries (Mary Gaitskill) and having a friend pose as JT at public events. Perhaps inevitably, she also blogged as JT, even continuing to post after the story of the hoax broke in New York Magazine. Albert, now 42 and unrepentant, comes across, in Nancy Rommelman’s LA Weekly piece, as a manipulative liar with an unbecoming hunger for fame.

Yet despite all her transgressions, Albert did write the JT LeRoy books. Is it fair to judge the writing differently knowing she was a privileged adult, not a troubled teen? If we can set aside the extraordinary, unwise, perhaps unhealthy lengths to which Albert went to create the character of JT (and I’m not sure we can), is she really doing anything that different from what George Eliot, or Diablo Cody, did? Isn’t inventing characters and inhabiting them what writers do when they write?

Which brings me to me. I have a blog called Pinky’s Paperhaus. But I am Carolyn Kellogg, a name blessed with alliteration, if little else. A few years ago I needed a persona for my Internet radio show about music and books; the show was on a prickly political station about which my then-employer would not have been pleased. Enter Pinky –- and later, exit Internet radio for blogland. Does that make me Pinky? Yes, although I don’t always know what that means. Like anyone else with a persona, sometimes the boundaries of self and construction get a little unclear. I’m Pinky, and I’m also Carolyn. Here, I will do my best to bring the two together. Hello.

Carolyn Kellogg

Introducing Carolyn Kellogg

Editors’ Note: The blogosphere is such a large landscape, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review is proud to announce Carolyn Kellogg’s arrival to help us navigate this terrain. Carolyn has been a frequent contributor to our pages (check out her recent review of Sarah Boxer’s "Ultimate Blogs") and she’s, well, just so darn smart about these things. In the weeks to come, Carolyn and the staff will be working together to bring you the best, up-to-date coverage of all things literary on Jacket Copy. In fact, look for her first contribution this afternoon, a provocative post about Oscar winner Diablo Cody, as well as Laura Albert and so much more. Here's a bit more information about her, in her own words:

Born in Florida and raised in Rhode Island, Carolyn Kellogg moved to Los Angeles to study at USC, which she did, with some success, between bouts of dropping out. She’s easily distracted by loud music and spicy food and even politics: In 1992, she went to the Democratic convention as a member of Jerry Brown’s staff. Proprietor of the book blog www.pinkyspaperhaus.com and former editor of LAist.com, she’s been writing and producing Web content since 1996. Currently, she is teaching and pursuing a master’s in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her first literary obsession, at age 6, was the Nancy Drew mystery series; she prefers the blue covers with the silhouette endpapers.

The peril -- or wisdom? -- of reading too much: 5 Signs

Weds. a.m.:
Is there such a thing as reading too much? Sounds like heresy. What with all the studies that show Americans are reading less, reading while watching TV or reading only for work. "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," the National Endowment for the Arts study released in November, revealed that as a nation we are reading less and less for pleasure: one half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure, a number that correlates with less participation in civic and cultural life, lower pay and fewer chances for advancement at work. Yeah, well, reading too much also has its perils.

Here are some of the downsides of reading too much:

Disorientation: The mood and landscape of the book you are reading is dark and obscure but you actually live in sunny Southern California.

Amplification: The heightened sense of urgency you feel reading the novel is incompatible with daily life.

Social Interaction: The colleagues you don’t know in the elevator are not ready for the kind of intimate conversation that takes place in the novel you are reading.

Dissatisfaction: The people in your life are not as thrilling, fascinating, emotionally evolved, intelligent, sincere or well-read as the characters in the novel. Your own life seems gray, wooden and boring by comparison.

Severe Loneliness: No one you know has read the novel you just finished, so there is no one to talk to about it, which heightens your sense of alienation and isolation.

Sounds like a recipe for psychosis to me.

Susan Salter Reynolds

Samuel Pepys, blogger

Imagine my surprise Friday when, rummaging in the bins where new books arrive at our department, I found among the glossy covers of new mysteries and elegant art histories a book from 1895.

It was a personal package sent to me by a friend who spends a large part of his time haunting used bookstores. The book, "The Travels and Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson," has a shabby, red-knit cover: Of course it's shabby, though--it has traveled through a century. And yet, the book feels like less of a time capsule than you might assume.

Of course the language and circumstances are different from our own time, but the issue in all of these pieces--on Victor Hugo, on Francois Villon, on Thoreau and Walt Whitman and many others--is the cause of good writing, a concern that never goes out of style. Here, for instance, are RLS’ thoughts, which anticipate some issues about writing and the web, on Samuel Pepys’ ability to change his voice and moods:

"We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation.... There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and these  changes are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to others and a fool for oneself into the bargain....

"It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys ... must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day...."

The curious life of books

Tuesday, a.m.

At night the books on my desk rearrange themselves in different piles. Say, for example, I put the pile of 11 books on global warming all together. Next to a pile of books on the art of the memoir. Next to a pile of three upcoming novels about life in the West. They won’t have it. The grouping is too simple, too unsophisticated. In the morning, one of the books on global warming with a fiery cover has sidled over to a book of poems, "Empire Burlesque" by Mark Svenvold (many of the poems about the end of the world), both cozied up to a memoir about being single in L.A., adding up to a noir, Steve Erickson-style essay on the apocalypse that will never get written.

"The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao" by Charles N. Li lies deep in conversation with "Beijing Coma" by Ma Jin, an "allegory of rising China" shouts the flap copy; "a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests," out this spring. The frat boy at this table (if my desk has become a warm yellow-lighted room in a bar in a cold college town) is a funny book called "Going Dutch in Beijing" by Mark McCrum, with drawings of familiar gestures that mean one thing in Peoria and another in Shanghai. "Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation" by Antonia Finnane with its rich drawings of 1920s evening wraps keeps a polite distance from the riffraff.

What could they be discussing?

A book of black-and-white photographs of Frederick Law Olmsted landscapes by Lee Friedlander has a linen cover and a photo of dappled light on a warm lawn. A photo on the cover of a book I reviewed several weeks ago, "Hope’s Boy" by Andrew Bridge, is a dim reminder of the young man I interviewed just a few days ago, whose book (his first) is now climbing the New York Times’ best seller list (sixth on its way to fifth). "You won’t believe it!" he e-mails me. "I’m pinching myself!"

Dead poet’s society

Saturday afternoon, I took my 9-year-old daughter, Sophie, to the 41st annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Century City. This three-day festival is like a prom for book nerds: Rare book dealers set up booths with first editions, prints, manuscripts and other ephemera, and people like me walk through to ooh and ah.

Sophie lasted about an hour at the book fair, which was pretty good, I thought. Her favorite item was a first issue copy of the British edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone," the novel that launched a revolution. Initially, the book dealer told us, no one thought the Potter franchise had much potential, so the original printing had been only 500 copies, 300 of which had gone to libraries. The asking price for this rarity? $55,000.

And what did I lust after? First a $10,000 copy of Raymond Carver’s rare first book, the poetry chapbook "Near Klamath," which, until Saturday, I had never seen. Then, a notebook that Oscar Wilde had kept while in college, and, perhaps most remarkably, a first edition of Shakespeare’s "Much Adoe About Nothing"--note that Elizabethan spelling--dating from 1600.

There were also countless 20th century first editions: the novels of Faulkner and Fitzgerald, DeLillo and Pynchon, a work of history in which John F. Kennedy scrawled his signature while a student, noteworthy for who had once owned it rather than what it was. This is what’s fascinating about antiquarian books, the odd provenance of these materials, the idea that they have passed through countless hands, survived upheaval and now come to us less as literary artifacts than as the physical remnants of some long-gone and inaccessible past.

Late in the afternoon, Sophie and I would end up in the book arts section of the fair, where fine arts publishers displayed editions of their work. We spent a while checking out the Scripps College Press, which since 1986 has published collaborative books by Scripps students. These books open up like accordions or feature three-dimensional constructions--in one, a bed pops out from the page.

We also tried a working letterpress, set up by the International Printing Museum in Carson. As I watched, Sophie rolled the ink and worked the levers to print out a bit of telling commentary from Charles Dickens:

"The printer is the friend of intelligence, of thought; he is the friend of liberty and freedom in law; in truth, the printer is the friend of every man who is the friend of order, the real friend of every man who can read."

David L. Ulin

Polk award is bittersweet for "Blackwater" author

Winning the prestigious George Polk award is bittersweet vindication for investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. His book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," was ignored by most major news organizations (including this one) when it was released in February 2007.

Readers found it though, putting Scahill on the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists long before Blackwater Worldwide security forces killed 17 and wounded 24 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad thoroughfare last September. And with debate dragging on over whether Blackwater and other security firms (which operate in numbers rivaling actual U.S. military forces in Iraq) should remain immune from prosecution, still more attention to Scahill's book is likely to follow.

  "It took 17 innocent Iraqi civilians being gunned down in the streets of Baghdad for [Blackwater] to become a page one story," Scahill wrote in an e-mail. "If, in any way, winning this award means that efforts to hold Blackwater and other mercenary forces accountable for their killings and other crimes will intensify, that would mean infinitely more to me than any accolades for the book."

A Success Story That’s Academic

Yale University Press celebrates its 100th birthday this year, flush with the knowledge that its sales revenue for the last fiscal year totaled $30.7 million, making it the largest "books only"” university press in the United States, meaning that none of its income comes from the sale of scholarly journals. Of 88 academic presses in the country, Yale is one of the few that does not require an annual subsidy from its parent institution to stay afloat.

Over its first 100 years, the Press has published more than 8,000 books, most of them scholarly monographs in a wide variety of disciplines. The formula for financial stability? A savvy strategy that seeks out titles that will appeal to the general trade in numbers sufficient to support its more esoteric lists. Recent releases that sold more than 100,000 copies each include Edmund Morgan’s "Benjamin Franklin" (2002), Gore Vidal’s "Inventing a Nation" (2003) and E.H. Gombrich’s "A Little History of the World" (2005).

As heady as these numbers may be, they are dwarfed by two other Yale releases from the last half-century--Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" (1956) and David Riesman’s "The Lonely Crowd" (1950), a path-breaking sociological study that introduced such terms as "inner directed" and "other directed" to daily discourse--which have to date sold more than 1.5 million copies each.

Though not the first American university press--Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, holds that distinction--Yale’s history has been lively and eventful. Among its many ongoing projects is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, an annual competition inaugurated in 1919 that has introduced the work of James Agee, John Ashbery, Paul Engle, Carolyn Forché, Robert Haas, John Hollander, W.S. Merwin, Ted Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, James Tate and Margaret Walker, among others.

To mark its centennial, the press recently established the Yale Drama Series--a companion competition that will support the work of emerging playwrights with publication of the winning plays, staged readings by the Yale Repertory Theatre, and $10,000 cash awards--and launched a World Republic of Letters Series that will translate important works of literature in foreign languages and publish them in English editions. Both projects have been underwritten by seven-figure private endowments.

"The great ambition of the Republic of Letters Series is to help reverse the trend against literary translations, a kind of virtual censorship that further insulates our culture," John Donatich, director of the press, said. "It also gives Yale University Press another way to contribute something tangible to a world culture."

Nicholas A. Basbanes

Nicholas A. Basbanes’ forthcoming history of Yale University Press, “A World of Letters,” will be published in September; he will be a panelist this April at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Spoiler alert: “The Spiderwick Chronicles”

Warning: This posting discusses the ending of both the "Spiderwick" book series and the movie. If you’re planning on seeing the movie, read this post and don’t bother. If you’re planning on reading the series with your kids, read this post anyways and don’t worry—there are many more surprises to this series than  the one discussed here.

(For an excellent review of the movie, see the piece by Times staff writer Carina Chocano.)

“Based upon” is a nebulous term. So nebulous that I can imagine Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, creators of “The Spiderwick Chronicles” series for young readers, must be troubled — at least a little — by what moviemakers have done to their 5-book series.

I’m talking mainly about the ending, which isn’t allowed to unfold as it does in the books. Somebody must have decided that Black and DiTerlizzi’s original climax wasn’t good enough for celluloid. So a dark, violent twist has been added that, while it may impress the adults and high schoolers in the audience, is a cruel swipe at the 9-12 age group for whom the series was meant.

“Spiderwick” gives young readers a wonderful introduction into a corner of lore and mythology. The books follow the wanderings of Mallory Grace and her twin brothers Jared and Simon around their great-great uncle’s abandoned estate. Children need to dream, they need to be nudged to turn off the video games and hunt for treasures outside in the tall grass. The series does this. It possesses imaginatively rich material: There’s a magical book about the fairy world, a mystery surrounding the uncle’s strange disappearance long ago, and stones with holes that — when worn like eyeglasses — allow you to see creatures in the woods, including an ogre who wants the magical book so that he can rule over all the creatures. All of this is conveyed in a narrative that moves nimbly, is at times funny and is handsomely complemented by DiTerlizzi’s lovely black and white etchings.

Now, to the ending.

In both cases — books and movie — the villainous ogre, named Mulgarath, is confronted by the children. And in both cases, the wily shapechanger tries to fool the children by taking the form of their father. It doesn’t work. In the books, Jared suspects that "Dad" is a phony and tells him so, causing the ogre to give up his ruse and resume his monstrous shape, tree-limbs and all. A showdown ensues in the ogre's shabby palace.

In the movie? Quite a different climax.

Some random links: Cellphone books, Michael Chabon and the Coen Brothers

Easy reading: I’m waiting for the bus; I’m waiting to pick up kids. I get a hankering to read a little something. DailyLit is an e-book service site that provides "chunks of books" in five-minute segments (most customers prefer 2-3 minute segments) on your crackberry, iphone or PDA via email or RSS feed. "Anna Karenina," "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and 798 other books are available on a pay-per-read basis. "Dracula," for example, comes in 187 installments. If you receive one a day, five days a week, it’ll take you 37 weeks to read it. DailyLit just signed a deal with Berlitz--the Spanish language course, for instance, has 90 installments. The course costs $6.95. Armchair, fireplace, slippers apparently not included.

Susan Reynolds

Next up for the Coen Brothers: How lucky Cormac McCarthy was to have this filmmaking team realize his story "No Country for Old Men" in celluloid. And how lucky Michael Chabon is going to be, when the brothers begin filming "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." That's what the Guardian is reporting today; the pair have decided to adapt and direct Chabon's story, which imagines a world where Jewish refugees find a homeland in Alaska, not the Middle East. The story's thriller aspect (Meyer Landsman, the main character, is a detective trying to solve a murder) no doubt also appealed to the brothers, who have delved into the noirish realms many times before.

Nick Owchar

Be careful what you wish for

On Tuesday, at the Willesden Herald, Zadie Smith announced that the British blog’s short story contest, which comes with a prize of £5,000 and which she judges, would not be given out this year. "Our sole criterion is quality," Smith pointed out. "We simply wanted to see some really great stories. And we received a whole bunch of stories. We dutifully read through hundreds of them. But in the end--we have to be honest--we could not find the greatness we’d hoped for."

Smith went on:

"Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature, they are really about brand consolidation--for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies even frozen food companies. The little Willesden Herald Prize is only about good writing, and it turns out that a prize faithfully recognizing this imperative must also face the fact that good writing is actually very rare. For let us be honest again: it is sometimes too easy, and too tempting, to blame everything that we hate in contemporary writing on the bookstores, on the corporate publishers, on incompetent editors and corrupt PR departments--and God knows, they all have their part to play. But we also have our part to play. We also have to work out how to write better and read better. We have to really scour this internet to find the writing we love, and then we have to be able to recognize its quality. We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention."

As is only to be expected, Smith’s announcement has stirred up something of a furor, especially on the Herald’s comments thread. "I wonder how many PUBLISHED stories Zadie Smith and the other judges would read to find one ‘great’ story?" one comment read. "Few writers achieve greatness without first passing through mediocrity, promise, proficiency ...." Another complained: "Zadie Smith seems to lecture and patronise ‘unpublished writers’ rather than encourage or support them."

Because the Herald had alerted 10 writers that they were on a "short- list," the blog’s editors decided on Tuesday to split the £5,000 among them, only to reverse themselves again yesterday. Still, if the Herald’s back-and-forthing on the money is a bit unfortunate, the decision not to award the prize is a breath of fresh air. Why give a prize if no story rises to the proper standards? Why celebrate "mediocrity, promise, proficiency"?

No, too many competitions already function as popularity contests, meant to make writers feel good about themselves regardless of the quality of their work. Smith and the editors of the Willesden Herald have made a difficult decision, but sometimes you have to do that in the name of integrity.

David L. Ulin

19-0?

As a New York sports fan, I loved watching the New England Patriots lose the Super Bowl (and their bid for a perfect season) to the Giants last night. Not only for the victory itself but also because it offered cosmic repercussions — a restoration of the universe’s essential order, a victory by New York over Boston, a reminder of the way things are supposed to be.

The Patriots' loss also represents its own brand of karmic comeuppance, a reminder not to count your 19th chicken before it's hatched. As late as this morning, after all, a book called "19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots" by the sports staff of the Boston Globe was burning up the charts at Amazon.com.   

Although the book has since been yanked, the Associated Press reports that it was first offered for pre-sale as early as Jan. 29, nearly a week before the Super Bowl. The irony is that, according to a post at America Online's Fan House, "The Patriots famously fired themselves up to beat the Eagles in [the 2005] Super Bowl by listening to [coach] Bill Belichick reading off the plans for the Eagles' post-Super Bowl parade route."

Hubris, anyone?

David L. Ulin

How the dead read

Lydia Millet’s new novel, “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint: 244 pp., $24), has been racking up its share of coverage, including here and here. But what’s gone largely unremarked is its membership in what we might call the Book of the Dead club — a small subcategory of volumes that seem to suggest the dead may not be so ... well ... dead.

In May, Serpent’s Tail will reissue Derek Raymond’s “How the Dead Live” (256 pp., $14.95 paper), a virulent bit of British noir with an introduction by Will Self. That’s only fitting because in 2001 Self stole the same title for a novel of his own, although at the time, he admits, he had not yet read Raymond’s book.

That’s not all: There’s also William Greenway’s “How the Dead Bury the Dead” (University of Akron Press: 94 pp., $25.95) and Katherine Bates’ “How the Dead Depart” (Kessinger: 48 pp., $15.95), as well as what may be the earliest of all these books, Judith Johnson Sherwin’s 1978 poetry collection “How the Dead Count” (Norton: 132 pp., $26.95).

Who knew the dead could be so active? Perhaps there’s more to dying — and to living — than we might at first suspect.

David L. Ulin

Where the writers are: The AWP conference

Attending the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference --which began Wednesday in New York--requires a somewhat manic balance between panels, the book fair and the scramble to get to the best parties.

   But there are also rare moments of transcendence. One happened in the Ding Dong Lounge (admittedly, not a promising name), an uptown dive that was host to a reading for Creative Nonfiction magazine. Among a slate of unremarkable readers, Sierra Bellows, an MFA student from the University of Virginia, shone like a gem. Leaning on the pool table to read from her laptop, she quieted the room with a story about her grandfather that had a kind honesty and a genuine clarity of language. It was a reminder that we’re here for the writing, after all.

And there are several thousands of us here for the first-ever, sold-out AWP conference. Usually a magnet for writing students, professors and authors with books to sell, this year’s gathering has become a literary happening in the center of the publishing industry, New York.

"It obviously makes a difference for AWP to be in New York City," says Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books and a conference veteran. "It gives everyone a bit of a lift."

It’s a strange electricity. Panels on how to teach creative writing are as filled-to-the-brim as those on how publishers select their books, while authors from the National Book Foundation’s stellar 5 Under 35 read to barely two dozen people. Poetry is big--Yusef Komunyakaa and Sharon Olds packed a ballroom with several hundred fans. There must have been more than a thousand people listening to Joyce Carol Oates when I popped in.

But what about the parties? This is the problem with New York--there are just too many of them. In Atlanta last year, authors--including Dan Chaon and Walter Mosley, both remarkably approachable-- hung out at the hotel bar, which was enough to make people stop and stay. Here, the conference has two hotels, each with multiple bars, and "offsite" events take place all over Manhattan and, of course, stretch into Brooklyn. What makes a good party? Is it who shows up, as Jonathan Lethem did at a quiet reception for Steve Erickson?

Or does it have to do with how many people are there, or how well they dance or hold their liquor?
Partly, it’s all of those things--and if there happens to be a moment of writerly transcendence, then you’re in the right place for sure.

Carolyn Kellogg

Carolyn Kellogg is an occasional contributor to Book Review and hosts the literary blog Pinky's Paperhaus.

What’s on your reading playlist?

If you spend much of your reading time, as I do, on public transportation, you may enjoy Molly Flatt’s piece at the Guardian online about what she listens to in order to drown out the sounds of all the cellphones and jabbering around her.

Of course, books should be read "accompanied by nothing but the sweet, Mozartian sound of my own blossoming enlightenment," Flatt says. But when you’re trying to read Nicola Barker or John Banville next to some guy yelling into a cellphone, "What do you want tonight?! Pizza?! Tacos?!," a pair of earphones blasting Beethoven’s Fifth is a thing devoutly to be wish’d.

Nick Owchar