The Christian Science Monitor to cease daily print publication

To reduce costs and focus on its widely read website, the 100 year-old Christian Science Monitor will cease publication of its daily newspaper in 2009, it announced today; a weekend edition will continue. It is the first major national paper to cancel daily print publication.

The paper was founded by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, after she was attacked in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Despite its name, the paper has a secular, not religious, focus (and a lovely books section). What's more, the bad blood between Eddy and Pulitzer has been forgotten; the Christian Science Monitor has won seven Pulitzer Prizes.

Current Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma says:

In the Monitor's next century, as with its first century, it is committed to finding answers to the world's most important problems, asking the questions that matter and getting the story behind the news -- all of which is staying true to Mrs. Eddy's unselfish, original vision. The Monitor's role is right there in its name. It's to monitor the world, to keep an eye on the world from a perspective of hope.

The paper's budget has been supplemented by the church, but it hopes to become self-sustaining in the future. One question: With its new online focus and diminished newsprint presence, can we call it a "paper" anymore?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image credit: preview of upcoming Christian Science Monitor website from CSmonitor.com

Oh Brady! Maureen McCormick on book tour

For two or three or more generations of American TV-watching kids, Maureen McCormick's Marcia Brady was the perfect blond girl we aspired to be (or to date). She was lithe and popular, somehow grew from adolescent to teenager without a moment of awkwardness, had the coolest halter tops and, until that one fateful football-tossing day, the perfect nose.

OK, her nose was always perfect. It was only broken in the TV-pretend world of The Brady Bunch, not the real world.

Despite her five years as a Brady, Maureen McCormick has always been a real human being, living in the real world. Others have trouble making that distinction, though; for a recent birthday, she recalls in her new memoir "Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My Own Voice," reporters asked how Marcia Brady felt about turning 50:

Politely, I reminded them that Marcia Brady was still a teenager, but I, Maureen, created not in Sherwood Schwartz's imagination but in the womb of Irene McCormick, felt OK about it.

In her book, she has revealed some personal, slightly scandalous details: drug use, visits to the Playboy mansion, a passionate kiss with Greg Barry Williams while filming the Brady's Hawaii episode. The confusion of the real and Brady worlds affected her, too -- during the kiss, "a part of me — a tiny part, admittedly — said to myself, 'Oh my God! I'm kissing my brother. What am I doing?'"

McCormick is currently on book tour; she's got two California dates coming up, including a visit to the Sherman Oaks Barnes & Noble, about a 40-minute drive from the North Hollywood Brady house.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A fan poses with Maureen McCormick at Book People in Austin. Credit: Farmerchris via Twitpic

Books news: scary stories, more Hillerman, another mystery departure

Scary stories, the short-short version: If you haven't been listening to "Weekend America," you've missed the short stories it has been broadcasting for Halloween. Pressed for time? Never fear -- the stories all under 30 seconds.

For a longer scary interlude, don't miss Salon's interview with Stephen King. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his book "The Stand," the online magazine talks to the author, who ruminates on the afterlife, saying that it's "whatever you think you're going to get."

I think of the brain as this great, big, crenelated library with many rooms, billions and billions of books, rooms without number, but at the very end of all those rooms, there's a little tiny box that says "pull lever in case of emergency,"  because that's the door out, and when you go out, you get pretty much what you expected, because some chemical in your brain is programmed to give you that particular dream at the very end. If you're expecting [H.P. Lovecraft's] Yogg Sothoth, there he'll be, along with the 900 blind fiddlers, or whatever it is.

Tony Hillerman died Sunday at the age of 83. In a 1988 story on his work in the L.A. Times, Charles Champlin wrote:

In Hillerman's beautifully constructed plots, the ancient beliefs sometimes seem to have a bearing on present dastardly events, and they certainly color the thought processes of his policemen. But in the end, the crimes are very much from time present, as real and ugly as corpses and never falling back on the mystical to explain the inexplicable.

Hillerman wasn't the only mystery writer to pass away this weekend. Elaine Flinn -- who wrote the Molly Doyle series, most recently, "Deadly Vintage" -- had cancer that had metastasized. Sarah Weinman remembers her.

Patricia Highsmith, whose suspenseful Ripley books have been reissued as a box set, died back in 1995; 13 years earlier, she had talked to British interviewer Melvyn Bragg about Tom Ripley -- the clip about Ripley's sexuality is after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of spooky Legos by Dirk Loop via Flickr

Small Beer's pro-Obama sale

As the election draws closer, supporters are making extra efforts to support their candidates, including one independent publisher. Small Beer Press, run by Gavin Grant and his wife, Kelly Link, author of "Magic for Beginners" and the new "Pretty Monsters," is donating 20% of this month's sales to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Grant talked to me about what it means for a publisher to take a political stand.

Jacket Copy: You're going to donate proceeds from Small Beer book sales to Barack Obama's campaign. Are you sure all your authors are Obama supporters? Does it matter to you if they are or not?

Gavin Grant: I don't know which way our authors lean. Given the options, I would hope they support Obama. (And, of course, our authors will receive their royalties off the sale of these books.)

But do HarperCollins authors care that HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch and funds his right-leaning newspapers? Most probably don't. I don't think our political leanings being known will negatively affect our sales -- unless Rush Limbaugh calls down a fatwa upon us, and then sales would shoot through the roof. (Come on Rush, you know you want to.)

JC: Many of your books deal with slightly alternate realities. Are there any that might pertain to this election campaign, or the administration currently in the White House?

Gavin Grant: Maybe Angelica Gorodischer's "Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was," which was published in the mid-1970s in Argentina. It has no direct fantastical content, rather it's akin to reading an alternate history of a country that doesn't exist. Because it was the '70s, the book is more a series of allegorical tales than a direct damning of the administration. Something like Nicholson Baker's Bush-assassination story couldn't have been published there then -- the author would have been disappeared.

After the jump: who cares how readers view Gavin Grant?

Tony Hillerman has died

Tony Hillerman, the 83-year-old mystery novelist who used the Southwest as a setting and whose two best-remembered characters were Navajo police officers, has died.

Hillerman won the 2004 Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. It was just one of his many honors, including Edgar and Grand Master Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Navajo Tribal Council's Special Friend of the Dineh award, and an Agatha Award for his 2001 memoir, "Seldom Disappointed."

Hillerman, who was not Native American, was brought up in rural Oklahoma and went, as a boy, to a Pottawatomie Indian school. In a 2002 interview, he told PBS: 

When I decided I wanted to be a novelist, I had been a newspaperman for years. I didn't know whether I could develop a plot; I didn't know if I could develop a character. I knew I could describe. I thought, I'll set it on a Navajo reservation so I'll have a good background. If they don't like the story, they can look at the state setting, you know? That's how I got started. The more I knew about [the Navajo], the better I liked them.

The following year, the magazine The Rake asked him what he'd like readers to take away from his work:

Above all I would like them to be aware that the cultures of the people I like to write about, the Navajos and Hopis and so forth, are extremely complicated and extremely interesting — and in the case of the Navajos especially, are extremely valuable. You can learn a heck of a lot from Hopi and Navajo ways of life. For example, the negative value they put on greed, of having more than you need. In their mythology, that's how you identify a witch, the ultimate of evil. They have more than one kind of what we call a witch, they don't use that word. And the fellow who's got money and stuff, and kinfolks who are hungry, it's an almost certain sign the guy's evil. We've sort of left that behind us. We think the homeless person is probably a crook, or dangerous.

Greed was a theme for him then, as he talked about his 16th novel featuring Navajo detectives Leaphorn and Chee, "The Sinister Pig."

I think it was Enron and all these major, important companies going bankrupt and screwing their employees out of their retirement and their perks and everything while the CEOs sail off to their summer homes in the Antibes or whatever. That inspired me to get rough on 'em. Apparently nobody else is.

Hillerman thought his 20 years as a journalist served him well.

...you really had to sort of take a vow of poverty to be a journalist in the old days. ... I really think working at a newspaper as a reporter has two huge advantages for writers. One, you're writing every day. You learn how to use the language, you learn how to get a paragraph to make sense if you're doing it every day. And also it puts you where the action is, where you're seeing the guy sitting in the defendant's box sweating out the jury. You're at the scene of the crime, you're at the scene of the train wreck, you're dealing with people that are under tension, and I just think you can get a whole head full of memories of people and things. I wonder sometimes how normal people come up with their good books.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: AP

A cross-country beer trek

To celebrate a kind of quiet, bookish Oktoberfest, I picked up "Red, White and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey" by Brian Yaeger. The author drove around the country to visit 14 breweries -- and to sample their wares, of course.

The book affably chronicles the histories of regional American beers, including Leinenkugel, Shiner Bock and Bell's. Yaeger begins, appropriately, with Pennsylvania's Yuengling, the nation's oldest operating brewery. In the late 1800s, when Yuengling was getting started, local breweries were common: 4,100 breweries were in operation (more than exist today, even counting tiny brewpubs).

Instead of tracing how the business of beermaking has changed -- with the emergence of Anheuser-Busch, the devastation of prohibition, the later evolution of microbrews -- Yaeger gets small slices of the big picture as he talks to the current owners and managers. He draws the histories of the family businesses behind the beer, each with their own ups and downs. Only Dixie was affected by Hurricane Katrina; only New Belgium Brewing, the makers of Fat Tire, have set a world record for biggest bike parade.

Over and over, he asks what the future might be. Will these family businesses stay family businesses? Will they become more corporatized?

This calls to mind Steve Almond's "Candyfreak," in which he traveled around America to get a taste of local candy bars, even as candymakers struggled in a hostile business climate. But it's not quite "Candyfreak" -- why, after the jump.

Animal Talk: I can haz bestseller

People get batty when it comes to their pets. So all you writers struggling to find a publisher -- take note. A bunch of precocious pets are clawing their way to the top of the Los Angeles Times bestseller list.

"Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World," is a true story about a ginger colored kitty shoved into the after-hours book-return slot in an Iowa library. Adopted and nicknamed DeweyReadmore Books by the librarian, the friendly feline won over and changed the lives of the library patrons.

"I Can Has Cheezburger? A LOLcat Colleckshun," by Professor Happycat (that is not a typo) enters our paperback bestseller list at number six this week.

"I Can Has Cheezburger?" is a collection of more than 200 pictures of cats in compromising positions frequently dressed in drag, selected from the website of the same name. YouTube has finally infected the literary world.

This isn't the first time pets have landed on the bestseller list. In 1990, the first President Bush's springer spaniel Millie authored a book ("as dictated to Barbara Bush") called "Millie's Book." This dog's-eye view of life in the White House spent 23 weeks on Publisher's Weekly bestseller list.

In addition to Dewey and friends, there is "Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl," and a dog named Marley. Actually, "Marley & Me," a story of how an incorrigible Labrador retriever won over his family after flunking obedience school, has been on our bestseller list for months. With the movie coming out in December, the book should stay on the list for quite some time. 

-- Liesl Bradner

Radar shuts down and more magazine news

Yesterday Radar Magazine shut its doors. it's the third time the magazine has closed, but this time it looks it's really out of luck -- although the website will continue with a new owner, a new editor, and a mandate, according to a source at the New York Observer, to "become a competitor to TMZ." The closure stranded Ana Marie Cox on the McCain campaign trail, compelling her to ask for funding to keep covering the candidate, and left editor-at-large Choire Sicha with nothing to do but take photos of his ex-boss Alex Balk carting his belongings down the street.

The announcement came one day after the New Business Models for News conference, held at CUNY's journalism school. Writing about it for the Online Journalism Review, David Westphal says the conference reminded him of the adage "There is no solution. Seek it lovingly," adding, "There probably won't be A solution. There will be solutions." Like Cox taking $10 a pop over PayPal to cover her $1000/day travel expenses?

Sigh. Maybe one of the solutions is making pretty multimedia presentations. New York Magazine did that this week with a slideshow of a reading by writers Robert Christgau, Rob Sheffield, Chuck Klosterman, Dan Kennedy and Marc Spitz. The rock writers gathered to support the launch of a new website, Stories in High Fidelity, which "will be a place for bands, record stores, labels and writers to share their personal memories and opinions, tour diaries, album or live reviews, favorite bands or records and so much more." A new storytelling-oriented website -- that's good news, right?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by LoopZilla via Flickr

The ick frontier: 'Wetlands' and 'Crust'

The Complete Review gets the jump on "Wetlands" by Charlotte Roche -- the German blockbuster, which was Amazon's worldwide bestseller in March, won't be out in the U.S. until next spring. "Wetlands" -- which has also been translated as "moist patches" and "damp parts" -- is, among other things, awash in bodily fluids. From the review:

The story proper begins with the eighteen-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, noting that, for as long as she can remember, she has had hemorrhoids. Then she describes what that involves. And it's pretty much all downhill from there.

Hygiene is not a top priority for Helen. She could be described as an anti-hygienist; more to the point, she likes to describe her anti-hygienic way of life. She positively wallows in the muck -- preferably her own muck, as she revels in her various bodily excretions: among other things, she describes herself as a Körperausscheidungsrecyclerin ('bodily-secretion-recycler'), happily gnawing on her scabs, consuming her pus and snot, and worse. Much worse. Much, much worse.

Inside of all this goo, the review makes clear, is a tender, cheerfully-voiced story of Helen's disconnection from her broken family. But I don't know if I could make it through gross-out scenes like the one in which Helen uses food-encrusted barbecue tongs to fish out a lost tampon and then returns the tongs, unwashed, to their place. This is some serious, cringe-inducing yuck.   

And maybe that's the point. Could it be that familiar literary tropes -- sex, murder, betrayal, booze, isolation, love, war, warlocks, aliens -- have become too worn at the edges? Is it that, as Jane's Addiction posited, nothing's shocking? To evoke a visceral reaction, or the hyper-awareness that comes with surprise, must an author go beyond what they've found on the page? Is ick the last literary frontier?

Maybe there were icky books before now. But I do know that this question made me think of the new, well-wrought satire "Crust." Author Lawrence Shainberg writes of a man who changes culture by picking his nose. In our Oct. 12 review, Tod Goldberg wrote:

Soon, he has his wife Sara picking too, and her revelation is both sickening (she vomits from the intensity of the experience) and arousing, as she finds herself revisiting her nose with a more private result. And of course the need to explain his experience -- known afterward as Nasalism -- and to give voice to the consciousness he calls "the Founder" that now exists in him cause Linchak to start blogging about it all.

No matter how well the book lampoons New Age movements, I'm still grossed out by the title and the premise. Nosepicking as a central metaphor sounds ridiculous and amusing -- but it also makes me go "ewww."

My reaction to these books -- from what I know of them -- may signal my dull sense of humor, my uptight New England upbringing, or, quite possibly, both. What do you think: Is going grody the new edgy? Or is it just gross?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by pr1001 via Flickr

The wicked and the holy

The Witches, Demons and Thieves Puritan (and literary) Halloween party in New York last night featured Maud Newton, Kathleen Kent ("The Good Daughter") and Hannah Tinti. Tinti, who is the editor of One Story magazine, has recently published her first novel, "The Good Thief," and is giving interviews all around. The bewitching evening included a quiz, which Maud is sharing online. Sample question:

Strings of deaths in families led to the belief, in 19th Century New England, that one of the dead had transformed into a vampire and was returning at night to feast on everyone else. In the most famous of these cases, when Mercy Brown’s brother became ill soon after her death, their father ordered the girl dug up. Finding her oddly well-preserved, and her heart full of fresh blood, he cut out her heart, burned it, and fed the ashes to the boy, who died anyway. What very contagious disease do scientists say was actually killing these people?

No need to turn to the Dark Lord for the answer -- it's multiple choice.

Here in LA, I was sad to miss* Marilynne Robinson and Michael Silverblatt at the Central Library. Robinson's new book, "Home" -- the second with an Iowa reverend as an important character -- has been nominated for the National Book Award in fiction. Mark Sarvas was there, shot a bit of video, and jotted down some of what Robinson said, including:

There's nothing in the world I admire more than a good sermon.

I'd say most people find sermons tedious, but the understanding that Robinson admires them -- that she likes the idea of faith coupled with moral instruction, told in the form of a story -- may help me frame my reading of "Home," which I just picked up yesterday. Perhaps coincidentally, faith and morality was a running theme at Sarvas' blog The Elegant Variation this week. He also interviewed Rob Riemen, author of "Nobility of Spirit." When prompted to ask himself a question and answer it, Riemen responded: "Can faith move mountains? Yes, but always step by step." 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

* I was at an Online News Association meeting -- duly twittering.

Photo by Oneras [free Tibet] via Flickr