Jerome Corsi, author of "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality" was briefly detained before leaving Kenya. The AP reports that he was "kicked out of" Kenya for failing to obtain a work permit.
Corsi planned to launch the book, which the nonpartisan group FactCheck.org describes as "a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods." Top of the Ticket goes into more detail, noting it is "a bestselling book whose assertions — that Obama was raised a Muslim and is secretly seething with 'black rage' — have been widely dismissed as false and based on little more than the author's desire to derail the Democrat's presidential candidacy."
This is not the first time Corsi has published a volatile book of questionable veracity aimed at a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2004, he was a coauthor of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."
Corsi's Kenya trip was also intended for research into Obama's background, according to an e-mail sent by his publisher to Kenyan journalists. The Kansas City Star reports:
An e-mail sent to Kenyan journalists before Tuesday's book launch said that Corsi would "expose details of deep secret ties" between Obama and certain Kenyan government officials as well as a "subsequent plot to be executed in Kenya" if Obama is elected president.
Kenyan newspaper The Standard called Corsi "the author of a smear crusade," adding, "A statement inviting the Press to the launch today makes no secret of the intention to hurl dirt at Obama and undermine his campaign from his ancestral home."
Could Corsi have another book in the works before November? Or is he assuming that he'll need to attack Barack Obama again in 2012?
Jen Lancaster's third book, "Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer" hit the NY Times and USA Today bestseller lists this summer. She writes sassy, funny memoirs -- she's also the author of "Bitter Is the New Black" and "Bright Lights, Big Ass." Lancaster, who lives in Chicago, wrote to tell Jacket Copy that she supports John McCain and that she's "a staunch Rush Limbaugh-listening, Ann Coulter-reading, Sean Hannity-watching, National Review-loving Republican," whose "one regret is that I was never old enough to cast my own vote for the Gipper." So I wanted to know more.
Jacket Copy: Many of the authors who have come out for Obama write fiction; you write memoir. Do you think that writing fiction insulates authors from being judged on their political views? In other words, if your creative work wasn't connected to your personal life, would you feel freer about expressing your political ideas?
Jen Lancaster: Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction. For example, in "Bridget Jones's Diary," there's a scene where Bridget argues pro-Labour politics with her conservative dining companions. I can't imagine any British reader, regardless of party affiliation, who didn't find what Helen Fielding wrote utterly charming. And Jennifer Weiner, one of my favorite American writers, seems to infuse her characters with a left-leaning bent. Her viewpoint subtly defines her characters, and her skill in quietly advancing this philosophy makes me feel like I'm getting valuable insight into the other side. In short? Including bits of her worldview works.
As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative. For example, I read a celebrity diet memoir recently, and I found myself identifying with the author. That is, until apropos of nothing the author went off about the evils of conservatism. All I could think was, Honey, unless the president himself forced you to eat all that fried chicken, I don't want to hear it.
For me, my party views don't advance my narrative. Until I can find a way to write political satire like my idols Christopher Buckley or P.J. O'Rourke, I'll simply say what team I play for and leave it at that.
JC: If you were asked to join a group of authors speaking out in support of McCain, would you? You wrote in an e-mail that you admire Reagan -- if he were back and running in this election, would you help fund-raise or organize in support of him?
Jen Lancaster: I've done what I can as a private individual to help McCain's campaign; I've donated money, put up yard signs, coordinated with others on Facebook etc. However, I'm not sure my public support of McCain would be helpful. I'm a humor writer, so I don't always present myself in the best light. The person who accidentally gets high on Ambien and then orders Barbie heads off the Internet may not be who McCain wants as an ad hoc campaign mouthpiece.
However, if Ronald Reagan were alive and running, that's another story. I'd put my career on hold to work for him. It's a question of passion -– I like McCain, but I loved Reagan.
JC: Do you think your readers would judge you differently if you were more vocal about your political views?
Jen Lancaster: I guarantee being more vocal would have an impact. I started blogging about politics in the last election cycle (before I was published), and according to my stat counter, I lost half my audience. I'm noticing a lot of the big bloggers who've posted about politics are experiencing an ugly backlash. Readers are angry because they went to the bloggers' sites for a laugh, not a lecture. Again, it's a question of being appropriate for the audience.
Now that fans have read my books, maybe they'd have a better understanding of who I am and they'd be OK with some political dogma. Maybe they even want me to weigh in with my opinions; maybe they wouldn't. Regardless, I have too much at stake to find out.
I've never been shy about expressing my views, but if I'm going to inadvertently alienate fans, I'd prefer to lose them over causes I'm really passionate about, such as pit-bull rescue and not a pit bull wearing lipstick.
This post has been updated and corrected in several places with information from UC Davis.
Next week the academic journal Language & Communication will publish an article by UC Davis Professor Flagg Miller on the evolution of the term "al qaida" based, in part, on the oratory of Osama bin Laden. "Bin Laden is a skilled poet
with clever rhymes and meters," Miller told the Times of London, "which was one reason why many people taped
him and passed recordings around, like pop songs." [Update: This post originally reported that the article published in “Language & Communication” would include samples of Osama bin Laden's poetry. UC Davis says that is not the case.]
Osama bin Laden's poems were among more than 1,500 audiocassettes found in al-Quaeda's Afghanistan headquarters in 2001. Miller, a scholar who specializes in political discourse, Islam, and media -- his first book is "The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen" (Harvard University Press / Middle Eastern Monographs) -- has been studying bin Laden's poetry recordings for five years. He described the poems to The Times of London:
They reveal Osama Bin Laden as the performer, the entertainer with an
agenda. He told gory tales of dead mujaheddin from the
villages where he was speaking, which was often the first time their
families had learned of their fates. He mixed this news up with radical
theology and his own verse based on the traditions of hamasa -- a warlike
poetic tradition from Oman calculated to capture the interest of young men.
Earlier this month, Miller told the L.A. Times that the poems are didactic. Osama bin Laden, Miller explains, "coaches his audiences through their fears about dying in a violent
way. He coaches them to consider such an end as noble and potentially
beneficial to a larger purpose." The professor told the Times of London that "He crafts his words to excite the urban dissatisfied youth, offering them escape from their elders and
villages. Instead, many just die in terrible ways."
All of which fits politically. "He's a very good recruiter," Miller says. But that doesn't answer the aesthetic question: is Osama bin Laden's poetry any good? A sample after the jump.
"I'm an Obama chick," Judy Blume told an LA audience via video Friday night. The occasion was not a political fundraiser -- it was a celebration of the author's work called Blumesday (yes, a Bloomsday pun) and Blume's appearance was a surprise.
Judy Blume has written entirely adult novels ("Wifey") and children's books ("Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing"), but she may be best known for her young adult books -- "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," "Deenie" -- that deal with difficult adolescent subjects.
This week, Blume was the first author to post on a new website, YA for Obama. The site was founded by author Maureen Johnson, who writes, "We're looking to get people talking, and to figure out ways that we can ALL help Barack Obama become the next President."
Many authors are participating, including John Green ("Looking for Alaska"), Scott Westerfeld (the Uglies series), Meg Cabot ("The Princess Diaries"), Holly Black ("The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Libba Bray ("A Great and Terrible Beauty") and more.
At first it seemed odd that people who write for teenagers were publicly banding together to talk about the presidential election. Their readers can't vote, can they? But the site is about social networking, urging people of all ages to join, discuss, ask questions, share ideas. Just a few days old, it has more than 700 members.
"Tell your parents, tell your grandparents, it's not just about them this time," Blume writes. "It's about you and your future. It's about my grandson's future. That's why I'm speaking out."
As Jacket Copy said before, if you know of a group of authors who have gathered to publicly support John McCain, let us know at jacketcopyla (at) gmail.com.
Nobody was surprised when "Saturday Night Live's" season debuted with Tina Fey portraying VP nominee Sarah Palin — not even Sarah Palin. The resemblance is pretty striking (so you know, that's Palin in the photo).
But TV is not the only place Palin is getting the satiric treatment. The Onion, America's fake news newspaper, has a Palin page (as well as pages for Biden, Obama and McCain, too). And this week, the most literary of satirists, George Saunders, has his take on Palin in the New Yorker. He employs a fictional first-person, as he's done before, beginning:
"Explaining how she felt when John McCain offered her the Vice-Presidential spot, my Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, said something very profound: 'I answered him "Yes" because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.'
"Isn't that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and, because I had good readiness, in terms of how I was wired, when they asked that — whatever they asked — I would just not blink, because, knowing that, if I did blink, or even wink, that is weakness, therefore you can't, you just don't. You could, but no — you aren't....
"Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn't go there slightly earlier than I didn't go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun."
The narrator's rubric of Élites and Regulars grows increasingly confused, and a resistance to blinking begins to cause pain. As with much of Saunders' work — which has earned him a MacArthur "genius" Grant — it builds and snowballs, demanding that it be read in full.
As long as people remain intrigued in Palin, chances are satirists will be writing about her, too.
Amazon has opened a special Election 2008 bookstore as a place to buy all the McCain and Obama books you want. As we noted yesterday, Barack Obama's books are outselling John McCain's; Sarah Palin is outselling Joe Biden.
Now it's time to add Mrs. McCain and Mrs. Obama into the mix. "Cindy McCain: Elegance, Good Will and Hope for a New America" is a new biography by Alicia Colon; Elizabeth Lightfoot is the author of the biography "Michelle Obama: Grace and Intelligence in a Time of Change." The catch is that both brand new, potential-first-lady biographies are available only via the Kindle.
This means two things: that readers will get their hands on the e-books before the hard copies will be available, and that Amazon has an exclusive for its e-reader. Litblogger Booksquare points out that "the non-Kindle e-reader population vastly exceeds aggregate Kindle ownership." She writes:
Your customer wants the book now or as close to now as is possible. Not only should readers who want ebooks get the format they prefer, but readers of print books shouldn’t have to wait so long for books that might not be relevant weeks from now. Things change too fast to play by the old rules.
Readers who want the print version of the Michelle Obama biography will have to wait, according to the Amazon press release, until sometime later this year. As for the print version of the Cindy McCain bio? The press release says, "the book will only go to print if John McCain wins the election."
Ayelet Waldman is opening boxes. "My mail carrier is having heart palpitations," she says. A week ago, Waldman sent a casual e-mail –- it "had all these typos" –- to just five friends, asking them to donate books to benefit Barack Obama. To her surprise, "the thing goes completely viral. All of a sudden I start getting this stuff in the mail."
In seven days, hundreds of books have arrived. First editions from Stephen King and Billy Collins. Books from Anne Tyler, Tobias Wolff, Lisa See, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers. From Jamie Lee Curtis and David Leavitt and Judy Blume. Greil Marcus' donated books each arrived with a limited-edition companion CD. While we talk on the phone, she opens a package with three books from Erica Jong and a note from the author.
The fundraiser that started it all will be hosted by restaurateur Alice Waters in a private San Francisco Bay Area home; the books will be part of an auction there. But the overwhelming response means that they'll be available at other Obama fundraisers too. One in the planning stages includes appearances by Michael Chabon (Waldman's husband), Anne Lamott, Tobias Wolff and Isabel Allende. Things are happening so fast, though, that details for the events, which will be open to the public, are not yet available.
Waldman has been so focused on her efforts to support Obama -- this is "too important an election," she says -- that her own work has gotten a bit buried. Pulling more packages out from a stack, she discovered the edits to her memoir in progress, "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace."
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Ayelet Waldman photographed in 2003 by Randi Lynn Beach / For The Times
If you are organizing a book-focused fundraiser for John McCain, Jacket Copy would of course like to learn about it. Just e-mail jacketcopyla (at) gmail.com
News that Sarah Palin made inquiries about banning books shortly after becoming mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, has quickly been followed by speculations of what books she might have targeted.
Lists of books have been circulated in blog comments and via e-mail. They haven't been reported in papers like The Times because there is no evidence that they are accurate.
In fact, one widely circulated, very long list (which appears, among other places, on Librarian.net's comment string and has been disavowed by the website's owner) is obviously false because it includes four books that had not yet hit shelves when Palin became mayor in 1996 — "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," all by J.K. Rowling.
The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, the local Wasilla newspaper, has reposted a 1996 article covering the censorship inquiries that Palin put to local librarian Mary Ellin Emmons. This piece clearly states that "Palin said Monday she had no particular books or other material in mind when she posed the questions to Emmons." That should put an end to the inaccurate lists that are circulating.
Here's what the Valley Frontiersman says: "Emmons said Palin asked her outright if she could live with censorship of library books. This was during a weak [sic] when Palin was requesting resignations from all the city's department heads as a way of expressing loyalty."
The article continues: " 'This is different than a normal book-selection procedure or a book-challenge policy,' Emmons stressed Saturday. 'She was asking me how I would deal with her saying a book can't be in the library.'"
Palin described her inquiries as "rhetorical" and told the paper, in a written statement issued in 1996, that "she was only trying to get acquainted with her staff at the time."
Rhetorical? Well, OK ... if she says so. Still, it seems like an odd getting-to-know-you question to me.
As a novelist, I am fascinated by the emergence of Sarah Palin as a character. This lively cross between Annie Oakley and Eva Braun seems to have released Republican chakras to a degree that could be matched only by the resurrection of Ronald Reagan. This is more extraordinary by virtue of her having been an unknown local politician until — what? oh, about five minutes ago. As the nation slouches toward her possible elevation to the second-highest office in the land, we're all taking a closer look at what's gone on in Alaska these past few years.
There's the aerial wolf hunting, the moose burgers, the book banning — excuse me? The book banning? As Jacket Copy reported earlier this week, Palin leaned on the local librarian when she was mayor of Wasilla, urging her to ban certain texts. In other words, we are in danger of going from a nation where the first lady is a former librarian to one where the vice president is a character in "Fahrenheit 451." Clearly, this is what they mean by change you can believe in.
The role of Alaska in American literature is sure to be a popular subject in the event of a Republican victory. For me, the most intriguing treatment is "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," Michael Chabon's recent novel. The book is an alternative history about what might have happened had Jewish refugees been resettled after World War II in the Alaskan Territory rather than Israel. I don't claim to be privy to Palin's literary taste, but I would bet money that this book has not graced her night table.
And that, my friends (McCain's got me saying it now), is a shame.
— Seth Greenland
Photo credit: Stephen Nowers / Anchorage Daily News
Time magazine, in its reporting on John McCain's vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, has uncovered some information that is making librarians uncomfortable.
[Former Mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.
Librarian Jessamyn West, who blogs at librarian.net, writes, "Usually I’m just happy to see libraries even mentioned in national level politics, but not like this."
This seems like a good time to mention Banned Books Week, beginning Sept. 27, which celebrates the freedom to read. 2007's most challenged book was "And Tango Makes Three," a children's book about a penguin with two dads; books by Mark Twain and Alice Walker appear, again, on the list. Exactly what books Palin might have wanted to ban have not been identified (other than some unsupported rumors), but it's safe to assume that she won't be joining in to celebrate the idea that no books should be banned at all.
As Gustav bears down on New Orleans and the residents of coastal Louisiana evacuate, there is little the rest of us can do except watch, wait and hope for the best. And, maybe, read an exceptional account of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on some of those residents, "The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous."
Written by Ken Wells, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Louisiana native, "The Good Pirates" focuses not on New Orleans but on the adjacent St. Bernard Parish, equally as devastated by the storm. But when the hurricane winds, tornadoes, torrential rains and sudden floodwaters withdrew, St. Bernard's was virtually ignored by authorities, who focused on New Orleans. Rescuers were very slow to arrive; the people of St. Bernard's, many of whom had stayed behind, sheltered their neighbors who had survived and paddled out to rescue those were stranded.
The history of the region is critical to the residents' response, according to Wells, and he tells it in colorful detail — including, yes, pirates. Wells explains the difference between Creole and Cajun and how early French and Spanish settlers ended up in this one place. These chapters alternate with 2005, when the storm rages around the town's residents. He literally ends an early chapter with a wave bearing down on a van with a woman, her two daughters, her brother and their ailing father. It's a breathtaking cliffhanger.
The excitement and history notwithstanding, it's the stories of the survivors that are unforgettable. In some places, floodwater filled homes in less than 20 minutes. How did a 91-year-old woman survive? Why was she compelled, after evacuation, to return?
Author Ken Wells has done a commendable job of bringing the threatened bayous of Louisiana to life. You can listen to his appearance on NPR, which has posted an excerpt — the opening pages — of his book on their site.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo of a house in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in May 2008 by Carolyn Kellogg
As we noted yesterday, the biography of relatively unknown Sarah Palin was being snapped up by people eager to learn more about John McCain's choice for VP.
Today the book -- "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on Its Ear," by Kaylene Johnson -- is at No. 12 in all of books on Amazon. It is the No. 1 bestseller in Biographies & Memoirs of Women and also No. 1 in Biographies & Memoirs of Leaders and Notable People -- Politicians.
The Wall Street Journal quotes author Johnson as saying that "the book has been selling well in Alaska because people really like
her." That's probably an old quote, as the book is now selling well pretty much everywhere.
And some in Alaska aren't Palin-boosters. The Anchorage Daily News says local politicians are "stunned." Republican state Senate President Lyda Green, who, along with Johnson, is from Palin's hometown of Wasilla, said: "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?"
Many are looking to Johnson's bio for the answer to that question.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
UPDATE: "Sarah" is now, after 1pm Pacific, at #10 on Amazon's sales chart; it's the only biography in the top 10.
Chances are Sarah Palin is having a pretty good day. Yesterday she was governor of Alaska; today she's John McCain's running mate.
Kaylene Johnson must be nearly as happy. She is the Alaskan author who penned "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down." Will people wanting to know more about the Alaskan governor turn to this bio to tell them more?
At 159 pages, it's easy to tackle. According to one review, it's a straightforward accounting of Palin's history.
Author Kaylene Johnson has written two other books and many articles about Alaska. On her website, she writes about the process of putting together the book. She talked to Palin's childhood basketball coach, her aerobics instructor, her pastor, her siblings; she spoke with the governor twice. Johnson writes:
I had watched Palin’s rise to the state’s highest office with interest. Jaded as I was about politics in general, the notion that people could take government back into their own hands renewed my faith in the democratic process. It was an opportunity to learn and write about a fascinating woman who made Alaskan history by being the first woman and the youngest governor ever elected.
The only review on Amazon says that "Sarah" is "almost breathlessly optimistic" and wishes it weren't so "lightweight." The book started the day with an Amazon sales rank of about 300,000. As of 11am Pacific, it had risen all the way to 2,294 -- leaping over more than 290,000 other books. How far will it rise?
-- Carolyn Kellogg
UPDATE: And by noon it was at #775. Epicenter, the book's publisher, is figuring out how to fill the new demand -- Barnes & Noble alone wants 15,000 copies.
The hippest place for bloggers in Denver is called The Big Tent. For its $100 entrance fee, it's providing juice for laptops and PDAs (courtesy Google), free WiFi, free burritos and other snacks, yoga space and free mini-facials and hand massages (courtesy the Huffington Post). And it's right next door to one of the country's most famed bookstores, Tattered Cover.
All day Monday, authors visiting The Big Tent took their signings to Tattered Cover, including Markos Moulitsas ("Taking on the System"), Ted Sorenson ("Counselor") and David Sirota ("The Uprising"). It's a serendipitous spillover; I only wish that they'd post pictures.
On Wednesday, another big author will be signing at Tattered Cover: Michael Chabon. Is the author of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" a sleeper candidate for the Democratic nomination?
Late last night (or early this morning for those not on Pacific time), Barack Obama named his running mate: Sen. Joe Biden.
Biden made a stab at the Democratic presidential nomination himself this year; the first time he gave it a go was back in 1988. That year's election was chronicled in detail by Richard Ben Cramer in his book "What It Takes." Of Biden's ability to connect with audiences, he wrote:
Joe would get to talking fast, with conviction -- something near joy in
his voice -- and he'd haul them along, until they could feel his belief
like a hand on their backs, until they could see it as he could, until
the thing was shining in the air...
Of Biden's youth, he emphasized his scrappiness:
Joe Biden had balls. Lots of times, more balls than sense. This was from the jump -- as a little kid. He was little, too, but you didn't want to fight him -- or dare him. There was nothing he wouldn't do.... Joe was kind of skinny, and he stuttered, and the kids called him Bye-Bye, for the way he sounded when he tried to say his name. But Joey would never back down, and he knew how to box, when no one else did....
Biden has his own say, of course. It seems a candidate doesn't strive for high office anymore without a memoir. Biden's -- "Promises to Keep," published in 2007 by Random House -- begins with his own recollection of that stutter, concluding:
It’s a funny thing to say, but even if I could, I wouldn’t wish away
the darkest days of the stutter. That impedimenta ended up being a
godsend for me. Carrying it strengthened me and, I hoped, made me a
better person. And the very things it taught me turned out to be
invaluable lessons for my life as well as my chosen career.
As for how Biden's skills on the podium -- or his scrappiness -- will play out in the campaign to come, I'll keep reading the L.A. Times blog Top of the Ticket.
What's the buzz about booksellers and Barack Obama?
It started on Monday. The New York Times reported that big bookseller Barnes & Noble had substantially reduced its order of a new "admiring portrait" of Obama -- "Obama's Challenge" -- after it found out that Amazon.com, another big bookseller, would get to sell it first, amounting to an exclusive deal until Sept. 15.
And that's only the beginning. Independent booksellers were "disheartened" by the Amazon decision, trade mag Publishers Weekly reported that same day; one bookseller called the book's publisher, Chelsea Green, "a money-grubbing sellout."
The Vermont-based publisher is hardly the type; its tag line is "Publisher of Sustainable Living Books Since 1984." (Go on, look at your bookshelf: How many organic gardening books do you have from 1987?) What it was trying to do, Chelsea Green insists, is get the book into people's hands, and do it fast. The time from final manuscript to bound books will be less than four weeks.
That's where the exclusivity with Amazon comes in. "Obama's Challenge" is being offered as print-on-demand, or POD, through Booksurge, which is part of Amazon. Chelsea Green will be handing out some advance copies at the Democratic Convention in Denver, but all 15,000 conventioneers will get discount coupons for the POD version of the book, available Aug. 25, the convention's first day.
So what's the problem? Why are Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers so upset? That's what Jennifer Nix wants to know. Blogging at the Huffington Post, she writes, "Chelsea Green is facing angry calls for regressive business tactics based on an archaic system of book distribution, and canceled orders from booksellers large and small." (It might be fair to note that Nix, who thinks media and booksellers should band together to promote this particular pro-Obama book, is "editor-at-large for Chelsea Green.")
Independent booksellers may be angry, but it's Nix's piece that got one bookseller from the Harvard Book Store upset. She blogs at Bookdwarf:
Sure some stores might decide not to carry it, but it’s not like we’re getting together to actively decide to boycott the title. Some will carry it and some won’t. Was Margo Baldwin’s desire to get the books out fast smart? Yes. Do we care that Chelsea Green is having Booksure print them? No. For me and others it’s the exclusive deal Amazon gets. Do they think that having the book only available in one place will really drive the sales? Wouldn’t a blanket nation wide roll out of the book make more sense?...
And will they please stop talking down to us like we’re luddite idiots?
Closer to home, Vroman's Bookstore "doesn't care" about Chelsea Green's decision. But it does think that all the hubbub seems to be effective marketing.
Everyone's up in arms about the image of a Muslim Barack and machine-gun toting Michelle Obama on the cover of the July 21 issue of the New Yorker.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a cartoon — not designed to deceive, like a doctored photo — and if our friends and neighbors laugh at "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," I'm certain they're sophisticated enough to understand a little illustrated satire. But maybe someone out there thinks this accurately represents how Barack Obama moves through the world.
This is for sure: This is bringing a lot of attention to the (often low-key) New Yorker, and the magazine will likely sell more copies than in an average week. Which means new readers.
So who benefits? Fictionwise, it's SoCal local Sarah Shun-lien Bynum — author of "Madeline Is Sleeping" — whose story "Yurt" is in this issue. There are brief reviews of the novels "City of Thieves" by David Benioff and Poppy Adams' "The Sister."
As always, there is plenty of excellent nonfiction to be found in the New Yorker, in articles on current affairs and essays and criticism. Of course you can read about Barack Obama inside, and catch up on restaurants and music and movies.
There's even a little bit of satire in the mag, too: a piece called "14 Passive-Aggressive Appetizers" by Yoni Brenner. And all those cartoons. Isn't it clear that the New Yorker doesn't want to be taken too seriously?
Scott McClellan's memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," which officially debuts next week, has gone to #1 at Amazon and caused consternation among high-ranking Republicans who are speaking out publicly against the book.
Some say they are "puzzled" and "sad" about the former White House press secretary's claims, which others say are "patently false." Publishers Weekly compares this to "Casablanca," in which a fully-aware Captain Renault (Claude Raines) makes a show of being "shocked, shocked!" at the goings-on at Rick's; Publishers Weekly suggests that Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, Dana Perino and Ari Fleischer are simultaneously performing the role.
So what does that make Scott McClellan? Is he Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), the Resistance fighter, putting everything on the line to fight for justice? Is he Humphrey Bogart in the role of Rick Blaine, keeping his head down and taking no sides, deciding belatedly to stand up to the authoritarian regime?
Or could he be the lovely Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), torn between two very different men, finally compelled to go with her conscience instead of her heart?
With West Virgina voters going to the polls today, my thoughts turn to West Virginia literature, about which I know, well, not that much. But last fall I did hear Ann Pancake read from her novel "Strange as This Weather Has Been." It's a character-driven tale about a West Virginia family coping with living in the shadow of a mountaintop removal mine (like the one pictured above). "Black floods" of dirt and debris are an ever-present threat. Children play among the felled trees, and coal miners are at odds with the mine owners. You can read an excerpt at Narrative Magazine (free registration required).
What I do know a bit more about are narratives of presidential campaigns. A few favorites after the jump.
I know we just had our book festival, but this makes me want to be in New York.
But I am not in New York, so I get the next best thing: a blogorama about the event at MetaxuCafe. The site is gathering posts from smart bloggers who are in attendance, offering everything from a description of Rushdie's opening night remarks ("jolly") to a series of terrific photos. It's a way to catch up with the World Voices festival all in one place, instead of blog by blog.
If you already know enough about the political history of Burma, what's hot in Spanish literature and the real deal with Darfur, eh, there's no use checking it out. But otherwise....
The classic novelist and iconic rapper were both avid readers, and both of their libraries have been publicly catalogued. Now volunteers have added them to the library-sharing site Librarything. Other authors who've gotten the treatment are John Adams, Sylvia Plath, John Muir and Ernest Hemingway; in-progress are the book collections of James Joyce, Charles Darwin and Rembrandt.
Librarything is a lot like goodreads; although it isn't as technically showy, it came first and seems to be a little more fun. The people who started the famous-persons-libraries project have named their group "I See Dead People['s Books]." Nice.
Sadly, Fitzgerald and Shakur didn't have any books in common. Tupac's collection reflects an interest in African American poetry, spiritual searching (books on Buddha, the Kabbalah, the Tibetan "Book of the Dead") and practical guides for the music business. Fitzgerald -- whose collection of 322 books is hard to categorize -- apparently read some contemporaries (Sherwood Anderson) while avoiding others (Ernest Hemingway). Hmm... bad blood? Competitive? A question of taste?
Librarything is like going to a cocktail party at someone's house and wandering off to check out their books. Thanks to the Very Short List for showing me the way.
SoCal lit blogger John Fox and the good people of Red Fence hit the L.A. Times Festival of Books with a camera crew and tracked down some fabulous fictioneers (T.C. Boyle, Shelley Jackson, Lydia Millet among them) to ask them about art and literary pilgrimages.
Where have they gone? Which one ate a page of Shakespeare? Watch to find out.
Frustration was palpable Sunday among participants in the lone L.A. Times Festival of Books panel discussion specifically aimed at the Middle East. The occupation of Iraq, the now 60-year-old conflict between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians, as well as the vilification of Islam and Muslims in the West -- all have made the region more combustible than ever and our own U.S. democracy that much more tenuous.
"We are one or two terrorist attacks away from a police state in this country," journalist and writer Chris Hedges told more than 200 people in a packed UCLA auditorium Sunday for the panel, "Contentious Ground: The Middle East."
Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent who has covered the wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and El Salvador, decried the "gross mischaracterization of Islam as a religion of violence," which has skewed the U.S. public's perceptions about Muslims, the Arab world and the real sources of instability in the Middle East. Citing his experiences while covering the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s as just one example, he said, "Bosnian Muslims were the only peaceful ones in the conflict."
But what does that have to do with sewage, or a refrigerator?
At "Contentious Ground: The Middle East" -- which promised to be one of the more volatile discussions at the Festival of Books this weekend -- the panelists seemed to want to talk about something else. Moderator Zachary Karabell introduced the session Sunday saying: "With so much going on in South America, Africa and all around the world, it’s funny that we still believe the Middle East is the only problem."
And with that, they were off and running.
Amy Wilentz, former Jerusalem correspondent for "The New Yorker," agreed that five years in Iraq has inflated Americans' perception of the entire region. "I can't believe I'm back at this panel, five years later," she replied. But aside from slight tangents veering off to the religious right, activism and the current presidential elections, the panelists resisted temptation and focused on the core subject.
In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Reviewto task: "It has become the place where serious feminist books come to die."
Author Sarah Seltzer writes in the article (titled, in part, "All the Misogyny Is Fit to Print") that "catfights" flare in the pages when younger women review books by older feminists. She points to Wonkette founding editor Ana Marie Cox's dismissiveness of bra-burning in her 2006 review of Katha Pollitt's essay collection, "Virginity or Death!," as a typical example:
“[Y]oung, educated, and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra ... and raising their credit limit. Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this 'Desperate Housewives' watching party.”
Older female reviewers also draw criticism. Seltzer cites "Arts section doyenne Michiko Kakutani’s" 2007 put-down of Susan Faludi’s book, "The Terror Dream": "This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name."
Seltzer finds the opening line of Kakutani’s review "particularly perplexing because it reveals her belief that feminism has a bad name to begin with (it certainly seems to around the Timesoffices) and that feminists themselves, rather than sexism, are responsible for said bad name."
That's certainly well-reasoned, and Seltzer's article, if a little snarky, is definitely worth a read. It includes some sobering figures: The ratio of male-to-female-authors in the NYT's Book Review is about 2 to 1. Reviewers? Same thing.
Of course I wondered how the L.A. Times Book Review's gender balance stacks up. I did an incredibly unscientific survey of three Sunday Book Review sections from early 2008. There were a total of 28 books by male authors reviewed compared with 11 by female authors (a ratio of about 2.5 to 1). When it comes to the reviewers, the majority flips: 16 women to 14 men.
These figures don't really tell the story. How do you tally a book by a man who has a female editor? (I count it as both a male and a female author.) How about the book written by a man and translated by a husband-and-wife team? (Answer: two men, one woman.) As I said, it's an unscientific tally.
For hard numbers about gender balance in book reviews across the country, Sisters in Crime keeps careful track, but just of the number of mystery novels by men and women.
Counting is fun, but how useful is it? Such summaries don't track which books get cover treatment and considerable length versus those given capsule reviews. Nor do the numbers address the tone of reviews, which really is at the heart of the complaint in Bitch.
In the face of a citywide budget crisis, the Los Angeles Public Library is proposing a service charge for books circulated through inter-library loan. If approved, the $1-a-book fee will take effect July 1.
If this were a kind of luxury tax, it wouldn't seem all that bad. I mean, a dollar, right? But some people are concerned that it'll affect the smallest, least-funded branch libraries -- and their patrons -- the most. That's why they've launched this blog urging people to write to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and library leaders and to organize opposition to the fee before the May 1 City Council hearing on the library's budget.
There are about 70 branches of the L.A. Public Library serving the city's readers (a few branches are currently closed for repairs). Obviously, not all branches can have every book, but most are available within the library system -- via inter-library loans -- for free. Author Cecil Castellucci, who volunteers at a public school in Echo Park, told the no-fee campaign organizers:
As a read-aloud volunteer at Mayberry Elementary school, I use this service to get the perfect books to read to the students. For example, I used the inter-library loan service to get books on opera to read aloud to the kids in preparation for their field trip to the L.A. Opera. As a young adult author, I find it appalling to be charging $1 for an inter-library loan.
While the organizers are soliciting suggestions for how to support the library, I know of one sure way coming up April 30. It's the library's annual gala dinner, a fund-raiser for the library foundation that this year will honor author Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment," "The Last Picture Show"). Tickets are $750 apiece. Sure, that's a lot of smackers; but it would also pay for a lot of books zooming around the city through inter-library loans.
"Birds of Paradise" is a collaborative novel-in-progress appearing daily in the Los Angeles Times. Chapter 1 -- written by LAT columnist Steve Lopez -- threw a bunch of balls in the air and asked readers to step in and juggle. Lopez gave them a balding TV producer and his gold-digger wife, who is an ex-reality TV celebrity; a stupid congressman and a tough guy named Ernesto; a glass house in Malibu; a bribe; a trip to Cabo -- oh, and a stripper from Jumbo's Clown Room.
Hundreds of readers have sent in their own versions of the succeeding chapters (they must be 600 words or fewer and crafted in a tight time frame). The newspaper's judges have found the entries so good that not only is the winning entry posted, but also at least one runner-up and sometimes as many as four, as with today's Chapter 9. (Chapter 10 will be posted by 7 p.m. Pacific time.)
The winning entry for Chapter 2 was very good -- sleeker than Lopez's first and a touch more evil. It also hurled the plot in a new direction.
What you've got is a Southern California noir, of course. Me, I love this stuff, and reading Chapter 2 got me addicted. One hitch: With only the winners building the main plotline, the runner-up entries create a massive snarl of parallel universes. It's not just one collaborative novel -- it's a massive tree-like fiction with dozens of buds and sprouts contradicting one another.
Meanwhile, the message boards are serving as a kind of editorial meeting around the evolving story line. Contributors and readers alike discuss the way the story is moving (and the arcana of the submissions process).
Who is contributing? Everyone from a recent college grad to Kelly Lange, the TV news anchor turned novelist. I even found an old boss -- well, my boss' boss, actually -- among the runners-up. Joseph Fink of Camarillo has scored twice so far, with the winning entries for Chapter 2 and Chapter 8.
The winners will be invited to read their chapter at the 13th annual L.A. Times Festival of Books held at UCLA on April 26 and 27. Any Californian can play. (Here are the rules.)
And if you're stuck on where to begin, think Jumbo's. In noir, you can't go wrong with a stripper.
Jhumpa Lahiri's new story collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," was reviewed Sunday in our pages. Reviewer Lisa Fugard calls the book "a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers."
Lahiri, 40, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her debut collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and followed it up with the bestselling book-turned-movie, "The Namesake." Her new collection includes the story "Hell-Heaven," which ran in the New Yorker in 2004. That same year she appeared at the NewYorker Festival; in this film clip, she reads from her story and answers audience questions.
By his own count, the late Ryszard Kapuściński covered 27 incidents of revolution, war and upheaval around the world -- and recorded much of it in such books as "The Soccer War," "The Shadow of the Sun" and "Imperium"before he died on Jan. 23, 2007. Many of his fans may be surprised to learn that the Polish journalist also wrote poetry -- although one might wonder when he possibly found the time.
Although there was much fanfare around the appearance of Kapuściński's final book, "Travels With Herodotus," which was published not long after his death, it's disappointing that "I Wrote Stone," now published in English for the first time by Biblioasis, has come out with not so much as a single trumpet sounding.
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba, this slim volume gathers poetry Kapuściński wrote over 40 years. Slim, yes, but hardly insubstantial.
Big events -- such as the murder of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba -- may have been treated lyrically in his prose, but Kapuściński's translators note that he believed poetry could "illuminate dimensions of human experience that otherwise would remain unknowable." These poems capture the moments between crises, impressions that carry a book-length argument in a few lines. "Magellan Reaches Tierra Del Fuego," for example, ends on this note of despair:
They stand gazing — they hope for paradise and the caravel reaches the shore and they see sand, stone and cliffs
The University of Iowa caused a bit of a dust-up recently by changing the terms for graduate theses -- to make them “open access,” available online, for free, to anyone. Students in the writing program, one of the country’s most prestigious, balked.
Eventually, the issue was resolved: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (sorry, registration is required for the article) that the university will not publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents.
Not all college students are so lucky. Many top film schools -- including USC's -- hold the rights to their students’ final projects. George Lucas is rumored to have resorted to stealing the negative to his short film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” from the school. That worked out OK for him -– it became the basis for his first feature, “THX 1138,” starring Robert Duvall. But the university now makes sure to keep closer tabs on its students' work.
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
In 1960, "Little Toot," a Los Angeles Public Library bookmobile, was retired in favor of a new, larger book van. From the looks of things, officials declined to call the new touring library Big Toot.
Here in this sprawling Turkish city on the Bosphorus Strait is a wide hilltop boulevard full of pedestrians and trams and lined with bright shops, both local and international. Between the fashion and the food found along this street, Istiklal Caddesi, there are also many bookstores. They sell Turkish- and English-language books, and even Turkish translations of literary classics.
Turkey doesn't have a tradition of public libraries, so bookstores have a greater social role to fill. A wonderful example of such an oasis of erudition is Homer Kitabevi ("kitabevi" means "bookstore" in Turkish), just off Istiklal on Yeni Çarşi Cadessi, a steep, narrow street often crammed with taxis heading uphill.
Homer's owner, Ayşen Boylu, is a former urban archeologist who opened the bookstore 13 years ago; she was working on her PhD and found a dearth of the kind of books she needed. Today, Homer is packed with smart books on history and criticism, architecture and art, literature and religion. Most popular, Boylu says, are books on archeology, history, philosophy and photography. The store's runaway hit? Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." You can see Boylu in her store, and pics of more bookstores in Istanbul, after the jump.
I'm staying in Istanbul with my American friend Gloria Fisk, a literature professor who is working on a book about the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his reception at home and abroad. Last year she explored the ways her college students read the Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an article for n+1 magazine. Here we talk about her perceptions so far:
Q: How has Orhan Pamuk’s work shaped your ideas about Turkey? Gloria Fisk: I read "The Black Book" years ago, and it created this really vivid image of the city that I always wanted to come visit. I started paying attention to Turkish culture and politics.... [Pamuk's 1994 novel] had these really beautiful images of the city and the characters were really lively. To me it was ... evocative and real. But now I realize that most Turkish readers hate that book and think that that was the beginning of his downfall, and consider readers like me who got sucked into it Orientalist dupes.
Q: In Turkey, Pamuk is not universally adored? GF: He’s universally hated.
Q: Really? GF: I’m being a little flip. That’s an exaggeration, but he alienates most Turkish readers, for one reason or another.
Q: Pamuk made people angry by making public comments about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, right? GF: He alienated the ultra-nationalists with that. What didn’t happen was the sort of rallying around him that you might expect from intellectuals and progressives.
Q: Or the secularists? GF: Definitely not. Many of the most extreme nationalists are also secularists. Because the Turkish republic has secularist foundations, any threat to the nation is perceived as a threat to secularism, too. And any recognition of the Armenian genocide can be understood as a threat to the nation. Pamuk alienated hardline secularists by speaking to a foreign journalist about this shameful event that happened during the formative years of the republic.
Second, here's a tidbit from the Q&A that Penguin Books did with Jones (who admitted last week that her real name is Margaret "Peggy" SeltzerÖ) about a scene that always made her -- and her editor -- cry:
Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?
A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.
Crying over spilled milk? Did no one noticed that at its heart, this weeper is nothing more than an overworked cliché? Really?
Third, lit blogger Ron Hogan, who has been nobly anti-pile-on, writes that Jones/Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, was doing her job, picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who said on Feb. 28,"Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."
To which I would respond (heck, I am responding) that part of the problem is that Kakutani's feel for the truth of South L.A.'s "social rituals and routines" seems inevitably formed by the same pop culture hand-me-downs from which Jones/Seltzer seems to have crafted her book.
Finally, if you want to get with Madd Ronald, the gang member whose message about Peggy appeared on the now-defunct International Brother/SisterHood website, he's on MySpace.
"I'm an Obama chick," Judy Blume told an LA audience via video Friday night. The occasion was not a political fundraiser -- it was a 
Nobody was surprised when "Saturday Night Live's" season debuted with 
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Everyone's 
In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Review 
