I received this in an email - it was labeled as being from the Wall Street Journal, but I could not confirm that. It is an interesting piece, however:

November 6, 2003

Recipe for a Bestseller: Baked Fudge and Author Charm

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

New York

Hyperion was reasonably certain it had caught lightning in a bottle when it
acquired "PS, I Love You," a first novel about a woman coping, through a series
of letters, with the untimely death of her husband. Rights to the book were
swiftly sold to 14 countries -- and Hollywood. The author, Cecilia Ahern, was
young (22), pretty, well-spoken and, by the way, the daughter of Bertie Ahern,
prime minister of Ireland. "We believed she was someone who could break out,"
says Ellen Archer, Hyperion's vice president and publisher. Thus, the decision
was made to send Ms. Ahern on a six-city tour five months before the novel's
February 2004 publication, to chat up and charm bookstore buyers and owners at
specially arranged dinners, in the process perhaps convincing them to up
their orders for the book. "They loved her," adds Ms. Archer, "and yes, they
wanted more copies."

For decades, the author tour has been one of the key weapons in a publisher's
arsenal. The book comes out and the writer is dispatched to selected cities
for interviews, for readings, book signings and meet-and-greets with would-be
readers.

But over the past several years, many publishers have chosen not to wait
until a book is in print to put an author on a plane but to do so six months, even
four months before publication, all in hopes of generating big buzz and big
buys. "When we've done it," says Judy Hottensen, marketing director at
Grove/Atlantic Inc., "it always increases the order, whether it's by two books or 20
or 50."

In June, Sandra Brown, a prolific author of suspense novels, was on the road
for "Hello, Darkness," which was published last month. District attorney
turned best-selling novelist Linda Fairstein just got back from the pre-pub tour
for her latest effort, "The Kills," due out in January. And let's not forget
Grove/Atlantic, which arranged a pre-pub tour for the then-unknown Charles
Frazier, author of the phenomenal success "Cold Mountain." Or Doubleday, which sent out Dan Brown to get the drums beating for "The Da Vinci Code." Perhaps you've
heard of it.

"It's book publishing's version of the DJ tour that musicians have done for
decades to get that all-important segment to play their soon-to-be-released
records on the air," says Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House Inc.
"Anything we publishers can do to break our authors out of the pack is something we
want to try."

Pre-pub tours often involve first-time novelists, a tough sell under any
circumstances, and mid-list authors who seem poised to hit the next level of
success. Mr. Brown is a case in point. So, to a lesser extent, is Elinor Lippman,
whose seventh novel, "The Pursuit of Alice Thrift," was published last spring.
"A few months before 'Alice Thrift' came out we decided to have a booksellers'
dinner in Los Angeles and San Francisco just to extend her reach," beyond the
northeast, where she is strong, says Carol Schneider of Random House. Ms.
Lippman charmed the crowd, Random House's L.A. sales rep baked fudge for everyone (that confection was a key plot point in the novel), "and come publication,"
adds Ms. Schneider, "there were huge stacks of the books at all the stores."

The pre-pub tour can also be good for an author who's working well-mined
territory. "Before 'John Adams' was published, we were all thinking 'another
biography of a president,' " says Anne Kubek, a marketing vice president at Borders
Books. But its author, David McCullough, "was good about showing that it was
a different take and it raised our buy." Other candidates include the novelist
who's just branched out to nonfiction (or vice versa), a well-established
novelist who switches genres, or a well-established author who switches houses
(witness Sandra Brown, a recent emigre from Warner Books to Simon & Schuster).
Depending on budget and circumstances, some authors who do pre-pub tours will
also do the traditional tour to coincide with the book's release.

Publishers know they have to be very selective in their choices. Booksellers
will clear their calendars for only so many author dinners; in any case,
visits from too many authors diminish the general effectiveness of the pre-pub
tour. The books have to dazzle. So, come to think of it, do the authors. Ms.
Brown, according to Simon & Schuster publicity director Victoria Meyer, "is
wonderfully charming and spectacular looking." Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci
Code," "is an appealing, charming and knowledgeable author," says Doubleday vice
president Suzanne Herz. "The pre-pub tour paid off in spades for that book."

Booksellers praise the innovation partly because it signals a publisher's
commitment to a book, partly because it calls their attention to a galley they
might otherwise have overlooked. "We hadn't paid any attention to 'Cold
Mountain' until Frazier came in," says Carla Cohen, co-owner of Politics and Prose in
Washington, D.C. "But he was so charming and so self-deprecating, and it was
fun to be with him, so it made us want to read the book." And order it big.

Booksellers say they can recall no author whose appearance did a disservice
to the marketing efforts; publishers insist they can think of no author they
should have kept at home working on the next book. "Be assured," says Random
House's Carol Schneider, "that we always have writers come and meet with us
before we decide to send them on the road."

On the Road No More: Book Tours Are Over
by Sara Nelson


Among the most frequently voiced opinions about contemporary publishing—on a list that includes such truisms as "Nobody really edits anymore" and the ever-popular whine, "It got good reviews, why didn’t it sell?"—is the idea that every author should go on a book tour. Like visions of Maxwell Perkins holding a pen in one fist and a tortured writer’s hand in the other, the picture of an author facing a hall filled with avid readers hanging on his every word is irresistible.

Never mind that it’s also unrealistic and unrealizable.

I published my first book last month, and no sooner had the boxes arrived in the stores than people—those in publishing and those outside—began asking: When do you go on tour? How many cities are you going to? My answers: I was going on a tour-lette, to just a couple of places where I actually had some friends and thus could beat the drum and send mass e-mails and call in old favors to get people to show up—and oh, by the way, this was not necessarily an all-expenses-paid-by-the-publisher boondoggle, but rather a cobbled-together financial plan involving my publisher, the venues that were hosting me, my day job and my very own bank account. To some, this was all surprising: Surely, the thinking goes, if a publisher is really "behind" a book, the house will pony up the money and the arrangements for an author’s soon-to-be-triumphant national tour.

Yet while I have no doubt that Hyperion, say, has paid for publicists to cater to Steve Martin’s whims as he goes around the country flogging his beguiling new novel The Pleasure of My Company, or that HarperCollins is covering Gail Collins’ multi-city trip on behalf of America’s Women, I’m equally sure that most so-called "mid-list" authors—like, God-willing, me—aren’t getting the same treatment.

But this is not a complaint; it’s a fact. And besides, the publishers are right: In an age of dwindling local-newspaper book coverage, formidable Internet, radio and TV outlets and—let’s face it—strained budgets and stagnant (at best) book sales, most authors shouldn’t spend thousands of anybody’s dollars to show their faces in Cleveland—unless, of course, they happen to have grown up in Cleveland. It’s simply not cost-effective, especially since even the author of a book showing modest to decent sales will likely end up in a Barnes and Noble in Berkeley with only three audience members, two of whom are homeless.

"I’d rather they just gave me the money," opined one such mid-list author whose name you’d know if only he’d let me use it. Or, better yet, spent the cash—and, not incidentally, the publicist’s energy—on ads, or on placement in stores, or on national radio coverage. "I’d spend days and days planning an author’s trip and arranging local TV shows in St. Louis—where we’d ultimately sell five books," said a former book publicist. "It would take away from the time and energy I might have had to get the book on Charlie Rose or Fresh Air." But to authors, appearances—
especially public appearances—
remain important.

"I can’t tell you how many authors still believe a publisher’s love is measured by the number of cities on their book tour," said Barb Burg, a senior vice president and director of publicity for the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. "I tell my authors, ‘You’ll know I really love you and care about your book when I spare you the humiliation of empty bookstores and lonely hotel rooms and spend our publicity time, energy and dollars on what’s best for the book.’"

That said, even the most harried publicist and frustrated author will agree that the human touch—a personally signed book at a reading or, maybe even more important, a friendly relationship between author, publisher and smart independent booksellers—never hurts sales. Yet it seems to me that you can establish those relationships without necessarily getting on a plane. My publisher, Putnam, brilliantly suggested that I send personal notes and signed books to booksellers around the country—some of whom I’ve met, thanks in part to my column in this paper—but also to many I have not. I’ve also been making a point of stopping in bookstores and signing stock; who knows if one of those "Autographed Copy" stickers might sway a wavering book buyer? And yes, I’ve gone out of town, too—I’m writing this from a hotel room in Florida, in fact—but I doubt I’ll ever log as many miles as Jill Nelson, the journalist and author of Sexual Healing, who said at the Sarasota Reading Festival on Nov. 1 that she’s visited more than 20 cities since her book appeared last summer. Her novel—from tiny, brand-new Chicago-based publisher Agate—is doing well; it’s selling strongly and has been sold to the movies.

But is a book a hit because its author toured, or is a tour successful because the book’s a hit?

You may reach Sara Nelson via email at: snelson@observer.com.

COPYRIGHT © 2003
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
On the Road No More: Book Tours Are Over

November 4, 2003
PUBLIC LIVES
Those Books Look Good? Imagine Reading Them
By ROBIN FINN

It doesn't take much solo snooping to deduce that Nancy Bass — the third-generation owner-operator of the Strand Book Stores, New York City's overflowing repository of the printed page — keeps her office at the flagship store conspicuously, even suspiciously, bookless.

With 16 miles of reading material at the corner of 12th Street and Broadway (it used to be, famously, eight miles, but according to the new awning, Ms. Bass recently doubled the inventory), why not sample her own wares?

After all, she's the woman who masterminded an ingenious, lucrative spinoff of the family business: she supplies good-looking books to the libraries of good-looking readers like Tom Cruise, Richard Gere and Bono, and creates literary backdrops for television and film sets such as Dr. Melfi's office in "The Sopranos," Mikhail Baryshnikov's artsy loft in "Sex and the City," Bette Midler's salon in "The Stepford Wives" and Denzel Washington's den in "The Manchurian Candidate." Doesn't she have her own personal library?

Not on the job; not when she's busy designing and collating home libraries in East Hampton for Steven Spielberg and Ronald O. Perelman, or selecting the perfect books for the 34-room Manhattan apartment of Stephen A. Schwarzman, a raging bibliophile and the chief executive of the Blackstone Group. For a Ralph Lauren Polo shop in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, she supplied books that contained no religious images or illustrations of birds or women; for a "Saturday Night Live" skit, she scraped together 50 feet of books about bears. Her "Books by the Foot" installations usually cost around $100 per foot, $350 if top-grade leather and gilt are specified for yachts or mansions with antique pretensions. As for rarities: anyone who craves that second printing of Shakespeare, circa 1632, will have to shell out $125,000.

But Ms. Bass couldn't be happier that people are springing for books the same way they spring for designer wallpaper. If they actually read their décor, all the better. "I think it's good to have books in the house; it warms things up, but I find that having books in my office is too distracting," is how Ms. Bass, 42, blithely explains away their absence when she sweeps in a little late and a lot damp, chic trench coat and long blond hair flapping, and discovers her third-floor sanctum being scrutinized by a nosy stranger.

A few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, where she lives with a talkative parrot named Monkey who doubles as an alarm clock, she has one room devoted to books, mostly biographies and New York City-centric titles. On her nightstand is "The Swiss Family Robinson," catch-up reading. Her all-time favorite books are "The Odyssey" and "Lolita," which she feels has gotten a tacky rap from Hollywood, but she doesn't own copies of either. "I'm not a hoarder," she says, hoarsely. Ms. Bass's voice is musty and dusty. It sounds, appropriately enough, like old books smell.

But her office is not the lair of a bookworm. It is the streamlined lair of a confirmed cosmopolite/socialite (she won the award for best Halloween costume last week at the Central Park Conservancy gala) with an M.B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an aggressive management style honed by three years at Exxon. There are file cabinets where bookcases could be, and framed publicity pieces — clipped from magazines like New York, Crain's and People — on the walls. Yes, that's Ms. Bass who had a walk-on role in "Absolutely Fabulous."

There's a model of the 11,000-square-foot addition to the store, a floor dedicated to art books, that she intends to unveil next spring; a futuristic elevator will link the bargain hunter's delights in the basement to rare books on the third floor. Ms. Bass is all about transition and progress: rather than losing momentum to the Internet, the Strand credits 20 percent of its $20 million annual revenue to sales made on the Web.

ANYHOW, that copy of "In Praise of Nepotism" in here sticks out like a sore thumb. Ms. Bass is, after all, following in the footsteps not only of her father, Fred, who still does all the book buying for the Strand from his first-floor perch, but her grandfather, Benjamin, who opened the store in 1927. It is named for London's publishing district, which he frequented. But classic nepotism isn't the reason she has the book; turns out the author is a former Strand employee, Adam Bellow, son of the novelist Saul Bellow. She hasn't even read it yet.

"The only problem with owning a bookstore is that everybody expects you to have read everything," Ms. Bass says. "My mission is to keep this place going; I'm very lucky that it's a beloved place. Our history is genuine. We're independent. We don't worry about the competition, but we do keep tweaking the store."

She has begun holding Plimptonesque soirées, and fantasizes about a coffee bar on the second floor (don't tell Dad; he's anti-cappuccino). Besides expanding the store, she's training for a triathlon; on a whim, she biked 92 miles in a race in July and has since embarked on a fitness blitz.

Ms. Bass grew up in Pelham Manor, but her notion of a perfect weekend was coming into the city with Grandpa: books, opera, theater, French restaurants. It didn't feel like a culture indoctrination; it felt like fun. When she got into stamp collecting, he told her there was no money it. By age 16, she worked weekends at the bookstore; the family always assumed she would join the business, and she is still glad she did. Exxon was a little too slow with the promotions.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Public Lives: Those Books Look Good? Imagine Reading Them

Head over heels for sassy chick lit
Publishers add imprints for plucky novels as genre catches on with young women

By Anita Jain
Published on October 27, 2003

Beyond torn clothing: "This generation wouldn't be caught dead reading a bodice-ripper," says Louise Burke, editor of Simon & Schuster's Downtown Press.

She's in her 20s or early 30s, works in publishing or advertising, and lives in the big city. She has to contend with messy roommates, noncommittal boyfriends and callous bosses.
Following in the footsteps of Bridget Jones--the weight-obsessed, lovelorn fictional character who sparked the "chick lit" frenzy five years ago--a legion of plucky heroines have flooded bookstores with their tales of single woe. The books have found a niche among young urban women looking for a sassy voice that defines their generation. Their popularity is breathing new life into a sagging book industry dominated by older readers.

"At heart, these books are about female empowerment. It's what the 20-year-old wants to read now," says Carrie Feron, editor of Avon Trade. "People love this format."

The trend has grown to such a crescendo that two publishers set up separate chick lit imprints this year and are rushing out these books at a rate of two to three a month. Simon & Schuster launched Downtown Press, featuring a shopping bag logo, and Kensington Publishing introduced Strapless.

HarperCollins and Harlequin Books caught the wave earlier, starting imprints Avon Trade and Red Dress Ink, respectively, in 2001. Random House has had a special marketing program called XYZ to tout the books for a couple of years.

Since Bridget Jones's Diary, written by British author Helen Fielding, debuted in the United States in 1998, publishers have disgorged hundreds of these titles. The most recent sensation is The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger. The novel is based on her stint as an assistant to famed Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Published in June by Doubleday, the book has already sold 500,000 copies in hardcover.

"This generation wouldn't be caught dead reading a bodice ripper. They're more cynical, more savvy," says Louise Burke, editor of Downtown Press. "They relate to these books in a way that my generation didn't relate to romance."

No longer trendy?

Still, some publishers believe that the phenomenon is losing steam. Chick lit has been declared passe in Britain, where the trend originated. The plots are formulaic and the themes identical, critics say.

"The field will start to blur, and you won't be able to distinguish the good from the bad," says Deborah Schneider, Ms. Weisberger's agent. "Publishers shouldn't do so much of it."

St. Martin's Press has forgone a separate imprint for its chick lit roster, despite the runaway success of The Nanny Diaries, which has sold 875,000 hardcovers and more than a million paperbacks since it was published more than a year ago.

"If you have an imprint, you have to have something to fill it, and you become less choosy," says Elizabeth Beier, who edited another chick lit hit, The Dirty Girls Social Club. "There's a potential to kill the golden goose."

Most publishers aren't worried about the movement tottering on its high Prada heels yet. They see the format as one that has staying power. Downtown Press plans to up the number of chick lit titles it publishes a month to two from one. Red Dress Ink recently increased its output to three a month, while Avon Trade aims for two a month.

They are banking on the loyalty of readers like Aren Cohen, who works at the Guggenheim Museum and devours about half a dozen of the cheeky novels each summer. "It's all the best and all the worst of that experience of being a single twentysomething gal in the city," the 31-year-old Manhattanite says.

Chick lit has also found a following among teenage girls. "The books are about shopping, about men, about what their lives are going to be," says John Scognamiglio, editor of Strapless, Kensington's imprint.

Regardless of the merits of the books themselves, they have young women reading. As bookstores begin displaying chick lit titles in separate sections, fans are scooping up two or three at a time, say publishers.

Lucrative niche

Industry experts say publishers can make more money from chick lit than from traditional fiction. Most chick lit authors are first-time writers who receive small advances ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. But their books sell far better than those by peers in other categories.

Chick lit novelists commonly rack up sales of 50,000 books, while many unknown writers in other genres could expect to sell only 5,000 to 10,000, Mr. Scognamiglio says. He adds that Strapless in a matter of months has become Kensington's third-best-selling imprint among five.

The push for a separate imprint at Kensington came from the sales department, which noticed how chick lit was flying off the shelves. "They wanted a book a month and wanted an imprint name to go with it," the editor says.

Isolating chick lit under a separate imprint demonstrates that a publishing house is serious about the genre, giving editors access to better books earlier on. After a heated auction, Downtown Press was able to snag Ms. Weisberger's second novel for more than $1 million.

The price may be worth it if it keeps young women reading. "This audience may graduate to more difficult subjects," Ms. Burke says.

Copyright 2003, Crain Communications, Inc

Amazon's New Search Engine

Amazon.com unveils new book search engine

SEATTLE, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- Amazon.com unveiled a massive new search engine Thursday called "Search Inside the Book", containing 33 million pages of a collection of 120,000 books.

Amazon's registered customers can receive specific pages by entering words or phrases into the search engine. Search Inside the Book allows users to view search results by returning images of actual pages, without the ability to download an entire book.

Wired magazine said the breakthrough creates a powerful research tool, while respecting copyright law. The magazine called the technology "one of the boldest maneuvers yet in an intense commercial competition."

The magazine said the Amazon.com archive is intentionally crippled. A search retrieves not text, but pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But one cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end.

Amazon.com will limit users to fewer than a few thousand pages per month, or no more than 20 percent of any single book.

-----------------------------------------

From: AuthorsGuild Staff [mailto:staff@authorsguild.org]
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 5:09 PM
To: Member@authorsguild.org
Subject: Amazon's New Book Database

You might have read about Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" program, launched yesterday, in which the entire texts of participating publishers' titles are available on the Amazon.com website. Visitors can locate titles containing search terms they choose, and then access the two pages preceding and the two pages following the page containing those terms. Amazon sets a limit that permits a user to see no more than about 20% of a particular work. The company reports that publishers consented to the placement of all 120,000+ titles in the program.

We've reviewed the contracts of major trade publishers and concluded that these publishers do not have the right to participate in this program without their authors' permission. We wrote to these publishers after we learned about the program in July. Most argued with our interpretation of their contract (no surprise there), but some have said that they would remove a work from the program if the author insisted.

Whether your works should be in the program is hard to say. This program will likely prove to be useful in promoting certain titles. Midlist and backlist books that are receiving little attention, for example, may benefit from additional exposure in searches. For other titles, the program may erode sales. Most reference books would be at clear risk in such a database. So would many (if not most) travel books and cookbooks. Most fiction titles are not likely to be greatly threatened.

When we learned of the program, we thought that it would be impossible to read more than 5 consecutive pages from a book in the program. It turns out that it's quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy book. We've even printed out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. It's not something one would care to do frequently, but it can be done. So a reader could choose to print out all the fish recipes from a cookbook in the program. Or the section on Tuscany from a travel book. We believe readers will do this,
and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.

Other books at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program.

We'll be sending you more information about the program shortly, and we're going to be in further touch with the major publishers. If you'd like a book removed from the program and your publisher isn't cooperating, please let us know.

-----------------------------------------
Copyright 2003, Authors Guild. This work may be forwarded and posted, so long as it is not edited. www.authorsguild.org

October 15, 2003
Sun Sentinel

By Oline H. Cogdill

Margery Flax, a New York City office manager, has become immortal. Or at least her name has. In a new mystery series by South Florida author Elaine Viets, "Margery Flax" is a 76-year-old eccentric landlady who has a penchant for purple. Flax, 52, couldn't be happier that her name is being taken in vain. She planned it that way.

Flax got into a bidding war during a national mystery writers' conference to have her name used in a Viets novel.

"I love the character," said Flax. "She has an attitude about life that I really like, and is independent. She speaks her own mind and makes her own choices. She's what I hope to be when I am that age."

Flax had only one request about her namesake -- that she love purple. "Other than that, I wanted the character to be what the author wanted it to be."

Auctioning off character names for charity has long been a fund- raising staple of genre writers' conferences. Winners pay to have their name -- or that of a friend, relative or even a pet -- used in an upcoming book. The named character may make a one-time cameo or, as in Flax's case, may become a series regular.

Now South Florida authors will be donating the name of a character as a thank-you gift for special donations to public radio and television station WXEL-Ch. 42 [and FM 90.7] during the station's fall membership drive Oct. 18-31. South Florida authors who will be donating character names include James Patterson, James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, James Grippando, Viets and Jonathon King. Carl Hiaasen is offering lunch with the author in Islamorada in a package that includes a two-night stay at Cheeca Lodge. Tampa author Tim Dorsey will be donating annotated, autographed manuscript pages of his upcoming Cadillac Beach, which is set in Miami Beach. Station officials won't say yet how high a donation to WXEL should be to get a name in a novel, but this may open a new chapter on fund-raising for the channel.

Authors, authors
BY CONNIE OGLE
cogle@herald.com

''Twenty will not come again,'' A.E. Housman wrote in A Shropshire Lad more than a century ago. But for the moment let's forget the gentleman's lamentation on his threescore years and 10 and concentrate on our own imminent and significant number: Twenty years of appearances by the most luminous authors. Twenty years of readings and panels and lectures, of demonstrations of culinary prowess and healing arts. Twenty years of delicate and rare volumes that must be touched with utmost care and kids' books destined to be passed around with jelly-stained hands. Twenty years of falling in love with books -- have you recovered from Augusten Burroughs' hilarious, poignant Dry yet? or Alberto Fuguet's nostalgic Movies of My Life? or Eric Schlosser's exposé Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market? Books, and books, and more books.

Let us think of 20 as our lucky number as the Miami Book Fair International celebrates its anniversary. The fun begins with a special appearance by former First Lady Barbara Bush on Nov. 1 to benefit the fair's literacy efforts and ends Nov. 9 in English with Edwin Black and his unsettling War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race and Abraham Foxman and his unsettling Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, and in Spanish with a panel on Latin American Perspectives with Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Enrique Krauze.

In between, there are more than enough author appearances in both languages to flummox readers, who will face the annual searing dilemma: What to do when two intriguing sessions occur at the same time? How to choose between a reading with Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore) and Martin Amis (Yellow Dog) and a panel that includes National Book Award nominee Carlos Eire (Waiting for Snow in Havana)? A program featuring debut writers Vendela Vida (And Now You Can Go), Julie Orringer (How to Breathe Underwater) and Felicia Luna Lemus (Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties) or readings by novelists Sena Jeter Naslund (Four Spirits), Pete Dexter (Train) and Robert Morgan (Brave Enemies)? And will there be enough time to fit in an arepa and to shop?

The fair began as a two-day event. Marjory Stoneman Douglas signed books; readers paid 25 cents for cookies with poems tucked inside. ''When we started, we had to beg publishers and authors to come,'' says Eduardo Padron, fair founder and president of Miami Dade College. ``Now they beg us to be here.''

The fair ''is a Miami original,'' says bookseller Mitchell Kaplan, cochairman and co-founder. ``Other people saw what we were doing in Miami, and they went to their own cities and began doing it themselves. The book fair is one of our great exports.''

Look back over the past, and you will find familiar names on this year's schedule. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who kicks off this year's week-night ''Evenings with...'' series on Nov. 2, also was the opener in 1986, the year the fair expanded to a full eight days. Garrison Keillor, who appears Nov. 3, shared his Lake Wobegon humor with an overflow opening-night audience in 1987. Other ''Evenings with...'' speakers are wonderfully recognizable: Mitch Albom (Nov. 4) on The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel (Nov. 5); a couple of Herald guys you might know, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen (Nov. 6); and choreographer Twyla Tharp (Nov. 7).

But the weekend, oh, the weekend! The street fair sprawls on Nov. 8-9; thousands flock, many to ingest arepas. Fiction lovers can revel in readings by Joyce Carol Oates (The Faith of a Writer; The Tattooed Girl) and Edmund White (Fanny: A Fiction); Carolyn Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel); Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada); Alan Lightman (Reunion); National Book Award nominee Edward Jones (The Known World). Budding political wonks can hear former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Madame Secretary) or former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal (The Clinton Wars). Aficionados can meet Broward's Will Eisner, credited with creating the first graphic novel, A Covenant with God, and here to promote his new work, Fagin the Jew.

For history buffs: Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin; David Maraniss on Vietnam with They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967; Caroline Alexander on The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (hint: Fletcher Christian was the bad guy). For New Yorkers: Colson Whitehead's urban essays, The Colossus of New York. And current-events lovers can get their fix with correspondent Anne Garrels (Naked in Baghdad), with Jessica Stern (Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill) and perhaps with Malika Oufkir, who relates her harrowing ordeal in Morocco in Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in A Desert Prison.

So many books, so little time, and if you don't believe me, check with Sara Nelson, who wrote a book with just such a title. She'll be here, too. But as the man says, 20 may not come again. So it's time to celebrate.

October 23, 2003
To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Once upon a time there was a land in love with fame and brand names. By and by, some famous brand-name people, holed up in their castles, discovered a new trade. They started writing books for children.

Many wrote books about children who sounded like themselves. Jerry, a comedian who made pots of gold with a television show and more pots of gold with commercials for a credit card, wrote a Halloween book about a greedy boy who wants to get his hands on lots and lots of brand-name candy. Madonna, a blond star, wrote about a pretty little blond girl who has no friends because everyone is jealous that she "shines like a star." And Britney, a younger blond singer, wrote a book, with her mother, about a young blond girl who really, really wants to become a singer.

Everyone agreed there was lots of money and publicity to be made in kid lit. It was a time, after all, when a young British woman — who didn't have a famous name when she started — wrote a series of books about a boy named Harry and, legend has it, became richer than Madonna, and richer, even, than the Queen of England. Joanne Kathleen Rowling was interviewed on television and mobbed by adoring fans. The movies made from her books were hailed as a franchise.

Publishers were excited. Over the years they had signed up the likes of Bill Cosby, Jimmy Buffett and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, as children's book authors. Then the floodgates opened. Soon children's bookstores were as studded with stars and has-been stars as "Hollywood Squares," with titles by Spike Lee, Keith Hernandez, Jesse Ventura, Jerry Seinfeld, Britney Spears, Maria Shriver, Katie Couric, Marlee Matlin, Bob Dylan, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, LeAnn Rimes, Jane Seymour, Harvey Fierstein, Della Reese, Michael Bolton and Debbie Allen jostling for shelf space. Madonna and Lynne Cheney, who is married to the vice president, are the latest celebrities to join the crowd. Their books — respectively, "The English Roses" and "A Is for Abigail" — made best-seller lists.

A handful of celebrities, like John Lithgow and Jamie Lee Curtis, actually have a gift for writing for children: they know how to tell a story and how to tell it with words and pictures and whimsical wit. For others, children's books are just another way to merchandise themselves, another vanity production: Britney books, along with Britney dolls, Britney cellphones and Britney mouse pads.

Instead of creating imaginary worlds or engaging fictional characters, many celebrities just riff about themselves. Cindy Crawford has filled her book "About Face" with pictures of herself and her son. And Shaquille O'Neal has given his younger self a starring role in fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." (At least he has a sense of humor: he has cast himself as Little Red and Goldilocks, not as the Big Bad Wolf or Papa Bear.)

Other celebrities seem to think they can use children's books to reinvent their images or jump-start a stalled career. Madonna became a children's author after her movie "Swept Away" failed to sweep anyone away. Spike Lee became a children's author when he said he was finding it increasingly difficult to get money to make his movies. And Ms. Cheney began publishing children's books when, as second lady, she exchanged her image as a combative veteran of the culture wars for the more traditional role of political wife.

The problem was that these authors counted on audiences being able to forget — or ignore — who they used to be. "Please, baby, please," the title of the book Spike Lee wrote with his wife Tonya Lewis Lee, was a famous line, used in a very different context, from his raunchy 1986 comedy, "She's Gotta Have It." And Madonna's previous venture into publishing was "Sex" — a 1992 book that celebrated exhibitionism, bondage, bisexuality and group sex.

The subtext of "Sex" was essentially sadomasochistic: that all relationships are about power and control. Her new book, "Roses," Madonna has said in interviews, strives to impart the Cabala-inspired wisdom that when we disconnect from the "one life-giving force in the world," we "bring chaos and pain and suffering into our lives."

As for Ms. Cheney's new book, "A Is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women," it stands in jarring contrast to her earlier censures of feminism. A page on writers, for instance, features the name of Alice Walker and a drawing of Toni Morrison, even though Ms. Cheney, in her former capacity as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, once pushed for the nomination of Carol Iannone to the endowment's advisory council. Ms Iannone, a literature professor, had written that awarding prestigious prizes to black writers like Ms. Morrison and Ms. Walker sacrificed "the demands of excellence to the democratic dictatorship of mediocrity."

Although Ms. Cheney has often denounced multiculturalism and political correctness, her children's books, "A Is for Abigail" and "America: A Patriotic Primer," are illustrated with pictures of people of many different colors. Madonna's "Roses" similarly features drawings of a rainbow quartet of girls: a blonde, a redhead, an African-American and an Asian.

In retelling several famous folk tales, Shaquille O'Neal's "Shaq and the Beanstalk and Other Very Tall Tales" also tries to take a politically correct approach to violence, awkwardly trying to reconcile the Grimm-ness of the original tales with a gentler perspective. Before knocking out an angry giant with a golden basketball, the hero pauses to deliver a finger-wagging aside: "I have always believed that fighting is the loser's way out. You get nowhere using violence. It's always better to talk your problems out."

Many celebrities serve up similarly well-meaning but trite lessons in their children's books, hoping perhaps to emulate the success of William J. Bennett's best seller, "The Children's Book of Virtues." Katie Couric's "Brand New Kid" delivers the message that kids should reach out to the new boy at school. Keith Hernandez's "First-Base Hero" tells the reader that everyone makes mistakes and that it is important to persevere. And Julie Andrews Edwards's book, "Dumpy and the Firefighters," preaches that everyone can make a valuable contribution to the community.

While such morals are certainly worthy ones, they are no substitute for real storytelling, a craft many celebrities seem to think can be picked up overnight in between their real-life gigs. Other celebrity books do not even promote worthwhile lessons. In Madonna's book a clique of cool girls considers the beautiful Binah a sadly deprived child because she has only one doll and lots of books and has to perform unheard of chores like setting the table and emptying the trash. "The English Roses couldn't believe their eyes," Madonna writes. "They had never seen a girl work so hard in their lives. `She reminds me of Cinderella,' said Amy."

Jerry Seinfeld's "Halloween" has an even more offensive message: greed is good and rudeness is funny. His hero, an obnoxious brat, spurns some of the trick-or-treat candy he has received with snarky disdain: "Do me a favor, you keep that one," he tells an old woman who has given him an orange marshmallow treat. "We've got all the doorstops we need already, thank you very much. We're going for NAME CANDY ONLY this year."

As for the branding of children's literature with celebrity names, the fad shows no signs of flagging. Madonna has four more children's books on the way. The next, "Mr. Peabody's Apples," is due out on Nov. 10. Jay Leno and the football playing twins Tiki and Ronde Barber reportedly have children's books in the works as well.

So far Joanne Kathleen Rowling — never mind the Grimm brothers and Dr. Seuss — faces little serious competition in the children's book business, at least not from the celebrities who covet her celebrity and underestimate the difficulty of her art.




To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play

Sara Paretsky has been giving an eye-opening and thought provoking speech about the Patriot Act, libraries and freedom called "Truth, Lies and Duct Tape" and has made a text version available on her website. Check it out...

http://www.saraparetsky.com/silence.html

The Anthony Awards

Best Novel: City of Bones by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Best First Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin's)

Best Paperback Original: Fatal Truth by Robin Burcell (Avon)


Macavity Awards

Best Mystery Novel: Winter and Night by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin's Minotaur)


Shamus Awards

Best P.I. Novel: Blackwater Sound by James W. Hall (St. Martin's)

Best First P.I. Novel: The Distance by Eddie Muller (Scribner)

Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel: The Poisoned Rose by D. Daniel Judson (Bantam)


Barry Awards

Best Novel: City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Best First Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Best British Novel: The White Road by John Connolly

Best Paperback Original: Cold Silence by Danielle Girard


2003 Nero Award: S.J. Rozan

THE STONE READER

On a bright and sunny Sunday, I sweet-talked my family into going to the movies. Several months ago I marked my calendar with the arrival date of "The Stone Reader;" it was worth the wait. I don't see enough movies to properly review one, but I will share a few thoughts. In 1972 Mark Moskowitz bought a book called The Stones of Summer because of a rave review in the NY Times that called it something like the voice of a new generation. He couldn't get into it then, so he put it away and came across it a few years ago. He read it, and fell in love with it.  

Now this is not a book that I would probably read, but any bibliophile/bookbitch can certainly identify with the idea of falling in love with a book, of wanting to read all the author's books. But when Moskowitz went looking for more books by Dow Mossman, he hit a different kind of stone; a stone wall. He couldn't find a thing and not only that, he discovered that this book which he thought brilliant, was out of print. Moskowitz has a film production company that does political commercials and he decided to film his journey to find out what happened to Mossman.  

To be perfectly honest, there were slightly less than a dozen people in the theater during the showing I saw, and at one point I was the only one awake. There are probably too many artsy-fartsy shots of butterflies and moons, although I did love the shots of forsythia, a bush I have missed for my many years of Florida living. Yet the DVD comes out in November, and I find myself longing to order it online from The Stone Reader website because it comes not only with the obligatory additional footage but an entire third disk that won't be available for purchase elsewhere - 4 more hours of a 2 hour movie that put a lot of people to sleep. But it's about books, and one man's passion for books, and his joy and frustration shines through every minute of this film. I've never met Mr. Moskowitz, yet he feels like a friend.  

Barnes & Noble started publishing books, and won the rights to reprint The Stones of Summer at auction. So far it is available only through the B&N website and Amazon.com (pre-order, publication has been pushed back to October.) Borders, Books-a-Million, and the American Booksellers Association group of independent booksellers say they won't be carrying it, and they are not happy that B&N is the publisher, because it is exactly the sort of book indies generally embrace.

"The Stone Reader" is the sort of film that memories are made of.

I See Dead Authors: Authors Who Write from Beyond the Grave
by Marlo Verrilla
Latrobe Bulletin
Latrobe, Pa

I see dead authors. In my job it’s hard not to miss them. No, they are not lurking in the basement with quill in hand creating some masterpiece, but they might as well be. Some dead authors have been publishing for years.

Suspense writer Lawrence Sanders died in 1998 yet just published a new book this year called McNally’s Dare. It seems his character, Archy McNally was so popular, the public couldn’t stand to have him die with his creator, so poor Lawrence has to file 1099 forms from the great beyond. Actually, author Vincent Lardo took over the character with McNally’s Dilemma, which was published in 1999. Lardo has published four books since then under the Sanders name: McNally’s Dare, McNally’s Chance, McNally’s Alibi and McNally’s Folly.

Louis L’Amour, the greatest western writer ever to live, wrote three books a year for more than 30 years during his career, so it seems natural that a little thing like death couldn’t stop his writing obsession. He began his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, while suffering from pneumonia and was editing it the day he died. Since then his publisher, Bantam Books, continues to release his work. The company has re-released many of his books, such as four Hopalong Cassidy novels, but a new original book, With These Hands, a collection of short stories, was published in 2002.

Many other authors died before many of their works were published. Poet Sylvia Plath, died in 1963, with only The Colossus and The Bell Jar in print. Other works were published posthumously, such as: Ariel, Winter Trees, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Other books about her continue to be published. The movie, Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, hit theaters last week in limited release.

The above three authors are like many dead authors releasing books. They have either had their work taken over by someone else or someone found their work and published them after they left this earth. Yet, there is still one other type of dead author that exists, or rather doesn’t exist.

To the shock of kiddies everywhere, Franklin W. Dixon, great author of The Hardy Boys series, is not a real person. In 1927, publisher Edward Statemeyer came up with the idea of a private investigator’s two sons who get mixed up with mysteries of their own to solve. He assigned the story, or stories, as he intended it to be a series, to Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian journalist. McFarlane wrote every book until 1947’s The Phantom Freighter, but by the 1950s, the series had become dated to readers. In 1959, the series was rewritten to reflect a more progressive and faster society, as well as remove some derogatory ethnic references. Some readers liked the change, but others were outraged, thus leading Applewood Books to reprint facsimiles of the original series. These books with the original words and illustrations hit the market in 1991.

The Hardy Boys also had another incarnation in 1986 with the Hardy Boys Casefiles that offered more contemporary action. All in all, the following authors wrote The Hardy Boys series over the years: Leslie McFarlane, Andrew E. Svenson, Harriet S. Adams and James Duncan Lawrence.

So, my fellow book enthusiasts, be careful what you read, you just might be getting messages from the beyond. Dead authors exist and they will keep writing despite the laws of physics.

The following dead authors can be found at the Ligonier Valley Library: Douglas Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V.C. Andrews, Jane Austen, Frank Baum, Max Brand, Catherine Cookson, Brian Daley, Emily Dickinson, Zane Grey, Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway, L. Ron Hubbard, Caroline Keene, Robert Ludlum, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Rich, Harold Robbins, Eliott Roosevelt, Rex Stout, John Kennedy Toole, Anthony Trollope and Gertrude Chandler Warner.

The above list was compiled by Stacy Alesi of the Southwest County Regional Library in Boca Raton, Florida. She is known on the Web as the Bookbitch and can be found at www.bookbitch.com

The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

Don't like the list? Put your thoughts direct to Robert McCrum

Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.


12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.


13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.


14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.


16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.

24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.

38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.

43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.

45. Ulysses James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.

47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.

49. The Trial Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.

55. USA John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.

58. The Plague Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.

62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.

63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68. On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.

70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'

75. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.

81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.

82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.

83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.

84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.

85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.

88. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.

90. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.

95. La Confidential James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.

96. Wise Children Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.

97. Atonement Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.

Who did we miss?
So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?
Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?
What's happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Hesse's Siddhartha, Mishima's The Sea of Fertility, Süskind's Perfume and Zola's Germinal?
Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?
Let us know what you think. Send your own suggestions for the 100 best books ever to: observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

Fiction

T.C. Boyle, "Drop City" (Viking/Penguin Group USA)
Shirley Hazzard, "The Great Fire" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Edward P. Jones, "The Known World" (Amistad/HarperCollins)
Scott Spencer, "A Ship Made of Paper" (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Marianne Wiggins, "Evidence of Things Unseen" (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum, "Gulag: A History" (Doubleday/Random House)
George Howe Colt, "The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American
Summer
Home" (Scribner/S&S)
John D’Emilio, "Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin"
(Free Press/S&S)
Carlos Eire, "Waiting For Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy"
(Free Press/S&S)
Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness
at the Fair That Changed America" (Crown Publishers/Random House)

Young People’s Literature

Paul Fleischman, "Breakout" (Cricket Books/A Marcato Books/ Carus
Publishing)
Polly Horvath, "The Canning Season" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Murphy, "An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the
Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793" (Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin)
Richard Peck, "The River Between Us" (Dial Books/Penguin Group USA)
Jacqueline Woodson, "Locomotion" (G.P. Putnam’s Sons./Penguin Group
USA)

Poetry

Carole Muske-Dukes, "Sparrow: Poems" (Random House)
Charles Simic, "The Voice at 3 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems"
(Harcourt)
Louis Simpson, "The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems,
1940-2001" (BOA Editions)
C.K. Williams, "The Singing: Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Kevin Young, "Jelly Roll: A Blues" (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)

from Poynteronline
Posted, Oct. 13, 2003
Updated, Oct. 13, 2003

The First Draft of Mystery

By Robin Sloan
Online Reporter

There are a lot of would-be novelists in newsrooms across America.

Maybe you're one of them. If so, today's your lucky day, because I've got a sure-fire plan to go from writing police briefs to paperback best-sellers.

Here's what you do:

First, attend the University of Florida. Read all of Raymond Chandler's stories. Major in journalism, minor in creative writing.

Graduate. Get yourself to a newspaper in Florida.

Start on the cops beat, then move to feature writing.

Get a gig writing for the Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel magazine during the height of the '80s crime wave in Florida, during that magic, morbid moment when Fort Lauderdale is the murder capital of the world. Write some awesome stories, and get short-listed for the Pulitzer.

As you're doing all this, write on your own time, too. Pen a couple of novels after hours -- but leave them in your desk drawer. They're just for practice.

Parlay your magazine experience into a gig at the Los Angeles Times. Now you're in Chandler's territory.

Wait three years. Publish your first mystery novel. Win a prize. Quit journalism.

More than a dozen years -- and books -- later, you'll find yourself at the Don CeSar, a huge, pinker-than-life hotel on Florida's St. Pete Beach.

You'll be talking to a room full of features-page editors from across the country. And here's what you'll say:

"It's safe to say I would not be standing here talking to you about my novels if I had not been a journalist first."

OK, maybe it won't go exactly like that. But that's what happened to Michael Connelly, who's gone from covering cops in Daytona Beach to selling millions of books around the world. And even if your path is, er, not precisely the same as his, there are some lessons to be gained from Connelly's experience.

The Telling Detail
Michael Connelly was working at the Sun-Sentinel magazine, and Fort Lauderdale was the most dangerous place in the country.

Let's see how the homicide squad operates, he thought. So he spent a week with them, going out whenever they were called, day or night.

The central character in his story was the squad's sergeant. At each murder scene, he would take off his glasses and crouch quietly beside the body. Connelly made a note of these solemn moments.

Later, at the very end of the week, he was talking to the sergeant for the last time. The man looked utterly exhausted. He took off his glasses.

And that's when Connelly saw the groove. When the sergeant took off his glasses and held them in his mouth as he crouched over the murder victims, his teeth were clenched so tight they cut into the plastic. There was a deep groove.

That was a window into the sergeant -- it was the telling detail.

Connelly has looked for those details ever since.

Here's the story.

From journalism, Connelly learned the craft of writing well and quickly; the discipline to do it every day; and the focus that comes with searching for the single, telling detail.

He also learned journalism's public mission.

Connelly calls his genre "mystery with a message." In mystery, he says, there are writers who are trying to talk about what's happening in our lives today — racism, terrorism, corporate greed. And because mystery writers, like journalists, write fast, their work has a special immediacy.

Six months after Sept. 11, 2001, Connelly had a book out, "City of Bones," that talked about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and how they made everything else seem small in comparison.

Last April, his book "Lost Light" hit the stands. The Publishers Weekly blurb says that the book leads Connelly's recurring hero, Harry Bosch, into contact with "the elite terrorist hunters of the new Department of Homeland Security. "This is a thriller that raises questions about the Patriot Act, Connelly says. Mystery with a message.

So Connelly still uses the tools of journalism, and he deals with many of the same subjects. But there are, of course, some significant differences as well.

Now Connelly revels in the journalist's curse: He never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

"I don't let accuracy get in the way of the velocity and drama of a story," he says. "In a way, I pride myself on being a manipulator of facts."

In 1996, Connelly wrote "The Poet," a mystery with a journalist as protagonist.

"I'd never read a fictional account of a journalist that was accurate to my experience," Connelly says. So he said to himself, "I'm gonna write the first accurate thriller about a journalist ... I accomplished that for about 50 pages."

Here's how it sounds:
Glenn was a good editor who prized a good read more than anything else about a story. That's what I liked about him. In this business editors are of two schools. Some like facts and cram them into a story until it is so overburdened that practically no one will read it to the end. And some like words and never let the facts get in the way. Glenn liked me because I could write and he pretty much let me choose what I wrote about ... If he were gone, I'd probably find myself back on the daily cop beat, writing briefs off the police log. Doing little murders.
But after that, Connelly says, the character becomes a journalist's fantasy. For example:
The rest of the windows shattered and as I completed my roll I opened my eyes enough to get a bead on Gladden. He was squirming on the floor, his eyes wide but not focused and his hands held to his ears. But I could tell he had been too late in recognizing what was happening. I had been able to block at least some of the impact of the concussion grenade. He looked as if he had taken the full brunt of it. I saw the gun lying loose on the floor next to his legs. Without pausing to consider my chances, I quickly crawled to it.
Oh, well. "Being deadly accurate -- in novels -- is deadly boring," Connelly says.

A journalist turned novelist, using the skills learned writing the first draft of history to infuse current concerns and meaning into popular mystery. Could there be anything he misses?

Absolutely. He left journalism a decade ago. He works at home now, all alone, weaving intricate plots, making mysteries with meaning, and more than anything else, Michael Connelly misses the newsroom.

» Read more about Connelly at his official website


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