Sure, the dictionary got 'phat,' but it also trimmed the fat. Let's shed a tear for forgotten pieces of our language.
And there goes your last hope of learning what 'snollygoster' means. Pity.
David Kipen, Chronicle Book Critic
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/24/DD160008.DTL

When the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary came out in July, the publisher and the media mostly stressed the 10,000 newly added words and senses. "Phat," especially, came in for a lot of attention, as did "Frankenfood" and "cheesed off." What got hardly any attention were the evicted words -- the fat that got trimmed to make room for "phat." According to Karen Wilkinson, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster's offices in Springfield, Mass., a list of such words would run into the hundreds.

Of course, if Merriam-Webster didn't show a few hundred words the door every 10 years or so, there would be no room for all the new words coming down the pike. But let us just the same consider the unmarked graves of the words that Merriam-Webster's 11th has so unceremoniously whacked, and perhaps suggest a way that mourners might light a candle for their resurrection.

Among these ghost words, the most unjustly cashiered may well be "snollygoster." A snollygoster is . . . a snollygoster is . . . actually, without a previous edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary handy, there's no telling anymore what a snollygoster is. Luckily -- and here's a phrase that must give every last lexicographer at Merriam-Webster the fantods - - that's what Google's for. Thanks to Google, somebody named Michael Quinion at Quinion.com would have us all know that a snollygoster is "a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician." Now there's a word that's outlived its usefulness, you bet.

But before anybody gets too high and mighty about Merriam-Webster's excommunication of snollygoster, it probably bears repeating that languages are living things, not museum pieces. Dictionaries are snapshots from life, not idealized friezes.

This goes for Merriam-Webster's new desk reference just as it did for the first major English dictionary, Samuel Johnson's, in 1755. That year of Johnson's presumptuous task, by the way, is so momentous in the annals of lexicography that Merriam-Webster still uses it to demarcate "obsolete" words from merely "archaic" ones.

A fine new condensed version of Johnson's dictionary has just come out from Walker/Levenger, and it still rewards browsing far more than any other dictionary on the market. Snollygoster isn't in it, but "abligurition ("a prodigal spending on meat and drink") and 3,100 other selections are -- including many now-unfamiliar victims of Merriam-Webster's previous thinnings of the herd.


MICROREADER SHEEP-DIPPED
This time around, according to Merriam-Webster's Wilkinson, the 11th edition bounced not just snollygoster but also microcopy, microreader, microreproduction, record changer, portapak, pantdress, pocket-handkerchief, poke bonnet, vitamin G, lantern pinion, frutescent, impudicity, wool stapler, long play, retirant, sheep-dip, ten-cent store and traffic manager. A few hundred more, too, but nobody keeps a special list.

Why were these poor, preterite words shown the door, while countless others lived to define another day? It all has to do with the 15 million citations thus far cribbed by Merriam-Webster's faithful scriveners. Electronically and by hand, these lexicographers spend hours "pluck[ing] a few words from the multitudes rushing toward the Void of forgetfulness," as Thomas Pynchon has James Boswell say in "Mason & Dixon." If a word goes too many years without getting plucked for any citations -- falls out of usage, that is, even from historical novels -- it, too, could wake up snollygostered.

Hard to believe that even a fuddy-duddy could work up much indignation over the ouster of vitamin G, now that pretty much everybody calls it riboflavin. But more than a few folks are bound to miss a lovely mouthful like "frutescent, " which means "having or approaching the habit or appearance of a shrub."

There is, mercifully, a court of appeal for these and other condemned words.

Use a word often enough in print (Merriam-Webster hasn't yet got the hang of tracking radio and television citations, let alone untranscribed conversation),

and the same cruel statistics that doomed a word can just as easily resurrect it. According to Wilkinson, it's already worked for "wheatgrass," which is enjoying a second flowering thanks to a new generation of healthy eaters. As in muscle tone, so in vocabulary: Use it or lose it. Failing that, work extra hard to bring it back.

But there's a catch. Ask Wilkinson which publications (other than books) Merriam-Webster sifts for all those life-giving citations, and here are the sample titles she comes up with: the New York Times, the New Yorker, Newsweek, People, Air & Space, Better Homes and Gardens, Cats, Consumer Reports, Yoga Journal, Discover, Harper's, Library Journal, National Geographic, the New England Journal of Medicine, PC Magazine, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Time, TV Guide, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and Chocolatier.

Yes, come the 12th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in 2014, these are the publications by whose choices about usage all English words will live or die. Not to be a broken record here -- and how much longer does that expression have to live? -- but how many of those titles are edited west of the Mississippi, or even the Hudson? Could it finally be time for a Dictionary of the West, as different from its Yankee predecessors as Noah Webster's first American dictionary in 1806 was from Samuel Johnson's?


SNOLLYGOSTER? SHOW ME
Harry Truman might have thought so. A Midwestern master of American English who lived most of his life west of the Hudson, Truman supposedly numbered among the last to use the word "snollygoster" freely. This raises an uncomfortable question for Merriam-Webster: How are those of us dedicated to the biodiversity of language ever going to save the snollygoster from extinction when regional pockets like Truman's Missouri, where the word thrived -- and may still thrive, for all Massachusetts knows -- tend not to write for, or get quoted in, or even subscribe to, the New York Times?

Let alone Chocolatier.

The Internet lexicographer Quinion adds one final postscript to the arcane saga of the snollygoster: "The origin is unknown, though the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may be linked to snallygoster, which some suppose to derive from the German schnelle Geister, literally a fast-moving ghost, and which was a mythical monster of vast size -- half reptile, half bird . . ."

So Merriam-Webster's fine dictionary may still earn a place on the reference shelves at most publications, including this one, but the snollygoster may yet have its revenge. If some day a shadow should fall across the window-facing desks at Merriam-Webster, and a cry, somewhere between a reptilian snorting and a screech, pierce the sky, well . . . they can't say they weren't warned. If those lexicographers are smart, they have 10 years to find an excuse to mollify the snollygoster in time for the next edition. It doesn't sound like anything you want to get cheesed off.

E-mail David Kipen at dkipen@sfchronicle.com.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Streams of 'Mystic River' fed by Lehane's old town
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
A decade ago, novelist Dennis Lehane was living in the Charlestown section of Boston, an old working-class Irish neighborhood, when he saw the first hints of gentrification.
Lehane says he wondered "what would happen to the neighborhood once the Saabs outnumbered the Chevys and the corner store became a Starbucks."

Sean Penn stars in the film version of Mystic River, out in October.
By Merie W. Wallace, Warner Bros.

That became the seeds of the setting for his murder mystery, Mystic River, the latest selection of the USA TODAY Book Club.

A few years later, Lehane says, "a sentence started bopping around in my head: 'Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie-love, with an orchestra booming through his blood ....'" And that became the first sentence of the part of the novel set in the present.

"Pretty soon after that," Lehane says, "the rest of the characters began to wander onto the stage and scuff the floorboards and start looking at me like, 'So what do you want us to do here, boss?' "

Which, more or less, is how Lehane came to write the novel about three childhood friends entangled in a murder 25 years later — as father of the victim, police investigator and suspect. The movie version opens next month.




Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2003-09-24-lehane-town_x.htm

Whose Book Is It Anyway? When Journalists Get Book Deals
by Sara Nelson

Last spring, Seth Mnookin landed himself the kind of book deal every journalist who’s honest would admit to coveting: a healthy six-figure deal with Random House for a book about the debacle at The New York Times. A longtime media reporter who had covered The Times at Inside.com and Brill’s Content, Mr. Mnookin, a senior writer for Newsweek’s national-affairs desk, found himself with a 12-month deadline and a six-figure contract negotiated with Random House editor in chief Dan Menaker by agent David McCormick. There was just one problem: Could Mr. Mnookin write his book—which would necessarily include some information he’d uncovered during his time on the magazine’s staff—in his so-called free time and thus remain at the weekly, or would he need to take a leave of absence? And what exactly would such a leave of absence entail? Or would he be required to resign from his job?

In Mr. Mnookin’s case, at least, there was no conflict of interest about his jumping off from the research he’d gathered at Newsweek. "The Times was an institution I was covering from before [I got to the magazine]," he said. "Technically or legally, there was no issue." Still, when Mr. Mnookin asked Newsweek brass about the possibility of a leave, he was refused—for other reasons. "The most they give in this situation was two or three months," he said. Besides, most places only grant leaves to longtime staffers, and Mr. Mnookin had been there only a little over a year. The result: He resigned his job.

Or did he? "I’m still writing media pieces for them, and they’re paying me," he said. Never mind that they’re no longer paying him a salary or benefits and that the magazine is under no obligation to hold his job for him. "They’ve said they’d love to have me back," he said.

The world is full of journalists who look for—and get—book deals. (In the depth of the recession, a lot of us believe it’s easier to get a book contract than a raise at our day jobs, or even a new staff position altogether.) But who gets permission to do a book, and who gets a leave of absence, and why, and what it all means, varies from case to case and place to place.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why journalists would seek out extracurricular writing projects—"How else can we supplement our not-great salaries?" one asked, rhetorically—but the issues are different for management. "Granting book leaves is a way for companies to reward people they like; not granting them is a way to get rid of people they don’t," said one former New York Times staffer who was one of the latter. Which might explain why the brass is always so vague about how they make their decisions. "We won’t comment on specifics," said Bill Schmidt, associate managing editor of The New York Times and the person with whom staffers are supposed to discuss their book plans (along with their department heads), when I try to ask him about two recent Times people: Jere Longman, who wrote Among the Heroes for HarperCollins, and Alex Kuczynski, who is currently at work on a book for Doubleday about women and power. Ms. Kuczynski said she expects to return to the paper by the beginning of the year.

"While we want to encourage people to have rich and full careers, you always want to know what this is going to do to demands on their time," said Mr. Schmidt, adding that his first concern is conflict of interest: "We’re very leery if a reporter is keen to write a book about an ongoing story that he or she is covering that moment." As for whether the leave-grantees get to keep their benefits, access to their offices and/or their jobs in the long term (perks I thought were, in fact, the very definition of a "leave"): At The Times, anyway, that’s now "all part of the negotiations," according to Mr. Schmidt.

Basically, it comes down to this: Sometimes it means granting you a full-out leave with perks, like the kind John A. Byrne got when, in 2000, he took 101¼2 months off from BusinessWeek to write Jack Welch’s autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut—and retained his office and his benefits. And sometimes it means offering certain "incentives" intended to help both the individual and the organization. At The Times, for example, authors in search of publishers are encouraged to sit down and negotiate with Times Books—a publishing imprint jointly operated by Henry Holt and The New York Times. Writers who have considered publishing with Times Books say the terms of the leave they’re offered—office access, benefits, sometimes even their salaries or portions thereof—are far more favorable than the ones they’d get if they opted to publish with, say, Simon and Schuster. The problem, said one person close to the Times Books set-up, is that the advances they offer are not competitive.

So sometimes the news organizations have to be even more creative in finding ways to protect their own stories and hold on to the reporters who cover them. Take the case of The Smartest Guys in the Room, Penguin Portfolio’s forthcoming book about Enron. The authors of the book are Bethany McLean, who wrote one of the first stories about the corruption at the energy giant, and Texas-based reporter Peter Elkind, under the guidance of Fortune editorial director Joe Nocera—who, Ms. McLean said, had the original idea for the book and decided "it was the right time" to pitch it. Both Ms. McLean and Mr. Elkind—who had never worked together before—are Fortune writers now on leave from the magazine. According to Ms. McLean, however, they retain their titles, their offices, the use of such facilities as the Time Inc. library and, most importantly, their salaries. (They have contributed only a few small pieces to the magazine since embarking on the project.) They will also share the byline, which doesn’t include any mention of the magazine that employs them, so as to head off any suspicion that the book includes recycled or unoriginal material. So what’s the catch? "This was a deal that was done with Fortune, not with the individuals," said someone close to the process. Which means, presumably—though neither Ms. McLean nor a Fortune spokesperson will confirm it—that the authors were at least one level removed from the negotiating process, that they didn’t necessarily get any of the advance and may not even be getting future royalties. When I suggested to Ms. McLean that she might have gotten a better deal if she’d struck out on her own in search of a publisher for the story many believe she "owned" from the beginning, she said she was "not necessarily comfortable jumping off and doing the book myself." She pointed out that had she gone it alone, she would have had to hire her own researchers, find her own place to keep documents, and suffer without double phone lines and high-speed computers—not to mention without the companionship of an office full of helpful (but not intrusive) colleagues.

All of which may not be the best reasons for letting your magazine bosses take control of your book deal, but they’re not inconsequential ones, either. "If I hadn’t been at Fortune, we wouldn’t have done as good a book," Ms. McLean said.

Spoken by exactly the kind of staffer you really want to keep.

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

This column ran on page 8 in the 9/29/2003 edition of The New York Observer.



Whose Book Is It Anyway? When Journalists Get Book Deals

September 24, 2003
Clinton 'History' Doesn't Repeat Itself in China
By JOSEPH KAHN


BEIJING, Sept. 23 — In her autobiography, "Living History," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recounts how China's imprisonment of a prominent human rights activist, Harry Wu, caused a sensation in the United States and nearly derailed her plans to attend a United Nations women's conference held in Beijing in 1995.

In the officially licensed Chinese edition of Mrs. Clinton's book, though, Mr. Wu makes just a cameo appearance. While named, he is otherwise identified only as a person who was "prosecuted for espionage and detained awaiting trial."

Mrs. Clinton's book has become a major best seller in China, as it has in the United States, and her smiling likeness decorates bookstores and airport shops nationwide. Yilin Press, the government-owned publisher of the mainland version of the book, says it has become the most popular foreign political memoir in Chinese history, with 200,000 copies sold in just over a month.

But nearly everything Mrs. Clinton had to say about China, including descriptions of her own visits here, former President Bill Clinton's meetings with Chinese leaders and her criticisms of Communist Party social controls and human rights policies, has been shortened or selectively excerpted to remove commentary deemed offensive by Beijing.

The Chinese publisher has acknowledged making changes in the text but said they were "minor, technical" alternations that did not affect the integrity of the book.

Mrs. Clinton and Simon & Schuster, her American publisher, dispute that. "I was amazed and outraged to hear about this," Senator Clinton said in Washington today. "They censored my book, just like they tried to censor me."

In a statement issued today, a day after Mrs. Clinton was alerted to the editing changes by The New York Times, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said Simon & Schuster had sent a letter to the Chinese publishing house demanding that it recall the Chinese edition and provide a new translation that faithfully adheres to the original.

Robert Barnett, a lawyer for the Clintons who has overseen the book's domestic and international release, said the changes had been made without consultation, adding, "The senator will do everything she can to make sure that her readers in China get an accurate translation of her book."

Simon & Schuster prepared a new translation of passages dealing with China and posted them on its Web site today.

China often censors political content in its newspapers, television broadcasts, films, books and many of the arts, as well as the Internet. The authorities also routinely ban the publication or screening of foreign books or films that depict China in a negative light.

But the publication of books like "Living History" is part of an effort to show that China is becoming a more open society. China has been publishing more foreign titles and screening more imported films recently, at least partly fulfilling commitments to loosen media controls that it made as a condition of entering the World Trade Organization.

The heavy promotion of Mrs. Clinton's book initially seemed to signal new tolerance, given that the English version refers repeatedly, and in some cases pointedly, to Chinese political repression, the status of Tibet and other topics that are not generally discussed here.

In fact, the publisher has advertised the book — titled "Qinli Lishi," which translates to something like "Personal History" — as the most unabridged foreign political memoir in Chinese publishing history.

"In the past, translated books always had some cuts," an official of Yilin Press told the Beijing Evening News after the book's release last month. "But the Chinese translation of this keeps 99.9 percent of the original's content."

What the official did not mention is that the other one-tenth of 1 percent, if the edited passages indeed constitute such a tiny fraction of the total, involve most references to China itself.

The manuscript appears to have been combed for even stray mentions of China or its leaders, though the Chinese editors did not mark or otherwise indicate where they had made changes or elisions in the 466-page text.

For example, while Mrs. Clinton's English text discusses her concerns about China's treatment of the women's groups that attended the 1995 United Nations conference on women, the Chinese version leaves that part out. It also deletes a paragraph in which she criticizes the Chinese for not allowing a speech she made to be broadcast, in effect censoring references to censorship.

Though the Chinese edition includes much of Mrs. Clinton's account of her visit to China in 1998 with President Clinton, it selectively strikes out sensitive passages, including her statement that she was "haunted by the events at Tiananmen," the violent crackdown on a student-led pro-democracy demonstration in 1989.

The Chinese version says Mrs. Clinton attended a Protestant religious service in Beijing but omits a line that religious freedom was still "a right forbidden to many."

Mrs. Clinton's original version included a lighthearted story that needled the Chinese for making extensive preparations for a visit by foreign dignitaries.

She wrote that before she had stopped for an informal lunch in Shanghai, the police had replaced the staff in nearby stores with "attractive young people wearing Western clothes." That anecdote did not make the cut in the Chinese book.

Mr. Barnett said the changes constituted a breach of contract. The agreement between Simon & Schuster and Yilin Press, he said, allows only modifications that are essential "to achieve a competent and idiomatic translation."

When first asked about the editing, Liu Feng, the deputy editor in chief of Yilin Press, said that any changes were minor and that allegations of a breach of contract were "at the very least inappropriate."

But later today, after Mr. Liu said officials at the company had reviewed a letter from Simon & Schuster complaining about the changes, he described the American publisher's concerns as understandable.

He said Mrs. Clinton's book had been translated hurriedly because Yilin as the official publisher had to compete against China's vigorous black market in unauthorized versions of best-selling books. As such, he said, Yilin had no time to discuss changes with Simon & Schuster.

Despite competition from pirate publishers, Mrs. Clinton's book appears to have been a financial windfall for Yilin, which paid $20,000 for the publishing rights and has so far sold 200,000 copies at a cover price of $3.60.

Mr. Liu said the changes had been made by Yilin alone, without government consultation. Most state-owned media companies are not subject to advance censorship, though they can be held responsible if they publish something deemed offensive to the leadership.

The same company has already purchased the Chinese rights to sell Mr. Clinton's forthcoming autobiography. "You can bet that translation will be carefully scrutinized," Mr. Barnett said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

washingtonpost.com
Dewey Decimal Owner Sues 'Library' Hotel

The Associated Press
Saturday, September 20, 2003; 10:01 PM

DUBLIN, Ohio –– The nonprofit library cooperative that owns the Dewey Decimal system has filed suit against a library-themed luxury hotel in Manhattan for trademark infringement.

The Library Hotel, which overlooks the New York Public Library, is divided according to the classification system, with each floor dedicated to one of Dewey's 10 categories.

Room 700.003 includes books on the performing arts, for example, while room 800.001 has a collection of erotic literature.

In the lawsuit filed last week, lawyers for the Online Computer Library Center said the organization acquired the rights to the system in 1988 when it bought Forest Press, which published Dewey Decimal updates. The center charges libraries that use the system at least $500 per year.

Melvil Dewey created his system — used in 95 percent of all public and K-12 school libraries — in 1873, but it is continually updated, with numbers assigned to more than 100,000 new works each year.

"A person who came to (the hotel's) Web site ... would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system," said Joseph Dreitler, a lawyer representing the center.

Hotel general manager Craig Spitzer and OCLC spokeswoman Wendy McGinnis did not return phone messages Saturday seeking comment.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus seeks triple the hotel's profits since its opening or triple the organization's damages, whichever is greater, from the hotel's owner.

Dreitler said Saturday he and his client do not yet know the size of the hotel's profits. The center, based in Dublin, is willing to settle with the hotel's owners, he said.

———

On the Net:

http://www.oclc.org/

http://www.libraryhotel.com/ (PROFILE (COUNTRY:United States; ISOCOUNTRY3:USA; UNTOP:021; APGROUP:NorthAmerica;) )

September 15, 2003
A Literary Award for Stephen King
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Under pressure from publishers to shake up its sleepy image, the organization that presents the National Book Awards is planning to give its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters to Stephen King.

Mr. King's selection is the first time that the organization, the National Book Foundation, has awarded its medal to an author best known for writing in popular genres like horror stories, science fiction or thrillers. Very little of Mr. King's work would qualify as literary fiction.

Mr. King joins a list of previous recipients that includes John Updike, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.

The foundation plans to announce the award today and present it at its ceremony on Nov. 19.

In interviews board members and the executive director of the foundation said they chose to honor Mr. King for a host of reasons: his storytelling skill, his promotion of less-established writers, his donations to libraries and schools and the sheer volume of his work, which has found a multitude of readers. Although the honor denotes a contribution to American letters, several board members said they also considered the cultural influence of his many works adapted for film and television.

Mr. King's award comes when publishers are pushing the foundation, which they largely finance, to stir up more attention for its prizes and for books in general. The National Book Awards occupy a kind of indefinite middle ground in the world of literary prizes. They are less hyped than the Man Booker Prize in Britain, sponsored by a private company to promote its name and marked by extensive public debate among its judges, and this year by a controversially long list of more than 20 finalists. But the National Book Awards are also less prestigious than the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes, which are given by endowed foundations.

Told of Mr. King's selection, some in the literary world responded with laughter and dismay. "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls," said Harold Bloom, the Yale professor, critic and self-appointed custodian of the literary canon. "That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy."

Richard Snyder, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster, which is now Mr. King's publisher, and a co-founder of the awards organization, said, "I am startled every time you say it." He added: "You put him in the company of a lot of great writers, and the one has nothing to do with the other. He sells a lot of books. But is it literature? No."

Ten years ago Mr. King and another blockbuster author, John Grisham, bought tickets to the annual awards presentation on the premise that "that was the only way we were going to get in the door," Mr. King recalled in an interview. At the time, he said, he was pleasantly surprised then that "nobody treated us like poseurs and hacks, which I think was what in our hearts we really expected."

Still, he said, nothing prepared him for this kind of recognition. "When I was young, I used to think it should be easy to wed popular fiction with literary fiction. But as time went by and I got older, I began to realize how difficult it really is. I began to realize how many people are so set against it."

He recalled letters from students whose teachers had called him "a hack, a terrible writer, everything that is wrong with America," Mr. King said. "After 25 years of that, to get something like this is just so extraordinarily gratifying." When he learned the news, he said, "I got goosebumps."

Several board members said they believed it was time that the awards began to define "American letters" more broadly than just the kind of literary fiction read by an elite.

"It has to take more chances, and it has to explore different areas of writing," said Isisara Bey, a new board member who is also vice president of corporate affairs at the music division of Sony.

Board members said Mr. King's name had come up in its deliberations in previous years; Ms. Bey nominated him this year. She first began to appreciate his work, she said, when she was at Sony Pictures, and it released a film based on his novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption."

"His work has translated so well in so many other mediums," Ms. Bey said. "I really liked that it was not only good on the page, it makes great movies, I mean, really great movies."

Carolyn Reidy, a board member who is also president for adult publishing at Simon & Schuster, argued that critics often underrated Mr. King because of his commercial success. "This award is recognition that he shouldn't be underrated."

Ms. Reidy, one of 14 board members, said she did not recuse herself from the vote to select Mr. King because of her self-interest as his publisher. "That would be like having to recuse yourself from an election in which you are a candidate," she said.

Neil Baldwin, who has been executive director of the foundation since it began 15 years ago but is resigning after this year, said that choosing Mr. King matched the larger purpose of the foundation, which uses its awards ceremony to raise money and recruit writers to promote literacy.

For outreach to children, Mr. Baldwin said, Mr. King's stories are more accessible than, for example, the works of Susan Sontag, a recent National Book Award winner. Mr. King, who has his own foundations helping libraries, planned to return the $10,000 prize, Mr. Baldwin added.

None of Mr. King's books has ever won a National Book Award, which is given by juries of fellow authors who tend to pick fellow writers longer on literary prestige than book sales. But the foundation's board chooses the winner of the medal for a distinguished contribution to American letters, a kind of literary lifetime achievement award. Half of the board's members are book publishers and booksellers; the other half have experience in philanthropy.

Mr. King is receiving more elite recognition. In 1990 his writing began appearing in The New Yorker, first essays, and then short stories, one of which won an O. Henry Award.

Last year the critic John Leonard wrote a lengthy appreciation of Mr. King in The New York Review of Books, calling him "a high-school English teacher who may have hit it big with `Carrie' in 1974 but had never stopped reading the serious stuff." Mr. Leonard found in Mr. King's works traces of Thomas Hardy, Daphne du Maurier, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien and even Shakespeare.

Some in the literary world just shrugged about the award. "The words `distinguished contribution' are a little bit puzzling, but he is a good writer as popular writers go," said Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, who won the foundation's first medal. "I am not sure this was the original intent of the prize, but who knows about original intent?"

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Fall books preview
The hot new titles to look for in the coming months, from fiction to biography to politics.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Laura Miller

Sept. 11, 2003 | Over the next three months, the publishing industry floods bookstores with the best -- and sometimes just the flashiest -- books of the year. It can be hard to keep up even when it's your job, so for the average overwhelmed reader out there, we offer this highly selective list of titles to watch out for.

Politics

With the 2004 campaign season heating up, expect the usual rash of snoozy trail tracts by the likes of John Kerry ("A Call to Service," from Viking in October) and John Edwards ("My Trials," from Simon & Schuster in January), plus "Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire" by Wesley Clark, coming from Princeton next month. Walter Shapiro kills, er, covers several birds with one stone in "One-Car Caravan: On the Road With the 2004 Democratic Hopefuls" (Public Affairs, November). Bush haters will lap up "Bushwhacked" by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose (Random House), also set to arrive in September, Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?" (Warner, October) and "The Lies of George W. Bush" by David Corn (Crown, September). TV commentator Alan Colmes offers the undoubtedly more tepid "Red, White and Liberal: Why the Left is Right and the Right is Wrong" (ReganBooks, October).

On the other side, Bill O'Reilly (yes, again) asks "Who's Looking Out For You?" (Broadway Books, September) and Bernard Goldberg deplores "Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite" (Warner, November). What Greta Van Susteren will have to say in "My Turn at the Bully Pulpit" (Crown, September) is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner will seek to rally the nation's youth with "Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul!" (New Press, November). And for those craving dish from deep inside the Beltway, there's "The Georgetown Ladies Social Club" by C. David Heymann (Atria, October) about the klatch of five women who ran D.C. over the past half-century.

History

It's shaping up to be a terrific season for narrative histories in the spirit of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit." We're particularly looking forward to: "The Bounty," an account of the notorious mutiny by "Endurance" author Caroline Alexander (Viking, September); "Fallingwater Rising," a "biography" of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous house by Franklin Toker (Knopf, September); "A Venetian Affair," based on some long-lost 18th century love letters written by the ancestor of author Andrea di Robilant (Knopf, September); David Foster Wallace's history of the concept of infinity, "Everything and More" (W.W. Norton, October); "The Perfect Prince," the true story of a Renaissance-era imposter by Ann Wroe (Random, October); David Maraniss' innovative dual-track look at the Vietnam War at home and in Southeast Asia, "They Marched Into Sunlight" (Simon & Schuster, October); and two new histories by bestselling authors Nathaniel Philbrick ("Sea of Glory," about a 1838 exploring expedition, Viking, November) and Mark Kurlansky ("1968: The Year That Rocked the World," Ballantine, December).

Traditional history looks good, too. Paul Fussell takes issue with romanticized portraits of World War II in "The Boy's Crusade" (Modern Library, September). "Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis" by Daniel Silver illuminates how that institution miraculously survived (Houghton Mifflin, September). Edwin Black exposes the American roots of the Nazis' nightmarish racial attitudes in "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race" (Four Walls Eight Windows, September). Military history buffs will snap up Victor Davis Hanson's latest, "Ripples of Battle: How Wars Fought Long Ago Determine How We Fight, How We Live, How We Think" (Doubleday, September).

Early word on "Love and Hate in Jamestown" by David A. Price (Knopf, October) says this view of Colonial America is a page-turner. You can go even further back into the past with the purportedly definitive "One Vast Winter Count: The Native-American West Before Lewis and Clark" by Colin G. Calloway (Univ. of Nebraska Press, October) or to recent times with Joseph E. Stiglitz's "The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade" (W.W. Norton, October). One of the few Founding Fathers who hasn't been exhaustively reexamined recently is our first president; now Henry Wiencek weighs in with "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, November). Garry Wills, meanwhile, offers a controversial look at the role of slave states in the election of Thomas Jefferson in "Negro President" (Houghton Mifflin, November).

An infamous episode in American history is revisited by Steve Oney in "And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank" (Pantheon, October). Michael McGerr traces the evolution of a political movement in "A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920" (Free Press, September). After the release from prison of Kathy Boudin, Knopf is pushing up the publication date of Susan Braudy's "Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left" to later this month.

If your historical interests are more international, Thomas Cahill continues his bestselling series with "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter" (Doubleday, October). A rare cache of photographs taken during China's Cultural Revolution will be published as "Red-Color News Soldier" by Li Zhensheng (Phaidon, September). Peter Balakian indicts U.S. inaction in "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response" (HarperCollins, October).

Fiction

Only time will tell if the season's bumper crop of first novels will yield any choice specimens, but readers can also take their pick from books by more familiar talents. In September, the 50th anniversary of "The Adventures of Augie March" makes a fine occasion to revisit Saul Bellow's masterwork, and Viking is putting out a special edition of it. The fall's hottest new literary novel is Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude" (Doubleday), like "Motherless Brooklyn" a paean to his hometown. Pulitzer-winner Jhumpa Lahiri comes out with her first novel, "The Namesake" (Houghton Mifflin), and Neal Stephenson follows up his bestselling "Cryptonomicon" with "Quicksilver" (William Morrow), the first of a three-book series set among the scientific geniuses of the 1600s, sure to set geekish hearts aflutter. "Paris Trout" author Pete Dexter will tell further tales of working-class heroes in "Train" (Doubleday), and fans of the Melvillian herstory of "Ahab's Wife" should look out for Sena Jeter Naslund's new Civil Rights-era novel, "Four Spirits" (Morrow). "Outlanders" creator Diana Gabaldon starts a new trilogy with "Lord John and the Private Matter" (Bantam).

In October, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's "Love" (Knopf), reputed to be her best book in years, hits the stores. Look for new novels from Steve Martin ("The Pleasure of My Company," Hyperion), David Guterson ("Our Lady of the Forest," Knopf), and "Gap Creek" author Robert Morgan ("Brave Enemies," Algonquin). Edmund White has based his latest work of fiction, "Fanny" (Ecco) on the life of Anthony Trollope's mother, an ardent abolitionist. Booker-winner J.M. Coetzee will publish a novel with an animal rights theme, "Elizabeth Costello" (Viking). Writers' writer Shirley Hazzard has a new novel, too, "The Great Fire" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), set in Asia and Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Peter Straub returns to his trademark spooky stuff in "Lost Boy, Lost Girl" (Random), and literary writer Stewart O'Nan also tries his hand at a ghost story with "The Night Country" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Two giants of the mystery genre will bring out new books: Patricia Cornwell ("Blow Fly," Putnam) and Sara Paretsky ("Blacklist," Putnam). Cornelia Funke's children's novel "The Thief Lord," was a surprise crossover hit a year or two ago; her latest, "Inkheart," will be brought to us by the Potter-pushers at Scholastic. And last but not least, the University of California Press will publish a posthumously recovered play by Mark Twain, "Is He Dead?"

Popular favorites add to their ongoing series in November, notably Anne Rice giving her fans more Lestat in "Blood Canticle" (Knopf), and Elizabeth Peters offering a guide to "Amelia Peabody's Egypt: A Compendium" (Morrow). Stephen King begins the beginning of the end of his Dark Tower series with "Wolves of the Calla" (Scribner). Terry McMillan will further chronicle the lives of her African-American women characters in "The Interruption of Everything" (Viking). On the literary side, there are new novels from Booker-winners Pat Barker ("Double Vision," Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and Peter Carey ("My Life as a Fake," Knopf). Jim Crace, author of "Being Dead," tells the story of a man who keeps fathering children in "Genesis" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and Tobias Wolff's "Old School" (Knopf) describes a schoolboy's experience meeting his literary idol. Those whose readerly appetites are whetted by literary feuds will want to see if Martin Amis' "Yellow Dog," (Miramax), his first novel in seven years, lives up (or down) to the drubbing it received from fellow writer Tibor Fischer in the Daily Telegraph.

Business and Money

On pocketbook issues, Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston exposes the way the tax system benefits the rich in "Perfectly Legal" (Portfolio, Dec.). Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi look at "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Their Families Are Going Broke" (Basic, September). Doug Henwood presents a left-of-center take on the recent bubble and its bursting in "After the New Economy" (New Press, October).

In the realm of corporate misadventures, the reporters who helped expose Enron tell its story in "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Rise and Fall of Enron" by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (Viking, October). Kara Swisher offers her take on some bad business decisions in "There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle" (Crown, October). A controversial tycoon gets the once-over from Karen Southwick in "Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison" (Crown, November)

The Way We Live Now

Not surprisingly, this fall is packed with new books about the ongoing encroachments on Americans' civil liberties. To list a few, all appearing this month: "Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom" by Cynthia Brown (New Press); "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedom in the War on Terrorism" by David Cole (New Press); "Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil" by James Bovard (Palgrave); "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance" by Nat Hentoff (Seven Stories); "Why Societies Need Dissent by law professor Cass Sunstein (Harvard).

The state of the war on terrorism also gets several long, hard looks. Gerald Posner explains the lapses that permitted the attacks of September 11 "Why America Slept" (Random, September). Ronald Kessler examines "The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign on Terror" (St. Martin's, October). Benjamin Barber, author of the prescient "Jihad vs. McWorld," looks at U.S. policy mistakes that breed terrorism in "Fear's Empire" (W.W. Norton, September). Michael Ignatieff parses some painful moral dilemmas in "Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror" (Princeton, Dec.), and two neocon players lay out their agenda in "An End to Evil: What's Next in the War on Terror" by David Frum and Richard Perle (Random, Dec.).

Curtis White expands a Harper's essay attacking NPR's Terry Gross into "The Middle Mind: Why American's Don't Think For Themselves" (HarperSanFrancisco, September). Linda Perlstein spent many hours among her subjects to write "Not Much Just Chillin: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September). Brooke Kroeger delves into a shadowy topic with "Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are" (Public Affairs, September). John McWhorter complains of everyone "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care" (Gotham, October). Todd Oppenheimer denounces "The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved" (Random, October).

Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck find grist for their mill in "Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding" (Univ. of California Press, October), while Ethan Watters explains why a generation of city-dwellers is shunning marriage entirely in "Urban Tribes" (Bloomsbury, October). Joanna Lipper takes a close-up look at the lives of six teenage mothers in "Growing Up Fast" (Picador, November). Stephen Prothero describes the "Elvisification" of Christ in "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Dec.).

Finally, Studs Terkel proffers sustaining thoughts in "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times" (New Press, November) and Gregg Easterbrook explains that it's precisely when people think things are at their worst that they are actually improving in "The Progress Paradox" (Random House, November).

Biography

Nigel Hamiliton's unauthorized biography of Bill Clinton arrives late this month from Random House, around the same time that Clinton's secretary of state (the first woman to hold that position), Madeleine Albright, will publish her own memoir, "Madam Secretary" (Miramax). Clinton's secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin will come out with "Dealing With an Uncertain World" (Random) in November. Barbara Bush will offer her "Reflections: Life After the White House" (Scribner) in October. Police Chief Charles Moose describes his hunt for the D.C-area sniper in "Three Weeks in October" (Dutton, September), and Scribner will posthumously release the autobiography of '60s radical Stokely Carmichael, "Ready for the Revolution," in November.

Pop culture autobiographers in September include Tammy Faye Messner ("I Will Survive and You Can, Too!", Tarcher), Judy Collins ("Sanity and Grace," Putnam) and fashion photographer Helmut Newton ("The Autobiography," Doubleday). In October, it's David Beckham ("Beckham," HarperCollins), Donna Summer ("Ordinary Girl," Villard), Lance Armstong ("Every Second Counts" (Broadway), and the Pythons (as in Monty, in "The Pythons," from St. Martin's Press). In November, Suge Knight tells his side of his story in "American Nightmare/American Dream" (Riverhead). Rolling Stone contributor Anthony Bozza describes the life and times of Eminem in "Whatever You Say I Am" (Crown, October), and Pulitzer-winning author Robert Coles offers his tribute to "Bruce Springsteen's America" (Random, October), while Sophia Dembling and Lisa Gutierrez put the TV shrink on the couch in "The Making of Dr. Phil" (Wiley, October).

Literary types will be confiding in their readers, as well: Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the first half of his own story in "Living to Tell the Tale" (Knopf, November); Maxine Hong Kingston continues her sui generis work with "The Fifth Book of Peace" (Knopf, September); Joan Didion dissects her California childhood in "Were I Was From" (Knopf, September); Joyce Carol Oates offers insight into her formidable output in "The Faith of a Writer" (HarperCollins, September); Dale Peck delves into his family's past with "What We Lost" (Houghton Mifflin, November); and Amy Tan gets metaphysical in "The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings" (Putnam, October).

If you're dead, someone else gets to set the record straight, as Geoffrey Wolff is currently doing for the late novelist John O'Hara ("The Art of Burning Bridges," Knopf). Nathaniel Hawthrone gets a major bio from Brenda Wineapple ("Hawthorne," Knopf, September), Mariane Pearl (with help from Sarah Crichton) writes of her murdered husband in "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl" (Scribner, September). Another legendary journalist, Martha Gellhorn, is the subject of Caroline Moorehead's "Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life" (Holt, October). A biographer who's a bit of a legend herself, Diane Middlebrook, tackles the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in "Her Husband" (Viking, October), and the author of "1984" gets another biography in Gordon Bowker's "Inside George Orwell" (Palgrave, September). A very famous family gets a major multigeneration history in "The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings" by Thomas Maier (Basic, October). And no art lover will want to miss a great critic's book on a great painter, Robert Hughes' "Goya" (Knopf, November)

Away From Home

Two writers put forward their arguments on the conflicts in the Middle East in "The Case for Israel" by Alan Dershowitz (Wiley, September) and "Right To Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars" by Yaacov Lozowick, a former peace activist turned reluctant Sharon supporter (Doubleday, September). Barbara Victor investigates a relatively new phenomenon in "Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers" (Rodale, October).

Central Asia is a region that's fascinating many writers these days: Tom Bissell's "Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia" (Pantheon, September) and "The Storyteller's Daughter" by "Beyond the Veil" director Saira Shah (Knopf, September) are two notable examples. Lutz Kleveman writes of the area's geopolitical significance in "The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia" (Atlantic Monthly Press, September).

Dispatches from other trouble spots include a new book from bestselling author Tracy Kidder about a selfless doctor working under dire conditions in Haiti, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" (Random House, September). Janine Di Giovanni describes her experiences as a journalist in the Balkans in "Madness Visible: A Memoir of War" (Knopf, November). Bruce Cumings offers a rare glimpse of a sequestered realm in "North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom" (New Press, November).

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About the writer
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon.

culturebox
Book Report
How four magazines you've probably never read help determine what books you buy
By Adelle Waldman
Posted Friday, September 12, 2003, at 12:28 PM PT


Look up a book on Amazon.com, and the first media review you see isn't from a well-known book review outlet such as the New York Times or Washington Post but from Publishers Weekly. Scroll down, and chances are you'll also find an opinion from Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, or Booklist.

You've probably never read these magazines, even if you've seen their names on book jackets. But they're helping determine what you read. Together, they make up the big four of book industry trade journals, aimed at publishing insiders: newspaper and magazine editors, bookstore and library book-buyers, literary agents, and film industry types scanning them for movie rights. Long important as behind-the-scenes power brokers, they became even more powerful in the 1990s, when online booksellers signed deals with them. (Barnes & Noble.com, like Amazon, has a deal with Publishers Weekly.) Their reviews—300 or so words of plot summary, context, and a quick verdict—influence which books get noticed, bought, and promoted in the media. What might you want to know about these magazines, then?

Publishers Weekly, or PW, is the biggie—it plays Coke to Kirkus' Pepsi. Sold on newsstands in New York as well as by subscription, PW packs a couple hundred reviews into each issue, covering everything from literary fiction and nonfiction to self-help, mystery, and children's books. It's also the place to go for industry news and gossip. PW's reviews are anonymous and are largely written by freelancers; over the course of a year, in the magazine and on its Web site, PW covers about 10,000 books. (The Washington Post, by contrast, weighs in on 1,000 to 1,500 books.) Although PW has only 40,000 subscribers, compared to a million-plus people who get the New York Times Book Review every Sunday, it's read by everyone in publishing. Subscribers shell out about $214 a year for the privilege.

Kirkus is all reviews, no gossip. It's published biweekly on non-glossy paper with no photos or illustrations. The cover is adorned only with teasers for reviews inside. Approximately 5,000 people subscribe; the rate is about $450 a year. (For this fee, you can also access Kirkus' review archive, which dates back to 1933.) Like PW, Kirkus' reviews are anonymous and freelance-written, but the reviewers' identities are not as shrouded in secrecy: Each issue includes a list of contributors. As the scrappy runner-up to PW, Kirkus has long had a reputation for lively, unpredictable reviews that are sometimes outlandishly harsh. For example, take its assessment of Dave Eggers' stunningly successful novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: "It isn't," Kirkus said. Though the review allowed that the book "is better than most novel-like objects created by our younger writers," it nevertheless concluded: "Few readers will be satisfied … for their investment of time and good will."

Battered authors can still count on Booklist, which adheres to the golden rule of every creative-writing workshop: Find something positive to say, and proceed gently from there. "Satisfyingly dishy," it wrote of Candace Bushnell's Trading Up, which was savaged by Kirkus. Like Library Journal, Booklist is aimed at librarians. Published by the American Library Association, it's distributed biweekly during the school year and monthly over the summer. Though a glossy, a typical article is "Top 10 Biographies (Adult)." Its reviews are signed, and some 30 percent to 40 percent are written in-house, according to its editor. A subscription costs $79.95 a year.

Library Journal is a sister publication of PW. (Both are published by Reed Business Information, which puts out more than 100 trade magazines, from Variety to Broadband Week). Like PW, Library Journal is a glossy, with a section given to industry news and gossip. Its reviews, which are written by librarians, are signed, and the name of the library with which each reviewer is affiliated is listed. Annual subscriptions are $134.

While disgruntled authors may like to suggest that callow recent graduates make up the bulk of reviewers, trade editors insist otherwise. Mostly, editors say, reviewers are a mix of published authors, academics, schoolteachers, librarians (in the case of Library Journal, exclusively so), and recent grads. Most reviewers have gotten the gig by proving their knowledge of a subject area, like military history. Recent college graduates are actually a minority of reviewers—not because they're deemed too green to pass judgment on the brainchildren of their elders, but because ambitious twentysomethings tend to tire quickly of anonymity. The steady reviewers tend to be schoolteachers or retired schoolteachers, who churn out as many as 12 a month. (Surely none do it for the money, since the pay is typically $45 to $60 per review.)

But the four magazines' influence may finally be waning. While the Internet has increased the visibility of trade reviews, it has also made for easier communication among booksellers, and the journals' position as gatekeepers on advance buzz is not as secure. Today there are competing sources of early information, notably Book Sense 76, a monthly list of books recommended by independent book stores that is gaining influence among magazine editors, bookstore buyers, and film agents. (You can find it online here.)

Perhaps that's why PW's reviews have changed noticeably over the past few years. For most of its history, its "forecasts," as it terms them, tended to have more plot summary than bite. Now, under a new forecast editor and with its reviews reaching a wider audience through its licensing agreements with the online booksellers, they've generally become more spirited. (Some longtime reviewers have described them less charitably as sophomoric.) At the same time, Kirkus' have grown less acerbic. You can see why: Trade magazines aim to predict a book's fate in the real world. While they play a role in shaping that fate, a trade's plaudits can only influence, not determine, a book's reception—much as a movie can't be made into a hit with a marketing blitz. If a magazine were regularly to pan books that go on to sell well, as Kirkus did with Eggers' book, it would become far less useful to those who rely on them to spot winners. (A former trade editor said when such errors are made the magazine assigns that author's next book to a reviewer with a good track record of calling books right.)

The old regime isn't likely to be toppled any time soon; a "starred" review in PW still increases a book's chance of getting media coverage and showing up in your neighborhood bookstore. One author recently suggested that PW's negative review of her book had caused O magazine to pull an article about her. Worse, the author can't take the review off the book's page on Amazon, no matter how much she'd like to.

One thing the trades maintain—and an informal survey of freelancers bears out—is that reviewers are not directed to take a position on the books they're writing about; instances in which a reviewer's judgments are overwritten by editors are rare. Which means this: For better or worse, a motley assortment of underpaid and often anonymous reviewers using their own unfettered judgment have a great deal of influence over the books you are most likely to come across in your neighborhood bookstore and, if you are shopping online, buy.

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer in New York.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2088249/

The Librarian Action Figure is modeled after real-life librarian Nancy Pearl, author of the upcoming book "Book Lust."

Librarian Action Figure
Name: Nancy Pearl Occupation: Librarian

Weapon of Choice: The Dewey Decimal System

Accomplishments: Director of Library Programming and the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library. Nancy is best known for the, “If All Seattle Read The Same Book” project. This idea of one city reading the same book at the same time has been imitated in cities around the world. She is a book reviewer for the Seattle Times, Booklist, Library Journal, KUOW-FM Seattle, and KWGS-FM Tulsa.

Awards: 2003 Washington Humanities Award, 2001 Allie Beth Martin Award from the American Library Association, 1998 Library Journal’s Fiction Reviewer of the Year.

Education: Masters Degree in Library Sciences from the University of Michigan.

Interesting Fact: Decided to become a librarian at the age of 10.

Books Written: Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason; Now Read This: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1978–1998; and Now Read This II: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1990–2001.

Favorite Books: Fiction—The Brothers K, The Prince of Tides, Searching for Caleb, The Eyre Affair, A Gay and Melancholy Sound. Non-Fiction—The Best and the Brightest, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, The Liars’ Club, Into Thin Air.

Available: Fall 2003

September 7, 2003
The Good of a Bad Review
By CLIVE JAMES

LONDON — For the last year, the literary world has been in a mild uproar over the supposedly vexed question of harsh reviewing. The ruckus started when the novelist Dale Peck tried to bury his fellow novelist Rick Moody's memoir, "The Black Veil," under an avalanche of abuse in The New Republic. ("Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," the review began; after that it got rough.) The ensuing kerfuffle culminated in a long essay by Heidi Julavits arguing that the killingly negative review had become epidemic and was in need of its own monosyllabic name, like plague. "I call it snark," she wrote in The Believer, apparently unaware that Lewis Carroll had used the same word for something far harder to find.

Hers is a rather understated label (derived from the colloquial "snarky") for an attack whose intent is often not merely snide but outright murderous. Better acquainted with the concept of gangsterism in public life, the Germans call a killer review a "rip up" and the Italians a "tear to pieces." But this new, English word — English tempered by an American determination to believe that serious people can lapse from high standards only in a temporary fit of civic irresponsibility — is probably violent enough, and it certainly captures the essential element of personally cherished malice. The desire to do someone down, or indeed in, is the defining feature.

Adverse book reviews there have always been, and always should be, lest a tide of good intentions rise to drown us all in worthy sludge. At their best, they are written in defense of a value, and in the tacit hope that the author, having had his transgressions pointed out, might secretly agree that his book is indeed lousy. All they attack, or seem to attack, is the book. But a snark blatantly attacks the author — not simply to retard his career but to advance the reviewer's, either by proving how clever he is or simply by injuring a competitor. Since a good book can certainly be injured by a bad review, especially if the critic is in a position of influence, the distinction between the snark and the legitimately destructive review is well worth having.

In my own experience, dishing out grief has been a lot more fun than taking it. As a trainee critic, I was sometimes careless of the personal feelings of authors whose books I reviewed, and I simultaneously found, when I myself published a book, that my adverse reviewers were invariably careless of mine. Though I never grew thick skin (thin skin, after all, is what a writer is in business to have), I gradually got better at taking punishment. By no coincidence, I also grew more reluctant to inflict it. Anyway, personal attacks rarely work. They tend to arouse sympathy for the victim, and might even help sell the book. Legitimately destructive reviews, however, I both continued to write and grew resigned to receiving. They are part of the game.

But there's a catch. Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?

Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him.

Across the pond, Mark Twain later did the same to James Fenimore Cooper. Making hilarious game of the improbabilities in Cooper's tales of arcane woodcraft, Twain's essays about Cooper have been American classics ever since. So have Cooper's tales, but only in the category of enjoyable hokum. After Twain got through with him, Cooper's prestige was gone. Reading the reviews that did him in, one cannot avoid the impression that Twain would have enjoyed himself less if Cooper had been less of a klutz. Like Macaulay, Twain used someone else's mediocrity as an opportunity to be outstanding. This is getting pretty close to malice, for all its glittering disguise as selfless duty.

The same applied to Dwight Macdonald's attack on "By Love Possessed," a novel by James Gould Cozzens that was a best seller and a huge critical success in the late 1950's. Cozzens had his face on the cover of Time magazine. Macdonald thought the face needed a custard pie, and wrote a review that convincingly exposed Cozzens's masterpiece as portentously arranged junk. Macdonald usefully did the same for the clumsy prose style of the New English Bible, but there he was attacking a committee. In the case of "By Love Possessed" he was attacking a man.

When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have succeeded. It would be better to admit this fact, and admit that all adverse reviews are snarks to some degree, than to indulge the sentimental wish that malice might be debarred from the literary world. The literary world is where it belongs. When Dr. Johnson longed for his enemy to publish a book, it was because he wasn't allowed to hit him with an ax. Civilization tames human passions, but it can't eliminate them. Hunt the snark and you will find it everywhere.

Clive James is author, most recently, of ``As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002.''


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Chip Kidd, book cover designer, unmasked
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Whoever first said "You can't judge a book by its cover" has been lost to the ages, but Chip Kidd, the most celebrated of book cover designers, isn't arguing.

At 39, Kidd has designed more than 1,500 covers for authors from Michael Crichton to John Updike. But he says that judging a book by what's on its jacket is "irredeemably shallow."

He asks, "Would you want to be judged by your face?"

But don't people do that all the time?

"Yes, but it doesn't mean you should."

Kidd's work is now the subject of a book, Chip Kidd (Yale University Press, $19.95) by Veronique Vienne, a designer turned writer, who offers another view:

"Whether or not we know it, we all judge a book by its cover. Its role is to communicate not only what the book is about, but who will enjoy reading it. There is a subliminal language of images and typography that speaks directly to the subconscious mind of the potential book buyer."

Some covers, she says, can be misleading: "Serious anthropological studies can be disguised as mystery novels, but more often than not, they accurately reflect the mood, the style and the literary merits of what's between the covers."

And no one does that better, Vienne says, than Kidd, who has been described as a "design demigod," an "inky colossus" and "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design.

Such accolades seem to embarrass Kidd, who calls them "ridiculous" and admits to being "inky, but only on a dwarfish scale." He says the first cover he ever noticed was "no doubt for some sort of Batman comic I saw when I was about 3, enough said. Or maybe not enough said: the colors, the forms, the design. Batman himself is such a brilliant design solution."

A serious collector of Batman memorabilia, Kidd has designed and edited several books devoted to what Vienne describes as his "childhood obsession and lasting adult passion."

After graduating from Penn State, he went to work in the art department at Knopf, a leading literary publisher, in 1986. It was a time when books were replacing the covers of record albums as what Kidd calls the "cool, neat thing" for graphic designers.

Some of that had to do with the smaller size of CDs, which Kidd says "is not conducive to a bold, visual style," and the emergence of rock videos that make "the kind of visual statement album covers used to."

Vienne cites another difference: "Music stores are dark, with lots of reflective surfaces that make it difficult to look at graphics. Bookstores are more likely to use natural light and invite you to linger. It's an environment more conducive to graphics."

Kidd says the design process is "pretty simple, unless it becomes complicated."

It begins with the book's manuscript: "I read it, I brood, then eventually respond. Along the way, I may or may not involve photographers or illustrators or any amount of ephemeral detritus that washes up on my shores in the pursuit of solving the problem. And that is what it always amounts to: visually solving a problem." And that, he says, can take from 10 minutes to six months. He also talks to the author, who, he says at Knopf, "has final say, so it's a logical starting point."

Vienne, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, praises Kidd's ability to stretch "the visual boundaries between words and visuals by choosing pictures that appear at first glance to be non sequiturs."

She cites his cover for The Abomination, Paul Golding's 2000 novel about a child whose sexual identity makes him an outsider.

Kidd used a simple black and white photograph of a child's stuffed bunny rabbit standing on its head.

"It's not obvious," Vienne says. "But it's unsettling. The image makes you want to find out more. A nice cuddly thing turned upside down. It forces the reader's mind to make a leap."

Kidd also wrote a well-reviewed novel, The Cheese Monkeys, loosely based on his college experiences, and is working on what he calls not a sequel but "Episode Two." He says, "I'm aware a vast majority of human beings didn't read The Cheese Monkeys."

In her book, Vienne foresees Kidd eventually reinventing himself as a writer "too involved with his own writing to design the jackets of his books."

But Kidd cites two factors: "A: I love my job. And B: It pays the bills." (He says Monkeys sold about 50,000 copies in hardcover and paperback. Not bad for a debut novel, but no blockbuster.)

He also says he finds designing a lot easier than writing but can see gaining more attention and respect as an author, rather than as someone who designs covers for other authors.

"Which is the way it should be," he says. "The content inside is more important than the image on the cover."

-----------------------
Chip Kidd has designed more than 1,500 covers since 1986. His comments on four of them:

Who's Irish ?

Gish Jin's 1996 collection of stories about the immigrant experience: "The key here is spirit — to project the exuberant joy and rebellion of the kid in the story. I felt that if I could get that across, then I could pull readers into it."

Brazzaville Beach

William Boyd's 1991 novel: "One of my favorite covers ever because it's SUCH a great book! What I did was try to mimic the scheme of great cigarette packages, because the heroine of the story chain-smokes. I attempted to 'ape' the design of an African cigarette package that would have been used in the novel."

American Rhapsody

Joe Eszterhas' 2000 semi-fictional version of President Clinton's personal problems: "My editor-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, said to me, 'With this one, let's just give everyone a big kiss.' So I did."

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton's 1990 thriller: "The trick there was figuring out how to show a dinosaur without actually showing one, and the answer was to do a sort of X-ray silhouette of a dino-skeleton. The producers of the movie obviously agreed, because they bought it and ran with it."

© Copyright 2003 USA TODAY

Chick Lit
Genre Aimed at Young Women Is Fueling Publishing Industry

By Heather Cabot

N E W Y O R K, Aug. 30
— Bridget Jones's Diary, the 1998 best seller turned Hollywood hit, inspired a spate of similar tales, all starring imperfect career women looking for love.

This contemporary genre, known as "chick lit," short for chick literature, is now setting the pace for an otherwise struggling fiction industry.

"The mega authors — John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy — all have had a fall-off in sales," said Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble. "But the chick lit is growing, and they're growing exponentially."

In the $23 billion publishing industry, chick lit books earned publishers more than $71 million last year, and that's just the best sellers. Several publishers, including Harlequin, Broadway and Pocket Books, have created separate imprints to distribute the specialty titles.

The books feature everyday women in their 20s and 30s navigating their generation's challenges of balancing demanding careers with personal relationships.

"Nobody's got a great job," Hensley said. "Nobody has a perfect body, and God knows, none of them have perfect boyfriends."

‘Like Reading My Life Story’

The characters typically mirror the authors themselves. That's why 33-year-old Philadelphia writer Jennifer Weiner said chick literature captures a much more realistic side of women's lives. She believes it has an authenticity frequently missing from women's fiction of the past.

"I think that for a long time, what women were getting were sort of the Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz kind of books — sex and shopping, glitz and glamour, heroines that were fun to read about, but just felt nothing like where you were in your life," Weiner said.

A turning point in Weiner's own life inspired her first novel, Good in Bed.

She started the project at age 28, when a rough breakup left her dejected and depressed. The former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter turned her blues into a best seller by basing the lead character on herself.

The story of a plus-sized newspaper writer trying to navigate singledom touched a cord with her contemporaries and has sold more than 800,000 copies. Home Box Office is developing the book into a television series.

The women who packed a Weiner book signing in downtown Philadelphia one August weeknight reflected on the book's success.

"It was like reading my life story," said 30-year-old Danielle Medykowski, of Bucks County, Pa. "Just, I was reading it through somebody else's eyes."

A group of six Brooklyn-based writers hope to recreate that is the same feeling in their own chick lit manuscripts. Known as "The Little Red Writing Group," the 20- and 30-something women aspire to pen the genre's next best sellers.

For the last two years, the friends have met once a month over Sunday brunch to discuss their story development and characters. They strive to imbue their books with a tone that's similar to their chats among girlfriends.

"It has every single element: 'Oh, I'm so fat,' 'Oh, I want a date,' 'Oh, I don't make enough money,'" explained 32-year-old Elise Miller, who recently sold her book Star Craving Mad to Warner Books. "You know, it's all in there."

Author’s New Direction

Critics dismiss the books as nothing more than trendy beach reads. But the books appear to have staying power, now expanding into topics that move beyond the single life.

Recently, "bridal-" and "mommy lit" titles have become big hits, including Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It and Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic Ties the Knot.

The heroines may face new challenges, but the books maintain the same true-to-life narratives, along with some self-deprecating humor.

Weiner, now married for two years, said exploring more mature themes like motherhood was a natural evolution for readers and writers.

In June, she gave birth to her first child, Lucy, and promised parenting will be a prime theme of her third novel. She's confident her core audience will follow.

"Wouldn't you love to read, you know, Bridget Has a Baby?" she laughed.

You read it here first, but...

Book cover designers go out on a limb for latest trend

By Maureen Ryan
Chicago Tribune

August 27, 2003

You can't walk through a bookstore these days without seeing gams galore. Legs in boots, legs on roller skates and legs ending in bare feet abound, but stroll by the "new fiction" table, and what you'll see most often is a curvy set of legs in a sassy set of spike heels.

Many of the books are post-Bridget Jones, Sex and the City-esque tales, wherein a plucky gal-about-town eventually gets the great job, loses the weight and/or finds the perfect guy. And she does all of the above, if the book covers are to be believed, in a great pair of shoes.

In the past year or so, the appendage trend has strolled out of chick lit and started walking all over serious fiction.

"There is this zeitgeist thing with book jackets, where one trend kind of takes over," says noted book designer Chip Kidd, who has created covers for books by Donna Tartt, Michael Crichton and Cormac McCarthy. "I'm proud to say I don't think I've contributed to it."

Kidd thinks for a moment, then sighs. "I just did Platform by Michel Houellebecq, so I'm guilty," he groans.

Well, at least Platform, a bleak tale of sadomasochism by a bad-boy French writer, doesn't feature a perky heroine and her dating travails in the big city, a la classic leg-centric titles Jemima J, Someone Like You and Women About Town.

"They're all following me, they're all pretenders to my throne," jokes writer Jennifer Weiner, who got a leg up in the fiction world with her saucily titled 2001 novel, Good in Bed, which depicted a pair of curvaceous legs from a provocative angle.

Not content with the galloping success of Good in Bed, which peeked out of countless beach bags and eventually was sold to HBO, Weiner refined her winning formula for last year's In Her Shoes, the cover of which features two sets of feet in fabulous heels.

"The legs work on lots of different covers for [the] same reason they worked on Good in Bed," Weiner says. "They let you suggest lots of different things about your character with out specifying too rigidly what kind of person she is."

Weiner didn't even want legs on the cover of her first novel -- she wanted a "rumpled, sexy unmade bed," but that idea was shot down quickly.

"The [leg] jackets are fun and vibrant, they don't look like work -- some covers can look sort of daunting," says Stacy Creamer, executive editor of Doubleday, which published the leg-centric The Devil Wears Prada, and deputy editor of Broadway Books, which publishes a host of perky-gal tomes, including the limb-centric oeuvre of Jane Green.

What publishers don't want on most fiction covers is a full depiction of a woman, says Creamer, especially if the book's plot has an element of romance. Put a woman and a man on the cover, show their faces and you get dangerously close to the cliched "clutch jackets" of traditional romance novels, she notes.

Hence cutting a woman's face out of the picture entirely. For The Devil Wears Prada, Creamer and her team chose the image of a woman from the neck down in spike heels because "we really thought it would be iconographic, and that it would reproduce well for advertising. That was a big plus," she says.

Candace Bushnell's latest novel, Trading Up, also features a sexy pair of heels, which is not surprising, given that as the author of Sex and the City, she practically invented the concept of the urban heroine who has exhaustive knowledge of both heartache and $400 heels.

According to Bushnell's editor, Leigh Haber of Hyperion Books, earlier versions of the cover tried too literally to portray the idea of a woman looking for a better man, or "trading up." But "when you're trying to say too much with a cover, it doesn't work," Haber says.

Hence the sexy -- and simple -- shoes. "They best epitomized what [the heroine] Janey is about -- she's a Victoria's Secret model with great legs and great shoes," Haber says.

Given the success of the chick lit genre, Linda Bubon, co-owner of the Chicago bookstore Women and Children First, sees more and more titles with these kinds of perky, leggy covers. But she thinks the trend sells both writers and readers short.

Bubon cites Melissa Bank's 1999 story collection, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing -- one of the first kooky-shoes-on-the-cover books to hit big -- as well as Mary O'Connell's Living With Saints as substantial titles that potential readers may have dismissed as fluff, given their covers.

"As a bookseller, it concerns me if you don't pick a book up because you think it's silly and not worth your time," she says.

However, thank you for your interest
(Filed: 25/08/2003)

Tom Payne examines the art of the rejection letter

There are more rejection letters now than at any time in literary history. There are more manuscripts than ever - most publishers receive at least 100 a week - and more people to reject them. These days authors can expect rejections not only from publishers but also from the agents who themselves must wait for the work they're representing to be rejected.

Clare Morrall tells me she has received thousands of rejection letters. But now her novel Astonishing Splashes of Colour is on the long list for the Man Booker Prize, which was announced last week. It is the reward for an extraordinary amount of patience. Although this is the first novel she's published, it's the fifth that she's written. "I was very methodical with this one," she says; she sent it to agents rather than to publishers direct. Thirty-three agents. None took it on, so she sent it to Tindall Street, a publisher in Birmingham, who brought the book into the world.

DBC Pierre, who also appears on the long list, thinks this is because the agents don't look at much in their slush piles, and leave the skimming to interns. Some of the agents who turned down his book, Vernon God Little, don't even appear to know that they had done so. "I've since heard that some of the people I sent it to said they'd have loved to have seen it."

Yann Martel, who won the prize last year, was turned down by five publishers before Canongate accepted The Life of Pi. Francis Bickmore found it in the in-tray, and suspects that the publishers who rejected it didn't give themselves a chance to read it. The whole business is a raffle.

When there are so many blows to an author's confidence, it's hard to see how anyone can carry on writing. I suspect that those who do come to see rejection letters as scars that hurt for a while but soon become things you can show off. Jack London used to frame his. Plenty of writers have decorated walls with them. In this age of Oprah Winfrey, in which we all have something to say and, by God, we're going to say it, we are becoming increasingly familiar with the genre of the rejection letter. Don't worry if your work is turned down, we are told on myriad error-filled websites: so was Margaret Mitchell's, plenty of times, and JK Rowling's too. The premise here is that writers are beautiful individuals, and that publishers are corporate idiots.

And if aspiring writers still doubt that they're special, they can reflect that Paine, Poe and Pope published themselves, as if the work of these plucky pamphleteers and poets had spent years in a vault at HarperCollins but, hurray, they had enough self-belief to get out there and make us listen.

Just this month, the example of the Rev GP Taylor provides a fillip to all those who feel undervalued or overlooked: an editor took issue with his use of the word "skulduggery" in the manuscript of his novel Shadowmancer; he decided to publish the book himself; then it was forwarded to his parishioners and now the man has a six-figure advance. This sort of story is seductive because, understandably, we think of writers, not publishers, as the people who revolutionise literature.

But a book called Rotten Rejections, edited by André Bernard, makes you feel some pity for the people who sit in offices and make livings out of writers. For example, what is the correct response, on first looking into Gertrude Stein's Ida? However lyrical and lapidary the work, you have to applaud the publisher who wrote back in Stein's own voice: "Having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one."

Clare Morrall is aware of publishers who look to the bottom line: "They nearly all say, 'We quite like this but don't think it would sell enough copies.' With literary fiction they tend to say that either it's prize-winning material or they can't do anything with it." It's worth remembering that although TS Eliot was a modernist poet, as a publisher his banking side could come into play. In turning down George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London he wrote, "We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture."

It reminds us how brave publishers have been when they have put new work into the world. Many have rued that failure of nerve. I founded a creative writing paper at school, and can only remember rejecting one poet, who was called Patrick Mackie and whose elegant, sophisticated Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool is published by Carcanet. Bother; but I'm in excellent company.

When the first chunks of A la recherche du temps perdu reached the Nouvelle Revue Française, André Gide decided at a glance that the author was a snob and turned it down, only later to call it "one of the most burning regrets, remorses, of my life". Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape is unlikely to wallow like that, but does admit: "You're always haunted by the ones you said no to. I turned White Teeth down on the basis of about 10 pages," the same 10 pages that led Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton to snap it up. "And you know Leadville, that wonderful book [by Edward Platt] about the A40, the road I take in to work - I thought, in an ideal world yes, but… One should have been bolder."

In fact, the moments when writers receive a letter saying yes are more astonishing than the times when they are told no. Today, it is hard to imagine literature without the work of Primo Levi; but immediately after the war If This Is a Man was an extraordinary challenge to publishers. Nobody wanted to read about the Holocaust, perhaps because of horror mixed with a lingering anti-Semitism, and publishers knew it. One took the risk - a small house called De Silva - and printed 2,500 copies, of which they sold half. De Silva folded shortly afterwards, and only in 1958, after a handful of further rejections, did Einaudi take the book on. The plight of Anne Frank's diary was similar: it was turned down some 11 times before going into print.

Publishers still reject books that look all too relevant. David Caute wrote Fatima's Scarf, a novel about an author called Gamal Rahman whose own book, The Devil: an Interview, is burned by Muslims in the north of England. The novel, with its clear parallel to the Rushdie affair, was rejected 25 times. Publishers who had published him before turned it down; in the end he published it himself and writers queued up to praise the work. Something similar happened to Maggie Gee, who wrote The White Family, a novel about racism that many houses declined to publish. Perhaps they were uncomfortable with its frank but considered portrayal of white bigots; but Saqi Books was less afraid. When the book finally appeared it won a host of raves and a place on the Orange prize shortlist.

What makes the publishers in these cases look so short-sighted is how immediately Fatima's Scarf and The White Family found an enthusiastic audience - the authors were hardly loss leaders, after all. Still, in an ideal world, publishers should be able to judge each new book as if it were by a new author, and let the work speak to them on its own terms. How lovely it was when Doris Lessing had the self-effacement to submit a manuscript under a pseudonym, to establish whether the book would be considered regardless of who she was (it was rejected).

Many of John Blake's decisions are made precisely because of who the authors are. Among his authors are "Nasty" Nick Bateman, former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith and James Hewitt. Given the kind of flannelling that can pad a rejection letter, his honesty is refreshing. "There's a big problem with people who were famous five or 10 years ago, who were on telly every day and were very busy, but now they don't realise that time's moved on," he says. "You don't phrase it like that, though. You tend to say, 'the list's rather full at the moment', or, 'it's not quite right for us'. If you're feeling really mean you dump them on other publishers, and other publishers dump them on you. We pass each other dead celebrities all the time."

So what about the rejection letters themselves? These documents, coming as they do between the publisher's feelings and the author's, must mute the former to spare the latter. After all, they also come between a book's existence and non-existence. (Sometimes, too, they come between a person's life and death: the endless rejections of John Kennedy Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces are widely believed to have led to the author's suicide.) The letters publishers end up sending to authors are almost always lovely.

This is as true of the hard characters at John Blake as it is of the smoothies at John Murray. Blake says, "The other day we did have a call from a writer who was a bit hurt by the abruptness of the letter," but he does show signs of sympathy, adding, "To all writers, it's like their child… In the early days I used to write little letters of encouragement, but now we have a graduate who writes them." Katie Mahood, who composes courteous brush-offs at Murray, sounds so kind about the whole sad business that she reminds me of a vet who has to break bad news about a dog: "We're a particularly friendly company, and we try to make our letters a lot more personal, explaining why it's not suitable. They're normally apologising and encouraging, and we always look at the positive aspects."

Clare Morrall has more than 15 years' experience of rejection letters, and is in a position to say that they have become less personal in that time. She notes that those coming from a typewriter have been more detailed and helpful than the word-processed ones that are routine these days. She also has two daughters who are old enough to receive rejection letters of their own. The younger one gets politer responses, perhaps because she is submitting children's fiction. Agents are a growing source of the less intimate rebuff: DBC Pierre says that when they bothered to reply at all, they sent a standard rejection letter.

The rejections stashed in my own bottom drawer reveal nothing but politesse. My favourite came from Christopher Reid at Faber & Faber, whom I tried to impress not only with my poems but also with the fact that I had read them on the London cabaret circuit. "I must try to catch you one Friday at Kool Eddy's Café," he wrote, "but I'm afraid I shan't be able to publish this particular collection." The sweetest sort of letter is the one that makes you think it's the publisher's fault rather than yours. "I'm sorry, it's not for us" is the standard way of doing this, but some go a little further. "Our list reflects certain values, or interests, or specialities of the editors," Katie Mahood explains, "and so a proposal might not fit into the list." My best example of this is a charming note the Globe Theatre sent when returning my verse drama: "Our focus lies chiefly with Shakespeare and his contemporaries," it said, which is ageist but fair.

The biggest question facing the rejector is, how encouraging should I be? There are stories, urban myths I hope, of writers who, on being cheered by some halfway pleasant word from a publisher, renounce their jobs, remortgage their homes and starve their families in the name of their doubtful art. But from a publisher's point of view, the strongest argument against being too gentle is that it takes too much time. "Life's too short," says Dan Franklin. "I used to work with someone who'd write pages of A4, usually to unsolicited manuscripts, and the problem with that is that you get the manuscript back year after year, with the author having followed your advice."

I have heard it argued that there is no point in writing nasty rejection letters, since people who sit down to write a book, a play or a poem are doing no harm to the world. This is true, but it ignores the harm writers do to themselves by continuing to believe that the firstlings of their brains will at last reach the point of sale at Waterstone's. This is why the firmest rejection I received was also the kindest, and is quoted in full:

Dear Tom,

I spoke to Pat [Kavanagh, at the literary agents Peters Fraser & Dunlop] about your ideas.

As I suspected, her view is that unless you want to write a novel which you absolutely have to, then you shouldn't be writing that novel at all.

Does that make sense?

With best wishes, St John Donald

Anyone who has worked as a publisher, or editor, or reviewer, or as an editor or publisher of reviews, must wish that more people took this on board. It is a pre-emptive rejection, a kind of literary contraceptive that could save the world from many unwanted books, as well as the painful platitudes of real rejection letters. However special Sara Haardt was (she was a beautiful individual who married HL Mencken), one publisher at least wished she wouldn't write poetry. This is how he responded to her submission in 1923: "The poem I can't take. We have 200 or 300 hundred bales of poetry stored in Hoboken, in the old Norddeutsher-Lloyd Pier. There are 300,000 poets in America."

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003

August 20, 2003
An Author Gets Back at Knopf
By DINITIA SMITH

WASHINGTON — "I was fired from Knopf!" said the mystery writer Martha Grimes. "Sonny didn't want the next Jury book," she said, speaking of Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, and Ms. Grimes's 18-book series about an urbane British detective, Richard Jury, all named after English pubs, like "The Blue Last" and "The Grave Maurice."

Nearly 10 years later, Ms. Grimes speaks as if the hurt lingers. Knopf dropped her, she said, probably because at that time she wasn't earning back her advances.

Never mind. Now Ms. Grimes, 72, whose Jury novels are regularly best sellers, is having her revenge. She has written "Foul Matter," just out from Viking, a sendup of the publishing industry, with characters, her publicist says coyly, who may bear a resemblance to real people. There is plenty of inside information about publishing, but it is also a comic adventure full of quirky characters and plot twists.

"The woman is brutal," said Andrew Vachss, the mystery novelist, who is an old friend of Ms. Grimes. "This book is all-out war."

"Foul Matter" — it's the term for an unedited manuscript — is to publishing what Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" was to movies, a dissection of greed, hypocrisy and ambition. Publishers have been taken over by German conglomerates like Blundenraven and the real-life Bertelsmann. Companies have names like Queeg & Hyde, Grundge and Dreck Inc. An editor called Bill Mnemic regularly steals other houses' authors.

In the book a diabolical best-selling mystery writer names Paul Giverney agrees to jump ship at his old publisher and sign up with Mackenzie-Haack, but only if it gets rid of another, more literary author, Ned Isaly, who makes less money than Giverney

Giverney's motive is to prove that the business is so corrupt that publishers will go to any length to make money. But Isaly's contract is unbreakable, so the firm's head, Bobby Mackenzie, orders an editor, Clive Esterhaus, to have him killed. A Mackenzie author and Mafia informer in witness protection finds two hit men to do the job. The problem is that they insist on reading Isaly's work before killing him, and they turn out to be amateur literary critics.

Ms. Grimes is cagey about who the book's real-life antecedents are. Is Bobby Mackenzie supposed to be Sonny Mehta? Mackenzie is brilliant and canny, words applied to Mr. Mehta, who took over Knopf in 1987. Like Mr. Mehta, Mackenzie keeps a bottle of spirits in his desk, and he has added commercial authors to a previously rarefied list. Of course, this is a spoof, and any resemblance stops there.

"A couple of people have mentioned Sonny as a model," Ms. Grimes said. But she added, "I do consider Sonny to be some kind of publishing genius."

"I really admire him," she continued. She is hardly suggesting that Mr. Mehta would take out a contract on one of his own authors, she said.

"There's only one element of Sonny in Bobby Mackenzie," she said. "Sonny has a lot of power. It isn't inconceivable that he would demonstrate power for its own sake."

Paul Bogaards, the director of public relations at Knopf, said that Ms. Grimes and Mr. Mehta "had an amicable parting." He said that Mr. Mehta had not read the book.

Ms. Grimes says parts of her are in all the authors she portrays in the book: the best-selling Giverney, the purist Isaly, the unpretentious mystery writer Jamie. Clive, who in the end does the right thing, "is an amalgam of a number of people."

But what about Mortimer Durban, Giverney's agent, who is ruining publishing by getting huge advances for authors that they can't earn back? The name seems like a combination of two well-known real-life figures, Mort Janklow and Amanda Urban. "I wasn't even thinking of it," she said.

"Foul Matter" is one of several recent novels depicting publishing in a bad light. In "The Last Days of Publishing" (University of Massachusetts Press) by Tom Englehardt, a Pantheon editor resigned in protest when his boss, Andre Schiffrin, was forced out by S. I. Newhouse. As in "Foul Matter," publishing has been taken over by German conglomerates. Now the editor has to report to his ex-wife and a slimy former hippie.

German conglomerates have also taken over in "The Storyteller" (Doubleday) by Arthur Reid, a pseudonym for Howard Kaminsky, a longtime publishing executive, and his wife, Susan, a former editor at Dutton. Here the subject is plagiarism. An author who can't get published obtains a cache of manuscripts that he publishes under his own name. They become best sellers.

But why would Ms. Grimes, who admits to an annual income of over a million dollars from publishing, have a grudge against the industry? Well, success has not come easily.

In her autobiographical books, "Hotel Paradise" and "Cold Flat Junction," she describes growing up a smart, neglected child whose mother was part owner of a resort hotel in western Maryland. Ms. Grimes's father, a city attorney in Pittsburgh, died when she was 6.

She graduated from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa. She wanted to be a poet and studied alongside Donald Justice and Philip Levine.

Ms. Grimes married Edwin Van Holland and had a son, Kent, who today is her publicist. The couple divorced.

For 15 years, while bringing up Kent in Maryland, she taught English at Montgomery College, a community college, at its Takoma Park campus, "an awful job," she said, and tried to write. In her late 40's, she began sending out "The Man With a Load of Mischief," about Richard Jury. A dozen houses rejected it before Little, Brown published it in 1981.

Readers became passionately attached to Jury; his aristocratic assistant, Melrose Plant; and Plant's obnoxious aunt, Agatha. In 1992, when Ms. Grimes published her first novel out of the Jury series, "The End of the Pier," her fans and editors objected. She got hate mail, she said. Her editors call the non-Jury books, which have not been best sellers, "these other books," Ms. Grimes said. "If I hear that expression again, I'm quitting."

Today, Ms. Grimes lives in Washington and near Santa Fe. Tall and elegant, she has never remarried. "Someone had to thrill me enough," she said with a laugh.

"I have a reputation for being difficult," Ms. Grimes said. But that is because she refuses suggestions from editors without questioning them, she said. "I just squawk and complain."

Ms. Grimes has a generally dim view of the business. Her 1993 Jury mystery, "The Horse You Came In On" (Knopf), was reported to stem from a grievance she had against another mystery writer, Elizabeth George, also an American who sets books in England. Ms. Grimes said she thought Ms. George was stealing her ideas. Ms. George's agent called Ms. Grimes's accusations "baseless, preposterous and undignified."

Recently, Ms. Grimes said, "The book has no relationship to Elizabeth George."

Among Ms. Grimes's gripes are the big advances paid to some writers. "It's decadent," she said. "Most authors can't possibly earn them out."

She says this even though she receives advances of about $1 million for every three Richard Jury books. "I'm getting a lot — too much," she said.

In 1989 her agent sold "Send Bygraves," a book of mystery poems, for a quarter million dollars, "an exorbitant sum," Ms. Grimes said. "Crazy! You're not going to earn it back."

"I think agents do this to show their own power," she said. "That's one of the reasons I hate agents."

But wait, there's a mystery here. She's a best-selling author. Why bite the hand that feeds her?

"My motive in writing this book was not to attack publishing," Ms. Grimes said. "There were no characters in this book I actually disliked. I liked all of them."

"Foul Matter" could be about Ford, or any kind of business," she said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

An Author Gets Back at Knopf