The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

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

Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer

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

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

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

Fiction

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

Nonfiction

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

Young People’s Literature

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

Poetry

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

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

The First Draft of Mystery

By Robin Sloan
Online Reporter

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

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

Here's what you do:

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

Graduate. Get yourself to a newspaper in Florida.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connelly has looked for those details ever since.

Here's the story.

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

He also learned journalism's public mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

» Read more about Connelly at his official website


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http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=51191

TOO-SEXY LIBRARIAN

By ALISHA BERGER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEXTBOOK CASE: Harvard library assistant Desiree Goodwin says she's been passed over 13 times for promotion because she's black - and sexy.
- Mark Garfinkel

October 13, 2003 -- Beautiful Harvard reference assistant Desiree Goodwin is one smart librarian - but her sexy short skirts, tight blouses and dark skin are holding her back professionally, her lawsuit against the stodgy university claims.
The 39-year-old Cornell graduate has two master's degrees and 16 years of experience in her field, but those qualifications haven't helped ignite her career.

Goodwin says she's missed out on more than a dozen promotions in the past nine years because of gender and racial discrimination.

"I've been at Harvard for nine years and not once have I encountered a black professional librarian at any meeting or any gathering anywhere," Goodwin said. "I've heard about them, but I haven't seen one."

In her complaint, Goodwin says she was passed over for 13 promotions that went to white men and women with less experience and fewer qualifications. She also said her female boss identified her "sexy" wardrobe, "low- cut" tops and an alleged bad reputation as reasons for her professional stagnation.

"A man would never be penalized for being too attractive," Goodwin said. "It could only enhance a man's career if he is sexy. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Exaggerated femininity will work against you, but hyper-masculinity will work in your favor."

Goodwin, who still works at the Harvard Design School's Frances Loeb Library, said her boss's claims were bogus.

"White women wore sexy clothes, were outgoing, attractive and they were getting mentored and getting promoted, while I was being ignored and asked to work extra hours," Goodwin said. "I think it is racist because they feel threatened by the success of someone they don't feel is like them."

Goodwin added that most of the people in a position to hire and promote new staff members are white and called their lack of support for her advancement "cultural nepotism."

"They repeatedly select young white men and women to mentor as their protegees," she said.

Goodwin said she was told she'd never get a promotion at the Ivy League institution. She also claims a supervisor told her she'd "have no problem getting a job elsewhere because the first thing employers look for is a qualified black person."

Harvard University said the suit doesn't have legs.

"The case is without merit," Harvard spokesman, Joe Wrinn, said in a statement. "Gender and race were not factors."

Wrinn said the proof is in the pudding: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination both dismissed Goodwin's case.

The university has filed a motion in Boston federal court to dismiss the complaint. Goodwin has until Oct. 31 to respond.

New York Post Online Edition: news

Autumn 2003 Mystery Book Sense 76 Top Ten

It's not a mystery why these titles were chosen by independent booksellers as their top ten picks for the fall.

1. TO THE BONE, by Neil McMahon (HarperCollins, $23.95, 0060529164) "Dr. Carroll Monks, emergency room physician and part-time sleuth, is back and in fine form. Mystery lovers who haven't yet discovered author Neil McMahon and his Monks books are in for a real treat!" --Susan Wasson, Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM


2. THE DEATH YOU DESERVE, by David Bowker (Minotaur, $12.95, 0312311788) "The Death You Deserve is great. It's a title that I'll definitely recommend to thriller fans looking for a fresh voice." --Meredith Whiles, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington, KY


3. LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER, by Margaret Maron (Mysterious Press, $23.95, 0892967803) "This multilayered novel is rich in surprises and fun, as well as murders, relatives, and puzzles. The heroine finds her backbone as she struggles to understand and deal with the past and present. It is delicious to see her blossom in the midst of mayhem." --June Applen, The Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, FL


4. STILL LIFE WITH CROWS, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Warner, $25.95, 0446531421) "Medicine Creek, Kansas, is slowly dying as its farming base erodes along with the land. Main Street is shuttered, and the nearest mall is 200 miles away. The few townsfolk, unused to change, are terrified when a body is found mutilated in a cornfield. What does the weird tableau symbolize? As more are unveiled, enigmatic FBI agent Pendergast arrives from New Orleans to take charge in another knockout from Preston and Child." --Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ Also a Time Warner Audio (1586215043, Abridged Cassette)


5. THE SERPENT'S KISS: A Novel, by Mark T. Sullivan (Atria, $25, 0743439821) "A snake-bearing serial killer is on the loose in San Diego, and the more detective Seamus Moynihan and his crew find out about the case the more possible suspects they discover. Is it the internationally renowned reptile handler from the zoo? The drug dealer with a passion for 'hot herps'? Or someone with a connection to Lilith, mother of demons?" --Maryelizabeth Hart, Mysterious Galaxy Books, San Diego, CA


6. THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf, $24, 037541472X) "Small Boat is a follow-up to Fesperman's 1999 Lie in the Dark, which featured Bosnian cop Vlado Petric. Set five years after Vlado's daring escape from Bosnia, Fesperman picks up the story in Berlin, where Vlado is enlisted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal to find two WWII criminals from Bosnia. This is the best thriller/detective novel that I've read this year, a literary triumph from start to finish." --Barry Martin, Book'em Mysteries, South Pasadena, CA


7. EVERYONE DIES: A Kevin Kerney Novel, by Michael McGarrity (Dutton, $23.95, 0525947612) "Everyone Dies is by far the best police mystery I've read this year. Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney and his wife, Army MP Lieutenant Colonel Sara Brannon, have taken leave for the birth of their son -- a leave that turns into a nightmare as people from Kevin's professional past begin turning up dead. Will Kevin's wife and baby be the next victims?" --Bob Spear, The Book Barn, Leavenworth, KS Also a Brilliance Audio (1590867815, Abridged Cassette)


8. MORGUE MAMA: The Cross Kisses Back, by C.R. Corwin (Poisoned Pen, $24.95, 1590580745) "Morgue Mama is a real treat. The interaction between the older newspaper morgue librarian and the young, upstart crime reporter, Aubrey McGinty, was terrific. If you enjoy a chuckle or two with your mystery, you'll love this one!" --Linda Dewberry, Whodunit? Books, Olympia, WA


9. JUDGMENT CALLS, by Alafair Burke (Holt, $23, 0805073868) "Take an insider's look at Portland's Drug and Vice Division as Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid deals with courtrooms, criminal investigations, and her personal life. This may be Alafair Burke's first book, but she knows her way around the justice system, and her father, James Lee Burke, has every right to be proud!" --Barbara Theroux, Fact & Fiction, Missoula, MT


10. HARD AS NAILS: A Joe Kurtz Novel, by Dan Simmons (Minotaur, $24.95, 0312305281) "A relative newcomer to the hard-boiled crime genre, Simmons explodes onto the scene with his tough-guy antihero, Joe Kurtz. In this third novel in the series, ex-private eye, ex-con Kurtz hunts a serial killer who's targeting heroin addicts, while he's evading various hit men who are out for the bounty on his head. A serious, guilty pleasure awaits!" --David Thompson, Murder by the Book, Houston, TX

Publishers fight for more 'male lit'

Two men are fighting back against the "chick lit" phenomenon by setting up a publishing company exclusively for men's and boys' books.

David Elliot and Brad Thompson want to attack the "namby-pamby, touchy-feely" style of authors like Tony Parsons.

The pair told the Daily Telegraph there should be more buccaneering tales that teach boys about chivalry and stoicism.

Spitfire Books' first release will be Barry Norman's laddish 30-year-old novel Have a Nice Day.

The company, which will publish boys' books under the title Young Spitfire, is fighting the corner for men, believing female authors such as Zadie Smith and Helen Fielding receive too much attention.

"Because of feminism and political correctness, what young men read now is crap these days, with books by people like Tony Parsons," said Mr Elliot in the Telegraph.
"It's all this new dad stuff, all namby pamby touchy-feely. Where are all the great buccaneering, derring-do, true-life adventures and cowboy stories? Our criteria is that we want bloody good reads."

Spitfire wants a return to adventure stories where men are men and debauchery is welcomed along with smoking and drinking.

Female characters look like they will be given short shrift in Spitfire stories, as Mr Elliot believes JK Rowling was wrong to have made Harry Potter's friend Hermione his equal.

"It is typical of modern children's books in which there is a boy and a girl and the girl is as good as the boy," he said.

"Just William is a much better read for boys. Violet Elizabeth Bott was a whingeing, snivelling sneak who was always frightened. That is how I would like the girls to be."


The publishers say the influence of female-orientated books has edged out writers such as Neville Chute and JB Priestley.
Mr Elliot said Spitfire will provide an alternative to the publisher Virago, founded 30 years ago to promote women's fiction.

"They had their day," he said.

"Now it's time for us to have ours to redress the balance because men are not getting a fair crack of the whip."

Are there really not enough novels around for men and boys? Send us your thoughts using the form below.


I've read quite a few novels where men get to be extremely debauched, smoke and drink to excess and have lots of adventures where girls are given very short shrift. Of course, their focus is gay men in the urban jungle so maybe it's not quite what Spitfire want...
David, UK


I challenge you to find a boy equivalent of Hermione, ie someone who is good at studies not games. All the children fiction I have read has boy heroes as good at things other than academic subjects (eg William, Jennings, Harry Potter etc) while there is a wide range of "academic is cool" fiction for girls. When schools are failing our boys it is sad that fiction is too.
John, UK

The lack of books aimed at boys is simply the result of market forces. Because parents have an increased tendency to talk to baby girls, they pick up linguistic skills earlier on and are consequently much more likely to read. More female readers means more femenist books being written to supply the demand.
Graeme Phillips, Germany, normally UK

I think this is great and don't know why anyone hadn't thought of it earlier. I hope it succeeds - most (thirtysomething) blokes I know haven't read a single book since school. It would be nice to see books aimed at men that aren't either (a) humorous; (b) thrillers; (c) fantasy/sci-fi or (d) about the underworld/drug culture - because it my experience that's about all they'll read (if they do at all). Let's see something different.
Holly, UK

I look forward to seeing Spitfire Books crash and burn. Elliot and Thompson are the literary equivalent of The Darkness: sounding ironic without meaning to and ending up all the more pitiable because apparently this really is the best they can do. To quote "namby-pamby" Oscar Wilde: books are either well-written or badly written, that is all. What matters in creative writing is not what is said but the way it is said.

Men are not getting a fair crack of the whip? Well, to quote Martin Amis (a man who really knows how to write) in his new novel: that seems like a mild reparation for five million years in power.
Alan Simpson, Belfast, NI


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3180722.stm

Published: 2003/10/10 13:45:05 GMT

© BBC MMIII

I'm slightly obsessed with Mark Haddon these days...

Mark Haddon: Seeing the World Through New Eyes

Sunday, September 28, 2003

With a handful of picture books to his name, reams of unpublished novels in his drawer, and an agent who told him he would never ford the abyss between children's and adult fiction, Mark Haddon sat down one evening and wrote the following lines: "It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead."

When he wrote it, he did not know the voice belonged to Christopher, a 15-year-old math prodigy with a rare developmental disorder. He didn't realize that he was writing a spare new form of noir, told in the slab-flat voice of a child who has trouble processing anything so ambiguous as tragedy or emotion. Discovering the story even as he extruded one flat little sentence after another, Haddon wondered whether there would be readers willing to suspend themselves in such a disquieting world view. The answer was a resounding yes. His Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has gathered fans the world over, climbed its way up bestseller lists, and cloned itself into 30 languages, including Lithuanian and Chinese.

Perhaps it's a book for our time. Perhaps it's because we live in a world that craves stories that pit the young against rude fate: Consider, for instance, today's bestselling fiction: The Lovely Bones, The Life of Pi, The Secret Life of Bees -- novels about children beset by rape, murder, shipwreck, predators. In Haddon's remarkable story, the reader is made to travel the perilous road of adult perfidy with a cicerone who doesn't know what perfidy means -- a bit like riding a racehorse with blinders. And yet there is grace in the journey.

Forty-year-old Haddon was the first in his family to go to college -- in his case, as he mentions above, Oxford. His father "clawed his way" through night school only to become an architect during the building slump of the '70s; he made do by designing slaughterhouses. His mother was not a partisan of books. The town he grew up in -- Northampton -- despite being a mere hour from London, didn't have a bookshop. He grew up anxious, even depressed, although he would posit that "adults who remember their childhood as idyllic are deceiving themselves." The kids, he says, who are comfortable in the classroom are uncomfortable on the playground, and vice versa. There is bullying. Sadism. Getting from day to day is a genuine puzzle: A child who is sensitive to it might be a writer someday.

His favorite book at age 10 was The Origins of the Universe, by Albert A. Hinkelbein, which to this day sits next to his desk. When he read Lord of the Rings, at age 12, he thought he had graduated to adult fare, but Camus's The Stranger disabused him of that notion: He failed to understand what was so good about it. He believes it was then that his fascination with books began.

At first, he thought he would become a scientist. Maybe it was his parents' supportiveness, he says, maybe it was a bloodymindedness he inherited from his father, but what he remembers vividly was "the unspoken assumption that if I put my mind to something I would be able to do it." He feels he would never have succeeded as a writer without the underlying confidence that it would all come right some day. He survived a boys' boarding school -- "a low-security prison with slightly better décor, where there was violence and cruelty" -- because he could make people laugh. At Oxford, he majored in English. And then, of course, comes the stretch he describes above, caring for the disabled, after which he published a number of books for children, among them Ocean Express, The Sea of Tranquility and Gilbert's Gobstopper.

He has compared his success to someone who has pressed his face to the window of literary life for so long he cannot fathom how he tumbled in and landed in the Jacuzzi. He is ill prepared for fans, for the movie deal, for Brad Pitt wanting to own the story, for Steve Kloves ("Fabulous Baker Boys," "Wonder Boys") wanting to write the script. Husband to an Oxford professor of literature, father of a 2-year-old boy, expecting a baby soon, he still looks forward to getting together with aspiring children's books writers -- going off to Devon or Yorkshire or Shropshire, cooking his own meals and chatting all night into the wee.

What's next for this whirlwind phenomenon? Blood and Scissors. Of it he will only say this: "A few weeks ago, in an interview, I made passing reference to the funny bits in Curious Incident. The journalist who was interviewing me was outraged. She had wept her way through the book. So perhaps the best way to describe my next novel is to say that it is the story of an architect (not, I hasten to add, my father) having a rather dramatic breakdown."

With funny bits.

-- Marie Arana

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

The Writing Life

By Mark Haddon
Sunday, September 28, 2003

In 1980, I went to Oxford University to study English literature. After three years of big books, earnest late-night discussions, drunken parties and periodic essay crises, I decided, like many of my friends, that I needed to restore some kind of balance by spending time doing something that revolved around the needs of other people for a change.

I signed up with a volunteer's organization and was duly shipped to a small town in Wales to work with Michael, a young man paralyzed by multiple sclerosis. I was to be one of two helpers who did alternating 24-hour shifts, cooking, feeding, washing, taking Michael to the shops, turning him in bed at night, changing his catheter bag, holding his cigarettes so that he could smoke.

What I wasn't told until I was being driven to the house by Michael's social worker was that he had recently become an evangelical Christian of a particularly fervent stripe. He was now a member of a rapidly shrinking church whose members spent perhaps a little too much time deciding who was and wasn't going to be "saved."

In the circumstances, Michael and I got on rather well, though he was adamant that when I died I was going to hell (along with Catholics, lesbians, Muslims and pretty much everyone apart from seven or so members of his own church).

Michael had thrown the last three volunteers out of his house -- one because he had beer stashed under his bed, another because he was gay, the last because he owned a pack of tarot cards. They had been replaced by Neil, a reformed alcoholic who had been told, personally, by God, to go and work with Michael. This, it turned out, was not one of God's better ideas. Neil was the kind of man who couldn't open a packet of biscuits without spraining an ankle and setting fire to something. Despite having almost no education, he was attempting to read the New Testament in Greek using only a battered, second-hand Greek dictionary. He burnt meals, shrank washing and was persuaded to buy a second-hand car even though he couldn't drive. A door fell off the car the following week.

Shortly after my arrival, the local vicar dropped round for tea. The local vicar was very definitely not one of the saved, but he was dogged and cheerful and determined to make the best of a difficult conversation. Matters were not helped when Neil and I heard a loud pop and realized that Michael's catheter bag had burst. We spent the next five minutes trying to mop several pints of urine from the carpet while Michael and the vicar drank tea, ate egg mayonnaise sandwiches and made prickly small talk above our heads.

A few days later I attended a prayer meeting in Michael's living room. At the climax of the evening, when the singing and the preaching and the giving witness had whipped everyone into a state of high excitement, a large truck drove past the house shaking the walls. Immediately Neil leapt out of his seat, shouting, "It's the Second Coming!"

I learnt four valuable lessons during my time in Wales.

One: The great majority of the problems that occupy people with disabilities are the problems that occupy all of us -- money, family, relationships, broken washing machines, neighbors with electric guitars, etc.

Two: Sunny stoical people can become seriously disabled, but becoming seriously disabled does not necessarily make you a sunny stoical person. Consequently people with serious disabilities can be as cantankerous, small-minded and difficult as the rest of us.

Three: You can live with someone who is paralyzed from the neck down and spend more time looking after the third member of the household who is physically fit and in full possession of all his faculties.

Four: The blackest moments in life are often the funniest.

These things were on my mind when I sat down to write The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Though it is deliberately never mentioned in the book, Christopher, the narrator, has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. I knew, from the beginning, however, that Christopher had to be a rounded, believable human being, not an accurate clinical portrait of someone with the condition. Such a portrait, in any case, would be impossible, because people with Asperger's are as varied and eccentric and diverse a group as Italians or bus drivers or piano players. So I did no research.

After leaving Wales, I did a series of jobs that involved working with people who had physical handicaps and learning difficulties. And ever since that time I have been interested in the subject. If I come across a newspaper article about Tourette's, I'll read it. If I come across a television program about Down Syndrome, I'll watch it. But I made a point of not getting large tomes on autism out of the library. I made no visits to special schools. Indeed, when I started putting Christopher's character together, I borrowed all of his ticks, habits and obsessions from a variety of people I know, none of whom would be labeled as having a disability.

Consequently I was amazed (and very flattered) when, shortly after the book was published, I started receiving letters from parents and grandparents of young people with Asperger's, saying that I had "got it exactly right." I was equally amazed (and very disconcerted) to receive a string of invitations to speak at academic conferences on autism.

It comes down, I think, to this: We live in an age obsessed with facts. If we want to learn about a group of people with whom we have very little contact, we watch a TV documentary, we read a book of popular science, we buy a biography. We forget, too easily, that we can have all the facts and still be no nearer the truth. We forget that imagination is still one of the most powerful tools we possess.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's father says that to understand another human being you have to spend half an hour in her shoes. This, of course, is not just Atticus Finch talking to his daughter about Tom Robinson, Boo Radley and the other residents of Maycomb. This is also Harper Lee talking to us about the book we are holding in our hands.

I am always suspicious of writers who have what Keats called "a palpable design" on their readers, however honorable that design. But you cannot write a half-decent novel if you do not empathize with your characters, and if you do not try to persuade your readers to feel the same way.

It is for this reason that novels remain one of the best ways we have of understanding people we have never met, one of the shortest routes to a half-hour in another person's shoes.

So, if Curious Incident has any palpable design on readers, it is to persuade them that however different we may be from one another, however alien we may seem in one another's eyes, the things that separate us are dwarfed by the things we have in common. •


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

AUTHOR ANNOUNCES MORTAL WORK OF ART

Writer Shelley Jackson invites participants in a new work entitled "Skin." Each participant must agree to have one word of the story tattooed upon his or her body. The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another. In the event that insufficiant participants come forward to complete the first and only edition of the story, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If no participants come forward, this call itself is the work.

Prospective participants should contact the author (shelley@drizzle.com) and explain their interest in the work. If they are accepted they must sign a contract and a waiver releasing the author from any responsibility for health problems, body image disorders, job-loss, or relationship difficulties that may result from the tattooing process. On receipt of the waiver, the author will reply with a registered letter specifying the word (or word plus punctuation mark) assigned to participant. Participants must accept the word they are given, but they may choose the site of their tattoo, with the exception of words naming specific body parts, which may be anywhere but the body part named. Tattoos must be in black ink and a classic book font. Words in fanciful fonts will be expunged from the work.

When the work has been completed, participants must send a signed and dated close-up of the tattoo to the author, for verification only, and a portrait in which the tattoo is not visible, for possible publication. Participants will receive in return a signed and dated certificate confirming their participation in the work and verifying the authenticity of their word. Author retains copyright, though she contracts not to devalue the original work with subsequent editions, transcripts, or synopses. However, correspondence and other documentation pertaining to the work (with the exception of photographs of the words themselves) will be considered for publication.

From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.


SHELLEY JACKSON'S INERADICABLE STAIN

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