August 24, 2004
Sex, Sex, Sex: Up Front in Bookstores Near You
By EDWARD WYATT

Porn stars may not keep many things hidden, but whatever secrets they had are now on the shelf at the local bookstore.

A wave of confessionals and self-help guides written by current or former stars of pornographic films is flooding bookstores this year, accompanied by erotic novels, racy sexual-instruction guides, histories of sexual particulars and photographic treatments of the world of pornography.

While many bookstores have long maintained sections devoted to erotica or sexuality, rarely have those books been as prominently positioned as some of the current crop, which have been elbowing their way onto display tables at the front of the major chain bookstores.

Every generation has a book or two that sets pulses quickening and generates frantic debate about pornography, community standards and the lowering of the bar for what is acceptable. But the latest flurry of sex books, coming at a time when sexual images already dominate advertising, entertainment and the Internet, is clearly finding a wide audience.

Publishers, for their part, insist they are not simply churning out dirty books.

"I don't publish pornography," said Judith Regan, president and publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins. "I publish smart books about sex. A lot of people try to imitate what I do but they don't do it well."

Ms. Regan's most recent offering is "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale," a memoir by Jenna Jameson, probably the most successful woman ever in the adult-film business, written with Neil Strauss, a former reporter and music critic for The New York Times.

The book, which is already climbing the best-seller lists, is long (579 pages), graphic (with clinical descriptions of a smorgasbord of sex acts) and bulging with color photos of a mostly nude Ms. Jameson (which led some stores, including Wal-Mart, to refuse to stock it).

Also headed for stores this fall is "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" (Bullfinch Press) by the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, with an introduction by Gore Vidal and essays on the intersection of pornography and culture by Salman Rushdie, Nancy Friday, John Malkovich and others.

For history buffs there is "The Intimate History of the Orgasm" (Grove Press), as well as histories of prostitution (Grove) and the pornographic film industry (ReganBooks), all currently in stores or coming soon. Atria Books has just issued "Star," a novel by Pamela Anderson with a reversible book jacket that contains a nude pinup of the author on the inside.

"100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed" (Grove), the sexual memoir of a teenage Italian girl, and "The Surrender" (ReganBooks), a former ballet dancer's account of her spiritual awakening through anal sex, are also on the way. Even some mainstream novels are drawing attention for their sexual content, like Tom Wolfe's forthcoming chronicle of the sex-and-beer obsessions of the college crowd, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

"Sex is what is selling these days," said Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books and Washington Square Press, imprints of Simon & Schuster that publish Zane (who will not disclose her real name), one of the industry's top-selling authors of erotica. "When publishers see that, everybody wants to get into the market."

The current crop of books was spawned by the success two years ago of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." by Catherine Millet, a French art critic. The book, published by Grove Press, received mediocre reviews but spent nine weeks on the Times best-seller list, bringing a new air of respectability to the genre.

Bob Wietrak, vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble, said that while erotica had been around for years, a big difference now was that it was written by name-brand authors rather than by the ubiquitous Anonymous.

"What we're seeing now in novels is that they're sexy, but they're very sophisticated," Mr. Wietrak said. That sophistication has brought greater acceptance, he said, and demand has generated better placement in stores.

Ms. Jameson's book is featured at the front of most bookstores. ReganBooks is also promoting "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," by the Vivid Girls, stars of pornographic films produced by Vivid Entertainment.

The key to her assertion that Ms. Jameson's book is smart, Ms. Regan said, is in the subtitle. "This is a cautionary tale for this culture," she said, referring to the book's frank descriptions of Ms. Jameson's rape by a relative of her boyfriend, her drug addiction and other trials.

"It's the story of what she aspired to and what she's become, and the price she paid for it," Ms. Regan said. "You cannot live a life like this and not pay a price."

Last week, the book appeared among the top 20 titles on the Amazon.com best-seller list. It also showed up at No. 27 on the extended best-seller list of The Times for the week ended Aug. 14, which is notable because the book did not officially go on sale until Aug. 17. (The extended list of 30 best sellers appears at www.nytimes.com; the top 15 of those appear in The Times Book Review on Sundays, about two weeks after the list date.)

A different kind of sexual awakening is the subject of "100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed." When it was published in Italy last year, the author was identified only as Melissa P., and she would not pose for photographs that showed her face because, she said, she was not yet 18.

The book itself is hardly as demure, relating such tales as the author's 16th birthday, when a lover goaded her into having sex with five men at once. The book sold more than 500,000 copies in Italy alone, and its success has spread across Europe. The author has helped her fame by revealing herself as Melissa Panarello. In interviews, she insists that the book mirrors her own experiences, although she stretched into two years events that actually took place in one.

Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said he believes the book will endure alongside previous erotic best sellers published by Grove, including "Tropic of Cancer" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

While he acknowledged that a chronicle of an adolescent's sexual experiences "is probably not a book that is appropriate for every market," Mr. Entrekin said the book was neither exploitative nor pornographic. "Pornography, for me, comes from intent, and I just don't think there's that intent here," he said.

Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria, concurred, saying that erotica like Zane's "Sex Chronicles," "Addicted" and, most recently, "Skyscraper" have sold more than a million copies not because they are exploitative but because they are intelligently written.

"These books are not subtle or coy or sentimental," Ms. Adero said. "They express their sexuality with a humor and a confidence that is reflective of today's woman. That is a cultural change that I don't think is going to reverse itself."

Some others clearly agree, including Harlequin Enterprises, publisher of the famed Harlequin Romance novels. In recent years Harlequin has introduced several book series that take a distinctly modern - that is, explicit - view of sex. In one series, called Blaze, the authors Lori and Tony Karayianni, writing as Tori Carrington, address a letter to readers in which they claimed to have surprised themselves at how far into "the shadowy side of sex" they go.

Harlequin romances, of course, can be bought at Wal-Mart, one of the biggest sellers of books today. But Wal-Mart shoppers looking for Ms. Jameson's memoir will be disappointed: the chain decided against carrying the book, Ms. Regan said. (Wal-Mart officials did not respond to inquiries seeking comment.)

Wal-Mart shoppers can, however, buy Ms. Anderson's novel, "Star," though with a difference. To accommodate Wal-Mart and other mass retailers, Atria issued about one-quarter of the 135,000 copies of the novel in print so far with a plain pink cover, instead of the jacket featuring a nude Ms. Anderson - a sort of modern equivalent of the plain brown wrapper.


The New York Times %3E Books %3E Sex%2C Sex%2C Sex%3A Up Front in Bookstores Near You

Laptop stolen from Corelli author

The author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin has offered a reward for the return of a stolen laptop containing the first 50 pages of his next novel.
Louis de Bernieres told the Eastern Daily Press the laptop had been taken from his garden shed in Norfolk.

The author was attending the Edinburgh Festival when the burglary happened.

He said he was offering £500 for the laptop's return, and a further reward for information leading to a conviction "of the creeps that stole it".

De Bernieres said he now faced having to rewrite the start of the book A Partisan's Daughter.

"I felt stupid for forgetting to bring the laptop in with me. I think I had been meaning to go back down there," he told the Eastern Daily Press about the theft.

"They also got all my garden tools which is a pain at this time of year."

He added: "I was about 50 pages through a new book and it was going very well, I was on a roll. I mostly feel angry."

De Bernieres had first embarked on A Partisan's Daughter when he was in his 20s, inspired by Yugoslavian friend who had claimed to have worked as a prostitute. He said he was on the fourth rewrite of the book.

"I would like to offer a reward of £500 for the return of this computer, and a further reward of the same amount for any information that leads to the conviction of the creeps that stole it," he told the newspaper.


The author shot to fame with Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which became a critically-acclaimed bestseller before it was adapted for the big screen.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3584460.stm

Published: 2004/08/20 16:39:02 GMT

Zhang Ziyi to Star in 'Geisha' Movie

Fri Aug 20, 2:18 PM ET Add Entertainment - AP to My Yahoo!

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES - After long years of development and some tricky Hollywood dealmaking, a movie version of the best-selling novel "Memoirs of a Geisha" is headed into production.


The book became a sensation around the world when it was first published in 1997. The story chronicles a young girl's rise from poverty in a Japanese fishing village to life in high society.


The lead role of Sayuri will go to Zhang Ziyi, the Chinese actress who starred in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and appeared in the comedy "Rush Hour 2," her publicist said Thursday.


For those unfamiliar with the story, a geisha is a Japanese woman schooled in the art of dance, singing and conversation to be a companion for wealthy men.


Zhang, 25, has been working to perfect her English for several years and now speaks the language with little difficulty.


"This is the first time that I will play the lead in an English-language movie. It will be a big challenge, but the studios, producers and director have shown great confidence in me. I will continue to do my utmost to make this the best role I've ever played," she told The Associated Press.


Ken Watanabe, an Oscar nominee for "The Last Samurai," will portray the Chairman, a high-powered executive with whom Sayuri falls in love.


Another "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" co-star, Michelle Yeoh, has signed to portray Mameha, the elegant and experienced geisha who becomes Sayuri's mentor.


"Geisha" will be directed by Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director of "Chicago."


Marshall has long wanted to make this his next project, but was locked into a contract with Miramax Films, while Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks SKG held the rights to "Geisha." After lengthy negotiations that threatened to block his participation, a deal was eventually reached among the studios.


"We could not be more excited about the extraordinary cast that we have in place for `Memoirs of a Geisha,'" said Marshall, who's also a Tony-winning director and choreographer. "We are adapting a beloved piece of literature that has become a worldwide sensation, which made it important to me to assemble a cast with a prestigious international profile."


For many years, Steven Spielberg was interested in directing the film. He will now serve as a producer.


"From the time I first read Arthur Golden's novel, I wanted to see this as a film," Spielberg said. "It's a uniquely compelling story rich with characters who take you into a world you have never experienced before."


Production is set to begin in the fall, but the release date has not yet been specified.






Yahoo%21 News - Zhang Ziyi to Star in %27Geisha%27 Movie

Nautical novelist 'couldn't even sail'
By James Landale
BBC News


The late Patrick O'Brian's celebrated maritime novels inspired legions of fans to venture on to the ocean waves. But fresh evidence suggests the legendary writer couldn't even sail.
Since Patrick O'Brian died four years ago, the author of the famous seafaring novels behind the film Master and Commander has been exposed as a man who invented much of his own life. He was English, not Irish; his name was Russ, not O'Brian.

Yet none of this has dented his cult following and reputation among his fans as one of the greatest story tellers in the English language. His 20 novels about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin continue to sell by their thousands.

But now fresh claims have emerged that will test the loyalty of even his most vocal supporters.

It appears that the man who wrote so brilliantly and so accurately about naval warfare and life aboard ship during the Napoleonic wars did not actually know how to sail. The claim is made in an article by a wealthy American businessman called Tom Perkins in the current edition of the sailing magazine Yachting World.

Mr Perkins, a venture capitalist behind some of the world's biggest internet companies, was such a fan of the books that he invited Patrick O'Brian, then aged 80, and his wife to spend two weeks on his 154ft superyacht "Andromeda" on a cruise of the Mediterranean in the summer of 1995.


In his article, Mr Perkins describes a dinner where he and Mr O'Brian discussed the trip. He claims that the author's "knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil".
They agreed to start the voyage at the small harbour of Port Vendres on the southern French coast near to where the reclusive writer lived.

"O'Brian then suggested a cruise circumnavigating Sicily, a stop in Greece, dropping by Beirut and winding up with a comprehensive tour of the Balearic islands," Mr Perkins writes.

"I was stunned! How, I wondered, could this old salt possibly comprehend a tour of over 3,000 nautical miles with numerous ports of call, in 14 days in a yacht capable of only about 12 knots?

"As I began to explain the physical limitations of time and space, he added a desire to drop the hook in Naples, Capri and Tangiers as well."

On being told that this was impossible and that they would confine the trip to a cruise of the Balearic Islands, a somewhat disgruntled O'Brian gave Mr Perkins the impression that he was "short-changing him on his yachting holiday". And once on board, Mr O'Brian revealed a further lack of nautical knowledge.


He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day
Tom Perkins, Yachting World

"Underway to Menorca beneath a sunny sky with a 20-knot following wind, the sailing was marvellous and O'Brian was delighted," Mr Perkins writes. "I introduced him to the helm but he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe [a sudden change of direction involving the boom swinging violently from one side of the boat to another].
"I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful. He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day."

Mr O'Brian had in the past claimed that he had sailed on board square-rigged ships in his youth, learning to "hand, reef and steer".

In the article, Mr Perkins also gives fresh insight into Mr O'Brian's otherworldliness, a man who knew more about the 19th Century than his own time.

"One morning after breakfast... Patrick said: 'Tom, I wish to ask you an embarrassing question which will reveal my utter and total ignorance of all things in the modern world. What is software?'" Mr Perkins replied: "The piano is the hardware and the sheet music is the software."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/3570988.stm

Published: 2004/08/16 17:04:42 GMT

© BBC MMIV


BBC NEWS %7C Magazine %7C Nautical novelist %27couldn%27t even sail%27

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?



I Love You%2C Madame Librarian -- In These Times

C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes'

By Tommy Nguyen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page C01

In announcing the cancellation of "Booknotes" -- C-SPAN's popular author interview program -- yesterday, host Brian Lamb was haunted by the numbers. He spends 20 hours each week reading books in preparation for "Booknotes," he estimates. That's 1.8 years of his life that have been dedicated to reading since the show debuted April 2, 1989. Now he wants to reclaim some of that time for his personal life.

Has it come to this? The author-interviewer, arguably the most quirky and dedicated on television, the creator and curator of one of TV's few institutions for avid readers -- has he finally tired of books?

"Oh, that's not true -- I still love reading," Lamb says. "I've never missed a show in all these years. It's been great, but I also think it seemed, in many ways, like I was always studying for a semester exam every week. Even kids in school get the summers off. I just thought it was time to do something new."

The program -- which has featured guests ranging from Bill Clinton to Shelby Foote, from Roger Mudd to Michael Moore -- will be pulled Dec. 5, when "Booknotes" celebrates its 800th author interview.

"What? They're canceling 'Booknotes?' " says Barbara Meade, co-owner of the Politics and Prose book store on Connecticut Avenue, a mecca for a "Booknotes" kind of person. A candlelight vigil at the store has not been announced. "Well, our store customers have loved watching his interviews, and they've gotten very interested in a particular book after watching a show [on the book]. We hear from our customers that 'Booknotes' is the only thing they watch on TV. They're going to be very disappointed."

As word spread yesterday among book lovers, many remarked on the way the show's tone and mood could edge on the surreal. Some recall Lamb asking questions such as:

"What was it like running U.S. foreign policy?"

"Was Khrushchev a trustworthy man?"

"How much did you make when you were 23 years old?"

"What is buggery?" Lamb once asked author Martin Gilbert.

Lamb's idiosyncratic interview techniques were eulogized. "Lamb's show is the most strait-laced stream-of-consciousness bit of showbiz on a rigidly anti-showbiz outlet in the history of entertainment," said one author who did not wish to be identified because he had been a guest on the show.

Local literary agent Debra Grosvenor, who has seen many of her clients on the show (including Eleanor Clift and Steve Neal), says she'll miss it a great deal.

"It was fabulous," she says. "It seemed to be an unbiased discussion on that particular book, and Lamb comes across as a very intelligent reader. I don't think its [book sales] impact has ever been quantified in the industry, but we would always be thrilled when one of our authors got on the show."

On Dec. 12, "Booknotes" will be replaced by another interview program hosted by Lamb, tentatively called "Q&A," which will occasionally invite guests from the book world. More frequently, however, they will come from beyond. It's a bonus, says Lamb, if they come from the deep beyond.

"We really want to hear from new and exciting people who are not necessarily writing books, accomplished people from all walks of life," says Lamb, mentioning that politicians, journalists, doctors, scientists and historians will all be a part of his expanded Rolodex. A scenario he's counting on for the show's development sees him picking up the paper, turning to the back pages and finding a story on someone who has very little or no chance of making it on any other TV show. That's his new definition of a quality guest.

"There are 4,000 schools of higher learning in this country," Lamb says. "How many of those chancellors and presidents have you seen on TV? How many of them have interesting stories to tell? How about we just start with that?"

Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN, says he also changed the show's focus because he has become a bit weary of the book promotion cycle: After publishing a book, an author will simply make the rounds and appear on many shows. "What really kept me and the show going all these years was this great opportunity to learn something new in my reading, meet new authors and pass along my unique experience to the audience," says Lamb. But since exclusive television appearances are so rare among authors, "it seems that I can't do that anymore. So if I do interviews with authors in the future, I'd rather talk to them outside of that sequence."

"Booknotes" will still survive on its Web site, where archives of the interviews will remain, and Lamb insists that BookTV -- C-SPAN2's 48-hour programming on the weekends -- will see enhancements that will compensate for the loss of "Booknotes." Most likely viewers will see another interview show soon.

But Lamb wants everyone to get excited about his new show. "Because we're not governed by ratings on C-SPAN, we have the luxury to experiment," says Lamb. "We can be different and unusual."



C-SPAN Writes Last Chapter Of 'Booknotes' (washingtonpost.com)

Valuing Bestselling Books
July 2004

Retail Strategy
Research by
Alan Sorensen
Assisstant Professor of Strategic Management
Stanford Graduate School of Business

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Each week millions of readers look at the New York Times bestseller list to see what everybody else in the country is reading. And as soon as a title hits the list, booksellers typically push the book to the front of the store and slash its price by as much as 40 percent.

So it seems reasonable to assume that once a book makes the list its sales will really take off—if not for the lower price then because readers might view bestseller status as a sign of quality or because they don't want to miss the action. According to Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management who has studied the effect of bestseller lists on sales of hardcover fiction, the majority of book buyers seem to use the Times' list as a signal of what's worth reading. Relatively unknown writers get the biggest benefit, while for perennial best-selling authors such as Danielle Steel and John Grisham, being on the list makes virtually no difference in sales.

"There is an effect, but it's small—much smaller than most people would have expected," says Sorensen, who studied sales records for 2001 and 2002. "What's remarkable is there is this dominant downward [sales] trend," he says, describing the typical sales path over time in the fiction titles he studied. Most sales occur soon after a book hits the shelves and gradually peter out. "If anything, what appearing on the [bestseller] list does is not so much cause your sales to increase from one week to the next, but rather to decrease at a slower rate."

Of course, looking at bestsellers alone wouldn't prove that any week-to-week sales changes were caused by the list itself. To answer the causal question, Sorensen needed a comparison group: books that sold well but somehow missed the list. So he looked at data from Nielsen BookScan, a sales monitoring service that tracks retail sales of books across the nation. Unlike the New York Times, which samples sales from only some stores, Nielsen BookScan captures most actual sales.

Consequently, Sorensen found differences in the two lists. In fact, in the two years he studied, Sorensen found 109 different books that failed to make the Times list even though Nielsen reported they sold more copies than other titles on the Times' list. Thus, if Sorensen saw sales rise on the Nielsen BookScan data the week following that same title's appearance on the New York Times list but saw no similar increase for a different top-selling Nielsen book that wasn't on the Times list, he inferred that something about the appearance on the Times list caused the subsequent jump in sales.

Based on these comparisons, Sorensen estimates that previously best-selling authors got the least benefit from being on the New York Times list, while unknowns had the greatest jump in sales. On average, he estimates, appearing on the Times list might increase a book's first-year sales by 13 to 14 percent, but for first-time authors sales probably would increase by an impressive 57 percent. And for established authors like Danielle Steel or John Grisham whose every novel seems to become a bestseller, "the list has no discernible impact on sales," writes Sorensen.

This pattern, he says, suggests the bestseller list primarily tells consumers what may be worth reading. "It's free advertising for new authors who make it to the list," he says. With a well-known author, on the other hand, people don't need a bestseller list to help them decide whether to buy the book.

Careful to isolate the bestseller list from other likely causes of higher sales, Sorensen also looked at the famous "Oprah effect," the stunning way being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's on-air book club immediately catapults a title onto the bestseller list. Though reluctant to name numbers because there were few Oprah titles in the sample, Sorensen says the Oprah effect is "many times bigger" than the bestseller effect.

Looking at sales of individual titles is fun, but for economists, says Sorensen, a more interesting question is the effect of bestseller lists on overall product variety. If bestseller lists are indeed generating extra sales, are those sales stolen from other books? Or are those extra sales literally extra sales, bought by people who wouldn't otherwise have bought any book? "It's a really hard question, and I don't have the ideal data for answering it," concedes Sorensen. But he has indirect evidence suggesting that being on the list does indeed generate extra sales. If he's right, everyone but the perennially best-selling authors and their publishers may have a little bit less to grumble about.

—Marina Krakovsky



Research - Valuing Bestselling Books - Stanford GSB

Susanna Clarke's Magic Book
By JOHN HODGMAN

"I wanted to write about magicians,'' Susanna Clarke said as we climbed a high moor in Derbyshire. ''I really like magicians,'' she went on, with a wry, apologetic dignity, as if it were an affliction she was born with. ''But there was no reason to suppose anyone else would.''

It was a cool, gray evening, and Clarke's luminous silver hair was still damp from a sudden rain that had come and passed. Her partner, the science-fiction and fantasy novelist and critic Colin Greenland, had gotten far ahead of us. They have been vacationing here for six years, hiking these steep hills and wooded cloughs in the very south of the north of England. They are both beer enthusiasts and punctuate their ramblings with long digressions in local pubs. Normally they live together in Cambridge, where Clarke worked as a cookbook editor for many years. But now she wore the comfortable clothes and comfortable air of someone who has left her day job forever. Because after 10 years, she has finally finished her novel, ''Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,'' and it will be published this September.

It follows the friendship of two gentleman sorcerers in London in the early 19th century: the bookish Mr. Norrell and his pupil, the dilettante Jonathan Strange, who come to the aid of England in the Napoleonic Wars by, for example, moving Brussels to America. And it is about a third magician, the Raven King, a human brought up by fairies who came to rule Northern England through much of the Middle Ages before suddenly disappearing, taking magic away from England and closing the fairy roads behind him.

The novel is being compared with abandon in the press to the ''Harry Potter'' books, but it is not for children, unless they are children who really, really love footnotes. It is nearly 800 pages long, but in some ways that number feels arbitrary, as if the novel consisted of just those pages Clarke chose to show, and that she might have easily chosen another 800 from those she kept in reserve. She has lived in the world of the novel for more than a decade after all, carefully charting the false history of English magic and documenting it with citations from a fastidiously false bibliography. What did not make it into the main story is alluded to in copious notes that make up sort of a second novel at the bottom of its pages (when they do not take over the pages altogether).

Clarke is equally meticulous in the research she has not made up, which has produced an observant and often very funny comment on the stiff mores of regency England: when Mr. Norrell comes to restore magic to England and becomes a reluctant celebrity, it is not so much that London is enthralled with magic as it is enthralled with the same old spells -- the lure of notoriety, the cultivation of social status.

In short, it is a patient, grown-up novel of dueling wizards. As much as this spells crowd-pleaser to me, I would have considered this something for a niche crowd. But Bloomsbury is betting I am wrong, publishing some 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain and Germany, with 17 foreign publishers currently finishing their translations.

''What happened when I was writing 'Strange & Norrell,''' Clarke said on the moor, ''was the world kind of changed in my favor.''


When Clarke's first story was published, she almost didn't know about it. In 1993, she had just turned 33 and had returned to England after a stint teaching English in Italy and Spain with a mind to write a novel about magicians. And being a serious, responsible person, she signed up for a five-day residential course in writing fantasy and science fiction. The co-instructor, Colin Greenland, was a renowned critic and champion of the genre who had long argued that it be taken seriously as literature, which Clarke appreciated. She also liked that in his novel ''Harm's Way,'' he had written about satellites made of wrought iron and so might have a feel for what she was doing.

But he wanted all the students to submit short stories before the course began, ''which annoyed me,'' she said when they picked me up at the train station, apparently unconcerned about offending Greenland. ''I wasn't working on short stories. I was working on a novel.''

At the time, she wrote, and still does, in fragments: bits of dialogue and sketches of scenes that come to her as if they were overheard. (Sometimes she will be sitting in a pub and start scribbling in notebooks as Greenland waits.) Even by then she had amassed ''great bundles'' of material.

But being diligent, she didn't complain. So she culled from the bundles something resembling a short story, and she called it ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu.'' It was about three otherwise respectable women who secretly practiced magic -- including the governess, Miss Tobias, who was ''too tall, too fond of books, too grave and -- a curious thing -- never smiled unless there was some thing to smile at'' -- and are discovered by the famous magician of London Jonathan Strange.

Greenland liked the story so much that he sent part of it to his friend Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist and comic-book writer. Greenland helped Gaiman publish his first short story many years before, and now he wanted to share another exciting new writer with the world. He didn't tell Clarke. He was afraid that she might have stopped him, because Gaiman was one of her favorite writers.

''It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance,'' Gaiman recalled. ''It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata.''

But Clarke's life had prepared her for her work. Reared by Methodist ministers, she grew up moving from congregation to congregation, from Glasgow to Staffordshire to Yorkshire to Nottinghamshire. And because she was not really of any particular place, she chose one: the wilder landscape and poverty-born practicality of the north, which she preferred to the cosmopolitan southern cities, where, she recalled, when she went to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics, some people actually owned two pairs of boots.

She read the historical fiction of Rosemary Sutcliff and the fantasies of Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner and especially came to love Jane Austen. In secondary school, the headmaster asked her what she wanted to do, and she told him she wanted to be a writer. ''Apparently that was not what he meant,'' she said. ''He meant, What do you want to do in the next three minutes?''

By the time she reached Greenland's class, she had worked in publishing and written most of two novels, one about angels who visit Liverpool wearing black suits and white shoes (it was the New Romantic period of the 80's, she explained sheepishly) and the other a detective novel. And she had long been dreaming of the arrogant young magician who would first appear as Jonathan Strange in ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu.''

After Gaiman received the story, he showed it to his friend Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who in the mid-90's was assembling a highly anticipated anthology of new science fiction and fantasy called ''Starlight 1.'' Clarke did not hear about any of this until she came home one day and heard Hayden's voice on her machine, offering to publish her.

Clarke called back and said she would consider it. She was concerned that it might hinder her main goal: the novel, which she had started in earnest just before enrolling in Greenland's class. Finally, ''I made poor Patrick Nielsen Hayden write this letter saying that if I did want to put this story in the novel, I could.'' Then she agreed.

In the anthology's contributors' notes, Clarke wrote that she ''spends most of her time editing cookbooks and watching people take photographs of food.'' In fact, she had joined in ''Starlight 1'' a group of accomplished science-fiction and fantasy writers (including one Nebula award winner and one woman who had written more than 170 books) and, as well, a larger community of magician lovers: the passionate, prolific, happily weird and somewhat self-contained otherworld of ''the genre.''

She contributed to several other anthologies, including ''Starlight 2'' and ''Starlight 3,'' and was discussed and praised on Internet bulletin boards devoted to fantasy fiction in general and fairy-tale fiction specifically. She fell in love with Greenland and coaxed him up to Cambridge from London, where he had been living for years in a house known for having no heating and being a sort of colony for science-fiction writers. And she went back to working on her novel.

This is a happy ending for a fantasy writer, I would think. But it wasn't to be her ending.

he two most successful commercial franchises that have come into the book and entertainment worlds over the last five years are 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings,''' the literary agent Simon Lipskar said. ''Anyone who's going to be honest about that is going to see a marketplace that's rewarding fantasy.''

Fantasy has not, of course, been absent from literary fiction, but it has been admitted to the mainstream generally only when pedigreed (Martin Amis's ''Time's Arrow''), political (Margaret Atwood's ''Handmaid's Tale'') or exotic (which is to say, Latin American). Fantasy and science fiction as a capital G genre, meanwhile, has largely been shelved separately from the rest of the culture, in part because of the genre's mania for self-classification into ever-narrower niches (high fantasy versus alternate history, hard science fiction versus space opera, cyberpunk versus steampunk) and in part because of pure snobbery.

Still, it is hard to deny a sense that the boundaries between genre and literary fiction are slipping. Gaiman's ''American Gods,'' in which an ex-con joins the Norse god Odin on a road trip, was marketed as a mainstream thriller. Philip Roth is just about to publish his alternate history novel, ''The Plot Against America.'' And Kelly Link's self-published ''Stranger Things Happen,'' with its ghosts and giant dogs and men with tin noses, was named among the best books of the year by Salon at the end of 2001.

Around this time, Susanna Clarke had begun to despair. She had been working on the book for several years, and, as she wrote to me, ''Colin and I agreed the time was right to find an agent when the whole burden of carrying this huge unfinished book became too heavy for just the two of us.''

Giles Gordon took her on and in early 2003 sold the still unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury, which quickly snapped up world rights based largely on a reader's report that Bloomsbury would later circulate at the London Book Fair and that began, ''This book so captivated and riveted me that I'm charging half the full fee.''

When Bloomsbury acquired the rights to publish ''Harry Potter,'' its division in the United States did not yet exist, so the American market -- and the fortune it generated -- went to Scholastic instead. Clarke's book will be the first novel Bloomsbury will publish in a coordinated worldwide campaign across its three branches in Britain, the United States and Germany.

Clarke's acquiring editors in Britain and America weren't particular fans of magic. As Karen Rinaldi, publisher at Bloomsbury U.S.A., said, ''You just read it and say, 'Damn, it's great, it's long, it's fantasy and I'm going to publish it.'''

A fantasy novel used to be able to rely on perhaps 7,500 dedicated hardcover readers. Nearly that many advanced readers' copies have been circulated already, a select number of them wrapped in paper and sealed in wax with an image of a raven. They have been selling for more than $100 on eBay in England, a fact noted with some awed amusement by Greenland.

This sort of push by a publisher is not so unusual for a big first novel. But it is curious for a big first novel about dueling magicians that is uncompromisingly literary without being shy about taking the genre seriously. And her novel is being published with none of the fantasy trappings, none of the comforting camouflage that it is for children. It is being published, well, like a regular book.

''We are now in the conditions that a lot of us spent the 80's working for and demanding,'' Greenland said, ''which is a very large crossover between adult and children's fiction, genre and mainstream fiction.''

On the other hand, he said, there is some apprehension as well. As Kelly Link said of Clarke's success: ''It makes me very, very glad, and also a bit worried. It's too close to my idea of the way things ought to be.''

Greenland told me, ''Somebody actually said on a Web site, 'I hope this novel lives up to all the hype, because if not, it's going to be a big setback for all fantastic historical crossover writers.'''

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to complete the joke. ''Both of them?''


You learn a lot of things when you are writing a book for 10 years. At a pub called the Three Stags' Heads, Clarke easily switched between conversations on ''The X-Files'' and Wellington's cavalry. When we were shown the preserved cat that was said to have been found in the pub's wall, where it had been bricked in generations before to ward off evil spirits, Clarke pointed out that in East Anglia, it would have been far more likely to find a horse's head: ''Horse magic had much more of a hold there.''

Later, she said, ''One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages and how difficult it is to get good servants.'' So her apartment is challenged by bookcases full of soldiers' accounts of Waterloo, the social anthropology of George Ewart Evans and dozens of slim books on such subjects as styles of visiting cards and mausoleums.

''I love books about very small things,'' she said. When a certain character draws a knife from a well-laid table near the end of the novel and holds it to a man's throat, ''I had to restrain myself from buying a book on 19th-century fruit knives.''

This makes Clarke a great person to share a pint with. She can also be disarming in her candor and her kindness, evidenced by the fact that she invited me on vacation with her and Greenland and constantly inquired as to my ability to keep up with them on the moors and gave me a hot water bottle at night.

Sometimes when I talked about her writing, though, her face grew calm as stone, and I felt like a very unsmiled-at thing. And when I complimented her on how plausibly she had conjured the idea that England was ruled for hundreds of years by a mysterious vanished magician king, her reaction made me wonder if I had read the wrong book, and she looked concerned, as though she were trying to come up with a polite way of telling me that that was true. Later she told me that she was gauging my reaction against her intent: to wrap the surreal in the mundane. But I also knew she had written the book alone, over countless early mornings before going to work. And while I did not get the impression that she didn't appreciate praise, it did seem that she was one of those rare writers who no longer required it.


After our beer at the Stags', we walked through a deep valley, called, appropriately, Ravensdale, that was full of shadow and sharp-smelling wild garlic and had a tiny hamlet at the bottom that seemed almost to be abandoned. In a few weeks, Clarke would go to Chicago for BookExpo America, the big annual trade show. It would be only the second time she had been to America, and perhaps because Greenland was once again far ahead of us, she explained that the only thing she was ambivalent about was being there without the person who knows her best in the world.

Otherwise, she seemed eerily prepared for her moment. I asked her how she felt when it became clear that this was to be a worldwide publishing event. At first it was surprising, she said, ''but when you hear that they've sold Sweden, and then you hear that they've sold Finland, suddenly you say, 'What about Norway!'''

Now Clarke told us we would climb to the top, and the three of us attacked the valley's steep side. I was frankly shocked by the effort: it felt like walking up a mossy, earthy wall. Greenland also seemed overwhelmed, falling back with me as Clarke moved indomitably upward. Finally we reached the sunny top. Greenland and I each took a puff off my asthma inhaler, and Clarke said, ''I am very proud of you both.''

Earlier, Greenland told me that he felt he had accomplished two things in life: discovering Neil Gaiman and discovering Susanna Clarke. To which Clarke scoffed, ''You discovered both of us by the difficult process of having us put our work in front of you and saying, 'Read this.'''

''My job here was to open two envelopes and read the contents,'' he said. ''And I did it.''

I then asked Clarke whether she ever thought of herself as fantasy's flag bearer, sent out by Greenland and Gaiman and all those others to conquer the mainstream.

''No,'' she said, laughing. ''And I'll thank you not to suggest it.''

In the fall, she will undertake a punishing tour of the United States and Canada and then Germany, and then return to the United States. But at this moment, she was relaxing, reading about Egypt, its gods and antiquities, and pondering her next book, which will be set in the same world as ''Strange & Norell'' and will need to be written in much less time than a decade. ''I have a bit of a problem now that the fairy roads are all open,'' she confessed. ''What do I do with them?''

Back at the top of Ravensdale, we climbed over another wall and set out over another field. The farmers here are charged with keeping a public path clear for hikers, and in front of us, diagonally across the sun-battered field, was a great luminous green stripe of turf. Greenland and I were hesitating before the path. But now Clarke was ahead of us, and we followed her.


John Hodgman is a contributing writer for the magazine.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

The New York Times > Magazine > Susanna Clarke's Magic Book

Women Win, Orchids Rule and Elvis Lives
By JANET MASLIN

This is how James Patterson looks in the flesh: wistful, sensitive, a little sporty, much the way he looks on the covers of his books. Amazingly, this is how he does not look: exhausted. The man is a publishing powerhouse, with best sellers that arrive regularly at four-month intervals. He has four brand-name ideas up and running: rhymes ("Roses Are Red"), numbers ("1st to Die"), houses ("The Lake House") and correspondence ("Sam's Letters to Jennifer," his latest). He averages three books a year, but next year there will be five.

How does he do it? "Mr. P." (as he is called on the cover of his next foray, "santaKid," a Christmas book for children) is not the only best-selling dynamo who brings this question to mind.

Actually, Mr. Patterson's trade secrets are more understandable than most. His sentences, paragraphs and chapters are famously short, so that the style of the children's book, despite illustrations and words like hiya and cool, is not so unlike that of the adult ones. And his marketing skills are not to be sneezed at. Sure, "santaKid" describes how an evil corporation tries to buy Christmas and take over the North Pole. But its own sleigh will be pulled by a million-dollar marketing campaign, according to Little, Brown & Company's latest catalog. Promotional Santa hats will be part of the holiday cheer.

Busy as he is (with a young adult novel also in the pipeline), Mr. Patterson is a lazybones by some lights. Danielle Steel works at an even more breathless pace. And if she seems to sell endless versions of the same romance to the same readers, perhaps that's because she has refined the art of glam-dropping to a science. "Second Chance," her latest, invites readers to identify with a heroine, one Fiona Monaghan, who is "an icon in the fashion world" and looks "like Katharine Hepburn with a little dash of Rita Hayworth."

Fiona is "constantly surrounded by photographers, assistants, designers, models, artists and a flock of hangers-on." She is "all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and all-caring."

Caring is an interesting word there: Ms. Steel shies away from the selfish, ruthless, shameless home-wrecker type, preferring something more genteel. She would rather focus on inadvertent fabulousness, as in: "She had never paid much attention to the impact she had on men, she was always too busy thinking and talking about a variety of topics." That syntax makes sense only if you notice the 62 other titles on the current "Also by Danielle Steel" list and realize that the author hasn't much time to sweat the small stuff, like periods and commas.

Sustaining such popularity has unusual prerequisites. It is not entirely necessary to be alive, for instance. The Archy McNally novels of Lawrence Sanders have continued to appear well past Sanders's death, with the franchise handed down to Vincent Lardo, whose name appears in pint-size letters on the cover of "McNally's Bluff." Mr. Lardo also wrote five preceding books in the McNally series, which The Boston Globe has called "effortlessly written to be effortlessly enjoyed." Still, the effortlessness of Sanders (whose name appears in very large letters) falls into a special category.

Peddling the dead can be accomplished in other ways, too: "Such Vicious Minds" is the latest in a series of mysteries (including "Blue Suede Clues" and "Viva Las Vengeance") that star the post-mortal Elvis Presley as a character. As written by Daniel Klein, this latest installment features a real Elvis, a fake Elvis and a blurb for the series ("I enjoyed this sequel as much as the first book") from no less a Presley fan than Bill Clinton. As for Elvis, well, he's still talking about pink Cadillacs and saying "Ma'am."

The 42nd president of the United States is certain to have had more fun with this than he might with "American Evita," a hatchet job by the prolific Christopher Andersen. With "Madonna: Unauthorized," "Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot," "The Day Diana Died" and (his best title, for a book about Jane Fonda) "Citizen Jane" to his credit, Mr. Andersen is another speed demon, with tactics all his own. "Sex, power, money, lies, scandal, tragedy and betrayal were the things that defined the public lives of both women," he writes, by way of explaining how "American Evita" equates Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with Eva Perón.

Mr. Andersen, a king of the clip job, recycles old news while adding a scandal-sheet spin. So sources like "one longtime ally," "someone" and "a close family friend" are relied upon. And words like consummate and ultimate set the tone of overkill. "Hillary would later recall" generally indicates a detail lifted from Senator Clinton's own book, although Mr. Andersen never slows down to connect quotes with specific sources. Every now and then (" `What do you mean?' she yelled, as Bill turned vermilion"), Mr. Andersen's creativity is all his own.

At least give him credit for filling 292 pages with printed words. "Woman Power," Dr. Laura Schlessinger's latest dose of nonfree advice, actually relies on the time-saving use of blank space. Throughout this book, there are nearly empty pages that the reader is supposed to fill in herself. Herself? I think it's fair to assume that no man is going to read a book that asks: "What less-than-positive wifely actions and attitudes did you recognize as yours?" In any case, Dr. Laura leaves room for a 10-line answer.

"What motivated you to read `The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands?' " she asks about her own most recent bossy best seller. (That one warrants 11 blank lines.)

Surely there are better ways for an author to be self-referential. Consider "Song of Susannah," the sixth installment in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, which is by now so complicated that it has spun off a book-length concordance explaining people, places, events and mutants — yes, mutants — from Volumes I to IV. Even Mr. King acknowledges that when he sat down to write Volume V, "Wolves of the Calla," in 2001, he needed the refresher course of listening to the first four installments on audiotape.

"The Dark Tower" may not be easily picked up in mid-epic, but here is a warning: Sept. 21, Mr. King's birthday, will be a red-letter day for its loyal readers. That's when all will be revealed in the final installment, called "The Dark Tower" and standing at 845 pages in prepublication galley form. Anyone already in possession of it has been asked to "Please respect the `Dark Tower' fans that have been waiting for over 30 years to read the conclusion of Roland's quest" and not give away the end of the story.

Unbelievably, this is the same on-sale date scheduled for the third and final volume of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle," "The System of the World," which is even longer: 912 pages, in smaller print. Truly, Sept. 21 will be a day for the girding of loins and the getting of glasses, because both these series are worth following to their finales. And both authors, however they did it, have managed to give Middle Earth a run for its money.

On a more modest note, Sue Grafton is merely working her way through the alphabet with Kinsey Millhone, private detective, one book at a time. Suspense still attends the question of what will happen when Kinsey gets to X — or Z! — but "R Is for Ricochet" is another of Ms. Grafton's sensible-sounding installments.  (A, B and C were for Alibi, Burglar and Corpse, respectively.) 

By now, at R, there are signs of fatigue: on the first page we learn about the weather. ("Morning cloudiness had given way to sunshine.") On the second it is revealed that Kinsey likes an olive and pimiento cheese sandwich for lunch. Descriptions are worrisomely flat. ("The lawns were wide and well tended, and the quiet was underlined by the twittering of finches.") Still, Ms. Grafton has much the same reliability as Janet Evanovich, not to mention much the same readership. Each of them dishes up the mystery-novel equivalent of comfort food.

Eric Jerome Dickey, whose latest is "Drive Me Crazy," specializes in steamier fare. He likes to describe a woman "head to toe, wedding ring to thong." He likes the kind of anti-hero who found himself "being a man in need of a new sin." And this novel's main character, an ex-con turned chauffeur called Driver, is the kind of guy who can say "you're silk and lace in a blue jean world" and get away with it. Mr. Dickey's characters have enough sultry self-confidence to suggest, at their best, a Prince song on paper.

"He didn't give you anything I can't take away with a phone call," the wife of Driver's boss threatens.

"And you didn't give me nothing I couldn't buy for a hundred dollars," Driver replies.

Even hotter than the previous exchange, "sticky and heavy with desire," with "a thick tongue-flap of tissue separating the mass from the moist female organs below," is . . . what? The vanilla orchid, that's what. Tim Ecott describes it so lovingly and elaborately that his "Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid" joins the ranks of fashionably myopic scientific histories. The format's success relies on both the author's doggedness and the reader's curiosity. Salt, quinine, the color magenta: each has had its in-depth studies, and now the vanilla bean is ready to be in vogue. At least one other vanilla-ography will be published later this year.

At least vanilla won't hurt you. It does not turn up in the "V" section of Laura Lee's "100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life and What You Can Do About Them," though vacations (you might die snorkeling), vegetables (watch out for the spud-shooting potato gun), vending machines (don't hit them or they'll fall on you) and vitamins (kids eat them like candy) do. In this, the perfect book for anyone who does not already have enough to worry about, Ms. Lee accentuates the hazardous in certain commonplace objects. Uh-oh: beware of books.

There are moldy old books that carry hallucinogenic spores. There are new ones — by Mr. King or Mr. Stephenson, for instance — that could fall and break your toe. And there are books that are absolutely harmless, like "Lunchbox: Inside and Out," by Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett, which simply depicts collectibles from the wide world of vintage lunch containers. How did they do it? Sometimes there's an even better question: Why?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/books/30CROW.html?pagewanted=2&th

Being in the Zone Pays Off for First-Time Novelist

Jul 27, 2004

Raelynn Hillhouse will soon break into print with Rift Zone (Forge), an end-of-the-Cold War thriller bearing enthusiastic blurbs from half a dozen masters of her chosen genre [that is sitting in my to-be-read pile, but near the top!--bookbitch]. And this debut author's first novel has been chosen as an August Book Sense Pick.

Such developments might startle any other beginning novelist, but the resourceful Hillhouse seems to be taking all this well in her stride.

"I spent all my life getting into places that other people don't get into!" she said recently, from her home in Hawaii. "So I just put those same skills to work."

Her most dramatic acts occurred as a student in divided Berlin in the 1980s -- a place and period that looms large in Rift Zone.

But Hillhouse's break-in to her own life's interests began much earlier, in the Ozarks of rural-southwest Missouri, where she grew up the child of parents who ran a company that produced etching equipment for newspapers.

Despite her family's word-related work, she was not especially encouraged to read as a child. "I was always a self-starter, so I did it on my own," Hillhouse said. "Ours was a small town of about 5,000 people; the nearest bookstore was 35 miles away.... I was famous for skipping high school and driving 30 miles to the nearest university and sitting in the library there all day reading. If I had missed one more day at school, I think, I wouldn't have graduated; but as it was, I was valedictorian. I've always loved to read."

Hillhouse went to college for two years at Washington University, in St. Louis ("150 miles and a world away from the rural Ozarks"). Then, inspired by the tales of people from other lands who had done business with her parents, she moved to Europe when she was 20 and lived in that part of the globe for the better part of six years. "I'm good at working various systems and things, and managed to finish my degree while abroad."

Divided Germany drew her: "The whole idea that you could take one culture and, as kind of an experiment, impose two very different social systems upon it, was very interesting intellectually." At different times, Hillhouse had a Fullbright research grant and a scholarship through East Germany's League for Friendship of the Peoples, which she called "a pure propaganda organization." The latter saw her living and studying in East Berlin, in the early 1980s.

"These are the days," she recalled, "when Reagan is in office, and the Cold War is heating up.... It was not a good time to be an American in Eastern Europe -- not even in Western Europe, for that matter, because of the missile buildup that we were doing. It was in a time of great suspicion: there was great tension. And that's part of what made it exciting -- because I was there in my 20s, looking around, trying to learn everything I could about those very unusual places."

Adding to the "excitement" were the ways Hillhouse found to supplement her East German scholarship money: by smuggling goods from East to West.

"What I found out worked best, in Berlin, was taking Cuban rum from East Berlin to West Berlin," she said. "Like soldiers everywhere, [the French soldiers stationed in West Berlin] weren't paid a whole lot, and not enough to be able to go out drinking to the amount that they wanted. So," Hillhouse concluded with a laugh, "I was using Fidel to support NATO, in a way."

Hillhouse also smuggled jewels out of the Soviet Union, hiding the gems in the hollow heads of little souvenir busts of Lenin.

"I've carried everything from computer boards to lingerie," she said. "One of the things I found with the highest return was condoms: because you couldn't get them in Eastern Europe, but the demand was still pretty darned high!"

During and after such extracurricular activity, Hillhouse earned her undergraduate degree from Washington University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Back in the States, she had a faculty position and was on tenure-track at the University of Hawaii when the Communist system in Eastern Europe all of a sudden disintegrated.

"I used to be laughed at," Hillhouse remembered, "for saying that change was going on in East Germany; no one believed it of that 'ultimate Stalinist society.' I had an article and grant proposals arguing that, just at the time everything started falling apart. I was quite well funded, for the last year of my dissertation! I ended up having to change galleys of my article coming out in Slavic Review, to past tense,because everything (in Eastern Europe) was gone!"

After the reunification of Germany at the turn of the '90s, Hillhouse determined to write a work of fiction about that now-vanished place she'd known and liked so well.

"I've traveled in over 40 different countries and lived in six different foreign cities, but divided Berlin was without exception the single most exhilarating, electrifying experience of anywhere. I wanted to try and capture that somehow, in a way you couldn't do in academic books. I didn't want to create something where readers are just going to read about Checkpoint Charlie. I wanted them to experience it."

Achieving her aim wasn't as simple as defining it, though. "I realized -- well after starting to recapture and create -- you really have to learn how to write, first," Hillhouse explained. She took several summer courses at Iowa and in Squaw Valley and (with Charlie Baxter) in Splitrock. When she at last felt prepared, Hillhouse wrote Rift Zone in about five months, and then spent another five months polishing and editing.

After that, Hillhouse (who holds an executive-level job now in Hawaii) put some of her system-working skills to work.

Author Gayle Lynds, whom Hillhouse had met at a writers' conference, put her in touch with an agent -- who, after four months, decided Rift Zone was not for him. Undeterred, Hillhouse sent e-mail queries to another group of reps.

"Within six hours, I had an offer from Bob Diforio, based on the first 50 pages," Hillhouse said. "Bob's the former president and chair of NAL, and I wanted an agent who was strong on the sales side; so that worked out really well."

Forge contracted to publish Rift Zone, and Hillhouse then went to work getting helpful blurbs from such star thriller-writers as Lynds, Nelson DeMille, Stephen Coonts, and Clive Cussler.

"I cold-contacted them," Hillhouse said. "Clive Cussler took three letters, though. The last one was two sentences long -- something like: 'No matter how insurmountable the odds, (Cussler series hero) Dirk Pitt will never give up; I know early in your career, you wouldn't either. I've learned from you both.' That was it. And he did it!"

But this new author thinks booksellers are the real key to whatever success her work will have: "The people who love books, and handsell them.

"It takes such strong motivation, and such love of books, to put one's whole self into creating a bookstore and to keep it running.... Those are the people that can really sell books with passion -- and that's what it takes, you know."

That's a quality the self-starting Raelynn Hillhouse can well relate to.

"This was a book written with a lot of passion," she said of Rift Zone (whose follow-up volume is well into its planning stage). "I hope that shows through." -- Tom Nolan



Bookselling This Week: Being in the Zone Pays Off for First-Time Novelist

Kidd covers design, murder in 'Learners'
By Whitney Matheson, USA TODAY

Kidd's new piece of fiction, The Learners, makes its debut today as part of USATODAY.com's Open Book series. A new chapter of his exclusive, seven-part novella will be published online each Thursday at openbook.usatoday.com.

The Learners serves as a sequel of sorts to Kidd's first novel, 2001's The Cheese Monkeys (Perennial, $13.95). Set in the early 1960s, The Learners follows a young graphic designer who decides to answer the first newspaper ad he creates.

What follows is "a murder mystery about a killing that may never have taken place," Kidd says.

Not only does Kidd draw on his graphic-design background for the narrative, but he also incorporates it into the text. Typography plays a crucial role in The Learners; font size and design pull readers into the action.

A few lessons from Kidd's college psychology classes also are thrown in: A central character in The Learners is real-life social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose experiments during the 1960s still incite controversy.

Kidd plans to expand his novella into a full-length book, tentatively set for release in 2006.

"This really is the story I've been wanting to tell all along," says the author, who took a month-long break from his design job at Knopf to write The Learners at Bogliasco, Italy's Liguria Study Center.

Kidd also is working with book publisher Rizzoli to develop "a definitive coffee table book" of his designs. He also is an editor at large for Pantheon's graphic novels division. And then, of course, there are more book covers: "Designing is so rewarding in a way that writing isn't."

Look for Kidd's work on titles by Augusten Burroughs and John Updike in coming months — and, a couple years from now, on Kidd's next novel.


USATODAY.com - Kidd covers design, murder in 'Learners'

July 18, 2004

THE LAST WORD

How Many Books Are Too Many?
By LAURA MILLER

Brace yourselves, novelists and would-be novelists. Figures released this spring show that a new book of fiction is published in the United States every 30 minutes. Even if you don't count the titles published through print-on-demand and other fee-charging, vanity-press-type outfits, the total still comes to 10,000 books a year -- or one book published every hour or so. And that's just the fiction.

The statistics come from R. R. Bowker, the company that compiles the Books in Print database and assigns ISBN's (International Standard Book Numbers) to new books and editions. Every year, Andrew Grabois, Bowker's senior director of publisher relations, crunches the numbers this way and that, and this time around the killer figure is 175,000: the awe-inspiring total of new titles published in 2003, a jump of 19 percent over 2002.

So that's a good thing, right? Surely the whopping number of books reveals a robust marketplace of ideas? The problem is, the demand for trade books (that is, titles of general interest, as opposed to technical books or textbooks) is dispiritingly flat. As more and more books are offered to the same number of readers, the question hardly anyone dares to ask is: how many books are too many? For authors, are better chances at being published eventually canceled out by the likelihood that their books will get lost in the crowd? It's the question I put to several editors, most of whom -- unsurprisingly, given their answers -- chose not to be named.

''In all honesty,'' one told me, ''a lot of big publishers will say that not only are other publishers publishing too much, but they are, too.'' Obviously, no company wants to decrease the number of terrific books it publishes, and no one plans to produce outright bad ones. Where the going gets tough, or ought to, is among the books that are merely mediocre.

While another editor I talked to protested that there's a place in the world for so-so books -- minor works by major writers, for example -- most worry that too many readers feel burned after taking a chance on an unfamiliar title and getting stuck with a dud. Other readers, people who may buy one book a month and don't follow reviews, are daunted by the task of choosing from so many alternatives. (Hence, their reliance on mavens like Oprah Winfrey.) M. J. Rose, an author who parlayed the success of her self-published first novel into a contract with a large publishing house, told me about a vacation during which she met a few dozen women interested in contemporary fiction. ''All were frustrated and complaining,'' she wrote in an e-mail message. ''They had no idea what to do with the number of books they encounter in the store. Sometimes they leave the store empty-handed because they are too overwhelmed.''

Even editors speak wearily of ''The Wall,'' the long shelves of new titles that face shoppers in the larger chain stores. ''So many books,'' said one editor who specializes in literary fiction. ''And in three weeks, they'll be replaced by a whole new batch.'' Even the chains themselves have developed reservations. When they began expanding in the 1990's, superstores would stock nearly every title on a publisher's list. ''They had shelves to fill,'' a publishing professional told me. ''But even they have become more selective. Lately, they've been cutting back on the midlist,'' a word used for literary fiction and serious nonfiction. If the chains pass on a book, it becomes effectively invisible to a huge population of readers.

''Everyone is reading the same 20 books,'' Paul Slovak, the associate publisher of Viking, complains -- a problem most attribute to the shrinking press coverage for new books. ''It's become a winner-take-all situation.'' Especially for genres that rely heavily on reviews to drive sales, like fiction, the toll is grim. But vanishing reviews, an editor from a venerable house said, are only partly to blame: ''We just don't have any credibility left, when we're each putting out 15 novels a year and they can't all be good.''

Editors have many reasons for publishing books even they aren't really excited about. The accounting methods of most publishers don't reward selectivity. If you budget for 93 books per year and publish only 80, you might see next year's budget, or even your staff, cut; so, that editor continued, ''if the celebrity memoir you budgeted for doesn't come in because the author is in rehab, you have to find something else to fill that slot, fast.'' Publishers may buy a weak first book to get a crack at the stronger second one, and young editors often have to cut their teeth on manuscripts that senior editors have passed over. One prominent editor points to the growing number of nonfiction books bought on the basis of proposals: ''For every book that turns out better than you expected, there's one that's worse. That's spilled over into fiction. Now people are selling novels off 100 pages. Or off 30 pages, and they get a two- or three-book deal!'' Disappointing manuscripts are pushed through nonetheless: ''You have to write a real stinker to get canceled.''

BUT a reader pays the same price for the stinker as for the masterpiece, and probably invests as much precious leisure time in reading it, too. His or her willingness to do so isn't an inexhaustible resource.

Could the oversupply of books be hurting the demand for them? The difference between publishing and other businesses is that a great many people don't produce books just to make money. They want to introduce their words, or someone else's, to the world, and a lot of them see prestige and even romance in calling themselves authors or publishers. It sometimes seems everyone wants to take up writing, is (incorrectly) confident of success and plans to get to it any day now. But what good is a hammer in a world without nails? If everyone is writing and publishing books, who will find time to read them?


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > The Last Word: How Many Books Are Too Many?

KANSAS CITY.COM

Read a good book lately? Tell us about it

Hey, book lovers: It's up to us to get people reading again!

Last week a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts reported that "literary reading" has suffered a dramatic decline. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of adults reading literature - novels, short stories, poetry and plays - dropped from about 57 percent to 47 percent. Men and women, young and old, all ethnicities - just about every demographic group is reading less literature.

But maybe we newspaper readers can do something about that, at least here in Kansas City. Just e-mail us with the title and author of a good book you've read this year. Then, in a sentence or two, tell us what the book's about and why you liked it.

Send e-mail to tengle@kcstar.com. Please put "good book" in the subject line. Deadline: 5 p.m. Monday, July 19.

Please keep your recommendation to one good book (fiction or nonfiction, new or old, doesn't matter) and be brief in your comments.

We'll make a master list of all these great reads and share them with you soon online and in The Star's FYI section.

(For more on the NEA report, "Reading at Risk," go to www.arts.gov/news/news04/ReadingatRisk.html.)




Kansas City Star | 07/14/2004 | Read a good book lately? Tell us about it