White House Postpones Poetry Symposium
Thu Jan 30,11:02 PM ET

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - Two former U.S. poet laureates criticized the White House on Thursday for postponing a literary symposium it believed would be politicized. Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove characterized the decision as an example of the Bush administration's hostility to dissenting or creative voices.

The Feb. 12 symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" was to have featured the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The postponement was announced Wednesday and no future date has been set for the event, to be held by first lady Laura Bush.

"I think there was a general feeling that the current administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse," Kunitz, the 2000-2001 poet laureate, said Thursday.

In a statement, Dove, who served as poet laureate from 1993 to '95, said the postponement confirmed her suspicion that "this White House does not wish to open its doors to an `American voice' that does not echo the administration's misguided policies."

In announcing Wednesday that the symposium had been postponed, Noelia Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the first lady, said: "While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum."

Mrs. Bush, a former librarian who has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues, has held a series of White House events to salute America's authors. The gatherings are usually lively affairs with discussions of literature and its effect on society.

Hughes and Whitman themselves were frequent social commentators. Whitman once complained that the presidency and other offices were "bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes." Hughes' political writings and left-wing sympathies led to FBI (news - web sites) surveillance and harassment from Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Kunitz, Dove and others had refused to attend the symposium and a nationwide protest was soon organized.

Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, e-mailed friends asking for poems or statements opposing military action against Iraq.

"Make Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon," the e-mail reads.

He had expected about 50 responses; he's gotten about 2,000, including contributions from W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose poem, "Coda," includes the lines "And America turns the attack on the World Trade Center-Into the beginning of the Third World War."

Hamill will post all the submissions on a Web site that began running Thursday.

White House invitations have inspired protests before. In 1965, poet Robert Lowell refused to attend a White House arts festival, citing opposition to the Vietnam War.

Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate, said Wednesday she had accepted her invitation to the poetry symposium because she felt her "presence would promote peace."

"I had commissioned a fabric artist for a silk scarf with peace signs painted on it," she said. "I thought just by going there and shaking Mrs. Bush's hand and being available for the photo ops, my scarf would make a statement."
___

On the Net:


http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

FYI -
Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement

This Web site was established to provide information about a proposed Settlement of lawsuits brought by Attorneys General of 43 states, Commonwealths and Territories, and by counsel for the Plaintiff Settlement Class entitled In re: Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation.

The lawsuits, which are currently pending in the United States District Court for the District of Maine, relate to the retail pricing of prerecorded music compact discs, cassettes or vinyl albums (collectively known as prerecorded Music Products).

You may be a member of the Settlement Group and your rights against Defendants may be affected if you are a person or entity that purchased these prerecorded Music Products from a retail store during the period of January 1, 1995 through December 22, 2000.

Russians To Sue 'Potter' Over Alleged Putin Resemblance
Law Firm Claims Dobby Character Looks Like Russian Leader

January 28, 2003

It's Potter versus Putin in the latest identity crisis to rock the Muggle world.

Some Russians are charging that a character from the latest Harry Potter movie was created in the likeness of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The character in question is "Dobby the House Elf."

Some say there is a slight resemblance to the Russian president when comparing their noses.

One Russian law firm was so offended, it's preparing to sue the special effects team that created Dobby, Baltimore's WBAL-TV reported.

There is no response from Warner Brothers or President Putin.

Still driving customers up the wall after 100 years: Foyles, the bookshop that time forgot
By John Walsh
23 January 2003

It's in the Guinness Book of Records as the bookshop with the most titles in stock and the longest lines of shelving (30 miles). It boasts the most starrily famous clientele, alive or dead, of any bookshop in history (Eva Peron, the Argentinian first lady, finding herself temporarily short of cash one day, paid for her books with a crocodile-skin vanity case). The guest speakers at its Literary Lunches read like a guide to 20th century literature. It is also, by general consent, one of the most infuriatingly, perversely eccentric retail operations in the history of commerce. Foyles, the most famous bookshop in the world, is 100 years old this year.

It was actually on 14 July, 1903 that two brothers, William, 17, and Gilbert Foyle, 18, sold their first wholesale book. But months earlier, they had started in business by flogging some unwanted textbooks from their parents' kitchen table. They advertised in educational journals, and were startled by the response. Their first year of trading made a princely £10.

In 1906 they bought the shop at 113-119 Charing Cross Road and were away. William Foyle became a bookselling legend, "the Barnum of Books". He employed his 17-year-old daughter Christina in 1928. She later ran his empire for 40 years – and nearly ran it into the ground.

For decades, Foyles has been a shopper's nightmare, with miles and miles of haphazardly arranged titles, non-English-speaking student staff, and a payment system apparently designed by a Victorian lunatic. "It was a byword for dreadful bookselling," said Nicholas Clee, editor of The Bookseller. "They never answered the phone, the assistants never knew anything, and were hired and fired in six months. You could never find any book you wanted."

Would-be buyers had to queue twice. "There weren't any tills or cash registers," remembers The Independent's Christina Patterson, who worked there (and was fired after five weeks) in the mid-80s, "You sat in a little wooden box, and people would have to bring you dockets hand-written by the assistants. I dreaded being asked for help. I couldn't confidently have said which floor I was on."

The trouble was Christina Foyle, who hated any signs of modernity. She refused to allow computers or electronic tills, and spent no money on refurbishments. Her attitude to staff was autocratic: once she fired 40 women for "talking too loudly".

Since she died in 1999, leaving £60m (most of which went to charity, and none to her family), the shop has been run by two of Christina's nephews, Christopher (whom she made a director on her deathbed) and Bill Samuels (whom she cordially loathed). Between them they pulled the shop into at least the 20th century.

Some things don't change, however. You can still spend hours browsing the miles of shelves and marvelling at how everything is in the wrong place. Under "Fiction" you can find Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson, Baudelaire's Prose Poems and the plays of Beaumarchais, and that's just the Bs. Other famous works of conspicuous non-fiction include Rousseau's Confessions, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help and the Greek historian Polybius's Rise of the Roman Empire. With a perversity that borders on the criminal, Proust's 3,000-page A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is filed under "Short Stories". But there's a certain delight in finding out-of-print books, some dating back to the mid-70s, that have been in Foyles' stock for 30 years.

"There's a lot of goodwill in the trade towards Foyle and Samuels, as there would be towards any independent operators, in a world of chain stores" says Nicholas Clee. "They make no attempt to hide their opinion of the shop's past. They want to get things right from now on. After years of incompetence, Foyles still has a very good name."

Mystery visitor returns to Poe's grave
By FOSTER KLUG
Associated Press

BALTIMORE -- With his face hidden beneath a dark hood, a man crept into a bitterly cold downtown graveyard before dawn on Sunday and raised a solitary birthday toast to Edgar Allan Poe.

Continuing a 54-year tradition, the man, whose identity remains unknown, put his hand on Poe's tombstone, bowed, placed three red roses and a half-empty bottle of Martel cognac on the grave and then silently slipped back into the shadows.

A huge pale-white moon glowed over the city, yet the man still eluded dozens of people who waited in their cars or huddled together on the sidewalk outside the cemetery.

"To me, it's magic," said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, who spent the night tucked inside a former Presbyterian church nearby with a small group of Poe enthusiasts he invited to watch the ritual. "It would be very easy to step out from our hiding place and expose him, but no one wants to ruin this mystery."

No one, not even Jerome, who has watched the cemetery every Jan. 19 since 1976, knows the identity of the so-called "Poe Toaster." The visit was first documented in 1949, a century after Poe's death. For decades, Jerome says, it was the same frail figure.

Then, in 1993, the original visitor left a cryptic note saying, "The torch will be passed." Another note left later told Jerome that the first man in black, who apparently died in 1998, had passed the tradition on to his sons -- Jerome thinks there are either two or three. Such notes are the only communication anyone has had with the visitor.

A combination of respect, the visitor's cunning and the chill of Baltimore on a January night have kept the curious from uncovering the secret.

"It's just this incredible rush of adrenaline when you see that he's made it again," said Anita Gruss, an athletic director at a high school in Centreville who has seen 12 toasts. "Even after all these years, it's a thrill."

Poe, who is best known for poems and horror stories such as The Raven and The Telltale Heart, died in Baltimore at the age of 40 after collapsing, delirious, in a tavern. The circumstances of his death remain unclear: some researchers have blamed a fever, while others point to the late stages of alcoholism or to rabies.

The visitor's three roses are thought to honour Poe, his mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and his wife Virginia, all of whom are buried in the graveyard. The significance of the cognac is a mystery.

"That he has kept this secret for over 50 years is just so fascinating to me," said Joe Sainclair, a high-school English teacher from Mountaintop, Pa., who was seeing the toast for the first time Sunday. "For a fan of Poe, for a fan of mystery, it just doesn't get any better than this."

Two Worlds And In Between

Jonathan Kiefer discusses the delicate art of translation with Michael Emmerich, English translator of Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto

Here's what it means to be a literary translator: If you haven't heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven't heard of Michael Emmerich. If you have heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven't heard of Michael Emmerich. The former is a hip, ethereal, superstar Japanese fiction stylist; the latter is her English translator. If Banana becomes as big in Britain and the United States as she is in Japan, it will be because of Emmerich, but unless he too renames himself for a piece of fruit, who will give a damn?

"A nice thing about being a translator is that you don't have to worry about that stuff too much," Emmerich says. "You don't have to worry about being a really public figure. You can just do what you love." It's hard to know whether his Zen attitude comes from a longstanding affinity for Japanese culture or from having no illusions, but in either case it serves him well.

Make no mistake: as translators go, Emmerich is a hot shot. He didn't seriously study Japanese until he got to college, but by graduation he had translated one of Japan's most revered writers to great acclaim. That's impressive for an English major.

"It didn't make sense to take East Asian studies," Emmerich recalls. "I'd have to study economics, and that didn't interest me at all." In 1997, while still a Princeton undergraduate, Emmerich read several stories by Japan's first Nobel laureate for literature, Yasunari Kawabata, and decided to make a senior thesis of translating them. His advisor, Joyce Carol Oates, was enthusiastic and supportive; so were the various literary magazines which soon published some of the stories, and Counterpoint Press, which published all of them, as the collection First Snow on Fuji, in 1999.

"The reviews were terrific, and a couple said very kind things about the translation itself, which is unusual," Emmerich says. "So after that I started getting requests from publishers. One such request was Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep, which was published in 2000."

Last August, Grove released his translation of the newest Banana book, Goodbye Tsugumi, a wistful but transformative tale of the burdened relationship between a young woman and her cousin, an invalid "who had been going through her rebellious teens ever since she was born." In a deceptively compact volume, the book furthers Yoshimoto's human insights, and her radiant, searching style.

"I don't think she really has the right image in the U.S. yet," Emmerich says. "I don't think she has the right image in Japan either. She's a pretty experimental, sophisticated writer. She's writing carefully, and creating her public image carefully. I've been trying to make it clear how smart she is."

Still only in his mid-twenties, Emmerich is now about as on the map as a translator can hope to be. He is therefore entitled to make sweeping romantic pronouncements about his craft:

"A good translation is one that translates meaning, not words. Meaning is alive, words are dead."

"When you read a scene it could take five minutes. To translate it could take eight hours. Reading gives you an intense emotion. Translating gives you that same emotion for eight hours. It's ten times, a hundred times, more intense than reading!"

"Translating is always going to be much more than you hoped."

"The translator is of course always blamed for everything."

Such assurance is almost mandatory for Emmerich's highly detailed and fundamentally speculative work. When reading something that really excites him—whether it's the lucid cleanliness of Kawabata or the moody dreams of Yoshimoto or something else—Emmerich can't resist starting to translate immediately. He has also been known to exhaust himself in pursuit of a single correct cadence.

He seems undaunted by the responsibility of cultural ambassadorship, and concedes that translation is a kind of hyper-nuanced literary criticism. "Ultimately translators have to rely on their own instincts," he says. "We try to create feelings and scenes in one language that approximate as closely as possible the feelings and scenes we live as we read the book we are translating….Rhythm is very important. The rhythms of language. Getting things to connect."

Emmerich has what he can only describe as a "tendency to try and sneak into the spaces between words." His dark, inky voice shimmers whenever he inserts a Japanese word or notion into an English sentence. Yet, he says, "I've never felt translating literature from Japanese is automatic. The words are so far apart. The texture of the language is so different…it's some hazy realm that's bordered by the two languages. When I was growing up I had no idea that that space between languages existed." He grew up on Long Island, and can not account for what drew him to such a notably foreign language in the first place.

"My parents were travelling," he says. "When she was pregnant, they went to Japan. There's probably no other answer that means anything. For some reason Japan has always interested me most." Emmerich confesses that he has, in fact, wanted to be a translator for nearly as long as he can remember. When they were children, he and his sister Karen once planned to learn seven languages so they could speak a different one on each day of the week. It didn't happen, but probably came a lot closer than similar plans in other families. Karen is also a translator now, currently living and working in Greece.

Last summer, Michael left for China, "from whence he'll come back, no doubt, with another language under his belt," his sister observed at the time. He stayed with a non-English-speaking family and studied Mandarin. Such monkish immersion is no doubt elemental to his success, and to his comfortable obscurity.

The people who have heard of him, including his family and many admiring colleagues, will occasionally ask Emmerich if he'd like to try a novel of his own. But translation beckons. "You get excited as if you were writing your own stuff," he explains. "You are writing your own stuff. I have no interest in that. This is what I do."

Publishing's latest gimmick
Matt Seaton
Tuesday January 21, 2003
The Guardian

The things publishers will do to get their books noticed, part 44. The latest wheeze, from Fourth Estate, is to dispatch David Flusfeder's new novel, The Gift, to literary editors and reviewers with a cover-wrapped slip bearing the legend "Signed first edition". This type of inducement is not without precedent: in 2001, the same publisher printed a limited number of proof copies of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, followed by a large quantity of signed review copies. More recently, Donna Tartt added her autograph to the 500 proofs of The Little Friend sent out by Bloomsbury. The implication is that you, esteemed reviewer, are getting something valuable. In the case of The Gift, you are being given, well, a gift.

Of course, publishers are always coming up with such scams. Literary editors not only receive 400-500 "first editions" (ie review copies) of books every week, but some come with all manner of goodies - sweets, helium balloons, T-shirts. Even the sober academic press, Routledge, sent out Raimond Gaita's new book about our relationship with animals, The Philosopher's Dog, with a cuddly toy mastiff.

But the "signed first edition" of the Flusfeder novel is different: there's no add-on gimmick here, just the planting of the idea that this is a serious novel that's going to be talked about, bought and reprinted ... and, eventually, be worth something (provided you have a signed first edition). After all, signed first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone go for upwards of £20,000; a mint copy of Fever Pitch will fetch £750; even a first edition of Trainspotting is worth £300. So can a publisher create an instant collectable like this?

"Absolutely," says Robin Harvie, Flusfeder's publicist. But isn't that the same as a bribe? "Of course it is." Oh, right. "This is David's break-out novel," Harvie goes on. "All the lit eds have picked it up, so it's worked."

So how many of these signed first editions are there? "We've done a first run of 4,000. It took him about a month to do - but he's recovered now."

I call Simon Finch Rare Books, who deal in first editions, for a quote. It says £12.99 on the flap, I say, but what will they give me?

"Probably a bit less. But it wouldn't be something we would buy: 4,000 is an awful lot," says Natalie Galustian. "Unless he becomes some kind of through-the-roof phenomenon, I wouldn't hold my breath."

What does the author think of these shenanigans? "I find the whole thing a bit baffling," confesses Flusfeder. "I went through some minor psychosis at the time." To prevent himself going completely mad, he says, he occasionally doodled as well as signed. So if you get one of the three or four copies that contain a caricature of the author, hang on to it. You never know, it might be worth something.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

January 20, 2003
Some Best-Seller Old Reliables Have String of Unreliable Sales
By BILL GOLDSTEIN

Some of America's most popular authors are finding that being big isn't what it used to be.

Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark and Sue Grafton, usually among the most bankable of best-selling writers, sold far fewer copies of their books than expected this past year. The disappointing sales numbers, possibly the result of too many books from the same authors or the book-buying public's changing tastes, contributed to a dismal holiday season for book retailers, particularly chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Not all star authors suffered drop-offs in their sales numbers: Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Nora Roberts and Janet Evanovich continued their predictable and profitable ways. But the decline of such stalwarts as Mr. Clancy and Ms. Clark could presage a trend that would play havoc with publishers' bottom lines, and even the advances handed out to big-name authors.

The commercial necessity of publishing a lucrative roster of brand-name novelists, who can be counted on to write a book a year, was underscored last week by the ouster of Ann Godoff as president of the Random House Trade Group and the merger of the imprint with Ballantine Books.

The trade group had more adult hardcover best sellers in 2002, including books by Tom Brokaw, Anna Quindlen and Maya Angelou, than any other Random House division. But its recent lists have lacked the prolific best-selling novelists that are vital to the book divisions of large media conglomerates like Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, AOL Time Warner and Viacom, which owns Simon & Schuster. Random House no longer has a James Michener or Robert Ludlum to pour cash into its coffers consistently and help smooth out the inevitable peaks and valleys of publishing new authors.

Ballantine, primarily a paperback imprint, publishes crime novelists like Jonathan Kellerman and Richard North Patterson in hardcover.

"Brand-name authors still dominate the best-seller lists. They are still the bread and butter of the industry," said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chief executive of the AOL Time Warner Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson. But a change is afoot, he said. "There is no longer a quintessential best seller. The market is diluted to some extent by the incredible number of brand-name authors out at the same time."

And some retailers and publishing industry executives blame publishers for giving readers too much of the same thing by individual authors. Mr. King released two horror books in 2002, and Ms. Clark, the suspense novelist, published three.

While sales of Mr. King's first book of 2002, "Everything's Eventual," a story collection, nearly matched those of his 2001 novel, "Dreamcatcher," his second book, the novel "From a Buick 8," fell short. "From a Buick 8" has sold 367,000 copies, about a 20 percent decline, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which gathers sales data from outlets that represent about 70 percent of total sales.

Ms. Clark's June 2002 novel, "Mount Vernon Love Story," has sold 108,000 copies, far fewer than the 427,000 copies that sold after her "Daddy's Little Girl" went on the shelves in April, according to Nielsen Bookscan. (Her other book in 2002, a memoir, sold about 60,000 copies.)

Executives at the companies that publish Mr. Clancy, Mr. King, Ms. Grafton and Ms. Clark acknowledge their weaker sales in 2002, but contend that the sales drops are the consequence of a weak retail economy that has hit booksellers especially hard. During the nine-week holiday season ending Jan. 4, sales at Barnes & Noble stores open at least a year were down 3 percent from the previous year. And Borders's fourth-quarter comparable-store sales at its superstores were down 2.5 percent, while sales at Waldenbooks were off 6.3 percent.

Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of the Penguin Group (USA), confirmed that Mr. Clancy's "Red Rabbit," a spy thriller published under its Putnam imprint, had not sold as well as expected. But, she said, it still reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list. "Tom's audience is still out there," she said. "If blue jeans are down for a month, does that mean Americans aren't going to keep buying blue jeans?"

"It's been a year of different buying patterns," Ms. Kennedy said. "They're not the patterns we predicted." She pointed to the Penguin Group's success with new books by Jan Karon, Maeve Binchy, Nora Roberts and Patricia Cornwell.

Some retailers speculate that younger readers are turning elsewhere for commercial fiction. "We're all old enough to know these writers who've been writing a long time," said Daniel Goldin, a trade buyer at Harry Schwartz Booksellers in Milwaukee. "When I first started in publishing, people like Arthur Hailey were still selling. And then they stopped."

One retailing executive insisted that the downturn was not because of the economy. "Too many authors are cranking out at least a book a year," the executive said. "Readers can't keep up. It's the bottom-line pressure to be on schedule, to deliver at least a book a year. You have 10 percent of people saying, I can wait for the paperback or wait until I hear more about it. And then they may not buy."

But the definition of overproduction is relative. Hardcover sales for James Patterson are up, though he published three novels, including collaborations, in 2002. Warner expects to sell more than a million hardcover copies of his latest thriller, "Four Blind Mice," released in November, an 8 to 10 percent increase over his previous book's sales, according to Mr. Kirshbaum. Warner will sell more than seven million copies of Mr. Patterson's books in hardcover and paperback this year, up from about two million copies five years ago.

"There's no question we're seeing a softness at retail, which is impacting sales on the brand-name authors," said Jack Romanos, president and chief operating officer of Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ms. Clark and, under its Scribner imprint, Mr. King. "But we won't really know how well these books have done until they're published in paperback a year from now. We won't make up the hardcover dollars, but ultimately readers will come to them."

While sales have slipped for Mr. Clancy and Mr. King, the authors are not in danger of going the way of Irving Wallace and Arthur Hailey just yet. Sales of their earlier books in paperback have remained remarkably consistent, even as their latest hardcover sales dip. Mr. King's "Carrie," for example, his first novel, originally published in 1974, sold about 23,000 copies in both 2001 and 2002, according to Nielsen Bookscan.

Paperback sales for previous titles by Ms. Clark and Ms. Grafton have stayed similarly consistent. "As each of these authors has a new novel, they may dilute" their own hardcover sales, Mr. Kirshbaum said. "But when you take all their books together, they may actually be growing." Ms. Grafton, he said, may be selling less of her latest mystery, "Q is for Quarry," in hardcover, "but she's still selling A through P."

Nonetheless, the steep sales decline could have a long-term impact on future author advances. "I am more nervous about paying large sums," Ms. Kennedy said, because "a sense of solid trending" is more difficult to achieve today than several years ago.

Mr. Kirshbaum said: "Publishers will be more careful when courting major authors. There will be some tempering of advances going forward. There are limits to what can be sold, and if agents realize there has to be some reality in terms of advances, that would be valuable. It's a nice thought."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

The Dialect Survey uses a series of questions, including rhyming word pairs and vocabulary words, to explore words and sounds in the English language. There are no right or wrong answers; by answering each question with what you really say and not what you think is "right", you can help contribute to an accurate picture of how English is used in your community.

The test is designed for speakers of North American English, but speakers of all varieties of English are welcome to take the test.

The dialect survey is an expansion of an initiative begun by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. Dr. Vaux prepared an earlier version of this survey for his Dialects of English class at Harvard in 1999. The survey has since been revised and expanded for a larger, lay audience.

Dialect Survey

BookMania! a rousing success story
By Christine Selvaggi staff writer
The Stuart News
January 19, 2003

Book enthusiasts, a group of authors with growing notoriety, and a bit of marketing helped make the ninth annual BookMania! a success beyond expectations, according to organizers.

The book festival commenced Friday at the Blake Library in Stuart with a much-anticipated lecture by crime fiction author Elmore Leonard. It ends today at 7 p.m. with a performance of "The Tender Nights of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

"Each year, the caliber of writers gets higher and higher," said Judi Snyder, library community relations coordinator. "We're thinking about space for next year."

Snyder said a book festival's biggest draw is the lecturing authors, which this year included Leonard and Edna Buchanan, a suspense novelist and Pulitzer prize-winning crime reporter.

"This is a small community, and it's amazing they can put on this presentation," Boca Raton resident Stacy Alesi said. "It's very impressive."

As Alesi waited in line for Buchanan to autograph her newest title, "The Ice Maiden," the Miami Herald reporter chatted about the "victory garden" she planted after Sept. 11 and her guess on the whereabouts of missing child Rilya Wilson.

"The audience here was very responsive because we're all Floridians," Buchanan said.

Buchanan's book, along with others, sold steadily throughout the fair, with one title unexpectedly selling out.

"We're doing a considerable amount better than last year," said Dale Kostakos, community relations manager with Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

Snyder attributed the numbers to increased marketing, which included mailing 3,000 BookMania! fliers weeks in advance to hype the event.

"We doubled the size of the brochure and it was massive campaigning," she said.

Snyder added that brainstorming already has begun for next year's festival. She thinks it will surpass the success that the little library in Stuart found this weekend.

"We want to accommodate the people," she said.

- christine.selvaggi@scripps.com

I loved this...in response to a thread on a listserv regarding pet peeves in books, Mark Terry posted this eloquent, intelligent response. I wish I'd wrote it:

Subject: My anti-peeves

Anti-peeves? Oh well. Just...here's what I like in books.

Books that tell good stories. Books with male main characters. Books with female main characters. Books with male and female main characters. Interesting characters. interesting voices. Humor. Good dialogue. Books I can get lost in. Books that make me want to keep reading. Books with cliffhanger chapter endings that make me excited to turn the page. Books that I'm so excited by their existence that I go to the bookstore as soon as possible and buy them even if I don't get around to reading them for a while. Books told in the first person and the third person. Multiple point of view books. Drama. Sadness. Happiness. Violence. Did I say violence? Let me repeat that. I don't want violence in my life, but I really do want it in my reading. Go figure. Violence. Death. Murder. Madness. Love. Sex. Romance. Sex and romance. Romance and sex. Love. Anger. Hostility. Sweetness. Books that take me to exotic places like Panama and the Congo and Greenland and Texas and Miami. Books that take place in my backyard. Did I say violence and death? Murder and mayhem? Death, destruction. The end of the world. Birth. Rebirth. Did I say sex? Let me say it again. Sex. Blue collar and white collar and pink collar and no collar. Straight people and gay people and angry people and happy people. I want to be presented an organized version of life which is entertaining and thought-provoking, but recognizably like life with all its messiness. I want, desperately, to be entertained. I want books that suck me in and won't let me go, that I think about when I'm not reading them and that I can't wait to get back to, that I'm sorry when they're over, about people who I would like to have in my life...and I guess, in a way, I do. And if I can't get that from a book, well, then I might not finish it.

Best,
Mark Terry
The author of Catfish Guru
Two Theo MacGreggor Mysteries
Medical Writer: www.mark-terry.com/clips
Mystery author: www.mark-terry.com

Thank you, Mark, for sharing.

From PW Daily for Booksellers (January 10, 2003)

Debut Novelist Len Williams Seeks Justice Though Fiction

Addressing a hotly debated topic in America today, author Len Williams has taken his astounding real-life story and turned it into the new legal thriller Justice Deferred (Welcome Rain, $26.95), a book that considers the nation's "three-strikes" laws. These laws, which have often received much public support, can in some 20 states put even nonviolent criminal offenders behind bars for life after committing only three minor offenses.

Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a fan of Williams's book, has lauded the novel on both its literary and social merits. "I really do believe," she said, "that even [with] the most ardently conservative individual, if they saw the kind of case that is [put forth] in Justice Deferred, they would rebel."

The book's author, a former CEO of several large companies, including Coca-Cola New Zealand and Pic 'N Save Corp., decided to write the novel after his own experience with what he sees as the tragedy of "three-strikes" laws. After the 1980 disappearance of his then-17-year-old son Michael, Williams sought help from authorities. "He and his family tried every outlet imaginable," said Welcome Rain editor Chuck Kim, "and they met with a lot of indifference from the police forces, with the FBI, and with pretty much any law enforcement agency you can think of. They felt that no one cared unless the kid was famous."

Williams himself described his experience with the authorities as "frustrating," saying, "[The police] did nothing beyond entering data in their system and calling us if they got any 'hits' from other law enforcement agencies. If a Congressman's girlfriend goes missing, however, dozens of detectives are called in. Ordinary people get very little active help."

It was not until nine years later that Williams's family received their first bittersweet chance to gain closure: a criminal in Alabama announced to the police that he had murdered Williams's son and buried him in a swamp. When police officers led the alleged killer to the supposed location of the body, he attempted to escape but failed. Williams, then posing as an FBI agent so his identity would not be revealed to the criminal, eventually discovered that the man had simply seen the missing Michael's picture on a milk carton and decided to confess to killing the boy for a chance to escape prison.

The man was serving a life sentence he felt was unfair--a sentence which had been handed to him by Alabama's "three-strikes" laws. According to Williams, the man's "incarceration [was] the result of misguided undercover police officers who operated fence houses as multiple felony entrapments, luring these men into crimes that put them away for life."

Williams began to feel pity for the criminal who had lied about killing his son, a feeling which, he said, "gave me the idea to humanize the 'three-strikes' issue through the medium of a novel...I wanted to reverse the roles of the prosecutor and the prosecuted."

In Justice Deferred, Williams creates Billy Ray Billings, an escaped ex-con who goes to amazing lengths to nail the two cops who use Alabama's third-strike rule to engineer an unjust life sentence. PW Forecasts praised the novel, suggesting "the combination of dialogue-driven scenes and surprising plot twists is downright addictive."

Williams has since commented that if his novel annoys the police, his task will have been accomplished, adding that "the police need to make more of an effort to see themselves as the public does. Their job is to protect and defend, not to act as prosecutors and judges." Although he thinks that there is not much hope of exonerating the prisoner who falsely confessed to his son's murder, Williams hopes that the book will do some good for other people unfairly targeted by "three-strikes" laws. "I hope it makes people rethink their views on this issue," he said, "and the roles of police and prosecutors, who can sometimes be unnecessarily heavy-handed."

He also hopes that publicity from the book will put him into contact with someone who knows what happened to his still-missing son Michael.

Strossen, the ACLU president, told PW Daily that the scenario in Williams's book is "typical of somebody who has been put away by these 'three-strikes' laws... Many of these people have engaged only in properties crimes, and I'm not condoning any crimes...[but] what the public had in mind was putting away violent criminals." In Strossen's opinion, these laws exist at least partly because politicians who are tough on crime get votes more easily that those whom the public thinks may be sympathizing with criminals. "It's easy to have a slogan that Joe Blow is tough on crime," she said, "[but] it takes more explanation to tell people 'Hey, wait a minute, it may sound tough, but this is how it really works.'"

She also cites a case recently brought before the Supreme Court, in which California's "three-strikes" laws may force a man to serve a sentence of 50 years with no possibility of parole for shoplifting $150 worth of DVDs that were to be holiday gifts for his nieces and nephews.

Strossen said that in some jurisdictions, police have been discovered to be manipulating laws in order to make multiple-felony charges out of one crime. She also mentioned that the resulting "lifers" cost taxpayers $30,000 per year per inmate for the rest of their lives, "tying up resources for education and other programs."

"These ['three-strikes'] laws are crowding our prisons with nonviolent criminals... [and] it's ironically putting states in situations where they have to release more violent criminals," Strossen said. "[Len Williams's Justice Deferred] conveys a very serious reality that every person needs to know about."--Channing Joseph

Farewell, Raymond Chandler
A true-to-life portrait of the law makes the novels of George P. Pelecanos more than just pulp fiction.
By James Fallows

When you want to pat a crime novelist on the head, you say that he does for his turf—Glasgow in the case of the Scottish writer Ian Rankin, the Boston area for Dennis Lehane—what Raymond Chandler did for World War II-era L.A. I just picked up Daniel Woodrell's novel Tomato Red. Above the title on the front cover is a blurb from The Los Angeles Times. "Woodrell does for the Ozarks," the blurb announces, "what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles."

Chandler's fiction has just been released in three omnibus editions, a sure sign that he maintains an avid readership and lofty reputation. In addition to being a storyteller, Chandler also left his mark as a critic. His 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay "The Simple Art of Murder" attracted attention for its swipe at the conventions of detective fiction and some wonderfully catty put-downs of his rivals. Chandler directed his greatest contempt at A.A. Milne. In 1922, before Winnie the Pooh made him a star, Milne enjoyed modest success with The Red House Mystery, which the famed critic Alexander Woollcott called "one of the three best mystery stories of all time." Chandler, however, considered the book preposterous because of the gaping holes in its plot and its reliance on coincidence, which made it no more true-to-life than the Pooh books. (Chandler's essay is again available, together with several of his short stories, in a collection called The Simple Art of Murder.)

Yet Chandler's own novels are now showing their age. The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely now seem just as stylized and unrealistic as the noir films adapted from them in the 1940s. Both the books and the films are artful and entertaining, but also more than a little bit campy, like zoot suits and swing dancing. Chandler sizes up his fellas and dames in undeniably snappy language. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it," Philip Marlowe says of himself on the first page of The Big Sleep. He introduces a thug with a tender heart, Moose Malloy, as "a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.... Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." From Farewell, My Lovely: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." All this is like Ring Lardner's immortal "Shut up, he explained." Jazzy and not quite contemporary.

In Chandler's mysteries, the law, like the language, also seems dated. The cops and prosecutors are never as smart as Marlowe, and they resent him for it. Their real function is to banter with the wily hero-detective and create obstacles through their clumsy literal-mindedness for him to surmount. But in the end, they're always shown up by Chandler's clever, rule-breaking protagonist. The cause of justice would be better served in Chandler's world if the state's bumbling law enforcement apparatus could just stay out of the way.

The novels of George P. Pelecanos have been praised as the contemporary equivalents of Chandler's, but—at least by modern standards—Pelecanos's are better. His territory is the unglamorous, workaday side of metropolitan Washington, D.C. Private detectives and policemen also populate this landscape, along with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges—and, of course, criminals, both penny-ante and viciously psychopathic. But the role of the law and its agents is far more complicated in Pelecanos's books.

In the last generation, nonfiction accounts of police work and prosecution have emphasized the compromises that are necessary to keep the system running. If prosecutors couldn't offer plea bargains, the court system would collapse; if the police had no informers, they would never be able to make arrests. Pelecanos's world is full of these expedient departures from the theoretical clarity of the law, without falling into outright cynicism about the base motives of the police.

Pelecanos published his first book in 1992 when he was 35, and his tenth novel, Hell to Pay, was released in 2002. The books are animated by dialogue that sounds like the real thing, spoken by representatives of a variety of classes and ethnic groups. They include pop-culture references to movies (the Blaxploitation epics of the 1970s, for instance), to sports (most of the male characters, white and black, love playing basketball and talking about the pro and college game), and, on practically every page, to music (Should Jimi Hendrix recordings be put in the pop or soul bins?). Since the mid-1990s, Pelecanos has enjoyed considerable acclaim within the world of American crime writing and has attained crossover literary status in Europe. His latest book has received the sort of enthusiastic mainstream attention in the United States that could lead to his being recognized as a "real" literary figure.

In Pelecanos's writing, the law itself becomes a character as complex as any human one. His characters who are involved or at odds with the law are capable of surprising us with their benevolence—and their malevolence. The central symbols of American law—the White House and the Justice Department, the Capitol and the Supreme Court—are visible from the part of Washington, D.C., that the novels inhabit. Pelecanos's terrain, however, has rarely been portrayed in fiction before.

Readers of The Washington Post may recognize this as "Metro section" Washington—not the official business of the politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, and pundit-crats described in the "A" section of the newspaper, nor the glamorous people described in the "Style" section. Instead this is the blue-collar city of blacks, whites, Hispanics, and assorted immigrants doing jobs that could just as easily be located in Oakland or Detroit. What links the action to D.C. is the characters' ongoing resentment about being ruled by congressmen elected from other parts of the country, with no real attachment to the district. Nick Stefanos, a Pelecanos character who appears in several books, reads a newspaper story about local problems:


Meanwhile, fat-cat politicians from Virginia and North Carolina ... and suburbanites who made their living in town but paid no commuter taxes, ridiculed the District of Columbia relentlessly. Stefanos, a lifelong Washingtonian, was fully aware of the problems. Like most residents, though, he didn't care to hear about them from leeches, tourists, and self-serving southerners.


Stefanos is one of a rotating, multigenerational cast of Pelecanos characters, most of whom are either black (working class, professional class, or criminal class) or like Stefanos, second- or third-generation Greek immigrants (with a similar range of class backgrounds). Pelecanos himself is the son of a Greek immigrant. As a teenager he worked as a delivery boy for his father's lunch counter in Washington. Before becoming a writer, he worked in restaurants, appliance stores, and other commercial places he describes in his books, and he articulates the jaundiced views of the unpampered.

Even the bad guys he writes about are social critics. In Shame the Devil, published in 2000, a psychopath named Frank Farrow ends up working as a dishwasher in a resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where D.C. professionals go for a "refreshing" getaway weekend. Farrow "took the last dinner plate from a gray bus tray and used an icing wand to scrape what was left of a rich man's lunch" into a trash can, and considered the clientele:


Well-to-do white people. There wasn't anything more pathetic. Khaki pants, Bass Weejuns, outdoor gear, sweaters tied around the neck for those days when the weather was on the warm side but 'unpredictable.' They had come down here with their spouses for an overnight at the 'quaint' bed-and-breakfast. They'd go 'antiquing' around the town, have a nice dinner, wrestle for a couple of minutes in the four-poster bed, go home the next day just as sad and unsatisfied as when they arrived. The point was, they could tell their friends they had spent a quiet weekend on the Eastern Shore. Farrow guessed it was all about making some kind of statement.


Shame the Devil does an especially good job of introducing the mechanics of law and justice in a realistic though not wholly cynical way, but it's hardly the only Pelecanos novel that does. King Suckerman (1997) is set in 1976, at the time of the Bicentennial celebrations in Washington. (In the climactic eliminate-the-bad-guy scene, some of the gunshots are masked by the Fourth of July fireworks on the mall.) This was also a time of general optimism about black "home rule" in the District, of bell bottoms and giant Afro hairdos, and of Shaft-type films—of which the fictional "King Suckerman" movie is one. In this book, a recurring character named Marcus Clay is just starting out in the record business, and his Greek-American friend (from teenage basketball), Dimitri Karras, has a more or less promising future. More precisely: He's still in his 20s, so he has time to burn.

They end up being pursued by another "salt and pepper" team—of murderers. These killers resemble the real-world D.C.-area snipers of 2002: One is a youthful apprentice and the other a malign leader, and they kill with a combination of careful calculation and spur-of-the-moment brutality. Yet their story differs because the police never catch up with them. Instead, the protagonists Clay and Karras figure out that the killers are coming and snuff out the threat themselves.

The Sweet Forever (1998) is set ten years after King Suckerman, in the spring of 1986. The external event that marks the period is the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament. All the characters cheer for the best local team, the Maryland Terrapins, and while the Terps don't go all the way, their star, Len Bias, shows his promise. The next-to-last chapter of the book follows the celebration through working-class D.C. when Bias signs a huge deal with the Boston Celtics and its famous cigar-smoking general manager, Red Auerbach, who lives in the District. The very last chapter, only two pages long, never mentions Bias's death from a drug overdose two days after he signed the deal, but it shows the impact of that news on the neighborhood. The plot of the book turns on the ruination drugs have brought to the District, or at least the part chronicled by Pelecanos.

As in most of Pelecanos's novels, police and lawyers are central figures in The Sweet Forever, but with the same range of motives and qualities as the other characters. One of the white cops, Richard Tutt, seems almost a caricature of obnoxiousness. He endlessly razzes his black partner, Kevin Murphy, with racist jokes, and then gives him a high five to show that it's all in good fun. Murphy, who has an ailing wife and is serving out his time till his pension, keeps swallowing his rage and pride. After Tutt tells a particularly vulgar joke, he is relieved to hear Murphy call him by his nickname, "King":


[That] meant everything between them was okay. Course, Tutt knew it would be okay. Civilians didn't understand about the shell cops had, the things that could be said between partners. You could use any goddamn words you wanted to use in fun, because those were just words, and there was only one real thing that mattered, one serious task at hand, and that was to watch your partner's back.


Pelecanos makes clear that Tutt is deluding himself—Murphy detests him. Further complicating the situation, Tutt is a dirty cop, on the take from a drug dealer. Murphy is presented as essentially a principled man: He does his best to rescue an 11-year-old boy who has been targeted by casually violent drug dealers. But he needs his share of the drug take to care for his wife, who is rendered helpless by depression. Murphy grapples for a way to recover his honor within the uncomfortable circumstances that Tutt and his wife have put him in. And it turns out that Tutt also has a kind of honor. Criminals and cops alike recognize in him a physical, animal-like bravery that few of them possess; he believes in protecting his partner's back.

Shame the Devil, set in 1998, is the most emotionally wrenching of Pelecanos's books. Marcus Clay has moved to solid-citizen status, having sold his record stores to a big music chain. Dimitri Karras might as well be dead, because of a family tragedy that I will describe only as the realization of every parent's worst fear. The author of this tragedy is the aforementioned Frank Farrow, who is washing dishes while laying low after the horrible crime. Dan Boyle, a white cop who shows up in several of the books, manages to be the hero of Shame the Devil, while dealing with the failings that hound him whenever he appears in a Pelecanos novel: He is a drunk, he is a racist, and he frames suspects with "throw down" guns and bags of drugs. But he is motivated not just by personal loyalty to his friends, including Karras, but also by a sense that police work should lead to decent ends, even when the means are questionable.

In Raymond Chandler's books, none of the cops or prosecutors appeared to have a conscience, let alone a complicated set of motivations or a sense of humor. The only troubled, truly complex character in his novels was Marlowe himself. On the other hand, everyone in a Pelecanos novel (except for the psychopaths) wrestles with the question of what's the right thing to do. Public defenders care about "justice" in the abstract, but also about the alibi or trick that will get their client off. Internal-affairs investigators in the police department, who are often portrayed as a cop's insidious nightmare, sometimes punish their enemies but also care about trying to clean up the force. Rather than being noble saviors—or self-serving lowlifes in suits—these officers of the law are as hassled, humbled, and outraged by life as the rest of the characters in Pelecanos's D.C. Yet while he paints an intricate and realistic portrait of how the law functions, there is also a sense in his work that despite his view of the law's double-edged character, he remains something of a romantic about the law. He wants his law guys to be better than they are. He wants to be able to rely on the law as something exceptional.

The D.C-area sniper killings that took over the news this fall seemed in a way to be straight out of Pelecanos. They were set on his turf; they were the work of monsters. In their randomness they demonstrated something Pelecanos frequently stresses, the unpredictable intrusion of violence into innocent, routine life. The police, apparently bumbling but ultimately successful, could also have been drawn from Pelecanos.

But a less publicized, equally brutal killing at about the same time and on the same turf was even more representative of the world Pelecanos has created. In mid-October, a 36-year-old Baltimore woman and her five children were burned to death when their house was firebombed, allegedly by a 21-year-old drug dealer. The mother had been trying for months to get the dealer out of her neighborhood. She had called the police dozens of times to complain. Before the authorities could do anything effective, the drug dealer did.

A Pelecanos book would convey the coldness of the killer and the desperation of the victim. But with scenes of officers arguing in the station house or having trouble getting to sleep without drinking themselves there, Pelecanos would also show how their failure to act in time would forever torture the representatives of the law.

James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author most recently of Free Flight.
From Legal Affairs, January/February 2003

Politics creeps into the blog...

The Post's Lloyd Grove notices a new drink offered by the Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in D.C: The "Trent Lotte." The $3.25 item consists of "separate but equal parts of coffee and milk." Customers are encouraged to mix them together.

and this...

Nine Things Strom Thurmond Is Older Than, from Maxim Magazine

1. AM/FM radio
2. Human flight
3. The Panama Canal
4. Wristwatches
5. Tea bags
6. Ice cream cones
7. The World Series
8. The states of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii
9. Dick Clark

Granta's grotto
Every decade Granta's list of Britain's best young novelists causes a literary sensation. Here The Observer presents an exclusive preview of the winners for 2003

Geraldine Bedell
Sunday January 5, 2003
The Observer

Granta's list is a marketing exercise on behalf of contemporary literature, and was the brainchild of Desmond Clarke, who ran the Book Marketing Council in the early 1980s, before literary novelists acquired their present status as minor celebrities. The first list, published in 1983, included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift. It was, in other words, a particularly fortunate time to have embarked on such an exercise, and Bill Buford, then editor of Granta, who devoted an issue to the list, decided to repeat the process himself in 1993.

The second list was, by general agreement, rather less starry, but nevertheless included Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, Ishiguro (again), Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, Will Self, Helen Simpson and Jeanette Winterson. Both lists promoted the odd author who scarcely wrote another word (Ursula Bentley, Adam Lively); but, on the whole, the selections provided a telling snapshot of talent as it surfaced. Granta's list, like all literary prizes, is an attempt to bypass market imperfections, and is loved and loathed by publishers, who are inclined to dismiss it as irrelevant when they aren't included, and to applaud its detachment and authority when they are.

This year's judges ('Why no Sophie Dahl?' complained Ian Jack, editor of Granta) were Jack himself, as chair; Robert McCrum, The Observer's literary editor; Hilary Mantel, novelist and critic; Nicholas Clee, editor of the Bookseller; and Alex Clark, fiction reviewer for the Guardian and London Review of Books. They have been reading since September, when Jack and two assistants at Granta had already whittled down the original 140 submissions to around 50.

Almost constant email traffic helped to streamline their six meetings, which, according to Jack, 'sometimes followed a pattern of quite refined discussion, using words like interiority and plot strategy. At other times it was just: "I couldn't stand it".' Mantel was impressed that none of the judges seemed to be pushing a line. 'When it was all over, I realised we all had unpredictable tastes. I couldn't now pick up a book and say: "Alex Clark will like this".'

Clark thinks 'it's significant that a feeling came over us that we weren't battling each other to get our choices on the list, but that we were battling through what was in front of us to try to get to the gems. It can't be denied that we read some stuff that was absolutely shocking or simply lacklustre.'

Clee felt he suffered 'too many self-conscious works of fiction, and writers who didn't feel like novelists to their fingertips. There was some pretty bad stuff - disguised autobiography that didn't really work as fiction, books that were poorly structured, quite a lot of posturing from people who seemed to regard fiction as a kind of exercise, a too common desire to shock, quite a lot of overwriting and a certain amount of underwriting. A few were hard to read: the writers weren't engaged with the reader.'

Clark mentions 'work obviously rushed or clichéd, novels that were clever ideas not properly seen through, awful self-consciousness, and particularly, novels that could happily have seen a few more drafts. I don't think we came away with a very positive view of editing.' Jack finds it hard to avoid the conclusion that much publishing works on the slot machine principle: 'If you put out enough, you'll eventually come up with three oranges.'

Whether mischievously or incompetently, publishers submitted a number of authors who weren't eligible, three of whom would have been strong contenders. Claire Messud holds three passports, none of them British. Nick Barlay (author of a trilogy of low-life stories told in London demotic) and Andrew Crumey (who holds a PhD in physics and has written four novels) were both disqualified for being too old.

So were there any shoo-ins? Several judges mentioned, unsurprisingly, Zadie Smith. AL Kennedy appears on the list for the second time, 'and if anyone was a certainty, she was,' says McCrum. Mantel read Fingersmith (quite a fat novel) in two sittings. 'We were all bowled over by that book,' says Clee. 'I don't think there was much argument either about David Mitchell [author of Ghostwritten and number9dream, which was shortlisted for the Booker] or about Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room [also shortlisted for the Booker] which was very impressive. Ben Rice has only written one small book [Pobby and Dingan, a novella about a child's imaginary friends set in the Australian outback] but it's marvellous, such a perfect little gem of a thing that I wanted him in.'

A similar consideration influenced Alex Garland's omission. His publisher didn't submit any work, and it is rumoured that the author of The Beach is blocked and doesn't expect ever to write another word. Nevertheless, McCrum thinks that he ought to be there: 'Even if he doesn't write again, we're missing a towering talent without him. But it would have meant 20 blank pages in the magazine.'

Garland's is not the only striking absence. Giles Foden was one of two authors (the other was Zadie Smith) tipped by Bill Buford, now literary editor of the New Yorker; his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, about Idi Amin, garnered great reviews, excellent sales and a Whitbread award. Both Jon McGregor (If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things) and Maggie O'Farrell were frequently mentioned as likely contenders. (There was a groundswell of support for O'Farrell, but her bid foundered during a discussion of the plotting of her recent novel, My Lover's Lover, in which the protagonist sees something on a station which is not revealed until the end, although there is no reason to withhold the information; it is, as Jack says, 'a stunt'.)

Others who might have been expected to make it on include Welsh writer Niall Griffiths, Tobias Hill and Patrick Neate. Jack regrets the exclusion of Zoe Heller, whose as yet unpublished second novel is about a North London school teacher, and Rebecca Smith, who has written a charming first novel about an organic café on the South coast.

On the plus side, there are some unexpected discoveries. Monica Ali's Brick Lane won't be published until the middle of the year, but this story of the Bangladeshi immigrant experience 'sailed through,' according to McCrum. Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978, and he too is yet to be published (his novel, Politics, has been bought by Jonathan Cape). 'He was a late entrant,' says Jack, 'his agent wrote to me saying he was a cross between Milan Kundera and Woody Allen, which made me really not want to read him.'

Other authors were judged on a very small output - Rachel Seiffert, Ben Rice, Dan Rhodes. While some entrants were known to the judges, there were others whom none of them had encountered, such as David Peace, who has written four books with unappealing titles - 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983 - about the Yorkshire Ripper.

Clark acknowledges that the hardest thing was probably 'trying to give parity to new writers who show real promise, and more experienced writers who have already fulfilled a certain amount of theirs'. This could cut both ways. Rachel Cusk got on as much for her track record as for her latest novel, which was not greatly admired. Giles Foden conversely suffered from having produced a couple of books, Ladysmith and Zanzibar, that didn't live up to his debut.

So does a certain kind of writer emerge from this process? Or, to put it another way, does it make sense to talk of a generation of writers? At one level, these books have little in common: they are variously set in nineteenth-century London, in Scotland, Australia, Japan and Afghanistan, and they range in tone through comedy, melodrama and introspection.

'I doubt it's ever made sense to talk of a generation of writers,' says Jack. 'Ishiguro is not like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie is not like anyone, except possibly Marquez. There is, though, quite a lot of sex, and transgression generally, in this lot, and much more historical writing. This introduced us to what came to be known as the Bakelite knob problem. In one novel we read, a woman didn't switch on the radio, she turned the Bakelite knob on the wireless. There was a lot of that sort of thing. Sarah Waters is brilliant at not doing that.'

Clark suggests that the notion of a generation of authors is antithetical to the individual quality of novel-writing. In the end, the judges weren't looking for anything much beyond pleasure. 'An affection for the reader,' says McCrum. 'After all the discussion about what it said about the condition of England,' says Jack, 'we would ask, "If you weren't a judge, would you want to carry on?" So, the giving of pleasure.'

Mantel was 'delighted' to discover Ben Rice, Dan Rhodes and Monica Ali, 'whose big book came in quite late. It's not entirely without problems, but she has a wonderful commitment to narrative and to bringing us news of a world, a mindset. I hadn't read Sarah Waters before, but Fingersmith stood out. I don't think I've enjoyed a book for years in the way I did that - the feeling that you're in safe hands and can give yourself up to it. I read it as if I were a child.'

Even so, Mantel was disappointed with the overall standard. 'It would be nice to think people were making exciting, new, 2003 mistakes, but many showed the usual defects of bad writing - an inability to keep the viewpoint steady, to decide who the book's about, or to impart information, so that it's done clumsily through dialogue. Too many people seem to go into print without editorial support and are left to sink or swim, when one well-targeted question could have brought down the whole edifice.

'My feeling is that the list is weaker than previous lists because of the apparent ease of getting published,' says Mantel. 'There are half a dozen brilliant people on here, and not just the ones I've mentioned, but the competition was not that strong. Many of the others would not have been on in other times.'


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