Language: What's hot in the hype of publishing

By William Safire
The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 2, 2005


WASHINGTON 'In the blurbosphere," says Charles McGrath, recent editor of The New York Times Book Review, "has there ever been a book that wasn't acclaimed?" He considers that indispensable adjective of praise - rooted in the Latin clamare, "to shout," also the root of "clamor" - to be the key word in publishing's "language of hagiography."

Let's parse that. I define McGrath's blurbosphere as "the throbbing universe of book promotion," coined on the analogy of blogosphere, "the galaxy of Weblog commentators." Hagiography (not, as I first thought, the bio of Al Haig) is "writings about the lives of saints." Thus, in the straining-to-sell world of book marketing, we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame.

Acclaimed, in this fulsome lingo of book ads and catalogs, now means merely "the author received at least one good review." Widely acclaimed means "two or more, plus a cable TV plug." Critically acclaimed means "it was decently reviewed in a specialized publication but didn't sell."

Long- is a beloved half-word adverb in the blurbosphere. The letters of Lytton Strachey, advertises Farrar, Straus & Giroux, regarded as one of the classiest publishers, is "a long-overdue collection." Whenever a writer has taken forever to deliver a book, it is hawked as long-awaited. On the other hand, if the author has a hot hand and sold well last time out, the adverb is switched and his work becomes eagerly awaited.

Sales problem: How do you blurb a dull book? Meticulously researched, or if you're really in trouble, definitive, exhaustive, spiced with profoundly insightful. Whatever covers a lot of ground and spans the millennia is a sweeping epic, which could soon be a major motion picture about three generations of janitors.

Brilliant, through overuse, has lost its sparkle. Fascinating has lost its charm, powerful is impotent and even towering achievement is getting shaky. Liberals go for heart-shattering and deeply empathetic while conservatives are attracted to gripping and compelling.

For adventure novels, riveting is getting a rosy run, along with the hypnotic mesmerizing and the noun page turner.

Desperate copywriters use the "in the tradition of" device, piggybacking on another writer's fame. This says "if you liked that best seller, you'll automatically love this," a marketing idea Amazon seized upon. In fact, it signals "we're using this best-selling name without permission to attract your attention because that author would never stoop to blurb this."

Literary editors have learned to be suspicious of all endorsements. How can a kindly person praise a friend's fairly good work without leaping overboard into the prepublication pool of prevarication?

Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and surely one of the 20th century's greatest writers, who died last month at 89, showed me the way. A decade ago, a cloak-and-dagger novel of mine was roundly panned in the daily New York Times. Bellow, master of the art of fiction, sent me a note calling the review "offensive" and cheered me up with: "I thought your book was ingenious, diverting and even instructive. Nietzsche wrote somewhere that when you show people something true they sometimes behave as if it were old hat - vieux jeu - and accuse you of peddling platitudes."

That was a morale picker-upper, all right, not least because the adjectives he chose with his usual care to describe my book were neither excessive nor condescending. Ingenious dealt only with its complicated plot; diverting evoked a spirit of amusement about a work not to be taken seriously; and instructive described the informational use of spooky tradecraft. Each adjective showed restraint in friendly comment, and in a private note not to be exploited. But taken together - and with that Nietzsche allusion as well as a French vernacular version of "old hat" tossed in - it was the most generous "acclaim" a journeyman novelist could hope for.

Language: What's hot in the hype of publishing

LIBRARIAN WRITES THE BOOK ON ETIQUETTE FOR PATRONS

DEAR ABBY: I have been thinking about writing this letter for a long time. I'm the director of a small public library. I love my job and serving our patrons. But you would not believe some of the outrageous behavior that occurs in libraries -- so I have written:

A LIBRARIAN'S PLEA FOR LIBRARY ETIQUETTE

Please keep your children with you at all times. A librarian is there to help you select materials -- not baby-sit or clean up after your children. An unattended child can create hours of cleanup work in only a few minutes. Teach your children not to run or shout in the library.

If your child throws a tantrum, screams or continually whines, please take the child home. He or she probably needs a nap, a snack, or simply your undivided attention. While you can probably tune him out, other patrons cannot.

Do not use your cell phone in the library. No one wants to listen to you scream at your spouse or discuss personal finances. You never know who's listening, but you can be sure somebody is.

Do not bring food or drink to the library. A spilled drink can ruin books in an instant. Even if the book dries out, it will develop mold, which spreads to other books.

Return materials on time. Most libraries have limited budgets and limited staff to serve a large population. Don't waste our resources by failing to return materials when due. Don't claim you have returned a book when it's actually in your bedroom, child's room, gym locker, office or the back seat of your car. Librarians get no pleasure from collecting fines for overdue materials. Calling to remind you that things are overdue wastes limited staff time. It also wastes time and money to replace lost books, order the replacement (if there's money in the budget), and process it to be put back in circulation.

We are happy to help with your reference questions. But please remember we're not magicians. If you have a deadline, plan ahead. While we can perform miracles, they take a little time to accomplish, and there are other patrons to be served.

If you want to view pornography, buy a home computer. While we support free speech, our facility needs to be child-friendly. No one -- not children, other patrons or staff -- wants to see your "private life."

Talk to us in complete sentences. We are not mind readers. When you silently thrust a library card at us, we don't know what you want unless you tell us.

Please remember this is a library, not an office service. We are happy to help you find resources, but don't ask us to do your homework, write your paper, edit your letter or do your taxes.
And by the way, a simple "Thank you" makes our day.

I know this letter is too long to print, Abby, but thank you for letting me get this off my chest. I feel better. -- MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN IN KANSAS

DEAR MARIAN: You're welcome. I'm printing your letter in full because it has merit, and also because I suspect most of the offenders do not know any better.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Write Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

Dear Abby on uExpress

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The Da Vinci Crock

Steve Jobs's review of his biography: Ban it

By Katie Hafner

Story last modified Sat Apr 30 04:20:00 PDT 2005

SAN FRANCISCO--No one can accuse Steve Jobs of indifference.

In an image-obsessed fit of pique, Apple Computer has banished books published by John Wiley & Sons from the shelves of Apple's 105 retail stores--all because of Wiley's plans to publish an unauthorized biography of Jobs, Apple's chief executive.

It is not clear whether Jobs or anyone else at Apple has read the book--"iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business," by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, which will go on sale next month.

The very ambiguity of the title--Icon, or I Con?--is the first clue that the work may not be hagiography. But in the publisher's view, the specifics are probably beside the point.

"It was clear they didn't want us to publish the book," Susan Spilka, a spokeswoman at Wiley, said.

In recent months, Apple showed its penchant for secrecy by suing a Harvard student who operates a Web site for Apple enthusiasts, accusing him of trying to induce Apple employees to divulge company trade secrets. It also filed lawsuits to stop leaks of company information on several Web sites that traffic in Apple news.

The action against Wiley seems meant to shield Jobs's personal privacy, not the company.

But as far as advance publicity goes, Jobs and Apple could not have done a better job in generating buzz for the book in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Frank Sanchez, the head buyer for Kepler's, a popular bookstore in Menlo Park, Calif., said the store initially ordered five copies. After news of the fracas was reported on the front page of The San Jose Mercury-News on Tuesday, he bumped the order up to 25.

"You know the old saying, 'There's no bad publicity,' " Sanchez said.

Wiley, in response to increased interest in what it calls an "intimate look at a controversial leader," has decided to double the book's initial press run of nearly 50,000 and race it to stores on May 13, a few weeks ahead of its original publication date.

The reaction is no surprise to people who know Jobs well, and certainly not to his many biographers over the years, who have seen his combativeness when it comes to guarding his private life.

"I think he's trying to show people he's serious about protecting his privacy," said Debi Coleman, a co-managing director of SmartForest Ventures in Portland, Ore., who worked closely with Jobs in the 1980s, when she was in charge of Apple's manufacturing. "And now he has the power to do something like pull books."

Parts of the new book are a rehash of Young's 1986 book, "Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward," (Scott Foresman & Company). Young and Simon updated the older book with new material about Jobs' return to Apple, his success with Pixar Animation Studios, his bout with pancreatic cancer, and his marriage.

Written without access to Jobs or people close to him, the book has little new information and will disappoint readers hungry for fresh insights into Jobs.

Yet what the authors lack in firsthand sources they compensate for with attitude. One chapter in the uncorrected proof is titled "iPod, iTune, Therefore I Con." To introduce the section that discusses Jobs' cancer, they write, "Even on Mount Olympus, the gods of Greek legend were not invulnerable."

And in describing Jobs's manner with his employees, the authors describe "the aura of fear Steve carried with him like a dark cloud," adding, "You didn't want to be called in front of him to do a product presentation because he might decide to lop off the product, and you with it."

More than a dozen books about Jobs and Apple have been published over the years.

The biographies, in particular, rankle Jobs, who likes to maintain tight control over all information emanating from his universe, especially anything about his personal life.

"It fits his pattern," said Alan Deutschman, author of "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" (Broadway Books, 2000). "Steve likes to be in control, and a book by an independent journalist is nothing you can control." Deutschman said Jobs had not spoken with book authors for the last 20 years.

Deutschman faced similar opposition when his book went to press five years ago. Jobs called Peter Olson, chief executive of Random House, to try to persuade him to stop publication of the book. Jobs did not succeed.

Apple's action against Wiley is reminiscent of other fits of corporate pique toward the publication of unflattering portraits.

This month, General Motors withdrew its advertising from The Los Angeles Times because it was irritated at the newspaper's coverage of GM. Chrysler withdrew ads from Car and Driver because of a 1983 article that recounted damage to a Dodge after it hit a steer at 60 miles per hour.

But in this case, the retaliation is hitting other authors who have never run afoul of Jobs. In the last few days, some two dozen popular technical titles, including "Dr. Mac: The OS X Files" and "GarageBand for Dummies" (as well as "Macs for Dummies" by David Pogue, a columnist for The New York Times), were removed from Apple store bookshelves and returned to Wiley's distribution center in New Jersey.

Spilka said that Wiley books sold in Apple stores represent a "tiny fraction" of the annual sales of the company's professional and trade book division.

"It's a sad state of affairs," said Robert LeVitus, author of "GarageBand for Dummies" and other Apple-related titles. "I didn't do anything. I just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and got nuked."

In the technology world, even the book's title is raising eyebrows. "With the capital 'C' it reads like, 'I con people; I'm a con man,'" said Jason Snell, editorial director of Macworld magazine in San Francisco.

But Young said the title was not intended to convey negative overtones, and that it was a playful twist on Apple's iPod and iMac. "He's become an icon, bigger than life," Young said.

Katie Cotton, a vice president for corporate communications at Apple, declined to comment about the book or whether Jobs had seen it. And Jobs did not respond to an e-mail message asking for comment.

In a lengthy telephone interview, Young, 53, spent much of the time excoriating Jobs.

"This guy is out of control," Young said. "I'm just a little guy. I'm just one of many guys Steve has destroyed over the years.

"I think he's lost it. He faced mortality, and he knows without some massive change Bill Gates will be remembered as the important person in the computer business, and I think he's lost it over that.

"He has an amazing ability to con people," he said.

Whatever Young's opinion, industry insiders doubt that the book or Apple's retaliatory move will alter how Jobs is viewed in Silicon Valley.

"It is not possible, aside from things unimagined, to damage his reputation," said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco. "Steve is on such a roll in both of his companies, he's earned the right to do whatever he wants."


Steve Jobs's review of his biography: Ban it | CNET News.com

All I can say is...YIKES!

Possible Gay Book Ban in Alabama
April 26, 2005
Gfn.com News

A republican lawmaker in Alabama has introduced a bill that will ban books with gay characters or by gay authors.

Gerald Allen’s push is based on his opinion that homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle that should be insulated from Alabama’s children.

Under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen told CBS News. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

Books with gay characters or by any gay author would be withdrawn including classics by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. The restrictions of the bill are so drastic that it would include Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" has lesbian characters.

Allen has been a vocal critic of gay marriage.




gfn.com - Featuresa

We'll Map Manhattan
By RANDY COHEN

I propose to create, with the help of the Book Review's readers, a literary map of Manhattan -- not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters, a map of the literary stars' homes.

I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo's ''Great Jones Street.'' Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ''small crowded room'' at the firehouse across the street. I realized: there's only one firehouse on that street and few buildings that contain tiny apartments rather than commercial lofts. I know where Bucky Wunderlick lives. Or would live if he existed. He's got to be at No. 35. Knowing this made walking around the neighborhood like walking through the novel. But I walked without a map. Shouldn't there be a map of imaginary New Yorkers?

It would be a lush literary landscape -- the house on Washington Square where Catherine Sloper waited and yearned, the coffee shops where the characters of Ralph Ellison and Isaac Bashevis Singer quarreled and kibbitzed, the offices where John Cheever's people spent their days, the clubs where Jay McInerney's creatures wasted their nights, the East 70's and Upper West Side avenues where the Glass family bickered (Salinger gives several addresses), downtown where Ishmael wandered the docks.

This first map will display fiction set in Manhattan (in the future, I can imagine maps of Brooklyn, Chicago, London and more). It could include novels, poems and stories from all eras (from Hart Crane to James Baldwin to Michael Chabon to William Gibson) and all genres -- literary fiction (Truman Capote, the Roths, Henry and Philip), pop fiction (Bertice Berry and Sophie Kinsella), Ed McBain mysteries, Ira Levin thrillers, children's books (Faith Ringgold's ''Tar Beach,'' E. B. White's ''Stuart Little''). It will be a kind of Global Positioning System for the characters of Dawn Powell, Han Ong, Meg Wolitzer, Mario Puzo, Colson Whitehead, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon (from ''V.'' -- ''This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black.'' Where is that alligator? Where is the sewer where Benny Profane hunted it down?)

Since nobody is widely enough read -- I'm not widely enough read -- to know the haunts and houses, the offices and bars and subway stops of so diverse a population, I appeal to Book Review readers to send in their favorites. The graphic artist Nigel Holmes and I will put them on the map and credit the first person to submit a site we use.

Sometimes that information is explicit. ''In my wallet was a supply of engraved cards reading Archie Goodwin, With Nero Wolfe, 922 West 35th Street.'' (In other books, Rex Stout gives the street number as 506, 618 and 938.) Curiously, the 900 block of West 35th Street would be in the Hudson River -- it's a non-address, the real estate equivalent of those 555 telephone numbers used in movies.

Locating other houses requires close reading or at least alert looking. Bernard Waber places Lyle, Lyle Crocodile for us: ''This is the house. The house on East 88th Street.'' But where on East 88th Street? The clue comes in an illustration: the amiable reptile stands on his front stoop looking at a house to his left marked No. 234. That puts Lyle's own house at No. 236. Alas, a visit to the block shows not the charming brownstone where Lyle lolled but an ordinary tenement. Lyle's house, like Lyle, is a fiction. As it happens, Harriet the Spy lives in the same neighborhood, in a house on East 87th. You'd think someone as clever as she would have noticed a crocodile around the block.

While some houses are an author's creation, others are authentic New York landmarks, akin to the actual historic figures who appear in period fiction. The Plaza Hotel is home to Kay Thompson's Eloise; Woody Allen and F. Scott Fitzgerald characters also checked in. The El Dorado at 90th and Central Park West is where the parents of Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar dwelt in the bourgeois splendor she was so eager to escape.

Houses are not the only sites that merit a place on the map. There is also the lagoon at the southeast corner of Central Park that Holden Caulfield frets over (where do the ducks go when it freezes?), and the beautiful St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square where ''Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27'' in ''The Group,'' by Mary McCarthy.

Some addresses can only be approximated. In Edith Wharton's ''House of Mirth'' Lily Bart drifts toward Lawrence Selden's apartment in the Benedick without quite meaning to. ''As she reached 50th Street . . . she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue.'' Midblock, she notices ''the Georgian flat-house with flower boxes on its balconies. . . . A few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together.'' Even though we know only Selden's block, we'll map it.

Then there are the truly elusive. Melville obscures the address of the faceless office building where Bartleby works -- or prefers not to. The unnamed narrator declares, ''My chambers were up stairs, at No.---- Wall Street.'' The view gives no hint; the windows face an airshaft: ''Within three feet of the panes was a wall.'' Ingenious readers are encouraged to pinpoint this building.

Easier to deduce is the workplace of Vladimir Girshkin in ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' by Gary Shteyngart. ''His story begins in New York, on the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, the most disheveled, Godforsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York's financial district. On the 10th floor, the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society greeted its clients.'' But which corner? Simple. To the south is Battery Park and the Custom House. Bowling Green is on the northeast. Thus, the office can only be in the handsome 10-story building on the north-west corner, at 1 Broadway -- although in the real world there is nothing disheveled about it. Of course Shteyngart's No. 1 Broadway, like all these addresses, is imaginary architecture, as fictional as the characters who inhabit it. But it's no less real, and no less mappable, for that.

To submit an entry: send an email to bookmap@nytimes.com

Randy Cohen writes ''The Ethicist'' for The Times Magazine.



The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: We'll Map Manhattan

Woman finds wad of cash in library book

Associated Press
Apr. 27, 2005 07:50 AM

NATCHEZ, Miss. - Who said reading isn't enriching? Michele Anderson recently discovered more than just a great story when she opened a library book. She also found a wad of cash.

The former employee at Armstrong Library pulled a mystery novel off a shelf and noticed a bulge in its dust jacket. She opened the book and discovered what library officials termed was a "substantial" sum of money.

"I felt something in there, and from my time working here, I just had to straighten it out and felt in there and pulled it out," Armstrong said. "I thought, 'Whoa, wait a minute.' "

Library officials declined to say how much money was discovered, or what the title of the book was, so they could locate the money's rightful owner.

The book hasn't been checked out since March 2004, when the library switched its system of tracking books. Before then, the book had been checked out 45 times, but the library's record-keeping system doesn't track previous checkouts.

Susan Cassagne, the library's director, said she believes if the money isn't claimed, it should belong to the library.


Woman finds wad of cash in library book

'Kite Runner' catches the wind
By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY

GARFIELD, N.J — It's a long way from Kabul, Afghanistan, to The Venetian, one of those cavernous party houses with crystal chandeliers and sweeping staircases where brides and bar mitzvah boys make their grand entrances. But Khaled Hosseini made the journey last week, along with about 800 suburbanites who paid $55 to eat boneless breast of chicken and broiled salmon and listen to this most unlikely of literary stars.

Hosseini, an unassuming, gracious and boyish-looking doctor from California's Silicon Valley, is the author of The Kite Runner, the tale of an improbable friendship between two boys more than 30 years ago in Kabul.

Almost as improbable is the enduring popularity of his book.

After an initial printing of 50,000, The Kite Runner is now in its 17th printing with more than 1.4 million books shipped. It began hitting best-seller lists last September and has remained there ever since. It was No. 7 on the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list last week.

Don't expect it to go away any time soon. A movie script is being worked on at DreamWorks. Stage adaptations are being planned at high schools from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. And there are the book clubs.

"It's the darling of the book clubs," says Walter Boyer of Bookends, an independent bookstore in Ridgewood, N.J., who was selling Kite Runner here at the Friends of the Ridgewood Library's annual author luncheon. "We've sold as many already this year as we sold all last year."

He and his wife, Pat, also at the luncheon, say that of the 50 book clubs they supply in northern New Jersey, 40 have selected The Kite Runner.

And it all has happened almost entirely through word of mouth, according to Hosseini's publisher, Riverhead Books. A mother tells a daughter. A friend calls a friend. Another paperback is bought.

Hosseini, 40, has taken a year's sabbatical from his practice as an internist to continue promoting Kite Runner, his first novel, and finish his second. He's on the road most every week in addition to helping raise money for Afghan causes through various Kite Runner evenings.

Colleges, from Michigan State and Rutgers to Villanova and Duke, have put the book on the summer reading list for incoming freshmen.

Perfect timing

Hosseini, who concedes he has become something of a poster boy for his native land, says he's surprised by it all. "I thought it would find a niche with people who are interested in that part of the world. But it's not a niche anymore."

Indeed not.

"I read it, my mother-in-law read it, my husband read it and my niece read it, and we were all moved by it," says Barb Vedder, a Hosseini fan who attended the Ridgewood Library event.

The Rev. Ashley Harrington of Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Tenafly, N.J., joined parishioners, all Kite Runner fans. He likes that the book is about redemption, about making a wrong right. "You need someone to tell the truth, and that can happen in Tenafly, N.J., as well as in Kabul, Afghanistan."

Even the Afghan ambassador to the United States, Said Tayeb Jawad, jumped on board. "This book generates a tremendous amount of goodwill for Afghanistan," he said at a Kite Runner evening at the New York Ethical Society last week. "It's being channeled into knowledge of our country."

Riverhead has maintained all along that the book's timing was near-perfect with interest in Afghanistan rising since Sept. 11, 2001.

Although the hardcover was out in 2003 (Hosseini had a solitary fan show up for a book signing early on), Kite Runner's popularity didn't really begin to soar until last year when the paperback edition came out, which is when book clubs began picking it up.

Cindy Spiegel, Hosseini's editor, is one of the few people who isn't surprised by the success: "I was just impatient for it to happen."

Sharon Yacura, a co-chair of the Ridgewood Library luncheon, signed up Hosseini last September and realizes now what a coup that was. "We've never had this number of guests before," she says. The annual event had to be moved to the larger venue, and 200 people still had to be turned away.

At the luncheon, Hosseini addressed the question he gets asked several times daily: Is Kite Runner autobiographical?

Well ... yes and no.

Yes, he grew up in Kabul in the '60s. Yes, his father was a diplomat, had servants and lost it all when the Soviets moved in. The family eventually landed in northern California, where Hosseini lives with his wife and two young children, Haris, 4, and Farah, 2.

"When I say some of it is me, then people look unsatisfied," he says. "The parallels are pretty obvious, but ... I left a few things ambiguous because I wanted to drive the book clubs crazy."

His father, who dies in the book, is very much alive, however, and "a shameless promoter" of Kite Runner, according to Hosseini.

His initial spark to write the book was from a CNN report that said the Taliban had banned kite flying. "I thought it unusually cruel."

Initially a short story, Kite Runner was rejected by the likes of Esquire and The New Yorker. Then, in 2001, a friend suggested he expand it into a novel. Spiegel helped him rework the last third of his manuscript, "which isn't all that unusual with a first novel," she says.

Last week, the book got its debut as a stage presentation in New York as part of American Place Theatre's "Literature to Life" program.

Actor Aasif Mandvi gave a moving monologue of some of the more poignant sections of the book and afterward called it "amazing storytelling. ... It's about human beings. It's about redemption, and redemption is a powerful theme."

From book to stage to screen

The book's stage adaptation is scheduled for schools in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Cleveland and Tucson; other schools can get more information at the American Place Theatre's Web site (www.americanplacetheatre.org).

As for the DreamWorks movie, Hosseini has read the script and likes it, and has made only a few suggestions. A production date and cast are yet to be announced.

His next novel, Dreaming in Titanic City, also based in Afghanistan, is the tale of a 30-year friendship between two women, a story of "how human beings behave ... how they can be great and how they can be horrible."

He's happy with the way it's "rolling along" (he should be finished next spring) and happier that the protagonists are women.

"That should put the end to the autobiographical question once and for all."


USATODAY.com - 'Kite Runner' catches the wind

Celebrities go for 'esoteric' books
Annual 'Who Reads What' list released
Tuesday, April 12, 2005

GARDINER, Maine (AP) -- Celebrities leaned toward specialized, somewhat abstruse subjects -- and Huck Finn -- as they listed their favorite books for 2005 in the annual "Who Reads What" list.

"Very esoteric this year," said Glenna Nowell, who started the celebrity reading list in 1988 when she was librarian in this small southern Maine city. "There's such a diversity of books, and not well-known, not best sellers." Nowell also notices a lot of nonfiction this year.

One best seller that did turn up on the list was "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. It's a book listed by best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark. Sci-fi master Ray Bradbury, meanwhile, turned to a classic, "The Friendly Persuasion" by Jessamyn West.

The list, which Nowell compiles to invigorate people's interest in reading, has drawn responses in past years from several U.S. presidents and other world leaders, athletes, actors and authors. This year's list, released to coincide with National Library Week, runs the gamut from consumer activist Ralph Nader to Oakland Athletics pitcher Barry Zito.

Nader was one of three who included "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain on his list, which also included a selection of heavier books, such as "The Standard Oil Company" by Ida M. Tarbell. But the former presidential candidate was tight with his words of literary praise, offering none in his response to Nowell.

Zito was nearly as frugal with his praise, offering a single word -- "Life!" -- when describing his reaction to the spiritualist "Creative Mind" by Earnest Holmes.

Some of this year's contributors noted the power books had over them.

Author Reed Arvin, who writes courtroom thrillers, said Mark Danielewsky's "House of Leaves" was so creepy that "there were times when reading this book I threw it down on the floor in a combination of awe and horror." Helmuth von Moltke's "Letters to Freya," which bares the spiritual side of a Nazi intelligence officer, "burned a hole in my heart," Arvin wrote.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, whose books have romantic themes, called "Flowers From the Storm" by Laura Kinsale "one of the best historical romances ever."

Phillips also listed "Shadow Divers" by Robert Kurson as a prized page-turner. "A so-called 'guy's book,' " wrote Phillips, "but I couldn't put it down."

Bradbury told Nowell that he considers "The Friendly Persuasion" one of the best books of short stories published in a half-century. "It is warm, beautiful and round as a freshly laid egg," he wrote.

Actress Bonnie Bedelia called "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener" by Martin Gardner "compelling and unpretentious musings of one of the greatest freethinking minds of the 20th Century."

Toronto Sun foreign columnist Eric Margolis revealed his taste for books with spy themes, including this year's favorites "Special Tasks" by Pavel Sudoplatov, a former Soviet KGB general who writes about the inner workings of the Soviet secret police from the 1920s to 1980s. Margolis calls "Imperial Hubris" by former CIA terrorism analyst Michael Scheuer a "must read for all interested in politics and Mideast."

Novelist Jodi Picoult wrote that Alice Hoffman makes writing look easy in "The Ice Queen," which is to be published this spring. Picoult said Hoffman "can cut clean to the bone of relationships between men and women."

Actor-author Dirk Benedict, who reads two books a week, said it wasn't easy to pick a favorite. But he said "West With the Night" by Beryl Markham "defies categories. Adventure, Autobiography, Inspiration, Romance, Travel, History, Feminism ... all of these and much, much more."

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who covered the war in Iraq, wrote that "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran "should be read at least every couple of years."

FACT BOX
Celebrities cite their favorite books for Glenna Nowell's 2005 "Who Reads What?" list.

- JAY AMBROSE, columnist: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain.
- REED ARVIN, author: "House of Leaves" by Danielewsky; "Letters to Freya" by Helmuth von Moltke; "The Jeeves Omnibus" by P.G. Wodehouse.
- BONNIE BEDELIA, actress: "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener" by Martin Gardner.
- DIRK BENEDICT, actor, author: "West With the Night" by Beryl Markham.
- RAY BRADBURY, author: "The Friendly Persuasion" by Jessamyn West.
- MARY HIGGINS CLARK, author: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini.
- SEAN FAIRCLOTH, Maine legislator: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
- DAHR JAMAIL, journalist: "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran.
- PAMELA JONES, journalist, Groklaw founder: "Patent It Yourself" by David Pressman, and "Open Source Licensing" by Lawrence Rosen.
- ERIC MARGOLIS, Canadian columnist: "Imperial Hubris" by Michael Scheuer; "The Anatomy of Fascism" by Robert Paxton; "Special Tasks" by Pavel Sudoplatov.
- RALPH NADER, consumer activist, politician: "The Standard Oil Company" by Ida M. Tarbell; "One Thousand Americans" by George Seldes; "Aims of Education" by Alfred North Whitehead; "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Shame of the Cities" by Lincoln Steffens.
- SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS, author: "Flowers From the Storm" by Laura Kinsale; "Shadow Divers" by Robert Kurson.
- JODI PICOULT, author: "The Ice Queen" by Alice Hoffman.
- BARRY ZITO, major league pitcher: "Creative Mind" by Earnest Holmes.



CNN.com - Celebrities go for 'esoteric' books - Apr 12, 2005

ANNOUNCING THE 2005 BOOK SENSE BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNERS

The American Booksellers Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards. The winners in both adult and children's categories are those titles independent booksellers most enjoyed handselling during the past year, as voted by the owners and staff of ABA member bookstores.

The 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year winners are:

Adult Fiction -- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
Adult Nonfiction -- Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson (Random House)
Children's Literature -- Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett, illustrated by Brett Helquist (Scholastic Press)
Children's Illustrated -- Duck for President, by Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Betsy Lewin (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

Now in its sixth year, the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards include, for the first time this year, four Book Sense Honor Books in each category. These are:

Adult Fiction: Eventide by Kent Haruf (Knopf); The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant (Random House); The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin); and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Penguin Press).

Adult Nonfiction: Candyfreak by Steve Almond (Algonquin and Harcourt); The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, Robert Mankoff (Ed.) (Black Dog & Leventhal); Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's); Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins).

Children's Illustrated: Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henke (Greenwillow/HarperCollins); Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Young Readers); Mister Seahorse by Eric Carle (Philomel/Penguin USA); and Wild About Books by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Marc Brown (Knopf Books for Young Readers).

Children's Literature: Becoming Naomi Leon by Pam Munoz Ryan (Scholastic); Ida B ... and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World by Katherine Hannigan (Greenwillow/HarperCollins); Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (Disney Editions); and The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer (Richard Jackson/Antheneum/Simon & Schuster).

The Book Sense Book of the Year winners and honor books were selected by booksellers from titles most often nominated for the Book Sense Picks recommendation lists in 2004. Booksellers were also able to write-in titles on the ballot. Only books published in 2004 were eligible.

Holding court with author David Ellis

April 10, 2005

BY MIKE THOMAS Staff Reporter

Trial attorney David Ellis is an author. Which makes him about as rare as bad beer at Wrigley Field.

But here's the thing: Ellis, 37, can actually write. Oh, and plot like a mo-fo. That, the Downers Grove native and former high school jock will tell you, is his strongest suit. Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and several other pubs agree. So, apparently, do the folks who hand out coveted Edgar Allan Poe Awards for best first novels. Ellis garnered one for his debut effort, 2001's Line of Vision.

In the Company of Liars (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $24.95), his fourth and newest mystery-thriller, out this month, already is getting raves -- and not just from blurbmeister pals, either. "This is another impressive performance from a writer who expands his ambition and artistry from book to book," declared PW in late February. It's also a Mystery Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. And if past praise is any indiction, that's merely a taste of what's to come.


A confident first-run of 50,000 -- about 700,000 short of Scott Turow and millions short of John Grisham, but highly respectable nonetheless -- bodes well, too. A mass market paperback version (all his books have gone mass market) will likely quintuple that number.

In this tale of murder, terrorism and governmental shadiness, Liars unfurls chronologically in reverse, with some purposely bamboozling red herrings tossed in for good measure. Circumstances and characters aren't always what and who they appear to be. Ellis, as those who read him know, digs his twists.

He's a trained performer, too, both on the stage and on the page. Success in law (trial law, anyway) and literature depends on it.

"I think lawyers are naturals for creative writing and for fiction writing," he says over midday java in a cacophonous coffee shop across from his law offices in the Civic Opera Building on North Wacker. Dressed in a dark-blue double-vented suit, a red power tie and a spread-collar white button-down, he looks every bit the legal eagle.

"I'm not surprised that lawyers write fiction, because I think at the end of the day, the same talents that go into being a good trial lawyer go into being a good writer. No. 1 is you have to recognize that there's an audience, and you have to see through their eyes. If you have a jury in Cook County, and you're trying to convince them of something, it's very possible that you come from a very different background than those jurors. They could have any number of differences from you. And yet, it's their opinion that matters, not yours. So you have to present things in a way that's gonna convince them particularly."

For the past five years, Ellis, who lives in Lincoln Park with his wife of almost two years, Susan, an attorney, has handled cases involving election law and government. He joined his current practice, Williams, Bax & Ellis, P.C., in 2000, after stints with big firms and in Springfield, where he served as deputy counsel to Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. But he's spent most of his life in and around Chicago, absorbing the sites and sounds and sly dealings of a city where clout is king, and drawing repeatedly on experiences in and out of the courtroom for his story lines.

An avid runner, Ellis has three marathons and a slew of shorter races to his credit. Aside from physical fortitude, running brings creative clarity. And when it comes to penning intricate thrillers, clarity rules.

"I do my best thinking when I'm alone," he says. "I also do my best thinking when I'm inspired. So I run with headphones, and I listen to music that inspires me." The Cure, R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins, assorted hip-hop, Alanis Morissette. His mood, distance and pace dictate the mix.

***

Ellis wrote as a young kid (Hardy Boys-inspired fare, he says), but then sports and girls and studies and girls got in the way, and prose took an extended powder. A finance major at the University of Illinois (no hurtful hoops jokes, please), he went on to earn a law degree at Northwestern in 1993, leaping thereafter into Big Firm life. As it is now, law was his primary focus, but writing was ever on the brain, if only in its deepest recesses. Life just got in the way. That, however, would soon change.

Missy Thompson, Ellis' former associate at the now-defunct firm Pope & John, recalls a creative writing class they took together through the University of Chicago in 1995. At the time, she says, Ellis mentioned nothing about authoring a novel. In fact, unbeknownst to her and most everyone else, he'd just begun work on his first, Line of Vision. Pre-submission tweaking continued for the next three years, and select friends viewed the work-in-progress. Then, at long last, he sent it out into the world.

"I didn't think that either of us really took [writing] more seriously than the other," Thompson says. "We thought, well, that was interesting and that was fun, and then we just went on to other things. We never read each other's stuff and I don't think we even wrote anything out of class ... I don't even think we turned anything in. It was more how to do the process. Because I wasn't writing anything, maybe I just didn't have any higher expectations of him," she says, laughing.

For Ellis, wisdom from his late father ("the most important influence in my life, without question") and best-selling Chicago counselor Scott Turow (they worked on a case together), and dogged persistence in the face of rejection kept hope afloat. Before long, his first manuscript found an agent, a publisher and, eventually, an audience. The Cult of Dave, as you might call it, has grown considerably since, and their hyperbolic plaudits keep coming. "David Ellis sets a new standard with this superb legal thriller," declared blogger Stacy Alesi at bookbitch.com of 2003's Life Sentence. Amazon.com is filled with similar accolades, and jaded newspaper critics from coast to coast have been wowed as well.

Ellis, for his part, retains an understated, "aw, shucks" attitude. He doesn't lack confidence, but neither is he a horn-tooter. Far from it. One friend calls him "modest to a fault."

"The amazing part of Dave is he gets it all done, 'cause he doesn't sleep much," says Ellis' law partner and colleague of 13 years, David Williams. The two met in 1993 as newbie associates at Pope & John. "He's not a part-time writer or a part-time lawyer. He really throws himself into both, and it's not an easy thing to balance the two. But he manages to pull it off. And he has the unbelievable ability to get things done very, very well in tight time frames. He'll have a brief due Monday, and he'll know if it's Thursday afternoon, he doesn't really have to hunker down until Friday at 2, and he'll work all weekend and stay up all night to get it done, and get it done."

Ellis' fifth work already is in progress, and he's brainstorming on plots for the sixth. (Don't ask, he won't tell.) The obsessive process of writing, he says, never truly ends. Neither, it seems, does the public's hunger for law-based books, TV shows and films.

"Law affects every aspect of our lives," he says, seated behind the desk of his newly uncluttered office high above the city. "There's attention there, because we don't understand something that is having a profound influence on us, so we want to know more about it."

And while he's gunning to be tops in his field (Dad would have expected no less), the next Grisham or Turow, Ellis is content simply to have seen the light and realized a dream so early on.

"I'd love to have Scott Turow's success," he says. "If that happens, great, but I'm not gonna worry about it. You can psyche yourself out. All you gotta focus on is, What's the best book I can write, and what do people want to read. And there's always a tug between writing what you think serves your artistic integrity and what people want, but that's a tug I don't mind having."

-------------------------------------
'Put the gun down, Doctor'
Excerpt from In the Company of Liars:


McCoy is first through the door. She hears the man running through the house, his bare feet slapping across the hardwood floor. "Back bedroom," she is told via her earpiece by a member of the team at the rear of the house, looking through the kitchen window, blocking an escape route.

They flood in behind her, a team of eight agents, but she is first down the hallway. Her back against the wall, both hands on the Glock at her side, she shuffles up to the bedroom door and listens. Over the sound of her team's shoes on the hardwood, she can hear sobbing. She reaches across the width of the door and tries the knob. The door opens slightly, then McCoy pushes it open wider with her foot and pivots, her Glock trained inside the room, and she sees what she expects.

He is standing at the opposite end of the bedroom, near what appears to be a walk-in closet and then a bathroom. A large bed separates the man and McCoy.

McCoy holds a hand up behind her, freezing the other agents in place, before returning her hand to the Glock trained on the suspect.

"Put the gun down, Doctor," she says.

Doctor Lomas, she knows, is a broken man, nothing like the proud figure she has seen in the company brochures. She stifles the instinct to think of him as a victim, though a victim, in many ways, is precisely what he is.



Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Holding court with author David Ellis

Book buying up 23 per cent, report says
Canadian spending on books more than double the amount on live sporting events
By REBECCA CALDWELL

Saturday, April 2, 2005 Page R7

Canadians are quick to boast about the quality of their writers, but perhaps it's time to talk about the quantity of the country's readers. A new report, Who Buys Books In Canada?, based on 2001 Statistics Canada survey information, reveals that Canadians spent $1.13-billion on books that year -- up 23 per cent from 1997 (or up 15 per cent after adjusting for inflation).

In fact, money spent on books is the third-highest category of cultural spending in the country, just after newspapers ($1.22-billion) and visits to movie theatres ($1.18-billion). Significantly more dollars are shelled out for books than are spent on live performing-arts events ($824-million) and more than double the amount spent on live sports events ($451-million).

"I think that a key message coming out of this is books are not obsolete, that $1.1-billion is not a market to be trifled with," said Kelly Hill, the president of the report's producer, Hill Strategies Research Inc.

But while the amount of money spent on books is impressive, less than half of Canadian households -- only 48 per cent -- purchased any books that year. That puts book buying fourth on the list of top cultural items or activities households spend their money on, following newspapers (63 per cent), movie tickets (61 per cent), and magazines and periodicals (54 per cent).

Still, this doesn't mean more than half the country doesn't spend time reading -- three of the top four cultural activities are reading-related activities. And although the study seems to indicate that 52 per cent of households report they don't buy books, Hill noted that the information compiled doesn't take into account books borrowed from libraries or from friends. The study also does not take into account what kinds of books are being purchased and can reflect both diet guides or literary fiction.

Across the country, more money was spent on books in Ontario ($465-million; or $212 per household, with one half of households reporting they spent money on books). The Atlantic provinces spent the least on books: $64-million, or $159 per household, with 45 per cent of households stating they purchased books.

There are seemingly more book lovers in the Prairie provinces than any other, with 53 per cent of households reporting book buying, for a total spending of $196-million, or $194 per household. Quebec, meanwhile, had the fewest number of households reporting book buying. Only 41 per cent of households admitted buying books, although total spending was the second highest, at $209-million, or $170 per household.

Interestingly, the report contradicts an image of the loner bookworm: Thirty-one per cent of the highest spenders on performing-arts events and 23 per cent of the top spenders on sports events also spent more than $200 on books.

"Bookish people tend to be active people, they are not bookish in the sense of being reclusive," said Hill. "That's a myth that's busted a bit here."


The Globe and Mail: Book buying up 23 per cent, report says

Reader, I shagged him

Since her death 150 years ago, Charlotte Brontë has been sanitised as a dull, Gothic drudge. Far from it, says Tanya Gold; the author was a filthy, frustrated, sex-obsessed genius

Elizabeth Gaskell is a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a "biography" called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author's death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint.

As the 150th anniversary of her death on March 31 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell's fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry's veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

When I first read her at the age of 13, I thought she was another boring Gothic drudge who got lucky. When I returned to her 10 years later, I recognised her. Charlotte was an obscure, ugly parson's daughter, a sometime governess and schoolmistress. Her father Patrick had fought his way from Ireland into Cambridge University and the church. She was toothless, almost penniless and - to Victorian society - worthless. But she dared to transcend her background and her situation. In her novel Jane Eyre, a dark Cinderella tale of a plain, orphaned governess, she dared, baldly, to state her lust.

After I had reread Jane Eyre, I wanted to know what dark genius created this world. I turned to Elizabeth Gaskell's Life, but I could not recognise the sanitised Charlotte she conjured up. Gaskell befriended Charlotte when the novelist was 34 and already a star. Contemporary critics had been appalled by Jane Eyre's "coarseness", but the public was thrilled and Charlotte was a celebrity. Gaskell waspishly described her first sight of Charlotte in a letter: "She is underdeveloped, thin and more than half a head shorter than I ... [with] a reddish face, large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether plain."

Gaskell described her encounters with Charlotte to friends in long, gossipy, gawking letters. "I have so much to say I don't know where to begin ..." And Charlotte noticed Gaskell's need to weaken and infantilise her, writing to her publisher, George Smith, "she seems determined that I shall be a sort of invalid. Why may I not be well like other people?" Gaskell was already hungrily plotting the biography, which she convinced herself was an act of charity. She wanted to rescue her friend from the accusations of "coarseness" and she did not have to wait long: Charlotte died in 1855, nine months after her wedding to Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Gaskell portrays Charlotte as Victim Supreme. She begins to sew her shroud from her first chapter, when she copies out the Brontë grave tablet in Haworth church, voluptuously listing those who died of consumption: Charlotte's mother, Maria, her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, Anne and Emily, and her brother Branwell. Charlotte, Anne and Emily were "shy of meeting even familiar faces". They "never faced their kind voluntarily". The Brontës are shown, with understated relish, as lonely, half-mad spinsters, surrounded by insufferable yokels and the unmentionable stench of death. Under Gaskell's pen, they become the three witches of Haworth and she hurls on the Gothic gloom, ravaging the moorlands and the town for appropriate props. She has a particular fondness for the graveyard outside their front door: "It is," she notes, "terribly full of upright tombstones." She is bewildered by the Brontës. She could never accept they were, quite simply, talented. There had to be a magical mystery at work on those moors ...
Gaskell carefully fillets the letters to match her agenda. Any hint of Charlotte as a sexual being is tossed on to the historical furnace. Charlotte's correspondence with the (married) love of her life, Monsieur Heger of Brussels, is ignored, as is her thwarted romance with George Smith. Gaskell could hardly leave out Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Nicholls - but no doubt she would have liked to. Her biography is the ultimate piece of feminine passive-aggression, a mediocre writer's attempt to reduce the brilliant Miss Brontë to poor, pitiful Miss Brontë. Gaskell wrote the Life as a tragedy, not a triumph. But if Charlotte Brontë's life is a tragedy, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Let me introduce you to the real Charlotte Brontë. She was not a wallflower in mourning. She always wanted to be famous; she pined to be "forever known". Aged 20, she wrote boldly to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her talents. He replied: "You evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls 'the faculty of verse'." Then he chides her: "There is a danger of which I would ... warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be." Charlotte ignored Southey but Gaskell couldn't believe it. She concluded the correspondence "made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise".

Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach. As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: "I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited." Note to Mrs Gaskell: Charlotte didn't want to kiss those children; she wanted to vomit on them.

Charlotte did not only feel passionate hatred for small children; she felt passionate love for men. Unlike the female eunuch created by Gaskell, she was obsessed with her sensuality. She wrote to a friend: "If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up ... you would pity and I daresay despise me." The thwarted lust of a parson's daughter? Gaskell dismisses it as "traces of despondency". In Brussels, studying to become a governess at Heger's school, the virgin became ever more lustful. She wrote obsessive letters to him, begging for his attention. "I would write a book and dedicate it to my literature master - to the only master I have ever had - to you Monsieur." Later she writes: "Day or night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach - all that I know - is that I cannot - that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope ... I cling on to preserving that little interest - I cling on to it as I cling on to life."

When Gaskell heard of these letters she panicked. "I cannot tell you how I should deprecate anything leading to the publication of these letters," she clucked to her publisher.
Charlotte's "master" did not return her love, but Jane Eyre's did. Charlotte's fixation with sex could not be realised in truth - so she realised it in fiction. Jane Eyre has spawned a thousand luscious anti-heroes, and a million Pills & Swoon paperbacks. Her prose is dribbling, watchful and erotic. It's much better than The Story of O, or Naked Plumbers Fix Your Tap. In Jane Eyre she created the men she could not have in the sack: rude, rich, besotted Edward Rochester and beautiful, sadistic St-John Rivers. Both, naturally, beg to marry Jane and Charlotte draws every sigh and blush and wince exquisitely. She writes long, detailed scenarios for her paper lovers. Jane loves to argue with them and she always comes out on top. In the throbbing, climactic scene, after Rochester has teased her (lovingly, of course), she pouts: "Do you think, because I am poor, plain, obscure and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God have gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh - it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed though the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal - as we are."

Rochester melts. "'As we are!' repeated Mr Rochester - 'so,' he added, enclosing me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: 'so, Jane!'" The St-John fantasies are filthier yet, as Charlotte's masochism oozes on to the page. "Know me to be what I am," he tells Jane. "A cold, hard man." Jane watches St-John admire a painting of a beautiful woman and the voyeurism excites her; "he breathed low and fast; I stood silent". I know Charlotte had an orgasm as she wiped the ink from her fingers and went to take her father his spectacles.
Charlotte was not only randy; she was rude. She was sent a copy of Jane Austen's Emma and spouted bile all over it. "[Austen] ruffles her reader with nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound," she bitches. "The passions are perfectly unknown to her ... the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death - this Miss Austen ignores." Later she smacks her more firmly over the bonnet. "Miss Austen is not a poetess. Can there ever be a great artist without poetry?" If Charlotte slagged off Austen - her only real rival in the canon of superb, sex-starved writers - what would she have made of Gaskell's blackwash? I suspect she would have seen it for what it was - the one parasitic shot at immortality of a second-rate writer.

I decide to visit Saint Central - the parsonage museum at Haworth - to see if anything of the real Charlotte remains. Might a leg, or an arm or a finger be sticking out from under Gaskell's smiling tombstone? It doesn't look good for Charlotte. Just nine months after the 150th anniversary of her wedding (there was a mock ceremony, with a shop manager as Mr Nicholls and the villagers as the villagers) the Brontë groupies are excitedly preparing the "celebrations" for the 150th anniversary of her death. A "light installation" is projecting a shadowy grim reaper. Yes - it is Death. It crawls across Patrick's pillows, returns and crawls again. Pictures of the "Brontë waterfall" are gushing noisily over the front of the parsonage. Inside the house are the relics, pristine and pornographic. Charlotte's clothing is imprisoned behind glass: her ghastly wedding bonnet, covered with lace; her gloves; her bag; her spectacles. I can see from the dress that she was a dwarf. A genius indeed, but a dwarf.

In the shop, Gaskell, again, has won. There is every Brontë-branded item the mother of the cult could wish, except, perhaps, enormous golden Bs. I choose a gold fridge magnet, a tea-towel that says "Brontë genius - love, life and literature" and a toy sheep stamped with the word "Brontë". There is a Jane Eyre mouse mat that says, "I am no bird and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will." This souvenir disgusts me, but no doubt Mrs Gaskell would love it. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte wrote "independent human being". She did not write "independent mouse mat".

I can find no remnant of the breathing, brilliant novelist in Haworth; it is merely the site of a death cult that weirdly resents its god. I wander up the road to the moors and am surprised they haven't packaged the mud - "Real Brontë Mud!" As the taxi bumps down the famous cobbled street, past the Brontë tea-rooms, the Villette coffee shop, Thornfield sheltered housing (imagine 50 creaking Mr Rochesters) and the Brontë Balti (Brontë special - Chicken Tikka; it's true), I yearn to rip the road signs down and torch the parsonage. This shrine needs desecrating, and I want to watch it burn. I want to see the fridge magnets melt, the tea-towels explode and the wedding bonnet wither. Somewhere, glistening in the ashes, there might remain a copy of Jane Eyre. That is all of Charlotte Brontë that need loiter here.

'War Trash' Wins PEN/Faulkner Prize
By Associated Press

March 23 2005, 11:05 AM CST

NEW YORK -- Ha Jin's "War Trash," a novel about Chinese POWs under American captivity during the Korean War, has won the PEN/Faulkner prize for best fiction by an American author.

In announcing the award Wednesday, PEN/Faulkner co-chairs Robert Stone and Susan Richards Shreve praised the book as "a powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war -- the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict."

Ha Jin will receive $15,000; a prize of $5,000 goes to the four runners-up: Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead," which last week won the National Book Critics Circle award; Edwidge Dandicat's "The Dew Breaker"; Jerome Charyn's "The Green Lantern"; and Steve Yarbrough's "Prisoners of War."

Previous PEN/Faulkner winners include Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Ha Jin, who won in 2000 for the novel "Waiting."


Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press


Metromix. 'War Trash' Wins PEN/Faulkner Prize

And now for something a little different...

May I Have You for Dinner?

by Jennifer M. Brown, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/21/2005

Readers are devouring Cannibal: The True Story Behind the Maneater of Rotenburg by Lois Jones. Released in January as a paperback original from Berkley, the book has already sold more than 4,700 copies, according to editor Allison McCabe--with no publicity. Still, somebody was writing about the book, because a radio show host who contacted McCabe said he'd heard about it online. McCabe could only take his word for it: she herself had studiously avoided the cannibal Web sites "because they are so appalling, and because I didn't want to be on the FBI's 'most wanted' [list]," she says.

She learned of Armin Meiwes--a German who advertised online for someone to be willingly eaten alive, found his victim (Bernd Juergen Brandes), slaughtered and ate him--when his December 2003 murder trial hit the national media. McCabe approached Lois Jones, a British journalist based in Germany, about writing a book based on the bizarre events.

McCabe, who will never again eat turkey chili (her lunch fare as she edited the chapter in which Meiwes dines on his victim), has nonetheless come back for seconds. She has signed up Death by Cannibal, a collection of profiles of several convicted American cannibals, due out from Berkley in June 2006.

This article originally appeared in the March 21, 2005 issue of PW Daily.

PublishersWeekly.com - May I Have You for Dinner?