Jonathan Frazen's take on why novels will survive

Dan Winters for TIME

On the eve of his much lauded new release, "Freedom", Jonathan Frazen, author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Corrections (2001), waxes poetic about life, writing, and the pleasure - and need - of humans to sit down and become immersed in a good read in this cover article from TIME magazine. Here's an excerpt:

"There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites — as one does — the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

Read more: 

TIME magazine cover article on Jonathan Frazen: Great American Novelist, by Lev Grossman

Barnes & Noble on the sale block

More BookStore turmoil. After reporting huge losses last quarter, and indeed all last year, it's not surprising especially given the upsurge in online e-book purchases. Amazon recently reported that e-books are currently surpassing hard cover purchases and CEO Jeff Bezos is expecting sales of e-books to pass paperbacks within 18 months. Is the bricks and mortar bookstore dead? I hope not. I still like to browse amongst titles I'd not necessarily search for online.

More here:

The Most Amazing Bookstores in the World

Shakespere and Co. in Paris. This legendary English language bookstore has served as a haunt for literary greats such as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. The store is generously stocked with both used and new books, and features an eclectic collection of not for sale books that can be enjoyed in the reading room upstairs. Often flooded with tourists, the bookstore still serves as go to spot for readers and writers alike.

We seen other pics of bookstores around the globe before but these take the prize.
It's a difficult time for bookstores. Online booksellers offer seductively low prices and the convenience of ordering from home. eBooks are poised to change the business of publishing as we know it, allowing readers to bypass printed material altogether. There are news stories almost every day telling us about another independent bookstore that has shut down, a casualty of the changing book business.

Hay-on-Wye in Wales is known through out the world as 'The Town of Books.' There are more then thirty bookstores in the town, and it has come to be known as a center for second hand and antiquarian books.

However, we hope that there will always be a place for physical bookstores. Below, we have gathered some of the most amazing bookstores in the world (slideshow at link)-- the places that would make any reader shut their laptop, put aside their eReader, and go out to buy a book. From New York to Portugal to China, we've picked the most beautiful, impressive, and inspiring. Let us know what you think!
Slideshow of other great bookstores.

Fox News Attacks Chicago Libraries

Gads!

Here's an excerpt: "They eat up millions of your hard earned tax dollars. It's money that could be used to keep your child's school running. So with the internet and e-books, do we really need millions for libraries?"

Little Bee - there's nothing "little" about this powerful novel

This is one of the most moving books I've read this year. It reaches in and grabs hold of you and won't let go. I found myself examining my own life choices, could I have made different decisions that would have impacted the people around me more, or less? The harsh and sometimes difficult material is bathed in straightforward prose, so much so that it sneaks up on the reader. Often one finds oneself with an unconscious hand over mouth in stunned review as you keep on reading, unable to turn away. You'll emerge with a greater awareness of our world, and maybe even a bit of change to your own world view, on the themes of violence, immigration, friendship, and the power of one person to impact them all.

From the Washington Post Review: "Little Bee" deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure." Despite the cutesy title (the book was more sensibly published in Britain as "The Other Hand") and the coy book-flap description ("It is a truly special storyand we don't want to spoil it"), "Little Bee" will blow you away.

Like Ian McEwan's propulsive novel "Enduring Love," in which a fatal hot-air balloon accident binds together two strangers who witness it, "Little Bee," by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave, hinges on a single horrific encounter. On a beach in Nigeria, the lives of Little Bee, a teenager from a small village, and Sarah O'Rourke, editor of a posh British women's magazine, are brought into brutal conjunction. Little Bee and her older sister have the misfortune to live on valuable Nigerian oil deposits, for which their family pays a deadly price. Sarah and her husband, heedless tourists out for a walk in the sand, are confronted in an instant with a choice: Save the girls at great personal cost or ignore them.

'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online

Just the latest lament on how the internet is making us all incapable of deep thought:
(from the npr article)

June 2, 2010

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.

"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."

Carr admits he's something of a fatalist when it comes to technology. He views the advent of the Internet as "not just technological progress but a form of human regress."

Human ancestors had to stay alert and shift their attention all the time; cavemen who got too wrapped up in their cave paintings just didn't survive. Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather "an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page."

Read the whole article

The Internet, Carr laments, simply returns us to our "natural state of distractedness."

Mysteries Resolved: Edgar Awards Given

The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of their prestigious Edgar Awards for the best crime and mystery writing at a banquet in New York City on Thursday night. Edgars went to John Hart, right, for his novel “The Last Child” and Stefanie Pintoff, whose “In the Shadow of Gotham” won best first novel by an American author. In nonfiction, “The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives,” edited by Otto Penzler, won in the critical-biographical category, and Dave Cullen took the prize for best “fact crime” for “Columbine,” his account of the 1999 shootings at that Colorado high school. Dorothy Gilman was named this year’s grand master. A complete list of winners is at theedgars.com.

Other best novel nominees - winner in red:

• The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)
• The Odds by Kathleen George (Minotaur Books)
• The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)
• Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Random House - Ballantine Books)
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster - Atria Books)

A complete list of winners is at theedgars.com.

Why iPad ebooks are so cool - check out Alice in Wonderland

Yeah, we all love paper books. But you have to admit that e-books can, indeed, do stuff that paper books cannot. A good example of this is Alice for the iPad, Lewis Carroll’s story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned into a children’s storybook but with an interactive twist.

This particular e-book is not meant to be read sitting still; it’s meant to be shaken and stirred, forcing many interactive elements on the screen to move around, fall down or jump up. And I bet the kids will love it.

Pulitzer Prize 2010 fiction to "Tinkers" by Paul Harding

For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to "Tinkers," by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press), a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.

Finalists

Also nominated as finalists in this category were "Love in Infant Monkeys," by Lydia Millet (Soft Skull Press), an imaginative collection of linked stories, often describing a memorable encounter between a famous person and an animal, underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles; and “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W.W. Norton & Company), a collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

From the Booklist review of "Tinkers":

A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web. In the present, George lies on his death bed in the Massachusetts house he built himself, surrounded by family and the antique clocks he restores. George loves the precision of fine timepieces, but now he is at the mercy of chaotic forces and seems to be channeling his late father, Howard, a tinker and a mystic whose epileptic seizures strike like lightning. Howard, in turn, remembers his “strange and gentle” minister father. Each man is extraordinarily porous to nature and prone to becoming “unhitched” from everyday human existence and entering a state of ecstasy, even transcendence. Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense. --Donna Seaman

Looking for a happily ever after? What’s the story with the future of independent bookstores? In some cases, it’s quite positive.

More than three independent bookstores are hanging on, if not thriving, in Boston. With more and more city libraries shutting their doors at least several days per week, let's look again to the independent bookstore as a place to browse new and old titles and converse in the community square about all things "books".

Here's the article from the Wall St. Journal: