John Grisham: 'I tried literature and didn't like it much.'

Dan Brown, who was criticised by his fellow best-selling novelist Philip Pullman last week for his 'flat, stunted and ugly' prose, has won sympathy from John Grisham.

(Reprinted from The Telegraph UK
By Richard Eden)

"I know that what I do is not literature," says Grisham, who has sold more than 250 million copies of his legal thrillers such as The Pelican Brief and The Firm.

"For me, the essential component of fiction is plot. My objective is to get the reader to feel impelled to turn the pages as quickly as possible. If I want to achieve that, I can't allow myself the luxury of distracting him. I have to keep him hanging on and the only way to do it is by using the weapons of suspense. There is no other way.

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(Even) Bad Writing wins national awards

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Named after the Victorian novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the oft-quoted "It was a dark and stormy night," the tongue-in-cheek competition attracts as many as 10,000 entries in several categories, including detective fiction, Western and romance. Here's a few favorites:

Runner Up in Detective Fiction by Tony Alfieri of Los Angeles:
"The dame sauntered silently into Rocco's office, but she didn't need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: "I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection," or maybe, "Do you know a good dry cleaner?"

Winner of Romance Fiction Jeanne Villa won in 2008 (so good, er - I mean "bad" I had to post it here) with this inspired opening:
"Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner."


2009 Winner in Fantasy Fiction: "A quest is not to be undertaken lightly--or at all!--pondered Hlothgar, Thrag of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion Hralgoth through the ever-darkening Thlargwood, beyond which, if he survived its horrors and if Hroglath the royal spittle reader spoke true, his destiny awaited--all this though his years numbered but fourteen.

Gives unpublished writers everywhere hope.

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For a list of winners in other categories>>>

Eyebrow-raiser: HarperTeen edition of 'Wuthering Heights'

(reprinted from Chicago Tribune blogs)
An insult to teen intelligence or shameless grasp of Twilight coattails?

Name: Heathcliff
Sex: Male
Hometown: Yorkshire
Relationship status: It’s Complicated
Interested in: Women
Looking for: A Relationship

That’s one of the “extras” in the new HarperTeen edition of Wuthering Heights which boasts “Bella & Edward’s Favorite Book” on the cover.

At least Emily Bronte didn’t get the same dumb-down as Shakespeare. Guess words that have withstood the test of time don’t have a chance against relentless dumb-down.

On the same star-crossed lovers theme, the new Romeo & Juliet features a hip retelling – and it reminded me more of bad version of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones than anything else.

Any other candidates for Facebookization?

Literary Prizes for Humanitarian Causes

Books that address the topic of contemporary slavery were among the honorees of the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, whose winners were announced on Tuesday. The selection committee for the prize, which recognizes “the power of literature to promote peace and nonviolence,” said in a news release that its nonfiction prize would go to “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern Day Slavery,” by E. Benjamin Skinner, and that its fiction prize would go to “Peace,” a World War II novel by Richard Bausch. Both prizes come with an award of $10,000; the committee said that Mr. Skinner is donating his honorarium to Free the Slaves, the American wing of Anti-Slavery International.

The committee said that it had chosen “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” by Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, as the runner-up in its nonfiction category, and “Say You’re One of Them,” a short story collection by Uwem Akpan, as its fiction runner-up. The collection by Mr. Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, was also recently chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

Traveling to London, Rome, or Paris and want to find a great bookstore there?

(reprinted from the L.A. Times)
For those who could fritter away hours in a good travel bookstore, there are compelling options in European capitals, starting with Stanfords in Britain.

The London flagship, which claims to have the world’s largest array of travel books and maps, may be the oldest specialty travel shop. Founded in 1853, it was mentioned in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

Since 1901, Stanfords has made its home among the theaters of Covent Garden, where along with books and maps, you can buy flags of the world’s nations (not to mention the skull and crossbones for aspiring pirates).

The best-kept secret for travel lovers in the City of Light is Librarie Ulysse (pictured above), which has a collection of 20,000 new and used books, maps and periodicals in a narrow cupboard of a shop on the romantic Ile St. Louis. Owner Catherine Domain is a member of the Societe des Explorateurs Francais—a good thing since you have to be an explorer to find things in this marvelous old curiosity shoppe of a travel bookstore.

Finally, Rome has its own travel book treasury, the Libreria del Viaggiatore on a winding street near the Campo de’ Fiori. It’s a tiny shop but packed with items of interest to travelers, including guidebooks, maps, cookbooks and travel-related fiction in a multitude of languages. It’s at via del Pellegrino, 78, 39 06 68801048; open 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday; 10 am. to 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; no website.

—Susan Spano, Los Angeles Times staff writer

Google and a Retailer near you can now print books on demand

Google to reincarnate digital books as paperbacks:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Google Inc. is giving 2 million books in its digital library a chance to be reincarnated as paperbacks.

As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader like those made by Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Inc.

The "Espresso Book Machine" has been around for several years already, but it figures to become a hotter commodity now that it has access to so many books scanned from some of the world's largest libraries. And On Demand Books, the Espresso's maker, potentially could get access to even more hard-to-find books if Google wins court approval of a class-action settlement giving it the right to sell out-of-print books.
More at the Washington Post article>>>

Libraries across America celebrate "Banned Books Week" Sept 26 - Oct 3, 2009: How many have you read?

In honor of Banned Books Week next week, a celebration of the intellectual freedom of the written word by the American Library Association, we've pulled together the list of top 100 classic novels of the 20th Century, according to the Radcliffe Publishing Course. Many of these have been challenged for sexual content or language by conservative school districts wishing to restrict reading lists of "required" books from English classes in schools or by city or state governments for various other reasons. Some were burned due to "subversive" content by Nazi's during WWII. The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom records at least 42 on the list (in bold below) have been the target of ban attempts.
More on why these books have been the subject of censorship at the
Amer. Library Assn. website
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Think you love books "too much" ? Here's one for you.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
by Allison Hoover Barlett
If you're interested in book collecting, detective stories, or just a good read, check out this non-fiction - but decidedly, not dry - tome delving into the book collection world. Here's a few reviews:

"John Gilkey wanted to own a rich-man's library in the worst way, and was soon acquiring expensive first editions in the very worst way of all: theft. Allison Hoover Bartlett's "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" is the enthralling account of a gently mad con artist and his fraudulent credit-card scams, but it's also a meditation on the urge to collect and a terrific introduction to the close-knit, swashbuckling world of antiquarian book dealers."
-Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Classics for Pleasure and the memoir An Open Book

"Allison Hoover Bartlett has written a meticulous and fascinating book about a serial bookthief and the persistent sleuth who dogged him for years and finally caught him. It will be especially gripping for those of us who trade in antiquarian books, who owe much to Ken Sanders's persistence. A fine read."
-Larry McMurtry, bestselling author of Books: A Memoir and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove

"With its brilliantly observed details, wry humor, and thrilling plot twists, Bartlett's narrative drew me deep into the obsessive world of a book thief and the dealer determined to stop him. It's a captivating cat-and-mouse game and a fascinating exploration of why people are so passionate about books. If you liked The Orchid Thief, you're going to love The Man Who Loved Books Too Much."
-Julia Flynn Siler, author of The House of Mondavi

Is James Patterson worth $150 million?

From Forbes Magazine:

When Hachette Book Group announced a landmark deal with author James Patterson on Tuesday, the numbers were stunning. It calls for him to churn out 17 books through 2012, 11 for adult readers and six for young adult readers. A source familiar with the terms estimates it to be worth at least $150 million to Patterson.

Patterson's not a writer. He's a fiction (and non-fiction) factory. In 2008 he authored or co-authored seven books and in his 33-year career as a published author he's written 57. He sells an average of 20 million books per year. An estimated 170 million copies of his novels are in print worldwide. Most important: During the last two years he's earned Hachette an estimated $500 million. According to Forbes estimates, Patterson took home $60 in the last year million for the effort.
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Shoeless Joe not guilty? Two Chi-town lawyers dissect "Eight Men Out"

Two Chicago attorneys have joined the ranks of those trying to clear "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's name.

Paul Duffy, who represents the fledgling Chicago Baseball Museum organization, and Daniel Voelker, who has sat on the group's board of directors, take exception with assertions made about Jackson in the 1963 book by the late Eliot Asinof, "Eight Men Out." The book, later made into a popular film of the same name, is about the eight White Sox players suspected of fixing the 1919 World Series.

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Philadelphia to close all Free Public Library branches

In a dramatic move, the Philadelphia Free Library System announced today that it will close all branch, regional and central libraries as of Oct. 2. There will be no book loans, no classes, no programs for seniors or children, no outreach to the community, no more community meetings at library locations. Starting today, the library began truncating its loan period.

The library system of one the nation's oldest cities -- which authors Ben Franklin, R. Crumb, Edgar Allen Poe, Louisa May Alcott and Ezra Pound all called home -- stands on the brink of complete closure.
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Edgar Award Winners 2009

The Mystery Writers of America give these awards to honor the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction produced the previous year. The awards began in 1954 and are named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe.







2009 Winners
Best Novel:
· Missing by Karin Alvtegen
· Blue Heaven by C.J. Box -- Winner!
· Sins of the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno
· The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes
· The Night Following by Morag Joss
· Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Best First Novel by an American Author:
· The Kind One by Tom Epperson
· Sweetsmoke by David Fuller
· The Foreigner by Francie Lin -- Winner!
· Calumet City by Charlie Newton
· A Cure for Night by Justin Peacock

Best Paperback Original:
· The Prince of Bagram Prison by Alex Carr
· Money Shot by Christa Faust
· Enemy Combatant by Ed Gaffney
· China Lake by Meg Gardiner -- Winner!
· The Cold Spot by Tom Piccirilli

For complete list>>>

British Library in London delights

On a recent visit to London I stopped by the venerable British Library. Here you see a photo I snapped of the "King's Library", a tall glass tower - the King's Library Tower - which houses books collected by King George III (reigned 1760-1820). It is considered one of the most significant collections of the Enlightenment, containing books printed mainly in Britain, Europe and North America from the mid 15th to the early 19th centuries. Consists of 65,000 volumes of printed books, with 19,000 pamphlets. Before this time there were no collections of books outside wealthy persons personal libraries. The great thing about this collection is that you, yes you, or anyone with a library card (and you can get one by simply registering) can examine these books, as well as thousands of others in the Library collections.
For more about the British Library King George collection

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - a book lover's gem

Tops the "Favorites" list of almost everyone who has ever plunged into the depths of this intriguing, mysterious, lyrical tome set in 1945's Barcelona. Here's how the Reading Group Guides describes it:

The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he's never met. With the passion of García Márquez, the irony of Dickens, and the necromancy of Poe, Carlos Ruiz Zafón spins a web of intrigue so thick that it ensnares the reader from the very first line. The Shadow of the Wind is an ode to the art of reading, but it is also the perfect example of the all-encompassing power of a well-told story.

Highly recommend!
The new bestseller by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game, offers up some of the same themes and locations albeit in a different era, still the love and power of books prevails on every page.

Quotes: The Importance of Literacy

Fall Books: Brown, Albom, Crichton big names to watch

Three authors who've become publishing franchises —Dan Brown, Mitch Albom and the late Michael Crichton— top this fall's lineup of books that promise to be commercial juggernauts:
•Brown's The Lost Symbol (Sept. 15), his first book since 2003's The Da Vinci Code, is likely to be 2009's best-selling hardcover.

•Albom's Have a Little Faith (Sept. 29) is his first non-fiction since 1997's Tuesdays with Morrie.

•Crichton's adventure Pirate Latitudes (Nov. 24) was found in his computer after he died at 64 in November. (Steven Spielberg is developing the movie.)

They're just the biggest of big names: Nicholas Sparks (The Last Song, Tuesday), the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (True Compass, Sept. 14), David Baldacci (True Blue, Oct. 27) John Grisham (Ford County, Nov. 3), Stephen King (Under the Dome, Nov. 10), James Patterson (I, Alex Cross, Nov. 16) and Sue Grafton (U is for Undertow, Dec. 1).

Sad to see another great bookstore close...

The Librairie de France, the bookstore and New York institution that has operated for 74 years from a storefront in Rockefeller Center, will close at the end of the month, its owner, Emanuel Molho, said Wednesday. Mr. Molho, 73, whose father, Isaac, founded the store in 1928 and moved it to its current location in 1935, said that his lease is set to expire on Sept. 30, and that his rent on the space had become too expensive.
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Libraries provide more in tough economic times

click on the arrow to view this video about libraries that provide more than just books in these hard times...