With very few traditional paying markets left for short fiction, contests have become the bread and butter of beginning writers. A few magazines have even taken a hybrid approach. I recently received in the mail an advertisement for Narrative and was surprised to see that its editors charge a reading fee for each submission. In the past such behavior would certainly have been labeled a scam. Now it is not so clear. Narrative pays its authors, and each published piece becomes eligible for a $4000 annual prize. If we need any more evidence that short fiction, and perhaps fiction in general, is moving into poetry’s territory–being of interest to only a small group of readers, most of whom are also writers–then we do not have to look far to collect it.

Contests usually charge a fee for each story entered and use the funds thus raised to provide the prize to the winner and a well-known author as judge. Recent years have seen some of these judges deciding that no entry deserves the prize. Poets & Writers is running a poll on what should be done with the funds in this case.

I am reminded of a nature documentary I once saw that followed the lives of the animals trying to eke out an existence from a shrinking pool in the Kalahari. As the size of the pool shrinks, things become quite contentious.

Yesterday’s Fresh Air featured reviews of Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and Triangle by Katharine Weber.

For 13 months, the federal government sought the identity of anyone who signed on to a certain computer at a certain Connecticut public library during a 45-minute time frame on Feb. 15, 2005.

Now the FBI is apparently no longer interested in that information.

Read the rest of the article at The Connecticut Post.

A New Jersey library director faces possible discipline by her board for doing her job well.

The University of Chicago has completed its archive of Saul Bellow’s professional papers.

Recommended.

Of John Updike’s Terrorist, Jonathan Raban writes:

[The book] does so many things so well–is rich in scenes, or at least sights, of arresting brilliance, and sucks the reader into a gripping and suspenseful story–that it may seem churlish to harp on the one thing it does badly, which is to imaginatively comprehend the roots and character of Islamist jihad against the West. Because Updike shrinks from giving any real credence to the ideology that drives his plot (in both senses of that word), the book becomes a temporarily enthralling, but ultimately empty, shaggy dog story.

Read the rest of the review at The New York Review of Books.

Tuula Sariola, widow of the renowned Finnish crime novelist Mauri Sariola, has admitted that 16 crime novels credited to her were actually written by a ghost writer, her friend Ritva Sarkola.

Read the rest of the article at Helsingin Sanomat.

Bowker, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic information, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing compiled from its Books In Print database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2005 decreased by more than 18,000 to 172,000 new titles and editions. This is the first decline in U.S. title output since 1999, and only the 10th downturn recorded in the last 50 years. It follows the record increase of more than 19,000 new books in 2004.

Great Britain, long the world’s per capita leader in the publication of new books in any language, now replaces the United States as the publisher of most new books in English. 206,000 new books were published in the U.K. in 2005, representing an increase of some 45,000 (28%) over 2004.

Read the rest of the press release at Bowker.com.

I am passionate about public transportation in general and subway systems in particular. I do not feel that I have a handle on either the layout or the character of a city until I have ridden its subway (and if it doesn’t have one, then where the hell am I?). It was therefore with great pleasure that I discovered a new book about Washington’s Metro.

John Updike was on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition today.

Listen to the interview.

NPR is running a feature on Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books.

Fiction is in fashion at DKNY–and at Chanel, Saks and other high-end stores that are hosting signings by chick-lit novelists.

More and more, publishers are finding retail store partners where authors–particularly novelists who write about fashion-conscious young women–can mingle with the kinds of people who publishers think will buy their books.

Read the rest of the article at, appropriately enough, USA Today.

CNN is carrying an AP article on A. M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life.

The reviews have been mixed, at best. The New York Times daily review trashed the book, calling it “dreadful,” but the Sunday review called it “a splendidly perceptive joke about the freaky helixes of cultural evolution.” She’s been panned almost as much as she’s been praised.

Homes is affected. “You would expect someone like me to be jaded or cynical about it all,” she said. “It surprises and horrifies me that I’m still so naive about it all.”

For booksellers, that kind of discrepancy often means bigger sales.

Read the rest of the article at CNN.

Here’s another one for the mixed reviews file. Updike has, undeniably, been in a bit of a slump. I reserve judgment on this one but provide quotes from a couple of reviews below.

Booklist concludes:

This marvelous novel can be accurately labeled as a 9/11 novel, but it deserves also the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism. Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike’s career.

While The Washington Post states:

It is as if a belief in American multiculturalism is the only good reason a human being could have for staying alive. Why indeed do the billions of non-Americans who walk this Earth refrain from blowing themselves up? I suspect that Updike really cannot see that they have any good reason not to.

Resources:

• Buy Terrorist at Amazon.com
• Read about John Updike at Wikipedia

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry’s annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of “snippets” of text, calling it a “grisly scenario.”

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

The Guardian has produced a list, an exercise which has, in general and obviously, become a worldwide substitute for exercising mental rigor.

Below Kafka on the Shore in my stack of Asian works that have recently received translations lies Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue. I have previously read Red Dust, which I, having outgrown the vagabond lifestyle, likely appreciated more at the time than I would now. Even then, I found that the book followed the template of Soul Mountain uncomfortably closely and placed it firmly in the interesting by incident category rather than in the interesting by insight one.

Resources:

• Buy Stick Out Your Tongue (Hardback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Ma Jian at Wikipedia
• Read an Interview with Ma Jian at The Guardian
• Listen to a Review of Stick Out Your Tongue at National Public Radio