The truth is that chick lit is bad for America because it’s bad for ambitious, literary writers, male or female. And that means it’s bad for all of us. As America increasingly devalues intellectual rigor, education and compassion, it becomes harder and harder to find a good book. And believe me–the ex-fiction editor–it’s not because they’re not out there.

Read the rest of the article at the Weekly Dig.

Update (17 April 2008): One can no longer read the article there, as the link, which I have removed, has been redirected in puerile fashion for unknown reasons.

Today’s Talk of the Nation featured a segment on the life and writing of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, author of The Cairo Trilogy and numerous other works.

The review in The New York Times of Gunter Grass’s autobiography concludes that:

The great Grass ought to have been open to a clear choice: saying whether he jumped or was pushed into all this. Instead, he fudges the story of his SS enlistment and kind of glides around the specifics.

A New York Times review by Emily Barton begins:

At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question–the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”

Prose’s succinct answer is “no,” but she elaborates on it with characteristic humor, asking us to imagine “Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.” Repelled by that sort of poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops–right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my students) can reasonably expect.

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana has compiled a list of the upcoming season’s highly anticipated titles.

Recommended with reservations.

Mom dead. It was hard to believe. Just hate bad news like that. Damn liberal media stick it in your face. Had Bolten check it out on Fox News to be absolutely sure. He reported back and said, “Chief, do you remember what happened to Spot, when he stopped barking, forever? We have a similar situation here.” Good hire, El Bolto.

Read the rest of the piece at The New Republic.

Norman Mailer and Barack Obama have endorsed a new first-person history of Hurricane Katrina.

E.L. Doctorow and Stephen King are up against former presidential candidate
Al Gore and a man who made a fortune writing about his dog for The Quills, a book prize that aims to bring some Oscar-style glitz to publishing.

So begins the Reuters article on Yahoo on this year’s Quills award.

Our world, the world of soft power, where people are persuaded to believe that they want the lifestyle, the commodities, the cheap celebrity, that the money-mongerers want them to want, has done something much more complicated to books than to ban them. Freedom of choice, as it is called, floods the market with trash, so that readers are genuinely bewildered about what is and isn’t worth the time, and books are marketed as five-day-wonder disposable objects.

Read the rest of the article at The Times.

The New York Times is carrying the first chapter of Randall Woods’s new biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Today’s “Book World” in the Post was a little sparse, a condition to which I have sadly resigned myself. The most interesting bit was a short (part of a ho-hum roundup of recent mysteries) review of Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. Some time ago, in graduate school, a friend handed me a Poppy Z. Brite paperback. I read it in little fits in my kitchen (with the blinds drawn–it had one of those horror/fantasy covers that would make someone carrying a trashy romance around look sophisticated) as a respite from weighty literary theory texts and found it not to my taste. Even though the book wasn’t my thing, I got the strong sense that Poppy was interesting and, er, bright, an impression long since reinforced by posts at her blog. I have not read her series of New Orleans semi-mysteries, but I think that I will place the first in the queue.

Booksellers are an obsessive lot–it’s rare to find one who only reads one book at a time. All the ones I know have two or three books going at the same time. I have the audio book I’m listening to on my bus commute, my bedside book, and then I have the book I am really reading.

Read the rest of the post at the Powell’s Books blog.

In the latest installment of All Things Considered’s “buttonhole books” series, T. C. Boyle explains how he came to appreciate the short stories of John Cheever.

Nonfiction, once relegated to the “good for you, like oatmeal” shelf, has become the kind of fare readers choose for enjoyment.

In this age of declining readership for all sorts of publications, any reading is good reading, right? Maybe. But does a de-emphasis of the literary novel–still the form of entertainment that requires the most engagement and conjecture on the reader’s part–coincide with a devaluation of the imagination?

A Boston Globe article reveals the lengths to which authors are forced to go to protect themselves from sales tracking algorithms.

The author of The Tin Drum apparently served in the SS. It is always intriguing and instructive to learn how such secrets are kept over long periods and why they come to light when they do.

. . .19 authors picked to compete for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, arguably the world’s top premier literary prize. A place on its longlist puts writers on the literary map.

View the list at The Times.

A new book by two Beltway veterans laments a sidetracked Congress. The Washington Post’s review succinctly summarizes the authors’ approach:

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

A recent humor piece (that’s what they do over there, for the uninitiated) at The Onion focuses on simile. The recent chick-lit article at The Washington Post put me in a frivolous mood, so I will aver that the guy in the photograph next to the story has an Elijah Wood thing going on, baby.

Recommended with reservations.

. . .while the future is unlikely to see paper books disappear, a movement from paper to screen is nonetheless taking place rapidly in many domains. . .

Read the rest of the article at The New Republic.

Kit Whitfield at The Guardian has published a list of novels that cannot be easily categorized.

In The New York Times, Joe Queenan writes of his addiction:

Like any addiction, the insatiable desire to start new books provides immense pleasure. Still, it is a monkey I often wish to get off my back, because I do not want to wait another five years to find out how The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire turns out, and would love to know what Shelby Foote (The Civil War) thinks about the stand-alone burial of Stonewall Jackson’s arm. At my current glacial pace–I am now roughly 400 pages into each–I will be a grandfather before I get to the part where the Crusaders sack Constantinople, and will be festering in my grave long before Pickett rolls the dice at Gettysburg.

John Pomfret went to college in China. In 1981, that was a rare experience for an American. Pomfret–now a journalist–has since checked on five former classmates for the book Chinese Lessons.

Listen to the story at National Public Radio.

The Washington Post article on “chick lit” moves from a dead-on opening (below) to a bizarrely half-hearted defense of the genre.

You can spot a chick-lit book a mile away. Pastel cover? Check. Obligatory graphic of baby carriage, Christian Louboutin stiletto, engagement ring or all of the above? Check.

The lukewarm defense is repeated throughout the four capsule reviews contained in the article, but its juxtaposition–the first book is described as having a “featherweight plot,” the second is “pretty cheesy,” the third is “a little dull,” and the fourth is possessed of “fluffy moments”–seems to make it clear that an author who knew better was asked to write a positive article on the genre.

The post at The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog begins with a description of recent changes at the Web sites of Penguin and HarperCollins. It ends with the truth:

Or maybe it’s a pincer movement. Some publishers–though not yet HarperCollins–have used the web to begin cutting out bookshops. You don’t need to go to a bookshop, or even onto Amazon, to pick up a Penguin. As big publishing wakes up to the potential of the web and tries to reach “customers” direct, perhaps the media are next for the chop?

Yesterday’s episode of Fresh Air featured reviews of two new novels: Pound for Pound by late writer F.X. Toole, and The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos.

The Powell’s Books blog is running a fun post about pursuing MFAs, judging others by what they are reading, buying and selling books, and more.

A Washington Post article carries the following cogent but low-key defense of speculative fiction:

All fiction begins with the question “what if?”–as in “What if a bunch of pilgrims set out on the road to Canterbury and told stories along the way?” or “What if a governess discovered that her handsome, brooding boss has stashed his crazy wife in the attic?” or (unfortunately) “What if Adam Sandler got his hands on a remote control that could fast-forward time itself?” Speculation is at the heart of the enterprise, and sci-fi and fantasy are merely its logical outcomes.

The New York Times article begins with the sort of “long tail” twaddle with which we have become familiar, offering a succinct summary of why the model has not been embraced by publishers–”[they] remain wary of the long tail theory, largely because they haven’t figured out how to make money off it.”

It is well worth continuing to page two, however, for nuggets such as this one:

Some small presses build their business entirely on the long tail, bringing back into print esoteric titles that are in the public domain or had been abandoned by other publishers as unprofitable. “We’re like scavenger birds on the back of hippopotamuses,” said Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, which was founded in 1999 and is affiliated with The New York Review of Books. Top sellers among the imprint’s 200 titles include Richard Hughes’s dreamlike novel A High Wind in Jamaica and historical novels by J. G. Farrell that revolve around Britain’s colonial rule. “We’re happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies” during its sales life, Frank said.