A Salon reader asks:

The thought of publishing the novel terrifies me. However, I do long to be published. I would not be happy just writing for the sake of writing. I want to write to be heard. It’s just that I’m afraid of being heard, as much as I want it.

. . .Have any suggestions?

Salon answers.

The Guardian has the news that Philip Roth has won the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman.

Highly recommended.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers.

The Print On Demand (POD) crowd has grown (like horse shit grows mushrooms; sorry) a critic. Snideness aside, if the critic is serious and works as the lead editor of a small press as he claims, then this Web log will prove to be an interesting experiment.

The London Review of Books has a review (surprise!) of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers.

The New York Times has an article on the decline in corporate funding for the arts.

When companies do support culture, they are increasingly paying for it out of their marketing budgets, which means strings are attached to the funds: from how a corporation’s name will appear in promotional materials, to what parties it can give during an exhibition, to the number of free or discounted tickets available to its employees.

National Public Radio’s Web site covers a series of Oxford-style debates called Intelligence Squared U.S.

Teachers are still terrorists, according to the right. Think Progress has a post on the latest excrement from Fox News.

Recommended.

The Washington Post has a review of Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.

These tech robber barons simply do not understand education, medicine, or the arts. Steve Jobs apparently agrees with Bill Gates (but Michael Dell, of all people, dissents) that schools should operate on a corporate model and serve strictly as training grounds for corporations.

Running for the Senate, you say? Who, then, is left to call out the liars of the publishing industry on the subject of sales figures?

. . .publishers routinely withhold full sales figures, saying the information is proprietary. The only people legally entitled to know those numbers are authors and their agents.

The Guardian reports the disturbing news that Turkish author and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk “has reportedly left his home country to live in America amid fears for his life.”

The Guardian has a short piece on writers’ rooms. The spaces themselves contain what one would expect–desks, computers, reference books. Some are tidy (perhaps only for the camera), some unkempt. A few of the quotations provide a bit of interest.

All Things Considered has a review of The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak.

Recommended with reservations.

The New York Times is carrying the first chapter of Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth.

The Washington Post has an article about a reading program in which students earn points that are meant to act as an incentive.

Under the formula, the complicated and violent “Macbeth” earns a reader four points, and the Nancy Drew mystery “The Picture of Guilt” is worth five points. Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” is worth 20 points; Tom Clancy’s voluminous “Executive Orders,” 78 points.

“Macbeth,” the story of a man’s lust for power, is given a book level of 10.9, meaning that it is understandable by 10th or 11th grade. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved,” which depicts a mother choosing to kill her daughter rather than see her enslaved, is given a book level of 6.0, appropriate for sixth grade. It is worth 15 points.

The Times has a fascinating article on ten years of borrowing statistics from British public libraries. Sorry to lead you on like that–the article is not (or at least the statistics are not) fascinating. Like any large-scale measure of the habits of the public in any country, this one reveals only that people, taken in aggregate, have terrible taste.

Stef Penney has won the Costa Book of the Year Award for The Tenderness of Wolves.

Slate is running a review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford.

Fresh Air has an interview with Turkish novelist Elif Shafak.

Highly recommended.

The New York Times has an essay by Sam Tanenhaus on the writing of Saul Bellow. Herzog is one of my favorite novels, and Tanenhaus’s selection from it reminds me of why that is the case.

And the prose! Here is Herzog, the most fully realized intellectual in all of American fiction, aflame with lofty ideas and petty grievances, aboard a train hurtling along the Connecticut shore: “The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dripping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters’ cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.”

A National Council of Teachers of English bulletin alerted me to the existence of the just concluded 21st Century Literacies Impact Conference. The rather silly framework of the sponsoring organization seems like a throwback to the early 1970s, when freewheeling education reform in urban and suburban schools, the main characteristic of which was the removal of “barriers” such as performance requirements, spread like (poison) ivy.

The London Review of Books has James Meek’s review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright.

Meg Rosoff at the Guardian’s books blog writes of the difficulty in coming up with a title in the advertising age.

. . .as my wise and trustworthy editor has pointed out numerous times and at great length, Dark Ages as a title will not sell. It will not sell because it suggests darkness, gloom, unhappiness. What’s worse, it suggests history.