Norman Mailer may not be feeling up to head-butting, sitting on, or stabbing anyone these days, but he’s still good for a war of words. As Rush and Molloy reported in last Friday’s New York Daily News, even if Michiko Kakutani isn’t reviewing his books for the New York Times, it’s still her fault that the paper gave him a bad review.

(The direct link to the piece has expired, but I was able to retrieve the cached text. Blog-time is merciless.)

Mailer tells us, “I learned that daily reviewers at The Times cannot review people who are enemies or friends. So [’The Castle in the Forest’] was given to [former Times film critic] Janet Maslin. Poor Janet. Is she going to write a good review of me under Michiko’s nose?”

Apparently not. Last Friday, Maslin sniffed that “for all the long-winded, claustrophobic intensity,” the conclusions of Mailer’s “repetitive” novel “turn out to have caca’s subtlety … It’s thinking is so small.”

“Janet Maslin is a Kakutani clone,” says Mailer. “You can quote me on that.”

But no Mailer grudge play is complete without a party scene:

Well, at least the feud lent some intrigue to the party that Mailer’s Random House editor David Ebershoff threw at his West Village townhouse. Joining a crowd that included E.L. Doctorow, Arthur Schlesinger and Judith Miller, author Gay Talese had just deposited his coat upstairs when he whispered to Mailer, “Michiko is up there. She’s a little nervous about coming down. But I told her you’re a forgiving guy.”

Mailer, who’s been the target of a few of Talese’s “whoppers,” replied, “Would you stop that [bleeping] b-?!”

Still hoping for the video Of Mailer’s appearance on The Martha Stewart Show to show up on YouTube. (Looking for it, I stumbled across footage of Mailer fighting Rip Torn that is…hard to describe.)

On Salon.com, Gary Kamiya offers a balanced, thoughtful essay (”The Readers Strike Back“) on the rapidly evolving — and somewhat off-balance – relationship between writer and reader.

The reader revolution has also provided an unprecedented snapshot of America. Anyone who surfs the Web looks out over democratic vistas that Walt Whitman could only imagine. The switchboard is lit up and behind each light is a real human being whose opinions and interests can now be heard by all. Is this a good thing? It depends on whether your commitment to democracy, transparency and openness outweighs your desire not to be flooded with noise about Paris Hilton, Brazilian bikini waxing and the profiles on MySpace.

Kamiya is writing mostly about works that are published on the Web, but as he astutely notes, the relationship effects novelists, too. I wrote about a Booklist mention in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker awhile ago, and Kamiya is also interested in Powers’ take on writers’ heightened exposure to noisy public debate.

Fiction writers are not exposed to as much online feedback as journalists, but they too are exposed. And some fiction writers are beginning to register this in their work. In Richard Powers’ latest novel, “The Echo Maker,” one of the main characters is a neurologist and writer whose recent books have been criticized. Looking at comments about him on Amazon, he thinks: “Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, private thought gave way to perpetual group ratings. The age of personal reflection was over. From now on, everything would be haggled out in public feedback brawls.”

For his part, Powers seems to welcome the age of “public feedback brawls” — at least as they affect his work. “What’s liberating is my books are being talked about by a lot of people in a lot of different forums, from esoteric literary quarterlies to blogs,” he said in an interview with Salon’s Kevin Berger in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s now possible to feel that you’re just part of a conversation that’s veering and weaving all the time. In a way, it parallels the issues in ‘The Echo Maker.’ We want to believe the self is a single and a solid thing. But we need to stop thinking about the self as a kind of solid art sculpture and start thinking of it as a river, flowing and changing. Maybe many years ago, I had the idea that a book had an innate quality and was a solid, identifiable monument of unchanging value. But it’s clear to me that books, like people, are works in progress. They are constantly being transformed.”

But Powers’ view of fiction as constantly in flux is probably not shared by most novelists, who are more apt to see their creations as immutable objects, “artifices of eternity” like Yeats’ golden bird in “Sailing to Byzantium.” In one sense, this sense of fiction as autonomous shields it from the reader revolution — but it also leaves it potentially open to being undercut, whittled away. If all the cultural noise and audience feedback is about either nonfiction or the more blatantly attention-getting elements in fiction, will fiction writers have an incentive to stop dreaming?

I probably didn’t have time to read this essay this morning, but I’m glad I did. Consider this my response.

British publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson (an imprint of Orion Publishing Group) is launching a new line called Compact Editions (strapline: “Great Books in Half the Time”) in spring. From the Guardian:

[The publisher] claims that market research shows many readers are put off by the “elitist” image of classics and by their daunting length and small print.

At first I thought I would dispute Joel Rickett’s claim that “no publisher has dared to meddle with the texts - until now,” though: what about Reader’s Digest Condensed Books? Upon further review, Cleveland Amory is no Leo Tolstoy.

At Biology of the Worst Kind, Jenny Diski delivers the opposition party’s response.

But don’t fret - so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background.  Pity really, I could get quite excited about a 21st century Anna Karenina set in Chislehurst and renamed Paige Simkins (she doesn’t die in the end - the train’s cancelled on account of engineering works).

More and more, it feels as if the Monty Python sketches are coming true.

Thanks to Dan Kraus for the link!

So, as many of you already know, Oprah finally put an end to the suspense and announced her new book club selection: Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man (I made this starred review public so you can read it even if you’re not a Booklist Online subscriber).

Some people have speculated that Oprah is hoping that the dignified, unimpeachably credentialed Poitier will provide a tonic after the James Frey fiasco. But who knows if Poitier can withstand the kind of scrutiny that attends the Oprah authors? Many an author has cracked under the pressure.

I’m guessing even Poiter has some kind of scandal lurking in his closet. Maybe he really wasn’t the first African-American man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor — I’m just spitballing here — or maybe he’s only been the recipient of two prestigious lifetime achievement awards, not three. Perhaps his directorial resume has been padded to make it seem as if he starred in, directed, or wrote more films than he really did (40, 9, and 4, or so his bio claims). He looks good on paper, but only time will tell if Sidney Poitier’s up to the challenge of being an Oprah Author.

lesbian movie sistersmovies lesbians xxxfuck long moviesclips movie long pornmale sex teen moviemasturbate moviemovies masturbating pantiesballs monster scene movie sexdesktop movie themesgirl fight movie

More catching up. Last Saturday night, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for their 2006 awards. Winners will be announced March 8. A partial but nearly complete list:

Nonfiction

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn (Verso)

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade, by Anne Fessler (Penguin)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (Penguin)

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama (Ecco)

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Grove/Atlantic)

What Is the What, by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s)

The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford (Knopf)

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography

The Afterlife, by Donald Antrim (Farrar)

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel (Houghton)

Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters (Delacorte)

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

Strange Piece of Paradise, by Teri Jentz (Farrar)

Poetry

My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, by Daisy Fried (Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Tom Thomson in Purgatory, by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

Poems: 1945-1971, by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelego)

Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel (Farrar)

Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems, by W. D. Snodgrass (BOA)

Criticism

While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer (Doubleday)

Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, by Frederick Crews (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Dennett (Viking)

On Looking: Essays, by Lia Purpura (Sarabande)

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, by Lawrence Wechsler (McSweeney’s)

Biography

The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)

At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968, by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster)

Flaubert: A Biography, by Frederick Brown (Little, Brown)

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (St. Martin’s)

A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler, by Jason Roberts (HarperCollins)

The nonfiction category includes the Booklist Top of the List winner (The Lemon Tree) and Editors’ Choice book (The Girls Who Went Away). The fiction category includes both the Top of the List winner (The Road) and three Editors’ Choice books (Half of a Yellow Sun, What Is the What, and The Lay of the Land). The biography category includes an Eds’ Choice book, too (Flaubert).

It’s a strong list of books, of course, but one of the fun parts of the NBCC picks is that there are always a couple of surprises. And if the choices tend toward the highbrow, well, these are book critics, after all. If you want populism, there’s always the Quills.

Still catching up…way back on last Friday, the Mystery Writers of America announced the nominees for the 2007 Edgar Allan Poe Awards. Winners will be announced at a gala banquet on April 26 (attendees can choose from steak, salmon, or mystery meat).

For a full list, click here. A partial list is below:

Best Novel

The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard (HarperCollins)
The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin (Farrar)
Gentleman and Players, by Joanne Harris (Morrow)
The Dead Hour, by Denise Mina (Little, Brown)
The Virgin of Small Plains, by Nancy Pickard (Random/Ballantine)
The Liberation Movements, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel by an American Author

The Faithful Spy, by Alex Berenson (Random)
Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn (Crown/Shaye Areheart)
King of Lies, by John Hart (St. Martin’s/Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)
Holmes on the Range, by Steve Hockensmith (St. Martin’s/Minotaur)
A Field of Darkness, by Cornelia Read (Mysterious)

Best Paperback Original

The Goodbye Kiss, by Massimo Carlotto (Europa)
The Open Curtain, by Brian Evenson (Coffee House)
Snakeskin Shamisen, by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)
The Deep Blue Alibi, by Paul Levine (Bantam)
City of Tiny Lights, by Patrick Neate (Riverhead)

Best Fact Crime

Strange Piece of Paradise, by Terri Jentz (Farrar)
A Death in Belmont, by Sebastian Junger (Norton)
Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine, by Capt. Joseph K. Loughlin & Kate Clark Flora (Univ. Press of New England)
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer, by Robin Odell (Kent State Univ.)
The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder, by Daniel Stashower (Dutton)
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson (Morrow)

Best Short Story

“The Home Front,” from Death Do Us Part, by Charles Ardai (Little, Brown)
“Rain,” from Manhattan Noir, by Thomas H. Cook (Akashic)
“Cranked,” from Damn Near Dead, by Bill Crider (Busted Flush)
“White Trash Noir,” from Murder at the Foul Line, by Michael Malone (Mysterious)
“Building,” from Manhattan Noir, by S.J. Rozan (Akashic)

Best Juvenile

Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake, by Jennifer Allison (Dutton/Sleuth)
The Stolen Sapphire: A Samantha Mystery, by Sarah Masters Buckey (American Girl)
Room One: A Mystery or Two, by Andrew Clements (Simon & Schuster)
The Bloodwater Mysteries: Snatched, by Pete Hautman & Mary Logue (Philomel/Sleuth)
The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery, by Nancy Springer (Philomel/Sleuth)

Best Young Adult

The Road of the Dead, by Kevin Brooks (Scholastic/Chicken House)
The Christopher Killer, by Alane Ferguson (Viking/Sleuth)
Crunch Time, by Mariah Fredericks (Simon & Schuster/Richard Jackson)
Buried, by Robin Merrow MacCready (Dutton)
The Night My Sister Went Missing, by Carol Plum-Ucci (Harcourt)

Grand Master

Stephen King

The Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award

Bloodline by Fiona Mountain (St. Martin’s/Minotaur)

Neate’s City of Tiny Lights was one of my favorite books last year, so I’ll be rooting for that one. And while I really enjoyed the Manhattan Noir anthology, the two stories nominated here weren’t among my favorites. Ah, well, award giving, like reviewing, is a subjective business.

bdsm free moviesgay porn moviesmovies hogtiedmovies sybiandownloads movie porn freefree porn movie samplestits big movieshorse free sex moviesmindy movie vegaporn trailers movie

Amazon.com’s new POD division, BookSurge.com, offers DIY authors a menu of services that make the early days of self-publishing (”Where do you want us to put these boxes of books, sir?”) look like the Dark Ages. But in Slate’s Hot Document column, Bonnie Goldstein discusses an a la carte item that goes Kirkus Reviews‘ Kirkus Discoveries one better: a “New York Times Review”:

The most interesting add-on BookSurge offers is, for $399, a personally crafted review written by “New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh.” (Ellen Tanner Marsh’s bodice-rippers Reap the Savage Wind and Wrap Me in Splendor graced the New York Times trade- paperback bestseller list in 1982 and 1983.) Not surprisingly, many BookSurge titles boast enthusiastic reviews by Marsh.

As this Hot Document discovers, Ms. Marsh is refreshingly free of the blindered solipsism that causes so many reviewers to listen only to their guts: 

Unlike most book reviewers, Marsh is receptive to input from authors. If you click onto the next page, you’ll see an e-mail that BookSurge LLC’s editorial services coordinator, Thomas Kephart, wrote Bowman regarding his “New York Times Review.” Quoth Kephart: “Ms. Marsh agreed that your suggestions were more descriptive, therefore she used your wording to make the changes you desired.” Kephart’s e-mail makes that other New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, seem, in comparison, downright stuck-up.

Strangely, references to this service, including the direct link, have been removed from BookSurge.com since this new wrinkle came to light. Perhaps they’re simply updating the pricing schedule–$399 for the first draft of the review, $99 for each round of the book author’s revisions?

I spent Monday morning frantically formatting the American Library Association award winners and linking them to their Booklist reviews. A partial list is below–a less partial list is here. You sure can’t accuse ALA of being stingy when it comes to literary awards.

(A special shout-out to former Booklister John Green for his Printz Honor book, An Abundance of Katherines. Do we smell a three-peat in the making?)

Newbery Medal Winner

Patron, Susan. The Higher Power of Lucky. Simon & Schuster/Richard Jackson, $16.95 (1-4169-0194-9).

Caldecott Medal Winner

Wiesner, David. Flotsam. Clarion, $17 (0-618-19457-6).

Printz Award Winner

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. Roaring Brook/First Second, $16.95 (1-59643-152-0).

Coretta Scott King Award

Author Award

Draper, Sharon. Copper Sun. Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, $16.95 (0-689-82181-6).

Illustrator Award

Weatherford, Carole Boston. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson. Hyperion/Jump at the Sun, $15.99 (0-7868-5175-9).

New Talent Award

Jones, Traci L. Standing against the Wind. Farrar, $16 (0-374-37174-1).

Sibert Medal

Thimmesh, Catherine. Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon. Houghton, $19.95 (0-618-50757-4).

Carnegie Medal

Knuffle Bunny. Weston Woods Studios, DVD, $59.95.

If you want to comment on the winners–or the books you think should have won–visit the Booklist Book Club. Everybody’s being so nice there, which is nice, but a little constructive criticism sure would be interesting, too!

rape moviesbeastiality free moviesmovie zenrahentai movieparis hilton moviemovies veronica zemanovahorse movies sexadult moviemovies incestmovies old

Things have been so quiet here that readers will be forgiven for thinking I died. Fortunately, I was only in Seattle.

I was there for the ALA Midwinter Meeting, where I had the opportunity to show Booklist Online to a lot of people, and also to get a lot of really useful feedback from people who already use the site. And, yes, I did find time to sample the local beer.

Whenever I travel for work (I first typed “travel from work”–is that a Freudian slip or what?), I always plan to keep the blog updated. After all, the great promise of the Web, or so they say, is that you can do your work from anywhere. Heck, I could update my blog from my handheld if I wanted to.

But whenever I travel, I find that the real-time, real-life (what the digirati wags used to call “meatspace”) concerns get in the way. After all, I’m at conference to confer, meet, and interface with people–if it wasn’t helpful to shake some hands I wouldn’t get on the plane in the first place. And the necessary work on the site, much of which I do on my laptop, seems to go slower when I’m not using my office setup.

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t blog from Seattle. Let me just say that it was productive, enjoyable, and thoroughly exhausting.

And now back to work.

5 arm loans 1cash about loans quick2007 conventional limits loanloan $100home adjustable loans equitycash advance loan instant quickloan cash payday us cash advance$100,000 tv as on loansloan add calculators on0 car loan apr

All right, so there’s a gentleman (and I use the term loosely, very loosely) who not only doubts that I’ve written a novel using his name–he goes so far as to suggest that “Keir Graff” is merely a pseudonym he employs for his own work.

Or words to that effect.