Here’s a heart-warming story of a man who didn’t let a prison sentence stop him from writing a book. Take that, whiners! Oh, wait. Sigh. Make that a “heart-worming” story. 

I first saw this story in this morning’s Chicago Tribune (”Dracula book gets American early release“), while I was fending off the jam-covered hands of my two-year-old, but the Guardian headline, besides actually letting you know what the story is, has more flair (”Dracula Book Gets Pedophile Off the Hook“):

IASI, Romania (AP) - An American historian sentenced to seven years in prison for sexual perversion and abuse of minors won early release from prison Tuesday because he wrote a book about Dracula, his attorney said.

…

His lawyer, Liviu Bran, said the historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled “The life and Times of Vlad Dracul” while he was in prison. The book, written from September 2003 until October 2006, was counted as community service, Bran told reporters.

I’m not generally in favor of encouraging the writing of memoirs, but here’s an idea: how about making him write a book called I Knew She Was Under 18 and I Still Did It: I’m Sorry?

There’s a bizarre kicker, too:

Treptow moved to Romania in the 1990s and was director of the Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi, which is housed in a building owned by the espionage service. The service has declined to say whether Treptow worked for them.

It’s hard for me to imagine that the Romanian espionage service would hire someone of dubious character.

File this under, “Who Says Poetry Doesn’t Pay?” The News Blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Frank Bidart has won the 2007 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. (If you look at the URL on the link, it appears that the first draft misspelled the award’s name.) The prize is given by the Yale University Library and carries a cool $100,000 cash award.

Mr. Bidart, who has written four volumes of poetry, was cited by the award’s judging panel as "a poet whose work exemplifies consistent originality of theme, sustained linguistic and formal explorations, and a strong sense of the profoundly serious and adventurous nature of the poetic calling."

$100,000 for “sustained linguistic and formal explorations”? I’ve been paid 10 cents a word for workmanlike infotainment — I’m in the wrong line of work!

Seriously, I kid the poets, but I celebrate their paydays. Every time a writer cashes a check instead of a CEO, the world inches one millimeter toward balance.

More information and actual poems can be found on the original press release.

From Cary Tennis’ “Since You Asked“ column on Salon.com: 

Q: I don’t feel like writing. Does that mean I’m not a writer?

A: Yes.

Cary Tennis’ answer to this self-described “young, talented writer” is far more thoughtful than mine, but given the number of books being published every year — and the number of authors desperate but unable to make their ways into print — I don’t really see the point of hand-holding someone who’s unable to get off his butt (or, rather, given the nature of writing, onto his butt) and do the job.

I had saved a draft of this post yesterday, along with a clever jab about writing as a therapeutic means to boost one’s self esteem — when along comes this morning’s column. It’s “frustrated writers week” at “Since You Asked“:

Q: …reading the writer who didn’t want to write compelled me to write. However, unlike that writer, I have no problems writing. I’m terrified of publishing…any suggestions?

A: Keep a diary.

Once again, Tennis’ answer is much, much more thoughtful and kind than mine. But still.

The act of writing is, of course, inextricably tied up in the writer’s self-esteem. But it’s almost as if some people feel the world owes them a career as writers — or at least that the world owes it to them to smother their insecurities with kindness, to prop them up in the chair and to force the novel out of them.

I’m sure I’m being short-sighted and that some indispensible novel was gotten in exactly this way (although the mental image is starting to kind of gross me out), but that’s not art, that’s therapy. And while I’m sure the creation of many great works have been therapeutic to their authors, if you’re not fortunate enough to have the will to finish or publish your work — or to have a patron willing to rub your shoulders and feed you hot soup — then you must ponder the invention of my least-favorite verb, journaling.

(The questioner, by the way, confesses that he/she would “be very surprised…if more than 100 people ever bought the book” before speculating that he/she is perhaps “terrified of success”. And I’m terrified of asteroid strikes.)

This probably sounds like an odd diatribe for someone who both loves reading and writes books. Do I want a better career as a writer? Of course. I’m also a pragmatist. There are too many books and too few readers* to support all but the fortunate few as full-time writers. Even the cry that “it must be said” is often inaccurate — probably someone, somewhere has said it better than you. And, I freely admit, me.

So why write? Because you have to. Because you can’t imagine not doing it. If you think you’d enjoy having other people read your work, send it out and cross your fingers. Discussing the breathtaking modesty of my own first publishing deal with a friend, I shrugged and said that it was nice to get the book into print, but it’s not like I wouldn’t have written it anyway. And it’s not as if I won’t write more books even if I’m never published again.

Writing books was once the province of gentlefolk with both money and leisure enough that the idea of “needing” to write was incomprehensible. I’m glad as anyone that it’s more democratic now, but sheesh. Writers write.

And if you can’t or don’t want to write, what on earth is wrong with reading?

*According to some oft-cited statistics, 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them and 80% of American families did not buy or read a book last year.

Gawker (”Secret Workings of ‘Times’ Book Review Exposed!“) has the inside scoop on an insider’s take: Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, told an audience at Harvard how things work where he works.

(And enough with the cloying sentence construction, me.)

Gewen named names (of Book Review staff), explained selection policy and procedure (sort of), complained that the Book Review staff are poor cousins to their Sunday Magazine kin, and admitted that he has no idea who they’re writing for.

The reason for his trip, he said, was to correct some misconceptions among the largely academic audience about how the Review is assembled. “We’re thought to have agendas, we’re thought to be out to get people,” he said. “I hope by the end of this talk I’ll have persuaded you that none of that is the case.”

The editorial staff totals 17, which, Gewen asserts, is more than any other book review in the country can afford. Hmm…after a quick scan of the non-anonymous masthead of Booklist, I counted 18 editorial staffers, plus 1 contributing editor and 4 contract reviewers.

There’s nothing revelatory in the Gawker piece, but anyone who’s curious about how review journals are put together will be interested in taking a peek. And even people who actually work at review journals will be curious to see how another one functions. Reviewers are a rare, idiosyncratic breed and I imagine their workplaces are, too. (The Booklist offices, surprisingly, are more like IBM in the 1970s: starched shirts, clean shaves, no hair touching the collar.)

My favorite paragraph describes the kind of cold comfort — wit and a trust in one’s own superior intellect — that poor cousins are often forced to accept in lieu of a fat paycheck.

Once, Gewen said, they encountered a pair of medics outside their office, wearing white jackets, looking worried, pushing a gurney down the hall. After assessing the scene, one of Gewen’s colleagues said that it was a clear sign that “someone at the magazine had an idea.”

Thanks for the link, Dan Kraus!

Philip Roth has won the 2007 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, for Everyman. He’s the first writer to have won it three times. (He also won for The Human Stain [2001] and Operation Shylock [1994].) From the Washington Post (”For Roth, a 3rd PEN/Faulkner Win, by Bob Thompson”):

Roth’s novel tells the story of the physical decline and death of its unnamed protagonist. “What hit me so hard about ‘Everyman’ was its intensity, and its systematic, pitiless stripping away of false comforts — and then real comforts,” said David Gates, one of the three writers who served as judges. “The only comfort for the reader is that Roth has faced such terrifying truths absolutely straight, and made even this devastating material into a thing of beauty.”

I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds like a great double feature with The Road. Roth has now won so many awards that he can afford to be discriminating about them:

“I’m delighted,” he said in a telephone interview. The PEN/Faulkner is a gratifying award, he said, because over the years “there just seems to be a consistency to the quality of the winners.”

“Unlike some of those other awards I’ve won,” he added, rolling his eyes.

Ian McEwan? Salman Rushdie? Harold Pinter? A. S. Byatt? Doris Lessing? Alan Bennett? Iain Banks? David Mitchell? Ian Rankin? Pat Barker? Alasdair Gray? Philip Pullman? Nick Hornby? Martin Amis? Muriel Spark? Terry Pratchett?

J. K. Rowling?

In the Guardian (”Who is the greatest of them all?“), Stephen Moss assesses the field — and the concept.

One early respondent attempts to kill the debate at birth: “‘Best’ is a game for six-year-olds and consumers with the minds of six-year-olds. The convenors of this daft vote should grow up and get a life.” A fair point, echoed by some of those I talked to, and especially by female critics who see this desire to establish a pecking order among writers as a male phenomenon. Men, seeking absolutes, are keener to carve a literary Mount Rushmore, to pay homage to idols. Men are natural fans; women perhaps better readers.

While I completely share the above respondent’s belief that such things are unmeasurable, I agree with Moss when he calls it “harmless fun.” Lighten up, already, people.

Trying to establish Britain’s GLA, or even a leading group of contenders, is a hazardous undertaking. But it is at worst harmless fun, and at best might provoke us to consider what constitutes great writing, whether a canon has any validity, and who determines what work survives.

Things have been awfully busy around here lately and I find I’ve been drifting away from what I like doing most — writing about the books I’m reading. By the time I’m done opining (or whining) about the news, updating the landing pages in Booklist Online, and bug-hunting in our new publishing system, it’s usually too late in the day to tap into the part of my brain that has any thoughts worth sharing.

But I’ve read some great books lately: Free Fire, by C. J. Box; The Book of Air and Shadows, by Michael Gruber; The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom; House of Meetings, by Martin Amis; What Is the What, by Dave Eggers — the list, as they say, goes on. When I get this many stellar reads in a row, I find myself wondering if I’m getting overenthusiastic. Am I awarding too many stars? People have limited reading time, and to praise too many books too highly would be a disservice.

(Then I think that my worrying is counterintuitive: if anything, reading more great books would seem to encourage parsimoniousness, because the merely excellent books would pale in comparison to the truly great ones. Then I worry that I’ve become a human smiley face, cheerfully bestowing honors because I want everyone to have a nice day.)

Anyway, I don’t want to revisit my past hand-wringing. My new guiding policy is this: don’t get jaded. Discriminating, always, but I don’t want to penalize a worthy book by withholding a star just because I starred a review the day before and I want to maintain my self-image as someone who’s hard to please.

For the upcoming March 1 issue, I wrote a starred review of Neil McMahon’s Lone Creek. McMahon belongs to the fine tradition of Montana writers who work with their hands in order to support their passion for words. My father, who lives in Missoula, met McMahon when he showed up — with another writer, Fred Haefele – to do some tree trimming in my father’s yard. McMahon’s Carroll Monks series was very good, but Lone Creek may just put him on the national map. I’m always hoping for Montana crime stories as good as the ones that got me hooked (by James Crumley, mainly) and McMahon shows he’s worthy of Crumley’s company.

I’d barely finished reading Lone Creek when I started Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. Though Temple is apparently regarded by some aficionados as Australia’s best crime writer, I have to confess I’d never heard of him. Now I’ll never forget him. I was hardly expecting another great book so soon, but The Broken Shore, which racked up the awards in Australia, was well worth the rave that will run in the March 15 issue of Booklist. Interestingly, despite the Down Under location, this one has elements — land-use issues and racial discrimination — that make it feel like an American West crime story with Aussie accents. The devastating ending is worthy of the movie Chinatown, and protagonist Joe Cashin is a richly complicated character we’ll want to see again.

But the great books I’ve read lately haven’t only been about crime. Well, Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me is about a crime, sort of, but because it’s literary fiction and not crime fiction, it’s more about the crimes we commit against ourselves than the kind we commit against other people. Rich in both ideas and ambiguity, it’s the kind of book that’s hard to review, period — and extraordinarily hard to review within the brief confines of a Booklist review. Because I labored so hard over it there, I’ll just quote myself here:

“In gorgeous, melancholy prose, O’Hagan portrays a man who misapprehends both the community and himself, leading us on a thoughtful exploration of faith and of religion’s role in an increasingly un-Catholic world - and, eventually, of the simple need to love and be loved. The juxtaposition of Anderton’s memories of privileged life at Oxford with the cheerful ignorance of the Dalgarnock youth provides an open-eyed elegy - that is to say, cognizant of the contradictions of nostalgia - for a more beautiful way of life.”

Granted, I’m getting better books to review now that I toil as an editor than I did when I toiled as an editorial assistant, but still, this has been a remarkable run of books and I’m grateful. Now I have to make do with the likes of Lore Segal (Shakespeare’s Kitchen) and Henning Mankell (Depths). Sigh. Can’t a guy get a break?

If you’re attracted to the sexiness of book awards despite their arbitrariness and stupidity, you may wish to participate in The Morning News‘ 2007 Tournament of Books. The mission statement, according to ToB chairman Kevin Guilfoile:

Someone, possibly me, once said that all decent ideas are born from too much wine, and so it was with the Tournament of Books. Exchanging emails with the TMN editors after a few glasses of Argentinean Malbec, we each confessed that we’re attracted to the sexiness of book awards despite the fact that book awards are also arbitrary and stupid. In this way the National Book Award is (in a joke that was neither as tasteless nor on the nose as it was when I wrote it two weeks ago) much more like Anna Nicole Smith than it is like Anna Deavere Smith.

The idea that any small group of people, no matter how intelligent, could emerge from a locked room to declare one book as the year’s finest is absurd. People like to say that awards foster discussion about contemporary literature, and that’s true. But if that is the real purpose, than let’s have a real discussion. Let’s make the judging entirely transparent. Let’s admit that the nominees were selected arbitrarily (one was originally published in 1988, though rereleased in 2006) and that we chose a number of books as finalists before any of us had even read them. Let’s lay bare any biases the judges might have. Let’s hear specifically why this judge preferred this book over that one. Let’s seed all 16 finalists in an NCAA-basketball type bracket and pit them against one another in a Battle Royale of Literary Excellence!

I’m with Guilfoile: book awards are arbitrary and imperfect but I like them anyway because I like talking about books. I’ve already cast my vote, for the arbitrarily decided Booklist Top of the List winner, The Road.

There’s been a lot of discussion of late about the future of reading and of books as physical objects, but if paper-and-ink reading ever goes the way of the dodo bird (please, please let it not happen), there will be a symbiotic, minor art form that will die as well: the bookplate.

Lewis Jaffe sent me a link to his blog, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, thinking I might find it of interest. It’s extremely interesting. I think my favorites artistically are the angular, 1920s modern styles (check out Hart Crane’s) and the science fiction-related styles. The art nouveau (check out Freud’s) and the heraldric styles are nice but perhaps the most familiar to me. Then there are those that sort of defy description. Celebrity bookplates are fun, too.

I have no idea how many people are creating new bookplates nowadays, but where there’s books, there’s hope. (I seem to remember that my friend John Green received a set of bookplates not too long ago.) Anyway, Jaffe’s collection is really worth seeing.

(A reader asked me to include more images — at Likely Stories, we aim to please.)

In his “Media Mix” column exploring the mainstream media’s increasing coverage of what was once “tabloid fare” (the circumstances surrounding Anna Nicole Smith’s death, the hair formerly belonging to Britney Spears), USA Today’s Peter Johnson seeks insight from Us Weekly’s editor, Janice Min, and gets, well – get this:

Min understands Smith’s appeal. “This story is the ultimate in voyeurism: You’re getting to see the inner workings of a celebrity, her demise, her home life, what she ate, what drugs she was taking, the court papers. It’s almost like the real-time unraveling of a celebrity. And, let’s face it, this is better than any TV show that’s on right now. It’s probably better than any book you’re reading. You can’t script this sort of crazy drama.”

“It’s probably better than any book you’re reading”? Let’s see, I’m reading Lore Segal’s Shakespeare’s Kitchen. It’s a funny, intelligent, nuanced look at the way people build surrogate families out of friends and coworkers — yeah, I guess the Anna Nicole Smith saga offers more food for thought. Especially the part about that guy Howard K. Stern. How weird is that? At first I thought he was the famous Howard Stern. Howard Stern and Anna Nicole — how weird would that be? I get the chills just thinking about it.

“You can’t script this sort of crazy drama”? Lady, Carl Hiaasen craps better plots than this. But I guess that’s the kind of thinking that, over the past 50 years, has turned television from a medium where you might see a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky to a medium where you can watch slack-jawed, swimsuit-clad teenagers mangling grammar as they self-importantly narrate their way through pedestrian rites of passage.

You know what? I guess you can’t script that.