A corrective to the notion that aspiring writers have difficulty getting published. (”Faking it: Craigslist becomes a workshop for aspiring writers,” by Andrew Adam Newman, International Herald Tribune):

Craigslist is “a fun place to look when you should be doing something else,” said Debbie Newman, an editor at the gossip blog Jossip who trawls Craigslist for offbeat ads. “If you’re a talented writer and maybe a frustrated one working somewhere like a law firm that limits your day-to-day creativity, you take your opportunities where you can find them.”

Craigslist has advantages over other soapboxes. “You can set up your own blog, but people are not necessarily going to go there,” said Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist. “If you haven’t established an audience, you can do worse than Craigslist.”

Inside the London Library (”The Insider,” by Frances Wilson, the Telegraph):

The real pleasure of the place, however, is that walking up the steps and pushing open the door is like entering the wardrobe into Narnia. Behind the rational 18th-century exterior is a vortex that spreads, sprawls and expands, rising up into the clouds, spiralling down into the bowels, edging back to the beyond.

Readers are sucked down the 15 miles of cool iron corridor and swallowed by layer upon layer of shelving. You breathe in leather and dust, you blink as fluorescent lights flicker. You could be lost for a week and as happy as a skylark.

…

This, and other sections, are housed on metal grids which allow you to look upwards and downwards to other floors. For the critic Raymond Mortimer, gazing through ‘the half-transparent floors of the book-stack, I feel inside the brain of mankind’.

Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm, talks to the Los Angeles City Beat about L.A. literary culture, his reading habits, and the idea that arguing is impolite (”3rd Degree: Michael Silverblatt,” by Rebecca Epstein):

You are known for being able to impress your guests with your critical acumen. Have you ever been stumped or totally taken off balance by one of them in return?

Somehow or other the idea that argument is impolite has come up. It’s sort of like, why fight with people whose opinion you already know? But America, to be lofty, was once a place where everything was discussed - politically correct or not - and we talked with enormous belief that the conversation could change the listener. But if we’re not used to starting with incomprehension, then passion as informed talk doesn’t take hold. People aren’t swayed.

Norman Mailer had done me the great favor of calling me the best reader in America. It was amazing. Also, his publisher had told me that Norman had given explicit instructions not to schedule two things on the same day that he would talk to me, because he really enjoyed talking to me, but it wore him out. This was because I’m not afraid anymore, and we would argue.

(From Likely Stories stringer Frank Sennett.)

From the Guardian (”Iranian publisher’s ruse fails to protect raunchy García Márquez title from censors,” by Robert Tait):

Iran’s straight-laced censors are not known for their tolerance of sexually risque literature, so a book called A Memory of My Melancholy Whores was never likely to meet with their approval.

But in their determination to get Gabriel García Márquez’s highly acclaimed work into the bookshops, local publishers hit on an audacious ruse - they sanitised its title.

As a result, the normally vigilant gaze of culture and Islamic guidance ministry officials was averted when a novel by the Nobel prize-winning author innocuously titled Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts was submitted and accordingly authorised for publication.

It’s a funny world. In this country, retitling a book called Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts as A Memory of My Melancholy Whores would be the best way to get people to read it.

(Read Brad Hooper’s review.)

The National Book Award winners have been announced. A somewhat controversial pick, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, is the fiction winner–giving our reviewer, Ben Segedin, the opportunity to say he called it. (And Donna Seaman starred the poetry winner, too.)

Fiction

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar)

Nonfiction

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Poetry

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (HarperCollins/Ecco)

Young People’s Literature

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown)

Learn more at the New York Times (”Vietnam War Novel Wins National Book Award,” by Motoko Rich). For instance, Denis Johnson sent Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award on his behalf. Kidding! Actually, his wife accepted in his absence, though the article doesn’t explain why.

Update: from the Associated Press (”‘Tree of Smoke’ Wins National Book Award,” by Hillel Italie):

The 58-year-old Johnson, who lives in New Mexico, rarely talks to the media and is currently on a writing assignment in Iraq.

Ira Levin, a writer whose bestselling novels are probably most remembered by the movies made from them, has died. From the Associated Press (”‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Author Dies in NY,” by Larry McShane):

NEW YORK (AP) - Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose genre-hopping novels such as the horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby” and the Nazi thriller “The Boys From Brazil” provided meaty movie roles for Mia Farrow and Laurence Olivier, has died of a heart attack, his agent said Tuesday. He was 78.

… 

Levin’s page-turning books were once compared by Newsweek writer Peter S. Frescott to a bag of popcorn: “Utterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there’s no way to stop once you’ve started.”

A mere week after hearing that Judith Regan wants out of the spotlight (”I want my life to get smaller, not bigger”), we learn that she’s coming back to the spotlight in a big, big way. From the Associated Press (”Regan Files $100M Suit Against Publisher,” by Samuel Maull):

NEW YORK (AP) - One-time book publishing powerhouse Judith Regan filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit Tuesday saying her former employers asked her to lie to federal investigators about Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner who was once her lover, and tried to destroy her reputation.

Regan, who worked for HarperCollins Publishers LLC, said the smear campaign stems from her past intimate relationship with Kerik, who was police commissioner under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and from the political agenda of News Corp., the parent company of HarperCollins.

And more on the mind-boggling notion of reading books on cell phones. From the Chicago Tribune (”Cell phones’ latest plot twist,” by the delightfully named Stevenson Swanson, if that is his real name):

With their small screens, cell phones might not spring to mind as a suitable medium for reading lengthy stretches of text. And a much-ballyhooed e-book revolution during the dot-com era in the late 1990s and early 2000s fizzled, leading many in publishing to doubt whether books would ever escape the bounds of paper.

But that hasn’t stopped such publishers as Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster and Avalon Travel from making deals with specialty firms to produce mobile versions of some of their titles.

Most critics really liked Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Booklist certainly did, too; the book earned a star from the tough-minded Ben Segedin). But it’s always interesting to read the outlier reviews. After all, book reviewing would be pretty boring if we all agreed on everything. And, boy, does B. R. Myers disagree (”A Bright Shining Lie,” Atlantic Monthly):

When a novel’s first words are "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed," and the rest of it evinces no more feel for the English language and often a good deal less, and America’s most revered living writer touts "prose of amazing power and stylishness" on the back cover, and reviewers agree that whatever may be wrong with the book, there’s no faulting its finely crafted sentences - when I see all this, I begin to smell a rat. Nothing sinister, mind you. It’s just that once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.

Shirley Dent says it isn’t. And Harry Potter gets worked into the discussion. From the Guardian books blog, again (”Terrible poet, laughable terrorist“):

In his recent book, An Invitation to Terror, Professor Frank Furedi likened official responses to terrorism to that of the school kids in Harry Potter: the terrorist threat is a “Voldermort-like figure that cannot or must not be named”, and instead of identifying and giving the threat “a clear name, they prefer to castigate evil extremists and radicals who apparently hate freedom”. Bang to rights on this script in the Malik trial. The prosecution, the defence and the judge all unwittingly conspired to give Malik’s warblings about martyrdom and beheadings far, far more credence than they were due.