According to Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times, struggling novelists now face another source of competition: striking screenwriters (”Hollywood writers turn to Plan B: the novel“). Given the film scribes are used to earning, though, book advances certainly won’t make them forget their day jobs:

Lydia Wills at Paradigm agreed that “back-burner projects” are now getting more attention, noting a surge in “book pitches and novel writing” among her agency’s Hollywood clientele.

But although the strike has given screenwriters who’ve long had novels percolating in their heads the impetus to finally get the darn things written, there’s also a cruel reality: Because book fees are small change compared with the big payoff of a Hollywood script, it’s a treacherous hedge, a gamble on something that might not even cover one month’s rent, let alone a house note.

From the sounds of it, though, the screenwriters writing novels see the chance to work in a long form as more than a paycheck–perhaps an opportunity to get reacquainted with their muses. But while some of them are certainly well connected enough to make it into print, agent Mary Evans, for one, isn’t always thrilled to hear from them:

“Oftentimes, you shudder when a screenwriter sends you a novel, because they tend to be strong with dialogue but crappy with context, and novels are all about creating the proper context for the story,” said Evans, whose clients include Smith and Michael Chabon. “Screenwriters are attracted to novel writing because they can let their freak flag fly and just write what they want, but the truly talented novelist-slash-screenwriter is very rare.”

A. L. Kennedy (Paradise, 2005; Indelible Acts, 2003) has won the Costa Book of the Year award (you remember the Costa, it used to be the Whitbread) for her fifth novel, Day (Jonathan Cape, 2007).

Taking a quick look at the author’s site, I found myself charmed by her reviews of her reviews. Not for Day, alas, but for Paradise and others:

If you are a reviewer and your work appears here, take it as a compliment. Or take it as a minute exposure to the delightful "being reviewed" experience. The reviews are categorised as follows:
Good - reviews which give the impression the book is good.
Bad - reviews which give the impression that the book is bad.
Silly - reviews which are not really terribly well written, or informative. Reviews are shown to help readers decide if they should read a book and as a small comment on the state of literary reviewing.

In Slate, Garth Risk Hallberg asks, “Who Is Grady Harp?”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: “an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits,” as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of “Web 2.0″ - an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas - one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

And, somewhere, Grady Harp asks, “Who is Garth Risk Hallberg? What’s that you say? I reviewed his book?”

For more on the subject, click here.

And, because it’s Friday, The Onion:

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

GREENWOOD, IN - Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

(Thanks, Carlos!)

In Wired, Clive Thompson calls science fiction–or, if you prefer, speculative fiction–”the last great literature of ideas.” And he makes his case in a language appropriate to the venue:

Here’s my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times - writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life - eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality - and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds - so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

He makes a great, provocative argument. And though he cites some oft-cited examples of “literary” authors working in sf (Roth, McCarthy, Chabon, Lethem, Atwood), he’s also right on the money when he talks about why the genre gets “short shrift” from “serious” readers:

Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors - like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick - have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

And a few generations’ worth of nerd stereotypes aren’t easily overcome, either.

My favorite line comes at the end of this paragraph:

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender’s Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

From the Department of Really, What Did You Expect?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A book publisher that bought an ad on Don Imus’s radio show is suing the shock jock and his former bosses at CBS Radio for more than $4 million, saying Imus insulted the book he was paid to promote.

(”Advertiser sues Don Imus for unscripted comments,” Reuters)

More on the Ishmael Beah controversy in The Australian. Another former child soldier, Kabba Williams, has questioned Beah’s account of events (”Child soldier questions Beah’s tale,” by Peter Wilson):

“That is not true … 1995 was the period when Ishmael got involved in the conflict,” Mr Williams told The Australian in a telephone interview yesterday.

However:

Mr Williams said he was not surprised by what he believed were the inaccuracies in Beah’s account because the traumatic adolescence of the child soldiers meant “a lot of us do not know our own childhoods”.

The publisher, however, may need to take some blame for another, far less forgivable, error:

Beah, according to his own account, spent at least 10 months wandering between villages before reaching the relative safety of the village of Yele in Bonthe district, only to be recruited by the soldiers occupying the town.

A map that has appeared at the front of Beah’s book in its many reprints — more than 650,000 copies are in print and a new soft-back edition is about to be released in Europe — shows that trek as a winding, 1000km route between Mattru Jong and Yele, about 450km to the southwest.

But the map is deeply flawed. In fact, Yele is just 6km southwest of Mattru Jong.

I’m on deadline today for my review of the new C. J. Box novel, Blood Trail (Putnam). A couple of years ago, I complained that Mr. Box had deprived me of a good night’s sleep. At the time, I’d just returned from spending three months at home with my first son, and the readjustment to business hours was proving rocky.

Well, Box did it again on Wednesday night. And, with a second son who’s–how do I say this politely?–slumber-challenged, I could still use the shut-eye. But I defy anyone to get within 50 pages of the end of a Box novel and just stop, no matter how scratchy their eyes are.

Despite the number of terrific books that I’ve been fortunate enough to review for Booklist, it’s pretty rare when I find that I can’t stop reading one of them. Books have become my job, and no matter how much I enjoy my work, I know that there will be more good stuff coming my way soon. So when I simply cannot close the book, that tells me one thing for certain: it’s going to get a starred review.

I will say that Blood Trail isn’t quite as good as the last Pickett, Free Fire, or my favorite, Out of Range, but given that Box is now on the two-books-a-year plan (”amateur,” scoff Ken Bruen and Walter Mosley), it’s remarkable how close he is to those benchmarks. Box’s other book out this year was the terrific Blue Heaven (St. Martin’s/Minotaur), which I approached with some trepidation only because it seemed to signal an effort to make the Wyoming author more mainstream (they photographed him without his cowboy hat, for example). But that was a needless worry. Box has proved that he can branch out with stand-alone thrillers while keeping his large core audience (Pickettheads? Romanowskians? Boxovites?) happy.

Come to think of it, my only quibble with Blood Trail is probably that it’s a bit shorter than usual–in which case, I shouldn’t be complaining. Because then I’d really be short of sleep.

Check out the critical conversation in the new Time Out Chicago (”Critical Condition,” by Kris Vire), featuring Booklist’s very own “books critic,” Donna Seaman (the accidental title makes it seem as if we also have food, TV, and automotive critics). An excerpt:

Kris Vire: Is passion more important than education?

Donna Seaman: Initially, but passion must lead to discipline and immersion. Expertise is gained from sustained attention.

Don Hall: I think passion and education go hand in hand. If you’re passionate about theater, you’ll likely educate yourself about it.

Anne Holub: You have to have a passion for it; otherwise, you’re simply not going to bother.

Chuck Sudo: Expertise is gained from sating your curiosity, then realizing there’s still more to learn.

Donna Seaman: Yes. One must also have the urge to share one’s enthusiasms. To advocate. To be clear about what it is that matters in a work of art.

Sam Jones: Formal education is probably not more important than passion, but knowledge of the medium you’re criticizing is.

Anne Holub: Right, and since most subjects are constantly changing and growing, it’s likely going to be a lifelong pursuit.

Jim DeRogatis: In as (allegedly) democratic an art form as rock & roll, it is true that literally everyone is a critic. The difference between a good critic and a bad critic is the ability to put into words the reasoning behind those opinions. And there education can be helpful, but it can be as informal as simply being a voracious reader.

Chuck Sudo: Or, if you’re talking about food and drink, as simple as going to that one hole-in-the-wall restaurant you’ve long avoided because of preconceived notions.

Mike Sula: Or just being aware of your preconceived notions.

Don Hall: In order to appropriately criticize, a dollop of self-awareness is necessary - knowing your own prejudices, etc.

Sam Jones: Critics are like statistics - what they say is almost meaningless without the underlying story.

Donna Seaman: Ongoing self-education is essential.

Jim DeRogatis: And education is another word for journalism: If you have a perceptive young reader, you can send him or her out to critique something without having a deep knowledge in the subject, so long as he or she does the journalistic homework beforehand. You need not have gone to Juilliard to critique the Rolling Stones, or to have heard all of their 40 or so albums. But you’d better get the facts right when you come back and write up your emotional reaction to the show.

Donna Seaman: Everyone who reads a book, listens to a piece of music, and so on, experiences a slightly different work of art. A critic has to be able to imagine many responses, and see the experience in a greater context.

Jim DeRogatis: Why is that important? Do you really want to know how an 11-year-old experienced Hannah Montana?

Donna Seaman: Writing is always about exposing the workings of a mind, even a tween with bad taste.

Anne Holub: I want to know how the 11-year-old’s parents experienced paying for those tickets!

Sam Jones: We come to trust critics by reading them - that’s how we have traditionally gotten the story.

Believe me, Donna does not look like her icon. She actually looks like this.

Hey, TOC gave yours truly a mention, too! (Chest thump.) Respect.

Peter Wilson and Shelley Gare of The Australian have published a point-by-point rebuttal (”Response to author, publisher claims“) to Ishmael Beah’s rebuttal:

Author Ishmael Beah and his publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux have attempted to refute The Australian’s disclosure of major factual errors in his best-selling book “A Long Way Gone.”

But a statement issued by them on Tuesday January 22, which has appeared on various websites  www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6524214.html%5E contained several further errors of fact and did not acknowledge that Beah’s account of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone is seriously  flawed.

Furthermore, they say, Ishmael Beah may not even have been a child soldier at all, technically speaking:

That means Beah was a refugee and then child soldier for a combined period of one year, not the three years that he describes in his book. Instead of being a child soldier for two years from the age of 13 he may for instance have been one for two months at 15, which at that time would have been too old to be technically considered a “child soldier” under UN provisions outlawing the use of under-age combatants.

One wonders, of course, how the UN could have arrived at the age of 15 as a cut-off. (An optional protocol that came into “effect” in 2002 raises the age to 18.)

Wilson and Gare continue to acknowledge Beah’s “terrible ordeal.” Now that their own reporting has been attacked, well, you can tell that they’re frustrated. If they’re right on the details–and they certainly cite their sources in a more convincing manner–then it seems the best route would have been for Beah and his publisher to admit that some license was taken in the storytelling, and that, given the author’s youth and traumatic experiences, mistakes were understandably made. Given the subject’s horrors, I think the public would be forgiving.

But with both parties standing their ground, what happens next?

Update: More from FSG.