In an extremely brief item in the Scotsman (”JK split fuelled Potter’s anger“), well, it’s too brief to summarize without a quote becoming redundant:

HARRY Potter author JK Rowling has revealed the boy wizard’s anger stems from the break-up of her first marriage.

She said her split from Jorge Arantes in 1993 was a dark period, adding: “A part of Harry’s anger is my own.”

I sure hope she starts writing another bestselling seven-book series soon, so we can go back to hearing about the stories on the pages. I have a feeling that next we’re going to learn that Rowling’s decision to write about a wizard came from her fondness for Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic.”

(Via Sneed.)

And the children’s-book revelations about sexual orientation just keep on coming. From America’s Finest News Source, The Onion (”R.L. Stine Reveals Slappy From Night Of The Living Dummy Was Gay“):

NEW YORK - Children’s author R.L. Stine broke his long-held media silence Monday to announce that Slappy, the evil ventriloquist’s dummy from the Goosebumps Night Of The Living Dummy trilogy, was a homosexual.

“This is not completely unexpected,” said Goosebumps fan Ned Kosorowski, who has long speculated that the fictional wooden doll preferred the company of men, and has even written fan fiction describing graphic sexual encounters between Slappy and Amy’s father. “Slappy’s constant attempts to break out of the closet that Amy stores him in at night clearly represent his struggle with homosexuality - as well as his deep-seated, repressed feelings for [rival ventriloquist’s dummy] Mr. Wood.”

What? You thought that the end of the Harry Potter series meant that we could finally stop talking about Harry Potter? Ha!

J. K. Rowling’s recent outing of Albus Dumbledore has puffed a smoldering fire back into flame. Are her ex-post-facto revelations a carefully calculated attempt to prolong the publicity–or proof positive of full-blown logorrhea? (Actually, I’d like to coin the word “authorrhea.”)

Bring on the media overkill!

On Salon (”Dumbledore? Gay. J. K. Rowling? Chatty.“), Rebecca Traister wishes Rowling would shut up, already.

Thanks to Rowling’s loose lips, the Potter universe continues to make news even after its end. In her desire to control and describe it, she’s turning a modern assumption about what authorship means inside out. Whoever said the author was dead sure hadn’t meant Joanne Rowling.

Some Guy with a Website (”Rowling’s Wide Stance“) says, graphically, that fuming fans should get over it.

Author J.K. Rowling takes the initiative in declaring the sexual orientation of one of her beloved characters. This has shocked the fan fiction community, who for so long have assumed it was their right to make their own baseless and unfounded assumptions about fictional characters they had no part in creating.

Radar, getting in the spirit of things, outs some more childhood icons (”Fairy Tales,” by Neel Shah and Paige Ferrari):

Jo March, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
A tomboy with a rather unladylike roughness to her character, Jo secured her place in the pantheon of closet cases after rejecting a marriage proposal from ardent young buck Laurie. She also cut off her long hair - her “one beauty” according to the novel - in favor of the DeGeneres bob.

And, of course, you can already buy the T-shirt.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this already, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll be interested. I saw this in Publishers Weekly (”Live from Frankfurt,” by Karen Holt) first, but New York (”Dave Eggers’s Next Novel Is Based on ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?“) included pretty pictures:

Publishers Weekly reports that the Frankfurt Book Fair is abuzz with talk about Dave Eggers’s new novel, which apparently quietly sold to Ecco last winter. Ecco, the small, super-literary imprint at Harper, doesn’t usually brag about sales potential, usually because most of its books don’t have a lot of sales potential. According to PW, though, Ecco chief Dan Halpern is telling everyone at the fair that the book - an adult novel based on Where the Wild Things Are, scheduled to be published in 2008 to coincide with Spike Jonze’s movie, for which Eggers co-wrote the screenplay - will be a monster hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.

I can see why they think it has sales potential. I can also imagine a marketing meeting where someone riffs that the book will appeal to kids and adults, or the kid in everyone, or adults because they used to be kids, or kids through adults and everyone in between….

It probably won’t sell well to the anti-monster crowd, but what do those people like?

So now Little, Brown won’t be publishing Tintin in the Congo at all (”Little, Brown Cancels Tintin in the Congo,” by Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly):

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which had been planning to publish Tintin in the Congo, a book criticized for its racist, Colonial-era depictions of Africans, has quietly pulled the title from its fall list, PW has learned. The publisher also said it will not include the book in a forthcoming box set of all 24 books in the Tintin series. 

Well, nobody said you have to publish something you don’t like–or that your customers don’t want. But pulling the book from what would have been a definitive boxed set has me wondering: did Thomas Bowdler ever stay the night in a Potemkin Village?

What I mean to say is that, if some kid gets hooked on Tintin now and grows up to tell his friends that he’s a fan of Hergé, he won’t really have seen the whole picture, will he?

Sometimes you see the same thing on several different blogs, and how you cite it simply depends on the order in which you read the blogs. (Making the case that you should name your blog “AAA Litblog”.) Anyway, via BookDaddy via Bookslut, it’s Beckett for Babies:

Brilliant. I hope somebody publishes this.

The favorite author of young British adults? Not J. K. Rowling. From the Guardian (”Dahl beats Rowling as young adults’ favourite author“):

Roald Dahl remains the most popular children’s author among young adults, a survey has found.

JK Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book sparked a publishing sensation when it hit the bookshelves 10 years ago, is only the fourth most popular author.

Second and third place were taken by CS Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia series, and Peter Pan creator JM Barrie.

Note the use of the word “remains.” 

The survey, commissioned by ITV3, defines YAs as ages 16-34. I’m guessing 10-18 might have gotten a different result, but who knows? Jolly good show, Dahl, old boy.

In Sunday’s New York Times (”No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov“), David Oshinsky’s look at Knopf’s rejection file reveals that even a “gold standard” publisher makes some errors in judgment:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges ("utterly untranslatable"), Isaac Bashevis Singer ("It’s Poland and the rich Jews again"), Anaïs Nin ("There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic"), Sylvia Plath ("There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice") and Jack Kerouac ("His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so"). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita" (too racy) and James Baldwin’s "Giovanni’s Room" ("hopelessly bad"). 

Sometimes, trolling through the Booklist card catalog (ah, the sights! the smells! the feel of the cardstock!) we spot similar judgments that, with hindsight, are clearly off the mark. A few years ago, Bill Ott issued a mea culpa for our review of Charlotte’s Web:

The worst part of our review is that we ignore the barn altogether. White once wrote that his novel "was a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung." Unfortunately, Booklist was too busy worrying about symbols even to smell the dung, much less accept it. As I reread Charlotte this time, I was impressed once more with what a marvelous balancing act White manages. On the one hand, he was adamant about showing barn life as it really was, but on the other hand, he set himself an utterly unrealistic goal: to keep Wilbur out of the pork barrel. As a farmer himself, White had killed his share of pigs - that’s what farmers do - but he never liked it, and in Charlotte’s Web, he wanted to find a way to let one live. To do so, he was obligated to mix fantasy and reality, which required the help of a spider who was capable of being "both a true friend and a good writer." Introducing fantasy into a book intended to celebrate the reality of farm life was a dangerous move for White. In saving the pig, would he lose the barn? Will the manure still smell when the spiders become prose stylists? We know now that White’s barn was plenty big enough for both Wilbur’s manure and Charlotte’s bons mots, and we are profoundly sorry Booklist didn’t know it in 1952.

I didn’t write a post yesterday because I was busy getting the September 1 issue of Booklist online. Yes, I know yesterday was September 5 — the holiday weekend wreaked havoc with the schedule. But, as brilliant as Booklist reviews are, I’m guessing that not too many people were celebrating Labor Day by reading Booklist Online. I didn’t get any letters, anyway.

September 1 is our annual Spotlight on Sports, an issue I am partial to (though not, of course, as much as the Mystery Issue). I contributed reviews of a couple of books on pool (Running the Table, by L. Jon Wertheim and The Hustler and the Champ, by R. A. Dyer), a game that I have studied and struggled with, and one on soccer (Love and Blood, by Jamie Trecker), a game that I love to watch but play poorly.

A few of my favorite reads from the new issue:

• Bill Ott’s Back Page on Michael Dibdin
• Joanne Wilkinson’s review of Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs
• Ian Chipman’s review of Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite
• Donna Seaman’s review of Caryl Phillips’ Foreigners 
• Frank Sennett’s review of Henning Mankell’s Kennedy’s Brain
• Ray Olson’s review of Garrison Keillor’s Pontoon (which sounds a bit as if it had been written by Keillor himself–applied judiciously, I love this approach)

And, though I know a lot more about adult books than youth books, I thought these were really interesting, too:

• A Core Collection, “Social Class in Youth Fiction” (I got to know this one quite intimately, as it took an inordinate amount of time to format)
• Ilene Cooper’s review of Barry Lyga’s Boy Toy

(Full disclosure: I have not read every review in this issue; your favorites may vary.)

The two sources I trust the most have finally weighed in on the Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the front page of the Book Review, The New York Times printed a review that revealed no major spoilers (although if you’re not aware of the ending by now, it’s time to sublet that granite subterranean flat you’ve been living in). Reviewer Christopher Hitchens takes a few high brow swipes at the series as a whole and the final volume in particular, but I expected nothing less.

The most anticipated analysis came from my Uncle Stevie over at the Bible of Popular Culture, commonly known as Entertainment Weekly. Stephen King has been the most loyal reader and defender of Harry Potter , J.K. Rowling and their combined exploits. He is also one of the most astute commentators on the state of today’s popular culture.

I’m still mulling over Hitchens’ piece and his perceptive parallels drawn between Orwell, Dickens, Kipling and Conan Doyle and Rowling. Your thoughts?