Your Friday grab-bag: 

Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq are tired of being pushed around, darn it. And, like the public men of letters they are, they’re . . . taking it public. The headline to Angelique Chrisafis’ Guardian story says it all: “The cultural whipping boys’ manifesto: France has vomited on us for too long.”

In Forbes, Lacey Rose and Lauren Streib round up “The World’s Best Paid Authors.” You’ll be surprised to learn that J. K. Rowling tops the list. James Patterson, who publishes about 100 books per year, places a distant second. (Update: I missed this the first time around, but Rowling’s riches accrue at the rate of five quid every second.)

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, children’s librarian Regina Powers insists that “Reading shouldn’t be a numbers game.”

Poets & Writers reports on a case of a publisher’s bookkeeper playing editor (”The Bookkeeper Bungle: Indie Publisher Recalls Errant Rejection Letters“). (Via Galleycat.)

And, lastly, the British publisher of The Jewel of Medina has responded to being firebombed by announcing that the book will be published even sooner than planned (”Publisher speeds up release of Muhammad book,” AP).

Oh no he di’n't: Horace Engdahl, “the top member” of the Nobel Prize jury, dissed American literature, big-time (”Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete,” by Malin Rising and Hillel Italie, AP):

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Several notable American literati offered stern rebukes, including this one:

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. 

Given that Engdahl also said, ”Europe still is the center of the literary world,” I think we can assume that his dis extends to Asian, African, Australian, South American, and Antarctican literature, too.

I’m sure bookmakers have adjusted their odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which may be announced as early as next week, accordingly.

In a scenario that will sound familiar to U.S. readers, Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan has said that popular English TV hosts Richard and Judy treat their book club followers as if they were “stupid” (”Richard and Judy ‘treat their readers as stupid,’” by Senay Boztas, The Observer):

‘We have an industry where we have a Richard and Judy culture,’ he said at a debate on whether or not the novel is overrated. ‘Certain totemic elements, certain gongs must been struck for a novel to be worthy of presentation to a mass audience. This is a coarsening.

‘[The Richard and Judy book club] is a wasted opportunity … They have a massive captive audience of people who aren’t completely undiscerning; they aren’t stupid. Why are they treating them as if they are stupid? There is an opportunity to use that connection to turn a generation on to good writing.’

I wonder if he’ll refuse to go on the show. Wait, what’s that? He wasn’t invited?

Interestingly, O’Hagan went on to praise Oprah and criticize Franzen (”who wasn’t happy to be read but that was inverted snobbery”). So never mind that angle.

For the record, I think O’Hagan is a wonderfully intelligent writer–and perfect book club material.

Sir Salman “Scruffy” Rushdie (sorry, I just can’t help myself, it’s too cute), whose name is frequently evoked in the Jewel of Medina affair (note to the Ian Fleming estate: great title for a Bond film), has weighed in (”Rushdie condemns cancellation of Muhammad novel,” by Hillel Italie, AP)

“I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have canceled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals,” Rushdie said Thursday in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”

The Independent finds this funny, or at least–what’s the word?–ironic (”Rushdie attacks censorship – while trying to stifle criticism of himself,” by Amol Rajan):

Rushdie’s very public intervention comes at a time when he is engaged in a legal battle to amend the content of a book that criticised him.

Rushdie disagrees:

Rushdie denied there was any contradiction in his actions, saying: “[Sherry Jones’s book] is a work of fiction. Ron Evans’s book is not, and it contains a very large number of provable lies and complete absurdities which were defamatory not just about me but my son’s mother, Elizabeth West, the Metropolitan Police and people including John Major and Norman Tebbit.

Also, he added, “Evans and the others did not call me ‘Scruffy,’ they called me ‘Sartorially Splendid.’”

Just kidding. I made that up.

. . . or at least that’s the headline I imagine the British tabloids using. Sir Salman Rushdie has threatened to bring a lawsuit against his former police bodyguard, Ron Evans, because of certain passages in Evans’ memoir, On Her Majesty’s Service (”Rushdie anger at policeman’s book,” BBC). The author of The Satanic Verses, however, makes it clear he’s not issuing a fatwa of his own:

He said: “I am not in the business of suppressing books. I just want the stuff taken out of which he knows to be untrue.

“Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.”

No word yet on whether Evans has requested police protection from the outraged author.

Vedran Smailovic, the “Cellist of Sarajevo,” wants money from Steven Galloway, the Canadian author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, for his role in the book (”Famous cellist claims story stolen by Canadian author,” CBC):

With a stool and his cello, Smailovic once played on top of the rubble from a deadly mortar attack in Sarajevo. In plain view of snipers, he played for 22 days straight — one day for each person killed during the mortar attack.

So does the character in Steven Galloway’s book, published this year. It’s a war tale woven around three characters in Sarajevo and their reaction to a cellist character inspired by Smailovic, whose story has travelled around the globe.

“How can somebody steal your work, my, my sadness, my, my tragedy?” asks Smailovic.

“[I don’t know] for what I would be compensating. I mean, he performed a public act and I mentioned it?” asks Galloway.

I’m shocked–shocked!–that in this day and age, a spontaneous and moving tribute could be claimed as a copyright-protected piece of performance art. Then again, I am naive and easily surprised. I’m guessing that Galloway didn’t make as much money off it as Smailovic thinks he did. But then again, I am naive, etc.

From the Department of Almost Too Good to Be True, a dinner party for the authors of Dinner Party Disasters turns, well, disastrous. From Publishers Weekly (”Bloodshed at Connecticut Book Party,” by Lynn Andriani):

As entrées were being enjoyed, a McCain supporter and an Obama supporter, having exhausted their verbal arguments, lunged at each other with fists flying. Eventually the kitchen staff came to the rescue and separated the two men, but not before some blood was shed and the well-heeled guests were shaken up. After a cooling down period, the rambunctious guests returned to the table (with revised seat assignments) and ate dessert.

“It’s funny now, but it wasn’t so funny then,” said coauthor Stokes. “The irony was that as the evening began we all kidded around about how someone should stage a disaster at one of these book parties—and lo and behold, it happened.”

Are they sure this wasn’t staged?

Now this is my kind of literary feud. There’s been bad blood between Derek Walcott (The Prodigal, 2004) and V. S. Naipaul (A Writer’s People, 2008) for years, but Walcott just took it to a whole new level, debuting a poem, “The Mongoose,” onstage at the Calabash Literary Festival in Kingston, Jamaica. From the Guardian (”Rhyme and punishment for Naipaul,” by Daniel Trilling):

Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.

A sample:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction
Read his last novels, you’ll see just
what I mean
A lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than Dickens

This year isn’t going too well for Naipaul. First Patrick French’s biography, The World Is What It Is, now this–and it’s only June. But perhaps Naipaul will have the last laugh:

But Walcott’s attack is unlikely to be ignored. French says that Naipaul will most likely wait until he has devised a suitably literary way of striking back. ‘Knowing Naipaul, he’ll say nothing and then at some point he will lash out. I remember him saying to me once: “I settle all my accounts, I settle all my accounts.” He gets even in his own way, even if he has to bide his time.’

Update: Here’s audio! (It’s at the very end.)

You’ve gotta love Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone, 2006). At least he doesn’t pick fights with small-timers. The New York Observer reports that he called Michiko Kakutani “the stupidest person in New York City.” It must have been something she wrote:

In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: “there is something oddly preening about [Franzen’s] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable.” Also: “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen’s unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.”

In related news, another feuding writer-reviewer duo, Rick Moody and Dale Peck, have reconciled. Peck, you may recall, famously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.” And there’s video, too.

On Galleycat, Emily Gould asks whether they’re being sincere:

This is cute and all, but there’s a chummy, clubby aspect of the ‘reconciliation’ that bothers me. Does Peck really take back everything he ever said about, say,’The Black Veil?’ Does he still care fervently about literature and how it’s marketed, or is he just spending his free time swimming around in a vault full of money a la Scrooge McDuck now that his sci-fi project with the dude from Heroes sold for $3 million?

Hey, if a cream pie doesn’t demonstrate sincerity, I don’t know what does!

Remember Thomas Kohnstamm? Well, he’s in the news again. His claims that Lonely Planet guides are not entirely trustworthy have irked a number of people, including, er, Lonely Planet. On their site, they address his charges, although they respond to one of his biggest complaints in a fairly vague manner:

5. Thomas claims he was not paid enough by Lonely Planet to do the job without shortcuts. While we ask a lot of our authors, we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees. 

Yes, but what if no one in the travel-guide industry pays their correspondents enough to do a thorough job? Wouldn’t that be an interesting story? (And hardly unimaginable: many freelancing gigs pay so poorly that they rely on the notion of writers doing the work for free/for fun/for their resumes….)

There’s plenty of chatter at the Lonely Planet forums.

BBC, which owns 75% of Lonely Planet, reports on the foofaraw (”Lonely Planet rebuts ‘fake’ claim“), and–hey, this is interesting:

Other travel writers, while not endorsing Mr Kohnstamm’s methods, said he was reporting genuine failures in the travel-writing industry - that writers are poorly paid, have to cover their own costs, and were expected to check a vast amount of detail.

As for myself, when Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? came across my desk, I had a strong feeling of deja vu, given that I had recently published a short story about a Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe travel writer (”If You Should Have Any Need at All“) in the Chicago Reader last December.