The NBCC's Tips for Successful Book Reviewing

When we launched Critical Mass, we asked what topics or questions you'd like to see us address on the site. In response to your responses -- and the steady stream of emails we get asking for tips on becoming a professional book critic -- we've put together and posted the NBCC's all new "Tips for Successful Book Reviewing: Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in." It covers a range of topics: getting started as a critic, building your reviewing portfolio, going national, keeping editors happy, ethics, and more.

The document is a work-in-progress: We look forward to hearing your thoughts here in the comments section (or via email), including tips of your own (I'd love to hear strategies other critics have developed), and additional questions/issues we haven't addressed but should. And stay tuned for more projects like this one: To answer some of the other issues you raised, we're conducting interviews with professional critics and review editors, to tackle some of the issues like, how does a critic pick which book to review, what's with the shrinking review sections, and more. In the meantime, check out this first installment, let us know what you think, and have a great long weekend!

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Jo on the March

Today's Washington Post sums up the myriad ways in which "Little Women" has resurfaced on the cultural scene -- on stage, in books, as Japanese anime. In Literary Land this renaissance includes Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer-winning novel "March," as is mentioned. But let us not forget former NBCC board member Katharine Weber's recent Alcott-inspired novel, "The Little Women."
The article attributes the latest renaissance to the countless readers of the female persuasion for whom reading "Little Women" remains a formative memory. Count me in on that one, although who says it was the reading experience that was so memorable? I received my copy -- the illustrated Junior Library edition from Grosset & Dunlap -- as a Christmas gift when I was 10. Maybe I remember the moment so well because it was so rare for me to own books (I was a library rat), or maybe it was because the book itself, not the jacket, was illustrated. Although the clear plastic jacket is long gone, my copy of "Little Women" remains nearly intact and in my possession, located between Alice Adams and Isabel Allende on a shelf downstairs.

Round Up

What is a beach read? John Valentine provides eight different answers, while Kristan Lawson presents an Oakland bestseller list that will keep you patriotic.

Allen Barra talks with David Milch, the creator of the HBO series, "Deadwood." What's really odd is they don't mention Pete Dexter's 1986 novel of the same name.

Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart is putting on eight benefit readings across Canada to celebrate their 100th anniversary. Tonight's happens in Halifax.

Hisham Matar, whose first novel is looking like the reading event of the summer in England, still does not know what Libyan police have done with his father.

Edward Guthmann profiles Siddartha Dhanvant Shanghvi, who says he has read the English Patient 42 times.

Cricket commentator Bill "The Bearded Wonder" Frindall has delivered his memoir, in which he recalls fellow commentator knocking back a couple of bottles of claret on the job.

"There are cartoonists in the Middle East who have been killed for what they do," says Salt Lake City Weekly political cartoonist Pat Bagley, whose new book is "Clueless George is Watching You."

This review of "Terrorist,"which will be moving into the #5 slot on the New York Times bestseller list, has the funniest headline yet.

The invisble ban has been lifted against novelists writing about terrorism, notes Aileen Jacobson in Newsday.

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Critical Outakes: Donna Leon on her extended Italian family

Q: I feel like you could read the Brunetti novels and learn how to live in Venice -- did you have many of his experiences when you first moved to Venice?

A: No, because I'd been going there a while. When I finally moved there, I understood Venice. And I knew people -- I met old ladies on the street and I called them zia, because they've become my aunts over the course of the years. I had a "grandmother," I have a "mother," I have two "aunts, "who are still in place there. So my relationship with Italy is, luckily, a familial one. I get phone calls with, 'my God, Susanna is pregnant, and I don't know if the guy is going to marry her or not!' And then there is a family conference about what to do with Susanna. It's a kind of psychodrama there.

Q: It sounds like people there treat you like an Italian, too.

A: Check my phone records from [the hotel she is staying at in London]. Every morning I have to call home. 'Ciao, what did you eat last night? How is your back, did you get to see the doctor?'

Q: And I notice the guy downstairs [at the hotel] speaks to you in Italian, too.

A: Oh, yeah. Nino? Listen to this: I've been coming to [this hotel] for eight years. Nino is from Capri, so Nino and I are bonded. Every time I come here, I have to bring Nino a piece of parmesan. So I show up with a kilo of parmesan for Nino. Last year, I showed up with a bottle of grappa. And when I go around the corner for coffee? I have to bring Nino a cappuccino! This is the concierge; he's supposed to be bringing me the coffee! But this is Italy.

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The Latest on Wikipedia

Power to the people: That seems to be the reluctant stance of Scott McLemee, a former National Book Critic Circle award winner for criticism, as he comes to terms with Wikipedia in his latest column for insidehighered.com. Grudging acceptance of the Internet encyclopedia created for and by everyone is coming from other sources, as well: In his column, McLemee references an instructive overview of the site by Roy Rosenzweig, a professor of history and news media at George Mason University. Rosenzweig believes the biggest problem Wikipedia faces is its tendency to be "whatever-centric," given that volunteer contributors obsessing on their pet topics lack a sense of the larger picture. More than offering an accurate portrait of the past, Rosenzweig notes, Wikipedia tells us about current popular tastes in history and the male, English-speaking demographics of the Internet. Still, he applauds its "self-healing quality" and advises colleagues to participate in order to provide scholarly context.

On the Nature of Generosity

The other day Warren Buffett anounced that he would be giving away the bulk of his wealth (some $44 billion), much of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which is now the world's largest philathropic organization. It's a gesure at odd with the times, an era when the elimination of the (so-called) death tax (basically any tax on the wealthiest American estates) was achieved and then presented as if it were peeling back some layer of awful governmental greed. The gesture calls to mind Bill Kittredge's book of a number years back, The Nature of Generosity. As Kittredge points out, the earliest humans were not obsessed with belongings or possessions. But once we became attached to them, we cut ourselves off from our need to wander, our need to commune with the land, our need to give. May sound a bit like Missoula mush, but if guru of Omaha has begun to see the wisdom of this -- chances are it's something worth banking upon.

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Round Up

Neal Schindler sings the praises of Tom Lutz's hustle in his attempt to figure out the true meaning of doing nothing.

In fewer than 200 pages, Pagan Kennedy's new novel packs an allegorical wallop, says Hannah Tucker.

Is it sacriligeous for an ordinary woman to summon blood to her palms or a sin to conceal what may be a gift from God? Ariel Gore wants to know.

Michele Roberts reassesses the work and legacy of the incomparable Angela Carter.

A New Zealand critic finds it slightly ironic that Philip Roth is writing about the weakening of the body when his prose is as strong as ever.

Paragraph, a workspace for writers in New York, is hosting a reading tonight featuring Ghana native Mohammed Naseehu Ali on the roof of the spa/gym Clay.

Robert Fisk meditates on the Titantic, nearly a century later.

George Saunders is the funniest writer in America, says Vince Passaro through his giggles.

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Critical Outakes: A.S. Byatt and story-telling

Q: You have written nearly as many short story volumes as novels. Did you ever think you'd write so many short stories?

A: Yes. If you'd have asked me twenty years ago if I could write a short story, I would have said no. No, I can't. But I got to feeling that pure storytelling was more and more important, and partly because I knew there was something terribly wrong with the French noveau roman, and this caused me to see that storytelling mattered. One of my theories of British literature is that it suddenly began to flower -- the British novel -- in the 1970s because the novelists realized they didn't give a damn about literary theory. Or literary critics. And they started telling stories. And the reviewers were still saying, you know, stories are vulgar. Everything is random and haphazard and kind of a miasma. But the storytellers, people like Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter, continued telling stories. I'm sure it has to do with a kind of split in my generation between university and being a writer.

Q: And you straddle this.

A: I do straddle this divide, yes. My work looks more peculiar than it is because of the death of my son, because I would have stopped being the kind of realist that I am in [the Federica Quartet] if I could have got those books written as fast as I could had he not been killed, which is better to say because everything got rather out of cync. And then I had to finish those four books because they required to be finished. I had already become a quite different writer, but I owed those books. They needed to be written, so I made a lot of discoveries and a lot of compromises about how you could put things into English realism that weren't in English realism, like all the awful fairy tale stories in "Babel Tower."

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Donald Hall Rocks Bennington

New U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall made his first appearance in his new role at Bennington's Low-Residency MFA program, as a tip of the hat to his long-time affiliation there as a writer-in-residence. Hall gave a reading at Bennington with novelist and fellow Bennington core faculty member Betsy Cox on June 18. "The ovation he received was the most intense I have ever experienced," said poet and Bennington graduate seminars program director Liam Rector, who was one of the first to comment on Hall's appointment. (You can hear Hall read "White Roses," "Peonies and Weeds" and other poems here.) Rector read from his new book of poems, The Excutive Director of the Fallen World, at Bennington's earlier session. It's due out in September from the University of Chicago Press.

Recommend a book in which nothing happens

A guy at the Mailboxes Etc where I pick up my packages requested something recently that threw me. Ordinarily, he likes writers like James M. Cain, but lately, he said, he wanted a book in which nothing happens. (The reason being that his own life is overly eventful at the moment.) Now, that description might, alas, fit all too many literary novels these days, but thinking of a good novel in which nothing much happens proved quite a challenge. Eventually, I came up with NBCC fiction winner "Being Dead" by Jim Crace, figuring, hey, it's short and it's about two corpses rotting, close enough. But I wonder if NBCC members and readers have any other recommendations?

Sweatshops and Diamonds

NBCC member and former board member Katharine Weber's new book "Triangle" has come out to great reviews. Tomorrow night at 6pm, there will be a reading and book club discussion at the Tenement Museum in NYC (108 Orchard Street), followed by a cocktail party at 7:30. I highly recommend it. The book is fascinating -- it tells the story of the deadly 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that killed 146 workers -- most of them women -- and galvanized efforts to reform working conditions in sweatshops (Katharine's grandmother actually worked in the very factory featured in the book). See the museum's website for details.


Also, later this week and the beginning of next week, there are two events related to Tom Zoellner's book about the diamond trade, "The Heartless Stone," which is also getting great reviews. The first event: This Thursday, June 29, at 7 pm, in the Borders at Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The second: Monday, July 10, at 7 pm, at the Half King Bar and Restaurant, 505 W. 23rd Street. (The second one also features beer).

Round-Up

In the wake of news that the graft surrounding Katrina is 'breathtaking,' Allen Barra reviews Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge."

Tonight at the Half King at 8 PM, at 23rd Street and 10th Ave., photojournalist Julie Denesha will talk about her pictures from Slovakia.

Matt Egan at the Hartford Courant would like Philip Roth to take another big uppercut swing at the Great American Baseball novel.

For those who follow the newspaper business, The Washingtonian gives a rather intimately detailed account of who's in and who's out at the Washington Post.

Liza Mundy examines the unbearing heaviness of almost being in this provocative article about the human embryo glut.

Rachel Cooke interviews a very funny (and a very sleepy looking) Howard Jacobson.

Nirpal Dhaliwal is a better writer than Zadie Smith....sayeth the astute literary critic Nirpal Dhaliwal.

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Our question to you

One of the hardest manuevers to perfect is the ole, what is that lady reading rubberneck. It is the book snob's version of the quick once-over. So rather than peer over your shoulders or down the commuter car at your books, why don't you tell us directly. We'd love to hear from you -- what's on your nightstand?

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What are you reading in.....Squaw Valley?

I've been rereading Jane Eyre with a lot of enthusiasm. It's just been pointed out to me that both Rochester and Heathcliff are based on the notorious, sexually threatening Lord Byron. Besides it's a hell of a novel, with the guardian moon, the fire and ice of Jane's nature, the 'doubling' of the characters. --Oakley Hall

Critical Outtakes: John Ashbery's neighborhood

Q: Do you ever wonder if interviews can tell us anything now that they are so de rigeur for writers? Do they wind up being the same interview?

A: I can't make it up differently each time. You ask me how I began writing. Or what I felt about this writer. There is a certain sameness to it. I always tend to repeat these things.

Q: It's tempting to show up and ask, what is your favorite ice-cream, or how long have you lived in this apartment?

A: I like those questions because I can actually answer them.

Q: Okay, how long have you lived in this apartment?

A: I've been here since 1984. Before that I lived in this building, and in two other apartments since 1972.

Q: Doesn't Edmund White live on this block?

A: Yes, he does. There's a Lutheran church in the middle of this block and it was just before this.

Q: Where were you before this?

A: For two years I lived in a brownstone on 25th between 9th and 10th Avenue -- beautiful apartment but it was at that time a remote, slightly scary neighborhood. Chelsea has become a place people actually want to live in. I've been living here since 1970 -- then, before, it was always, what do you call a college you apply to but don't hope to attend? It was a safety neighborhood. But when I got out of college and moved to New York, the cheap place to live was the Village. Poets could actually live cheap in little walk up apartments in the Village. When I moved back to New York after ten years in France I was planning to live there again but I realized things had changed, so actually for four years after I moved back I lived in a very nice brownstone on East 95th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenue, which again was a totally deserted neighborhood at that time. The block between 2nd and 3rd was abandoned houses, sewages, and now it's young college graduates.

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Monday news

Henry James' ghost lingers a while longer, and A.N. Wilson's latest novel is the latest example of his possession of British novelists, says James Grainger.

Science writer Christine Kenneally meets a child with half a brain.

NBCC board member Kevin Prufer has won a Pushcart Prize for his poem, "A History of the American West," as well as the 2006 George Bogin Memorial Award, John Mark Eberhart reports.

Wednesday was the 20th anniversary of Borges' death. Miami Herald writer Enrique Fernandez pays tribute.

David Kronke of the LA Times and Jonathan Storm of the Philadelphia Inquirer review Bill Moyers' new television "Faith and Reason," a series of conversations with writers about religion.

The Twin Cities book fair kicks off July 7th, not to be confused with the Twin Cities Book Festival, which doesn't start until October, and features Mary Roach and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among other writers.

NBCC board member Steve Weinberg reviews"Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power"

To honor Fred Chappell's retirement from reviewing poetry at the Observer, NBCC board member J. Peder Zane pens a little doggerel.

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Round Up

Dwight Garner tells the backstory behind Updike's 15th appearance on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Aspen Summer Words conference kicks off in Colorado, featuring, among other writers, former NBCC winner Ted Conover.

Speaking of Colorado, ten years after the death of JonBenet Ramsey, Gaby Wood goes out there to check in on the ongoing investigation.

Carrie O'Grady thrills to "God Lives in St. Petersberg," by Tom Bissell, one of the 19 "Young Turks" identified as writers to watch by the NBCC at BEA.

Two-time NBCC finalist William T. Vollmann is picking up fans in Australia.

Former NBCC president Marie Arana gives readers a brief bio of Monica Ali, while Liesl Schillinger reviews her new book for the Times.

Ian Jack reflects on how difficult it was to turn down Martha Gelhorn's last written piece.

You know the price of human tissue is on the rise when Forbes begins running articles about it.

NBCC board member Steve Weinberg admires Jason Roberts' skill at explaining blindness nearly as much as James Holman's ability to overcome it.

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Roundup

Luc Sante finds that Robert Greenfield's new biography of "nutty professor" Timothy Leary "unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120." Helen Simpson revisits Angela Carter's "darkly erotic" reinvention of fairytales in her 1979 book The Bloody Chamber: "The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality - heterosexual female sexuality - which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint. This was the year, remember, that Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore won the Booker prize, and Penelope Lively's Treasures of Time won the National Book Award. Anita Brookner's first novel, A Start in Life, would not appear for another two years. Margaret Thatcher, 53, had just been elected Britain's first prime minister. Angela Carter, 39, had seven novels to her name, none of which had so far received more than marginal recognition." And Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch interviews Joan Didion in Central Park's Summerstage series Friday night, June 30, at 7:30. Read an excerpt from Paris Review Didion interview here.

What are you reading in ....Dubai?

Here's what I have been reading in the Dubai:
Diplomatic Baggage - The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse by Brigid Keenan. This is, on the surface, a witty account of expat life in countries ranging from Trinidad to India. However, it poignantly reveals the sacrifices women have to make to their careers (Brigit had been a fashion editor in London) as they follow their husbands around the world. I suppose I liked this book so much as I could relate to it!--Leila Aboulela

It's Official: December is Pynchon month

Several years ago, word was out that a book by Thomas Pynchon was done but just waiting for the right moment to land. It appears the runway just opened up. A publicist from Penguin Press has confirmed that in December Penguin Press will be publishing a new novel -- details to come later. Wikipedia has already posted information stating the new novel could involve a "Russian mathematician who studied for David Hilbert in Gottingen." Whatever it is, the new book will be proceeded by a deluxe edition of "Gravity's Rainbow."

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The Road to Guantanamo

July is shaping up to be a chance for further discussion about Guantanamo, if only arts pages have the courage to take it up. Michael Winterbottom's angering and shaming new film -- which is really worth seeing -- will be arriving in cinemas, not to mention a novel called "The Prisoner of Guantanamo," by veteran reporter Dan Fesperman, the paperback of David Rose's thoroughly alarming book, "Guantanamo: the War on Human Rights" (which reminds us that the contractor who built the new prisons there was, you guessed it, Halliburton), as well as Minneapolis attorney Joseph Marguiles' "Guantanamo: Abuse of Presidential Power," which draws upon his experience as lead counsel in "Rasul v Bush," the case which succesfully petitioned the Supreme Court to extend the right of judicial review to all prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

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Round Up

You think you know all about oceans, and then along comes a Harvard academic to remind you about that overlooked Indian Ocean.

For Julia Cameron, the artist's way apparently began through misery.

The Colorado Springs Independent shares with us some gems of insight from John Tesh's website.

This radio station book club in West Virginia is not going to challenge Oprah's power, but it's a heartening example of how local media can work together to get cities reading.

If this lede by Tom McGonigle doesn't make Los Angelenos want to read "Kensington Gardens" than they need to go take a time out.

Jonathan Raban reviews "Terrorist" in "The New York Review of Books."

Slate re-opens Skinner's Box.

Margaret Wertheim cleverly reviews a new biography of the physicist Michael Faraday.

The band Cracker would like to "write records the way Thomas Pynchon writes novels...use absurdity, irony and sarcasm in that tangential way Joseph Heller used in 'Catch 22.'

Happy birthday to David Leavitt, who has managed to publish 16 books by the age of 45, the latest of which, "The Man Who Knew too Much," comes out in paperback this fall.

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Report from the Relaunch Party for "The Reading Room"

Last night I dropped by the Cervantes Institute for the relaunch party of former NBCC board member Barbara Probst Solomon's litmag "The Reading Room" and learned that the only Saul Bellow work that ever made it to film was his novella "Seize the Day. The 1986 film was Robin Williams's debut as a serious actor (as Tommy Wilhelm) and revived Jerry Stiller's career (he played the shyster Dr. Tamkin). Stiller was there last night to show a clip of the film. Turns out Bellow had a walk-on part. The author, who had recently won the Nobel, asked the producer, Robert Geller, if he could have a small role in the film (he is credited as "man in hallway"). Geller told the crowd last night that Bellow arrived on set wearing his own Borsalino and his own suit from the 1950s, but didn't seem to realize that when the camera rolls, even if you have no lines, the nerves can show. "Something happens to one's body," Geller said. "It took five or six takes."

The latest issue of "The Reading Room"honors Bellow and artist Larry Rivers. Frank McCourt was there to read Barbara Probst Solomon's witty and provocative interview with Rivers, "An Afternoon at the Madrid Ritz." (Solomon ties Rivers to Duchamp: "Larry River's painting 'Seventy Five Years Later,' where the figure of a naked young woman is ambling down the abstract staircase of Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase' is prescient. The question Rivers seems to be asking himself -- how far can you go with abstraction? With modernism? -- must have been troubling Duchamp. For the last twenty years of his life Duchamp worked in secret on his Etant Donnés...The installation contains a stuffed leather form of a naked woman lying on the grass...which can be seen through two peep holes in a wooden door." )

Solomon was introduced by the Cervantes Institute's executive director, no slouch as a novelist himself: Antonio Munoz Molina, author of 13 novels (the English translation of his "Sepharad" won the 2004 PEN translation prize) and twice winner of Spain's Premio Nacional de Literatura.

Daily Round-Up

Elizabeth Royte isn't the only journalist talking trash. Sheryl Beauvais writes about another book called "Gone Tomorrow," a follow-up to Heather Rodgers' 2002 documentary of the same name.

On Monday June 26th, Sebastian Junger will be reading from his swift new book, "A Death in Belmont" at his bar, The Half King. Does that mean he has to buy himself a round afterwards?

L.A. Times staff writer Tim Rutten makes the good point that, "for a government so obsessed with secrecy it has weighed prosecuting reporters for espionage, George W. Bush's administration has spawned an extraordinary number of what are essentially book-length leaks."

In "Entertainment Weekly," NBCC board member Jennifer Reese says "Alantejo Blue" "establishes definitively that Monica Ali is a major literary talent," while fellow board member Celia McGee is most struck by the fact that Ali has "gone all refusenik on the idea that writers of a certain background should take their origins as their exclusive subject matter."

The Guardian wants you to brush up on your Mark Twain. A good place to start, too, would be Vermonter Ron Powers' "Mark Twain: A Life," which was an NBCC finalist last year.

You have to wonder how many times Nathalie Angier's "Woman" is recommended in this context. (Second story down)

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Critical Outakes: David McCullough

Q: In his review of 1776, David Hackett Fischer pointed out that while some historians use theoretical frameworks, and some overwhelming research, you bring history alive through the accumulation of little telling details. Is that fair to say?

A: Well, I think I'm writing about people. Listen, that was a very generous, thoughtful, review, and I greatly appreciate it, and I am very fond of David. I like his work and I like him. But when I say I love the admonition of Dickens to "make me see," it doesn't mean seeing how the light falls on that chair. It means make me understand. And I am writing about people, and what it was like to have been in their shoes in their time, facing the unknowns and fateful uncertainties. I don't want the reader ot ever lose sight of the fact that these people you are reading about never had any idea how it would turn out. They don't know. Anymore than we do in our time. And that's a very hard and important aspect of history that it seems to me is essential to understand. I also have to urge you to sustain your disbelief. That you don't know it's going to turn out.

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Subway, Escalator, Listen

Here's a reminder that tonight at 7PM at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City, one-time NBCC finalist Elizabeth Gilbert will be sharing the story of "Eat, Pray Love" with singer-songwriter Jen Chapin. Former Air-American radio host Katherine Lanpher will be doing the moderating and may just beatbox, too. The event is free and open to the public.

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Round-Up

Edmund White says there is a renaissance in gay literature.

NBCC member Michael Upchurch also says Andrew Holleran's "Grief" is his best yet.

Happy birthdays to former NBCC winner Ian McEwan (who turns 58) and Anne Carson, who was an NBCC finalist for "The Autobiography of Red."

Make all the what exit jokes that you want, but New Jersey graduates more high school seniors than any state in the union.

If you want to cheat on your term paper, California is the place to be.

Watch your local listings for Bill Moyers' return to PBS with "Faith & Reason," a televised series of conversations which grew out of the recent PEN conference.

Some Vietnam veterans are still seeking treatment for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

There's no fun in fundamentalism says a reviewer in the Boston Herald regarding "Terrorist."

Edward Gutmann writes a nice remembrance of the late Judith Moore.

Time tells us which mystery writers are worth checking out. They should have added Donna Leon.

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Would you like that gift wrapped?

Over the past two years, UK booksellers and publishers have begun to appeal to customers' latent collector instincts. And it's worked. Waterstones has been printing signed limited editions of books like Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" and selling them at around fifty pounds each. All of these limited editions - which have print runs of about a 1000 -- have sold out.

But things can get tonier from there. Last year, the LRB bookshop produced a limited edition of Julian Barnes' "Arthur & George" in an issue of 125 (which now sells for a whopping $650), and readers who really, really enjoy Colm Toibin's forthcoming short story collection, "Mothers and Sons," will have the chance this winter to pony up 140 sterling for "The Long Winter," a 25,000 word short shory which Tuskar Rock Press is releasing in time for the holidays.

A cynic might say this is fetishizing books, but it's actually been part of modern publishing all along. In his bio of Andre Malraux, Oliver Todd noted that the future French Minister of Culture (and Gallimard editor) made his literary debut buying books along the Seine and reselling them to fancy dealers. And in his memoir, "At Random," Bennett Cerf wrote of how special limited editions of books helped get Random off the ground. A collector himself, Cerf recalled learning that an Italian publisher was putting out a limited edition of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Cerf quickly sent in a check, but made it out to Mr. D.H. Lawrence. That way, when the check came back it had Lawrence's autograph on it. What a shame that today all he would get would be a facsimile, if that at all.

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Mark your Calendars

In one month, New York Times editor and NBC book columnist Bill Goldstein will be interviewing Andrew Holleran, author of "Grief," at Housing Works Used Book Cafe in SoHo at 7PM. For those who missed Goldstein's profile of Holleran in the Times, this is a chance to watch him to do one live.

Holleran is best known for his era-defining "Dancer from the Dance," but he has written what might be his most beautiful book in "Grief." After burying his mother, the book's narrator travels from Florida to Washington, where he meditates on whether it's possible to start over again. His thoughts are prodded along by conversations with his celibate landlord, and the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, which he reads on the lonely park benches around Washington's monuments.

It's an eerie, unbearably sad book -- everything Roth's "Everyman" should have been but perhaps didn't quite achieve. In the Los Angeles Times, James McCourt called it Holleran's "most socially and politically significant work yet." Entertainment Weekly book editor Thom Geier wrote that "Holleran exquisitely captures the many nuances of loss." If you happen to live in Washington, D.C., you can hear Holleran read from the book tonight at 7PM at Chapters Bookstore, 445 11th St., NW. (202) 737-5553.


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Critical Outtakes: Don Delillo

Q: In your play, "The Day Room," one of the character says about actors: "Dying is what we're all about. We show you how to hide from what you know." Is this idea -- that actors teach us how to deal with death -- something you are addressing with in your new play, "Love Lies Bleeding?"

A: In theater, the dead speak more than in other art forms. Ghosts. I think those earlier plays of mine have a strong kind of meaning for actors and playwrights, and in fact that line -- "in theater, the dead speak" -- was a line I wanted to use in this play, but it just didn't fit. I've been doing some thinking about "The Day Room," because there might be another production here. In a small theater with a small company. And there is some dialogue in the areas that surround the quote you just recited where that line or that idea might work well. Ghosts on battlement. Is this an ideal role for an actor -- to play a dead man? Is this what suits an actor perfectly? These questions get into the metaphysics of acting, and I'm anything but an expert on it, but it is just kind of an intuition on my part that it might be so.

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Street Lit: Degrading or Empowering?

NBCC board member Marcela Valdes has a nice piece in the Washington Post about Street Lit called, "What a change in genre means to African Americans." I knew it was a big market, but I didn't know how big (one book store she mentions brings in about $600,000 a year on street lit alone). It's literature of love and violence, of "dealers, junkies and ho's." Some say, it's pornifying and degrading African American literature. Others say it tells truth people need to hear. And talk about a great lead:

"The African American Book Industry Professionals Conference took place on a Thursday this year, while most of the Washington Convention Center still hummed with preparations for Book Expo America. For many attendees, the real excitement began when Nick Chiles convened a panel called "Too Hood or All Good?: The Impact of Urban Fiction on African American Literature" in a large, windowless room.

There was the expectation of a fight."

Makes you want to know what happens next, doesn't it?

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John Updike's next book will be criticism

"If writers -- if people -- are either clean-desk or messy-desk," Martin Amis once wrote, "then Mr. Updike is clear-work-surface atop tightly packed draws: he is organized."

Starting in 1965 with "Assorted Prose," John Updike has unpacked his reviewing drawer every eight to ten years or so and brought together the reviews and essays he publishes in "The New Yorker" and elsewhere into a book. With each decade these collections have become heftier, and more review heavy. In an interview last week, Updike mentioned it's about that time and his next book will be his biggest yet.

Q: So are you working on another book of assorted criticism?

A: How'd ya know. I am indeed, and I've spent the last two months collecting it, assembling it. I had kind of hoped it'd be smaller than the last two have been. Odd Jobs and More Matter were kind of at the outer limit of what a book can be and not be fun to hold. Hugging the Shore was a slightly smaller size, sort of handier, felt much nicer in the hands. I would have loved to go that size, but what I discovered when I collected my hard copies is that I had about 1,000, maybe 1,100 pages. It's being read by my editor now -- slowly (laughs) -- and it probably won't come out at least until late next summer of fall.

Q: It feels like, for a time, you were reviewing a lot of biographies.

A: I think I get sent more biographies, and there was a time when it seemed every book was a biography, which are in a way fun to review because they tell you things you didn't know: it's a little like taking a college course on an author. And then there's always enough there that is interesting to quote that you have no trouble filling the 3,000 words, but right now I recently read the complete works in translation by Michel Houellebecq. I was glad they didn't go on forever. He is obviously very talented and has something to say, but it's pretty disagreeable what he does have to say. I reviewed much more briefly Peter Carey's new novel. That was fun. I just thought Hugh -- the mentally challenged brother -- ran away with the book. and you didn't feel the romance and art scene as much as you might have, I don't know. It was certainly very knowledeable, as everything Carey writes, and he writes, sentence-by-sentence, wonderfully.

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Round Up

Ron Suskind's new book is full of things we all kind of know already, and sort of wish we didn't.

The Edinburgh book festival has sold 36,000 tickets in the first three days of bookings.

Slate has been around for ten years. Yesterday they published a timeline of highlights.

Lisa Belkin talks about the Hidden Brain Drain Summit, and how it plans to address "the highly qualified women and minorities who are either leaving the workforce or languishing on the sidelines."

The McSweeney's folks in LA have been holding a show called "The World Explained" to raise money for after school tutoring. The latest was hosted by Andy Richter.

Stephen King is today's guest reviewer at Amazon.com, addressing Scott Smith's "The Ruins."

Gary Shapiro visits New Directions and discovers a place where fruit has been growing on the office balcony tree for 70 years.

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Try Not to Get Addicted to This

Shelley Jackson, whose last project was a story tattooed on the bodies of some 2,000 different people around the globe, has created a mutant questionaire to go with her upcoming novel, "Half Life." Just log on and click to answer whether statements like "From the outside, I seem like everyone else, but inside, I'm different" apply to you. I just did mine and apparently I will die alone and am related to Friedrich Nietzsche. Thanks, Shelley. Thanks a whole helluva lot.


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Critical Outakes: Ian McEwan

Q: What is your style of composition. "Saturday" feels like it unfolds in a series of set pieces. Do you know where they are going?

A: Not entirely. I'm fairly -- what's the word? -- unsystematic. I brood. I sort of mulch things around for a long time. There are certain things I avoid thinking about before I write, and even thinking about them gives them more shape than they should have before I get them there. I sort of brood until I'm driving myself nuts, and what I should do is write. And then what I am looking for is the tone, the style, the means by which I should tell a story. The very first bits of Saturday I wrote is Henry stepping out of the house on a fresh morning, seagulls in the sky, and some memory of childhood: a basalt rock formation by the sea. I thought, I don't know where this is going, but I'm sure at some point he'll step outside of his house. I just need to try this out: and with that I saw the prose. And then I started again. For this book I wanted a very pure style -- so that every page I wanted characters to emerge as if from nowhere. So this man gets out of bed and makes his way to the window, as if he materialized out of darkness, and forms in front of the reader's eye.

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Blurb Wars: "This book is ... incredible ..."

Most critics have been there -- you hate a book. You say, "This book is an incredible failure. It's amazing that the author doesn't seem to have done any research into X-Subject-Matter," or something of the sort. A few months later, you happen to see the paperback on a table in the bookstore. You pick it up and see your name on the front cover next to the quote: "This book is ... incredible ... amazing." Or simply, "Incredible." What's a critic to do? Well, aside from careful writing (the best criticism is driven by metaphors and ideas and examples, not easily-blurbed adjectives) and knowing the tricks of the blurb trade so you can try to avoid them, not much. Charles Isherwood has a funny, and slightly un-nerving essay about this in the Times.

More on Product Placement: Jane Smiley is not selling you lawn feed

In this hilarious editorial, Jane Smiley confesses to having sold the right to be a name in her next novel for $10,000. The benefit was a charity auction, and the winner was Betty Baldwin. Applying her Ph.D. to the task, Smiley then performs a close reading of the editorial changes product placement may have placed upon "Cathy's Book," which was the subject of a recent New York Times piece about product placement.

In the end, Smiley decides it is not ethics but style which should rule the day here -- but it funnels this whole question of product placement toward the perennial tension between industry and artistry. Cannot questions of style (or as it is sometimes called, taste) become questions of ethics? Take, for instance, the edits that Richard Wright accepted to make when Book of the Month Club -- then a hugely poweful arm -- made "Native Son" their main selection. As Hazel Rowley described in her biography, and as Michael Anderson noted in this review, it left the book distorted until the Library of America published the corrected texts.

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Daily Round Up

Floyd "triple threat" Skloot reviews John "quadruple threat" Updike in the San Francisco Chronicle and finds "Terrorist" a novel wholly without credibility.

Two writers from Time lob questions at Wole Soyinka and he's not smiling.

Alison Bechdel brings out Fritz Lanham's subversive side.

The Telegraph recently ran a story mocking Americans' attempts to speak British English. Well, someone needs to explain to this journalist "how d'ya like them apples" was last said without irony in "Good Will Hunting."

In the Baltimore Sun, Laura Demanski says "Alantejo Blue" is former NBCC finalist Monica Ali's "more ambitious and accomplished novel," while Brad Zeller argues it's less a novel than a cousin of books like "Winesburg, Ohio."

Salvador Plascencia says don't let the packaging fool you, Carlos Fuentes' new book is not about politics.

NBCC board member Carlin Romano says what makes Henning Mankell's Wallander "as a detective is the ratio of ratiocination to action."

While all eyes are on Donald Hall, Frank Wilson went out to Swarthmore to visit one of the U.S.'s older former poet laureates, Daniel Hoffman.

Katherine Dunn admires the reporting in Mark Bowden's "Guests of the Ayatollah."

Happy birthday to former NBCC finalist Tobias Wolff, who turns 61, not to mention Salman Rushdie, who is 59 today.

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Barbara Epstein: 1928-2006

Barbara Epstein, the outspoken founder and coeditor of The New York Review of Books, has died. Born Barbara Zimmerman, she helped launched the review during the newspaper strike of 1962-3 along with her then husband Jason Epstein, along with Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick. The review's early list of contributors was just as noteworthy: Norman Mailer, W.H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal. As were Epstein's parties at her New York apartment, which Edmund Wilson recounted in his journals. For more on her legacy visit the New York Review of Books website. She will be missed.

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Critical Outakes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Q: You have degrees from Northfield Mount. Hermon, Columbia, and the Sorbonne, and yet in your writing you have remained a fiercely democratic writer. Did you ever consider staying in the academy?

A: Well, I definitely wasn't cut out to be a professor. I wrote poetry criticism for very few years at the San Francisco Chronicle -- but that was more like story-telling. I didn't really critique. These days, the literary world as in the graphic arts world, everyone is more interested in the method or the process of how you create something than the work itself. So when I get interviewed by someone from a literary page, they immediately want to know the process of how you created a poem. I always say that's a trade secret. That's why I can't teach.

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of "Americus I."

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Politics and Reviewing: how has your book section changed since 2000?

I spent Friday afternoon opening the bins of books that had arrived at my office. At one point, within a matter of minutes, I had opened three -- all scheduled for publication in September -- addressing the menace of the "Christian right." Before the afternoon was out, several more had arrived addressing the menace of the Bush administration, the futility of the Iraq War, impending economic collapse, and assorted environmental disasters.

I have become very selective when it comes to political books. I look for the one that has something different to say -- they're certainly rare enough -- and is likely to be overlooked. The same holds true for febrile environmentalist tracts: I have little sympathy for the apocalyptic. The new ice age never showed up, the population bomb never went off, and I guess I missed the famine in the '80s.

The Inquirer did review Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" (reviewer Tom Lipscomb noted "Phillips begs so many questions with contradictory readings of the same statistics that the reader can get dizzy trying to follow the logic.") But how many times do we have to revisit the topic? Actually, I think we're done with it.

Frank Wilson, book editor, "The Philadelphia Inquirer."

Sunday Round Up

Lesley McDowell digs into the letters of Martha Gelhorn and finds it fascinating how Gelhorn changed her tone from correspondent to correspondent.

Former NBCC finalist Gaby Wood attends an eco-furniture show in New York and sees the beauty of lamps made from recycled PVC pipe.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette wins the prize for the most bizarre illustration for a review of John Updike's "Terrorist" yet.

Nicholas Wroe talks to Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason, the latest in the Scandanavian invasion of crime writing.

Patti Thorn lobbed a few questions at John Updike at BEA, who shared with her his discomfort over the recent New York Times poll results.

Warren St. John profiles a comic who has harnassed the "wisdom of the crowds," and the question remains: are earth sandwiches funny?

The Toronto Star laments the blandification of the once hip Bohemian Embassy neighbourhood, where Margaret Atwood used to read. Imagine how they feel if they visited SoHo these days.

Sarah Hampson profiles Ellen Seligman, the fiction and poetry publisher at McClelland and Stewart, Canada's most prestigious publishing house.

Dylan Foley interviews David Remnick, who notes that newspapers are "facing an existential crisis."

NBCC member Heller McAlpin argues that with "Unaccompanied Women," late-life sexpert Jane Juska is simply trying to extend her 15 minutes of fame.


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More on Product Placement in Books and Creative Publicity

Today's New York Times has an editorial about product placement in books -- a topic I posted about briefly last week. They've focused on the fact that it's happening, not surprisingly, in books aimed at young adult readers:

"When you think about it, literature must seem to young readers like a strangely antiseptic universe, wholly devoid of the art form they know best: advertising. It's a fair bet that an ordinary young American has absorbed far more "content" ... derived from advertising than from almost any other source. Marketing products in literature intended for young readers is still a terrible idea, of course. If nothing else, books should remind them that there once was a time when life was not entirely about shopping."

Their take: "writers will nearly always take publicity if they can't get cash."

I didn't realize it had become a one-or-the other thing -- most writers I know actually want both publicity and cash for their work (as if you can separate the two). In a perfect world, they'd get both from their publishing houses. But we all know that doesn't always happen. Which is why there's a long history of good writers coming up with endlessly new and creative ways to get book publicity without stooping to product plugs (in fact, I suspect the product plug tendency may come more from publishers than writers).

Actually, come to think of it, I'd love to read an article that traces creative publicity schemes cooked up by writers throughout the generations. Somebody out there should write it ...

Politics and Reviewing: how has your book section changed since 2000?

The ideological landscape has certainly changed since 2000; it's gotten a lot more fractious. Many books that are now published are more statements or screeds than books based on years of research, experience and analysis.

This plays out in a couple ways; because our space is so limited, I'm particular about which "political" books we review. The author really needs to have a track record (I'm pretty allergic to pundits popping off). The other issue is that sometimes reviewers have very strong feelings about certain issues, and I have to occasionally rein that in as an editor. Seattle is a very liberal city, but the suburbs lean more Republican. As a start, a review needs to be something people of different persuasions can read and think about, even if they don't agree with the point of view of the book....or the reviewer.

Mary Ann Gwinn, book editor, The Seattle Times

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What are you reading in ....Penngrove?

"A Woman of Uncertain Character" by Clancy Sigal, whom I met years ago through Doris Lessing, and whose books - "Weekend in Dinlock," "Going Away," and "Zone of the Interior" - I gulped down one summer. His new book, a memoir about himself and his mother and father, tells the story of his own political education in Chicago, in the shadow of those great Chicago writers James Farrell and Nelson Algren. Feisty and funny and as ornery as ever, Sigal tells a fascinating personal story that also illuminates large parts of American social history in the 1930s and 1940s.

--Jonah Raskin

What are you reading.....in East Hampton?

"Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch. Short, informative essays on contemporary poets that include examples of the work with commentary so that you get an interesting anthology along with the essays."

--Harvey Shapiro

Go Ahead, Contact A Critic: They Don't All Bite

Book critics are trained to be such analytical and objective souls that they are impervious to anything other than what's on the page, right? RIGHT. Just to give you a sense of how the Real World works, let me tell you about my experience with authors Lisa and Carolyn See

A year ago, Random House published daughter Lisa's novel "Snowflower and the Secret Fan." Having read the galley, I felt it was Lisa's best effort to date, a window on Chinese cultural norms and a lovely evocation of female friendship. I praised the book in reviews that ran in several newspapers, and Margo and I did a BookBabes column talking about how Random House got behind the book, and we recommended it as good summer reading for our Good Housekeeping column.

Some months later, I received a handwritten note from Lisa See, who wanted me to know how much she appreciated my endorsements for her book. Well, that was a nice thing to do, I thought. End of story.

But not quite. This spring, as Random House prepared to go to press with mother Carolyn's latest novel, "There Will Never Be Another You," Lisa sent an email asking that reviewers pay attention. Funny, the book ended up reaching the top of my very large pile. I looked and I liked it enough to write a positive review that will appear in two newspapers later this month.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not selling out for a thank-you note. The new book stands on its merits. Yet it's amazing how not only good work but also small courtesies can lodge in your brain. Authors can acknowledge coverage without compromising themselves or the critics. Years ago, after I wrote a profile of poet William Stafford and his son, Kim, he sent me a note about the article in which he wrote, "I learned from it." This was quintessential Stafford, a populist to the core, who believed we can all learn -- for better or worse -- from each other. To this day, I still don't know if his words were meant as a compliment. But I never forgot his gesture.

-- Ellen Heltzel

Round about Saturday round up

Steve Winn takes the measure of John Updike , while in The New York Times, Robert Stone puts "Terrorist" in the context of "Americanization."

Daniel Woodrell continues to beguile the British. John Williams made a recent pilgrimmage to the Ozarks to go see him.

Orhan Pamuk, Monica Ali, Alan Hollinghurst, and a few other former NBCC finalists share their holiday reads with the Guardian.

In the Washington Post, Warren Bass finds that in Mario Batali, Bill Buford has found a man who "if he finds a sacred cow, is likely to serve it up medium rare."

Gail Caldwell says Julia Glass' new novel is "a medley of geographic locales, little and large emotional sagas, and things that go bump in the night -- the terrors, private or collective, that wake us and make us change our lives."

And a happy belated to former NBCC finalist (for "Black Water") Joyce Carol Oates, whose birthday was yesterday.

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Critical Outakes: Dave Eggers

Q: It seems like one of the overarching themes of your work, especially your recent work, is generosity. Would this have been such a passion for you if your first book hadn't been so sucessful?

Eggers: It would have been in a different way. I wasn't able to do much in the way of acting on -- volunteering -- when I was raising [my brother] Toph, there wasn't time. When he was in his later years in high school, that was around the same time that the book came out, and so at the same time that I had more time, suddenly there was money, too, that I didn't expect or know what to do with and it threw me off guard. You know, early on, with my family, when [Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] was coming out, when we realized there would be some money from it, we did all agree that any run off from it -- if there was money we didn't know what to do with -- our first commitment was cancer research. So we donated the first chunks of money to that and to hospice organizations around the country.

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More Literate World Cup Stuff

Roger Cohen, New York Times columnist and author of "Hearts Grown Brutal," offers his list of the worst of the referees' debacles in his World Cup blog "The Beautiful Game." The blog gives Cohen a good excuse to get back to Germany, where he was posted for the Times, and to watch with the rest of the fans. As he says in his intro, "Football's beauty is also its mystery. There's no obvious reason why some great footballing nations, like Spain, always go wobbly at the World Cup. Or why eleven guys and a round ball should so often equal magic. This blog will attempt to fathom and evoke some part of such enigmas. It will give you the lowdown on beauty in Deutschland."

--Jane Ciabattari

Reinventing the reading

This summer Barnes & Noble is borrowing a page from the highly successful "Talking Volumes" series run by the Star Tribune out in Minneapolis. They're calling their new event "Upstairs at the Square," and it will feature a writer and a musician, conducted in concert and conversation by journalist and former Air America host Katherine Lanpher.

Having attended one of MPR's variety nights, which Lanpher used to run, this could be a really good development, since books and authors always benefit from attention that comes outside their normal audiences. (Case in point, a bookseller said to me recently about the Times list; "If the music section had done a series about the best album of the past 25 years, I would have gone out and bought them, too.")

Plus, readings have been dead for sometime. The first "Upstairs at the Square" show is next Wednesday at Union Squre and will feature NBCC finalist Liz Gilbert, author of "Eat Pray Love," talking with singer-songwriter Jen Chapin, whose new album, Ready, is set to land next month.

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Round-up

There will be more authors than pubs in Edinburgh, briefly, this summer.

Timothy Leary's story reads like "a glorious Day-Glo inversion of what we've come to expect of Greatest Generation," says Nick Gillespie in the Washington Post.

NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn talks to Francine Du Plessix Gray about her childhood and other frightening topics at the Seattle Times.

Thirty Nobel laureates will be meeting in the Jordinian city of Petra to brainstorm "solutions to some of the world's most dire problems."

NBCC criticism finalist Craig Seligman argues that the shadow of Thomas Pynchon falls on Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan."

There are close to 30 new literary journals in Israel, and Haaretz takes stock of them.

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Updike on Michiko Kakutani's tough love

From the audience Q&A session of last night's event with John Updike at the New York Public Library:

Q: What did you think of Michiko Kakutani's review of "Terrorist" in the New York Times?

A: (audience laughter)....Michiko and I, we have danced many rounds together. Her review this time seemed petulant to me. She gets a hold of one tiny point of the book and can't get let go. And she's censorious. I don't feel this so keenly with other authors. She's not easy to please. But in a way, a bad review keeps a writer honest. I've been on tour for two weeks, and I've met a lot of people face to face, and what you mostly get is flattery. Pretty soon you get to thinking you're a swell fellow. And Michiko Kakutani brings you back to reality.

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Politics and Reviewing: How has your section changed since 2000?

I'd have to say that the topics of the books we cover has certainly changed -- lots more nonfiction, and a lot of it focused on Islam, U.S. foreign policy, immigration, China, Latin America, the sciences, to name some of the areas we cover widely -- but our tone hasn't. I would say we're pretty much middle-of-the-road, by Bay Area standards, anyway. What that means is though I'm certain that there are books that readers who identify themselves as "right wing" wish we would cover, or cover in a way that they approve, I'm also certain that there are readers who think we're not left wing enough.

Oscar Villalon, book editor, San Francisco Chronicle.

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Self-Interest vs. Open Access Legislation

When powerful interest groups clash, the arguments they make for their opposing positions typically bear the same marks of euphemism and Colbert-style truthiness that Christopher Buckley turned into comedy with his novel-turned-movie about the tobacco industry, "Thank You for Smoking." Rest assured that self-interest, not just the public good, lurks in the background -- and that's what some some scholars and writers say about the American Publishers and other groups who are fighting open access legislation.

-- Ellen Heltzel

Donald Hall: Poet Laureate Worth Study Finally Gets The (Measly) Big Bucks

Donald Hall, just named U.S. poet laureate, said he'd encourage NPR to pay more attention to poetry, and maybe even suggest that HBO do something. For starters they should look at his 1988 NBCC award winning collection "The One Day," which interweaves a male and female voice in one long poem. (The female no doubt drawn from his longtime love Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in April 1995 at 47. The two were married 23 years, and his memoir "The Best Day the Last Day: Life with Jane Kenyon" is a poignant tribute.) Here's a sampling:

"We are one cell perpetually / dying and being born, led by a single day that presides / over our passage through the thirty thousand days / from highchair past work and love to suffering death. / We plant; we store the seedcorn. Our sons and daughters / topdress old trees. Two chimneys require: / Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house."

Hall will receive the poet laureate's compensation of $35,000 for a year, plus $5,000 expenses. A poet's worth today. By comparison, Barry Diller whose company runs Home Shopping Network, took home $3295 million last year in total compensation.

-- Jane Ciabattari

Sibling Rivalry: NY Times vs. NY

In the department of potentially useless information that's now in my head: Adam Moss, the new-ish editor of New York Magazine -- who used to be editor of the New York Times Magazine and parts of the Book Review -- seems to be giving the Times a run for its money these days.

Both publications launched re-designs of their websites a few months ago, and for some reason, I hadn't visited NY Magazine's new site until this morning. Turns out, their new site couldn't be more blatantly identical to the New York Times newly re-designed website without being some kind of design plagiarism or something (I actually went to the NYMag site and for a minute thought I'd typed in the wrong URL -- click around both for a while, you'll see what I mean). My first thought was, how ballsy: First NY Mag takes a prized editor from the Times (and he takes lots of employees with him, then gets NY Mag nominated for a record 5 National Magazine Awards), now they're taking the NYTimes website design too?! But they didn't.

Turns out, NY Mag launched their redesign four months before the Times launched theirs ... NY Mag has been pumping their site with all kinds of original content, and their traffic has been skyrocketing. Can't help but wonder how the Times' redesign turned out so similar. Same design team? Doubt it.

(full disclosure: I write for both magazines -- it's like some crazy double conflict of interest thing that probably makes it so this post doesn't even exist).

Critical Outakes: Kazuo Ishiguro

In an ideal world, every interview could be published in full. But due to space constraints, most of them are left on transcripts. Here's an exchange which didn't entirely make the cut from an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro regarding his NBCC finalist, "Never Let Me Go."

Q: From the very beginning you have been writing about memory. Did you ever think you would still be addressing it two decades later?

A: I worry about this, you know. Initially, probably in the kicking off thing, when I started to write I was writing about Japan. And lots of stuff was coming from my memories. To some extent, it was an act of preserving things that were good that would have otherwise have faded in my memory. There's this whole Japan that I left behind, but I guess it's not just Japan as a world of childhood that I had a clear attachment to. I probably was wanting to nail down those memories, put them in a solid fictional world, before they faded forever. So remembering was part of my motivation.

I worry about this more now, though, because I think it is very easy for writers [to get stuck]: they start doing something at one point in their life, and it's the right thing. But then you hang on to that thing and you hang on to that thing beyond when it is appropriate.

All of my stories have been set in this retrospective way, using the textures of memory. I am very aware that part of this is for technical advantages. I like that way of telling stories. I like that I can place an episode from the 1930s right next to, on the same page as an episode of the 1950s. I don't have to follow the plotline. And so I can work much more like I guess a visual artist would do, if they place one image next to another. Just because the artistic order tells them to rather than it's the way a still life should be set out. It gives me that freedom, and I can explore the relationships between the 1930s and the 1950s. I can control the novel and the moods very, very clearly that way.

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Soccer in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia tied Tunisia today 2-2, but perhaps the fact that a game was officiated at all should be considered a victory for everyone. In Sukhdev Sandhu's essay in "A Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup," he describes how less than a year ago, a Saudi newspaper printed a fatwa against soccer by Sheikh 'Abdallah Al-Najidi. Among the restrictions was language itself:

"One should not use the terminology established by the nonbelievers and the polytheists, like: "foul," "penalty kick," "corner kick," "goal," and "out of bounds." Whoever pronounces these terms should be punished, reprimanded, kicked out of the game and should even be told in public: "You have come to resemble the nonbelievers and the polytheists, and this has been forbidden."

Makes the food-fight between France and the U.S. regarding french fries and the like seem rather tame by comparison.

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Truthiness, Italian style:

From "The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi," which is forthcoming from Alexander Stille:

"I also found Berlusconi to be psychologically one of the strangest people I had ever met. I had never before interviewed anyone who had told so many obvious untruths with such enthusiastic conviction. He said a host of things that were almost childish in their obvious, transparent falsehood -- that he has never tried to exert political influence on the media he owns, that his television stations are mostly "left-wing," that his motives for entering politics were entirely selfless and that his political career has, indeed, harmed rather than helped his business, that it would be impossible, even if he wanted to, to pass legislation that would benefit himself -- but he said them with such apparent conviction, with such genuine-seeming passion that I actually began to doubt whether two and two still equalled four."

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Politics and Reviewing: how has your section changed since 2000?

Our "ideological content," such as it may be, has not changed in the past few years. I run about 80 percent literary fiction reviews, 20 percent nonfiction. Some, but far from all, of the non-fiction reviews involve politics, including books about the Iraq War and its fall out.

I look for balanced reviews of books that themselves strike me as balanced treatments of the issues they address: that is, nothing by writers who take extreme or dubious positions, neither the wingnuts of the right or the moonbats of the left. I choose reviews that explain what the books have to say and also assess whether the writers are credible and make their case well. And I am happy to say that my selection of books and reviewers has never been challenged by my immediate editors or by our top management.

Carole Goldberg, book editor, Hartford Courant.

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Daily Round-Up

Lesley Chamberlain says Tom Bissell is after "the Hemingway touch," but stops short of saying he reaches in, and grabs right hold of your heart.

In the portrait painting world, it's okay to declare you've always wanted a prize.

The Brooklyn Rail runs an elegantly put together review of "Voices from Chernobyl."

Ben Stein says Philip Roth's "Everyman" is worth an investment of your money.

Colm Toibin has won the IMPAC Prize.

Michael Upchurch likes "The Din in the Head," NBCC criticism book prize winner Cynthia Ozick's latest volume, outbursts and all.

Donald Hall will be plugging, spackling, and doing a lot of poetry plumbing as the new poet laureate.

Politics and Reviewing: How has your book section changed since 2000?

"There has never been any stated ideological taboos for the section -- but the higher ups seem more concerned with balance than they were in the past. I did have an immediate superior who got on my case for letting "editorial content" get into reviews (as if reviews weren't supposed to have any opinions in them), but he has quit. But if I would run constant rants against the current administration (and never any countering opinion), I think the argument wouldn't be that any single book shouldn't have been reviewed but that the section had become too one-sided. Also, probably, too boring. Controversy sells papers. We do have a lively letters to the editor section in the newspaper and people from both right and left are constantly criticizing the paper's ideological slant. That means to me that we are aiming for dead center, a space we didn't always inhabit."

-- Anonymous book review editor

Daily Round Up

Yvonne Zipp reads John Updike's Terrorist and discovers it is not suicide bombers that strike terror into his heart -- but obesity.

Ever skeptical, Robert Fisk parses the difference between being Canadian and Canadian-born in the wake of the recent sting in Toronto. Bill Kaufmann, who is both, agrees.

For the first time in recorded history, a man named Carlo reviews a book which features a hero...named Carlo.

A judge of the IMPAC prize shares her diary to some fellow Canadians.

Allen Barra says the West is alive and well today --most especially, in its mythology.

Edgardo Cozarinsky delves into the Argentine Jewish sex trade again with The Moldavian Pimp.

Anthony Shadid checks in from Tripoli, Lebanon, where some are awaiting the spread of a wider war.

There is a class at Portland State University on the sociology of soccer, and the author of this review teaches it.

Product Placement in Books?

Strategic product placement in movies always drives me nuts -- I had no idea it's now showing up in books: Companies like Cover Girl are signing deals with publishing houses (Perseus included) -- if authors mention a product by name, the company will help promote the book online. Or (in very rare cases) pay the author a good-sized chunk of change for the plug.

It all feels a bit skeezy: The book is passed to PR firms in manuscript form so they can read through it and find places where products might fit. So far, it's rare, but with the starved-state of book publicity, I could see this sort of thing taking off. Personally, I'd rather see them come up with extra publicity money other ways.

Poetry Foundation

Two new posts worth noting at the Poetry Foundation site:

(1) Daniel Nester reports as Robert Bly and Li-Young Lee get mystical with the yoga crowd. ("Some people have wet hair, fresh from after-yoga showers. Many have awesome posture.")

(2) Susan Stewart offers a list of poems she'd like to see canonized, including a sonnet from the brilliant Michael Drayton. (As Stewart rightly notes, "The best part is its emphatic "glad, yeah, glad.")

How does Steve Ross sleep at night?

In today's Times, David Carr writes a fawning portrait of how conservative stinkbomb Ann Coulter goads the media into selling her book by throwing out ridiciulously insensitive comments. What Carr fails to realize is by writing the piece he, too, is doing her bidding. (and some might argue, by posting this, so am I) But enough already! We all know this woman only cares about attention. Surely, isn't there another way for Crown to make it's bottom line?

Why 6 -2 does not equal 4

San Franciscans will have noticed by now that their beloved San Francisco Chronicle Book Review shed a third of its weight recently due to "production issues." It's not the first time this section, which reviews more fiction in translation than perhaps any other in the country, has faced a cut back.

Several years ago, the section was folded in to the general arts pages and was brought back thanks to the vociferous complaint of readers. And it's been warmly welcomed: recent-ish readership surveys showed that over half of the newspaper's subscribers read the section: numbers any newspaper section would kill for.

The loss of two pages a week over the year may seem small, but it translates into several hundred fewer reviews. This seems incredibly short sighted. The one advantage newspapers have over, say, television or radio, is that they can present a much larger amount of information and opinion since it is print. If you start to limit that, you chip away at the thing people turn to newspapers for -- breadth and variety.

Then there is just simple common sense. A book section, after all, encourages newspaper readers to read -- the very activity they need to encourage to get people to keep buying the newspaper.

Daily Round Up

If you don't believe Al Gore, or Tim Flannery, listen to Michele Nijhuis, who watches the climate change before her eyes in Aspen.

The Scotsman meets George Saunders and finds a fair-haired, bearded, plaid-shirt wearing normal guy.

NBCC board member Peder Zane has done his own poll of best books, and "Blood Meridian" is the winner.

Philip Marchand falls in love with Portugal as he reads NBCC finalist Monica Ali's latest novel.

A.C Grayling admires and skeptically regards Niall Ferguson's new book, "The War of the World."

Would that Susan Sontag was alive to make sense of this photographic story.

NBCC board member Jane Ciabattari goes travelling with Martha McPhee's "L'America" and enjoys herself, sort of.

Gaby Wood reviews the letters of Martha Gelhorn and discovers that letters might have been the great war correspondent's real genre.

**

What are you reading......in Sagaponack?

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, which opens with these lines: "It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly in Amsterdam and Roterdam, in the year 1663, whether they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus."

-- Harris Yulin

The World Cup Sunday Round-Up

The Netherlands defeated Serbia-Montenegro in today's match in Germany, which may bring back the ghosts of 1974. For those who didn't grow up stuffing a cup down their shorts and leaping sideways to block goal shots, there's plenty of literature out there to catch you up on the mythology of soccer. In light of the Dutch victory, David Winner's "Brilliant Orange," might be a good place to start. Oddly, it made the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction cut (in spite of the fact that it's nonfiction) over more cultishly passed around books like Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs," or Alex Bellos' hilarious and superb "Futebol."

It seems like some of the best soccer books bring out the interplay between nationality and sport -- how one bolsters or contradicts the other, as Frank Foer found out in "How Soccer Explains the World." To this list one might add Ryszard Kapuscinski's "The Soccer War," which regularly appears in top 10 travel book lists, and "Football in Sun and Shadow," by Eduardo Galeano, not to mention Nick Hornby's "My Favourite Year," and Sean Wilsey and Matt Wieland's recent, "A Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup."

It's easy, though, since soccer is such a global sport, to get destracted from the simple fandom of it all. Some of the funniest soccer books depict the mesmerizing vice-grip teams have on their fans, like Joe McGuiness' "The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro," which is less about being Italian than it is the triumph of a team from a small town winning above all expectations, and Nick Hornby's hugely enjoyable "Fever Pitch," which was turned into a baseball movie in the U.S., but has become relavent all over again, no matter what you think of the looming Fifa investigation of Arsenal.

The NYTBR Best Books: Why William H. Pritchard predicted the lack of concensus

From "Updike: America's Man of Letters."

"Can one imagine a lively argument among three readers about artisitc superiority when the first's notion of a great work is Toni Morrison's Beloved, while for the second it is Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, and for the third Updike's Rabbit at Rest? Most likely these readers would politely or rudely go their ways rather than attempt to persuade each other of their favorite's preeminence."

Pictures from Chernobyl

In McNally/Robinson I saw a copy of Robert Polidori's "Zones of Exclusion," photographs shot in three days while touring what remains of Chernobyl and Pripyat, Russia. Anyone who has read "Voices from Chernobyl," which won the NBCC award in nonfiction last year, might want to have a look at it. While Alexieivich's book was full of people, of their lives and stories, these photos -- like those in his "Metropolis" series -- are eerily blank, empty, deserted. On the blackboard in one picture is the date, 1986, and a lesson plan. Twenty years later the desks remains, covered in a blizzard of dust and ash.

Saturday Round-Up

Public heath journalist Laurie Garrett talks about the impact of AIDS over the past 25 years.

NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn hears the brothers in Peter Carey's new novel calling to her, loud and clear.

Americans are not the only ones who get huffy over lists of best books, as Nick Gillespie points out.

NBCC finalist Caroline Moorehead chronicles the tragic story of a Ugandan woman caught up in Britain's home office attempt to look tough on immigration.

Robert Fisk faces The Gauntlet and goes on tell Amy Goodman what the death of Zarqawi means.

Tom Bissell goes for a stroll across Afghanistan with Rory Stewart, wondering if his companion knew how dangerous his trip was.

Clive Wilmer says the sound-track to Seamus Heaney's new volume should be "Earth, Wind and Fire."

The NYTBR Best Books Vote: Why Curtis Sittenfeld Voted for "White Noise."

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of the Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for and why. Here's Curtis Sittenfeld:

"I voted for "White Noise," which I feel like does several things, all at once, and all of them well. It comments on society, and it has this great domesticity about this family, which is not quite a traditional family. Remember how there are all those step-children? And then it has the sort of social commentary of the main character's Hitler Studies program. On top of all that, there is the huge environmental event at the center of the book.

Each part of the book is bigger, thematically, then the next, and yet it all holds together. It's also one of those books that is just such a pleasure to read. There is a brilliant line in every other paragraph. It's satirical, but still entirely realistic. You know, I hate those books where there are characters who exist simply to make a point or a joke. All of Delillo's characters are well developed, endearing even. At the end of the day, it holds up as a work of realism. Remember how it begins with the kids being dropped off at school in station wagons? Change that to SUVs and you have today. And Delillo was very prescient about the disaster lurking around our environment.

-- Curtis Sittenfeld, author of "The Man of My Dreams."

##

The NYTBR Best Books Vote: Why Rick Moody Chose Grace Paley's "The Collected Stories."

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of the Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Rick Moody:


"I was excited to see on your website that someone nominated SIXTY STORIES, by Barthelme, which is also deserving. Short fiction got short shrift, undeservedly, and Paley, in my view, is the greatest writer of short fiction of the last generation."

Rick Moody, author of "Demonology."

**

Reviewing 101: John Updike's rules

Thirty-one years ago, in the introduction to "Picked Up Pieces," his second collection of assorted prose, John Updike laid down his own six rules for reviewing. They are still the single best guide to fairness today:

"My rules," he writes, "shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author "in his place," making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end."

Our Promise to You: No Buzz Marketing

A reporter mentioned the other day that some lit blogs get a cut of sales generated from their site traffic. I presume she was speaking of online bookselling affiliate programs.

Perhaps it's that old print background rearing its head, but isn't this a (rather large) conflict of interest? How can you actually claim to blog blindly if the chances are, a positive or salesworthy blog might generate some extra income?

And how can the reader follow you if this motivation is (even a small) part of your day-to-day job. Am I the only person who feels like this could come right out of a William Gibson novel?

And why stop there. Why not do some cross-promotional blogging, like this fellow, who runs 17 of them out of his home in Australia -- recommending everything from cameras to Olympic coverage?

It's one thing to accept advertising money: that's what has kept papers afloat for years. It's quite another to make a commission off the very object you are purporting to criticize.

Poynter has set one possible example by simply declaring they are part of the Amazon program when they put up book links. In the meantime, here's our promise to you: we won't be profiting by recommending one title or another; and certain, absolutely, no buzz marketing.


**

You Don't Have to be John Kerry to get Swift-boated

Eric Schlosser has apparently gone a step too far in criticizing the fast food industry. Last month, as "Chew on This," the fast-food nation for kids book he co-wrote with Chuck Wilson arrived in stores, "an array of U.S. food companies" have organized to attack the book and bring down Schlosser's reputation. Publisher's Weekly reported last week that Houghton Mifflin, his publisher, has gone so far as to hire their own outside PR firm to counteract their spin. And here were are, back at John Kerry's dilemma: do you elevate a false charge to truthiness by rebutting it? Sadly, we can't rely on the mainstream media to officiate this one. As Kerry found out, and as Eric Boehlert reminds in his excellent new book, "Lapdogs," they abdicated their role in parsing truth from fiction a while ago.

Round-Up

Former NBCC poetry winner Ruth Stone turns 91 today. Here's a report from her 89th birthday by NPR's Melissa Block.

At the Seattle Weekly, Roger Downey says Bill Buford has cooked up something sly and tasty with "Heat," while Molly Lori asks Anthony Bourdain to please get out of the kitchen.

John Pilger challenges the powerful in his latest book, "Freedom Next Time." Mark Curtis cheers him on in the Guardian.

Christina Paterson takes a deep breath and presses on with questioning one of the finest writers to emerge from Belfast: Bernard MacLaverty.

Lad lit has arrived in India, but the Times of India speak to a few fellas who just aren't buying it.

NBCC finalist Robert Fisk went trainspotting on his latest optomotrist appointment, and heard the tale of his eye doctor's curious visa.

Something dark and gloomy lurks in the Twin Cities....no, really....and a new anthology brings it into light.

Donna Rifkind is loathe to report back that things fall apart in Laura Esquivel's latest novel.

M.J. Anderson attends a conference in Philadelphia and comes away wondering if Ben Franklin would have been a blogger today.

**

The Memoir...Not Dead Yet

James Frey's "My Friend Leonard" hit stores without much fanfare last week in paperback with a new disclaimer that ought to clear up any confusion over what it is. Readers seem okay with it as the book lands at #6 on the Times list next week. In the meantime, it seems worth noting that the entire genre has not collapsed since the Oprah/Nasdijj/J.T. Leroy/Frey hullaballo quieted down.

In fact, the first six months of this year have featured some memoirs which were both heavily covered and highly praised. Former NBCC finalist Liz Gilbert's "Eat, Pray Love", Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, and Danielle Trussoni's "Falling Through the Earth" were all reviewed on the cover of the Times Book Review and went on to become NYT bestsellers. Augusten Burroughs' new collection of autobiographically-inspired pieces is hanging in at #11 this week.

And there are several other strong memoirs on shelves that are both critically acclaimed, entirely factual (so we know) and selling (at least moderately) well: Edmund White's lyrical chronicle of the people who made him: "My Lives;" Wole Soyinka's enormous history of his political activism: "You Must Set Forth at Dawn;" Eyal Press' personal journey through the battle of aborton foes and pro-choice activists in Rochester: Absolute Convictions; Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, "Fun Home;" Bernard Cooper's sad and funny memoir of his father: "The Bill My Father Sent Me."

This fall there will be more. Jonathan Franzen and Robert Stone both have memoirs waiting in the wings, while Joan Didion will unleash a massive 1200 page assemblage of her collected nonfiction, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live." Would that title had been around and in the air back in January to give us some perspective.

**

Round-up

Friends don't' let friends reveal their book sales stats ... here's why.

In his final column, retiring Sun-Times book review editor Henry Kisor says goodbye while looking at the last 33 years of book publishing and reviewing.

And speaking of the Sun-Times, NBCC member Stephen Lyons has adopted some new rules for eating in restaurants after reading Bill Buford's "Heat."

A best-selling book about cunnilingus and thugs? Welcome to street lit.

Wolcott loves losing himself in the New Yorker complete collection (as do I)

The world's first audio-only novel has been released, and it's "Sex on Legs" ... meanwhile, the Times says digital publishing is changing all the industry's rules (again).

The popular sport of pharmaceutical industry demonization: There's an onslaught of books about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, books that try to answer questions like, "Is Big Pharma in fact the moral equivalent of the tobacco industry?" If you want a taste, check out this excerpt/article in the New York Review of Books: the Dangerous Drugstore, or read this very well done review by Arthur Caplan.

And we just passed the 30-year anniversary of the death of investigative journalist Don Bolles', who was killed by a car bomb after taking powerful businessmen (and the mob) to task. His former employer, the Arizona Republic, has created an impressive tribute to him.

Jeffrey Eugenides Loves You

HarperCollins just announced that, together with McSweeney's, they will be publishing an anthology of stories about love edited by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides. Pub date is October 2007, with proceeds going to 826 Chicago, a relatively new chapter of McSweeney's reading/writing labs for kids. Vintage has published anthologies from McSweeney's in the past, but it looks like this new book will feature a new cast of contributors entirely: letters between Heloise and Abelard, Catullus, and some guy named William Faulkner.

**

Da Vinci Clone and the Question of Plagiarism

That's right, it's baaaaack: A massive story in the soon-to-hit-stands July issue of Vanity Fair digs into the plagiarism questions surrounding Brown's work. Contributing editor Seth Mnookin uncovers new examples and talks to text experts who say Brown borrowed the Da Vinci Code plot Lewis Perdue's "Daughter of God," (despite the recent court case over the issue that found otherwise). He quotes libel experts saying things like, "This is the most blatant example of in-your-face plagiarism I've ever seen. It just goes on and on." It sounds great. I haven't seen the full article yet, but I look forward to it. Mnookin is really good at digging up dirt on things like plagiarism and media scandals -- he actually makes it fun to read.

The John Updike Daily Round-Up

John Updike's Terrorist is off to the races, but it seems clear already there will be no critical consensus. On publication day yesterday (numerologists might wonder why it was published on 6/6/06), Michiko Kakutani argued a reader would be better served by turning to Terry McDermott's book of last year, "The Perfect Soldiers," while over the weekend Amitav Ghosh admired Updike's scholarship, yet felt something slipped through the cracks.

Still, there have been plenty of positive reviews, beginning with John Leonard's in "New York" magazine. Globe critic Gail Caldwell was stirred by its imaginative leap, Benjamin Strong admitted in the Voice that Updike still has an ear for the angry young man, while poet Richard Wakefield said in the Seattle Times its the immediacy of Updike's prose which makes the experiment work. This weekend, the TBR will have its say.

In the end, "Terrorist" will be immune to critical broadsides. And here's why. Updike said he was surprised other writers hadn't explored the terrorist mind. But he's not the first. He is just the first white writer of his generation to do so since 9/11. In that sense, Updike's flying leap is not just artistic -- it's representative of something the country as a whole (and a particular part of the country that had perhaps grown complacent) will have to get used to making, even if its from the naughahyde comfort of their barcaloungers.

**

Wen Ho Lee and the Tale of Confidentiality

When journalists -- whether newspaper reporters, magazine staff writers, on-air broadcasters, or books authors -- promise confidentiality to sources, those journalists should be prepared for negative consequences. Much of the time, promises of confidentiality are granted too quickly. Reporters can often find the information they need in court documents, in government agency files, on blogs, and from face-to-face interviews not yet conducted.

In other words, skillful persistent information-gathering ought to eliminate the need for confidential sources on many stories that currently rely on such sources. I repeat that journalists -- whether superb at their work, or mediocre, or just plain lazy -- promise confidentiality, they do so at their own peril. That means the journalists involved must be ready to deal with subpoenas and grand jury testimony and perhaps prison time.

The settlements paid by news organizations to Wen Ho Lee as part of a privacy lawsuit filed by him demonstrate a lack of newsroom planning and a lack of professional courage. Yes, the settlements might constitute good bottom line decisions. Yes, the payments might keep a few journalists from spending prison time in prison. But those considerations should be beside the point when vital journalistic principles are involved. The settlement will make quality journalism harder to accomplish in the future, because the trust of sources and audiences in journalists has been weakened.

Steve Weinberg, NBCC board member

**

The NYTBR Best Books: Why Thomas Mallon Voted for "Underworld"

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Thomas Mallon:

"Sure, you can reveal my vote. It was UNDERWORLD, a book I had very complicated feelings about. Its amplitude and ambition seemed commensurate with the designation the poll wanted to make. And yet, I confess: if I'd known the RABBIT quartet was eligible, I'd have voted for it, since I think RABBIT REDUX is Updike's greatest book and one of the really great novels of the last 50 years."

-- Thomas Mallon.


**

Daily Round-Up

Philip Marchand tries to figure out why so many great Canadian writers were born in the 1930s.

Meet the new poetry capital of America: Fresno, Ca.

The Washington Post has come around to reviewing Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilsation. In the eight months since his book came out, Fisk has been asking some disturbing questions about Iraq.

NBCC board member Carlin Romano sits down with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her bodyguard.

First year students at the Mass College of Liberal Arts will have to spend their first weekend on campus digging through Elizabeth Royte's dumpster.

Win a set of John Updike books by answering this simple question.

Gina Kolata has uncovered another creepy side-effect to some modern medication.

The $50,000 Griffin Poetry prizes were awared to Kamau Brathwaite and Saskatoon writer Sylvia Legris.

Keanu Reeves is coasting on his Matrix earnings -- and reading Thomas Pynchon.

Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham has a few suggestions about what to read this summer.

The NYTBR Best Book Votes: Why Stewart O'Nan Chose The Things They Carried

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Stewart O'Nan:

"The Things They Carried does a lot of different things in a small space, and for a comic piece it has real heft. It's a funhouse with a deadly serious moral core, and O'Brien is brilliant at knowing exactly where the reader is. I love the way it can change--in a single punchline or gesture, or by revealing its own frame--from sentimental to horrible, or from despairing to hopeful."

-- Stewart O'Nan

The NYTBR Best Book Votes: Why Andrew Sean Greer Chose The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Andrew Sean Greer:

"One thing to keep in mind: we didn't all meet together or anything. I didn't get to see John tussling with Mary Karr. Also: we're writers, not critics, and so what we're going to pick is going to be very personal. Writers mostly read books that inspire them to write, after all, so while a book may be remarkable, it may just not help out, and so it's put aside. That's what I finally came to in making my choice--Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--because that book got me so excited about the pleasures of reading that I started on my next novel with joy instead of dread. I wasn't the only one. That may not be a great answer, but as I said, I suspect most of us picked the things we loved the most.

I think we all knew, on seeing the question, that Beloved would win. It has a firm place in the canon, a Nobel Prize, and was a highly influential book. And I think Roth was an obvious one, as well, though his is a more European career, a series of novels in conversation with one another, and doesn't lend itself to this particular parlor game. Let me put in that I'm a great fan of Updike, as well. I know that isn't popular, for some reason, but he is a magnificent writer and--a dying breed--a man of letters. So maybe some of us thought, Okay, let me see what else I can put on the list. Not Morrison, Roth or Updike. Someone else who has meant something to fiction in the last few decades. Maybe someone under 50 for God's sake? And for many young writers, it's Michael Chabon. It may well be that the future of the novel lies in the mixing of genre and literary pleasures, and he literally wrote the manifesto on that (in his McSweeney's collection). And wrote the book to prove it."

-- Andrew Sean Greer

The NYTBR Best Book Votes: Why Madison Smartt Bell Didn't Chose Just One Best Book

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Madison Smartt Bell:

"I was happy to be included -- sincerely happy-- but I didn't put much stock in the project itself. I think they asked us all to send in a list of ten best books since a certain date. Mine included Merry Men by Carolyn Chute, Continental Drift by Russell Banks, Damascus Gate by Robert Stone, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and probably some title by William Vollmann and Mary Gaitskill, also maybe 1982 Janine by Alasdair Grey and ... pretty fuzzy, right?

I can say with confidence that Beloved was not on my list! I'm with the 93% majority there.... but the real thing is I can pick a list of 10 great books (maybe two or three lists of 10 great books) but the idea of saying this book is clearly number one while this other book is clearly number seven.... doesn't work for me.

I missed the NYT issue by being in Haiti at the time but I gather that the main result is an utter lack of consensus.... which I find rather cheering in fact, for it suggests that there is more diversity of taste AND talent out there than we are generally inclined to think."

-- Madison Smartt Bell, author of "All Souls Rising"

The NYTBR Best Book Votes: Why Mary Karr Chose Blood Meridian

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Mary Karr, who we spoke with via telephone:

"People often say, Oh a book's great because of its roots and its history ... I don't really give a shit about that. And I don't think the primary value of a book is idea or form -- it's feeling. It's such a corny thing, but for me the real yardstick is, does it make me feel, do I re-read it, and does it reward study. I have a copy of Blood Meridian I've read every year for about 11 years. I find it terrifying, and even though most of the characters are pretty despicable, I love them -- I can't live without the characters. It's like having a crush on somebody and stalking them. Like you're standing outside the window of that book with your boombox on your shoulder waiting, playing love songs and hoping they'll come out again.


About the list, I'm always astonished by the devotion to Updike. I think it's just from seeing his name in the New Yorker so relentlessly. I mean, no writer I know really values those books except the first one, "Rabbit Run," which I think is terrific. After that it became dilution. He certainly does make immaculate sentences, but so did Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, two mediocre novelists who are not a patch on Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Ralph Ellison.

And the abundance of Roth on there? The fact that they couldn't settle on one of his books almost tells you there's something wrong. Everybody has an idea that he's a great writer, but nobody can pick his best one, maybe two books? Everybody I know reads DeLillo and no one would disagree that "White Noise" and "Underworld" are his best books, hands down. So there's something about the scattershot of all those Roth books, it makes me mistrust it, makes me think it's about the author and not the book.

But I think lists like this are important to make because they cause people to have conversations about what is and isn't of value. In that sense I think it's really crucial, because otherwise all you've got in the marketplace are the critics, and the people who are actually writing don't have much of a voice. As somebody who cares about books, I think doing this kind of thing is good. You know, if it sparks conversation, it doesn't really matter what books you pick."

-- Mary Karr

The NYTBR Best Book Votes: Why Roxana Robinson Chose The Hours

As part of our efforts to uncover The Rest of The Best, we've been contacting the judges to ask what they voted for, and why. Here's Roxana Robinson:

"The request floored me at first. How can you choose the best book of the last six months, let alone the last twenty-five years? There are so many different things you want from a book, depending on your circumstances.

Happily, the Times gave us some time, so for awhile I waited, and simply let books present themselves in my mind. John Updike's Rabbit Quartet appeared at once, that beautiful elegaic passage through small-town America. I love those books, but I knew other people would too, and I liked the idea of a book that needed a champion. I also liked the idea of choosing a woman writer, because women are often left off literary lists. I thought of Shirley Hazzard's matchless Transit of Venus, unequalled for beauty of language and a perfectly unfolding narrative.

But the book that kept reappearing was The Hours, by Michael Cunningham.

Maybe twelve years ago I liked something else better; maybe there were books I'd forgotten or overlooked, but The Hours combines certain things necessary to me: exquisite language, profound compassion, and the luminous presence of a writer who is central to my thinking life. I keep a copy of The Hours wherever I write. It may not be the best book of the last 25 years -- who can say? -- but it's the one that remains closest to my writing life. It's the one that acts as a touchstone to the things that are important to me.

So that's the one I chose."

Roxana Robinson

The Rest of the Best

As you may have heard -- unless you are, for example, living in a steamer trunk -- the New York Times Book Review recently polled 125 writers in order to determine "the best work of American fiction of the past twenty-five years." When the Times presented the results of its survey, only books receiving multiple votes were listed. Since we're book critics (and therefore not too hung up on numbers), it seemed to us that the difference between getting one vote and getting two was ... not much. So we set out to find the books that received a single nomination, thinking that readers might be interested in the complete list.

Thanks to the kind cooperation of many judges, as well as the deep inboxes of several of our Board members, here's the first installment of ... The Rest of the Best.*

- Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon (nominated by: Edmund White)
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (nominated by: Andrew Sean Greer)
- Little, Big, by John Crowley (nominated by: David Orr)
- The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (nominated by: Roxana Robinson)
- Carpenter's Gothic, by William Gaddis (nominated by: Cynthia Ozick)
- The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (nominated by: John Irving)
- Ironweed, by William Kennedy (nominated by: anonymous)
- Collected Stories, by Grace Paley (nominated by: Rick Moody)
- On Glory's Course, by James Purdy (nominated by: Paula Fox)
- Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Library of America Edition edition - 3 volumes) (nominated by: Norman Rush)
- Aberration of Starlight, by Gilbert Sorrentino (nominated by: Geoffrey O'Brien)
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler (nominated by: anonymous)
- 60 Stories, by Donald Barthelme (nomination listed in NY Times Podcast)
- The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (nomation listed in NY Times)

In addition to compiling this list, we've asked judges for commentary on why they chose they books they chose. Some chose to remain anonymous -- others didn't. Like John Irving:

"I voted for myself," Irving told us, "for "The Cider House Rules" -- suspecting that, otherwise, I might not receive a single vote. We all know presidents vote for themselves, and they do far more harm than writers do. I confess to being underwhelmed by most of the books (and authors) receiving multiple votes, with the notable exceptions of the four novels by John Updike, and the six by Philip Roth. Clearly the TBR should have admitted that it asked the wrong question; the most admired writers of the past 25 years are Updike and Roth, and it's no surprise to me that among all the writers receiving multiple votes, Updike and Roth have the most readers. In fact, I just wrote Roth a letter, in which I said that, if the poll in the TBR had been a fight, he would have won by a TKO in the first round."

* We're still collecting information from several participants in the NYT survey. Over the coming days, we'll be updating this list -- as well as providing a steady stream of judge commentary. So stay tuned.

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No Daily Roundups for a Few Days

We're about to launch a new project here on Critical Mass, so to focus on that for a few days, we're going to hold off on posting the daily roundups. But have no fear, they'll return next week.