Bookslut, I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but after this, all is forgiven.
Bookslut, All is Forgiven
Appearing Elsewhere
Millions contributor Emily's award-winning review of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale has been posted by VQR. Check it out.
Amazing Literary Magazine Offer
Most of us litbloggers just blather on about books and publishing industry gossip, but Dan Wickett is a man on a mission. Part of his mission is to get people to read the literary magazines that are so important to literary fiction culture yet are so little read. In an attempt to rectify this situation, Wickett has approached a number of these magazines to put together a discounted subscription offer for anyone who subscribes to at least three. For all the details, visit his blog.
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The challenges of digital magazine editions
An article in the Wall Street Journal talks up some of the drawbacks of the 8 DVD-ROM Complete New Yorker set:Web-savvy users accustomed to navigating easily through online content find The Complete New Yorker a bit of an anachronism. Each page of content is literally a picture of a magazine page. Readers can't copy text from a story and paste it elsewhere. They can't search for keywords within the text of articles, only within titles and abstracts. If they want to jump from issue to issue, or article to article, they first have to go back to the index and sometimes change DVDs.The problem obviously isn't the technology, it's the 1976 law that requires publishers to get permission from free-lancers before republishing their work in another medium. The lawyers have determined that anything before 1976 is fair game to be converted into a new format. And while most publishers negotiated away the rights of free-lancers in this realm in the mid-1990s, there still remains a legal limbo for material published in between the two dates. Based on case arising from a similar set put out by National Geographic in 1997, by simply creating digital versions of the magazine pages, publishers are in the clear, and this is the route that the New Yorker has taken. The article linked above also looks at how this issue is affecting similar archiving efforts by other venerable magazines like Harper's Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.(via and via)
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Making Love on a Live Grenade
Tam Tam Books, my friend Tosh's labor of love, released it's fourth book this past week: Boris Vian's Foam of the Daze. Vian is mostly unknown in the States but he is one of France's modern masters. His novels are at once absurd and doleful. Foam of the Daze is his masterpiece.An AdmissionI've done something that I do every once in a while and that I feel a bit of guilt about. I've put a book down without finishing it. In this case, though, the book was actually very good, and what I read I enjoyed very much. Chris Hedges pulls no punches in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He ruthlessly whittles away the myth of war and violence until all that remains is the set of lies on which they are based. His arguments are almost too convincing, and after he lays it out, it is hard to make a case for a situation in which the use of force is warranted. I especially enjoyed the way he went about laying all of this out. Instead of proclaiming the virtues of peace, he very clearly described how war becomes a tool that those in power use, willingly or not, to maintain their power. And that's it, that's the whole book. And that's pretty much why I quit about halfway through. He made is argument very convincingly and I found myself quite moved, but then he made his argument again and again. I've described here in the past the lingering anxiety that has accompanied opening the throttle, so to speak, when it comes to reading. And now sometimes when I feel that I have extracted the essential nugget of wisdom from a book, I am ready to cast the book aside so that I can get to that next nugget. And, sometimes, this nugget is given away freely before the end of the book. I have become a very thirsty reader.
Rarnaby Budge, or The Fine Art of the Knockoff
This weekend, hurtling toward the conclusion of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, I took a pit-stop to thumb through Edgar Johnson's biography of the author. I was curious to see what had triggered Dickens' transformation from the showman of the early novels to the architect of the series of dizzying edifices that began with Dombey and Son. I didn't find the answer I was looking for. I did, however, discover the wonderful fact that Dickens was the victim of plagiarists, who during his lifetime published knockoffs like David Copperful, Nikelas Nickelbery, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwickians, and - my favorite - Oliver Twiss.You may recall that a couple of years ago, there were newspaper reports about Chinese J.K. Rowling manqués, who authored such blockbusters as Harry Potter and Beaker and Burn and Harry Potter and the Filler of Big. Apparently, this was no late-capitalist aberration, but part of a venerable literary tradition. I'm now wondering what might happen if some Millions favorites were plagiarized. The Corruptions? Jilliad? Shabbat's Theatre? The Amazing Adventurousness of Caviller and Quai? The Short Wonderful Life of Oskar Wow? Your suggestions are welcome below.
Staying Sane: A Year in Reading by Emre Peker (Part 2)
The depth of Ignatius' wisdom gave me an urge to read history, and I started with Napoleon: A Political Life, by Steven Englund. Englund is a notable scholar and the book was released to wide acclaim. Napoleon is a personal, political and military approach to one of the most influential leaders of history. I picked the book especially because I did not know much about Napoleon and sought enlightenment, which I got thanks to the book's thorough historical content, the presentation of Napoleon's personal background, and a very scholarly - yet novelistic - narrative. It is for certain that Englund is extremely passionate regarding Napoleonic studies and the controversies that surround it. His determination to relate to the reader both the specifics of Napoleon himself (character quirks, political ideas, practical implementations, the myth) and the historical evolution of the time (the French Revolution, Continental power struggles, trade issues) without any high opinions leads the reader to ask questions and wonder about different interpretations of the Napoleons life and actions.I was so moved by the joy of reading on historical matters that I picked up on Ryszard Kapuscinski - a foreign correspondent for the Polish press during the communist era who was recommended to me by the very C. Max Magee of The Millions and Cem Ozturk, great friend and emissary to Japan. I started with The Shadow of the Sun and realized once again how ignorant I was with regards to Africa. Since reading The Shadow of the Sun I feel ashamed to refer generally to Africa, as if it were one country, and it's inhabitants as strictly African. Kapuscinski's accounts are a mix of personal adventures that make James Bond stunts lame, coup d'etats surrounding the liberation of African colonies, and detailed descriptions of various cultures and peoples of Africa. Of course, immediately after finishing The Shadow of the Sun I picked up Imperium, Kapuscinski's account of his visits to the USSR. Kapuscinki's visit to the world behind the iron curtain, the different cultures that the USSR housed and worked diligently to eradicate and replace with communism, and the succinct description of the big brother situation is full of wonders. Imperium is a great read that is thrilling and unnerving at the same time. I still long to read The Soccer War, Kapuscinki's accounts of the revolutions he witnessed in Latin America but rein myself not to finish all his works in one breath.See also: Part 1
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Insta-Libraries
The Bookfinder.com journal rounds up some links about custom library designers, who do things like "custom-design a $70,000 insta-library for a Saudi Arabian sheik." Would you like to buy "books by the foot?" (it's a great way to furnish a room, if not the cheapest) We've looked at this phenomenon before, in March and again in August.
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