Gossip Girl and The New Yorker

Again, the current issue of The New York Review of Books features one splendid fiction writer's meditations on another brilliant fiction writer Last his time, it was Eisenberg on Nádas; this time it's Zadie Smith considering the critical legacy of E.M. Forster, who provided the inspiration for On Beauty.As a novelist, Forster has suffered by comparison to his more conspicuously innovative contemporaries (for my money, Howards End is as much a technical achievement as that other Bloomsbury monument, Mrs. Dalloway); Smith suggests that Forster is underrated as a critic, as well.Perhaps his critical medium - BBC radio - made it easy to overlook Forster's seriousness; perhaps his characteristic modesty did as well. Still, we can learn much from Forster, and from Smith's appreciation of him:He could sit in his own literary corner without claiming its superiority to any other. Stubbornly he defends Joyce, though he doesn't much like him, and Woolf, though she bemuses him, and Eliot, though he fears him [...] Forster was not Valéry, but he defended Valéry's right to be Valéry. He understood the beauty of complexity and saluted it where he saw it.

Narrative, a great online literary magazine, has a new issue out featuring a new story by Rick Bass and a classic by Frank Conroy. You can sign up for a free "subscription" to get access to the above stories as well as everything in their archives.

I read with interest D.T. Max's article in the recent Summer Fiction Issue of the New Yorker covering the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is, by the sound of it, one of the world's most important literary archives. The piece mostly covered the library's director Thomas Staley, and his impressive skill in locking down the papers of some of history's greatest writers, but it also delved into descriptions of the papers themselves.I suppose I'd never really thought of it before reading this article, but I was surprised at the sheer mass that these collections represent. For example, Norman Mailer's "archive - weighing twenty thousand pounds in all - came to the center in a tractor trailer." And that's just one of many, many archives. In all, the collection "contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair." The Texas is also old school in the way it approaches its collection.Staley's conservatism extends beyond his literary taste. He does not want to place the Ransom's archives online. He believes, quoting Matthew Arnold, that "the object as in itself it really is" can never be replaced by a digital reproduction. "Smell this," he told me one time when I was in his office, as he picked up a manuscript box from the Edwardian British publisher Cecil Palmer. We inhaled the scent: tobacco, mold, dust. "See, there’s information in the smell, too," he said.Be that as it may, the objects that Staley covets for the Texas collection may not be as plentiful in the coming years.I was fascinated, for example, by Don Delillo's papers as described by D.T. Max in the New Yorker: Delillio's manuscripts "were eerily immaculate - embalmed in acid-free manila folders inside blue legal-sized boxes, each about the size of an accordion folder."Compare this to a recent article in the New York Times discussing the increasing use of technology and software in crafting fiction. The article's centerpiece is Richard Powers, whose affinity for technology is well known. Instead of piles of paper, Powerspoured the background research into hyperlinked notebooks using Microsoft OneNote, a program more commonly used by businesses, which allows you to combine text documents, e-mail, images, spreadsheets and video and audio material into one searchable document. He then mapped out possible changing interactions between characters. "These notebook sections gradually grew into the kernels of individual dramatic scenes, which I could then work up in parallel," Powers said. "The combination of software programs (each of which links seamlessly into the other) allowed for simultaneous top-down and bottom-up composition."I would guess that some archivists might find it upsetting that, increasingly, modern day authors won't leave dusty boxes of paper to sift through. Correspondence will be collected in email form, and background research will include hyperlinks and spreadsheets, images and video. This doesn't jibe with the classic notion of doing literary research, but it will also open dazzling opportunities, as notable writers' papers will exist in digital form from the outset, and won't be physically limited to certain institutions. In this way we may trace the links and paths set down by writers as they crafted their work. We will be able to sift through the "dusty boxes" from our desks, wherever we are.

How does an independent bookshop not only survive, but remain vital amid the encroaching chains? How does a tightly-knit community bolster its authors in a cut-throat industry? Independent bookshop owner Heidi Hallett has tackled both these issues by doing what the best independent shopkeepers do - opting for the intimate, the local.As this recent Globe and Mail article explains, Hallett's Halifax bookshop, Frog's Hollow, has its fortunes interwoven with that of her community. By hosting book launches and in-store author appearances of regional scribes, Hallett keeps her dream alive: "Local literature is a vital part of our culture here, and I am concerned that if more independent bookstores like mine start going under, we risk losing that history and heritage forever."

Amazon has locked down a rare piece of Harry Potter ephemera far a tidy sum.We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby's in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000 [$3.93 million], and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.Since this is a particularly difficult volume to get one's hands on, and since there are likely many curious Potter fans out there, Amazon has offered up a special review of the book, along with images from its pages. (Thanks, Laurie)Update: Yes, it turns out this happened in December. So: old news, but new to me, and perhaps to you too.