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12.31.09

AbeBooks' Weird Book Room

 

Over at AbeBooks (UK) they have a Weird Book Room, filled with all manner of strange, hilarious and garish books, historical and present.

Some personal favorites include The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, Help! A Bear is Eating Me, The Waterless Toilet - Is it Right for You?, Is Your Dog Gay?, and The Haunted Vagina. At the moment, they have 101 crazy titles and are always accepting suggestions.

So take a moment to peruse their collection and revel in the colorful and varied selection of literary oddities.

 

 

 

12.30.09

High Literature Goes Pulp

Diesel Brentwood Bookseller Thomas Bailey reports:

 

Whether it was the need for an extra buck during a time of economic misfortunes, side-stepping progressively unforgiving critics, personal relief from esoteric verbosity and heavy subject matters, or simply the desire to work in genre and create something fast and wild without being anchored by expectation, both Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon, winners of the National Book Award, have produced two of the more interesting books of their careers.

However, each book makes a point to keep it interesting; not only in content but also in packaging. Johnson’s Nobody Move takes after the ever-so-popular fashion of mysteries and thrillers reshaping their dust jackets to give them some new edge only to subject them more to rips and tears by punching bullet holes into the front and back. The jacket wounds hint at the sexy graphics that lie beneath, ever congruous as any good mystery’s plot.

On the other hand, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice both embodies and distances itself from typical best-seller packaging. The cover is dripping with cartoonish imagery of the free and easy beach life that’s eerily rendered through heavy airbrush and digital composites. While many publishers cram the fronts and backs of books with praise from comparable authors or news sources, not a word can be found on this book. Just a “picturesque” sunset of arbitrarily filtered waves, lazy gray beach and Easter pink glow in the horizon.

Regardless of the reasons for writing these comparatively accessible books, they not only succeed in maintaining the idiosyncrasies of their authors but also provide the perfect impression of being well read while lounging on the beach or catching the next flight out of LAX.

Take that Dan Brown!

 

(For a taste of Inherent Vice, listen to Pynchon narrate the opening passages here.)

 

 

 

 

 

12.29.09

Ursula K. Le Guin's Resignation Letter

 

18 December 2009

To Whom it may concern at the Authors Guild:

I have been a member of the Authors Guild since 1972.

At no time during those thirty-seven years was I able to attend the functions, parties, and so forth offered by the Guild to members who happen to live on the other side of the continent. I have naturally resented this geographical discrimination, reflected also in the officership of the Guild, always almost all Easterners. But it was a petty gripe when I compared it to my gratitude to the Guild for the work you were doing in defending writers’ rights. I went on paying top dues and thought it worth it.

And now you have sold us down the river.

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the “Google settlement.” You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the “Google settlement.” They don’t have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Yours truly,

 

-- Visit UKL's website.

 

 

If You Can Touch It, Someone Will Steal It

Margo Rabb has written an excellent essay in The New York Times on theft and its effect on independent bookstores. Jack Kerouac, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, and Jeffrey Eugenides are some of the more frequently pilfered authors, but the most stolen book? The Bible. Even at the Parable Christian Store in Springfield, Ore., where patrons will be given a gratis copy of the Good Book if only they ask, the Bible gets snatched.

Many authors take the theft of their book as a compliment, though Eugenides and Auster note the precarious position it puts independents in.

For further reading, check out Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.

 

-- Read the full article.

 

 

 

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