Kelln Goes All Cory Doctorow

Posted 8 May, 2008 in Book News, Technology | 3 comments

Mystery / suspense author Brad Kelln, whose new novel, In the Tongues of the Dead, is due out this fall from ECW Press, has jumped on the Internet freebie bandwagon. For a limited time, he’s giving away Black Inside, the third novel in his Michael Wenton trilogy (which also includes Lost Sanity and Method of Madness), as a free download on his website.

Kelln is not a stranger to innovative Internet marketing. Last year he serialized a novel on his Facebook group, “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes Books.”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that authors who give away their material on the Internet experience a spike in sales of their physical books; we’ll have to wait until fall to find out if Kelln’s gambit pays off in sales of his new novel, which is described on his site as “a mystery thriller with religious undertones intended to evoke controversy.”

What’s Good for the Goose, or, Oh! My! Fucking! God!

Posted 7 April, 2008 in Book News, Assmonkeys | No comments

From the Times:

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

Yeah, God forbid a publisher should take the practice of deep discounting online, which Amazon practically invented, and use it to compete and, maybe, to retain a little scratch for themselves. The heartless bastards.

Of course, the net result of all this deep discounting will be a further erosion of publishers’ already meagre profit margins, so there is something of a cutting-off-one’s-nose-to-spite-one’s-face feeling to all of this.

(via Quillblog)

2008 Tournament of Books

Posted 6 March, 2008 in Book News | 2 comments

For those of you who haven’t had your fill of bookish smack-downs in the wake of Canada Reads, an American counterpart, The Morning News’s Tournament of Books kicks off next Friday. The competition is a round-robin format, with literary judges including novelists Nick Hornby, Elizabeth McCracken, and Gary Shteyngart (whose novel Absurdistan was beaten in the final round last year by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), and bloggers Mark Sarvas and Maud Newton.

There are sixteen books in the first round, with four judges (Sarvas, Newton, Ted Genoways, and Mark Liberman) choosing victors from eight brackets of two competing books apiece. The winners from those brackets will compete against each other (with Hornby and Shteyngart adjudicating), and so on until one book is left standing.

The sixteen books in contention include some of the most critically lauded titles from last year, a couple of which I’ve actually read. The competing titles are:

Run, by Ann Patchett
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich
Ovenman, by Jeff Parker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
You Don’t Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem
New England White, by Stephen L. Carter
Remainder, by Tom McCarthy
The Shadow Catcher, by Marianne Wiggins
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, by Stephen Marche
What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke

My review of Run is online, here. I did review Petropolis for the same publication, but apparently neglected to link to it, and now I can’t seem to track down the review online. As I recall, the review was mixed.

In any event, it’s nice to see fellow Canadian Stephen Marche on this list, and I’m looking forward to finding out which book will take the title this year. In the meantime, both Tree of Smoke and The Savage Detectives are on the TBR pile, and I’m hoping to get to them eventually.

If anyone wants to place bets on which title will ultimately prevail in this contest, your humble correspondent is more than happy to act as bookie, for a nominal fee.

Down These Mean Streets …

Posted 5 March, 2008 in Book News | 1 comment

Akashicbooks, the press that brought you Brooklyn Noir, Chicago Noir, Detroit Noir, and Havana Noir, among other hard-boiled anthologies is back with the forthcoming … Toronto Noir?!?

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived here all my life, but I’ve never really considered Toronto that much of a noirish city. I mean, we’ve got our sketchy neighbourhoods, any big city does, but Detroit, we ain’t. However, the new anthology has a terrific lineup of writers, including Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Sean Dixon, Nathan Sellyn, Andrew Pyper, R. M. Vaughan, and Heather Birrell. Yes, Heather Birrell. It’s so wacky it just might work.

I look forward to reading this when it hits stores in May.

And Then There Were Ten

Posted 30 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

The New York Times has whittled down its list of 100 notable books to come up with its choices of the ten best books of 2007 — five each for fiction and nonfiction. The best thing I can say about this list is that Rowling didn’t make the cut.

I’m actually wanting to read Tree of Smoke and Man Gone Down at some point, once I beat the TBR pile into some semblance of submission.

The Best … Recommended

Posted 28 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

In a similar vein to the NYT’s 100 notable books list, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle has today inaugurated what it is calling (rather awkwardly) the Best Recommended List:

Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?

Nearly 500 voters—from John Updike and Robert Hass to Carolyn Forche, Anne Tyler, Julia Alvarez and Cynthia Ozick—answered the call. Over 300 of our member critics voted as well. Starting in 2008, we plan to offer our Best Recommended List every month.

The inaugral lists consist of five titles each for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Of the ten fiction and nonfiction titles, only two — Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Alan Wiseman’s The World Without Us, both in the nonfiction category — do not also appear on the NYT list. This may mean that these eight books are truly the best of the best from the past year, or it may speak to the narrow sensibility at work in making the selections. There are 500 voters plus 300 member critics accounted for in the NBCC poll, which should provide for a multiplicity of viewpoints, but the populist opinion will always win out nonetheless.

What is interesting about the NBCC endeavour, as Mark Sarvas points out over at The Elegant Variation, is that in addition to the top-five lists, the NBCC will also be posting reactions by individual writers and critics talking about their favourite books. Sarvas quotes NBCC President John Freeman:

We’re excited to post this on the web because we know lists of 5 are nowhere near complete. So in addition to posting a list of all the books which received multiple votes, each day at the NBCC blog we’ll be posting votes from critics and writers who participated, to widen the scope of the conversation and to hopefully present a little bit of how much is out there.

This sounds like an interesting way to broaden the discussion, and to ensure that it’s not always the same five titles that get talked about.

Here We Go …

Posted 28 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

It must be closing in on the end of the year, that time when major news organs gather up their accumulated lists of sales figures critical accolades in order to cull together lists of the most profitable best works of the past twelve months.

Leading the charge is the New York Times, with its annual list of 100 notable books. Roth? Check. Russo? Check. DeLillo? Check. Rowling? Oh, for fuck’s sake: check.

Notable MIAs on this year’s list include critically acclaimed novels by David Markson and Steve Erickson, and Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which just won a little award here in Canada.

Have I just been in a horribly grumpy mood for the last 365 days, or has this year been a notably punk one as far as new fiction goes?

Divisadero Wins Governor General’s Award

Posted 27 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

Michael Ondaatje has won the 2007 Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction for his novel Divisadero. This is the fifth GG Ondaatje has won, which ties Hugh MacLennan for the most GGs for a single author.

Karolyn Smardz Frost took the English nonfiction award for her book, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. The English-language poetry winner was Don Domanski for All Our Wonder Unavenged.

The complete list of winners can be found here.

Come on, Baby, Light My Fire

Posted 21 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader was released on Monday, to almost universally dismal reviews. Steven Poole at the Guardian lists fourteen things that a traditional book does that the Kindle device doesn’t do, and suggests that these fourteen things — such as never needing recharging and the ability to convert into a flat surface suitable for rolling cigarettes without fearing that stray leaves will slip into the device and short-circuit the motherboard — are a bare minimum for what a viable e-reader should boast. In a similar vein, Ed Champion provides a list of ten reasons books are superior to a Kindle. Cory Doctorow, one of the earliest and most vocal “information wants to be free” advocates, explains why he won’t be buying a Kindle, but fails to explain how he reconciles this with accepting money from Amazon for selling his blog’s feed (which is free online) via Kindle. And the website dive into mark has a terrific satirical post about what’s wrong not just with Kindle, but with e-readers in general.

My own view is that the Kindle is fundamentally flawed at the conceptual level, as are all e-readers that have been marketed to date. Why? Because they don’t do anything that traditional books don’t already do, and they have significant drawbacks that books don’t.

You might recall my reaction to the Sony Reader earlier this year. Not much has changed where the Kindle is concerned.

In its promotional video, Amazon touts the various benefits of the Kindle as against previous e-readers and, indeed, traditional books. According to the video, the Kindle “lets you read books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs anywhere, anytime.” Really? How about reading in the bath? Make sure the water’s not too hot, because the steam might damage the delicate circuitry, and for pity’s sake don’t drop the thing.

The Kindle is roughly the size of a typical trade paperback and weighs 10.3 ounces. Great. It’s lightweight and portable. So are books.

It uses E-ink, which eliminates the eyestrain of many earlier readers, and the screen is not backlit, which is also easier on the eyes. However, traditional ink-on-paper is also easy on the eyes, and books aren’t backlit, either.

According to the video, “Kindle automatically saves your place in everything you’re reading so you can always pick up right where you left off.” Funny, I can do this with books, thanks to this nifty new gadget called a bookmark. Most bookstores give them away for free, but in a pinch you can also use business cards, subway transfers, or that phantom scrap of paper that seems to perpetually reside in your coat pocket.

It’s got a rechargeable battery that can last for days. Books don’t need a battery: they last in perpetuity.

Most New York Times bestsellers are available for purchase at the low, low price of $9.99 or less — after you’ve forked over $400 for the unit itself. And if you lose or break the Kindle, never fear: Amazon keeps a backup copy of your reading material, which you’re welcome to access once you’ve paid another $400 for a replacement device.

Matthew Ingram, writing in today’s Globe and Mail, compares the Kindle to the Segway, the two-wheel scooter that dropped like a lead balloon when it was released: “Cool device, great idea, but nobody wanted one, apart from a few rich bored geeks.” He’s right, as is the Guardian’s Poole: until e-readers can — at minimum – duplicate all the positive features of traditional books while eliminating most of the drawbacks of earlier devices (including, but not limited to, the prohibitive price), they’re not likely to make much of an impact on the reading public.

P.S. I’m not the first person to point this out, but I wonder if the marketing geniuses at Amazon could have come up with a worse name for their device? A unit associated with books and reading whose name evokes fire and stuff burning. Brilliant.

Johnson Cops National Book Award

Posted 14 November, 2007 in Book News | No comments

Denis Johnson won the 2007 National Book Award for fiction for his acclaimed Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke. The nonfiction award went to Tim Weiner for his book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, which beat out the heavy-hitter in that category, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.

Robert Haas won in the poetry category for Time and Materials, and Sherman Alexie won for young adult literature for his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Joan Didion was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American letters.