Three-time Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlisted for 2012

From: This Is Horror

"China Miéville joins SF heavy-hitters Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Sheri S. Tepper on the shortlist for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award, putting him in line to win the prize an unprecedented fourth time.
     Miéville – who won the prize in 2001 with Perdido Street Station, in 2005 with Iron Council and in 2010 with The City & the City – is nominated for Embassytown, a deep-space exploration of language, truth and identity which was shortlisted for the British science fiction awards earlier this year.
     His 2002 novel The Scar was also nominated for the prize, which is awarded to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK in the previous calendar year.
     According to the chair of the judges, Andrew M. Butler, there's no reason why the prize shouldn't be awarded to Miéville again."
— Richard Lea, The Guardian
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From: Vasanth Seshadri writes

Arthur C. Clarke

1917 - 2008

"In 2007, Clarke completed 90 orbits around the sun. He was now in a wheelchair, but his mind continued to reach the farthest outposts of the universe. He marked his 90th birthday by speaking to his followers through a Youtube video. He expressed three birthday wishes: For ET to call, for mankind to quit his addiction to oil, and for lasting peace in Sri Lanka. He could not resist making more predictions. He declared this the beginning of the golden age of space travel. He predicted that thousands of space tourists will travel to the moon and beyond within the next 30 years."
— Vasanth Seshadri writes
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Buy books by China Miéville and Arthur C. Clarke here...

Read more about China Miéville here...

Censors and Sensibilities

"Intrigued by rumours of a censor's library, literary historian Nicole Moore went searching for the old customs archive of banned books. In 2005, she tracked down the collection seven storeys underground in a huge repository in western Sydney.
     Thousands of banned books, all neatly covered and catalogued, filled 793 boxes. As Moore shows, such secret collections have accumulated in many parts of the world, often carefully tended by censor-librarians. Private Case, Public Scandal, the book that revealed the contents of the British Library's secret collection, was itself banned in Australia in 1966. Not surprisingly, the 20th century's largest and most notorious repository of forbidden literature was in the Soviet Union, with more than 1 million items.
     Having uncovered this long-buried Australian archive, Moore set about the daunting task of charting its history. She was aided by Peter Coleman's pioneering work, Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition, first published 50 years ago. The Censor's Library is a much more substantial work, analysing in forensic detail the major controversies and teasing out the narrative of how such restrictions, and the ensuing protests, shaped Australia's cultural, intellectual and literary landscape."
— Craig Munro, The Sydney Morning Herald
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"Some of the most controversial books in history are now regarded as classics. The Bible and works by Shakespeare are among those that have been banned over the past two thousand years. Here is a selective timeline of book bannings, burnings, and other censorship activities.

259–210 B.C.: The Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti is said to have buried alive 460 Confucian scholars to control the writing of history in his time. In 212 B.C., he burned all the books in his kingdom, retaining only a single copy of each for the Royal Library—and those were destroyed before his death. With all previous historical records destroyed, he thought history could be said to begin with him.

A.D. 8: The Roman poet Ovid was banished from Rome for writing Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). He died in exile in Greece eight years later. All Ovid’s works were burned by Savonarola in Florence in 1497, and an English translation of Ars Amatoria was banned by U.S. Customs in 1928.

35: The Roman emperor Caligula opposed the reading of The Odyssey by Homer, written more than 300 years before. He thought the epic poem was dangerous because it expressed Greek ideas of freedom.

640: According to legend, the caliph Omar burned all 200,000 volumes in the library at Alexandria in Egypt. In doing so, he said: 'If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.' In burning the books, the caliph provided six months’ fuel to warm the city’s baths"
— Freedom to Read
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Junk Food Books

Rated at a fifth grade reading level
by the University of Arkansas

"[U.S.] High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels far below those appropriate for teens, according to a recent report.
     A compilation of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school shows that the average reading level of that list is 5.3 -- barely above the fifth grade.
     'A fifth-grade reading level is obviously not high enough for college-level reading. Nor is it high enough for high school-level reading, either, or for informed citizenship,' writes Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas."
— Huffington Post
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"Our nation's (U.S.A.] graduating high school class of 2011 had a 32 percent proficiency rate in math and a 31 percent proficiency rate in reading [...]
     When it comes to reading, American students performed reasonably well compared to most European countries, and only 10 countries outperform us by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the U. S. include Finland (46 percent), Singapore and New Zealand (42 percent), Japan and Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent)."
— School Library Journal
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A Team of Wild Horses Working 'Round the Clock for the Elora Writers' Festival

Source image: Tommy Edwards (1955) from: Collectors Weekly

Elvis Presley takes over the reins from Bill Haley as "Intergalactic Trans-dimensional Spokesperson" for the Elora Writers' Festival. This brief ceremony was part of the opening reception of the Timeless Legends Convention held annually at the Elysian Fields Bar & Grill (Stardate: 6127.6).

"Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory." — Salvador Dali

Photo by Martha Holmes (from: Bob's Blog)

Salvador Dali and his wife Gala on the cover of a recent copy of LIFE magazine. It looks like he'll be spending some of his glorious money on tickets to the Elora Writers' Festival (Sunday, May 27, 2012).

Buy your tickets here...

Truthiness

From: Introligatornia

The necessity of fact-checking nonfiction has been discussed and disputed off and on in the publishing world over the past 40 years, usually in the wake of discoveries of inaccuracies or outright deceptions. Clifford Irving, named 'Con Man of the Year' by Time Magazine in 1972, sold a fake biography of the reclusive Howard Hughes and spent more than a year in prison for fraud. Six years before the flurry of discussion that has greeted The Lifespan of a Fact, there was the great debate — and much finger-pointing — following revelations that James Frey, author of the best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had exaggerated or simply made up information about his traumatic life. In 2008, Margaret B. Jones’s lauded memoir, Love and Consequences, the saga of her biracial gangbanging girlhood in the 1980s in South Central Los Angeles was revealed as pure fiction and 'Margaret B. Jones' to be a pseudonym for a white middle-class woman from Sherman Oaks, Margaret Seltzer. The book was trashed by Riverhead, its publisher. [...]
     [John] D’Agata is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, teaching creative nonfiction writing, and is the author or editor of four books, so he should know better — and I’m sure he does. So what is he up to? This is the intriguing question. What’s his game? You could say, as some have, that he is lazy, unwilling to follow through with the heavy and often tedious background work to get it right. You could say he doesn’t care about his responsibility as a writer to tell a story and enlighten his readership, or even the people about whom he is writing. You could say — and I would agree if you did — that D’Agata is not only untrustworthy but downright arrogant.
     For example: When [Jim] Fingal proves that there are 31 strip clubs in Las Vegas and not 34 as D’Agata claimed, D’Agata says: 'The rhythm of "34" was better in the sentence than the rhythm of "31," so I changed it.' And when he swaps the name of a bar from 'Boston Saloon' to 'Bucket of Blood,' it’s okay, because '"Bucket of Blood" is more interesting.'”
— Lee Gutkind, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Painting With a Battered Remington

"William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928 and has lived in England since the 1950s. He gave up sculpture when he turned 30, became a copywriter, and wrote his first two novels and several stories largely on company time. These stories, composed 'on a battered Remington typewriter in an office corridor in London' and set in England, were 'driven by curiosity about the unfamiliar.' [...]
     A conversation between a Protestant and Catholic priest is the subject of his most recent great story, Of the Cloth (2000), which, although completely grounded in concrete reality, hovers at fable's borders in a way similar to John Cheever's The Swimmer. It is a reminder that if Trevor's range of subjects has narrowed it has done so, as he described recently, in the manner of painters who 'paint the same subject many times … in search of another angle, another viewpoint …' In 1989, he made another comparison with painting when he was asked to define the short story:
     'I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.'"
— Chris Power, The Guardian
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Buy all of William Trevor's books here...