Writing's on the Wall

From: Calendars.com

"This is a story about the end of the gatekeeper. About the movement spreading throughout media, from which book publishing is hardly exempt, as readers of Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey have made all too clear.
     It’s about the reading public – the great unwashed, the hoi polloi – no longer letting tastemakers decide what’s worth reading. It’s about the masses seizing the means of publication.
     Publishing is an injured beast, but it was mortally wounded before Amazon attacked. And the injuries themselves are partly self-inflicted.
     The proof? The vast majority of top-heavy legacy publishers’ books – agented, edited, sales-managed, otherwise massaged, and only then published – tank, sinking with nary a trace. Conversely, some books, refused by dozens of publishers, go on to achieve rock stardom when some kindly soul finally deigns to bring them to market.
     Which means only one thing: Despite their vast education, experience and good taste, publishers have only about a quarter of a clue what the public really wants. For publishers, it’s 'the end of the world as they know it.'"
— Beverly Akerman, The Globe and Mail
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Jane Rogers' latest wins Arthur C. Clarke Award

"Jane Rogers' vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, has won the UK's top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke award.
     Published by tiny Scottish independent press Sandstone, Rogers' novel – narrated by a teenager – was longlisted for last year's Man Booker prize but missed out on a shortlist place. Now it has beaten some of the biggest names in science fiction, including China Miéville, Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Sheri S Tepper, to take the 2012 Arthur C Clarke award. Rogers has previously won the Somerset Maugham award and been a runner-up for the Guardian fiction prize, but The Testament of Jessie Lamb is her first venture into science fiction.
     'It wasn't an obvious Arthur C. Clarke winner – it's not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press. But I don't think anyone was surprised it was nominated. It really is a very good book and it has found a real audience in the science fiction readership,' said the prize's director Tom Hunter. [...]"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Source image from: Uludagsozlukgaleri

Hercule Poirot... need I say more?

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Marilyn French: November 21, 1929 – May 2, 2009

"[...] With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. 'My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,' she once declared.   
     Her first and best-known novel, The Women’s Room, released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages.
     Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had had on racial equality 25 years earlier. 
     'It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,' Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. 'It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.'
— A. G. Sultzberger and Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
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Dr. Benjamin Spock: Happy Birthday To You

From: Cool Aggregator

“'The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world' is a familiar and powerful adage. After all, perhaps no person exerts more power on a young person's life than his or her mother. Yet in postwar Western society, no person has had more influence on mothers than Benjamin McLane Spock, author of the best-selling self-help manual Baby and Child Care. Since his book first appeared in 1946, it has sold more than 50 million copies in seven editions and has been translated into 39 languages, making it, by some accounts, second only to the Bible in popularity.
     Generations of children around the world have been reared on Spock's fatherly advice, dispensed in a simple, straightforward and reassuring style. Indeed, Spock's book became the modern bible of baby care, and he himself enjoyed near universal acclaim as America's favorite doctor.
     The oldest of six children, Spock was born to a prosperous family in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 2, 1903. His father was a Yale-trained lawyer who became general counsel to the local railroad company. His mother also came from a distinguished background.
     Spock enrolled in Yale University in 1921, where he met and fell in love with Jane Cheney. Though his academic accomplishments were relatively modest, he was a strapping 6-foot-4-inch bastion of the rowing crew, which won a gold medal for the United States in the 1924 Paris Olympics."
— Vision
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"swaddled in diaphanous layers of multimedia"

"I recently bought a book about the future of books. It’s called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors (including two n+1 editors) describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection’s prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new, still-extraterrestrial-seeming iPad, I was surprised to find that very few of the authors mention e-books. Those who do tend to regard them with dread and disgust, like a farmhand studying a handful of fallen locusts. [...]
     The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server. Sitting in the Materials Research Lab among hulking, warmly breathing Xerox Sigma V processors, Hart went on to input and share, with a quixotic singularity of purpose, text after text, from Peter Pan to The Tempest. Few saw the revolutionary implications of his actions until years later, when his Project Gutenberg—which by then had uploaded thousands of books—began to attract copyright lawsuits and became a figurehead for the fledgling hacktivist and open source movements. Today, more than two million e-books are available for free download on the internet. Pair this abundance with an increasingly cheap (and perhaps one day soon, free) Kindle, and you have some counterweight to the dwindling local library. If those noble institutions exist at all in thirty years, our children will probably know them as quiet places to use computers and read e-books. You can already walk into one of 11,000 public libraries, from Manhattan to Missoula, and have e-books loaned to your Kindle. [...]
     Those more skeptical of the expanded e-book model might be at least partly converted by the new, best-selling app version of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, by Touch Press. Eliot’s poem comes swaddled in diaphanous layers of multimedia, which rise or recede upon command, including critical interpretations, Eliot’s own scribbled-upon drafts, and live readings by the author, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness, Fiona Shaw, and Viggo Mortensen. Upon release, the app quickly topped the iTunes list of best-selling book apps, and for good reason. It is the best enhanced e-book yet devised, revivifying a text long buried under its own accumulated dust. And yet it still feels chimerical, incongruous—an old man with cyborg arms."
— Robert Moore, n+1 magazine
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Famous First Words

I just discovered this article by Andrew Pyper on The Globe and Mail website. It's a fitting addendum to yestersday's post.

"Novelists can be superstitious ninnies sometimes. The good-luck coffee mug we set next to the keyboard every morning, the song we put on six-hour repeat, the Ideal Reader we summon to mind who kisses the tops of our heads and sends us off on a new day’s fabrications. Some of these fixations are helpful, others worrying symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. But no writerly preoccupation is more universally shared – or has been the cause of more agonized hours staring at the blank page – than the First Line. [...]
     How we begin a book is widely considered to be a matter so crucial, so decisive in determining whether a book soars or stalls, so elusive and mysterious, it’s often spoken of in terms closer to spell-casting than sentence making. So much is asked of the first line it can sometimes feel like an impossible burden to be carried by a handful of words."
— Andrew Pyper, The Globe and Mail
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