end papers

From: classaction.org

“April 17, 2014 – Last week, the Authors Guild (AG) filed an appeal to the US Court of Appeals in their ongoing fight against Google’s book-scanning project. This week, eight amicus briefs were filed with the court declaring the original ruling unacceptable. The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) participated in two of those briefs. Longtime TWUC members Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill and Yann Martel joined a brief prepared on behalf of 17 of the world's most beloved authors. Other signatories include J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Malcolm Gladwell, and Ursula Le Guin. As a founding member of the International Authors Forum (IAF), TWUC itself is represented in the IAF's amicus brief. “TWUC is extremely grateful to Margaret, Larry, and Yann for showing leadership and agreeing to sign the individual author brief,” said TWUC Chair, Dorris Heffron. “It’s so important for the courts to see the world’s authors are against Google on this.” The New York Second Circuit court previously ruled Google’s unpermitted, uncompensated copying of millions of complete, in-copyright works to be a "fair use." The AG’s appeal and the author briefs argue such a finding is without precedent and plainly ridiculous.”

— The Writers’ Union of Canada
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“The most arresting moment in 'Google and the World Brain' Ben Lewis' thoughtful new documentary about the search giant's effort to scan all the world's books, takes place not in Mountain View or a courtroom but rather a monastery high above Catalonia in Spain. The film's globetrotting crew is interviewing Father Damiá Roure, who runs the library at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, about what happened when Google came to digitize the library's collection. Roure speaks happily of the Googlers' visit, explaining that their efforts allowed the monks to bring their collection -- which dates to the library's founding in the 11th century -- to the wider world.
     As he finishes speaking, a filmmaker just out of the frame asks about what else Google might do with the information found in those books. What if, she asks, Google wanted to sell the information they had scanned in those books? Should the monks get a cut of the sale?”
— Casey Newton, cnet
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artist as criminal

From: Freedom to Read Week

"More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
     The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
     They have urged the United Nations to create an international bill of digital rights that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the internet age."
— Mathew Taylor and Nick Hopkins, The Guardian
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More prison talk...

"Jurors in Chicago found author and infomercial host Kevin Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt Tuesday for making false claims about his book, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. In a series of infomercials, Trudeau claimed the book revealed a 'miracle substance' discovered in the 1950s and kept secret by food companies and the government that allows people to eat anything, not exercise and not gain weight.
     In fact, the book prescribed daily exercise and a 500-calorie-a-day diet. Trudeau was charged with violating a 2004 court order prohibiting him from making false claims regarding his book. In an unexpected move, U.S. District Judge Ronald Guzman had Trudeau taken into custody immediately after determining that the author, who prosecutors think has millions of dollars stashed in overseas bank accounts, was a flight risk.

    Margaret Atwood writes about Dave Eggers' The Circle and the 'prison' of living in public: 'Publication on social media is in part a performance, as is everything "social" that human beings do; but what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be "ourselves"? What happens to us if we must be "on" all the time? Then we're in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement.'"
— Annalisa Quinn, NPR
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getting naked

From: Found in Mom's Basement

"Beyond the world of storytelling, plot is defined as a secret scheme to reach a specific end. Or it’s a parcel of land. Or it means to mark a graph, chart, or map: the plotting shows us what has changed; our ship is headed this way. To a writer (me) interested in (obsessed with?) plot-making, all of these are significant definitions. The lessons abound.

     I once read somewhere that Margaret Atwood compared novel writing to performing burlesque: don’t take off your clothes too slowly, she advised, or the reader will get bored; get naked too fast, and the entertainment ends before it can really begin. I put that in my plot-pocket, too.
     Arc is tied into notions of plot because both concern action, event, and change as they relate to character. I want to say that arc is the structure on which plot hangs. And now, a second later, I want to say that arc is the unfolding of plot, the specific path that events take to enable a character to move through a story. And now, two seconds later, I want to say that if plot is the what and the why, then arc is the how. As you can see, I’m still working all this out in my mind."
— Edan Lepucki, The Millions
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palindromes and palimpsests

From: cobra.be

“'The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.'

     Margaret Atwood found this first epigraph for her William Empson lectures, published as Negotiating with the Dead: A writer on writing (2002), in Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies: Notes and notations (1992). The act of naming explains the peculiar title of Atwood’s new novel MaddAddam – the third volume of a dystopian sequence, so far including Oryx and Crake (reviewed in the TLS, May 16, 2003) and The Year of the Flood (TLS, September 18, 2009). The title MaddAddam looks and sounds like a stretched (or stuttered) version of the appellation 'Madam,' but in Atwood’s dystopia it is the collective name for the grandmasters of an elaborate computer game: 'EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?'
     […] Atwood’s exploration of the boundaries between myth, storytelling and written fiction has previously been combined with her interest in sexual politics and the power structures that arise from the raw, biological facts of human reproduction. Most memorably in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) she evoked another dystopia, the Republic of Gilead, where in the aftermath of nuclear war, fertile women were appropriated by the state and assigned to the households of the governing elite to serve as surrogate wombs.”
— Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement
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Buy all of Margaret Atwood's books here...

See a related post here...

Man Booker Longlist Announced

"The Man Booker judges have presented 'vibrant' list for the prize’s longlist mainly focusing on disasters ranging from the financial to the natural. Heavyweight authors including Margaret Atwood, JM Coetzee, Roddy Doyle and David Peace missed out.
     The judges took nine months to sift through 151 works, the most in recent times by a Booker jury, before coming up with 13 titles for the 2013 longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
     Jonny Geller, joint chief executive of literary and talent agency Curtis Brown, said: 'It is one of the few longlists in recent years where I want to read more than a handful. Full of life, vibrancy and different worlds. The absence of some big names is not the point; the inclusion of new ones is what is exciting.'”
— Nick Clark, The Independent
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alone at the top

'Sad news, for fans of Alice Munro, the short-story author whom Margaret Atwood once described as en route to 'international literary sainthood,' and whose writing Jane Smiley, awarding her the Man Booker international prize, said was 'practically perfect.' She has told Canadian press that she's retiring – and this time she sounds definite.
     Winning the Trillium book award for Dear Life, Munro told the National Post that the prize was 'a little more special in that I'm probably not going to write any more. And, so, it's nice to go out with a bang,' adding that this was definitely it for her, and she has 'very much' come to terms with the decision.
     'I'm delighted. Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable,' she said."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here...

The life and works of the late Iain Banks to be celebrated at the Edinborough International Book Festival

From: eBay

"The lineup of over 700 events for this year's [Edinborough international book] festival was announced today, with appearances at the festival site in Charlotte Square Gardens from major literary names including Roddy Doyle, Kate Atkinson, John Banville, Antonia Fraser and Edna O'Brien.

     As the festival marks its 30th anniversary, Salman Rushdie – chosen for the 1983 Granta best of young British novelists list – will be looking back on his career over the last 30 years, Margaret Atwood will be chairing a series of events on genre, and Colm Tóibín will be tackling Sons and Lovers as part of a new series of workshops in which the audience is guided through a close reading of a favourite book."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all of Ian Banks' books here...

Dreams Within Dreams

"Last night’s dream: 'The Forest of Misplaced Inventory,' said the dream voice. 'That shouldn’t take much description!' The visual was a stack of shrink-wrapped red plastic garbage-can lids in a stand of green spruce trees.

     It must have been a writing dream. I sometimes have those. But what was it trying to tell me? Dreams often pun: Was the key word invention? Has my invention inventory been mislaid somewhere among the synaptic neuron branches? Will I find out later? In a novel I probably would, but life isn’t a novel, and vice versa.


The best writing dream I ever had was in the mid-Sixties. I dreamt I’d written an opera about a nineteenth-century English emigrant called Susanna Moodie, whose account of her awful experiences, Roughing It In The Bush, was among my parents’ books. It was a very emphatic dream, so I researched Mrs. Moodie, and eventually wrote a poem sequence, a television play, and a novel—Alias Grace—all based on material found in her work. But that sort of dream experience is rare."
— Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books
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Buy Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In The Bush and all of Margaret Atwood's books here...

Hybridization

"[…] We are sitting at a coffee shop in Austin, Texas; I am asking [Robert Jackson] Bennett questions about his latest novel, American Elsewhere, which was featured on 'most highly anticipated' lists around the Internet at the end of 2012. He tells me that although Mr. Shivers was shelved under horror and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in that genre, the horror community disowned it. 'They were like "no, this is not horror. You’re wrong,’'' Bennett says. 'That’s always been kind of a struggle for me, in that the folks who really like my books are frequently not the genre hard-core people. It’s usually folks who read a wide variety of stuff, that tend to fall into mainstream. And a lot of the fantasy that I like isn’t hardcore fantasy — it’s stuff that mainstream, non-geek people would love to read just as much.' He sighs. 'But then again no one really knows what the hell they’re talking about when they talk about this stuff. It’s all made up.'

     If something is identifiable as 'genre fiction,' it should be easy to identify what genre it’s in. After all, to classify something as belonging to a genre is to say that it is part of an easily recognizable group formed around shared traits. Over the past forty years, genre-bending has become increasingly common, as mainstream and 'literary' authors lift plots and themes from fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror.

   In 1989, SF author Bruce Sterling invented the term 'slipstream' to describe fiction by mainstream authors such as Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and J.M. Coetzee that slipped beyond the margins of realism without being classifiable as fantasy or science fiction."
— Amy Gentry, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy all of Robert Jackson Bennett's books here...

"floating petri dish"

"This summer, you can take a cruise featuring more than sun-kissed college kids, waterslides and black tie dinners. Instead, vacationers who cruise on the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 on Aug. 15 will set sail with author Margaret Atwood as she promotes her most recent book, 'MaddAddam,' just before its official release.
     The third book in Atwood’s trilogy that includes Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood will be published on Sept. 3. The science fiction work will conclude the MaddAddam trilogy and will continue the story of the Crakers, a bio-engineered species that is the only surviving species following a man-made plague."

— Taylor Malmsheimer, New York Daily News
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"In February, an engine fire crippled the Triumph, turning what was supposed to be a four-day cruise into an eight-day debacle and public relations nightmare for Carnival. CNN covered the story of the ship, which floated for five days in the Gulf of Mexico without power or working toilets, as an epic breaking news event, taking live calls from stranded passengers and referring to the ship to as a 'floating petri dish.' The Triumph had more than 4,200 people on board (including crew and passengers)."
— Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News
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"Noroviruses like cruise ships. Current and recent passengers on two Princess Cruise Lines ships can now attest to this personally.
     More than 200 people on the Ruby Princess and the Crown Princess, both bound for South Florida, were reporting gastrointestinal illnesses, company officials told Associated Press on Saturday. Those officials blamed a norovirus.
     Noroviruses are no cause for hysteria, but they’re far from pleasant, causing vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. They can also cause a low fever, headaches and muscle aches, but for folks cooped up in tiny cabins, aches are the least of their troubles."
— Los Angeles Times
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Buy germ-free copies of all of Margaret Atwood's books here...

"[…] mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. […]" — from the The Confiteor of the Catholic Mass (Wikipedia)

"[…] The gist of the thing is this: novelist Ian McEwan had just been accused [2008] of plagiarising from a historical memoir in his novel Atonement […]
     Authors of the caliber of Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and even Thomas Pynchon (who is notorious for shunning publicity) all wrote letters published in that week’s Daily Telegraph, basically standing up and saying 'I am Spartacus' – saying that if [Ian] McEwen was to be so casually accused of this heinous crime then they themselves were intimately acquainted with the crime in question. If anyone was to be waving a tar brush, it seemed, the overwhelming response from the writers was 'tar one, tar all.' The authors all admitted with gay abandon that they themselves had cheerfully plundered other work – be it historical writing, autobiography, primary-source documents, even other novels – in the writing of their own books, and said that such research was the lifeblood of any novel that depended on period detail. […]
     Literary editor of the august Times of London, Erica Wagner, weighed in too: 'We have come to a pretty pass where an author like Ian McEwen has to write on the front page of The Guardian explaining what research is. The myth of originality? There’s no such thing.'
     Research is essential, and we all do it, from all sorts of sources. Some of the authors who wrote their letters in support of Ian McEwen revealed their own sources – Colm Toibin admitted to using actual phrases and sentences from the work of Henry James in The Master, his (fictional) re-imagining of a period in the life of said Henry James; Rose Tremain acknowledged that her book Music and Silence depended, as she put it, 'to a shocking extent' on a small illustrated book by the name of Christian IV by one Birger Mikkelson; […]"
— Alma Alexander, Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelist
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Pigs Will Be Pigs

"I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. I read it at age nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book – the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust."
— Margaret Atwood, The Guardian
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Buy all of George Orwell's books — and everything by Margaret Atwood — here...

Intervention

Photo: Michael Hale

"Fellow fiction writers,
     Let's be frank: we're not the healthiest-minded bunch. If we were we'd spend our days doing something more pleasant than writing fiction. But lately we seem to have taken a turn for the worse. We look out at the shifting landscape of publishing—e-books rising, big publishers quaking—and obsessively ask, both publicly and privately, Is the novel dead? Is it all Fifty Shades of Twilight from here on out? Are we going the way of the poets, soon to be read by only each other? [...]
     Irritable. Pessimistic. Beset by feelings of worthlessness. There's a term for this pattern of emotions. It's called 'depression.' We, as fiction writers, are collectively depressed. We might not be depressed as individuals; but we have become depressed as a group."
— Yael Goldstein Love, Huffington Post
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Squids in Space

From: Good Show Sir

"Many of her casual readers, and most critics of her work, are aware by now that Margaret Atwood got herself into a spot of bother after the publication of her pulpish dystopia Oryx and Crake (2003), when she disassociated her text from the conversation of SF, the underlying megatext of conventions, phrases, solutions, tags and cliches which honest Science Fiction writers both acknowledge and make new in their works, and which has evolved enormously over the years.
     Despite her conspicuous use of SF topoi copied holus-bolus as they existed half a century ago — i.e., the Superman Mad Scientist who Ends the World while Simultaneously Creating a New Species to Inhabit the Remains — she claimed in 2003 that what she wrote was not Science Fiction at all, because Science Fiction was all about squids in space. [...]
     In 2003, Ursula K. Le Guin — a writer of singular importance to the field not only for her fiction but for her critical work — made it clear that the squids-in-space bon mot was genuinely discourteous. But her measured rebuke seems to have made little difference. Atwood has now reiterated her claim almost unmodified, in her latest book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination [New York: Doubleday/Nan A Talese, 2011. 255 pp.]. It may be that like a lobster in a trap who cannot find the exit door, Atwood cannot work her way out of the perplex of ill-judged subjectivity in which she had trapped herself: perhaps because, as with any statement of belief as opposed to argument, her 'definition' of SF is as unfalsifiable as any sermon. [...]
     When she genuinely relaxes, though, it is not all bad. The [Richard Ellmann Lectures presented in 2010 at Emory University] themselves give us, in three sections combining memoir and excursus, an attractive picture of the young Atwood discovering fantastika in general, SF in particular. Her early reading was clearly intense, and she conveys a sense of that sensual intensity here through some dextrous narrative passagework, though without giving any large number of specific textual referents. Indeed — to return to the main burden of complaint about the failure of In Other Worlds to argue its case — it is noticeable that, utopias and dystopias excepted, almost no SF novels published after the early 1950s are either mentioned explicitly or by inference, with the exception of William Gibson (but stopping short at  , which is treated as both utopian and dystopian, but not as an SF prayer to the Gods Inside Tomorrow), Ursula Le Guin (inescapable chider and presider) and Bruce Sterling (for his Slipstream riff) [see more here]. I may be failing to remember others, but the book (or at least my advance review copy) contains no index. As far as “SF and the Human Imagination,” we are left with teen encounters with pulp, and the extremities of the utopian mind (which mainly, I think wrongly, are extrinsic to the line and structure of SF itself). As far as the megatext is concerned, nought. There is no there there."
— John Clute, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Fiction Rules

Fourteen writers share their lists of writing "rules and regulations" with the Guardian:

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary. — Elmore Leonard

8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. — Margaret Atwood

7. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. — Anne Enright

5. Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. — Neil Gaiman

Read more... then get back to writing.