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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reading nest

From: Dezeen

"a trustworthy storyteller"

“2014's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Donna Tartt, for her latest novel The Goldfinch.
     Tartt's sprawling epic triumphed over the two other nominees, The Son by Philip Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis.
     Tartt's novel tells the story of Theodore Decker, an orphaned Manhattanite who winds up in possession of a renowned painting, Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch." Tartt's coming of age story follows Theo to Las Vegas, New York City's Lower East Side, and Amsterdam, where the events of his life are intermixed with his burgeoning theories on art and love.”
— Maddie Crum, Huffington Post
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“One of the greatest of Tartt's many gifts is her ability to assure readers that they're in the hands of a trustworthy storyteller. Her novels always feature surprising, in some cases preposterous, narrative elements, but she makes us believe them. She'll wrong-foot us, but she won't cheat us. Characters will certainly go off the rails, but the plot won't. This is an amazing achievement.”
— Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Times (October 17, 2013)
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See an earlier post that mentions The Goldfinch here...

And buy all of Donna Tartt's books here...

And now a word from our contest judges…

We asked five of our contest judges “What do you look for in a story?” and this is what they said:

Kira Vermond
(Guelph author of Owlkids titles The Secret Life of Money, Growing up Inside and Out and the upcoming Why We Live Where We Live.) Find Kira here: http://www.vermond.ca/

"I'm always on the lookout for a story that makes me feel something -- happiness, sadness or even worry -- when I read it. I want to get to know the characters so when they take me on a journey, I'll go along to find out what's going to happen to them."



Lisa Dalrymple
(Fergus author of Skink on the Brink, Bubbly Troubly Polar Bear and If It’s No Trouble, A Polar Bear). Find Lisa here: http://lisadalrymple.com/

"So much of a good story comes down to the development of character. This may be a character I love; it may be a character I hate; it may be a character I want to read more about just because I need to know what makes him/her tick. Then I like to see how this character copes with a certain event or circumstance that occurs. I want to NEED to know what happens next to this character I’ve grown to care about. If you can do those two things in a setting that feels tangible and alive to me, then you’ll have me hooked!"

Heather Wright
(Kitchener author of Writing Fiction: A Hands-On Guide for Teens.) Find Heather here: http://wrightingwords.wordpress.com/my-books/writing-fiction-a-hands-on-guide-for-teens/

"What do I look for in a story? A strong opening that introduces the main character and gets the action of the story going right away. I like characters that would make good friends, which means they're not whiny, or mean, and they don't spend hours wandering around just thinking and feeling sorry for themselves. I like characters who change and grow: if they aren't strong, they learn to be; if they aren't brave, they learn to be; if they're not patient, or kind or understanding; they learn to be."

Lisa McLean
(Guelph communications professional and short-short story author.) Find Lisa here: http://www.stronglywordedletters.ca/about

"For me, a successful short story has a clear plot in which characters do something. And at the end of the doing, I want to know how they’ve been transformed. They might see something differently or hold their head higher (or lower)."

Sharon Blomfield
(Waterloo writer and photographer.) Find Sharon here: http://sharonblomfield.com/About.html

"I know it will be a good story when the first sentence promises me something interesting. When an author gets that part right, the rest of the story always delivers."


Buy all the books mentioned in this post here...

past irony

From: BOOKRIOT

“Percy Shelley famously wrote that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming? […]

     Skeptics reject sincerity because they worry blind belief can lead to such evils as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism. They think strong conviction implies vulnerability to emotional rhetoric and lack of critical awareness.”
— Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll, Salon
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"She Gave it Away Free All Over Town"

From: LadyLillith333

I love fake book covers... here's a real doozy.
     So get reading before the spring weather, along with all that flowing sap and things sprouting out of the ground, takes your mind off the page completely.

"… upended genre conventions”

“A brilliant eccentric is found dead. The police dismiss it as a suicide, but the man’s lover is convinced it was murder and will stop at nothing to discover the truth. Can our scrappy protagonist trust anyone, even her own family? Is a stolen painting the key to unlocking the plot’s multiplying mysteries? Is Trotsky’s variant of Marxism incompatible with the exceptionalism of the individual championed by Aleister Crowley? Up until that last question we had a comfortably familiar crime fiction narrative ready for bed, but then along comes Nick Mamatas to kick over the cradle.

     Our narrator is Dawn, a punk rocker in her late teens. Her idle voyeurism into the lives of her Long Island neighbors leads her to Bernstein, a mystic living in a shack. Bernstein is ostensibly the victim here, but given the particulars of her situation it’s Dawn who we feel for. Bernstein’s dead on page one, whereas Dawn is saddled with a demented grandmother, menaced by a basehead father and a girl who looks strangely like her, and surrounded by a tightening net of too-interested strangers. […]
     Love is the Law is not the first time Mamatas has upended genre conventions with his instantly recognizable style, but it may be his most accomplished effort yet. Not because it’s less ambitious than his previous novels (it isn’t), or because it’s more straightforward (though it is). No, what makes Love is the Law such an exemplary achievement is that here at last Mamatas has struck a nigh-perfect balance amongst all the disparate elements he draws together. In the past, the jarring clash of this narrative flourish with that contemplative aside was all part of the rough-and-tumble charm, but here the pieces all slide smoothly into place…no mean feat, considering how ambiguous it is in places.”
— Jesse Burlington, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Get all of Nick Mamatas' books here...