"Nobody can hurt me without my permission." — Mahatma Gandhi

Martin Luther King, Jr. (from: The Southern Humanist)

Tartan Noir

"[William] McIlvanney has been called the Godfather of Tartan Noir and lists bestselling crime writers like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid among his fans.

     'I find it very flattering,' said McIlvanney. 'I went to the Bloody Scotland [crime writing] festival last year and I was amazed by how many people were so benign towards me. I mean, to be called the Godfather of Tartan Noir - which is not my favourite term - is hugely flattering.'
     His re-released novel, Laidlaw, is broadly considered to be the first work of Tartan Noir and kicked off a phenomenon that has collected international acclaim for its portrayals of the dark side of Scottish life.
     'Anything that keeps the book alive, I think, is good,' said McIlvanney.
     'I don’t think that it’ll be the ultimate expression of Scottish culture, folk will come along and do more but I think it’s great that there’s an area where the value, the significance of the written word, is appreciated.'
     Set in Glasgow, McIlvanney, says the novel reflects the No Mean City tag but doesn't exaggerate it.
     'I think Glasgow has a reputation which is not unearned but which is exaggerated,' he said.
     'Besides being a hard town it’s a terrifically warm town, I think, it’s a place, as I once said, where Greta Garbo wouldn’t have been alone - she’d have been in a pub somewhere and somebody would shout out, 'Hey you in the funny hat, come over and have a blue lagoon!’"
— Tony Black's Pulp Pusher
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Buy William McIlvanney's books here...

l'écrivain-ity

"[…] In the neighbouring 9th arrondissement, Les Plumes hotel pays tribute to literary lovers: George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Juliette Drouet and Victor Hugo. Set on the Rue Lamartine, named after the Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine, the hotel even has literary quotations etched on the shower glass. And in L'Hotel in the St Germain des Prés district, guests can sleep in the room in which Oscar Wilde died.

     One of the first literary-themed hotels was the Le Pavillon des Lettres, which opened in 2010, a stone's throw from the French president's residence at the Élysée Palace, where 26 rooms pay tribute to writers including William Shakespeare, Émile Zola and Franz Kafka.
     Whatever the conceit, it appears to work; Le Marcel is full, and Laurence Guilloux, director of the recently opened four-star R Kipling hotel, says its leather armchairs, fireplace and library are popular both with the 'young and dynamic' and 'older couples who like the ambience … it's about creating a character, a personality for each hotel.'"
— Kim Willsher, The Guardian
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"Voldemort, Jeff Bezos and Darth Vader walk into a bar..."

From: verging on pertinence

"My anti-Amazon stance once made my sister cry. It was Christmas morning. She was talking enthusiastically about her Kindle and the freedom it gave her to read books and newspapers from around the world. I pounced, scolding her for supporting the Voldemort of the book industry.

     Didn’t she know Amazon was destroying our independent bookstores through its loss-leading low prices? Or that by locking Kindle users into buying from Amazon, and preventing them from easily reading their purchases on, say, the Kobo or Sony Reader, it had created a 'walled garden' that was giving it a frightening ebook market share (an estimated 60% in the US and 80% in Australia)?...
     [But] gradually, and very much in denial about it all the while, I have turned into my worst nightmare: an independent bookstore-loving bibliophile who shops mostly at Amazon.
     Whatever you do, please don’t tell my sister."
— Charlotte Harper, The Guardian
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"[...] bipedal nests of contradictions"

Source images: pxleyes and Retronaut

"No stage of the writing process — not the editor’s first response to the manuscript, not the review gauntlet — is as fraught for writers as those first few months of uncertainty: that miserable time when we think, believe, know with absolute assurance that we’ve found the key to the novel in our heads, though maybe, probably, definitely not.

     Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on. She’ll try, because she has to ('Well, it’s about this friendship between these two, um, friends . . . ') all the while listening to the magic leaking out of the balloon, and she’ll hate you for it.
     If writers agree on anything — which is unlikely — it’s that nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready. Unfortunately, because we’re writers, aka bipedal nests of contradictions, avoiding the temptation to share is never as easy as simply keeping our mouths shut."
— Mark Slouca, The New York Times Read more…

From: Retrogasm

Resistance Movement

"In Canadian publishing, all eyes are on Quebec. That's because the province is debating whether to fix the price of books. The argument for fixing prices, many say, is to ensure that the city's [Quebec City?] independent bookstores will still be standing at the end of the decade.
    A book industry coalition has been campaigning for a year now, hoping to implement a fixed book price policy for new releases that would disallow any reseller from slashing prices for at least a nine month period. During that initial nine months, resellers would be allowed to extend a maximum 10% discount to readers.

     The book industry was finally heard from, officially, on Monday, in Quebec's Parliament Hill, as several proponents stipulated their views at the Fixed Book Price Hearings. […]
     The French-language niche market in Quebec province, whose entire population is the size of New York City, is suddenly making big waves as it considers not only fixed pricing for books but as it reconsiders the entire model of book selling."
— Luca Palladino, Publishers Weekly
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Buy books by Gabrielle Roy and Leonard Cohen here...