Category: words

THE AFTERLIFE OF INDEPENDENTS

It’s been a year since Duthie Books, Vancouver’s largest independent bookstore, succumbed to the mega-store onslaught and went out of business. Owner Celia Duthie had to do something in her next life, so she started a book-lovers retreat on the Gulf Islands.  “Book clubs have taken off across the continent over the past decade, whether they’re small groups of friends who once studied English lit together or TV audiences turned on to reading by book-promoting celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey. Even the rise of megabookstores like Chapters and Indigo signal a new corporate awareness of the appetite for books and the rise of a so-called salon culture – people from all walks of life who remain interested in reading and ideas, despite the prevailing media obsession with movies, television and the Internet.” – National Post (Canada)

THE RACE IS TO THE LUCKY

Ah yes, we all like to think that destiny, talent and hard work lead to artistic success. But these qualities aren’t the determining factor when it comes to literature. “What determines a work’s longevity is in many cases an accumulation of unliterary accidents in the lives of individuals years and sometimes even decades after the writer has gone unto the white creator. ‘The race is not to the swift,’ Ecclesiastes tell us, ‘nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happen to them all.’ Nowhere is this truer than literary survival.” – Boston Review

SLASH AND BURN, BABY

One might not be able to (or want to) imagine Captain Kirk, Agent Fox Mulder, and Obi-Wan Kenobi as the fodder for red-hot gay erotica, but for the burgeoning groups of writers known as “slash” or “Fan-fict” writers (mostly heterosexual women) pop culture’s most famous male stars are the stuff fantasies are made of.  Largely published in print fanzines and on the web, slash writers have “elaborated the worlds they felt were ignored by the shows’ producers, ‘repairing or dismissing unsatisfying aspects.'” – Brill’s Content

FOLLOW-UP

  • Michael Ondaatje had a respectable literary career before “The English Patient” and the movie of it made him truly famous. The author, who lives in Toronto, has been described as “the Greta Garbo of Canadian letters.” With all the distraction of Hollywood, it’s probably not surprising that his follow-up book took seven years to produce. – The Telegraph (UK)

ROTH FOR NOBEL?

Ten years ago, “Philip Roth was still considered a literary troublemaker, a gleeful misogynist, a self-absorbed rake who made it impossible for an entire generation to look at liver the same way again.  But over the past decade, something magical has taken place. While his peers have slipped quietly into their literary dotage, Roth’s powers have steadily waxed. Since 1991, he has pumped out six books with metronomic, superhuman regularity, winning five major awards, including a Pulitzer. Now, with the imminent publication of his new novel, The Human Stain, the unthinkable has occurred: Portnoy is a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize.” – New York Magazine

UNLIMITED READ

A new hypertext book is a rabbit hole of an experience. “253” is a story of the 253 passengers (and the drive) on a train. But every sentence is filled with hypertext leading to details and subplots and descriptions of the other people on the train. No two readers are likely to read it the same way. “It’s far more work than writing an ordinary story,” says the author. In a traditional book, the author does not have to create everything around a character, everything they see. In hypertext, it’s all there: The writer has “to create interesting material that may never be read by anybody, ever.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

READING REVOLUTION

New electronic publishing technologies change not only the way we’ll be able to access words in the future, but also the way stories are written. The simple linear reading experience may be coming to an end. “This is either the dawn of a new age of writing or the end of Western civilization.” – Washington Post