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News of Andrew Wylie’s deal with Amazon.com really brought home to me how much of a shift reading in general, and publishing specifically, are undergoing with the rise of new technologies. Five articles that appeared over the weekend address that shift in different and interesting ways.

The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post, A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life
By Dave Kindred

The ongoing revolution in how news and information are delivered in the digital era provides the backdrop for Kindred’s highly readable account of the Post’s journalistic triumphs and business travails over the last four years.

The Guardian:

Might Ryu Murakami’s switch to the iPad signal the beginning of the end for traditional publishers?

Earlier this month, in a manoeuvre I predict will soon be seen as a watershed, the admired contemporary Japanese writer Ryu Murakami announced that he was publishing his new book, A Singing Whale, in partnership with Apple, as an iPad download, turning his back on his regular Japanese publisher, Kodansha. The book will also include video content set to music composed by Oscar-winning Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Boston.com:

Kicking back with a good e-reader
They’re portable and give you access to thousands of titles, but which is the best for beach days? Or should you just go old school?

On Monday, Amazon.com, the online merchant that also developed the Kindle e-book, said that over the past three months, it had sold 143 digital books for every 100 hardcovers and that the gap had widened in the past month to 180 digital sales for each 100 in paper. Forrester Research, a technology tracking firm in Cambridge, expects that as many as 10 million e-reader devices will be sold in the nation this year.

TriQuarterly Online:

Flipboard points to the future of reading

If you have an iPad, you should install Flipboard right now. If you don’t, bear with me because I’m going to attempt to make a point about reading online in general, whether you have an iPad or not.

As you see from the video, Flipboard is an app that aggregates content from the links your friends on Twitter and Facebook are sharing, plus packages of pre-selected topics like books, technology, politics, etc. It then assembles these pages into a beautiful magazine-like format that takes advantage of the iPad form factor perfectly. I can already tell that once some of the rough edges are smoothed out, this will be my app of first choice for reading content from the web.

* I’ve downloaded Flipboard twice for my iPad– first time it choked when I tried to set it up, second time it asked for my email to put me on a “wait” list to create my account. Yeah, umm.. fuck that. This app has potential but was released way, way too early.

And finally from The Guardian:

Technology fetishism is skin deep
Our shallow obsession with gadgets disguises a conservatism where real change takes place at numbingly slow speed

A milestone has been reached, a Rubicon crossed. With the news, announced on the Guardian’s front page on Wednesday, that ebook sales on Amazon have outstripped hardbacks for the first time, I have decided no longer to pay attention to hi-tech company marketing memos. That means that next time Mark Zuckerman converts another half billion users to Facebook, Jeff Bezos converts another half million words to Kindle ebook format, or Steve Jobs farts to the left – or will it be to the right this time? – I won’t be reading.

This guy is the real deal, the most imaginative writer I’ve come across. If you haven’t read his stuff, you’re missing out on some of the best writing being done today, genre or otherwise.

via the New York Times:

Making Squid the Meat of a Story

If your idea of a science fiction writer is a scrawny guy with computer-glow pallor who’s a little too interested in whether warp speed is a realistic rate of travel, China Miéville is not that person.

Tall and buff, he has a shaved head, a row of earrings curving sharply around the edge of his left ear, a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics and a mind that skips easily from “Jane Eyre” to welfare reform to the joys of bicycling around London. He is also a serious Socialist who ran for Parliament in 2001. The Evening Standard called him “the sexiest man in British politics.”

Mr. Miéville’s novels — seven so far — have been showered with prizes; three have won the Arthur C. Clarke award, given annually to the best science fiction novel published in Britain. And his growing fan base has come to include reviewers outside the sci-fi establishment.

I first began reading Saramago in 1999, a year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writing was like nothing I had read before– erudite, playful, inventive, challenging, sometimes maddeningly discursive, but always humane, always compassionate. I read the rest of his novels as quickly as I could obtain them and was looking forward to the release of The Elephant’s Journey in 2010.

Earlier this summer, I was at Pacific University when I learned that José Saramago had died. It was surprising how much this news disconcerted me, as if I had learned a favorite uncle had died. Two days later I was having coffee with one of the faculty when, assuming she had heard the news, I noted Saramago’s death. She had not heard the news and her initial reaction was much like mine. We sat together for awhile saying nothing, an odd but comforting moment, two people reflecting on the loss of someone neither had met but that each felt they knew.

via The Guardian:

The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago

“The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it’s not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear. . .”

When he died last month, the man who wrote those words in The Elephant’s Journey, José Saramago, was an old man, 87 years old. His preoccupations and politics and passions might seem to belong to a past age: a diehard communist impatient of dictators, subversive of orthodoxies, disrespectful of international corporations, peasant-born in a marginal country and identifying himself always with the powerless, a radical who lived on into an age when even liberals are spoken of as leftist . . . But the still more intransigent radicalism of his art makes it impossible to dismiss him from the busy chatrooms of the present. He got ahead of us; he is ahead of us. His work belongs to our future. I take comfort in this. As we patiently lift stones in the endless fields of modern literature, we must expect scorpions and grubs, but it is now certain that, at least once, an elephant has appeared.

via The New York Times

Literary Agent Plans E-Book Editions

The literary agent Andrew Wylie  said on Wednesday that he would begin his own publishing venture, called Odyssey Editions, which will produce e-book editions of titles by some of his clients, including Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth. Mr. Wylie said his new company would focus on older titles whose digital rights are not owned by traditional publishers

Stories like this became inevitable as e-readers gained traction. Digital text so undercuts the resources the big publishing houses have to offer– printing presses, marketing budgets, relationships with the mega-bookstores–  that “name” authors can bypass long established distribution channels and sell their work directly to the reader, with amazon.com and other sites serving as conduits. The publishers are howling but it’s really far too late.

Lesser stars in the literary firmament will, I think, benefit as well from these shifts– their work will no longer go out of print or be tossed into remainder bins at the giant mall bookstores to make way for the next Dan Brown commodity, instead staying permanently and instantly available online. And unlike used books, they will get paid for each sale.

For unknown writers, the rise of digital text is a very exciting development, with lots of new opportunities to get work out into the wilds. I don’t know how many folks will still be interested in books (digital or otherwise) as the future comes avalanching down upon us, but at least it will be available should they choose to enjoy the analog pleasures of reading.

I read this for a laugh, then got to these quotes from one of the performers–

“The work is close to the heart,” L’amour says. “We have an emotional connection to the pieces we have chosen.”

L’amour points out that the repeat audience at her salons come because of the readings. “They’ve already seen us naked, so that’s routine for them,” she says. “They come to hang on every word.”

The Globe and Mail article does a pretty fine job of illuminating the humanity of the story instead of just hyping the lurid stuff– there’s something kind of moving about the whole enterprise.

Naked girls reading? Burlesque turns a page

It has to be the most provocative literary series in the world with a title like “Naked Girls Reading,” but it’s exactly as advertised. Burlesque divas remove the pasties and G-strings – those time-honoured barriers to complete nudity – and grab a book.

And it’s an all-star international lineup of naked readers who kick off the five-day, third-annual Toronto Burlesque Festival at the Gladstone Hotel Wednesday night. NGR, in fact, is the newest phenomenon of the phenomenal burlesque revival.

Meh. Not impressed. Blood is easily drawn and regenerates fairly quickly. Now anthropodermic bibliopegy— there’s real commitment.

via The Telegraph:

Book made with Sachin Tendulkar’s blood to cost £49,000
In a bizarre marketing strategy, a luxury book publisher is bringing out a special edition biography of Tendulkar with pages made from his blood. The “blood edition”, which also includes unpublished family pictures and Tendulkar’s thoughts about his career, weighs 37kg and contains 852 pages all edged in gold leaf, the Guardian reports. Due to be released next February, The Tendulkar Opus has a price tag of £49,000. Only 10 copies will ever be made and all have been pre-ordered.

* background post

A Call From The Equalizer

Any poet who had work accepted by The Paris Review and has received notice that their poems will no longer be published due to the editorial changes at the magazine are encouraged to submit those poems for consideration to The Equalizer, a new PDF-based journal which I’m assembling right now for a September/October 2010 launch.

What’s interesting about this new development is that it really encapsulates the intersection/abrasion between traditional print and digital media. One of the main factors in this whole saga is the time lag between acceptance and publication inherent in creating print magazines. Things can and do change, editors included. With digital media, a collection of poems (or stories or images or audio/video, or any combination) can be assembled rapidly and instantly disseminated online to computers, smartphones, and digital readers. Lag is minimized, a significant benefit to both the writer and the reader.

Currently, paper magazines still have the edge as far as institutional support, editorial judgment, and the pool of writers they can draw from, but these advantages will not be enough to counter the low start-up costs, global reach, and the sheer nimbleness of digital mags. And as the quality of writing online improves, the deficiencies of the old model can only become more pronounced.

“Hi, Paris Review here. Remember those poems we accepted from you? Umm…”

Behind the scenes at The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010: part 1.

Dear XXXX,

Recently I replaced Philip Gourevitch as editor of The Paris Review and appointed a new poetry editor, Robyn Creswell. Over the last month, Robyn and I have been carefully reading the backlog of poetry that we inherited from the previous editors. This amounts to a year’s worth of poems. In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted by Philip, Meghan, and Dan. We have not found a place for your three poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration. I am sorry to give you this bad news, and I’m grateful for your patience during the Review’s transition.

Best regards,
Lorin Stein

I’ve always like twisted fairy tales, maybe because I grew up in Hawaii where “chickenskin” stories about Pele’s curse or the Nightmarchers were more popular than treacle like Cinderella or Snow White (or at least the Disney versions– the original Brothers Grimm stories are full of cannibalism, torture, and dead children).

A review from the Seattle PI:

These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales by Jim Knipfel

In These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales, brilliance is rewarded with torture, beauty is its own punishment, and outrageous good fortune always turns to crap. The only thing worse than being the victim of some of the malevolent creatures in these fairy tales is to be their beneficiary. Twisted? You bet! Entertaining? And how!

And a NYT review of an excellent collection I came across last year:

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938, at the height of the Stalinist terror, at a time when the Soviet Union was on the brink of war. For decades, censors shunned her fiction because of its impolitic bleakness, and she survived by working as an editor and translator, writing plays and television and radio scripts (when she could), and selling the occasional newspaper article. But with the rise of perestroika and the fall of Communism, she has been rehabilitated, and today is hailed as one of Russia’s best living writers.

*hat tip to Electric Literature’s excellent tweets

From Open Culture:

20 Great Authors (and Actors) Read Famous Literature Out Loud

Every now and then, we like to present vintage clips of great authors reading classic literary works – works they have often written themselves. These clips can be fairly revealing. Through them, you can recapture the voices of literary greats, most long since passed. And you can hear how they give character and expression to their own works … or those of others. In response to a reader’s request, we have pulled together some of the finest examples previously featured here. And, for good measure, we’ve added prime clips of famous celebrities giving literary readings too. Hope you enjoy (and share):

1) William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

2) James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake

3) Vintage Radio: Aldous Huxley Narrates Brave New World

More at link.