U.K. exports censorious libel laws

Just in time for Banned Books Week, which runs until Oct. 6, The New York Times reports how a loophole in English law, combined with the globalized booktrade, may have a deleterious effect on freedom of speech outside of U.K. borders.

At the centre of the controversy is Saudi banker and businessman Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, who wrangled an apology and undisclosed damages from Cambridge University Press for publishing Alms for Jihad, which alleges that bin Mahfouz is an Al Qaeda financier. Bin Mahfouz also recently won damages from U.K. publisher Pluto Press, U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld, and the newspaper The Mail on Sunday for making similar allegations.

The concern is that stringent libel laws in the U.K., where the burden of proof falls on the defendant, will affect foreign publishers, since, as the article points out, English libel law technically applies not just to U.K. titles, but to all books on sale in the U.K.:

Today, any book bought online in England, even one published exclusively in another country, can ostensibly be subject to English libel law. As a result, publishers and booksellers are increasingly concerned about “libel tourism”: foreigners suing other foreigners in England or elsewhere, and using those judgments to intimidate authors in other countries…

Incidently, the article points out that one of the original “libel tourists” may be Roman Polanski, who in 2005 used the English courts to sue Vanity Fair, which published allegedly slanderous comments by former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham.

Tomine to Lethem: butt out, smartypants

Comics artist Adrian Tomine tells The Believer that excessive praise for his just-released graphic novel Shortcomings – which was serialized in his popular comic Optic Nerve – makes him uneasy. Specifically, he raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading.

I also am trying to think – and I hope other people will start to see it this way – that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

The above could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem, printed on the dust-jacket of Shortcomings‘s hardcover edition (published by Drawn + Quarterly). The blurb begins by articulating “Tomine’s genius” and goes on to reference some heavy-hitters:

[Tomine’s] mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer’s in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro.

For criticism more to Tomine’s liking, go to Guardian columnist Ned Beauman’s comics blog. Though he is just as rapturous (he calls Shortcomings “not only one of the year’s finest comics, but also one of its finest works of fiction”), Beauman meets the book on its own terms, and peppers the review with various pithy aperçus, including this one: “Tomine’s artwork is so simple and realistic that it sometimes resembles an airline safety leaflet, and his storytelling isn’t any more experimental.”

Amazon and Penguin want your unpublished novel

Not content to be sidelined by the literary establishment any longer, Amazon announced on Monday that it is teaming up with Penguin Group to launch a new prize for unpublished novelists. Appropriately, the “jury” is composed of amateur reviewers and established editors, who will award the top prize of a Penguin publishing contract and a US$25,000 advance:

… contestants from 20 countries [including Canada, except for residents of Quebec] can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000. The full manuscripts of those semifinalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller Eat, Pray, Love, and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner …

Whether the formula is hopelessly baroque or refreshingly democratic remains to be seen, but its complexity seems to confirm one thing: clearly, scouting literary talent is a subtle art.