John Updike dies

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and man of letters John Updike has died of lung cancer, at the age of 76. From the Associated Press:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.

Update: the New York Times obit.

Bookmarks: 1,000 novels everyone must read, toilet poems, and more

• The Guardian has created a list of 1000 novels everyone must read, broken down into categories like comedy, crime, family and self, and state of the nation. In considering the list, Stuart Walton wonders whether or not he will lose the will to read.
• A Japanese group is campaigning to use “toilet poems” in bathroom cubicles to decrease toilet paper usage in Japan.
• To: President Obama. From: McSweeney’s, and the kids of the U.S. — Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

Neil Gaiman wins Newbery Medal

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Anansi Boys) has won the John Newbery medal, one of the most prestigious awards for children’s literature in the U.S.

Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for The Graveyard Book, a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children’s literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman’s work for its “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” noting its “magical, haunting prose.”

Gaiman says idea for The Graveyard Book was inspired, in part, by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book — though the main characters in the novel are of the supernatural variety: vampires, witches, and werewolves (oh, my).

Wolf discusses The End of America

In the Guardian, Naomi Wolf discusses her book, The End of America, and her foray into the world of YouTube to reach the uneducated souls who frequent gas stations and nail salons.

The End of America details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one. I took the message on the road, and one of those early lectures — at the University of Washington in Seattle, in October 2007 – was videoed by a member of the audience. Even with its bad lighting and funky amateur vibe, this video, posted on YouTube, has been accessed almost 1,250,000 times.

This was a humbling lesson. While a polemical argument in prose may reach tens of thousands of the usual suspects — formally educated people who like to follow such texts — the video version reached far beyond that audience. Everywhere I went, from the gas station to the nail salon, I ran into people who would have been unlikely to read a book of mine, but who were passionately supportive of the argument from having watched it on YouTube.

Author sentenced to three years in jail for insulting Thai royalty

Australian author Harry Nicolaides has been sentenced to three years in prison for violating the Lese Majeste (a crime or offense against the dignity majesty) law in Thailand.

Harry Nicolaides was arrested last August over a 2005 book called Verisimilitude, which includes a paragraph about the king and crown prince that the authorities deemed a violation of the Lese Majeste law.

The Thai Criminal Court originally sentenced Nicolaides to six years in jail but cut the punishment in half because of the guilty plea.

To add insult to injury, only 50 copies of Nicolaides’ book were published, and just seven were sold.

Bookmarks: inauguration edition

• Taken from Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses, test your knowledge of the final words of former presidents’ inaugural speeches (Jacket Copy)
• Barack Obama will take the oath of office on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used, and will eat a meal modelled on some of Lincoln’s favourite dishes (including the apple-cinnamon sponge cake). For The Book Bench, Adam Gopnick and Jill Lepore recommend some Lincoln books (The New Yorker)
• Martin Levin dissects Obama’s reading list (The Globe and Mail)
• Evangelist Rick Warren (and author of The Purpose Driven Life) delivers the invocation at Obama’s inauguration (abc6.com)
• Q&A with inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander (TIME Magazine)

Bookmarks: Winnie the Pooh makes a comeback, Dubya wants to write a book, and more

• Winnie the Pooh is back, 80 years after his first published appearance, in the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s 1920s collection Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. (CBC.ca)
• George W. Bush is planning to write a book – something about the toughest decisions he had to make as president – and says though he doesn’t know how long it will take him to write it, he’ll be able to “get ‘er done.” (The Guardian)
• Another comeback, this time from Chris Rock, who’s scored a deal with Grand Central Publishing to write a book of “comedic observations.” (His last book was 1997′s Rock This!). Perhaps a collaboration with the above? (CTV.ca)
• The shortlist for the Romantic Novel of the Year award has been revealed – read it and weep. Literally. (The Guardian)
• A new media start-up called The Printed Blog is publishing free newspapers twice-daily in cities across the U.S., collecting the best local blog posts for those cities. Printed news and information – what a novel concept! (Wired.com)

Sawyer’s synchrotron engagement

Robert J. Sawyer is coming to a synchrotron near you — if you live in Saskatchewan, that is. In June and July 2009, Sawyer will be writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s largest particle accelerator, in Saskatoon. The physics research facility has never had a writer-in-residence before (shocking!); in fact, the position was created specifically for Sawyer, who will mentor writers on the CLS staff and in the community. The residency came about as an opportunity to “explore the creative processes at the root of science and art, and increase public discussion of science in Canada.”

CTV adapts Spalding’s Who Named the Knife?

On Jan. 7, CTV will air Of Murder and Memory, a fictionalized adaptation of Linda Spalding’s 2006 true crime memoir Who Named the Knife? Spalding’s book centres on the trial of Maryann Acker, who was arrested with her husband in California in connection with a robbery and murder spree. Acker was convicted of first-degree murder in 1982 — largely due to her husband’s testimony — and is serving two life sentences. Who Named the Knife? chronicles Spalding’s personal involvement in the murder case — first, as a juror for the trial, and then some 20 years later as she re-examines both the case and Acker’s life, after finding the diary Spalding kept during the trial.

The cast includes Annabel Gish as Sally Linden, Chandra West as Theresa Nichol, and Hugh Dillon as Vincent Nichol.

NY publishers’ descent from the high life

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the dying glitz and glam of the publishing world, which, according to Rich, once “came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.”

Stark contrasts are drawn between company parties past and those planned for the future: Macmillan, which announced mass restructuring and layoffs in mid-December last year, will trade their Hotel del Coronado spring list meeting venue for meetings via webcam. Simon & Schuster cancelled its holiday party, while one division of Random House had pizza and beer in a cafeteria room. Other “glittery and cozy traditions” of the industry that are being clamped down upon are flights, hotel bills, cocktail hours, and, of course, the lunch tabs.

Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances. But publishers, editors and literary agents, who have often been among the best diners in the city, are now reconsidering their favorite restaurants.

Besides the flash, though, other aspects of the publishing business are being examined, like distribution of advance print galleys, the return of unsold books by retailers, and cash advances for authors.

At HarperCollins a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.

Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”