Mario Vargas Llosa: Marquez is dead to me

This week’s Maclean’s has an interview with Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a new novel (The Bad Girl) out this fall. The article is an entertaining read, mostly because interviewer Isabel Vincent expends a considerable amount of effort trying (and failing) to get the author to call Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez the worst thing that ever happened to the region.

Llosa is reasonably chatty and forthcoming throughout, sharing his opinions on authoritarianism, Latin American politics, and the writing life, at least until Vincent’s final question:

What about Gabriel García Márquez, who is, like you, a literary giant in Latin America? You used to be good friends until you punched him out in a Mexican theatre in 1976. Neither you nor he have ever spoken about the feud, which has become one of the legendary battles of contemporary literature. Although you haven’t spoken for more than 30 years, you share the same agent [the legendary Carmen Balcells in Barcelona], and you recently agreed to allow part of your own book on García Márquez to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America. Does this mean that there is a rapprochement with García Márquez on the horizon?

I don’t answer questions about that.

(Photo courtesy of the author’s official website, http://www.mvargasllosa.com/)

Read a book, read a motherf@#%ing book

After U.S. National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman had finished freaking out over declining levels of American readership, bookselling blogger The Written Nerd looked at the stats from a more reassuring angle:

The [U.S. National Endowment for the Arts] survey states that 56% of Americans read any book in 2002 (that’s ANY book, not just “literary works,” which the survey focuses on).

The Associated Press/Ipsos survey says that 73% of Americans read any book last year (i.e. in 2006).

Therefore, if these two respected organizations are to be believed…

AMERICANS READ MORE LAST YEAR THAN THEY READ FIVE YEARS AGO.

Ah, numbers. So many different ways to interpret them. Good thing words aren’t like that!

Anyway, Freeman’s article raised the spectre of how to attract more people to reading:

Now that cigarettes are becoming less and less palatable in an actor’s hand, put a book there. If the NEA wants people to read, strong-arm a copy of William Carlos Williams’ The Doctor Stories onto Grey’s Anatomy. Companies which spend millions of advertising dollars articulating their brand could say a lot more for less by using books. Why doesn’t The Gap stock copies of On the Road?

The Black Entertainment Television network, as pointed out by GalleyCat, is helping out with that angle – sort of. BET’s new animation department has produced a music video that it says celebrates literacy and black pride.

Its cartoon rapper bounces on a piano, riffing on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and in his first line bellows, “Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book!” He goes on in a similar manner to encourage listeners to brush their teeth, care for their children, drink water instead of booze, and wear deodorant. Sound advice, to be sure, but it’s all accompanied by a plethora of profanities and stereotypical rap-video images.

A Los Angeles Times article covers the mixed reactions to the clip – some see it as a funny satire of the hip-hop industry; others find its rampant use of negative African-American stereotypes offensive.

The article also describes the parts of the video that most startled Quillblog:

In one scene, a gangster uses a book as a cartridge in an automatic weapon, while another shows a woman shaking her rear with “BOOK” printed on her low-riding pants.

Nothing says “reading is fun” like guns and booty-shaking, right?

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

Random authorial musings

Over at the Insider’s Blog on the Random House Canada BookLounge website, Todd Babiak uses an author guest post to talk about book clubs – or, more specifically, his awkwardness at book club meetings. Since publishing The Garneau Block, he’s been invited to appear at several gatherings, he says, and he always overdoes it when it comes to tie-wearing, boob-staring, and hummus-eating.

I always wear a suit, which is always too much. The host invites me in and I sit down in a comfortable chesterfield and smile. As we introduce ourselves, I investigate, by the tone and tenor of their voices, whether any of them disliked the novel. Women in book clubs always seem to be attractive and intelligent, so I worry about being caught checking them out (after two glasses of wine, my gaze tends to linger). And, of course, I worry about eating too much hummus and horrifying these lovely readers with my garlic breath.

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also blogged at the Random House site, and his entries range from the morbidly amusing (increasingly violent sketches he has drawn to accompany his signature in books, and the follow-up entry about how Brits and Canadians respond to his sense of humour versus how Americans respond) to the annoyingly whiny (publicity is hard and journalists are manipulative hacks).

Judging books by their covers

The proverb about not judging books by their covers is put to the lie time and again in stores, where the poor old covers have only a few seconds to grab the potential reader’s eye. Many authors are keenly aware of that, which leads them to micromanage the designs for their books.

The blogosphere has produced two good examples of authorial interest in covers lately. Shameless magazine‘s Stacey May Fowles is publishing her novel Be Good with Tightrope Books this fall, and she’s asking Shameless blog readers to vote on her two cover choices here. (Quillblog joins the current majority of comments in voting for the clean, spare, and stunning version one, hopefully an easy winner over the cluttered second option.)

In the not-clean-and-spare department, Managing Humans author Michael Lopp blogs here about his own cover design experience. When the first proposals showed up, he, uh, wasn’t thrilled.

Right. So, the book. 10 months of constant pessimism [about his book]. This is why when the first batch of covers for the book showed up, I thought, “Okay, good. I knew they’d be awful.”

Worst Case Scenario

Here. Play along at home.

Not complete disasters, but clearly cliché. I mean, c’mon — cheese? Didn’t we move our cheese around back in 1998?

So Lopp asked a friend, artist Kevin Cornell, to come up with artwork for a new cover. The final product, which the author loved, is a little fussy for Quillblog’s taste – but you, dear reader, can judge the cover (and the book) for yourself.

Dream rocker bios for Canadian publishers

In the wake of the mammoth contract granted to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards for the story of his life, The Globe and Mail‘s Matt Hartley asked three Canadian publishers which Canuck rockers’ memoirs they would most like to publish. McClelland & Stewart’s Doug Pepper thinks autobiographies by Neil Young or Rush singer Geddy Lee would be highly desirable; Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company, which has printed memoirs by Randy Bachman and Natalie MacMaster (to be released this fall), dreams of publishing Joni Mitchell; Jack David of ECW Press, which has already done three books by Rush drummer Neil Peart, would like to print Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies.

No one seems to want to touch anything written by Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger, but surely it’s only a matter of time.

(Neil Young photo courtesy of CanadianContent.)

Publishing contracts as employee benefits

How many aspiring authors are there are among the 30,000-plus employees of the Borders U.S. chain? Quillblog guesses a lot, and it looks as though Borders does too: the chain has announced it will publish a novel by one of its shelf-stackers, the winner of a contest that closes on Jan. 31, 2008.

Do you think the winning manuscript will be an angst-filled tale of a life stalled in a dead-end job until something wacky or earth-shattering happens? Nah, Quillblog doesn’t either.

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

Teenage Potter translator arrested

In today’s obligatory Harry Potter update, CNET News (via Reuters) is reporting that a 16-year-old in France has been arrested for posting three chapters of a French version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Internet more than two months before the official translation will be released. The French-language book will come out on Oct. 26; in the meantime, while French bookstores are free to sell the English version, this kid will be fighting the law.

The lesson: keep your hack translations to yourself; Harry Potter will have only one official French word for “hallows.” Bungling the translation of that term is definitely an arrest-worthy offense.

Maclean’s vs. lawyers, round 2

The Canadian Magazines blog is keeping track of the battle between Maclean’s and the Canadian Bar Association in the wake of last week’s interview with Lawyers Gone Bad author Philip Slayton and the subsequent heated reply from the CBA. An editorial in the Aug. 13 edition of Maclean’s (which was also publicized with a press release) maintains that while the editors had some misgivings about the splashy “Lawyers are rats” cover headline, they stand behind it and the issues raised in the story, because (they say) other legal experts have brought them up before.

In an introductory note to the editorial, they also accuse the CBA of leaning on the magazine’s financial backers to force an apology.

Furthermore, the CBA has repeatedly attempted to apply financial pressure to our parent companies, Rogers Publishing and Rogers Communications Inc., in order to force an apology from Maclean’s.

Ken Whyte, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean’s, made the following comments: “That the CBA would refuse to debate the serious issues raised by our piece and instead try to — let’s put the best face on this — use its financial muscle to purchase an apology from us rather confirms the sentiment of our cover line.”

Ouch. Lawyers, back to you.

Meanwhile, in Sunday’s Toronto Star, regular crime fiction reviewer Jack Batten looks at Slayton’s book through the lens of Batten’s own time at the University of Toronto Law School. Batten says he’s seen some legal rats himself, and deems the book “smart and lively.”

Don’t let Henry James ask for directions

New York arts blogger Terry Teachout has posted a wonderful anecdote told by Edith Wharton about Henry James. It seems the Master’s complex writing style carried over into his speech, and, as one might expect, it got in the way when asking simple things.

According to Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, the two authors got themselves lost while rattling around the village of Windsor in her motor car, and James asked an old man on the road for directions.

“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer–so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…”

“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah–? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the aged face at the window.

(Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.)

Harry Potter and the Big Huge Giant Spoilers

Potterphiles, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because The Onion has your back with an important spoiler warning. Apparently, that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book gives away the ending of everything and everyone to do with Potter!

“The whole experience is completely ruined for me,” said 25-year-old fan Ethan Clay, adding that the book builds up suspense, and then, without warning, gives away vital, plot-altering information. “The least [Rowling] could have done was put a spoiler alert or something on the front cover.”

Nothing is safe anymore. Avert your eyes!