As previously reported by Quill & Quire, Nielsen Business Media announced plans in early December to cease publishing Kirkus Reviews, the 76-year-old pre-publication review journal. Now, however, it looks as if the journal might live on.

According to an internal memo obtained by DailyFinance, Eric Liebetrau, the managing editor of Kirkus Reviews, claims that the magazine has an interested buyer and that the publication will immediately resume business as usual. The magazine will continue to operate under the Nielsen umbrella for now, and Liebetrau expects a sale to be finalized in the next two to three weeks.

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio’s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

MobyLives points out U.S. author Stephen Elliott’s subversion of the usual promotional plan.

His true crime memoir, The Adderall Diaries, was released earlier this month, and rather than send out the advance reading copies to the media, he started The Adderral Diaries Lending Library. Basically, he sent an ARC to anyone who wanted one, and who promised to lend it out after they read it in a timely manner. Readers had one week to complete their read, and they would be sent an Email address of the next person on the list scheduled to receive a copy. Then they’d have to priority post them the book.

This fall Elliott is touring D.I.Y. style, by connecting with readers in their towns and giving readings at their houses. Here is a Facebook group of people who read an advanced copy.

This kind of word-of-mouth promotion is PR gold. For every book review that gets printed, a few sales may result, but any publicist will tell you that nothing beats a personal recommendation.

• Simpson’s writer takes revenge on uppity Pynchon scholar
• Nick Cave has a new novel, with its own iPhone app, Dave Byrne has a new memoir, and now … wait for it … Duran Duran has a book club on its website?
• Listen up, weary book publicists – all you gotta do is get a celeb to tweet your book title and you’re gold!
• Infringe first and ask questions later? Well yes, if you’re Google. The copyright office weighs in
• Details magazine lists its favourite literary podcasts
• The 9/11 novels worth reading

• The best revenge on bad reviews

• Coach House Books publicist Evan Munday asks, “Which Canadian book should be made into a movie?”
  

• Novelist Mariko Tamaki on fiction versus academia in the new issue of No More Potlucks

• Montreal’s Arjun Basu, author of several Twitter-length short stories, is having one turned into a short film

• Book critic Julia Keller on how to read graphic novels

• Bologna Children’s Bookfair may be forced to reinstate a fourth day, according to Publisher’s Weekly

• The much anticipated Ted Kennedy book review in The New York Times

• Random silliness: There is a great need for a sarcasm font, library porn, and the “homeless” Elle intern

One of our favorite book blogs, the L.A. Times‘ Jacket Copy, appears to have fans from all walks of life, including former U.S. presidents. This morning, blogger Carolyn Kellogg posted a handwritten note from the “Office of William J. Clinton,” in which Mr. Clinton took the time to gently correct her on a small error in an earlier post. From Kellogg:

I have no idea where he finds the time to read a book blog. I’m just a blogger and I can barely find time to do laundry.

But read it he did. How do I know for sure? Because he offered a correction: His dinner with Bill Styron was in 1994, not 1999. Thanks, Mr. President. It’s fixed now.

The main part of his note was to let me know what he’s been reading lately. And I think that he wouldn’t mind if I share that list with you. Here’s a list of books Bill Clinton has been reading lately, from his own pen:

1. Steven Johnson’s “The Invention of Air” and “The Ghost Map,” esp. #1
2. Tom Zoellner’s “Uranium”
3. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” his best book.
4. John Bogle’s “Enough”
5. Selden Edwards’ “The Little Book”
6. Richard North Patterson’s “Eclipse”
7. Andrew Greeley’s “The Cardinal Sins” (now almost 30 years old)

Over the past few weeks, the Ontario-based publisher Biblioasis has been running a contest called Revenge Lit, in which authors were invited to submit 250-word tales about the murder of a literary critic. (The contest was created to promote Terry Griggs’ new mystery novel Thought You Were Dead, which kicks off with a freelance critic meeting an untimely demise.) The winner hasn’t been chosen as of yet, but all of the submissions have been posted online.

Some of the stories are essentially just venting, but others display moments of solid inspiration. Virginia Winters’ untitled piece wins the prize for best opening line: “The [chalk] outline looked like his ego: bloated, empty, one accusing hand outstretched.” We also liked the basic idea behind Charles Schaeffer’s “Leaping to Conclusions,” which posits that John Wilkes Booth wasn’t actually aiming to shoot Lincoln, but a New York Times critic one box over.

Two of the strongest entries, however, belong to RW Morgan and Ken Duffin. From Morgan’s “Little Guys Don’t Count”:

“Why are you so upset with me?”

Was he dense? “You wouldn’t review the book! We can’t get into the stores now. She’s the best author we ever published – we put everything we had into it. I know we’re a small company, but you could have at least looked at it. We’re ruined!”

“It’s not just me. All reviewers do the same thing. A book needs to fit our standards [...] We look at the size of the publisher, the amount of money spent on promotions, the number of booked interviews, the scope of the campaign. We try to weigh the potential impact on the media. It’s a calculated strategy.”

I pulled out my tape measure. I was ready. Woody sounded concerned for the first time. I think he finally got it. “What are you measuring?”

“Your coffin.”

And from Duffin’s “The Tell-Tale Parts”:

“Byron Lunquist,” he called out. “I’m arresting you for the murder of Julius Pinkle.” Lunquist, clad only in pajama bottoms and tanning ointment, asked the sergeant what had given it away.

“Pinkle was sporting radioactive dye in his nether bits. He’d had a scan the day before. Your dog’s wearing the evidence,” he said. “Plus,” he noted, pointing to the nicely decorated spruce, “you’ve used Pinkle’s head as a tree topper.”

It was safe to say that the Sergeant could appreciate symbolism and irony as much as the next guy.

In response to the recent spat between Ukrainians and Russians over the true citizenship of Nikolai Gogol, The Guardian books blogger John Mullan questions the whole notion of countries laying claims of ownership on writers. He also takes the opportunity to poke some fun at Ireland, for what he sees as its penchant for stealing authors away from Britain.

Look at the Irish, who have proved particularly skilful at this. They have effortlessly reclaimed all the great authors who fled the country of their birth – Goldsmith, Joyce, Beckett – even though the latter wrote some of his greatest work in French, the language of his adopted country. They have managed to persuade many that Laurence Sterne (born in Ireland because his father was a British soldier stationed there) and William Congreve (born in Yorkshire, but educated partly in Ireland because his father was another British officer) were really Irish. (The fact that both these writers were witty somehow confirms their essential Irishness.) And, their biggest triumph, they have taken possession of Jonathan Swift, perhaps the greatest of all satirists. In fact Swift called himself “English”, spoke of his residence in Dublin as an “exile” in “a land I hate”, and did not even have an Irish accent. But he has long become a great Irish patriot, adorning banknotes and tourist brochures.

In case anyone was wondering, it looks like the massive staff cuts at The Globe and Mail don’t have any immediate ramifications for the paper’s books coverage. About ninety employees are exiting the paper this week, 60 having accepted a buyout offer and 30 having been laid off. But publisher Phillip Crawley told Q&Q yesterday that key books-related employees – books editor Martin Levin, online editor Peter Scowen, and publishing reporter James Adams – are not among those departing.