S&S asks political commentators to “refrain from commenting” on Obama novel

O: A Presidential Novel, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, has generated a lot of buzz around the identity of its anonymous author – perhaps too much buzz as far as the publisher is concerned.

According to The Cutline, both Joe Klein – the once anonymous author of Primary Colours – and NBC correspondent Chuck Todd were contacted by S&S publisher Jonathan Karp and asked to “refrain from commenting” on the identity of the author (though Klein has already denied writing the book). In an email, Karp wrote:

On January 25, we’ll be publishing a secret novel simply titled O, about President Obama’s campaign for re-election in 2012. The author of the novel wishes to remain anonymous. You may be asked to comment on whether or not you are the author. If so, it would be great if you refrained from commenting, in solidarity with the principle that a book should be judged on its content and not on the perceived ideology of its author.

The author, an individual with integrity and talent, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama and knows the political world intimately. In fact, you may know this person, or know of this person — if you are not in fact the author yourself.

Tellingly, his request coincides with the release of an excerpt on the book’s dedicated Web site, where visitors are encouraged to post comments under the heading “Who Do You Think Wrote O?”

Obama, Rumsfeld books set for winter release

Simon & Schuster unveiled the cover for O: A Presidential Novel, an anonymously authored novel about U.S. president Barack Obama. The cover features a gold “O” bookended by a pair of protruding ears against a blue background.

Set during the 2012 presidential election, the book is described by The Washington Post as:

a novel about aspiration and delusion [...] written by an anonymous author who has spent years observing politics and the fraught relationship between public image and self-regard. The novel includes revealing and insightful portraits of many prominent figures in the political world – some invented and some real.

There’s been a flurry of speculation about the identity of the author, someone Simon & Schuster says “has been in the room with Barack Obama and wishes to remain anonymous.”

A blogger at the Wall Street Journal points out the futility of such conjecture:

In addition to the 469 employees of the White House, the president had 616 visitors there in December 2010 alone, according to records released by the administration.

And since we don’t know that this “room” is the Oval Office, we should probably also include everyone who’s attended a party or town hall or fund-raiser or campaign trail event also attended by Mr. Obama, plus his classmates, students and colleagues over the years.

O isn’t the only work of fiction inspired by American political figures published this winter. Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott is a novel that publisher McSweeney’s says imagines what would happen if former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “was abducted at night from his Maryland home, held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial, and kept in a place where no one could find him, beyond the reach of the law.”

The novel is set for release Feb. 8, the same day Rumsfeld’s official autobiography, Known and Unknown, is launched by Sentinel. By no coincidence, the covers of both books are similar — though only one features Rumsfeld in an orange jumpsuit.

B.C. arts council head resigns

The former chair of the B.C. Arts Council, Jane Danzo, who announced her resignation on August 11, told the CBC that she left because she had to speak out against the funding cuts to the arts in her province:

The spring budget axed the funding the B.C. Arts Council hands out to groups by an estimated 50 per cent, from around $14 million to about $8 million.

Despite the cuts, the province then announced a new $10 million Arts Legacy Fund, without consulting the B.C. Arts Council, Danzo said.

“Even after the announcement, the board was not consulted for input, nor was it permitted to know the details as they were developed by ministry staff over a four-month period,” Danzo said in her resignation letter to Culture Minister Kevin Krueger.

Today, the board of governors of the Canadian Conference of the Arts spoke out in support of Danzo, calling the cuts “a strategic error that will have negative impacts not only on tourism and economic development but also severely compromise the role your province plays in defining Canadian identity at home and abroad.”

First look at Douglas Coupland’s fashion line for Roots

Author and visual artist Douglas Coupland announced via Twitter today that he is teaming up with Canadian clothing and leather goods company Roots to design a limited-edition clothing and accessories line. On the video promo for said collaboration, Coupland expounds on his thoughts about Canadian culture and identity, a theme he has explored in visual art and non-fiction books for over a decade.

The Roots press release names Coupland’s collection Canada Goes Electric. A visual example:

Irony alert: no word yet on if this clothing line celebrating the meaning of Canada will actually be manufactured in Canada. The Roots website is dodgy on the physical locations of its factories abroad, though goes to great pains to feign being down with ethical labour practices.

Atwood takes home (half a) million-dollar prize

Margaret Atwood has won the Dan David Prize for “Literature: Rendition of the 20^th Century.” The Canadian author will share the $1 million (U.S.) prize with Indian author Amitav Ghosh, and each winner will share 10% of the winnings with graduate students working in literature.

The Dan David Prize is presented annually by Tel Aviv University in Israel, and includes winners in three categories: Past, Present, and Future (Atwood and Ghosh will share the prize for the Present category). A different discipline is chosen annually for each category, and this year’s literature prize honours the two novelists for providing “vivid, compelling, and groundbreaking depictions of 20th century life, rousing public discussion and inspiring fellow writers.” Here’s what was said specifically of Atwood’s work:

Her work enabled, for the first time, the emergence of a defined Canadian identity, while exploring both national and transnational issues, such as colonization, feminism, structures of political power and oppression, and the violation and exploitation of nature. She is the creator of a wide range of original fiction in which realism, myth, and parable are skillfully united.

Former laureates of the Dan David Prize include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (in 2009, for leadership); former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore (in 2008, for social responsibility); and Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (in 2008, for creative rendering of the past). Atwood and the rest of the 2010 winners will be honoured at a ceremony on May 9 at Tel Aviv University.

Douglas Coupland really does like the Canada Council

Douglas Coupland has called himself the world’s worst worrier, and apparently the thing he’s been fretting about lately is an inaccuracy that appeared in the National Post. In the article in question, crime novelist William Deverell draws on a recent op-ed penned by Coupland to bolster his argument that Canadian readers suffer from what he describes as a “national snobbery disorder.” From Deverell’s article:

The New York Times recently ran Douglas Coupland’s scathing critique of Canadian literary pretentiousness: “There is a grimness about CanLit,” he wrote, in which typically authors are supported by the government “to write about small towns and/or the immigrant experience.” Coupland refuses to accept Canada Council money.

Coupland wants to set the record straight: whatever his feelings about the state of CanLit, he happily supports the Canada Council. Earlier today, he sent out a mass e-mail correcting the misperception. The complete missive is below:

Hi everyone. Sorry for the mass email but it’s important to me. Here’s a letter I wrote to the National Post an hour ago.

Hi Post,

A puzzled friend forwarded to me your September 14 piece on publishing in Canada that I hadn’t read. Glitch! Fact is, I really do support the Canada Council – and have done well by them throughout the years. The Council helps creative people at all phases of their careers and is also critical in helping artists and writers and performers abroad as well as domestically. Could you publish this for me? I’d been wondering why certain people were being weird to me in some situations and now I know the reason. Otherwise all is well, and thank you for your support over the years. And please keep writing about publishing. It’s an interesting moment in its history.

Keep well,

Yours,

Douglas Coupland

That should do it. In case you’re wondering, here is what Coupland actually said about the Canada Council in The New York Times:

I’m a big fan of subsidization of the arts. Without subsidization, CanLit couldn’t exist for 10 minutes. Canada is an extravagantly huge and underpopulated country with no economy of scale. Maintaining an identity is expensive, period — thus the need for money in the arts. And I think the Canadian government ought to be hurling 10 times as much cash at literary arts in general, CanLit as much as anything else.

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

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.

Laferrière wins Medicis

Montreal author (and recent Q&Q cover star) Dany Laferrière is on a roll lately. After winning the $10,000 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix last week, he has now been named recipient of France’s illustrious Prix Medicis literary award, alongside U.S. author Dave Eggers.

According to AFP:

Laferrière won the Medicis for L’enigme du retour (The Enigma of Return), a fictionalised account of the 56-year-old author’s soul-wrenching return to his native Haiti to attend his father’s funeral. Born in Port-au-Prince but now living in Montreal and Miami, Laferrière has explored the themes of identity and exile in some 20 novels over the past 25 years.

Laferrière won the French-language prize, while Eggers won the prize for best foreign novel for his 2006 work What Is the What? Lafèrriere is only the second Canadian novelist to win the Medicis. The first was Marie-Claire Blais, who won in 1966 for Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.

HarperCollins cancels Ballard memoir

In 1996, Harold Brodkey published This Wild Darkness, a slim volume describing, in often painful detail, his physical deterioration from AIDS. Portions of his journal from this period remain online, and provide starkly honest insights into the combined pity and terror elicited by living with a terminal illness:

Being ill like this combines shock – this time I will die – with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself. It is like visiting one’s funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself. Now one belongs entirely to nature, to time: identity was a game. It isn’t cruel what happens next, it is merely a form of being caught. Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head. It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

It now appears that J.G. Ballard’s own memoir of his struggles with mortality will never see print. Ballard, who died of cancer on April 19, was in negotiations to publish a book entitled Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The book was to have consisted of Ballard’s recapitulations of his discussions with his oncologist.

However, the author became too ill to complete the book, and now HarperCollins has cancelled the title. From The Guardian:

“We had agreed [to] the terms but Jim became too ill last winter to start any work on it,” said his editor Clare Reihill. “He had written a wonderful, quite detailed proposal – the book was laid out, he knew exactly what he was going to do, but sadly he became too ill to do any more, so unfortunately it won’t happen.”

Quillblog is dismayed this title will never be published: Ballard was a notoriously unsentimental writer, and his memoir, like Brodkey’s, would likely have provided an illuminating glimpse into one of life’s most troublesome rites of passage.

Fun with movie trailers

A couple of literary-themed movie trailers hit the Internet recently.

The preview for the adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh can be seen here. Directed by Dodgeball auteur Rawson Thurber, the film looks to have, ah, streamlined some of the themes of Chabon’s novel. In the trailer, at least, there’s only a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to the narrator’s struggle with his sexual identity, which is the crux of the novel. To be fair, though, trailers don’t always represent movies with scrupulous accuracy.

Also looming is Away We Go, a film scripted by author/McSweeney‘s founder Dave Eggers and his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and directed by Sam Mendes. According to the IMDB, the film is about a couple expecting their first child who, obviously being too special to live just anywhere, travel the country in search of the place that will best nurture their uniquely beautiful souls. To be fair, though, Quillblog is paraphrasing. The trailer is here.