Daily book biz round-up: Mankell okay; librarians do Gaga; and more

Your mid-week links party:

• Apple to face wild west shoot-out in Texas?
• Henning Mankell okay; calls for sanctions against Israel
• James Ellroy makes Montreal journalists cower before him
• Yet more petty behavior by authors in Amazon’s reviews forums
• U.K. iBookstore titles more expensive than print editions
• Librarians do incredibly bad Lady Gaga impersonations

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.

Who will win the Nobel?

It’s not quite the biggest reward that can be given to a writer (that would be inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, or maybe Richard and Judy’s), but the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing to sneeze at – just look what it has done for last year’s winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio (who?). The prize is to be handed out tomorrow, and the international book media abounds with speculation. That the head of the prize  recently remarked that the Nobel has been too “Eurocentric” in its picks has caused some to believe this is America’s year, with maybe Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates heading to Stockholm.

As far as the oddsmakers are concerned, however, the prize is most likely to go to Israeli writer Amos Oz. According to the odds posted at Ladbrokes.com, Oz has a 3-1 chance of walking away with it, the same German author Herta Müller (who?).

Alice Munro is farther down the list at 25-1, the same odds as Bob Dylan(?). Atwood is 40-1, and Ondaatje is 50-1.

Whoever wins, the odds of someone posting, within 24 hours of the announcement, a video mashup on YouTube featuring Kanye West interrupting the ceremony in Stockholm are about 2-1.

Burned holy books to be symbolically buried, maybe

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, symbolism is everything. And there is a small tussle going on right now that is so heavy with symbolism, it might as well be an Ingmar Bergman film. At issue is a set of Jewish holy books that were allegedly burned by a group of Arabs. The books were being studied by Homesh Tehila (“Homesh First”), an Israeli group looking to re-establish a settlement that had been dismantled by the Israeli government. They had been maintaining an ad hoc yeshiva (a kind of school) on the site of the former settlement.

Unfiltered information about this kind of thing is difficult to come by (hence our hedging in the title of this post), but Homesh Tehila alleges that Arabs raided the yeshiva and burned the books a few weeks ago, and plans were afoot to bury the texts as part of a, well, highly symbolic ceremony.

From the The Jerusalem Post:

According to David Ha’ivri, a spokesman for the Samaria Regional Council, one night when there was no guard, local Arabs broke into the yeshiva and “burned to ashes” the holy books studied by the students.

In a press release, Ha’ivri juxtaposed the fire created by the burned holy books with the spiritual fire kindled by the yeshiva students’ learning.

(The ceremony, by the way, appears to have been postponed after some of its leaders were threatened with arrest.)

Norman Mailer and The New Yorker

James Wolcott has a post up today about the relative lack of Mailer content in The New Yorker over the past six decades or so – Louis Menand’s pithy obituary notwithstanding.

Wolcott pulls a quote out of Mailer’s book Armies of the Night to help explain the scarcity:

Although [critic Dwight MacDonald] would not admit it, he was in secret carrying on a passionate love affair with The New Yorker – Disraeli on his knees before Victoria. But the Novelist [Mailer] did not share Macdonald’s infatuation at all – The New Yorker had not printed a line in review of The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, or Cannibals and Christians, and that, Mailer had long ago decided, was an indication of some of the worst things to be said about the magazine. He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. “Because they would not let me use the word ‘shit,’” he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say shit in The New Yorker.

Wolcott notes that, these days, “all manner of shit is said in The New Yorker, and nobody minds, not even the senior nuns.”

(By the way, you can say “shit” in Q&Q.)

Book critical of pro-Israel lobby incites pre-pub jitters

The New York Times has posted an article about a new book being published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this September: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. It seems that early excerpts from the book, which argues that the pro-Israel lobby wields too much influence in U.S. political circles, are setting off accusations of anti-Semitism. That’s not really all that surprising, of course, but what is surprising – or shameful, at any rate – is that several cultural and political institutions are canceling planned events with the authors.

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

The authors were particularly disturbed by the Chicago council’s decision, since plans for that event were complete and both authors have frequently spoken there before. The two sent a four-page letter to 94 members of the council’s board detailing what happened. “On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event,” and that his decision “was based on the need ‘to protect the institution.’ He said that he had a serious ‘political problem,’ because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the council. ‘This one is so hot,’ Marshall maintained.”

In Canada, the default distributor for Farrar, Straus & Giroux is Douglas & McIntyre, but D&M marketing manager Emiko Morita told us that they will not be selling the book here because it has not been made available to them by FSG. As she explained to us, this suggests that FSG is still looking to sell Canadian rights separately.

UPDATE: Q&Q has been informed that Penguin Canada holds Canadian rights and will be publishing the book on Sept. 4.

Reading still dangerous to young minds: Part two

Before getting too smug about the first part of today’s In Other Media, Canadian readers, who tend to see themselves as more liberal than Americans in their attitudes about what children should be allowed to read, should check out a story in the Toronto Star. In the story, education reporter Tess Kalinowski reports that the Toronto District School Board, the largest board in the country, is making Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes off-limits to children below Grade 7. The book features interviews with children caught in the firing line of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but the Canadian Jewish Congress wrote to the board claiming that the book’s lack of historical and political context made its contents unsuitable for children in Grades 4 to 6. The board agreed and the book will now be unavailable in junior school libraries. (The book has also been removed from contention for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award in some jurisdictions and from the library shelves of York’s public school board because of complaints from the CJC.) Toronto school board chair Sheila Ward assured the public that the book is not being banned, as children can still get Three Wishes from their local library or bookstore. At least for now….

Related links:
Read the article in the Toronto Star

Silver Birch selection felled by school board

The Toronto Star reports this morning that Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes, a book that featured conversations with Israeli and Palestinian children, is causing controversy in the York Region District School Board, near Toronto. Education reporter Tess Kalinowski reports that the book, which made the Ontario Library Association’s list of finalists for the Silver Birch award (the winner is then voted on by nine- to 11-year-olds), has been dropped from the school board’s selection list. The article points to a Feb. 8 letter from the Canadian Jewish Congress that outlines some of the concerns about the book. “The letter says the book portrays Israelis as ‘brutal occupiers,’ and Palestinians as ‘murderers who are so intent on killing Israelis that they are prepared to blow themselves to shreds,’” Kalinowski writes.

CJC director Len Rudner told the Star: “What you’re left with is a book where, in a fair number of instances, you have kids saying: Maybe suicide bombing is a viable alternative, or maybe it’s understandable or maybe it’s a career choice for me. It either convinces children that maybe blowing up your enemy by strapping explosive devices to yourself is not such a far-fetched thing, or it advances the message these people are crazy and people like that can’t be trusted. Just imagine how those kind of messages can play themselves out in a schoolyard.”

Other area school boards, including the Toronto District School Board and the Durham District School Board, are going to review the book in the near future. The Peel District School Board has already conducted a review of Three Wishes and deemed it suitable.

Related links:
Click here for the Toronto Star article
Click here for Q&Q‘s review of Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes

Heckled author threatens lawsuit

A heckling incident at a Chapters store has turned into an ugly war of words that may spill over into the courts. Howard Rotberg, author of The Second Catastrophe, a novel set in Israel, was reportedly heckled by two Muslim men during a discussion of the book at a Chapters location in Waterloo, Ontario. The men reportedly accused Rotberg of depicting all Muslims as terrorists. When one of the men uttered an anti-Semitic remark, they were escorted out of the store. Indigo Books & Music has since released a statement about the incident, claiming that Rotberg retorted to the taunting with a racist remark of his own. Rotberg denies the accusation is now considering suing the chain for libel.

Related links:
Canadian Jewish News article