Book biz roundup: zombie Salinger still publicity-shy, Nabokov was right about butterflies, TED gets into e-books, and more

• A year after his death, J.D. Salinger is still shunning the spotlight
• Vladimir Nabokov’s theory about a particular species of butterfly gets confirmed by scientists
• TED, the ongoing lecture series (conference? symposium? smartypantsium?) is starting an e-book line
• Ukrainian poet and playwright Anna Yablonskaya among the victims of Monday’s bombing in Moscow
• Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood gets yet another ending
• U.S. senator Scott Brown seeks to combine book tour and re-election campaign

Bookmarks: Amazon fails, flanimals escape, and more

Here are some literary links for your perusal:

• Amazon continues to fail: After removing all Macmillan titles from its site, the company’s own stock fell nearly 6% yesterday
• Salty Ink is throwing caution to the wind and judging books by their covers – from now until the end of the month, you can vote for the best Atlantic Canadian book cover
• Ricky Gervais reacts to the news that “flanimal rights” activists seem to have freed 12,000 copies of his new pop-up book
• Say hello to your old friends the Glass family: With new covers pre-approved by Salinger himself, Penguin will relaunch his backlist this June

Readers salivate over Salinger’s unpublished manuscripts

J.D. Salinger has been dead a scant five days, but already people are clamouring for his unpublished work to be made available. In a 1974 interview (one of the few the famously reclusive author ever gave), Salinger said, “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” And the prospect that the author was writing – and not publishing – has fans all a-twitter at the notion that there may be new work forthcoming once the vaults are thrown open.

Writing on the National Post‘s Afterword blog, novelist Andrew Kaufman suggests (with tongue firmly in cheek) that he and a group of “co-conspirators” are going to descend on New Hampshire for the purpose of “stealing J.D. Salinger’s filing cabinet.”

We just can’t wait any longer. Mr. Salinger may have only [just] passed on … but it’s been 16,296 days since he’s published anything. We’ve received no new family dramas from the Glasses, nothing about Holden dropping out of college or backpacking through India, not even a chuckle from the Laughing Man. But Salinger, so the legend goes, turned his back not on writing but publishing. Joyce Maynard who lived with Salinger after his self-imposed literary exile claims he’s completed at least two full novels. Margaret Salinger, his sister, stated that Salinger kept a detailed filing system, one that’s even colour coded to let future editors know what to publish and how to publish it.

In a more serious vein, entertainment lawyer Michael Levine tells the Toronto Star that Salinger’s unpublished work represents a potential “gold mine”:

“The interest and enthusiasm in the academic community and in the trade community remains profound. Sixty-five million copies of The Catcher in the Rye have sold. Whatever the quality of the subsequent manuscripts, there would be interest,” Levine said.

All of which may be true, but Quillblog would like to caution Salinger’s many fans about the dangers of being overly enthusiastic. Posthumously published work by renowned authors is not always everything it’s cracked up to be.

Salinger, Chekhov, and other literary greats in illustration

In light of two significant events – the death of J.D. Salinger and the 150^th birthday of Anton Chekhov – Quillblog would like to draw attention to the fantastic website created by Canadian comics fan Steve Gettis. In 1998, Gettis wrote to 10 illustrators he admired, asking them to send him sketches of their favourite literary figures. After receiving several responses, Gettis created the website “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!” to display these creations. According to the L.A. Times, the name came to Gettis after he “heard his young sons playing a game in which the Fantastic Four’s The Thing was, he says, ‘beating the snot out of the Irish playwright.’”

So while the Internet is still abuzz with alternately fraught, surprisingly flippant or satirical commentary on the death of J.D. Salinger, spend some time browsing the website. American artists Scott Morse and Mike Allred have takes on Salinger himself, while Darick Robertson offers a brooding vision of Holden Caulfield.

As for Chekhov, take a look at illustrator Dan Panosian’s take on the Russian playwright, then continue to explore “Hey Oscar Wilde!” for drawings of Canadian literary greats such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje.

J.D. Salinger dies at 91

J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey, has died at age 91 in his New Hampshire home. According to The New York Times, the author died of natural causes:

“Despite having broken his hip in May,” [his literary representative, Harold Ober Associates] said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”

The CBC offers further details on the famously reclusive author:

Salinger guarded his copyright and the integrity of his artistic output as fiercely as he guarded his privacy. He rejected numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen. And his lawyers blocked a screening of the film Pari, by Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui and loosely adapted from Franny and Zooey, at the Lincoln Center in 1998.

Salinger, who took part in the Battle of Normandy during the Second World War, leaves behind his daughter Margaret, his son Matthew, and his wife, Colleen O’Neill.

Time to retire Catcher in the Rye?

There’s an internet debate a’brewin’ over the merits of that perennial high school syllabus placeholder The Catcher in the Rye. Over at Good Magazine, Anne Trubek makes an impassioned plea to replace it with something newer and fresher:

J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

Meanwhile, the scribes at Gawker have responded with an equally impassioned WTF? directed at Trubek:

My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher in The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher in The Rye, and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.

Haruki Murakami on translation

Mainichi Daily News – yes, we read ‘em all – has an interview with novelist Haruki Murakami on the recent work he’s done translating some classic American novels into Japanese:

Over the past few years, Murakami has rendered into Japanese four full-length novels – J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s – as they are important novels “I really wanted to translate,” he says.

Murakami worked on these now-published translations from 2003. The novels are not just representative works of their famous authors, but also stories Murakami has read repeatedly since his high school days and, he says, “I personally like them.”

“I’ve always translated Fitzgerald, but otherwise concentrated on contemporary works,” Murakami says, adding there were three reasons why he decided to take on the “classics.”

“I’ve gradually worked out my translation style and thought it was about time I gave them a try myself,” he says, outlining the first of his motives. “And, there’s a use-by date for translations and the old translations have reached that time.”

His final ground for updated translations was that “young people should translate new works by contemporary writers.”

Murakami says the “use-by” date on translations means they have a “50-year limit” of effectiveness because of changing writing styles in Japanese. Murakami says that the flood of works translated into Japanese during a literature boom here in the 1960s are now reaching their “use-by” dates.

Literary texts

The Book Standard website reports that Dot Mobile, which offers mobile-phone services to all students in universities in the U.K., plans to launch a program in January in which students are sent text messages of abbreviated summaries and first lines of literary classics for £20 a month.

Professor John Sutherland of University College London, who helped develop the program, doffed the white gloves to defend it against literary purists. “Whilst some may argue that [Charles] Dickens is really too big a morsel to be swallowed by text, the ‘Great Inimitable’ himself began working life as a shorthand writer,” he said in a press release. “He would, I suspect, have approved of the brevity if nothing else.”

Think you’re so smart? Identify the novel that opens with the following:

IfURlyWnt2HrBoutIt,Da1stFingUlProbWnt2NoIsWherIWsBorn&
WotMyLousyChldhdWsLyk&HwMyRentsWerOcupyd&AlB4TheyHdMe
&AlThtDaveCopafieldKindaCrp,BtIDnFeelLykGoinIntaItIfUWannaNoDaTruf

[Answer: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye]

Related links:
Click on the link to read The Book Standard story

Greasing the hype machine

A hot topic of conversation in the online literary community is the commercial success of The Traveler, an ambiguously fictional first novel written by the strangely pseudonymed John Twelve Hawks. Climbing the New York Times bestsellers list, making its way onto the pages of the international press, and being optioned for a film without so much as a book tour or interview with its mysterious author, The Traveler has become the source of much bewilderment and hoopla.

The reclusive author with a potentially true story passing as fiction is nothing new, as is shown in a recent story posted on The Times Online. The article begins with a discussion of the mother of all ambiguously fictional novels, Henri Charrière’s Papillon — about the author’s supposed imprisonment, subsequent escape and adoption into an aboriginal community in French Guiana — segues into a discussion on veracity in an author’s biography, ends with a short write-up on reclusive authors that that includes J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, among others, and ultimately blasts The Traveler, saying “the writer too shy to be named has become a cliché, and a marketing tool. The Traveler is shooting up the bestseller lists, in part because the author has declined to be identified.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times Online article
Click here for a reviewer’s discussion of the book’s hype
Click here for The Traveler‘s cryptic official website