Book links roundup: a guide to literary Tumblrs, unemployment literature, and more

• A guide to literary Tumblrs
• Grim economic times inspire unemployment literature
• Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest turns 50
• Cradling Charlotte Brontë’s teeny-tiny early work
• Torontoist peeks inside the new antiquarian bookshop, Sellers & Newel

U.S. literary journals thrive with low overhead and dedicated audiences

A couple of weeks ago poet Michael Lista got the attention of the publishing Twitterverse with his National Post essay “Why literary magazines should fold.”

Now, we don’t need another American TV sitcom to point out the differences between our two cultures, but here’s an interesting article about the financial health of U.S. West Coast literary journals. Turns out, boutique publishers like The Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and McSweeney’s Quarterly are doing just fine these days, but not for the reasons you might think. According to The New York Times:

If literary journals “are poised to do well,” as Laura Cogan, editor of San Francisco-based ZYZZYVA, said, it may be because they share qualities with many successful online ventures: skeletal staffs, low overhead and specialized audiences.

The article suggests journals associated with academic institutions have financially suffered the most over the last couple of years. Not that the successful print publishers are sitting around counting their money bags — they’ve been investing in the online side of their businesses by overhauling websites and promoting online subscriptions. McSweeney’s even hired a digital media director.

But, as the article concludes — and here’s where Canadians can nod in agreement — if these publishers are doing well, it is relative to their notions of success:

“No one has ever been able to make a good living writing or publishing literary fiction,” Stephen Elliott, a writer and founder of The Rumpus, said. “It doesn’t matter that there are exceptions. The rule stands.”

Bibliomania and the not-so-light side of book hoarding

Last week, the National Post‘s Mark Medley wrote a piece about his ever-expanding book collection and the difficulty he has lightening his load by even a single volume. “I am a book hoarder,” he says. “Help me, please.”

The same day the article was published, CBC Radio’s Metro Morning picked up the story and host Matt Galloway spent the rest of the week discussing the impulse on air, and over Twitter and Facebook. He even brought in Shelagh Rogers to talk about her own book-collecting habits. By the end of the weekend, the term “book hoarder” came up in national media a lot.

The piece caught the eye of one Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding. In her view, the conversation around book hoarding overlooked an important fact: hoarding is more than a mild eccentricity, it’s an illness. (To be fair, Rogers avoided the word “hoarder” throughout her interview with Metro Morning, opting instead to call herself a “book lover.”) Sholl responded to Medley’s article on her blog at Psychology Today.

In her post, “You Are Not a Book Hoarder,” she attempts to set the record straight on bibliomania:

Just because you have a lot of books, that doesn’t mean you’re a bibliomaniac. Can you walk through the room in which your books are stored? Have you depleted any of your life savings on these books? Do you hide when the doorbell rings or not allow a plumber into your home when your sink is clogged?

…

[C]arelessly tossing the label of hoarder around, as the National Post essay does, is disrespectful to hoarders and those affected by the disorder…. [N]o one’s arguing that the term hoarding is off limits. Or that you can’t joke about hoarding, ever…. Maybe the line between harmless humor and disrespectful minimization of a mental illness is similar to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography — you know it when you see it. Or maybe it’s simply keeping in mind that common expression: Language matters.

Peter Robinson wins $10,000 Harbourfront prize

The International Festival of Authors announced today that mystery author Peter Robinson is this year’s recipient of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize, “based on the merits of his own published work and the time he has invested in nurturing the next generation of literary talent.”

Robinson was selected by a jury comprising John van Driel, vice-president of programming operations at Classical 96.3 FM, National Post reporter Mark Medley, and IFOA director Geoffrey E. Taylor. Previous winners include Wayson Choy, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, and Jane Urquhart. The prize will be presented on Oct. 30, the closing night of the IFOA.

Atwood-bashing begins over “Fox News North”

Margaret Atwood is once again lending her name to a worthy cause, and like her support for the environment, brown-bag lunches, and stay-at-home book tours, the celebrated novelist’s actions have generated some mild controversy in the Canadian media.

The latest episode erupted on Tuesday when Atwood announced (via Twitter) that she had added her name to a petition protesting Sun Media’s efforts to launch a Fox TV-style news channel in Canada (the channel is being dubbed “Fox News North” and “Tory TV”). That immediately prompted a response, also via Twitter, from Sun Media national bureau chief David Akin accusing Atwood of supporting “an anti-free speech movement” and effectively accusing “me and my colleagues of hate speech.”

Atwood in turn replied that the issue isn’t about free speech per se, but rather Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meddlesome involvement with the CRTC, which recently denied the network a top-tier broadcast licence. As Atwood puts it in fewer than 140 characters, “we shouldn’t B Forced to Pay for it, & CRTC chair should be arms’ length, not Harper tool. Fox free 2 set itself up.” She elaborates her position in The Globe and Mail:

“Of course Fox & Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it’s legal etc.,” she told The Globe and Mail in an email. “But it shouldn’t happen this way. It’s like the head-of-census affair – gov’t direct meddling in affairs that are supposed to be arm’s length – so do what they say or they fire you.

“It’s part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing,” she wrote.

In today’s National Post, columnist Kelly McParland hits back with an editorial deriding Atwood for “sign[ing] onto this silliness.” Atwood, McParland writes, “stands for good stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, except when it comes to the case of people who don’t agree with her…. Right Peggy? Because you can’t be a good Canadian if you’re a Conservative. Everyone at the CanLit festivals agrees, so it must be true.”

The Post‘s paranoid speculation about a left-leaning CanLit cabal is nothing new. Assuming that at least some of Quillblog’s readers will want to follow Atwood in rejecting Fox News North, you can do so by adding your name to the petition here.

Lady links

• The L.A. Times calls The War on Moms an “infuriating, galvanizing read” and a “page-turner for working moms”
• The National Post talks to comics artist Maryanna Hardy about her appearance at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival
• Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based writer Emily St. John Mandel, eulogizes her agent on The Millions
• Kristen Stewart cast in On the Road adaptation
• Becky Toyne writes on the evolution of an indie bookstore
• Popular lit blog Bookslut celebrates its eighth anniversary this month

The changing face of DIY

In a recent column in The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith makes an excellent case for dismantling the stereotype of traditional publishers as obstinate elitists resistant to change:

Of course, everyone wants to get into selling e-books. No one is resisting this idea. The problem is that not everyone wants to buy them yet. Furthermore, no one has yet agreed on who will be in control of these sales, and in particular of how much each of these books is going to cost. Both the publishers and the booksellers want to set the prices, and the booksellers will want to set the prices much lower than the publishers will.

Smith goes on to discuss how e-books are helping change the face of self-publishing; he thinks that, in the age of PayPal, vanity presses may not be considered inferior to traditional publishing, despite continued lack of support from arts councils and awards juries:

Some of the most popular writers on the Internet are unpaid and unpublished in print. Furthermore, even successful published authors are beginning to experiment with putting their own works up for sale online. In this case, it’s not a lack of renown that causes authors to self-publish, but the opposite: If an author is a really big name, she knows she already has the following to generate sales without the help of a publisher’s marketing and sales departments.

The National Post examined the phenomenon of DIY publishing in a recent article:

It’s a curiosity of modern culture that an indie CD or film is cool, while a self-published book still carries a whiff of stigma. Don’t believe it? Just try to get your indie book reviewed in most publications that habitually fawn over indie music and film.

Daily book biz round-up, March 25

Here’s today’s book news:

• Publishers Weekly takes temperature of Bologna Children’s Book Fair
• Will Random House ever be on the iPad?
• More conjecture on Apple’s book pricing plans
• Newbery-winner Sid Fleischman dies
• Harold W. McGraw Jr. (of McGraw-Hill fame) dies, too
• British spy novel geek to auction off private library
• Shane Koyczan performs “Swiftly” for the National Post

Ian Weir doles out writing advice at the Afterword Reading Society wrap-up

Last night, book lovers gathered at Ben McNally Books in Toronto for the National Post’s inaugural Afterword Reading Society wrap-up. Brad Frenette, Afterword co-editor, hosted a Q&A with Ian Weir, whose novel Daniel O’Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre) has been discussed on the Post book blog for the past two months or so (and was one of Q&Q’s “Overlooked Books” of 2009). The novel has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Weir, a successful playwright and screenwriter, spoke frequently of how his background influenced the writing process of his first novel, and offered up some writing advice.

“I find it really useful to think of myself as an actor playing the role of the character,” he said. “If I were an actor, what would I be doing with this moment? What would I be doing with this character? So often as a writer you stay outside the character and discover that you’ve written characters who make a certain intellectual sense to you, but don’t actually have life.”

Weir also said that he appreciated the creative freedom that comes with writing a novel – the usual budget constraints associated with writing for the screen or stage did not apply.

“That’s the wonderful thing about being a writer,” he said. “It costs just the same to set a story with a bazillion characters in the streets of London in Victorian England as it does to write a novel with one character in the streets of London in 2011.”

This week in quotes: rules for writers edition

A number of rules for writers pieces have popped up online recently, most notably in The Guardian and the National Post. On Salon, meanwhile, Laura Miller turns it around, offering a reader’s advice to writers. Here are some highlights from all three:

“Kafka wrote a perfectly fine beginning to The Castle, then threw it out for a better one.  So can you. Revise.” – Leon Rooke

“In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” – Rose Tremain

“Writing fiction is not ‘self-­expression’ or ‘therapy’. Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.” – Sarah Waters

“Don’t confuse honours with achievement.” – Zadie Smith

“Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But ‘said’ is far less intrusive than ‘grumbled’, ‘gasped’, ‘cautioned’, ‘lied’. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ‘she asseverated’ and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.” – Elmore Leonard

“No sex unless it’s funny.” – Steve Zipp

“Read. I don’t know many great writers who aren’t also great readers. Although I do know lots of readers who aren’t writers. What was my point again? Oh yes. Reading is professional development for writers. In other careers, people go to conferences and take courses. Writers read.” – Terry Fallis

“Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There’s a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of ‘The Great Gatsby’ while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.” – Laura Miller