Book links round-up: reviewing The Hobbit trailer, Atwood is a 2011 hero, and more

• The Telegraph reviews trailer for The Hobbit
• Torontoist names Margaret Atwood one of 2011’s heroes
• Jonathan Ames contemplates writing book or comic to continue his cancelled HBO comedy, Bored to Death
• Publishers lament the titles that got away in 2011
• NPR names Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant one of the top comics of 2011.

VIDEO:

Publishing at the polls: federal parties respond to arts and culture questions

The Canadian Conference of the Arts sent leaders of the five federal parties a series of questions pertaining to arts and culture, and have posted the responses on its website. All of the parties responded, except for the Conservatives.

The answers are published without edits, and in a handy table format so you can compare responses. Of particular interest are questions pertaining to the Copyright Modernization Act:

Which elements of Bill C-32 will your party keep, and which elements of the bill will your party remove or change in a new bill to modernize the Copyright Act?

Bloc Québécois: The Bloc Québécois will ensure that the new bill is fair to both creators and consumers. This balance must be achieved, most notably through: an upgraded system for private copying, applying to Mp3 players and other digital music players; reasonable royalties to artists for redistribution of their works; the abolition of the education exemption and fair recognition of the resale rights of visual artists.

The Bloc Québécois is committed to fostering a regime requiring ISPs to pay royalties, which will go towards a fund to pay creators in Quebec who have been harmed due to the illegal downloading of artistic works.

Conservative Party:

Green Party: The Green Party of Canada strongly supports artists’ rights to guaranteed fair compensation through fair patent and copyright laws. At the same time, we consider the digital lock provision in Bill C-32 to be excessively restrictive in that it will not allow students and journalists to properly create and conduct research.

We will work with the CCA and other stakeholders to sharpen the definition of “educational uses” to find the right balance to give researchers this ability in a manner consistent with a thriving information commons, fair dealing principles, and moral rights.

Liberal Party: Recent studies have shown that Canada’s out-of-date Copyright Act translates into major economic loss (up to $965 million lost last year due to piracy, according to an Ipsos/Oxford economics study) for Canadian creators all across the country; the Liberal Party will thus start working on presenting a modernized copyright act as soon as we form government. Bill C-32, the latest Conservative attempt to modernize copyright, was unbalanced and unfair; a Liberal government will work with all stakeholders to ensure creators rights and their sources of revenues are protected under the Copyright Act.

Digital technology offers many new opportunities, but enjoying content without compensating its creators shouldn’t be among them. A new Liberal government will introduce technology neutral copyright legislation that balances the needs of creators and consumers and reflects the principle that our artists and musicians should be paid for their work. We will stand with Canadian creators as they navigate both the opportunities and challenges of the new digital society.

During the debate on copyright legislation in the last Parliament, it was the Liberal Party that developed a practical solution to providing musicians with compensation through a new private copying compensation fund rather than a levy. A Liberal government will look to develop similarly innovative solutions to ensure that the Copyright Act protects creators’ existing and future rights and revenue streams in a digital age. Likewise, the Liberal party believes that any exception under fair dealings must be clearly defined with a clear and strict test for fair use so that creators are fairly compensated for their work.

NDP: In reviewing Bill C-32, New Democrats would closely examine a number of key issues contained in the proposed legislation, including (but not limited to) ISP liability, Technological Protection Measures (TPMs, or so-called “digital locks”), statutory damages, private copying and reproduction for private purposes, broadcast mechanical licensing and fair dealing.

In order to arrive at an equilibrium between the interests of rights-holders and those of consumers, New Democrats would likely begin developing new copyright laws, beginning by consulting widely with stakeholder groups with the aim of creating a legislation that is – unlike C-32 – truly technology-neutral, balanced and flexible enough to ensure its adaptability to new platforms and technologies in the years to come. We would also determine definitively Canada’s obligations as a signatory to various international treaties governing copyright and intellectual property.

And when you’re done reading all the responses, reward yourself with a visit to vintagevoter.ca.

Reviews sabotaged on Amazon U.K.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail (via MobyLives) reports authors and publishers who are accusing each other of skewing Amazon star ratings by creating fake reader reviews:

[PR firms] provide favourable reviews of new books, at a price. Nathan Barker, of Reputation 24/7, offers a service starting at £5,000. He said: “First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we’d pick seven female profiles and three males. We’d say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.” Mr Barker claims this is common practice among publishers.

The article goes on to describe hostile reviews received by authors Polly Samson and Rosie Alison.

Daily book biz round-up: WSJ’s Weekend Edition debuts; DeLillo wins PEN/Saul Bellow; and more

Today’s book news:

• Reviewing the Wall Street Journal‘s new Weekend Edition
• Dying author searches for someone to complete his last work
• Don DeLillio wins PEN/Saul Bellow award for American fiction (as if he needed it)
• HarperCollins U.S. to launch conservative imprint (as if we needed it)
• Strand Bookstore now does better with candy than books
• MobyLives attends Toronto WOTS
• Banned Book Week kicks off

Wall Street Journal starts book review section

Bucking the trend of ever-declining books coverage, The Wall Street Journal will launch its first-ever book review section in the coming weeks. According to The New York Observer, which broke the news, the standalone section will be headed by former Atlantic editor Robert Messenger. From the Observer:

Book sections in newspapers have been killed left and right over the last few years. The Washington Post cut its standalone book section last year, The Chicago Tribune did it the year before, and the L.A. Times did it the year before that. There have been a lot of obituaries written in honor of book sections over the last few years, all lamenting a dying art in a printed newspaper that Rupert Murdoch — naturally — will now stubbornly try to revive.

Book lovers, writers, and industry professionals will certainly welcome the news of more ink being spilled on books. But one wonders what took the Journal so long: Murdoch, of course, is not only a maverick newspaper baron – his NewsCorp also owns HarperCollins.

Author’s wife admits trashing her husband’s rivals in anonymous Amazon reviews

There’s a reason why Amazon’s anonymous reviews are not considered entirely trustworthy. Case in point: last week’s farrago surrounding a series of reviews written by an Amazon reviewer using the pseudonym “Historian.” According to an article in the Guardian, Dr. Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University discovered a negative review of her otherwise universally lauded  Molotov’s Magic Lantern on Amazon. Polonsky went on a cyber-detective hunt, tracking back earlier reviews written by Historian, and discovering in the process a number of negative reviews directed toward British academics, including Oxford’s Dr. Robert Service. Significantly, Historian singled out one person – Dr. Orlando Figes – for praise. (Equally significantly, Polonsky had written a negative review of Figes’s 2002 book, Natasha’s Dance, in the Times Literary Supplement.)

Service responded to Polonsky’s discovery by sending a furious e-mail decrying the practice of anonymous, ad hominem reviews on sites like Amazon to 30 British academics, including Figes. Figes replied to all of Service’s correspondents, insisting that he was in no way responsible for the vitriolic reviews, which could have been written “by virtually anyone.”

However, last Friday, a note from Figes’s lawyer unmasked the actual author of the reviews, Dr. Stephanie Palmer, a lecturer at Cambridge. Palmer is also Figes’s wife.

In the pantheon of conflict-of-interest scandals, this one makes 2006′s Ryan Bigge/Leah McLaren contretemps seem like small beer. Writing in The Independent, Philip Hensher makes a salient point about anonymous book reviews online:

With the internet have come huge opportunities for anonymity. Anyone can say what they like about anyone else without there being the slightest risk of an interest, a direct connection, or an obligation being uncovered. That doesn’t seem an advantage, on the whole. I can see the reason for Salam Pax, the famous gay Iraqi blogger, to write pseudonymously. What possibly justification [sic] can there be for a blog of book reviews, or the reviews on Amazon, to remain anonymous, unless to conceal improper interests?

Historian’s reviews have been taken down, but Hensher’s point remains.

Novelist stops reviewing because of rampant misogyny in crime fiction: UPDATED

Novelist Clive Barker once called horror fiction the last refuge of the chauvinist. Jessica Mann might beg to differ. The British novelist, who also reviews crime fiction for the Literary Review, says that she has become so sickened by the “sadistic misogyny” in many crime novels that she’s giving up reviewing any more fiction.

Quoted in the Guardian, Mann insists that she doesn’t advocate censorship, but says she can no longer abide repeated descriptions of sadistic psychopaths doing increasingly horrific things to their female victims:

“Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me,” said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female crime writers.

She said that when a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague’s new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: “Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics.”

Mann goes on to point out that many of the most “inventive” misogynistic crime novels are actually written by women (the Guardian article mentions Val McDermid, Tess Gerritsen, and Canada’s own Kathy Reichs, among others). McDermid claims that the genre has become so sensational because the market demands it:

“There has been a general desensitisation among readers, who are upping the ante by demanding ever more sensationalist and gratuitous plotlines,” she said. “But when women write about violence against women, it will almost inevitably be more terrifying because women grow up knowing that to be female is to be at risk of attack. We write about violence from the inside. Men, on the other hand, write about it from the outside.”

UPDATE (OCT. 27): The original article from the Guardian‘s website, upon which this post was based, has been updated with the following notice:

This article was amended on Tuesday 27 October 2009. We previously said that one of the country’s leading crime writers and critics “is refusing to review new books” but that should have been “is refusing to review some violent new books.” This has been corrected.

Lisa Moore still “unreadably Canadian,” Barbara Kay says

National Post columnist Barbara Kay really has it in for novelist Lisa Moore. The one-sided feud began last July, when Kay responded to Post reporter Katherine Laidlaw’s “gushy” profile of the two-time Giller Prize nominee, calling Moore’s most recent novel, February, “unreadably Canadian,” a prime example of the “navel-gazing narrative stasis” that defines Canadian literature. “Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit,” Kay wrote, “where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men.”

The only catch was that Kay had yet to read the book in question. However, the opinionated journalist rectified the situation on her summer vacation, reading February and a handful of other literary titles sent to her by Moore’s publisher, House of Anansi Press. Not surprisingly, Kay’s summer reading only confirmed her assumptions about the novel’s unmanly approach to character and plot. “February is 99% writerly foreplay, 1% readerly orgasm,” she writes:

Moore is an enormously talented writer, but like so many others of her sensitive, creative workshopped-to-death ilk, a writer’s writer privileging an artistic, leisured rendering of memory and feeling over prole-friendly dialogue, action and, above all, plot.

According to Kay, the woeful state of CanLit can be blamed on the impact that feminism has had on the industry (Canadian publishing is “highly feminized by comparison to 40 years ago,” she observes) and indulgent public-sector grants, which encourage writers to “start writing for bureaucrats, academics, theorists and literary elites, not for flesh and blood readers,” Kay argues.

Of course, it’s impossible to take seriously a critic whose pre-judgments are so ingrained and politically charged. Unfortunately for Moore, any number of authors could have stood in as the target of Kay’s screed.

Faking your way through literary conversations

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

Reviewing Mailer

The 83-year-old Norman Mailer has a new book coming out next week – his first in over a decade – and The New York Observer’s Philip Weiss has just weighed in with an early review.

Weiss says at the outset of his piece that he sat down to read The Castle in the Forest (Random House) “wondering how many rounds [Mailer] can still go with a pencil,” but then he spends the rest of the review basically apologizing for ever having doubted the man.

This work has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit. There are a few signs of strain, but they hardly count against the power of the language and the ideas. Here’s Norman Mailer in Act V, and he has all the wit and magic of old Prospero.

If Weiss is right, it’s certainly good news for Mailer’s fans. But he has so much trouble synopsizing the nearly 500-page tome – even though his review runs a lengthy 2,000 words or so – that you may come away worried that Mailer has succumbed, like Pynchon and DeLillo, to the everything-plus-the-kitchen- sink approach to novel writing. As has been established elsewhere, The Castle in the Forest is a fictionalized biography of Adolph Hitler, but Weiss makes it sound as if Mailer is barely interested in Hitler:

There’s little history here at all, and more about czarist Russia in the late 1800s than about Hitler as a fascist leader. [And] any thought you have that the book will take up Jews and the Jewish question – again, no. Mr. Mailer finishes with Hitler in 1905, at age 16 or so, in Linz, Austria, at about the time when he’s figured out how to masturbate.

Weiss basically gives up trying to tell us what The Castle in the Forest actually is, and instead gives over to transcribing a long series of interesting (but rambling) phone discussions with Mailer about history, fathers and sons, incest, the Devil, demonology, his Jewishness, and the kabbalah. Let’s hope the book itself is a little more focused.