Bookmarks: Generic Wizard Nights, a feline Humbert Humbert, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• The Ontario Library Association has announced the nominees for the 2010 Forest of Reading Program. Votes can be cast for your favourite authors at the OLA’s website. Participants have between now and April 23 to read a minimum of 5 of the 10 titles in their chosen category
• Classic literature meets lolcats with LOLerature. Who knew what we were missing?
• A U.K. fan who was forbidden to throw a Harry Potter-themed dinner party throws a “Generic Wizard Night” instead
• Stephen King taps into vampire mania by writing his first comic book, American Vampire. The most terrifying fact, as pointed out by AbeBooks, is that the vampire bears an uncanny resemblance to Kid Rock
• For people who have too much time on their hands like dressing up their pets as literary characters, The New Yorker has been holding an online Critterati Contest. The contest has closed and the winners will be announced later today, but the gallery is still available for your browsing pleasure. (While there are a plethora of adorable Moby Dicks and Hestor Prynnes, this Quillblogger has money on the feline version of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, caught in flagrante delicto with an unwitting Barbie Lolita)
• The woman who gave us Lestat de Lioncourt is swapping vampires for angels, the National Post reports

Bookmarks: snobbery in the age of Kindle, Kerouac and the canon, and bigamy proves a boon

Some book-related links:

• James Wolcott wonders, “What’s a Culture Snob to Do?” in the age of Kindle, iPods, etc.
  
• Should Kerouac be kicked out of the canon?
• That old story: woman finds out her husband is a bigamist, starts small press, wins award.
• Philip Marchand’s literary take on Michael Jackson.
• David Bezmozgis reads a story by Sergei Dovlatov. (Audio)

The New Yorker slobbers over Alice Munro

Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.

On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event – her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”

Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.

Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.

Author tweets his way back into the limelight

Author and former New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum is attracting attention with an essay about his tenure at the prestigious magazine in that he’s posting on Twitter. Baum began his story this past Friday and has been gaining followers ever since, with 200 new readers joining in a two-hour period this morning. At the time of this writing, Baum is up to 1,411 followers.

Baum’s essay details his hiring (and firing) from The New Yorker and features many tidbits about his career in between, including links to stories he pitched but were never printed, information about his salary, and his commitment not to write for competing magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine.

What the L.A. Times‘ Jacket Copy blog cleverly points out, however, is that the timing of Baum’s “big reveal” is rather suspect, considering he left The New Yorker back in 2007. Carolyn Kellogg writes:

It could be a Twitter experiment. It reads like a short essay that’s been chopped into 140-character bits (in a few places, sentences stretch across two tweets). Or maybe he’s promoting something. Could he have a book out?

In fact, he does. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans was well-reviewed when it was released in February. It’s doing pretty well on Amazon (No. 1 in the subcategories of histories/Louisiana and biographies and memoirs/regional U.S./South). But it’s hard for a book to stay top of mind after the first flurry of attention.

While this Quillblogger is a fan of Twitter, this voyeuristic exposition sure doesn’t help counter the arguments that the site’s main use is for self-serving promotion.

J.G. Ballard’s final short story in The New Yorker

[UPDATE: This story has been corrected to note the previous publications of Ballard's story.]

The New Yorker has published a short story by science-fiction icon J.G. Ballard, who passed away on April 19. Originally published in French for Etoile Mecanique in 1981 and later in English for Ambit (1984) and Interzone (1996), the piece entitled “The Autobiography of J.G.B.” tells the story of a man named “B” who wakes up one morning to find that the people of England, France, and possibly the whole world, have disappeared without a trace. Carolyn Kellogg on the L.A. Times book blog notes how the story seems somewhat incomplete:

It feels to me like he got up in the middle of the story and never came back to finish it. But then again, Ballard was always messing with readers’ expectations – maybe that’s exactly what he wanted.

Although the story’s ending is rather abrupt, the captivating quality of this short piece shows how Ballard could create a realistic fantasy world and leave readers asking for more. Read the story here.

Bookmarks: inauguration edition

• Taken from Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses, test your knowledge of the final words of former presidents’ inaugural speeches (Jacket Copy)
• Barack Obama will take the oath of office on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used, and will eat a meal modelled on some of Lincoln’s favourite dishes (including the apple-cinnamon sponge cake). For The Book Bench, Adam Gopnick and Jill Lepore recommend some Lincoln books (The New Yorker)
• Martin Levin dissects Obama’s reading list (The Globe and Mail)
• Evangelist Rick Warren (and author of The Purpose Driven Life) delivers the invocation at Obama’s inauguration (abc6.com)
• Q&A with inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander (TIME Magazine)

Le Clezio’s work will appear in The New Yorker for the first time

Earlier this month, Quillblog copped ignorance to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s work, since there was only one English title available on Amazon. Apparently, the announcement of Le Clezio the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature piqued the curiousity of the insular and ignorant North American masses, and so The New Yorker will publish one of Le Clezio’s short stories, The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea, in the Oct. 27 print issue.

“We thought lots of people would be very interested to see what his work was like,” said New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, whose translation of the short story The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea will appear on newsstands Monday. “We also wanted to move fast and publish it while people still remember his name.”

Treisman had also not read Le Clezio’s work before the Nobel was announced. An abstract of Le Clezio’s story will appear on The New Yorker‘s website, though for now there’s a one-sentence write-up that sums it up: “Short story about a boy who runs away from school to be near the sea.”

Bookmarks: Invisible Publishing, most-hated books, new story from Alice Munro, and the case of the stolen Hulk

Some book-related links:

• Halifax’s Invisible Publishing profiled* (The Chronicle Herald)
• Critics pick their most-hated books (Times Online)
• New story from Alice Munro (The New Yorker)
• Nerd-thieves swipe Hulk statue from book store (2 News.tv)
• Argentinian fiction: the next generation (Los Angeles Times)
• 50 best summer vacation books (The Telegraph)
• Children’s book illustrator Tasha Tudor, dead at 92 (Washington Post)

* To read Q&Q‘s profile of Invisible from our May 2008 issue, go here.

Bookmarks: new Bond in Russia!, new Thunderbirds everywhere!, no new autobiographical characters in Salman Rushdie novels!

Some book-related links:

• New James Bond novel gets Russian publisher (MI6)
• New Thunderbirds novels after more than forty years (SWFA Pressbook)
• Salman Rushdie vows to stop creating autobiographical characters (The Canadian Press)
• Mold: the enemy of rare books (Chicago Tribune)
• Woman robs dirty bookshop (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
• John Updike on Flann O’Brien (The New Yorker)
• Deciphering authors’ handwriting (Slate)
• Leah McLaren: our own Paris Hilton? (Seven Oaks)

New book show debuting online

The New York Times reports that a new online book show is due to hit the Web in March.

The program will be hosted by Daniel Menaker, former editor-in-chief of Random House.

The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

Created by documentary filmmakers Odile Isralson and Lina Matta, the program is set to feature authors Richard Price (Clockers), Susan Choi (A Person of Interest), and debut novelist Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) in its premiere episode, followed two weeks later by the second episode, on first-time authors.