The Olive Reader

Playboy has named its list of the 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written. If you click on each cover, you get the reason for selection and an excerpt. Not exactly family-friendly excerpts, as you might imagine.

Some interesting back-and-forth about this subject over at Jeff Jarvis’ site. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

The New York Times is really milking this last-25-years-of-American-fiction thing. Here are 16,570 more words on the subject. And no, I’m not kidding.

If you’d like help finding worthwhile things to read, The Morning News has handed out its 2006 awards for online excellence. It includes an award for Favorite Bevy of Ephemera (which might win my 2006 Best Name for an Award). The winner of that one was an exceedingly strange site called The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and I think you’ll enjoy this post. I did.

I read an interesting piece in The Village Voice last night about the ‘death’ of independent bookselling. Don’t feel so bad indies, they predict the demise of big-box booksellers at the hands of print-on-demand and the ‘internets’, too.

“The old-fashioned bookstore was a charming place, but charm alone will not solve the problem of modern book distribution. . . . Hard though it may be to face the fact, the bookstore of today cannot primarily be a place for those who revere books as things-in-themselves.”

An editorial about the opening of another Borders superstore crammed with lattes and Sudoku instead of Foucault and Zola? No. Try a Carnegie Corporation report . . . from 1930.

The life-expectancy of a bestselling novel has halved within the last decade, according to a long-term study of fiction bestsellers. It has fallen to barely a seventh of its level 40 years ago.
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It was a long weekend for some of us Olive Readers at BEA, and a thorough reporting of the event is forthcoming (with pictures!) once our worthy staff recovers.

Suffice it to say for now that among the many curious events to which I was a witness, perhaps the most curious was seeing Cliff Clavin (neé John Ratzenberger) signing galleys of his forthcoming book We’ve Got it Made in America next to our own Daniel Handler. Wondering what he was up to, I read a few pages. I learned a life lesson, friends. Hollywood liberals look down on the common man, and the common man is what makes America great.

Several writers tell us which books triggered their desire for travel.

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.
—from The Abduction

You can read the New York Times obituary here and an “Appreciation” by the Washington Post here.

Stanley Kunitz, the elegant centenarian of American poetry, whose musings about life, death, love and memory brought him a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and two terms as U.S. poet laureate, died Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 100.

Today is the day of Dubravka Ugresic and THE MINISTRY OF PAIN. She has an interview with M.A. Orthofer of The Complete Review online now, and another interview with James Marcus of The House of Mirth. Also, today is the first day of her Words Without Borders online book group, which is off to a fantastic start thanks to Chad Post, of Dalkey Archive Press.

Every book should have a day, don’t you think?

On a dreary, rainy Monday morning, it makes me very happy to read of a place where the population temporarily grows from 1,500 to 80,000 because of a literary festival. Hallelujah.

A Slate piece argues that independent bookstores aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

We link. You decide.

I like looking at this website.

Somehow we missed this, but the board of the National Book Critics Circle Award has a blog called Critical Mass.

Commentary on literary criticism, publishing, writing, and all things NBCC related. It’s written by the NBCC Board of Directors.
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