I would have posted this on Beverly Cleary’s actual birthday (April 12) had I read this post earlier. Despite my lateness in my birthday wishes, I still feel it is appropriate to pay homage to an author that got me hooked on reading at a very early age.

Who can forget the innocent adventures of Ramona Quimby or the more mature Henry Huggins and his dog, Ribsy? I remember these characters more vividly than anything I ever watched on television when I was a kid and I can’t help but think they played a big role in developing my love for literature.

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It’s a sad day for the science fiction community, and even the literary community at large because Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. He is probably best known for works like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not too long ago I read his novel Time’s Eye which is based on the premise that the earth is suddenly carved up into different epochs of history. The result is groups of modern humans meet groups of ancient humans. A very interesting read, to say the least.

Clarke died in Sci Lanka, where he has lived for several decades. While I don’t think his shoes can ever be filled, his literary legacy will certainly live on!

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As most of you literary buffs have probably heard by now, literary great and Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer has died. According to a CNN article, Mailer was a very prolific writer:

He wrote constantly: novels, screenplays, articles (he was a key figure in the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s), poems, polemics. He co-founded the Village Voice. He was married six times.

I guess he was also prolific in the marriage department as well. I can honestly say that I’ve never read any of Mailer’s work, but I’ve been intrigued by him in the past. Maybe this will prompt me to pick up one of his books during my next visit to the bookstore. Any suggestions?

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The National Book Award Finalists have been announced! I’m only going to post the finalists for fiction and poetry. This is coming from the Critical Mass blog, which is the blog of the Book Critics Circle.

Fiction
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company); Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

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British author Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature:

Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, was born to British parents who were living in what is now Iran. The family later moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where she largely grew up. Lessing made her debut with "The Grass Is Singing" in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical "Children Of Violence" series, largely set in Africa, that include the works.

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There’s no doubt that the short story is in trouble. I’ve written about it here (Is the short story dead?), and a trip to your local bookstore will show you just how hard it can be to find a book of short stories amid all those popular fiction novels that sell millions of copies, self-help books promoting the newest fad in pop-psychology, diet books, celebrity memoirs, and…well, the list goes on.

Stephen King, who many consider to be the iconic image of those popular fiction novels that appear to edge out works of short fiction, ironically, is the editor of The Best American Short Stories 2007. These annual collections go back several decades, and when I was just a young, carefree college freshman, I began to read these collections with much interest.

In an essay written for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, King talks of his experience trying to find the best short works of fiction to include in this year’s collection. As he does, he attempts to figure out why the short story, which used to be very lucrative for both writers and publishers, has slid down into the wastebasket of American literature.

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Disgraced writer James Frey, who is probably best known for his "memoir", A Million Little Pieces, that turned out to be mostly fabricated, will be publishing a new novel with HarperCollins:

HarperCollins, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said it would publish Frey’s "Bright Shiny Morning" in summer 2008. It gave no further details about the novel.

Of course I think that Frey should be given a second chance. But I wonder if the publisher is banking a lot on the author’s name (hopefully not his reputation), rather than the quality of the book. According to the Yahoo! news article, it sounds like the editors are singing his praises over at HarperCollins.

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Lately I’ve been consumed with searching for a viable publishing model that would mutually benefit the author, publisher and bookseller. While this is not the perfect solution (I’m not sure a "perfect solution" can ever be found), and it’s certainly nothing new, it’s an idea worth entertaining.

Selling books on consignment is pretty simple. Let’s pretend you self-published your own book to bypass the bureaucratic large publishing houses, and got your book into a POD (Print On Demand) program. Great! So you order a box or two of books as inventory to get you started. Next, you start hitting the pavement and visiting the various local independent booksellers in your area. Once a bookseller becomes interested in your book, you agree to give them X amount of books to stock their shelves with.

So far no money has exchanged hands. You and the bookseller mutually agree on the percentage you’ll each get every time your book sells (ideally this agreement should be in writing and legally binding). And at regular intervals for a specific period of time you check in with the bookseller to see how sales are. If your book has sold, then the bookseller pays you the amount previously agreed upon! If there’s any unsold books leftover, the bookseller can continue to try to sell them, or simply return them to you, and you can try selling them elsewhere. No refunds. No hassles.

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What do Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell all have in common? They were all rejected by Alfred J. Knopf Inc, one of the finest American publishing houses. In fact, Knopf has published over a dozen Nobel Prize winning authors and 47 Pulitzer Prize winning volumes of works of everything from fiction to history!

What is even more interesting than such writers being rejected, were the comments left by those who had to read the manuscripts and either recommend them for publication or reject them. In one such case, the comments on a book by a young woman who is a household name were particularly harsh:

The work was "very dull," the reader insisted, "a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions." Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. "Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely," the reader wrote, "I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it."

That book turned out to be "Diary of a young girl" by Anne Frank (of course, it was also rejected by many other publishers as well).

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Every year or so this same issue is brought up: did Shakespeare really write all those plays and poems? 2007 is no different, except for one thing, Britain’s top Shakespearean actors have put forth a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" that seeks to breathe new life into this old debate:

Acclaimed actor Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, unveiled a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" on the authorship of Shakespeare’s work Saturday, following the final matinee of "I am Shakespeare," a play investigating the bard’s identity, in Chichester, southern England.

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