Sometimes I read a story in the news and just shake my head, this just happens to be one of those stories. According to a Yahoo! news article, a teacher in Texas has been placed on paid leave for "allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor":

A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave — and faces possible criminal charges — after a student’s parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims’ bodies.

As disturbing as this case is, for an English teacher to be punished for giving a student a book by a well-known and respected author (in this case the book is Child of God by Cormac McCarthy), it’s even more disturbing that this has turned into a criminal matter. What I also find disturbing is that this book was pulled from a list compiled by high school English teachers because of this one complaint. The vast majority of students and their parents think this teacher should be reinstated:

Last week, more than 120 parents and students crowded into a meeting where the school board voted to keep Tierce on paid leave.

Continue Reading

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)

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

Who does copyright protect? Obviously, it’s designed to protect the author from people stealing his/her work and selling it as their own. I don’t think anyone would really argue that that’s a bad thing. Copyright, however, also protects the interests of the publishers. It prevents a competing publisher from printing a bestselling book from a different publisher, and then undercutting the price.

However, over the long term, who does copyright really protect, and who does it favor? Classic American author Mark Twain had a few choice ideas about this topic, as he worried greatly about his kids not making any money from his infamous works:

What bothered him about copyright was the fact that it would eventually expire, leaving his heirs without a way to make an easy buck. Twain didn’t want perpetual copyright, only something that would cover his children’s lives. He noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat "the pirates."

Those "pirates" turn out to be publishers. The problem Twain had was that back then, copyright protection was only extended for 42 years, after which, the work went into the public domain. And once the work goes into the public domain, Twain argues, the publishers start circling like vultures:

Continue Reading

Sometimes it’s interesting to see who literature influences, and Bob Dylan is no exception. I ran across this article while reading through my Google Alerts email, which is tagged "literary news". The article gives a fascinating insight into how literature shaped Bob Dylan as a man, and his music:

Early work such as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall drew on ancient balladry, Walt Whitman, the French symbolists and more. When Dylan went electric in 1965, fusing rock with what Christopher Ricks has called "the force of poetry" empowered him.

Continue Reading

The French, who are known for their love and respect of literature, are noticing a horrible trend among college pupils in France that is beginning to mirror what the US has seen for decades: college students are shunning literary studies in favor of more "practical" subjects (I’ll pause here for dramatic effect).

France’s cultural heritage is in peril because students are shunning literature in favour of more practical courses that they believe will help them to secure well-paid jobs, the Education Minister said.

As one who majored in English literature myself, I can attest that those who believe this to be true are looking no further than the surface of what literary studies can offer a student. One French education official obviously agrees with me and makes a few good points:

"We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason," he said." They are always in demand." As for the aspiring economists and sociologists, they often ended up on overcrowded university courses with few openings in the employment market, he added.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

Do you ever spend time online while reading a book (not at the exact time you’re reading, of course) so you can gain a broadened understanding of the text? If so, how do you go about it? Chances are, you start with a simple Google search and go from there.

If you are doing this, then whether you realize it or not, you are helping to shape the future of literary criticism. A recent article in the Guardian Unlimited brings this issue to light with one particular novel called Spook Country by William Gibson. Now, I have not read the novel (but very intrigued and will add it to my reading list), so some of the article confuses me when it goes into various plot points about the book.

But it doesn’t need to be that hard to understand. A quote from the author himself actually makes this idea of literary criticism being shaped by Google very clear:

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text … there’s this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."

So on a real basic level, the idea is simply that because of the power of the internet, and especially the search powers of Google, the text of a novel can be taken to an entirely different level of understanding because of this "hyperlinked" quality that any text has right now.

Continue Reading

For most of us, fifty years is a long time. In the literary world, if a book is still being read and discussed fifty years later, then it’s probably sliding into the realm of a classic. One of those books is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. A new version of the infamous novel will be released, and according to reports, this version will be uncut. According to a Yahoo! news article, the new release will be much more revealing:

Now, 50 years on, the tale of disaffected youth struggling to find a place in post-war America is to be re-released in its original form, unedited, cruder and more erotic, and with the real names of Kerouac’s traveling companions restored.

Continue Reading