November 21, 2005

NEW YORK, Nov. 21 /PRNewswire/ — Bestselling author Vince Flynn presents Jordanian King Abdullah II a copy of his latest book Consent To Kill during a recent trip to Amman. His Majesty, who is a fan of Flynn’s novels, invited the Minneapolis native to be his guest at his palace.

This is a pretty good day for an author.

Update: arrived DHL the next morning. That was quick!

More or less.

BUCHAREST DAILY NEWS:

In his show called “The Da Vinci Code Scandal” anchor Radu Moraru (photo) debated, together with his guests, Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”, a novel which has generated considerable controversy and has been widely discussed by many people.
His guests were Olimpian Ungherea- a well known Romanian writer and a member of the Freemasons, Dan Ciachir-an expert in religious and especially orthodox problems, Mihail Galateanu-the editor in chief of the “Flacara” magazine and Georgeta Ghinea- a psychologist.

At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner - New York Times:

Twenty years ago, when Sidney Verba became director of the Harvard University Library, he thought there was a good chance he would enjoy a placid transition into retirement.

Sidney Verba, director of Harvard’s libraries, hopes searchable digital copies of books on Google would draw students to the actual books.

Placid is not the word Mr. Verba would use to describe his life now. “Challenging” or “exciting” would better fit the bill, he said, choosing his words carefully.

Mr. Verba is overseeing the university’s partnership with Google, which plans to create searchable digital copies of entire collections - tens of millions of books - at five leading research libraries.

[boring recitation of status quo omitted]

[lame money shot begins]

“We think and hope it is legally the appropriate approach,” Mr. Verba said of the Google project. “But we’re taking it day by day.”

[/lame money shot]

An irritatingly inconclusive article that gives far too much deference to the profilee’s ostensibly neutral position. In actuality, Harvard is one of Google’s key allies in Google Book Search. Their defection from the project would be global news and you can be absolutely sure that Google is cultivating Harvard assiduously.

Here’s one of those MSM stories that appears to have been found in a time capsule.

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Strip lit is joining the literary elite:

The Royal Society of Literature is Britain’s oldest, and some might say stuffiest, literary society. Its fellowship has traditionally consisted of the most eminent playwrights, novelists and poets in the country. Tom Stoppard, Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing are among the current fellows.

So it is truly a sign of the times that the front cover of the annual RSL magazine for 2006 will be devoted to two graphic novelists

When was Art Spiegelman’s MAUS published? When did R. Crumb flourish? Many literary people have been well aware of graphic novels since, well, forty or fifty years ago…

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Cookery and children’s titles surge in popularity:

Cookbooks, one of the book trade’s richest earners, reached new moneyspinning heights this year, according to the analyst Nielsen BookScan.

Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Dinners sold �7.4m worth, Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat Cookbook �3.2m and Nigella Lawson’s Feast Food That Celebrates Life �3m, helping to give food and drink books nearly 22% growth since last November.

Sales of children’s books rose 23%, invigorated by the latest Harry Potter (right) and rising popularity of other authors. Fiction grew 5% in value, non-fiction 3.3%. The overall books market was up 6.3%.

A cheery contrast to the many whiny articles that often surface.

The Death of Literary Theory - Is it really a good thing? By Stephen Metcalf:

The Death of Literary Theory
Is it really a good thing?

Yes. Next!

The National Security Archive:

New - November 21, 2005
The Guatemalan Police Archives
Images from Guatemala’s secret files of repression

Take a look at the Archive’s front page. Which of these things is not like the other?

The problem I have with this group’s interpretation of its mission is that, if you take their web site at face value, they seem to be suggesting that repression in Guatemala is relevant to our national security. It’s not. Viewed with a sense of scale, nothing that happens in Guatemala is especially important to the USA’s national security.

The wacky world of press releases never fails to provide bizarre “meta” stories. This is the first time I’ve ever seen an Amazon.com book reviewer issue his own press release.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 /PRNewswire/ — Robert David Steele Vivas, CEO of OSS.Net, a global open source intelligence (OSINT) provider, is also the #1 Amazon reviewer of non-fiction books, generally about national security, global issues, and intelligence. Today Steele has posted a list of 25 books helpful to citizens who might wish to evaluate whether Vice President Dick Cheney is guilty of dereliction of duty and high crimes and misdemeanors such as might merit impeachment if he does not voluntarily resign from office.

The list, easily viewable at Amazon by clicking on http://tinyurl.com/bl23w, is the top list of sixteen lists on national security and global issues.

What’s more, Mr. Vivas has quite the cottage industry of lists at Amazon.com. But Amazon.com doesn’t let you make money from writing lists, do they?

Finally, as a fact-checking journalist, not just one of the parasitic bloggers that the MSM complains about (see today’s New York Times for the latest whinge from David Carr), I must report that Mr. Vivas is not currently the #1 reviewer on Amazon.com, but a lowly #67.

THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE is another awesome title from HardCase Crime. Charles Ardai shared this inside info in a letter this weekend:

Friends,

We just got copies in from the printer of Ed McBain’s new Hard Case Crime book, THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE. This is a revised version of a very rare book he published in 1958 as I’M CANNON–FOR HIRE by Curt Cannon. He never liked that title — as he explained to us, the character’s name was never supposed to be “Cannon,” and he’s not for hire. The character was born as “Matt Cordell” in the pages of MANHUNT magazine, and it was only at the insistence of the editor of Gold Medal books that both the character’s name and the author’s ended up changed to “Curt Cannon.” When we approached him about letting us reprint the book, he agreed on one condition — that we’d let him change the character’s name back and give the book a new title and make other revisions to fix problems in the original edition of the book. We, of course, were delighted to make whatever changes he wanted — and we kept getting edits right up to the day before his recent death.

THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE is an excellent book — one of the very best we’ve had the privilege of publishing. And it really is a privilege. Ed (I should really say “Evan,” since in his private life he went by Evan Hunter) was very proud of this book, and with good reason. It’s not just a model of great pulp writing, it’s also a very personal story. At a memorial service Evan’s family held recently, I learned a number of things I never knew about him — for instance, that he grew up on the upper east side of Manhattan, that his father owned a tailor shop, that he took classes at Cooper Union, that he wanted at one point to be a Big Band musician. And finding those things out made me see THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE in an entirely new light — since it opens on the street outside Cooper Union, then travels to the upper east side of Manhattan where a man is found murdered in a tailor shop and one of the suspects is a young man trying to make it as a musician in a band…

THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE should be turning up in stores between now and the end of the month, and I can’t urge you strongly enough to get a copy and read it. To make this a little easier, we’re going to be holding a drawing to give away 10 free copies of the book. If you’d like to be entered in the drawing, all you need to do is send an e-mail message to drawing@hardcasecrime.com including your name and the address to which you’d like the book sent if you’re selected. We’ll accept entries until midnight New York time on Saturday, November 26th. All we ask is that if you are selected you post a review of the book somewhere online — Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, your own blog if you have one, your favorite mailing list, wherever you think it might help bring the book to the attention of people who might enjoy it.

I also encourage you to pick up a copy of Lawrence Block’s THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART, the Hard Case Crime title currently in stores. Or, if you’d like to get each new Hard Case Crime title shipped to you automatically, you can join the Hard Case Crime book club by calling 1-800-481-9191. You pay for only one book per month but they send you two — that month’s new title plus one old title from our first year. (Yes, you might occasionally get a duplicate of a title you already have, but what the heck, it’s free; if it happens, you can always give the extra to a friend…) A subscription to the Hard Case Crime book club also makes a great gift for the readers in your life, something to keep in mind as the holidays loom on the horizon.

I’ve got to say this is one of the better Xmas ideas I’ve ever seen. Hard Case is doing a tremendous job with packaging a consistent high-quality product animated by a single brilliant guiding concept: that hard case crime fiction is, well, lovable.

Yo momma’s ugly.

Sea Monsters @ National Geographic Magazine

About 250 million years ago Earth’s continents were gathered into one landmass, Pangaea. Shallow seas and the lack of significant marine predators created new niches for many reptiles that had developed on land. They wriggled into the water, swam, reproduced, and died, becoming the fossils on which the computer-generated art in this article is based. They remain, with good reason, the stuff of nightmares.

First good explanation I’ve seen for why there were so many big ugly reptliian sea monsters. (Note, they are not dinosaurs.)