from Shelf Awareness newsletter

If setting a good example will increase the number of readers in the U.S., then Amanda Patchin, owner of Veritas Fine Books, Garden City, Idaho, is setting an example extraordinaire. Her goal is to read 200 books–79,349 pages–this year.

The marathon read is Patchin’s response to the bad news about reading habits as summed up in last year’s NEA report, “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence.” One of the findings was that young Americans spend an average of only seven minutes a day reading for pleasure.

According to the Idaho Statesman, Patchin, 27, “has obviously not participated in those studies. . . . [She] has read about 10,000 pages since Jan. 1. That’s more than 200 pages a day.”

You can learn more about her quest at 200books.com, where she sums it up this way: “200 books in 2008. Selected from Everyman’s Library. Reading while caring for a toddler and a new baby and running a small business. With daily blog posts chronicling the attempt. Yeah, I’m nuts.”

Press Association
Monday February 18, 2008
guardian.co.uk

Alain Robbe-Grillet, a “new novelist” and film-maker who rejected conventional storytelling and was one of France’s most important avant-garde writers has died at the age of 85. Robbe-Grillet was admitted to the Caen University Hospital in western France over the weekend for cardiac problems, the officials said. He died in the hospital on Monday morning.

Robbe-Grillet wrote screenplays for such films as Last Year at Marienbad (1961) with Alain Resnais, and directed L’Immortelle (The Immortal) (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1967) and Eden and After (1970).

He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.

[ click to read rest of article from The Guardian UK ]

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions

Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age of 48, from an overdose of barbiturates, having written his epitaph:

Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukulele.

His reputation rests on one novel only: Under the Volcano (1947). Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, it describes the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-Consul, as he drowns in liquor and despair under the shadow of Popocatepetl. Lowry’s genius was to transform Firmin’s shabby addiction into a parable of universal significance and the story of Everyman in search of salvation. The novel’s mescal-inspired grotesqueries — grinning chocolate skulls and twitching centipedes — seemed to issue from the charnel-house of Baudelaire’s imagination. For all his modernity (Kafka and T. S. Eliot were clear influences), Lowry wrote in the timeless tradition of the damned poet who sees a holiness in going down the drain.

Like many alcoholics, Lowry is a murderous subject for biographers: not only could he make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Originally his biography was to have been written by the Canadian scholar Conrad Knickerbocker (a fine Lowryesque name); but, in 1966, Knickerbocker committed suicide. Another critic, Douglas Day, brought out his life of Lowry in 1973: it was marred by psychoanalytical humbug and factual errors. Gordon Bowker, Lowry’s most trustworthy exegete, published his compelling biography, Pursued by Furies, in 1993; it is unlikely to be surpassed.

In many ways, Lowry’s life was his own finest creation. All his writing — three unfinished novels, six or seven short stories, hundreds of letters and poems — was thinly veiled autobiography. According to Michael Hoffmann, Lowry intended the ‘whole bolus’ to be part of a continuum called The Voyage that Never Ends, with the great Mexican novel at its centre. Only fragments of this Dantean scheme remain, but the novella Lunar Caustic, begun in 1935, was to represent purgatory. (It was based on Lowry’s internment in the Bellevue mental hospital, New York.)

[ click to read full article by Ian Thomson in The Spectator ]

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: February 13, 2008 New York Times

In a surprise move, Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land,” has switched publishers for his next three books.

Mr. Ford, who turns 64 on Saturday, sold the United States rights to two novels and a short-story collection to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, ending his 17-year relationship with Alfred A. Knopf and more than two decades of working with Gary Fisketjon, now a prominent editor at Knopf. At Ecco Mr. Ford will work with the publisher, Daniel Halpern.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Ecco described the deal as “major,” but in an interview Mr. Halpern declined to disclose the terms.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Ford deferred to Mr. Halpern and Paul Bogaards, a Knopf spokesman, for questions on why he made the move. Amanda Urban, Mr. Ford’s literary agent, said, “It was a long and fruitful relationship with Knopf, and regrettably we couldn’t come to terms.”

[ click to read rest of New York Times article ]

92.5% of guild vote in favor of strike’s end

By CYNTHIA LITTLETON, DAVE MCNARY

“The strike is over,” Patric Verrone said, dispassionately but with the hint of a smile. “Our membership has voted. Writers can go back to work.”The WGA West prexy announced the news, something the town had taken as a fait accompli, shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. Some 92.5% of the 3,775 ballots cast were in favor of ending the 100-day strike, with 3,492 members voting yes and 283 die-hards ready to tilt at the windmill of continuing the work stoppage that began Nov. 5.

The vote on lifting the strike concluded a mere three days after the WGA cinched its contract agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in the wee hours of a Saturday morning. The strike vote was held over a 48-hour frame, with members able to vote in person at the WGA Theater and at Gotham’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, or via fax.

After announcing the vote tally, Verrone said WGA members were free to go back to work “immediately,” and he noted that writers for the Feb. 24 Oscar ceremony were believed to be doing just that on Tuesday night. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences prexy Sid Ganis and Oscarcast exec producer Gil Cates will hold a news conference Thursday morning to discuss their plans for the show now that the cloud of picket lines and stars staying home has lifted.

[ click to read entire Variety article ]