India's Literary Leaders

By: Menachem Kaiser

Vikas Swarup, the author of “Six Suspects” and “Q & A” (the book that became “Slumdog Millionaire”), has just been named India’s Consul General in Osaka, Japan. With the appointment, Swarup joins a long tradition of Indian authors-turned-government officials. Most prominently, there’s Shashi Tharoor, the Minister of State for External Affairs, who wrote “The Great Indian Novel,” and “Show Business” (which was made into the film “Bollywood”).

There’s also Pavan Varma, the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, who wrote “The Art of Making Love to a Woman,” an updated adaptation of the “Kama Sutra.” Navtej Sarna, who penned the novel “We Weren’t Lovers Like That” has, according to his Web site, served as a diplomat in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Geneva, Tehran, Washington, D.C., and as India’s Foreign Office Spokesman in New Delhi. He’s now the Indian ambassador to Israel. The late Nina Sibal, who was the first secretary of the Indian delegation to the U.N., wrote the novel “Yatra.” The country has also attracted foreign literary-inclined diplomats: Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet, served as the Mexican ambassador to India from 1962-1968.

What’s going on here? Do Indian writers feel that they must supplement their work with a more respectable profession? Or is an Indian diplomatic position cushy enough to allow novels to be written on the job? Tharoor, in a 2004 article published in The Hindu, has a more charitable rationale:

"Are diplomats uniquely suited—provided they have the gift to begin with—to be good creative writers? My friend and former United Nations colleague Jayantha Dhanapala, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador in Washington who is now his Government’s envoy in the ongoing peace process, certainly thinks so. He argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called “this nightmare of public solitude”). And most tellingly, as Dhanapala put it in a 1997 lecture, diplomats see creative writing as an escape valve for their professional compromises and frustrations—“an act of expiation for the bruising of the soul they have experienced in their working life.” The alternative, for less talented diplomats, has often been alcohol."

From: the New Yorker

Deadline

Recently, there has been much discussion around the web over the cover of the above book. A book that is not by Dan Brown, but by Simon Kernick.

However there is a silver lining. The bloggers Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have launched a Simon Kernick is Awesome Photoshop Contest. It invites readers to create deceptive book covers similar to the one above. Check it out for yourself (you'll laugh out loud) and then vote for your favourite.

A blog of awful library books

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner are public librarians in Michigan and cannot understand why librarians won’t weed the junk from circulating collections. The authors sincerely hope that public librarians will embrace maintaining a quality collection and share similar examples of awful library books.

Go here to find out what is making their list.

If you find an awful library book lurking in your stacks, feel free to submit it to the awful books website and don't be ashamed to submit it to this very blog - we could all use a good laugh!

1,000 Words: Stand Tall

A sculpture commemorating German writers and poets in the Bebelplatz, in Berlin. The sculpture was made by the German design team Sholz & Friends, as part of a 2006 project called the “Walk of Ideas.” The Bebelplatz is also recognized as the location of a Nazi book-burning in 1933, when over twenty-thousand books were burned in a single day.

photo credit: “Book Burning Memorial” by Venana, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

From: the New Yorker

Harlequin ventures into YA market

Harlequin ventures into YA market
by: Suzanne Gardner

In the hopes of capitalizing on the popularity of the Harry Potter books and the Twilight series, Harlequin Books is launching a new imprint this fall targeted at the young adult market. The imprint, called Harlequin Teen, will publish novels in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.

The imprint has been in the planning stages for several years now, according to Harlequin staffers, but it didn’t receive the green light until 2008. In the early days of development, editors from various Harlequin imprints were all asked to acquire titles for the new line. Within a few months, however, senior editor Natashya Wilson, who is based in the New York office, was given sole responsibility for Harlequin Teen.

“I’ve always been a YA reader, I never stopped reading it since I was young,” explains Wilson. “I’m familiar with a lot of the authors […] and I’m also probably one of the three biggest Twilight fans in the whole company.” Wilson is currently the only dedicated staffer assigned to Harlequin Teen, with support coming from employees at both the Canadian and U.S. offices. According to Wilson, more full-time employees may be brought in to work on the line, but no decisions will be made until after sales figures begin to roll in.

The program will kick off with three urban fantasy novels: Rachel Vincent’s My Soul to Take, which launches in August; Gena Showalter’s Intertwined in September; and a reprint of a 2004 Harlequin Luna novel by P.C. Cast called Elphame’s Choice in October. Print runs have not yet been determined. Going forward, Wilson says she is currently planning 17 books for 2010, and 18 to 20 books for 2011.

In order to set the teen line apart from the company’s many adult lines, titles will not be stocked in Harlequin racks or in romance sections – they will be shelved in YA sections as standalone titles. Although each book will be identified as a Harlequin Teen novel by a logo on the spine, they will not have a distinct series look.

In addition to marketing through Facebook and MySpace, the company has created an online focus group of almost 300 youths, who will be asked to voice their opinions on potential covers and story lines. A digital prequel to the imprint’s first book, My Soul to Take, will also be available in July as a free e-book and audio book.

From: Quill & Quire

Banned Political Books in China Thrive in Hong Kong

China's Bookstore
Why the Chinese-reading world still flocks to Hong Kong
by: Jonathan Cheng

HONG KONG -- This former British colony, famous as a global financial hub, is best known in Chinese political circles as something else: a supplier of the Chinese-speaking world's most sensitive books.

Even after returning to Chinese rule, Hong Kong retained its own laws, including generally wide-open rights to publish, other than some pornography restrictions. In China, by contrast, the government licenses publishing houses and has the power to censor or ban any book. So Hong Kong's bookstores attract large numbers of mainland Chinese travelers who use trips here to stock up on books they can't get back home, from virulent attacks on Mao Zedong to tomes on the three Ts of contemporary Chinese taboo: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen.

Even Hong Kong's airport bookstores are stocked with shelves of books banned in the mainland, mostly purporting to spill the beans on top Chinese leaders. China also prohibits carrying banned books into the country, but with the volume of traffic at the border making detection highly unlikely -- and with the consequences generally limited to confiscation -- readers seem willing to risk it.

"My bookstore could only thrive in a place like Hong Kong," says Paul Tang, founder of People's Recreation Community, a bookstore cafe in downtown Hong Kong with a Mao-themed decor and a focus on political books, including a wealth of titles published in the simplified Chinese script of mainland China -- but banned there. Mr. Tang, a 34-year-old former Starbucks shop manager who started his business -- then mainly a cafe -- in 2002, says mainland Chinese visitors account for 70% of his sales.

Attendance at Hong Kong's bustling book fair, whose 20th annual edition opens next week, jumped nearly 18% after Beijing liberalized travel policies for mainland Chinese visitors to Hong Kong in 2004. It has grown steadily since, last year hitting a record 829,967 -- more than four times the 200,000 that showed up at the first fair in 1990.

The event regularly draws informal "tour groups" of politically savvy mainland Chinese to snap up copies of books they can't buy back home, and this year fair organizers, in addition to promoting the event in mainland China, have lined up travel agents in Guangzhou and Shanghai, as well as Taipei, to organize package tours.

"Hong Kong is a free society, and we don't have any censorship," says Raymond Yip, who oversees the fair for the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. "The book fair is a truly diversified event in terms of accomodating books from different backgrounds, views and orientations." One of the speakers at last year's fair was Chinese-born novelist Ha Jin, who now lives in the U.S. and some of whose books have been banned in China.

Dozens of Hong Kong publishing houses churn out everything from slapdash exposés of mainland corruption to autobiographies. Blockbuster Chinese-language editions first published in Hong Kong in recent years include "Mao: The Untold Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in 2006 and "The Tiananmen Papers" by Zhang Liang (a pseudonym) in 2001. And this year there were the secret memoirs of late Chinese Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, smuggled out of mainland China on audiocassettes and published by Hong Kong's New Century Publishing in May. Mr. Zhao's memoirs, which tell of deep divisions in the Chinese leaders' handling of the 1989 student movement, sold out instantly in Hong Kong. (An English-language version, "Prisoner of the State," was published by Simon & Schuster in May.)

Hong Kong has long been fertile ground for political dissent. Anti-Manchu revolutionary Sun Yat-sen made a base here at the beginning of the 20th century, and every June since the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 a candlelight vigil has been held to mark the anniversary; this year's drew tens of thousands of residents to a public park.

Hong Kong's freedoms set it as an island of contrast against mainland China's strict regime. Until the 1980s, even Taiwan banned works ranging from 1920s short stories by Lu Xun -- revered in mainland China -- to books and articles advocating independence for the island, including several written by Chen Shui-bian, who would later be elected president. (Even today, Taiwan's government screens and restricts certain political publications, though the scope is far narrower than it once was.)

For decades, that made Hong Kong the only place in greater China where literary heroes of both Communist and anti-Communist persuasion could be published. And the ability to publish sensitive books and magazines is seen as an important barometer of freedom in a city that is vigilant about any erosion since the return to China in 1997.

"Hong Kong is the region's central hub for the free flow and dissemination of information, and that to me is Hong Kong's most core value," says Ho Pin, a mainland-born businessman who in 1990 founded Hong Kong-based Mirror Publishing. "The fact that Mirror hasn't been subject to any overt political pressure in Hong Kong all these years is a testament to that freedom." His house has been responsible for some of the most explosive political memoirs of the past two decades, including the Chinese version of "The Tiananmen Papers."

That freedom includes the freedom to be politically neutral. Both Mr. Ho and Mr. Tang, the bookshop owner, say they aren't particularly motivated by ideology, and Mr. Tang, for one, is happy to offer books from across the political spectrum -- though his most popular titles tend toward unauthorized biographies of Chinese leaders like Zhou Enlai and exposés of the reportedly prodigious sex life of Chairman Mao (a subject that drives a whole cottage industry).

"It doesn't matter whether you're left-wing or right-wing," he says. "The books are all here -- whatever sells best."

From: WSJ

Graphic novel version of 'Twilight' on the way!

'Twilight' exclusive: Graphic novel version on the way!

by: Tina Jordan

For those of you who can’t get enough Edward and Bella, EW can announce — exclusively — that Yen Press will be publishing Twilight in graphic-novel form, publication date still to be determined. Though Korean artist Young Kim is creating the art, Meyer herself is deeply immersed in the project, reviewing every panel.

Take a close look at the biology-class sketch we’ve obtained (that’s an empty dialogue bubble between their heads, if you’re wondering). What’s interesting to me is that it doesn’t look simply like an artist’s rendering of Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson. In fact, the characters seem to be an amalgam of Meyer’s literary imagination and the actors’ actual looks. The description of Edward from biology class: “His dazzling face was friendly; open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were cautious.” And Bella: “I was ivory-skinned …. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete…” To me, this graphic-novel Bella seems much closer to me to Meyer’s book than to Stewart’s sultry portrayal. The Edward shown is closer to Pattinson, but not a real duplicate; there’s something very winning in the sketch that I don’t see in Pattinson’s all-too-perfect tousled bronze locks and piercing eyes.

What do you think? If you’d like to see more before weighing in, pick up a copy of EW magazine, which will hit newsstands on Friday, July 17 — it contains finished illustrations of Edward, Bella, and Jacob.

From: EW