“But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an ‘endorsement’ from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, ‘I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book.’

“Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It’s latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called ‘quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.’”

Thanks to Bookninja, I was delighted to learn that Glenn Beck is inadvertently helping a recent book of anarchist polemic, The Coming Insurrection, published by the respectable leftist house Semiotext(e) vault up the bestseller list.

“San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore might have to close, the victim of a mix of demographics and economics.

“To even have to contemplate closing this place, with all of its history, is painful to think about,” she says.”

Via Bookninja, an article about the exodus of African-Americans from San Francisco.

Now even earlier!

I have a thing about redheads.

The top ten books written by librarians.

Matthew Rainwaters looks at the Texas criminal justice system.

Why yes, I would like a giant chandelier made out of old light bulbs.

The first movie made by chimpanzees (officially).

“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.”

Jacket Copy last week pondered the unfortunate tendency towards suicide, especially among poets, and why you are not allowed to kill yourself anymore.

The books blogs always like to talk about the future, but this week was like some sort of official book blog crystal ball week, what with this new decade they tell me we’re in now and everything.

We’ve already linked to Richard Nash’s take on the next ten years, but the NBCC’s Critical Mass has lots of different perspectives.

My favorite post comes from Anis Shivani, who, rather than blaming technology, says: “It is the gatekeepers of the book who, in this last decade, have been on an unremitting mission to bring about the book’s destruction: librarians who purge books to make room for technological substitutes, newspaper publishers who’re the first to voice the irrelevance of the book review, publishers who do everything possible to fulfill their own prophecies of the end of the serious book.”

Or possibly, this is what the future will look like.

And a British take on the whole mess. (Also here)

Speaking of technology (and the British), Bookninja has an awesome interview with Granta Editor John Freeman on “straddl(ing) web and print.”

Instead of worrying about the Internet, we should worry about books’ real enemies. (via Guardian)

And in other news, no one has ever explained Ayn Rand to me better and more succinctly than this.

“I’d been thinking about writing a book on genocide for some time, but the project really kicked off about a year-and-a-half ago, around the time my wife told me she was pregnant with our second child.

Naturally, I thought about the Holocaust. It wasn’t a morbid thought, or at least it didn’t seem so to me.

The thought was this: “At least our first son will have someone to go to the concentration camps with.”

At Tablet, Shalom Auslander, discusses his latest project: a self-described “comic novel about genocide.” (!)

He will be making a case for himself through ongoing installments at Tablet. Installments that will certainly be as provocative and unsettling and perhaps even hilarious as the very project he intends to complete.

“The Notebook is the collected entries from 87-year-old Saramago’s blog, O Caderno de Saramago. The book, ‘which has already appeared in Portuguese and Spanish, lashes out against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope, Israel and Wall Street,’ according to the Independent, in its report on the book’s Italian publisher dropping it for criticizing Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi.”

Saramago’s blog, in book form, is just one of the many things we have to look forward to in 2010.

Thanks to The Millions for scouting out these likely treasures.

Good morning my fellow Rumpusians, as Christmas steadily approaches and the panic to procure becomes almost reptilian, I can honestly say I’ve never handled so many one hundred dollar bills.

Are there that many people out there with so much money? …more

“With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it.  Even the works of man, unless they are being used in his daily living, have a way of losing their meaning, and take on the qualities of decoration.

What makes Istanbul worth while to the outsider is not the presence of the mosques and the covered souks, but the fact that they still function as such.  If the people of India did not have their remarkable awareness of the importance of spiritual discipline, it would be an overwhelmingly depressing country to visit, notwithstanding its architectural wonders.

And North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California.”

-From The Preface to Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes From The Non-Christian World by Paul Bowles.

…more

With the year winding down, the book blogs have been ablaze with your typical speculations about the best of this and that.

But perhaps there are less obvious threads out there if we only knew where to look. . .

The New York Times retraces the fictional haunts of Patricia Highsmith, our ‘most Freudian’ of novelists.

A cozy new issue of h+ is out.

Because any blog roundup this late in the year would be hard-pressed to avoid lists, here’s a unique top 25 best of decade one from HTML Giant!

A couple major publishers are standing up to Amazon (Via: Bookninja)

In case you need a reminder to break out your dusty copy of the Necronomicon, December is H.P Lovecraft Month.

The always enthralling A Journey Round My Skull treats us to The Raven.

While Jeff Bezos pilfers and plunders, Jacket Copy tells us about a stalwart independent press raising money for a good cause.

Greetings my fellow aesthetes, epicurians, book junkies and all around fine people!

I’m back in the Sunday guest side-car for today and next week while our legendary Seth Fischer prepares to graduate! …more

The winter is cold and dark and your fingers turn blue.

Money is scarce. Mornings are the worst of all. Some of us get lonely. We reach for the bottle or the remote control. We long for free camaraderie in a place that is conducive to reverie and bookishness and easy conversation. Are we alone in what we want? No! a thousand times NO.

If you want to attend a FREE event in an elegantly literary venue (a used bookstore), replete with music, art, books, smart people, a silent auction and endlessly nuanced conversation, I invite all of you to Dog Eared Book’s annual holiday party this Friday, December 4th from 7 to 10 p.m.

…more

“Carol wants me to write a novel: ‘You’ve met so many interesting people,’ she tells me.

Very good, there was a young man and he could never get his hands on enough women.  That’s a novel.

There was an idiot and he became God. That’s the same novel.  I can’t possibly think of any others.

It is rather pleasant to be the author of two such excellent novels.  The critics are divided in their opinions.  One lot believes that they should be shorter; another not, that they should be a mite longer.  I rather prefer short critics to long ones.  I like critics with tan shoes — look nicer, I think. . .”

-From The Journal Of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen, page 41.

This novel is quite possibly the book that made the biggest impression on me, ever.

Lord knows I’ve given it away to anyone who would listen. And sometimes those who wouldn’t listen, they still got a copy. …more

“Living in Brooklyn (as 3/4 of the Akashic Staff does), discussions about Irony usually in end hipster-bashing sessions. Williamsburg is rendered as a mecca of self-posturing, detachment and apathy. It’s easy to be negative!

Enter Trinie Dalton, who does the hard work of putting her writing to use, creating a world full of positive value.”

One of my favorite indie presses, Akashic Press has a new blog!

I especially enjoyed hearing about some of the recent titles in The Little House On The Bowery series.

“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist.  So much of what passes for reviews or criticism that I read online seems not simply to fail to contribute to my understanding of the work under review, but actually to disrupt that understanding, or worse, to degrade the work.”

It’s still “Mean Week” at  HTMLGIANT as Justin Taylor wonders whether book reviewers need to be held to higher standards. In short, he says, we need to review the reviewers.

The love of reading and the love of books, while almost always coinciding are still, in essence two different things.

If I loved to read as much as I loved books, for instance, then I wouldn’t own at least a hundred books which I haven’t read yet.

But really you can’t have one without the other. It just becomes a matter of proportion and, in more extreme cases like mine, sublimating an addiction. …more

“There’s a scene at the end of Ugrešić’s 1993 essay collection Have A Nice Day: From The Balkan War to the American Dream where the author describes an encounter that occurred while waiting in line for her I.D. card in Zagreb.

When asked her nationality, she declares, “Anational.”

Some standing behind her in the queue speculated that she’s afraid to admit she’s Serbian, others urge her to declare she’s a Croat, or better yet, a Gypsy.”

Over at The Quarterly Conversation, Karen Vanuska explores the many transnational worlds of Dubravka Ugrešić and paints a convincing picture of an author who has captured the flux of cultural identity-shifting in the late 2oth Century.

Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry. …more

“The Kakutani Two-Step. It works roughly like this: belittle a novelist’s finest work to date – preferably by tossing around unsupported adjectives…say, “arbitrary,” “flimsy,” and “unfinished.” Then, five or six years later, when the novelist in question brings forth his next book, or the one after that, complain loudly about how lame it is compared to his previous masterwork, which, it is to be inferred, you adored.”

Over at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg discusses the epidemic of short memory among famous book reviewers, including everyone’s favorite: Michiko Kakutani.

“I’m so, so tired of reading about how writing should be demystified, how it doesn’t work the way Cortazar describes at all, how you toil at it slowly like you’re scrubbing a toilet, how the important parts are rewriting everything (preferably with the help of a gaggle of fellow workshop women) and killing your darlings and not getting personally attached to your work, how “good rejection letters” are a cause for celebration, and how you should take a class at Mediabistro or teach one at Barnes and Noble.”

At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner, true to form, has a long, thoughtful and lyrical essay about Michael Greenberg’s new book, the work of Julio Cortazar and how we’ve compromised the magic of writing to our own detriment.

Every Tuesday the new books arrive at my store. I get to slice open the boxes, pull out the books, price them and arrange them in the most appealing and eye-catching way possible.

Because I don’t personally order them, it’s often a surprise what it’s inside. A tremendously exciting surprise that reduces me to a kid at Christmas, or a drunk in a new bar. …more

The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.

…more

90 Years of Vogue Magazine covers. You know, if that’s your thing.

New Scientist wants to tell you about the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics.

Sometimes extreme measures are needed to stop book theft.

NY Magazine on Nicholson Baker’s creative process.

When not trying to blow up the moon, scientists can do some pretty cool things, like creating rivers in laboratories.

It’s your humble Sunday guest editor back in the hot seat again for another wild ride through the bookblogosphere!

Today is special to me because the Folsom Fair will be happening which, if you’ve never been, is one of the most flagrant and life-affirming displays of leather, fetish and all around perversity to ever take place in the naked light of day. I highly recommend it. I also recommend dressing up. Today I will be going as a boy scout. Ahem…

Meanwhile, the book blogs! Much, much to share. Please follow me. . .

At The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito talks to Denise Oswald about the future of Soft Skull Press.

At The Book Bench, information is leaked about famous novelist spies. As if it wasn’t awesome enough that they were already amazing writers. . .

Ready Steady Book leads us to this provocative article in New Scientist about the connection between Virginia Woolf and science fiction.

At The Guardian Book Blog the inevitable question arises, Why the Dickens are we still reading Dickens? (Couldn’t resist, sorry.)

At New York Review Of Books, prolific author Joyce Carol Oates talks about the witchcraft of Shirley Jackson. (via Bookforum)

Silliman’s Blog leads us to ponder the indisputable connection between good liars and good writers.

This week The Rumpus brings you essays, an interview, a blurb and a review or two from good people like Michelle Orange and Josh Bearman and other special luminaries.

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British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter.

Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, receives €35,000.

This is the fifth time the Frank O’Connor prize — named for the Irish author — has been awarded. Previous winners include Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

“All these people would be sitting in their cells doing nothing,” said Kay Allison, 78, the program’s director and owner of Quest Bookshop in downtown Charlottesville. Officials, she contends, “are not looking long-term.”

The Virginia Department of Corrections closes books for prisoners non-profit. (via @mathitak)

The Next Settlement has a rock-solid American quality that compares favorably to William Carlos Williams.   Think Plymouth and ocean waves constantly changing, hypnotic in part because of the mysteries beneath.

…more

“Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass.  And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries.  Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bedsheets in place of curtains. Finally, after prolonged contemplation, the miracle of a soft and wavering glow would be revealed inside the house.” …more

“A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of those literary conferences here where writers are asked to talk about their own favorites. Unwilling to make a choice, he invented a Japanese author named Shiki Nagaoka and spoke with apparent conviction about how deeply Nagaoka had influenced him, fully expecting the prank to be unmasked during the question-and-answer period.”

In the New York Times Books section last week, a fascinating portrayal of Mario Bellatin, one of the leading, experimental writers in Mexico.

“Mr. Bellatin himself is missing much of his right arm, the result of a birth defect that he says he “plays with, takes advantage of and acknowledges” in his work by “writing with my whole body.” He jokes about “my left hand knoweth not what my right hand doeth,” and depending on his mood, he sometimes appears in public wearing a prosthesis with an attachment, chosen from his collection of more than a dozen, that gives him the appearance of Captain Hook.”

Beauty Salon and Chinese Checkers are available in English translations and I look forward to procuring them. In the meantime, check out Shawna Ryan’s Rumpus review of Beauty Salon.