If literature is dead, someone forgot to invite Haruki Murakami to the funeral.
-Jay Rubin on the Literary King of 21st Century
They say there are three ways of achieving immortality: rear a child ( Alex and Gabbie), plant a tree (in Vrbov, Prague, Sydney, Adelaide and Brissie) or write a book (Cold River). I might have done all three, but it took the Velvet Revolution at 32 to bless me with a bambino and it took almost twenty years to write the damn book. Now I read in the evil Guardian that some smart alecsia (smile), Helen Oyeyemi wrote her first book in seven months while studying for her A-levels. By the time she got her results, she had signed a two-book, £400,000 deal. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, Hurry up... Hurry up those foreign distribution rights for Love My Way as my family in Prague and Hight Tatra Mountains deserves to digest a performance set in another world yet so close to the bone!!!
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Now, there would be time for everything
The War on Libraries: Save and Burn, a Film Review
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.
All librarians should see this film, and I am sure they will feel like I do that librarians must leave their beautiful houses of culture, and join the fight to protect them from the despots East and West who will eventually destroy them. One librarian talks about how the Book of Kells was protected from the invading English, being moved from site to site, even in a building used by the invaders as a headquarters.
• Libraries: The DNA of Literature [Lindsay Waters examines questions at the very heart of book-based culture Bonfire of the Humanities ]
• · Secret Agent Richard Curtis presents his view of Spying in the Twenty First Century in an essay on Backspace (spies only). In the first part, he describes the two paradigms of contemporary publishing: the traditional model built around tangible objects such as books, warehouses, and stores; and the new model he describes as "virtual". The move from one model to another is underway and will impact the entire industry including authors, agents, editors, booksellers, and readers. 21 Century Vox: Part I ; Part 2: Paperbacks: The Long Tail that Wagged the Dog; Third article is still in a draft, galley, version, but it will soon stream from this web site The Rise of the Airport Model: Double Dragon Publishing
• · · It's Not Exactly Like They're Flying Off the Shelves Here Why it’s become so easy to write off our literary magazines ; [The Long Tail is about the economics of abundance -- what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone. The idea, basically, is that online retailing is allowing customers to explore their own tastes in ways hitherto not available. And what they find, as they continue to explore, is that they actually enjoy all kinds of weird stuff which they hardly knew existed -- because it isn't available on main-channel TV stations or supermarket bookshelves. This leads on to the idea that the sum of expenditure on all these little niche markets. The tail of Cold River can equal or exceed the value of the heavily hyped blockbusters ]
• · · · Online literary mag founder has made a name for herself with snarky, literate book reviews, thoughtful author interviews and a trend-tracking blog Jessa Crispin has a promiscuous love of literature All's fair in love and escape
• · · · · It is On Tonight: I can’t explain my current obsession with Love My Way. It maybe million things such as the performance which is peppered with streaks of endless darkness ... yet the scenes seem to be filled with raw and painful spiritual journey. Most of all the story explores the randomness of life and the bloody mindedness needed to carve out a place in the world. Georgia Toomey of In Style Magazine fame (Nov 2004) looks at the heartbreaker in the making, Claudia Karvan who led a little girl’s secret life among the iron lace. Claudia recalls her early life at her parent’s terrace in Woollahra Sydney. Pedestrian rite of passage: I need a stiff Vodka just to settle my nerves
• · · · · · What are you reading? And perhaps more interestingly, what are you going to read next? Your Next Escapist Step; [A memoirs of struggle through pain and social injustice. These struggles map the tangled laces of the Iron Curtain - the complexity of escape; its twisted fears, its desperate dreams. Escapes can be sad, disturbing, filled with hard core irony and absurd all at once: the emotional debris of an entire dysfunctional and tragic escape packed into each one. “If you haven’t turned pages of Cold River how would you possibly know whether your life was awful or good...” Powells My Pall ; If you can't say anything nice, ask your Significant Other if he read Cold River at Powells .. . It's Not Exactly Like They're Diving Off the Shelves Here, Either... See, the life of a writer is a perilous one, the chance of being published is slight and receiving an advance is even more remote. You’d think that maybe after you’d sold a few books things might get easier, but let me tell you, writing, like pimping, ain’t easy ]