I have a lot of ground to cover, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you disappear for a week.

1. Flavorwire ranks the 10 best-dressed authors.

Yes, Tom Wolfe is on the list. I’m not going to insult his Kentucky-Fried wardrobe. It is, after all, dapper. But how is it stylish to always wear the exact same thing? If I play the same note over and over can I claim to be a good songwriter?

But I can’t knock the list too much because it includes Oscar Wilde, whose fashion sense influenced figures as disparate as Batman and Scooby’s friend, Fred Jones.

2. Meanwhile, TresSugar lists 10 famous unfinished novels.

Some big names — Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Jane Austen — appear but all of them are trounced by The Canterbury Tales.

Canterbury Tales might be the only book written in the English language that could not be more popular or influential if it were finished. Chaucer’s entire reputation is based on this book (and his willingness to write in English when French was the chic language) and he didn’t even finish it.

3. Editor & Publisher has fired its editorial staff.

According to a memo from its owner:

Editor & Publisher magazine will be utilizing more individuals for the print edition who are experts in their individual fields as opposed to reporters who track down experts and put the expert’s story into the writer’s words.

Communications are also expected to improve over a department that previously was spread over four states and three time zones.

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I read that as “Get ready for a lot of recapitulated press releases.”

4. Finally, The Plain Dealer is reporting that local legend Harvey Pekar died of an accidental overdose from antidepressant medication.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I’ve been busy — attended a lot of weddings in the last month, including photos as evidence. As a result I have a lot of ground to cover in this post.

1. Two Dollar Radio — a small, family-owned, Columbus-based book publisher — is offering free lifetime subscriptions, all the work they’ve ever released or ever will release. All you have to do is tattoo their logo on your body.

Eric Obenauf, its publisher, explained the idea on their blog.

“It will hopefully grant the brandisher some credibility in literary circles as well as a hipness factor in social settings. Plus,” he adds, “it’s a conversation-starter: I don’t know how many times I’ve had to answer the question, ‘Is that a boombox on your wrist?’”

I have two tattoos (you’ll never see them unless I’m wearing a white textured tank top, commonly called a wifebeater) and I swore to never add a third. Now, I’m seriously reconsidering. (It helps that the publisher’s books and the logo are pretty sweet.)

2. Two e-books now cost more than their hardcover versions.

While it’s too soon (and an enormous exaggeration) to call this a “sign of things to come.” It may eventually become a fallacy to call e-books the cheap option.

3. Did you know that Cleveland has an old-money, no-girls-allowed book club that meets near the intersection of Euclid and Prospect that meets every Wednesday? Me neither.

They are called the Rowfant Club.

Here’s what one woman who was invited to speak to them had to say about it.

4. McSweeney’s has a new crop of columnists. (I will miss Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting.)

The most promising of the new class is The Cosby Codex, which hopes to give “a definitive theoretical reading of The Cosby Show.”

A sample:

The question viewers are left with, logically, is what event(s) transpired within the Huxtable’s universe between “Pilot” and “Goodbye Mr. Fish” that placed the first world under erasure and brought about the second world? That question is never firmly resolved (I, for one, suspect that Rudy Huxtable, who is always figured as a sort of Faustian figure within the larger Huxtable narrative, had something to do with it, a point which I will explore shortly).

5. Who thought a Family Circus movie would be a good idea?

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. No the arm with the boombox tattoo is not me. The rest of the photos are.

1. Slate fact-checked Picoult and Weiner’s accusations and tabulated if The New York Times reviews more men than women.

They do, almost two to one.

Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
—338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
—207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)

Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period:
—72 were written by men (71 percent)
—29 were written by women (29 percent)

Slate hesitated to conclude that the paper treated certain types of literature differently when they were written by men.

2. Meanwhile, Lincoln Michel of The Faster Times rebuts the claims by Picoult and Weiner that commercial fiction deserves more respect.

Somehow it isn’t enough that we are inundated with mass culture work—that the subways are plastered with ads for the latest formulaic thriller or romance, that Hollywood blockbuster trailers play non-stop on TV, that corporate record labels get their artists constant rotation on the radio—or that such work, as its fans and creators are always quick to point out, makes the most money 99% of the time. We also need Michael Bay winning Oscars, Twilight getting the Pulitzer, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry reviewed in favor of Big Boi or Animal Collective, and probably McDonald’s being reviewed by NYT food critics instead of whatever new Keith McNally restaurant has opened. After all, McDonald’s is where people are “actually eating.”

I don’t disagree with Michel’s assessment, but Big Boi is an awful example. He sold more than 20 million records as half of Outkast.

(Then again, I rolled my eyes when The Dark Knight didn’t get a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars.)

3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is in the early stages of development for a television series. I have four thoughts.

One, I love Sandman and would love for other people to love Sandman. Without Sandman, I would have never read Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees or Italo Calvino.

Two, a television series is preferable to a movie. There is no way to encapsulate all that makes Sandman wonderful in a 2-hour movie.

Three, I really hope this doesn’t suck. I didn’t love Watchmen, so I was OK with the mediocre, hyperviolent movie. But if Sandman sucks... I don’t know. I’ll complain about it on the Internet.

Four, Gaiman’s name is not yet attached to the series. It should be. Even if it’s only a respectful consultant position.

4. Borders will be putting Build-a-Bear stations into its bookstores.

The decision smacks of desperation but it makes some sense. They want to get kids into bookstores, but kids can easily download books. So dangle a carrot to get them inside the store — for example, an adorable, customized stuffed bear — and hope they buy a book or two while they are there.

Borders CEO Mike Edwards talked about tweaking the stores in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

Edwards clearly articulated the reason for adding more nonbook product—as more books are sold in digital formats, retailers need to redeploy the space they have used to sell trade titles. For Borders, that means adding more educational children’s toys and games, more adult games and puzzles, plus high-end stationery.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

1. Andrew Wylie and Random House have settled their e-book tiffle.

For background on the smackdown, click here and here.

The New York Times is promoting this as a win for Random House. They get the e-book rights to 13 popular backlist titles. However, “win” is a strong word, seeing as they will be paying a royalty rate that can reach as high as 40 percent. (The industry norm is 25 percent.)

So, yes, they get their e-books and Wylie’s Odyssey Editions lost more than half of its titles. But Wylie also negotiated a significantly higher royalty rate than the norm.

That doesn’t sound like a win. That sounds like compromise. (Not that there is anything wrong with compromise.)

Publishing houses that own the print rights to other Odyssey Editions titles, which still include novels by Evelyn Waugh and Saul Bellow, have remained tight-lipped.

2. Apparently, Roald Dahl was a bad student.

How bad? One teacher called him “indolent” and “illiterate.” Another had this to say: “A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.”

A camel? What does that even mean? Is the teacher saying that camels are bad writers? I suppose that’s true. I mean, I’ve never read anything worthwhile from any ungulate, so why single out camels?

(While stinging, this is not the best “camel” diss of all time.)

This information comes from Penguin’s The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets, which also will include an alternate ending to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

3. Richard Allen of We Who Are About to Die is writing poetry in the style and cadence of Rick Ross.

(If you don’t know who Rick Ross is, he’s a mediocre rapper who succeeds because of his accomplices.)

Rick Ross’s original stanzas:
I feel like Big Meech.
Larry Hoover.
Whippin’ work.
Hallelujah.

One of Allen’s takes:
I feel like Harry Crews.
Barry Hannah.
I want to be your dog.
Svanasana.

My own try:
I feel like Descartes.
Francis Bacon.
Think Deeper.
As-Salamu Alaykum.

-Jason Lea
JLea@News-Herald.com

My grandmother’s recommendations — call more often; don’t swear so much; ditch the redhead and marry a nice, Italian girl.

Yes, it’s the return of the Linklord, The Duke of Diversion, The Tangentmaster.

Apparently, the blog transformed into a Sweet Valley High fan site when I disappeared. Permit me to reintroduce a sense of equity by writing about everything but Sweet Valley High.

1. Yesterday was Bad Poetry Day. Celebrate belatedly with the Frisky’s worst adolescent poetry.

On example from a poem entitled “Boy in a Band:”

Never thought a guitar
Could make you look cuter than you are
Guess this proves how wrong I can be
When it comes to you
Falling for you
All that you do
Boy in a Band.

This might be bad poetry, but at least it’s honest.

2. Novelist Rick Moody says the recession has impacted how writers are writing.

I think the economy is changing the way people are writing and that writers are more desperate then at any time since I’ve been watching what’s been happening closely. And I worked in publishing in the last big recession in the early 90’s, so I saw some of it at that time. I think people are just really scared that they’re not going to get published at all, and as a result, they’re trying to shoehorn themselves into pretty rigidly formatted kinds of things ...

My former students who are out there now trying to get published are having trouble on those lines. It’s the crazy great ones, the kind of mad ones who are really struggling to find people to publish them. And not because the projects don’t have merit, but just because everybody’s looking at Bookscan and they want certain numbers of units to ship and so on. That is going to affect people going forward, not only because we miss out but because when we miss out we then forget that the opportunity exists for that kind of experimental work.

Moody’s a good writer. I like him. But this is all seems pretty obvious.

Writers changing their style so they can get published? Gasp.

Art being impacted by a recession? Alack.

Here’s a list of other fields impacted by hard times: all of them.

3. Barnes & Noble is for sale. The Wall Street Journal details how it fell so far so fast.

The simple explanation for Barnes & Noble’s decline is the Internet, which spawned Amazon.com, e-readers and digital books. But that didn’t have to be the end for B&N, which had a dominant market position and should have out-Amazoned Amazon, leveraging its brand and innovating when it began marketing and selling books online.

4. Betty White has signed a two-book deal with Putnam. You know you care.

5. Frank Kermode, a critic so influential he was knighted, has died at the age of 90.

6. Want to know what tyromancy is? Take the Guardian’s weird-word quiz.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

It’s been forever since we’ve had a decent slapfight between publishing powerhouses.

I mean, it feels like years have passed since Macmillan and Amazon had their superpowered staring contest. (Apparently, it was only February.)

Well, we’ve got fresh blood, and the melee involves Amazon, Random House and the Wylie Agency. For those who don’t know, the Wylie Agency is one of the most powerful literary agencies in the business. It represents authors like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and the estates of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer.

Random House is the largest trade book publisher. By far.

And Amazon is Amazon.

So we’re pretty much talking Muhammad Ali v. Superman v. Andre the Giant.

It began when the Wylie Agency made a deal with Amazon. Twenty of the most famous titles they represent — including Lolita, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and John Updike’s Rabbit series — will only be available on e-book through Kindle. (Wylie Agency functions as the agent and the publishing house in this agreement. Amazon is simply the distributor.)

Random House, which (wrongly) feels like it has claim to the digital rights to some of these titles, has stated they will no longer do business with any Wylie Agency authors until this issue is resolved.

“The Wylie Agency’s decision to sell e-books exclusively to Amazon for titles which are subject to active Random House agreements undermines our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors, and it establishes this agency as our direct competitor,” said Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said in a
news release.

Wylie declined to discuss Random House’s reaction with The New York Times and said he would have to think about it. (How novel, someone thinking before they comment.)

The Writers Guild has weighed in on several facets of the fracas. I tend to agree with their stances.

One, digital rights are not retroactively awarded to those who have the print rights, despite what Random House claims. New media, new income stream — new contract. It is that simple.

Two, does Amazon really need more power?

“Moreover, Amazon’s power in the book publishing industry grows daily,” the guild writes. “Few publishers have the clout to stand up to the online giant, which dominates every significant growth sector of the book industry: e-books, online new books, online used books, downloadable audio, and on-demand books. (That Random House, by far the largest trade book publisher, has retaliated against the powerful Wylie Agency but not against Amazon, which must be equally culpable in Random House’s view, tells you all you need to know about where power truly lies in today’s publishing industry.) Adding to Amazon’s strength may yield short-run benefits, but it’s not in the interests of a healthy, competitive book publishing market.”

Finally, the guild asserts, “publishers have brought this on themselves.”

“This storm has long been gathering. Literary agencies have refused to sign e-rights deals for countless backlist books with traditional publishers, even though they and their clients, no doubt, see real benefits in having a single publisher handle the print and electronic rights to a book ... Bargain-basement e-book royalty rates will not last. Low e-book royalty rates will, as e-book sales become increasingly important, emerge as a dealbreaker for authors with negotiating leverage. Publishers will, inevitably, agree to reasonable royalties rather than lose their bestselling authors to more generous rivals and startups. We suspect publishers are well aware of this and are postponing the unavoidable because it seems to make sense in the short run. We believe this is short-sighted.”

The fight has just begun. I await the next body blow.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. By the way, Tricia, I loved the point Flora Dempsey's mother makes. Many grieving parents, siblings and friends have talked to me about "the myth of closure."

No essays today.
Barely any words, at all.
Blog of videos.

The Melville House hosts its first annual Moby Awards tonight. (Yes, I know, technically something cannot be “annual” until it happens for two consecutive years; but that’s how they billed it, as the “first annual.” Next year, Melville House should call it the second inaugural Moby Awards.)

The awards recognize the best book trailers. The categories are best low budget/indie, best big budget, best performance by an author, best cameo in a book trailer (if Zach Galifinakis doesn’t win for his performance in Lowboy, I’m calling shenanigans), and least likely trailer to sell the book.

For your viewing pleasure, I have imbedded a few of the trailers.

I Lego N.Y.



Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter



The aforementioned Lowboy



Now, two completely unrelated book videos:

Brontë Sisters Power Dolls



Finally, Bill Murray reads poetry to construction workers



-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Today, I want to revisit some topics.

First, people are still asking if poetry matters. (Yeah, we've done this before.)

Gregory Cowles of The New York Times doesn’t offer any new thoughts — (no, poetry no longer matters; no, it is not the audience’s fault; poetry has become insular and will not matter again until it speaks to the public) — but he answers in such a way as not to make my teeth grate, which is an accomplishment.

Second, remember Michelle Kerns’s book review cliché bingo? Well, Flavorwire created a version for music reviews.

Third, Paul Edwards wrote a book titled How to Rap. I reviewed it.

Now, Edwards has posted an uncut interview with Kool G Rap that he did as research for the book.

I enjoy reading about artists’ creative processes. It doesn’t matter if that artist is G Rap or Victor Hugo.

Fourth, The New Yorker has published the best explanation I’ve seen on the state of the publishing industry thus far. One of the most insightful thoughts comes from Russ Grandinetti, the vice-president in charge of Kindle Content. From The New Yorker:

"In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. To thrive, he believes, publishers have to reimagine the book as multimedia entertainment."

But here’s the most telling fact:

"In reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist."

In other words, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling are probably funding some of your favorite, current authors. We should be grateful.

Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Thank you, Seth, for The New Yorker link. Lebron still isn't going to the Knicks.

A few things...

Thing #1: HTMLGIANT is soliciting blurbs for books that don’t exist.

That sounds more confusing than it is. Let me try to explain.

Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager are compiling a book. The book will be a series of blurbs describing other books that don’t exist. If I’m understanding correctly (never a safe bet), it’s pretty similar to what Steve Hely did for The Believer.

Deadline for the submissions are July 15. Follow the link for details.

Thing #2: I love me some Ralph Ellison, but I’m siding with Troy Patterson. There is no way I’m reading Three Days Before the Shooting.

First, I have a fairly strict 600-page cap on novels I read. I’ve broken it once or twice, usually for a Russian author; but I lack the attention span to harpoon Ellison’s 1,100-page leviathan. (I just checked. My copy of Invisible Man is 608 pages, so I guess I snapped my cap for Ellison once already.)

Second, if I’m understanding correctly (see above), this is basically Juneteenth: The Extended Edition. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t wish Juneteenth had another 700 pages.

Thing #3: The Guardian has a piece on how publishers change a book’s cover in different countries. The article piqued my interest on the subject without satiating it.

I wanted to know how US covers differ from their European counterparts. This quote is as close as I got to an explanation:

“The US, meanwhile, tends to signpost its literary fiction more than the UK.”

New game — I want to see which of our two readers can find the most wildly inappropriate book cover. Not “inappropriate” as in pornographic or violent, but inappropriate as in the cover has nothing to do with the book’s contents.

Winner can negotiate his or her own prize. (I have shelves filled with books I’ll never read again, and I’m willing to pay shipping.) E-mail submissions to me.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I was less than my prolific self last week.

I would have written more, but it’s poor form to blog from someone’s murder trial.

But I’m back and so is Michelle Kerns. If you don’t remember Kerns, she is the woman analyzing literary critics’ dependence upon clichés.

Her analysis (and accompanying graphs) are many positive things — fascinating, insightful and accessible. Unfortunately, those words are clichés, so I’ll just post a link instead of trying to describe it.

Of the publications she is following, Entertainment Weekly packs the highest percentage of clichés into their critiques. (Smart money bets EW remain the frontrunner through the entirety of Kerns’s experiment.) They averaged 1.1 cliché per 100 words. Time Out New York and Publishers Weekly trailed at .93 and .92 Kerns, respectively.

Yes, “Kerns” are the metric measurement for clichés per 100 words in a book review.

Kerns — the writer, not the unit of measurement — specifically picks on alliterations in her dissection of April’s reviews. Some of the alliterations, like “parboiled profundities,” I found clever. Some are admittedly pretentious, for example, “craziness crazily” and “This promising premise begins on promising premises.”

Elsewhere, Elisa Bassist asks, Have I Earned these Clichés? She writes about why she writes and comes up with, “It’s the closest definition I have of living.” Yes, she notes that her conclusion is a cliché. That’s why she gives her essay that title.

It’s much better than I’m making it sound, though I disagree with some of Bassist’s points. She describes writing as a “social act.” I would argue that it’s the opposite. Reading might be a social act; but writing, almost always, is done alone and for your own sake. If someone else reads a personal meaning into your own writing — wonderful! — but writing is a selfish process. It’s about you, even when it isn’t. (And, now, I have added my cliché to the stack.)

Bassist seems to acknowledge this when she quotes Jim Harrison.

“A writer [is] a small god who has forty acres as a birthright on which to reinvent the world.”

Two final notes — first, Elisa Gabbert has fun with Venn diagrams.

She says that most people separate “women poets” from “poets.” How can anyone divide the two? Whether right or wrong, I identify femininity with poetry. Most of the women I know are poets. Many just don’t bother to write it down.

Lastly, we finally have an e-reader that I would consider buying. The Kobo reader, from Borders, will cost $149 and come stocked with 100 classics, according to the Associated Post. That’s $1.50 per classic. Sure, I probably have most of these unidentified classics on my bookshelf already. (Whether I’ve read them or not is a different issue.) But it still sells for $100 less than competing e-readers.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

My apologies to both of my loyal readers. I have been covering a murder trial this week and that leaves little time for book blogging.

Allow me to catch up. The One Book, One Twitter experiment kicked off today. It’s a worldwide book club that uses Twitter. Readers voted on the inaugural novel and selected Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Gaiman had mixed feelings about the honor. He wrote on his blog:

As an author, I'm half-pleased and half-not, mostly because American Gods is such a divisive sort of book. Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it. (As contrasted with, say, The Graveyard Book, which some people love, some like, and a statistically insignificant number of people hate.) It's not a book I'd hand out to everyone, because the people who don't know anything about what I've written and who hate it -- who might have loved Stardust, or Neverwhere, or The Graveyard Book or Sandman -- probably won't go and look any further.

The #1b1t people have already run into an early problem with spoilers. I also suspect it will be difficult to have any meaningful conversation when all comments are limited to 140 characters and thousands of people are participating.

Still, though, it’s a noble idea.

The Animal Review guys got a book deal; and I suspect it will be my favorite blog-turned-book since Stuff White People Like. If you don’t know the Animal Review’s shtick, Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash — no, not that Steve Nash — grade animals on ridiculous, arbitrary criteria.

Here’s an excerpt from their entry on moose (which Lentz/Nash gave a “B”):

The main thing to know about moose is that they are enormous. More pointedly, owning one as a pet is a decision almost bound to bring a lifetime of regret. It will most certainly cause family conflict, and in all likelihood your friends will stop coming over. Plus your neighbors will gossip. You may end up on the news. And there are at least even odds that your chandelier will need frequent repairing.

Finally, Daniel Nester gives you 13 mistakes to avoid while writing, editing and promoting your book. (Suggestion #8: Don’t take reviews too seriously, good or bad. This especially applies to all the depressed or neurotic people out there; which, if you’re a writer, you most likely are.)

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

The News-Herald Book Club is multiplatform. (If I weren’t so repressed, I would have ended that sentence with an exclamation point.)

We have a YouTube page and a Twitter feed and everything.

In fear of sounding like an old man, I’m relatively new to this Twitter thing and taking suggestions.

Who should I be following? What writers? What critics? What magazines and newspapers?

Thus far, I am the disciple of eight feeds.

I follow the Book Examiner Michelle Kerns (you may remember me raving about her Literary Review Cliché Bingo); Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times book blog; Michael Schaub of Bookslut; Elizabeth Baines (also known as the Fiction Bitch); Electric Lit (who tweeted Rick Moody’s short story last year); Colson Whitehead (Fantastic quipper. “You don’t have to put on the red light, but it would help with the mood and general ambience. No pressure. Just putting it out there.”); Neil Gaiman (Yes, I am a fanboy); and Margaret Atwood.

There are probably legions of fantastic Tweeters I need to follow, but I will never know them without your help. So hit me with some suggestions — via the blog or Twitter.

Also, Nathan Bransford has finished his experiment. The most popular query also had the most popular manuscript.

Bransford doesn’t claim the query process is flawless. Instead, he argues it is the best system we have.

“And all things considered, given the time constraints I still don’t know if there’s a better replacement out there for a query + short sample, even with its imperfections. Queries really do give an agent insight into the overall work, with the sample pages providing another glimpse.”

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Nathan Bransford has started an experiment to see how effective the querying process is.

Bransford writes a blog from his perspective as a literary agent for Curtis Brown Ltd. (I think it’s the second best agent-run blog for writers. QueryShark is number one. Both help writers understand why agents make the decisions they do.)

First, some background: Most authors are published via agent representation. Agents often pick which authors to represent based upon a process that begins with a query letters that the writer sends describing their manuscript. (I use words like “most” and “often” because there are exceptions.)

If the agents don’t like the query, the process ends. The author does not get an agent. The book likely goes unpublished.

On Thursday, Bransford asked his readers if they thought the query process worked. Does it weed out the right people? Does it help good writers find the right agents?

Some said “yes;” others, “no.” My feelings tend to coincide with that of L.T. Host, who commented, “I think there’s probably a better way. I just have no clue what that could be.”

Now that everyone has had a chance to give their opinion, Bransford has arranged for an experiment that will give us quantifiable information.

He will take five queries and the first 30 pages of their corresponding manuscripts and post them on his blog. Then, he will ask his readership to rank the queries along with their pages. Finally, we will see if there is a large discrepancy between the quality of the queries and the actual text.

(In case you haven’t guessed, I’m writing about this contest partly because it coincides with my comments on the query process yesterday.)

On an unrelated note, Robert Swartwood is holding a hint fiction contest. Hint fiction employs the same principle as the Hemingway Challenge. Writers use no more than 25 words to hint at a larger story. Here are some examples. The deadline is midnight April 30. Winners get some stuff.

Last year, Swartwood’s contest was judged by Stewart O’Nan. This year — James Frey. Yes, that James Frey.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Vivienne Parry rediagnoses the “mad” women of literature on BBC News.

She suggests the Woman in White may have had a learning disorder and Madame Bovary wasn’t crazy, just a fantasist who would have fit in on reality television.

Parry talks about how “insane” women in the Victorian Era were often institutionalized for female sexuality.

Coincidentally, I’ve borrowed two books from Tricia in the last year. Both of which told the stories of women unfairly put in asylums because of their sexuality. (Interpret that how you want — not just that Tricia keeps reading books about the subject, but also that I keep borrowing them.)

On to the next one, Penguin Group Australia gave a backhanded apology for printing a cookbook with a recipe that called for “salt and freshly ground black people.” In case you were wondering, they meant “pepper.”

Bob Sessions, its head of publishing, said, “In one particular recipe [a] misprint occurs which obviously came from a spell checker. When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable.

“We’ve said to bookstores that if anyone is small minded enough to complain about this very ... silly mistake then we will happily replace [the book] for them.”

Let me get this straight. Penguin published a book with an unintentionally (I hope) racist typo, quickly forgave its proofreaders, and called anyone unhappy with your faulty product “small minded.”

This would be like if I rear ended Mr. Sessions’s car, forgave myself for texting while driving and called him a “jerkface” when he asked for my insurance info.

Finally, I love Everyday Shakespeare. Where else can I get sonnet battles about poorly parked cars?

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Bookstores received bad news regarding their February sales. Apparently, they have been exempt from the retail sector’s slow recovery.

I feel for bookstores. Publishers have wrung their hands over Amazon and e-books, but they only need to acclimate. Bookstores’ livelihoods are threatened by these new outlets and technologies.

Even if paper books ceased to exist, someone would still need to create content. (As a writer for a newspaper, this is the one thought that calms me.) But bookstores have become increasingly marginalized.

Sites like Amazon make brick-and-mortar sites unnecessary. You don’t need a physical store to download an e-book, and traditional books can usually be found cheaper on the Internet.

This makes me sad because I like bookstores. I like browsing the shelves and asking people who work there for suggestions. I like to sample books by reading a few pages.

Yes, I suppose you can do all of that online, except the Web site dictates what and how many pages I can sample before I buy. Amazon certainly isn’t devoid of opinions or suggestions. (Some of them are even helpful.)

I survived when my favorite music store closed, though I listen to fewer new artists as a result. I survived when the local video rental store closed. I will survive if my local bouquiniste closes, but I’ll be poorer for it.

One bright note for bookstores — the Guardian has suggested there may be hope in finding a niche. Sure, the linked story is about British political bookstores and may not apply stateside; but if chains are struggling, the answer may be to go small.

A few unrelated notes before I leave you. GalleyCat wants your help writing the world’s longest literary remix.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least link to the Pulitzer winners.

-Jason Lea

Darragh McManus complained about bad book titles. Eric Puchner of The Rumpus went the extra mile and actually classified the different types of bad titles.

He divides them into:

The Faux Poetic but Authentically Meaningless (“Hunt the Mist Slowly”);
The Purely Descriptive (“One Early Morning in Topeka at Dawn”)
The Lofty Abstraction, a.k.a. the Bad Kundera (“The Lonely Shackles of Mortality”)
The Hardy Boys Special (“The Hike from Hell”)
The Grammatically Complete Sentence (“Gladys Pemberton Strikes It Rich”)
The Inspirational Cliché (“Dreams of Rebirth”)
The Uninspirational Cliché (“Losing My Marbles”)
The Alliterative Tongue Twister (“Peripatetic Papa”)
The Allusion to Another, Much More Famous Work of Literature (“The Story of Christ”)
The It-Doesn’t-Get-Any-Cuter-Than-This (“Runaway Grandma”)
The Melodramatic Image (“Blood Dries Brown”)
The My-Life-Changed-Unexpectedly-and-I’m-Going-to-Tell-You-About-It (“Epiphany in a Tattoo Parlor”)
The Bad McSweeney (“How We Lie to the Moon, and How the Moon Lies to Us”)
The Scratch ‘n Sniff, a.k.a. But-It-Will-Make-Such-a-Lovely-Cover-Someday (“In the Valley of the Gardenia Blossoms”)

I have a soft spot from the Grammatically Complete Sentence. (Examples: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, And to Think I Saw It All on Mulberry Street, All’s Well that Ends Well and Something Wicked This Way Comes — though Something Wicked could also be filed under The Allusion to Another, Much More Famous Work of Literature, in this case, Macbeth.) Otherwise, I agree with Puchner’s taxonomy.

Also, I think we should start calling David Sedaris The Bad McSweeney.

Onto a new subject — want to buy your wife a Hester Prynne jersey shirt? Or, for the man in your life, a Huck Finn? There’s also a Moby Dick shirt available, but it could easily be misunderstood.

I’ve received a few links for literary T-shirts recently. Out of Print Clothing has the best looking but I prefer Literary Rags. (Check out Out of Print’s Lolita shirt. If Prynne doesn’t send the wrong message to your lady friend, Lolita probably will.) Literary Rags keep it simple — a black-and-white image of the author and one of his or her more recognizable quotes.

Like most trendy T-shirts, these are pricey; but it costs to dress smart.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Apple sold 300,000 iPads in 15 hours.

If the Pope were selling absolutions at half the cost of the e-reader (between $500 and $700, depending on how much memory you want), it might cause less of a sensation.

Those numbers are huge, bigger than expected. To give a bit of context, experts estimate that Amazon sold about 700,000 Kindles in the last two years. (We can only estimate because Amazon will not release how many it sold.) The iPad will probably match that by the end of the year.

The Kindle isn’t doomed, per se. The iPad still has some kinks (no Flash.) But it’s safe to Amazon’s hegemony has ended.

I am not one of the 300,000 people who bought an iPad Saturday, so a linked review will have to suffice.

In related news, Anna Quindlen is optimistic about reading’s backlit future. She also makes a call for the snobbing to cease amongst techies and literati.

There is and has always been more than a whiff of snobbery about lamentations that reading is doomed to extinction. That’s because they’re really judgments on human nature. If you’ve convinced yourself that America is a deeply anti-intellectual country, it must follow that we don’t read, or we read the wrong things, or we read them in the wrong fashion. And now we have gleeful e-elitism as well, the notion that the conventional product, printed and bound, is a hopeless dinosaur. Tech snobbery is every bit as silly as the literary variety. Both ignore the tremendous power of book love.

If I could, I would rename this blog The Tremendous Power of Book Love.

Moving on — Channel 4 will be tweeting Romeo and Juliet. It’s been done. Tweeting a classic is no longer the revolution it was 10 months ago.

Finally, I offer a pair of disappointing examples of censorship. Both books — The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry — talk about the persecution of a minority. In Carter’s book, it is Palestinians; in Lowry’s, it is Jews.

The antagonistic history of the Palestinians and Jews aside, both populations have suffered. They both have been the victims of stereotypes and prejudice.

Censoring does not stop prejudice. You know what does? The Tremendous Power of Book Love.

The best way to combat bigotry is to learn about the other people. The best way to learn about them is to hear their stories. Denying children access to these stories solves nothing.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Mentor’s Reader has returned from her hiatus. What could bring her back? One hint: Zombies...

We complained about cliche book reviews Monday.

Today, we pick on cliche book titles.

Darragh McManus wrote a column deriding tiresome novel titles. I won’t copy an excerpt, because it’s worth reading in its entirety.

My favorite part is when McManus creates fake novel titles based upon their genres. (Example, Serial killer thriller type yoke: Blood on the Edge.)

I thought I’d give his game a try.

Harlequin romance: Brazen Hands.

Children’s adventure that will inevitably be optioned as a movie: Mitchell Stevens and the Rock of Ages.

Chick literature: Hippo Hips & the Lonely Tarts Club Band.

Vonnegut ripoff: Ragnarocket.

Sci-Fi: Till the End of Times.

Booker Award Winner: The Hindrance of Altruism.

Tricia Ambrose autobiography: Suffering the Insufferable. (That would also work as a Booker Award Winner.)

Book to purchase because it sounds interesting but never read: People, and How to Stop Hating Them. (That would also work as a Tricia Ambrose autobiography.)

Hipster favorite that will inevitably be optioned as a Wes Anderson-directed movie: The Whistler Sisters.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. My second favorite part of the column is the photo’s cut line. “A pile of books.” I wish all cutlines were as generic. “Man standing in front of podium.” “Image to break up block of text.”

The publishing industry has portrayed Amazon as a villain for its e-book price bullying. (Click on the Everybody Hates Amazon label for background, if you need it.)

But Amazon has been giving people new and exciting reasons for people to hate it. The online shopping company has even drawn the ire of normally amicable Canadians.

To make a long story short, Amazon wants to establish a fulfillment centre in Canada. (I think “fulfillment centre” is French Canadian for “warehouse.”) However, Canada’s heritage ministry must approve of the warehouse, because booksellers are protected by Canada’s heritage laws. As thebookseller.com explains, bookselling is one of many cultural trades protected from foreign ownership so American influences do not overwhelm Canadian culture.

Amazon.ca bypasses heritage laws by distributing through a third party. For Amazon, the fulfillment centre would cut out the middle man.

Early indications hint that the government will side with Amazon, but Canadian booksellers have been riled.

Comic connoisseurs are also irritated with the Internet kingpin. A pricing glitch appeared on Amazon’s Web site that caused hardcover comic collections to be deeply discounted. I mean deep discounts. Books that would normally cost more than $100 were listed for less than $10.

Word of the accidental fire sale spread via the web until the Amazon top 10 was dominated by superheroes.

Once Amazon realized what was going on, they started fixing prices. Then, they removed buy buttons altogether.

While no one has said exactly what caused the snafu, the speculation is that it was caused by erroneous data entry by Diamond Book Distributors. Diamond distributes pretty much every comic you have ever heard of.

While some people received their omnibuses, many received cancellation notices, instead. An Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said those who don’t get their comics will get a $25 gift certificate for the inconvenience.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. I love that it’s a fulfillment centre, not a center.

John Edgar Wideman has abandoned major publishers for the independent hustle.

Wideman has received the MacArthur Genius grant, two Pen/Faulkner awards and was a National Book Award finalist. He has written more than 20 books, both fiction and nonfiction, mostly for Houghton Mifflin.

His newest book, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind, will be self-published through print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

This is a surprising move if it is about the money. Simply put, major publishers still offer the most returns. There is a growing self-publishing scene, and it may eventually become as lucrative as the majors (at least, for authors of Wideman’s caliber and cache.) But, right now, the major publishers are still your best bet to make money.

However, Wideman indicates this has more to do with him wanting control over marketing strategies.

“I’ve been thinking about alternatives for a long time. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach,” he said in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

There is a third possible explanation for Wideman’s decision. Briefs is, as its title implies, a collection of short stories. Those are difficult sales, even for a recognized author. It might be possible that Wideman had trouble placing it, so he went the POD route. (I want to clarify that I don’t have any evidence for this third hypothesis. I don’t know that Wideman had difficulty finding a publisher for Briefs. It’s just another possible reason for his partnership with Lulu.)

Either way, I don’t question the man. He’s a MacArthur-certified genius.

On to the next one: Peter Hedges, writer of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, listed his five favorite book-to-movie adaptations. (No, Tricia, Rebecca did not make the list.)

Next: I don’t follow college basketball, so this is my March Madness.

Finally: I received The Tao of Wu for Christmas but didn’t read it until yesterday.

“I believe death is the biggest hustle there is. It’s the biggest scam — because you can say what you want about it and nobody can prove you wrong.”

Thank you, Rza. I forgive you for Digi Snacks.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com