Because I know we are all just chewing on our keyboards waiting to hear what Google Book Search is doing next, and because it’s really quite unsanitary to chew on keyboards, here is the update. Most recently, Google struck a bargain with the Complutense University of Madrid to scan all the books its library holds.

The library’s collection comprises 3 million works, placing it after the National Library as the second largest in Spain. Public domain works such as those of Cervantes and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz will be available through Google; apparently, books that are still under copyright will also be partially accessible, under the searchable but not downloadable compromise that Google asserts is not copyright infringement. If the Madrid’s library will, in fact, contribute copyrighted materials to the scanning process, it will be only the second university to do so, after Michigan University.

According to the Reuters article, the Complutense’s library will be “the first library in a non-English-speaking country to join” Google’s efforts. I assume this is journalistically correct,but it might potentially be misleading, as Google announced that it was creating alliances with publishers in India six days earlier.

“We have already tied up with thousands of publishers in the US and UK and are now in talks with several Indian publishing houses over the past few days,” said Gautam Anand, Google’s strategic partner development manager. Though he shied away from naming the publishers, deals with Indian publishers such as Orient Longman, Sage Publishers, Roli Books, Orient Paperbacks, Diamond Publications and New Age International have evidently already been effectuated.

The distinction may simply arise from Madrid University laying title to the first non-English speaking library involved with Google Book Search, versus India’s publishers. In the press release for the Spanish library, a Google spokeswoman said, “We already have other non-English-language books, but this will be a huge boost to our Spanish-language content, as well as other languages.”

Or perhaps Google is only scanning the English books published in India; after all, India publishes approximately 28,000 books in English every year, a figure that falls behind only the U.S. and the U.K.

This is only one of many indications that India is swiftly becoming a major publishing force worldwide; their exports in publishing, which came in at a scant 330 million rupees in 1991, has increased exponentially to stand at 4.6 billion rupees today.

The entire Indian industry is “worth Rs.80 billion and it is growing by over 15 percent every year,” according to Shakti Mallik, president of the Federation of Indian Publishers. Its various publishers attribute growth to advancements in marketing, including email lists, personalised phone calls, preview booklets with summaries and excerpts, and affiliated blog discussions. Blog discussions! Do those work?

In which Young Thomasina fancies the citadel of professional reviewers being dealt yet another blow with the battering ram of bloggers, and receives her comeuppance for use of overextended metaphors

Lest we fully believe that one can only become a national bestseller via online word-of-mouth if you are leant some help from Amazon.com (as was Keith Donohue’s nevertheless snappy book The Stolen Child), let us examine the newest book that has taken the publishing industry by surprise and by storm. Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, has topped the U.S. Bestseller lists, once again despite a large amount of notice in the conventional press. It just warms the cockles of my book-loving blog-loving heart.

42-year-old Setterfield quit her job teaching French at Harrogate College six years ago, and began tutoring part-time instead, in order to give her time to bring her ideas for a novel to fruition. Diane and her husband Peter Whitall, an accountant, lived frugally in order to make ends meet while Setterfield scribbled notes and made plans for the novel’s story and shapes. A period of frustration in which she put the notes away was brought to a close by a creative writing class, and she began to compose the novel in earnest. Now, after over five years of scrimping, Setterfield finds herself an overnight millionaire.

The mystery, centered around a young antiquarian bookseller and an aging best-seller author who wants her biography written, edged out established authors such as Fredrick Forsyth, Jennifer Weiner, James Patterson and Anna Quindlen to surge to the top of the best-seller lists. Setterfield also holds title to being the first British novels whose debut hit number one in the United States since Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer in 1996—a book which had the significant boost of a pre-existing film deal.

Setterfield’s Cinderella story is precisely the kind about which all writers dream; with the book rights nabbed for £800,000 in the UK and more than £526,000 in the US, the promising author will now have the leisure to spend time doing precisely what she loves most: writing. “If you ask anyone who has ever thought of writing a book how they feel about getting their work published, they will tell you that nothing could be more thrilling,” Setterfield beamed. “Any serious writer would view it as an enormous privilege to be able to devote the best of their time to what they love and that is what I will now be able to do.”

One aspect of the Cinderella story is puzzling: the Faery Godmother only exists on one side of the Atlantic, and not the side where Setterfield herself lives. While it has sold over 70,000 copies in the U.S., last week it only sold 600 copies in the U.K. The fact that it has done so much better in the U.S. has begun to attract the attention of U.K. publications under headlines such as “British teacher becomes a literary sensation in the US.” The Times article suggests that blogging may be the cause of this discrepancy. “I suppose it’s a new form of word of mouth,” Setterfield said of the blog publicity.

But isn’t the blog community basically a global one? If blogs are responsible, why should they only have affected the bookbuying community in the U.S.? I tried to do more research, and found that opinions about the verity of blog-powered purchasing are divided. Sassymonkey at Blogher.com is both excited and credulous—and for good reason: she first encountered The Thirteenth Tale on a blog. Conversely, Rebecca Swain Vadne at the Orlando Sentinel uses one of my favourite words, ridonkulous, in assessment of the possibility.

I was somewhat relieved to discover on Galleycat.com (though Rebecca’s site, Shakespeare’s Coffee) that Barnes and Noble placed the story as their number one recommendation, and that Borders ran similar promotions. On the other hand, with due respect, I’m not quite sure I’d place the Power of Blogging all the way at Ridonkulous; other things may be at work here besides paid marketing, and perhaps Americans are simply more swayed by blogs or more attentive to them. Or perhaps, as Galleycat suggests, “American people can only take one new thing per year,” and this fall, it’s The Thirteenth Tale.

In the end, however, I heard about this book on a blog. Unlike The Stolen Child, which attracted me via the patented Sell-to-Thomasina-by-Quoting-Yeats promotional scheme, and which I read utterly oblivious to the vast internet marketing campaign, I came by The Thirteenth Tale through precisely the forum which may have made it a success. And now I am planning to go out and obtain a copy, not to vindicate my Blogging Hubris (see comeuppance, above), but because it sounds like a novel for people who love books. Look for a review sometime after I make it through my current stack.

Or: How The Stolen Child Gets to Ride Around in the Amazon.com Shopping Cart

When I reviewed Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child a couple of weeks ago, I was blithely unaware of the Amazon.com brouhaha surrounding the novel, having, I suppose, buried my head in a book literally and figuratively. But it turns out that the online purveyor of books has played an integral role in the book’s success, to the dismay of those who normally fancy themselves integral to a book’s success. Not only that, but Amazon has announced further plans to become Godparent to The Stolen Child by optioning the film rights and is now attempting to peddle the project to a studio and filmmaker.

Amazon.com’s involvement with the novel began with its decision to send free copies to the website’s top customer reviewers, in return for which the recipients would post summaries and their opinions online. The significance of this? The Stolen Child made it to the number one fiction seller on the website, despite being ignored by many major reviewers in professional publications. Furthermore, this form of solicited word-of-mouth propelled Mr. Donohue’s work to the Top 25 of the New York Times bestsellers list.

I enjoyed the book, and think its popularity is deserved, but the situation provokes some thought. An NPR broadcast, available as a podcast at NPR.org wonders what an age of consumer reviews will do to those for whom reviewing is a profession. Critics contend that those who are paid to read the book have the ability to lend weighty thought to its issues and societal contriubtion in addition to its capacity for entertainment. Meanwhile, on Fashiontribes.com, Lesley Scott asserts that “whether the traditional media likes it or not…a new generation of critics is on the rise.”

Following (one might guess) the success of its first campaign, Amazon.com purchased the film option for The Stolen Child. As far as I could discover, no partners for the film have yet been nailed down. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that Amazon is not offering to co-finance the film; its contribution would take the form of advertising and promotion on its existing website. This is, perhaps, a smart decision for the company’s first project outside of the (sizeable) world of its own website, but it may not contribute much added clout. After all, as the Variety article points out, Starbucks’ promotion of ‘Akeelah and the Bee’ apparently did little for the film.

On the other hand, it may simply be part of Amazon’s current attempts to broaden its horizons, culminating in an announcement this month that it will offer TV programmes and films as part of its Amazon Unbox service. This follows on the heels of its expanding web TV programming, which has at its forefront the Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher, a weekly interview with artists and authors. In fact, Keith Donohue’s interview on the show apparently spawned a lot of the interest that led to the decision to option the film. “We are always trying to innovate, based on listening to customers and the things they’re passionate about,” explained Laura Porco, Amazon director of merchandising. “This was a book we passed around to our editorial and merchandising teams. Everybody was excited by Keith’s voice and felt this could be a great movie.”

Isabel Wang comments sagely on Amazon.com’s marketing strategy at her blog isabel says. Meanwhile, Keith Donohue talks about appearing on the ‘Fishbowl’ and his opinions on making the book into a film at ‘Underground Writing’ on the book’s website; any blog post about optioning a film that ends with discussion of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy is a blog post that has won my respect and admiration.

Part II in BookInfo’s aptly if uncreatively dubbed “Advice from…” Series brings an interview with a literary agent and some rough guidelines from an editor to the fore. Both are courtesy of the cornucopia of information that is mediabistro.com.

AvantGuild spoke to Ted Weinstein, who became a literary agent after fifteen years in the publishing industry, working in such fields such as marketing, business development, and writing. His agency, based in San Francisco, focuses mainly on nonfiction, working with journalists and academics, and finding out this kind of information about any agency that you are considering is paramount.

For example, the chief recommendation that Weinstein has in terms of submission etiquette is to do proper research and look at Weinstein’s website. Guidelines are available both for the kind of work the agency handles, and how best to submit. Nothing will eliminate you from consideration faster than failing to do basic research and consequently including material contrary to an agency’s wishes. And nothing could waste your own time, as well as the agency’s, more than submitting to an agency that does not handle your kind of work. Weinstein said that he only accepts one or two percent of unsolicited material, but largely because so much of what he receives is not in the genre that he represents. With serious writers who have adhered to the submission guidelines, says Weinstein, “the odds are better because the overall quality is generally better.”

Mediabistro also shares the experience of Bill Belcher, a travel and adventure writer who put forth his newfound knowledge after spending several months editing LA Weekly’s OUT THERE section. Belcher’s advice on “How Not to Piss Off an Editor” is a succinct list of a few things not to do, such as:

Don’t:

• Send in a “rough draft.” I only want to see your best, finished work.
• Send me a complete ms when I ask for queries (pitches) only. I can scan a pitch quickly and tell if it’s of interest and not something we’ve already done or already have in the works. I don’t have time to read the entire story to figure this out.
• Send me a 1,200 word ms when I’ve asked for 650 and suggest I cut it.

These are only a few of his suggestions; read the article for the full take. Becher’s ‘Do’ list is even more succinct, but very often Goofus is more useful than Gallant when it comes to literary submission etiquette. The unwritten post “How to Impress an Editor” often has the most to do with submitting a well-written piece—and that’s a whole different task.

Let’s face it: just because you can write a novel or a poem doesn’t neccessarily mean you also know how to write a letter to a publisher or a literary agent. You may have spent years mastering the art of literary composition well enough to send a polished first foray to the rather terrifying foreign shores of other people’s desks, but striking and insightful use of metaphor does not neccessarily translate to skill with cover letter composition. Overenthusiasm or ignorance, arrogance or insecurity may be secretly undoing you. And alas, there are no comparable workshops where your peers can tell you that “Dear Sir or Madam” sounds cliche. But we here at BookInfo.net are compiling the recommendations of a few publishers, so that those foreign shores don’t bear such a resemblance to charging uphill at Gallipoli against the machine guns.

• Kit Whitfield’s Publisher Dating Dictionary

My personal favourite of those I’ve come across so far, Ms. Whitfield’s Dictionary makes clear precisely how foolish common inclusions in cover letters sound by comparing them to equivalent come-on lines. She then follows up with an explanation as to why this potential tactic is a faux pas. Her amusing and consequently extraordinarily helpful advice runs through an entire potential cover letter, from:

You say: ‘I know you don’t usually accept unsolicited manuscripts, but please, just have a look at this.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I know you’re married, but please, just go out with me once.’

You say: ‘I know you don’t usually publish this kind of thing, but please, just have a look at this.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I know you’re gay, but please, just go out with me once.’

If they have a policy, it’s there for a reason, and asking them to change their minds will just feel like you aren’t paying them the courtesy of assuming they mean what they say. Half the letters they get are asking them to make an exception of some sort, and after too many such requests, they start to look depressingly unexceptional.

…through possibly less obvious errors (at first):

You say: ‘I’ve studied literature and have a degree/qualification/teaching cert in it.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I’m good at relationships - I’ve watched a lot of romantic comedies.’

Studying and doing are totally different things - and if you don’t seem aware of that, it increases the chances that your work isn’t good.

…to more obvious ones:

You say: ‘I’ve been seeking a publisher for many years.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I’ve been trying to get laid for many years.’

Doesn’t sound good, does it?
…
You say: ‘I know this book isn’t perfect and shows my inexperience, but I’m hoping you’ll recognise the raw talent within me.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I’m not ready for a relationship at the moment - you don’t mind staying single till I am, do you?’

Sorry, but if the book isn’t ready, they won’t want it. Publishers and agents aren’t there to nurture raw talent: you have to work on your talent until it’s up to publishable standards. If you need someone to support you through the process, find a teacher or join a writing group, but there’s nothing a publisher can do with work that isn’t up to scratch yet.

The clever author and former editor also has an example of a good cover letter, which is equally useful if signficantly less hilarious. Be sure to read the entire article—it’s worth making into a poster, perhaps as “All I Need to Know in Life I Learned from the Publisher-Dating Dictionary.”

Since my last post on the battle over digitised books , Google has announced that in addition to providing searchable texts of books online, users will also be able to download and print certain novels. These certain novels are all classics well out of the range of copyright; Dante’s Inferno and Aesop’s Fables were given as examples.

The only true innovation here is the inclusion of the texts in Google’s special “print-ready” format. Project Gutenberg has been providing ebooks of texts in the public domain since 1991, the majority of which you are free to print out, re-post on your website, hand out on the street, wallpaper your room with, and so on, should you feel the need to wallpaper your room with Anna Karenina or A Tale of Two Cities, or, for that matter, the works of Lord Byron, a decorating scheme that is sounding increasingly appealing to me as this sentence goes on.

Project Gutenberg offers over 19,000 books as of last month, a number that is steadily growing; additionally, the Online Books Page provides a listing of where you can find over 25,000 free domain books on the web. It’s Google’s earlier bid to digitise material that still falls under copyright that has the publishing companies rioting, as this potential service would not only be unlike anything anyone else offers, but would also deprive publishers of their livelihood. After all, do we really want to put publishers out of business and then go around reading print-outs for the rest of our lives? A debate on this very topic and the value of e-books has sprung up at Pop Candy, in response to a blog post about the same news article on Google and Gutenberg.

But of course, the true merit of a societal service like Project Gutenberg is not that I could wallpaper my room with Byron’s poetic works, but that I could obtain of a text that has otherwise gone out of print. Should you prefer your out-of-print novels in a regularly bound format, the internet is still the best place to go, with many different used and new online booksellers offering to connect you with books that have fallen by the wayside of even the publisher’s Long Tail, the name given to its older backlisted titles.

BookFinder.com has taken special interest in the plea of the out-of-print book-seeker, and publishes a yearly report on the most frequently sought-out rare books. They note that “98 to 99% of all books ever published are now out of print” and are “fascinated to discover some of the choices that real readers make when they seek out books that are, by definition, not being actively marketed to them by the publishing industry.”

As the PublishersWeekly article points out, “the most notable titles were from celebrities or were lesser known works by famous writers.” Consequently Sex by Madonna tops the ‘Arts and Music’ category, Johnny Cash’s autobiography Man in Black is number one in ‘Biography,’ ‘Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror’ sees lesser-known titles by Ray Bradbury and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Installment 229, in which young Thomasina gets all in a tizzy about serialised novels and receives her comeuppance

All of my anachronistic tendencies are running around in their little highnecked blouses and lace-up boots with sheer delight at the news that Penguin is releasing a novel in serial form. G.W. (Gordon) Dahlquist’s Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is going to be turned out in ten paperback installments, one each week, prior to publication of the full novel in January.

The serialised format of this project, hearkening back to the days when Dickens’ Great Expectations outsold daily newspapers, is also mirrored in the project’s form and content. The volumes are bound and the covers designed to resemble Victorian serials, while the story itself, according to reviews in the U.S. where the full book has already been released, is a dark blend of science fiction, thriller, fantasy, and gothic mystery.

The serials’ home is a kind of parallel-universe but unnamed Victorian London, in which our three heroes, Miss Temple, a pretty and upright Victorian young woman, Dr. Svenson, a foreign physician enlisted to be chaperone to the Prince, and Cardinal Chang, an adequately Dickensian lower-class crook hired to kill a man, set out to solve their independent mysteries. The answers are somehow bound up in the three villains (titles leant them upfront by Penguin’s website, lest there be any confusion), the Contessa Laquer-Sforza, the Comte d’Okancz, and Francis Xonck. And, also no doubt, in the Glass Books and the Dream Eaters.

Reviews have been mixed: the Washington Post dismissed it as “hundreds of pages of ornament piled on a rickety piece of storytelling,” but the Cleveland Plain Dealer hailed it as “flat-out fun, engaging and funny as any tale of mystery and imagination I can recall,” saying also that “the dialogue is wry, the descriptions clever and the complicated plot advances as smoothly as a patrician’s pocket watch. …At more than 700 pages, this one ends too quickly.” The Kansas City Star weighed in the middle, praising Dahlquist for creating “a literary character in Miss Temple,” and assessing the book as having “a clever conceit with a foundation of literature as fantasy, though it has its excesses and derivations.” All other things aside, I find charges of verbosity in a serial to be rather beside the point: Dickens, for example, is not exactly concise. For which I love him, being a humble heir to prolixity myself (cf. size of current post).

But here the similarities to Victorian serials (if spiced up with a bit of science fiction and fantasy) end. The serials are not available in stores; you can only purchase a subscription online, with a limited edition of 5,000 copies. The entire series sells for £25, roughly £8 more than the complete edition to be published early next year, and in the U.S., only the full novel is purchasable.

If this is slightly dissapointing, confusion follows. Apparently, Penguin is using the book to “lure readers to their fledgling online site,” (according to Reuters) a goal that many publishers around the globe are trying to acheive in order to eliminate the middleman.coms like Amazon and encourage readers to buy directly from the publishers.

“Publishing is routinely behind in terms of using the Internet,” explained Amelia Fairney, publicity director for Penguin imprint Viking. “We have to start using it the same way the music and film industries have. We’re just moving with the times really.” An admirable goal, certainly, but it seems counter-intuitive to promote a website with a serialised novel. Would the music industry, as indicated by Fairney, promote their website with the release of wax cylinder recordings? Bookhugger that I am, I would never suggest that books are an analogously antiquated medium, but with the information flow tendencies of our society, promoting the serials via the website would make a lot more sense.

And furthermore, the Glass Books website does really seem in the business of promoting the books rather than drawing readers into an online community, as was originally promised. The Reuters article: “Penguin is hoping fans will discuss the book online after reading each installment and delve into the elaborate mythology surrounding the characters in a devoted online space, www.glassbooks.co.uk.” Both elaborate mythology and delving readers appear to be absent. Perhaps the forum for a blogging community has not yet been set up, as the book will not be sent out to its subscribers until next month, but until then, it does beg the question: who is promoting whom?

Embarking on an attempt to solve my own mystery, I discovered that (oddly enough) the U.S. site for the book has a a bit more interactive material—namely, an online game inventively dubbed the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Online Adventure—but still no forums. And I join a fair amount of other internet readers annoyed that the author on the UK site (GW Dahlquist) is advertised as having “never entertained the idea of being a writer until a chance encounter with film-maker Stanley Kubrick,” while the author on the U.S. site (Gordon Dahlquist) is said to be a playwright and film-maker living in New York. The ever-amusing and ever-informative folks at Booksquare apparently also found somewhere the claim that GW Dahlquist was the “world’s sole remaining practitioner of mesmerism.” By the time I arrived at the website, as far as I could divine, this mention of mesmerism had joined its disappearing brethren.

Maybe both Mr. Dahlquists did, in fact, meet Mr. Kubrick, or maybe neither of them did, but I would at least expect them to keep the marketing fiction consistent. You wouldn’t let this kind of inconsistency go within a fiction story (not that it hasn’t happened before, cf. The Three Musketeers), so why is it acceptable precisely within the realm which is supposed to be non-fiction? Does parallel-universe GW Dahlquist come part and parcel with parallel-universe Victorian London? The idea occured to me briefly that maybe all of this confusion is a kind of carefully orchestrated meta-mystery to draw in people as completely befuddled as myself, but I hardly think anyone involved has demonstrated that they’re quite that clever.

Visit Jurgen Wolff’s blogpost on Penguin’s marketing campaign; Daphoenus - Girl of Destiny’s telling inclusion of the book in ‘Literary Thingies’ rather than ‘Book Recommendations’; and a favourable review at Suburban Peril.

The announcement of the Man Booker Prize shortlist and the subsequent uproar has left me not quite certain about for whom I should feel more sorry—the slighted authors that everyone expected to make the list, or the authors who made the list who are now described largely as being ‘unknowns,’ ‘unexpected,’ ‘contentious,’ and so on. I can imagine them clipping out the articles (or printing them out, in this our modern age) with a hint of a sigh.

Nevertheless, the projected winners of the Prize are now out of contention. David Mitchell was the favourite, for his novel Black Swan Green, followed by Peter Carey, Booker-Prize winner in 1988 and 2001, for Theft: A Love Story. Nadine Gordimer and Barry Unsworth were also longlisted authors who had previously won the Prize. Waterstone’s also pointed out that Mitchell “would face stiff competition from Sarah Waters and Andrew O’Hagan,” according to BBC News.

Of all of these favourites, only Waters remains, and she has consequently been crowned Most Likely to Win. Her novel, The Night Watch, about love and loss during WWII, is joined by five other books on the shortlist: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, an epic that traverses the author’s native India and New York; Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, about an Australian penal colony in the nineteenth century; M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down, a story about the troubled childhood of an unsual Irish boy; Hisham Matar’s semi-autobiographical In the Country of Men, and Mother’s Milk, Edward St. Aubyn’s depiction of an affluent and dysfunctional family.

The Independent points out via the time-honoured horserace metaphor that the gallop to the Booker generally involves both well-known favourites and unknowns, and that in this regard the inclusion of ’surprising’ authors is a downright Man Booker tradition. On the other hand, the percentages are far greater this year, and half of the shortlisted authors are relative newcomers to the field: both Kiran Desai and M.J. Hyland published only one novel prior to the one currently on the list, and Hisham Matar was nominated for his very first book. The majority of female writers is also a rarity, and this is the first time that two Australian authors have made the shortlist.

Hermione Lee, famous literary critic and chair of this year’s judging panel, explained the shortlist decision: “Each of these novels has what we as judges were most looking for: a distinctive, original voice and audacious imagination that takes readers to undiscovered countries of the mind, a strong power of storytelling and a historical truthfulness.”

But Lee’s search for “audacious imagination” will not consitute the sole deciding factor, as it was recently announced that the Man Booker organisers have selected six book clubs around England to participate in the judging process. (Or, in the words of The Enquirer, they chose “to pluck six remarkable groups from relative obscurity to join their distinguished panel,” thus corroborating the Remarkable Things Plucked from Relative Obscurity theme beloved by either the Man Booker panel, the press, or both.) Groups similar to the Heaton Library Book Club, comprised of 23 women, will read the six shortlisted novels and catalogue their thoughts in journals and diaries, before voting on the group’s preferred winner and sending their results on to the national panel in London.

The Man Booker Prize has been open to writers from Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth of former colonies since its inception in 1969. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on 10 October, and will receive a £50,000 award.

Thanks to Rebecca Swain Vadnie of the Orlando Sentinal, through whom we discovered one of these links; visit her blog post about it here.

Contrary to the notion that I only post about things so that I can have an excuse to quote Yeats, the next book up for review is Keith Donahue’s The Stolen Child, both because it’s a new and beautiful example of bridging the gap between children and adult literature (albeit not precisely in the way I previously discussed) and also I’ve been looking to inaugurate our new Science Fiction and Fantasy category.

That being said, however, I confess the novel drew my eye because it takes its title from one of Yeats’s most famous lyrics (also called “The Stolen Child”), in which a child is abducted by a band of faeries. In the poem, Yeats mingles joy with sadness, for although the child will “hear no more” the familiar sounds of his life, the description of the faeries’ lives sparkles with beauty and delight. Furthermore, the faeries’ choice to take the child and make him a changeling is one of compassion: “Come away, o human child,” they refrain, “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

But Donohue’s debut novel is striking because it turns most notions of faeries on their pointy little ears. To wit, the opening line: “Don’t call me a fairy.” The band of changelings are called hobgoblins, but neither do they conform to the popular depictions of faeries or hobgoblins, which are traditionally naughty fairies (like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), or faeries who have been twisted to the Dark Side. They are, instead, battling against an age in which folk legends have lost hold on the mainstream consciousness, and are forced to live secret, desparate lives on the invisible peripheries.

The story begins in the late 1940s, when the seven-year-old Henry Day ran away from home and hid himself in the hollow of a tree. He is discovered by the hobgoblin band, who are also, in this novel’s universe, by definition changeling children once abducted from their homes. They retain the appearance of a child for hundreds of years, growing wiser and more bitter beneath their youthful skin, and can only return to the normal aging process by taking the place of another stolen child. The eldest of the hobgoblins is transformed by appearance into Henry Day, while the former Henry Day is renamed Aniday and takes his place amongst the changelings.

The tragedies of these two chief characters unfold in alternating, parallel chapters that span three decades. Aniday’s existence is both marked by wistfulness at being separated from the world he knew before and held back from the self-actualisation of growing to adulthood, and the hardship of the hobgoblin’s gritty subsistence. They must steal their clothes, live on plants, frogs, and insects, but above all remain hidden from humans. “If they catch you, they will think you a devil and lock you away,” a leader named Igel warns the group’s newest member. “Or worse, they will test to see if they are right by throwing you in a fire.” Meanwhile, Henry wrestles with clouded memories of his life several centuries ago, barely recalling a German piano teacher and the prodigy he had before the latter was abducted. Henry must assimilate himself into modern society, or become the object of suspicion; when he cannot hide his affinity and extraordinary talent for playing the piano, one the previous Henry never displayed, his father becomes suspicious indeed.

The novel is remarkable, however, because the changelings operate as a synecdoche for the story: the book itself is adult literature swaddled inside the husk of children’s myth. Though the topic is that of sprites, the themes are those of lost innocence and search for identity, of modern society’s subjugation of the magic of childhood itself. Comparisons to giants of children’s literature, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and adult-children’s literature, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, are well deserved; however, the book lacks the closure (I think I smell a sequel) that often makes these cross-genre adult/children’s books so satisfying, and is not appropriate for children so much as children stuck inside adults.

Read a review at The Guardian; read a very nice blog post by Ernesto Burden.

The newest scandal in the British publishing industy involves two warring John Betjeman biographers, a love letter hoax, an acrostic, and everyone’s fair dose of public shame. Who wants the film rights?

For A.N. Wilson, whose biography of the former British poet laureate came out this year to honour the 100th anniversary of of Betjeman’s birth, the story began about two years ago, when he recieved a copy of a document in the mail from a mysterious Eve de Harben. The document appeared to be a love letter from the late Mr. Betjeman to real-life friend Honor Tracy, and the sender purported to be Tracy’s cousin. Wilson, having no cause to believe that the letter was a fake, and no doubt ecstatic to have proof that Betjeman had a passionate affair 11 years after he had married his wife, gaily published the letter at the close of a chapter entitled “Betjeman at War.”

The letter theoretically might have stayed unquestioned for years, had not Eve de Harben sent a letter into The Sunday Times several weeks ago, exposing the letter as a fake. She explained it was revenge for an attack on a friend, the writer Humphrey Carpenter, who died in 2005. But curioser and curioser: no Eve de Harben was found at the return address on her letter to the Times, and when Wilson had tried earlier to return the copy of the letter to her, it came back to him stamped ‘addressee unknown.’ Furthermore, Mr. Carpenter’s widow, when contacted, insisted that her husband knew no one by the name of Wilson.

The time had come to realise that the name ‘Eve de Harben’ is an anagram for ‘Ever been had?’ (as the Press everywhere has been pointing out with glee). After all, the ‘letter’ sent to Mr. Wilson was revealed as containing an acrostic–that’s right, those things that primary-school teachers use to introduce ‘poetry’ to you and make you write a poem about yourself using the the letters of your name, and I rued the day that I was ever given one with so many letters. In the hoax epistle, the first letter of each sentence, with the exception of the first and the last three sentences, spells out ‘A.N. Wilson is a shit.’

Until Sunday, the perpetrator of the hoax remained at large, but speculations flew and largely settled on Bevis Hillier, who had spent 25 years amassing information and composing a biography on Betjeman, only to discover that Mr. Wilson was publishing one, too. Hillier finally confessed to authorship of the letter, conceding with the words “It’s a fair cop.”

For Hillier, then, the story obviously stretched back much further, to allow him to concoct such an elaborate imposture. It was not the discovery of Mr. Wilson’s feuding biography, however, but rather an unflattering review that Wilson published in The Spectator, condemning the second volume of Hillier’s biography as “a hopeless mishmash.” Hillier consequently dubbed Wilson “the playground bully of contemporary English literature,” thus, perhaps, unwittingly referencing the theme of delightfully child-like pranks to come. He was not actually pushed to creating the encoded insult until he read a favorable review of Wilson’s Betjeman: A Life in a national news paper.

Sophomoric? Perhaps. Hilarious? Without a doubt. Hillier’s inclusion in the letter of phrases like ‘Tinkerty-tonk,’ which only a Betjeman biographer could use, adds a degree of brilliance to the existing amusement that it supplies the ‘T’ in the final expletive. During Hillier’s brief but fervent period of denial, he said that the letter was “not the sort of lark I’d do,” but then added: “But it’s very Betjemanesque.”

Indeed. I am not without sympathy for Wilson, who finds himself in a rather sticky situation. On the other hand, I confess a bit of schadenfreude at the expense of literary biographers, always so eager to unveil scandal in their subjects, not to mention one who failed to do a little bit more research about his source once the letter came back to him marked ‘adressee unknown.’ At the very least, it’s a secret delight to see “the old, learned, respectable bald heads,” to quote Yeats’s “The Scholars,” walk in the ways of their Catullus—or Betjeman.

You can see a copy of the letter at Ultrabrown (with some other amusing acrostics); read a blog discussion at Kitabkhana.