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.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is, in a sense, the biography of the author’s own grief. These memoirs carefully chronicle her experiences following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The husband and wife had returned from visiting their only child, Quintana, at the Intensive Care Unit of a New York Hospital, where she lay in a coma. As the author was preparing dinner, a sudden silence in the midst of their conversation drew her attention, and she looked up to see her husband slumped over the table. “Life changes in an instant,” Didion writes. John had suffered a massive heart attack, and her fellow writer, best friend, and husband of forty years, was gone.

The book is a catalogue of the following year: the things that conjure up memories, the pieces of news or half-made plans that highlight the absence of someone “to agree, disagree, talk back.” Didion was additionally coping with her daughter’s illness, who relapses after a brief period of better health. The author plunged herself into the task of learning everything about Quintana’s malady, but we can tell that this additional test only intensified, rather than served as a distraction for, the original loss. The absence of her husband, palpable at every second of the day, propelled her into a state of “magical thinking,” the inspiration for the title. “We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss,” she writes. “We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

But I call it the ‘biography of grief’ with acknowledgement of the “cool”-ness with which Didion surveys her experiences. One hospital worker unwittingly echoes the author’s self-analysis, saying, “She’s a pretty cool customer.” And her book is not sentimental; it does not offer the normal platitudes associated with death; it simply offers an unflinching, clear-eyed view of her daily life. She writes from the moment, neither allowing herself disassociation nor melodrama. The book’s discipline is at once comforting and heartbreaking, and the memoir is destined to become a go-to book for anyone coping with recent loss, when sympathy, and not disassociated advice, is truly what we need.

Read a review at the Chicago Sun Times; for an insightful and alternate view, visit 2 Things @ Once.

When the Harry Potter books were first published in the UK, clandestine editions with ‘grown-up’ graphic design on the covers were introduced as a contrast to their more colourful, youthful counterparts. The intention was to allow grown-up readers to take them on the train or read them in public places, without hazarding the potential embarrassment of having to explain why they were reading something with a cartoon-like illustration of a youth contemplating a train on its cover. Of course, by this time, not only are the very words ‘Harry Potter’ about as clandestine as an elephant in a wading pool, but if you take one of the brightly-coloured books on the train you’re far more likely to receive knowing grins from the other passengers than searching glances of scorn.

The newest trend in adult reading is ‘young adult’ reading, and everyone is quick to cite Harry Potter as one of the reasons. “I hate to bring everything back to Harry Potter, but those books really brought many more adults to YA [Young Adult] reading,” said Jan Orts, who runs Philadelphia’s Joseph Fox Book Shop. “The same thing happened when Tolkien published the Rings. Harry Potter has blurred the lines.”

Unbeknownst to either of these women, Lisa Santamaria, manager of a Barnes & Noble children’s department across the city, was drawing a similar comparison. She explained that the growing number of adults making forays into YA fiction are drawn by the satisfaction of a cleaner resolution than adult literature generally provides. “Children’s books have a more upbeat ending, and a lot of people are looking for that,” she noted. “They want something a little more entertaining or fluffy, so they come to the kids’ section, only to find out that these books are not necessarily fluffy at all. Like Harry Potter - it makes you think.”

Because the trend doesn’t neccessarily have so much to do with a shift in the desires of adult readers as it does with an increasing gravity in Young Adult fiction. Not only do fantasy books such as the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials series tackle some weighty issues, but fiction about real-life teen concerns has seen a shift towards heavier topics and “racier material,” according to Cynthia J. Pasquale of The Denver Post.

Suzi Fischer, who buys books for the Denver bookstore Bookies, has noticed an increase in YA fiction dealing with “sticky subjects like sex, abuse, gay relationships and drugs.” Books such as It Happened to Nancy by Beatrice Sparks, in which the 14-year-old girl of the title is date-raped and contracts HIV, or Kevin Brooks’ Candy, in which a young boy is smitten by the seemingly-innocent Candy, and tries to rescue her from her life of heroin addiction and prostitution, are examples.

Teenagers grow up much faster with constant exposure to television and the media, and are ready to profit by considering these issues. Books published several decades ago that were once considered scandalous, such as I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donovon, dealing with homosexuality, and Forever, by Judy Blume, a non-graphic account of the life of a sexually active teen, have paved the way for the newest set of candid novels.

Part of the reason, too, why such a cross-over market exists, is that the category ‘Young Adult’ is a fairly new one, and a tenuosly defined when previous classifications such as sexual content do not neccessarily make a novel ‘adult.’ Orts of Joseph Fox Book Shop explained: “Having worked at the bookstore for 15 years, we’ve always felt torn about even the category of YA. There never used to be a category.” Even within the publishing industry, companies vary on their own opinions of what separates YA fiction from children’s literature. Little, Brown defines it as books appropriate for age 12 and up, whilst Bloomsbury puts the classification at age 14 and up.

And cross-marketing continues. Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-time, has been published in the UK in an adult and a children’s edition, with only their covers displaying any difference between them. But even so, with more and more adults reading YA books, embarassment is becoming a thing of the past. “I feel entirely free to recommend YA books to our adult customers,” Orts said. Santamaria once again echoed her, opining that there is “not a stigma among people my age. I have no problem shopping in the kids’ section because there’s a lot of good books there.”

When New Yorker and illustrator Ernie Colón originally tried to read the 568-page 9/11 Report, he was forced to quit after about fifty pages. The Report, nominated for the National Book Award and widely praised for its unflinching criticism of the government’s failures, was nevertheless difficult to comprehend. “For a government report, it was well written–but still hard to follow,” Colón said, citing “a lot of things going on at the same time in different places.”

And so, a year later, when Colón read that a miniseries based on the 9/11 Report was under consideration, he contemplated making a graphic adaptation of the report’s findings. The 75-year-old illustrator, who has worked for Harvey, Marvel and DC Comics, decided to run the idea by his longtime friend and colleague, Sid Jacobson, who served as managing editor and editor-in-chief at Harvey Comics, and executive editor at Marvel Comics. Jacobson’s reaction was, in comic book terms, “Holy @#$%! What a great idea!”

Jacobson’s experience in reading the report was similar, and his difficulty led to further inspiration. “I had trouble following what was happening on the four (hijacked) flights,” he explained, “and it hit me: Wow! You could show this as a timeline. You could really, really explain it.” Adds Colón: “We’re in the business of clarification.”

The result is a timeline that spans the first 18 pages of the book, utilising a fold-out in the hardcover edition. Not only does it elucidate the events of September 11th, but, like the 9/11 Report, it focuses on the events leading up to it and the failure of governmental agencies to heed the warning signs. Jacobson, working as the author to Colón’s illustrations, took text almost exclusively from the commission’s report. Unlike the recent movies United 93 and World Trade Center, “it’s not a dramatization. It’s the story of an investigation,” Jacobson insists. “It’s graphic journalism.”

But many worry about whether or not the ‘graphic novel’–if not ‘comic book’–genre can support a topic as weighty as the 9/11 catastrophe. Tim Sumner, whose brother-in-law died in the World Trade Center, supports a new wave of “historical reference,” but has his doubts about the graphic adaptation. “While having not read the book,” he said, “it sounds pretty cheap.”

With concern for its appropriateness, no matter how much he supported the concept, publisher Thomas LeBien sent the book to the former officials of the 9/11 commision. The chair of the commission, New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean, admitted that he was “very concerned” when he first heard about the project. “But when I looked at it, it was absolutely accurate.” He and vice chairman Lee H. Hamilton even agreed to write a foreward for the graphic.

And both Colón and Jacobson exercised extreme consideration over what they chose to depict. Some of the images envision the violence aboard the planes, but when the text that reads “as time grew short and desperate, civilians leaped from North Tower upper floors” is left unillustrated. “It would have personally offended me to draw that. I just couldn’t,” Colón stated. “We knew this was not just politically charged but emotionally charged. We didn’t want to do anything that would offend anyone who lost someone.”

But the stigma of comic books may remain, however considerate the renderings, however factual the prose. The authors deeply pondered the effect of employing classic comic book onomatopoeias such as “Blam!” for explosions and “R-RUMBLE” for the collapse of the South Tower, and ultimately decided to use them. “Our feeling was that it would look like a silent movie without it,” Jacobson explained. “You have captions, you have balloons with text, you have sound effects,” Colón added. “Doing without any of that would make it not readable.”

Readability is the aim of The 9/11 Report: The Graphic Adaptation, and it seems an admirable goal. From the advent of widespread printing to our contemporary relationship with television, film, and the internet, we are increasingly evolving into a society of visual learners. There’s nothing wrong with a proclivity towards the visual, as long as the facts are not simplified or obscured. Kirkus’s early review notes especially that the book does not fall prey to this trap, calling it “thoughtful — and by no means dumbed-down.”

And an education of a large portion of the population that the original report could not reach speaks for the potential for the book’s positive impact. The book arrives in time to mark the 5th anniversary of the original attacks, and now is the time for everyone to learn the truth about the government’s handling of the situation, not the time to bicker over the medium in which it is reported. “There are going to be a whole bunch of kids, teenagers and adults that will not read the report,” Colón summed up, pointing to his new book as an alternative. “The educational system at large has resisted them, I think, because of the term ‘comic book.’ I like to think of them as something that has more purpose.”

Read articles at USAToday and The WashingtonPost; visit a blog discussion at Cake or Death.

The release of This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Merrick, has stirred up a great brouhaha in the writing and publishing industries. The ruckus is not entirely illogical, as Merrick recieved inspiration through her dismay with the state of the writing and publishing industries. The book, she explains, is the fruit of “years of being appalled, as a young writer, at how little promotion serious women writers get:”

You need review space, and review space is still very biased toward men and bylines at our literary publications. Look at Harper’s or The New Yorker. It’s a very good week if there are 25 percent or 30 percent female bylines.

As that was happening, serious books by women were edged further off the front display tables by these knockoffs of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and then it just got harder and harder to find literary works by women. I wanted to make a way for the audience of readers who want more literary work to be able to find it. And so that’s how this anthology was born.

The anthology, which contains stories by writers such as Aimee Bender, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gorden, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Francine Prose and Curtis Sittenfeld, is anything but anti-feminist, contrary the conclusions some might draw from the title. Instead, its aim is to focus on the issues that preoccupy those women who are trying to make serious contributions to the face of literature, whether they are “female” issues, “feminist” issues, or neither. Merrick advocates the ability for women to write about the female psyche without limiting it to the topics of finding Mr. Right and the right handbag to go with him.

“We don’t have just one story, we have many stories, and they’re not getting heard,” Merrick laments. “It’s essential that they be heard, because if we don’t hear them and we just hear that it’s all about marriage and designer shoes, then that diminishes us. It diminishes our imagination.” She’s tired of men cornering the market on ‘genius’ books, a problem she encountered when trying to find a publisher for her novel Girly, an epic exploring female sexuality and spirituality through seven different voices. She finally had to publish the book herself.

But there are a number of disagreements that have sprung up around the book’s publication. The first is, naturally, from authors and proponents of the chick lit genre itself, who feel that the anthology is persecuting one half of the female authorship body, creating factions precisely when it should be rallying the troops. Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, fumed, “We’ve got the country’s (self-proclaimed) best women writers turning up their noses at their fellow women authors’ more commercial efforts. The best chick-lit books deal with race and class, gender wars and workplace dynamics, not just shoes and shopping.”

And one could certainly argue that the publishing industry is kept alive through commercial best-sellers that entertain readers even if they don’t innovate literature. In retaliation, Lauren Baratz-Logsted is publishing an anthology titled This is Chick Lit. “The reason chick lit sells in such great abundance is that it provides readers with a reliable form of entertainment,” she said. “Is there something wrong with this?”

But from Merrick’s point of view, chick lit is taking up publishing resources and bookstore space that might otherwise be available to serious female writers. And it seems to me that a continued proliferation of chick lit, sometimes without regard to quality, combined with a male domination in the genre of serious literature, can intimidate aspiring female writers, conciously or unconsciously. In his article, Jeff Simon points out that “only a few of the stories in her declaration of commercial independence are formally challenging. Is that because she - the anthologist - is out of sympathy with that kind of story, or the best current female writers are?”

Merrick reveals that the bias is not her own: she is desperate to discover female authors tackling issues and style in controversial ways. “I would argue that those books are being written - and very possibly not published,” she states. “We all know what we do with the difficult Boy Books. These books win our awards. These are the books that generations of men are trying to (emulate) with their next generation of Boy Books. I think there are women writing these books but it’s happening as there is increasing pressue on women to write in a more realist mode.”

Visit a discussion of This is Not Chick Lit on Conversational Reading.