Ten days after Kingsley Amis' Selected Letters is posthumously published, his son, Martin's autobiography will hit the shelves (shows how dumb I am, had no idea they were even related).

To have Kingsley's chronic hatred of phonies, philistines, "marshmallow-lefties", tight-fisted drinking companions, bullying officials, mouthy women, sod-the-public architects, pompous barmen, pretentious artists and people who say "tim peaches" when they mean "tinned peaches" – to have all his opinions raw, unconstrained by any shreds of tact, and his pungent stories about his peers unmediated by the filter of fiction, is a treat. To have the inside story on Martin Amis, the writer who has influenced more prose styles than any other in the last two decades, runs it a close second.  click for more 

Bookwire reports that a consortium of dotcoms including America Online Time Warner, Microsoft, Amazon.com, Yahoo and AT&T have joined resources to purchase the English language from the "cash-strapped British royal family, formal holders of the title to the Queen's English." (April Fool's story, duh :)  click for more 

January Magazine has a review of a new Peanuts collections, the first of its scale in nearly a decade. The strips were compiled by Patrick McDonnell, author of the Mutts comic strip.

Interwoven among all this are comments from Schulz himself and the book's editor. By my estimate, half the pages have some kind of commentary, which range from the very general (for instance, a comment on why there are no adults seen in the strip) to the specific (often, the inspiration for a particular strip). Schulz' comments are candid, often funny and sometimes surprisingly acidic. In light of the fact that he announced his retirement a few months after the book's release and died a few months later, some of his words are unintentionally sad.  click for more 

Feed Daily has an amusing bit on the Wordsworth Editions, venerable smut publishers for over a century, going digital.

Anais Nin and Anne Rice are in; Victorian raunch is out. Perhaps that's because old-school erotica spotlights the difference between what people are and what they pretend to be. It belies the prim morality for which the Victorian era is famous, and worse, belies the liberated chic for which we'd like to be famous today.  click for more 

Books Unlimited has an article on a study that examines how men and women react differently to books based on author's gender, covers, and (apparent) themes. Not a particularly flattering story if you're male, but fun regardless.  click for more 

Wired News has a review of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's new novel, The Light of Other Days. It's a novel about an invention (the WormCam) which allows people to view events taking place anywhere, at any time in history, and explores the social ramifications of this new toy. It looks like it could be Clarke's funniest and most light-hearted book to date.  click for more 

Andrei Codrescu's latest collection of essays has just hit the shelves. The Devil Never Sleeps begins with Codrescu's examination of the concept of "the rapture," and goes on to ferret out "the Devil's most modern and insidiously banal incarnations." For a preview, listen to the RealAudio commentary at his site (see link below).

While you're ordering your copy, don't forget to throw a couple extra dollars at a copy of The Blood Countess. This is the kind of gothic horror "Angelique Risotto" wishes she could write. Now where's that Messiah paperback?  click for more 

The divine, exclamation pointificating minds at Exquisite Corpse have published a new short story from the "elusive" Tom Robbins. And I do mean short, so instead of wandering into the kitchen to eat a cookie, give this a read.  click for more 

The Register reports that Mark Hogarth of London bought up over 100 domain names, including martinamis.com, ianmcewan.com, daveeggers.com and jeanettewinterson.com in an attempt to build a collection of novelist websites and pull in cash through Amazon affiliate sales.

Writing in The Times, [Winterson] said: "A writer is his or her own trademark. Our reputation is our name. If I cannot go on the Web, as myself, in my own right, with my own work, then how am I to trade?"

Winterson said she was preparing to take Hogarth to court to get back her "kidnapped" name.

update: Books Unlimited has another article on the same story.  click for more 

Salon (again) has an interview with Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and About a Boy. They discuss the recently-released film adaptation of Fidelity, his next novel, and some stuff on Americans vs. Londoners and how his novels translate to different countries.  click for more 

Salon has posted the second half of their articles on e-books. In the third article, Cassandra Complex, author Brigette Frase challenges her mentor Sven Birkert's assertation that digital media is destroying humanity's ability to read. "You go, girl."

In the last article, Salon's editor of books Laura Miller gets her hands on a Rocket e-Book for a couple of weeks. This is a good account of what these devices are like and whether they actually deserve to succeed in the marketplace or not (personally, I'm holding out for a trade paperback-sized PalmOS thing).  click for more 

Game.Ars has a bit on Tom Clancy's Red Storm Entertainment making a deal for some computer games based on novels by Anne McCafferey.

Red Storm is going to base a new game on McCaffrey's Freedom novels. The initial game will be titled Freedom: First Resistance -- an action-adventure played from the third-person perspective. You may know her better for her Pern novels. More details as they come.  click for more 

"Godfather of cyberpunk" William Gibson has penned an essay on the return of Steely Dan (who, you might recall, is named after a certain... device... from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch).

[Steely Dan] continues on, of course, in the atemporal reaches of electronic popular culture, and I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by the admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this?" Do the people who program these supermarket background tapes have any idea what this song is actually about?

Gibson also wrote an article/interview with U2 for Details back in 1994, worth looking up if you're a hard-core fan.  click for more 

Salon.com is in the middle of a four-part series of articles on e-books and the ramifications of King's Bullet. The first story, by Steven M. Zeitchik, paints a rather bleak picture of the event, suggesting that publishers like Simon & Schuster wil drag readers into a more prohibitive age of reading, where publishers have more control over how people read their books.

The second, somewhat more optimistic article, studies how e-book are more (and less) similar to traditional private publishing presses.  click for more 

Jonathan Lethem (obviously one of my favorites, as his name is all over this site) won the 1999 Best Fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle for his most outstanding novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Congratulations!  click for more 

Speaking of Eggers (below), BookBrowse has an excerpt from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This book — not exactly nonfiction, not exactly fiction — is a real treat.  click for more 

Had a chance to check out David Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius yet? (No? What's wrong with you?) Or are you a David Foster Wallace fan? Keith Gessen has written an essay for Feed that examines whether their works are "a literary dead end [or] a way out of the funhouse." OK, the article is a couple months old, but I'm just launching this site, give me a break.  click for more 

As a lifelong connoisseur of horror writing, I find that little appeals to me as much as the inexorable spiral into madness or evil as described by what at first seems a trustworthy narrator. Poe was the first master of the genre, and since then all kinds of fine writers have tackled it. Noir giant James M. Cain specialized in the good man temporarily driven bad by his love for a woman, and Jim Thompson took it a step further, with characters who slowly revealed (and creepily reveled in) their capacity for evil. Here though, I've chosen five writers using the first person to describe the anger, doubt and madness behind their women narrators.

I haven't read anything of O'Nan's, but the Salon "Book Bags" are always a treat. Check it out.  click for more 

Is Lo's Diary derivative, broadening, or simply bad? The Diary of Elizabeth Frankenstein was certainly the latter. And how about Wide Sargasso Sea, or even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? ForeWord has an interesting article on derivative novels.

The upsurge of publicity surrounding the release of Ahab’s Wife, published last year from a big house, is only the most visible example of a trend just now breaking the surface in independent fiction publishing: derivative characters. Increasingly, independent publishers of fiction have at least one title in their frontlist that borrows, sometimes most generously, from characters or themes first introduced by other writers.

 click for more 

E-books are certainly the topic du jour for book readers. The mighty John Katz has posted an interesting article on Slashdot regarding the mistakes book publishers are already making.

By e-distributing a Stephen King novella last week, the publishing industry lumbered in the footsteps of its dinosaur-cousin, the newspaper business, which has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on mostly useless and unprofitable Web sites. But it forgot to produce better or different papers, an enormous mistake, and publishers are making the same mistake. Why interactivity isn't about delivery, but attitude and content.

Good reading, here's the whole thing:  click for more