"The eager grasping for experience that marked her twenties here gives way to fears about her place in the canon and the worry that her period of most gem-like burning is at an end. At the ripe age of thirty-two, she wonders, 'Have I done all the living I’m going to do?' This most authoritative of writers worries over her tendency to defer to the authority of others, and her habit of masking her aggression and competitiveness. (Either she was a very bad actor, or she was more competitive and aggressive than one can possibly imagine.) It seems that Sontag is the only person who did not buy into the myth that she was 'serious'; the notebooks are full of reminders to smile less, to be more serious."

"For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?"

"... reading and thinking about the generations of women who had to suffer this kind of knee-jerk condescension from men, you begin to wonder how it was that any woman managed not to put her head in an oven before approximately 1968. Plath’s classmate in Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar, Anne Sexton, did eventually kill herself, too, but Plath’s sometime rival Adrienne Rich did not. Many millions did not. Why not? The situation was intolerable. How could anyone tolerate it?"

"It is what the internet lures out of us -- hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions -- that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV's power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, while the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude."

"Ha, it's always awful. There is a restaurant in Petersburg called 1913. I ask, why 1913? 'The only good year in Russian history.' (Both laugh)"

@o_crunk: "Writer Races to Victory From Way Off the Pace (I think Jaimy Gorden is a bit weird in a refreshing way)."

One writer: "Despite this, I got a shockingly enthusiastic response. It included an incisive commentary and suggested changes for a next draft -- a draft that, incredibly, this dude was willing to read whenever it came along. A few meetings over beers, three revisions and nine months later, I had a novel that clocked in at a sleek 290 pages but retained the language, weirdness and tone that imbued the original draft with whatever shadow of promise my agent saw in it. And we had come to a point where we could begin to shop it around. I doubt I could’ve honed the book as mercilessly as I did without my agent’s input."

"Though Gordon didn’t expand on 'hope' (indeed, 'expansiveness' was not a word to be applied to any of the writers given medals for new work), the sentiment was clear: Gordon’s was a classic underdog tale, about a little-known writer with a little-seen book who overcame long odds to capture the prize and, at least for one night, revel in the glory (or swoon out of disbelief)."

"Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction tonight. It’s the second time this year that a high-profile fiction award has gone to a previously very-low-profile novel."

"As I read 'Lord of Misrule,' I was mesmerized by prose like this and intrigued by the accuracy with which the author captured the idiom of the racetrack, the dynamics of backstretch society and the nature of the animals - both their physiology and their personality. How did a university professor know so much about this obscure subculture?"

"Before I do that, though, my idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information. Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit. Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones. In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone. We compete on context. I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content."

Anis Shivani compares creative writing programs to the medieval guild system. "The system is profoundly undemocratic when it comes to the quality of the product it engenders, and its relentless crushing of any incipient freelance competition. There is an undeclared boycott in place with the famous residencies, conferences, and awards, and non-guild members need not apply ..."

"For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete."

"I'm curious to see how this experiment pans out. I hope that this is a new niche for us writers. By pure coincidence, Amazon has just launched a new kind of product called 'Kindle Singles' that is exactly what I and other writers have been thinking about recently. I don't know how the experiment will evolve in the future, but there's one thing I do know: I for one won't be doing it alone. Books are still a communal effort, from creation to sharing."

A follow-up post from Craig Fehrman on his Boston Globe story. "... first I want to tell the full story behind Melville’s library. I didn’t have the space to do this in the Globe, but its fate is fascinating and complicated and even affecting. What’s true of Melville’s books is true of each author mentioned in my story, plus a whole lot more besides." Via: http://thesecondpass.com/?p=6602

"What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values."

"Feelings of wounded self-regard (on both sides) soon knew no bounds, and daily life at Yasnaya Polyana was approached with a mixture of attraction and repulsion that often excited thoughts of murder or suicide. Both Sonya and Tolstoy became obsessed to the point of dementia with the conviction that, at the hands of the other, each had been cheated of a destiny that would signify. Neither could have understood in advance of the marriage the depth of emotional ambition that motivated them, much less that it was precisely because that ambition was destined to be thwarted that each would be bound permanently, one to the other. It was the stuff upon which Sigmund Freud was to build an intellectual empire."

"Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus."

”Monotonous. Tedious. Repetitious. One note, all the way through. Theme inordinately stale + old hat. Alas, Willie.”

"I don't know what 'chick lit' is anymore, except books that are understood to be aimed at women, written by women, and not important. And I can't get behind that."

"The stream destroys what is most precious about a literate population: the ability to briefly stand alone outside time and social relations, to have an inner life."

"What is important is that these print version be quality — good covers, excellent paper, binding that doesn’t fall apart. Handmade, one-of-a-kind, original, limited edition, personal. The shift to digital reading is taking place rapidly, and there will be a point in the not-too-distant future where we stop thinking either/or and embrace either/and."

"The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves."

"You get my point: e-books as ancillary products for a newsmedia are something worth considering. Not now, but within a couple of years as the worldwide installed base of reading devices reaches tens of millions. At this point, at any media company version 2.0, e-books will be part of the standard toolkit."

"Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations."

"If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement." Hits all the major points.

"Flying back to New York from Texas, it dawned on me that devotees of SXSWi never hated publishing or wanted us to roll over and die: They just wanted us to repurpose."

How the physical and digital will coexist. "Goodbye, disposable books. Hello, new canvases."

"Yet we can't accuse his attenuated figures of being entirely unlifelike. They are like more and more people we know. In our lifetime we are witnessing the dematerialization of the human personality, as people withdraw their attention from their bodies and surroundings and give it over to cyberspace."

"I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online."

"Before we had Twitter, before the Internet, and before much of anything beyond the telephone I waited at a newsstand for the arrival of Esquire one February day in 1974. The magazine appeared on time as promised with the article everyone in the Bluegrass couldn’t wait to read. Its title: “How Kentucky Lures the Super Rich.” After a brief, quick reading I was on a pay phone dictating a story about the article to the newsroom in time to make the afternoon deadline."

"Disenchantment sets in, there's some ugliness and then it's pretty much over. But that rapture you can't forget, and the disillusionment, and so there has to be the long goodbye letter, which, because this is Jim Squires, turns into a book. You could call it a swan song, or you could call it a 250-page flip of the middle finger to his one-time love."

'Do you know what her children call her?" a mutual friend asked me when I said I was going to see AS Byatt. "You'll never guess. Not in a million years." "Antonia? Mum?" "No," he said, laughing. "They call her 'AS Byatt'."

See Johnson WSJ article. Related.

"There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?" I both fear Johnson's conclusions and suspect he is right.

"Wouldn’t it be nice to have an open web-based book database/search engine that would catalog all books and point to everywhere selling them online? That would link to reviews and resources etc? That could plug into libraries' catalogs as well?" Once users get a taste of what can done with data, they always want more.

"The Kindle 2 ... tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence."

Frustration at the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel at SXSW: "I’m so sorry, but it must be said. The future of publishing is already happening. People are doing it and they’re doing it really well."

More on the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel flop: "The publishers on the panel simply had nothing to say. There was literally nothing for the audience to listen to."

How DRM Drives Readers Mad.

D.T. Max's exhaustive early review of DFW's life and work.

Online reference shelf from O'Reilly.

"Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else."

In Union Square.

"The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world."

Depression, 20 years. Heartbreaking.

"Where to go after Infinite Jest?" Where to go after DFW?

"David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it."

A fair appraisal of DFW and his work from Kakutani

Makes me want to try some Juusto ...

Lost works restored to print

Congratulations to TD Thornton on winning the Castleton Lyons-TT award

Lulu alternative

“Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book"

Blog of writer Ed Park (Personal Days)