Giving or Taking?
Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Bill Clinton: Always TAKING while he's GIVING. From PublishersLunch:

Former President Bill Clinton's book about citizen activism and public service, GIVING: How Each of Us Can Change the World, has a pub date--Knopf announced a laydown of September 4, with an announced first printing of 750,000 copies. Though the publisher was vague on promotional details when they signed the book last May, with his wife Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign well underway, it now turns out that "Clinton has committed to a national author tour at the time of publication." Spokesman Paul Bogaards expects to have details "in the weeks to come on where he'll be going, what appearances he'll be making, and what national media he'll be doing."

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One Dollar Buys How Many Words in WHERE GOD WAS BORN?
Monday, June 18, 2007

5,443. What a bargain!

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Shoeless in New York
Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Years ago I wrote a chapter in DREAMING OUT LOUD about the messaging that country music stars send with their photos. Rule #1: If you're a woman, and you're selling sex, go barefoot.


[Tina Brown in New York Magazine.]

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Posted by B Feiler at 11:41 PM 0 comments

Twin Lit!
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The Feilerettes have always been very verbal, and have always loved books. Even before they knew the alphabet, they would sit on the ground and thumb through books, being very careful to turn every page. For some months now, when they arrive at the last page, they declare, "The end!"

Having recently turned two, one of our daughters has started thumbing through grown-up books. Ones without pictures. She was turning the pages on a book about New York real estate when she handed over the book to me today and announced, "Bruce Feiler." Bruce Feiler, it seems, is the author of any grown-up book.

Looks like it's time for her to meet the Mulgrays!

Like many identical twins, Helen and Morna Mulgray have always done everything together.

They have always shared the same bedroom, worn identical clothes and enjoyed the same books and television programmes. For three decades they had the same job -- though in different schools -- before retiring the same year.

But at the age of 68, the Mulgray twins, who have never been apart for longer than two weeks, created a minor piece of history yesterday when their first novel went on sale in bookshops across Britain.

No Suspicious Circumstances, a crime novel set in Edinburgh and featuring an intrepid female investigator from HM Revenue & Customs, is believed to be the first novel published in English by identical twins. The authors, from Joppa, outside Edinburgh, are described on the cover simply as "The Mulgray Twins."

Started more than 14 years ago, it is the result of thousands of hours of painstaking writing and rewriting. Each of its 86,000 words was a joint endeavour.

"We have both spent 31 years as English teachers so have always loved writing," said Morna yesterday. Helen added: "We used to do it in the holidays, but back then it was just a hobby. When we retired we had the time to do it seriously."

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The Netflix of Books
Monday, May 21, 2007

Apparently a number of people are trying this concept, but this is the first one I've heard of.

BookSwim aims to be the "Netflix of books." Since 1998, Netflix has become the king of online DVD services by renting batches of DVDs via the mail for a fixed monthly fee, and letting subscribers keep the movies as long as they like.

That's how BookSwim is meant to work. For $15 to $20 per month, the company will send your top five book choices. Return three books in a prepaid envelope, and your next three choices will be mailed to you.

For now, the founders are the only employees and will handle the mailing themselves. Assuming demand develops, they plan to hire part-time helpers.

Orders can be placed at BookSwim.com, along with customers' book ratings and comments. Burke and Siddiqui had an inventory of about 80,000 books when they launched the site's introductory phase in March.

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No Editing at the New York Times?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The NYT ran a long, long piece this weekend (now on top of the most e-mailed list) that basically makes a simple, timeless point: Nobody in the book business knows why some books sell and others don't.

“It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”

The hunt for the key has been much more extensive in other industries, which have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.

All true, all true. Fine. Even if the NYT and others have printing the same article since Guttenberg. But my favorite part of the article was this note attached to the end:
Editors’ note: The editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article.
So, did anyone edit the article?

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Free Authors!
Monday, May 7, 2007

I received this email from the AuthorsGuild. Interesting and important.

When collectors donate manuscripts, letters, and diaries of an author to libraries or universities, they are entitled to deduct the fair market value of those literary papers from their income for tax purposes. When authors donate their manuscripts and other papers to libraries or universities, they're permitted to deduct only the cost of the physical materials used to produce those documents (the cost of paper, ink, toner).

The difference, of course, is immense, and immensely inequitable to authors who choose to donate their papers for scholarly research.

We now have a good chance to right this wrong, and we'd like your help.

BACKGROUND

For seven years, the Authors Guild has supported proposed changes to the tax code that would allow authors and artists to deduct for tax purposes the appraised market value of their own work (such as manuscripts, first editions, or research notes) that they donate to museums, universities, and libraries. Current tax laws permit the creators to deduct only the value of the materials used in creating the work, such as the expense of the paper and ink in the case of an original manuscript. Collectors and others, however, are permitted to deduct the fair market value of donated manuscripts.

The "Artist-Museum Partnership Act" was recently reintroduced in the House and Senate to correct this inequity. In the Senate, the bill was introduced as S. 548, by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT). In the House, H.R. 1524 was introduced by Representatives John Lewis (D-GA), Jim Ramstad (R-MN), and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX).

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"Michael Chabon Makes Me Sad"
Thursday, May 3, 2007

A reader writes:

Hearing all this talk of the new Chabon release makes me sad… A year ago, I would have been thrilled and probably obtained an advanced reading copy. He’s been my “favorite” author since I first read his debut novel THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH back in the early 90s.

But I can no longer support the work of an author who has no regard for the story and characters that put him on the literary map.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a film version of MOP coming out later this year… Written and directed by the guy who brought us DODGEBALL, in which he’s CHANGED 85% of Chabon’s original story.

And the sad part is… Michael Chabon himself APPROVED of the script! WHY would he do this? I can only think of one possible answer: $$

If you are a Chabon fan, esp MOP, I suggest you do NOT see this movie. You will be sadly disappointed at the COMPLETE removal of the gay character, Arthur Lecomte, and the fabrication of a romantic love triangle between Art Bechstein, Jane Bellwether, and a bi-sexual Cleveland Arning. And really, what is MOP without the presence of Phlox Lombardi? Alas, she’s barely in it.

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Michael Chabon: Bad for Michael Chabon?
Monday, April 30, 2007

Writing is rewriting. The old adage takes on new meaning with Michael Chabon's new book. The WSJ reports on the near-death catastrophe of Chabon's first book since his Pulitzer.

"I shudder now when I think that I would have published the old draft," says Mr. Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." Instead, after consultations with his editor, he spent about eight months reworking the entire book -- a murder mystery set in a fictional Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland in Alaska. He added a flashback structure and pared down the language into a hard-boiled, Yiddish-inflected patois. "I felt like I had to invent a whole new dialect of English to finish it," he says.

Next week, after five years, four drafts, two trips to Alaska and a title change, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," will arrive in stores. While long gestation periods and multiple drafts aren't unusual in the publishing industry, the time and effort expended on behalf of Mr. Chabon's vision are illustrations of the book's importance to HarperCollins, which won it in a four-way, seven-figure auction in 2002, when it was little more than a one-and-a-half-page proposal. Now the company has again bet big, printing 200,000 copies of the finished product, Mr. Chabon's first full-length adult novel since winning the Pulitzer in 2001. "The stakes are high," says Jonathan Burnham, HarperCollins's publisher, "for Michael and all of us."

Everything about this story makes me happy, especially that Michael (whom I met briefly and had dinner with more than a decade ago but have had no contact with since) is willing to discuss this process openly. It makes me admire him even more, and I deeply admire Kavalier & Klay (even with the overwrought last third). I hope writing teachers teach this article in their schools and I hope the many writers out there who contact me will listen to the honesty in this piece. Old adages aside, one adage I preach a lot is that a writer has to learn to be a good reader of his own material. Maybe this self-honesty (even his point about being defensive at first) is why Michael Chabon is a great writer.

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How Many Diana Books Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb?
Friday, April 27, 2007

Apparently 180 is not enough! That's how many have been published up until now. But time to free up your summer: FOURTEEN more Diana books are coming this year, the tenth anniversary of her death, reports the WSJ:

Publishers -- whose only sure-fire hit this summer is the final Harry Potter novel -- are betting that readers will be as captivated as ever by the familiar arc of the princess's life, even though once-hearty sales of books about her have been flagging.

At least 14 new Diana titles are set for publication this year, but no one has more at stake in rekindling that interest than Tina Brown, the former high-profile editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair who banked a "healthy seven-figure advance" from Bertelsmann AG's Doubleday imprint for "The Diana Chronicles," according to the publisher.

Doubleday is printing 200,000 copies that will reach stores on June 12. The comprehensive biography promises new insights regarding Diana's pursuit of Prince Charles, her sad early years and how she used the media to her own ends. Beyond juicy details, Ms. Brown says she set out to write a book that examined the princess in a media and social context while discussing the impact of celebrity culture: "Why Diana was important, why she continues to fascinate, and what we should make of her 10 years after her death."

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God and Godless on C-SPAN

Some interesting discussions this weekend on C-SPAN-2's BookTV.

Saturday:
Live 2pm ET/11am PT
Panel Discussion on Religion: The Politics of Faith
  • Reza Aslan, "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam"
  • Chris Hedges, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America"
  • Jack Miles, "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God & God: A Biography"
  • Moderator: Jonathan Kirsch

    • Sunday:
    At 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT, a panel on the mixing of religion and culture featuring: Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"), Zachary Karabell ("Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence"), and Jonathan Kirsch ("A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization"). The panel is moderated by Thane Rosenbaum.

    Also on Sunday at 11:00 AM, a conversation with David Halberstam.

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    The Pope Admits He's Human
    Sunday, April 15, 2007

    Speaking of birthdays, Pope Benedict turns 80 on Monday. His new book, Jesus of Nazareth, was released on Friday, and in an extraordinary announcement, he has pointed out that it was begun before he was pope and expresses his personal views, not church doctrine. "Everyone is free, then, to contradict me," he says.

    Love this. Nothing like an author inviting reviewers to disagree with him and pointing out that he's only human.

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    Posted by B Feiler at 10:01 PM 0 comments

    "Rangers Lead the Way ..."
    Thursday, April 5, 2007

    In correcting blog posts. The other day I posted to a review by Jacob Weisberg of the latest book President Bush was reading. In it he mentions some mistakes that the author made about the Rangers creed. Well, it turns out Jacob was a bit mistaken, too. Here's what a reader of Feiler Faster wrote:

    "RANGERS LEAD THE WAY"
    Is the ranger motto.
    BUT, The Ranger creed states;

    ....."I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands
    of the enemy".......

    paragraph 5

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    Posted by B Feiler at 8:06 AM 0 comments

    Will Kevin Federline Get Britney's Book Royalities?
    Tuesday, April 3, 2007

    That is, if Britney ever wrote a book. Apparently not, as she had an air-tight prenup, reports say, giving him only $1 million from their marriage.

    But Mrs. Walter Mosley gets plenty: 25% of books published even after they were divorced!

    Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress, is being sued by his ex-wife for money she says he agreed to pay out of income from several of his books.

    Joy Kellman says in court papers that Mosley owes her at least $500,000, plus interest, from earnings on 11 books as provided by their divorce agreement. Some of the books were published after their divorce.

    The two were married from Sept. 5, 1987, until June 19, 2001, and had no children.

    Mosley, whose Devil in a Blue Dress was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington in 1995, is author of a crime series featuring private detective Easy Rawlins and sidekick Mouse. These and a few other books are the subject of Kellman's lawsuit.

    Mosley's attorney, Kenneth Burrows, said he had no comment on the lawsuit.

    Kellman's court papers, filed Wednesday in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, say Mosley failed to pay her 25% share of income from new editions or movie and TV versions of the books and from new formats such as audio books.

    Mosley also did not provide tax returns, royalty statements and other documentation about his income from 2001 through 2004, as required in the divorce agreement, until 2006, her court papers say, and much of the required information is still missing.

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    The New Great Excuse for Why You Didn't Read Your Friend's Book (Or Mine)
    Thursday, March 29, 2007

    You're saving the environment. Our books are carbon negative. But not Harry's.

    The printing for the final Harry Potter book will not only be the biggest, but also the greenest.

    Scholastic Inc. announced Tuesday that it had agreed with the Rainforest Alliance, a conservation organization that works with the business community, on tightened environmental standards for ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' coming out July 21 with a first printing of 12 million.

    J.K. Rowling's seventh Potter book will be a hulking 784 pages, Scholastic said, a comparable length to the last couple of Potter releases.

    Among the details of Tuesday's agreement:

    --The paper used will contain ''a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer waste (pcw) fiber.''

    --Nearly two-thirds of the 16,700 tons of paper will be approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international organization with a mission to ''promote environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world's forests.''

    --A ''deluxe'' edition of the new book, which has a first printing of 100,000, will be printed on paper that contains ''100 percent post-consumer waste fiber.''

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    Posted by B Feiler at 9:20 AM 0 comments

    "Cow Born With Two Heads in June"
    Wednesday, March 14, 2007

    Last week I posted about the new trend in libraries and the website LibraryThing. Within hours, I got this very friendly and informative letter from its founder (with a stellar Mesopotamian reference). Rather than leave it in the comments section, I thought I'd share it with everyone. If this is an indication of their customer service (or just their monitoring of blog commentary about them), they are on the ball!

    Hey there. This is the LibraryThing founder. Thanks for noticing us.

    Two quick points:

    We didn't time the announcement to go with the Shelfari thing, I promise. More and more I'm seeing people connect what happens with LibraryThing to other events—quite wrongly. Perhaps you'll appreciate the comparison, but it reminds me of Mesopotamian divination texts: cow born with two heads in June [horizonal line] famine in November. Bingo, a pattern!

    I'm glad you found your page. I'm sure you saw that all of your books also have a page, with ratings, reviews, etc. Did you see that LibraryThing has a special "LibraryThing Authors" section? Catalog 50 books, so your readers can get an idea of what's on your shelf, and LibraryThing promotes you in various fun (but not necessarily valuable) ways. Check it out. We'd love to have you.

    http://www.librarything.com/librarything_author.php

    Best,
    Tim

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    Library 2.0
    Friday, March 9, 2007

    The next big war in the book business is to see who can get you to put more of your book collection on the web. With the number of book buyers evidently declining rapidly (BN announced this week their 2007 earnings would be 30% less than previously reported, sending the stock down by 10%), booksellers are scrambling to get those of us who do buy books to do their selling for them. I know I'm not making this sound appealing, but there are hundreds of thousands who are doing it. I admit that I love the recommendations on Amazon for what others who bought this book also purchased -- it's a great way to tap into a social network of people who share a common interest. The new thing is to do this by uploading your own personal card catalog.


    First, the NYT on LibraryThing :

    Social networks that tap the interests and buying power of traditionally reserved groups like the bookish are a small but growing force on the Web. Ms. Havemann, for example, is among the 150,000 or so members of LibraryThing (www.LibraryThing.com), a site that lets people create detailed online book catalogs, learn about the collections of other members, discover shared favorites and swap recommendations.

    Creating a catalog on the Web site is easy. Enter the title of one of your books, and the search engine supplies the rest of the details, like the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, and a thumbnail image of the cover. Click again, and list the next item.

    You can view or print your catalog instantly, sorted by author, for example, or by more personal tags like “books that mention Venice,” “books that touch on digital photography” or “books I’ve loaned out.” Collections can also be displayed by book covers.

    Now, GalleyCat on the war between AbeBooks, an online used bookseller, and Amazon. This post was triggered by AbeBooks announcing a new Web 2.0 book recommendation system, "Book Hints":
    As for the feature itself, well, a sample showing reveals that it's basically the same thing as Amazon.com's "customers who bought this item also bought..." recommendations, only with book jackets! And based on the data from LibraryThing members rather than actual sales data, of course. The most salient aspect of this rollout, perhaps, is the way it attempts to steal the thunder from last week's announcement of Amazon's investment in Shelfari, one of the main competitors to LibraryThing (in which AbeBooks has a 40 percent stake), by getting AbeBook's version of the bells and whistles out first.
    Update: Wow. After writing this, I was doing an unrelated search and discovered that an entire page of Library Thing is devoted to people who have my books. Fascinating!

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    Posted by B Feiler at 7:06 AM 0 comments

    Death of the American Newspaper I: The Book Section
    Thursday, March 8, 2007

    More evidence (as if we needed any) of the severe challenges facing the newspaper industry. The great Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the WSJ reports: Publishers are no longer buying ads in book sections, which means fewer and fewer authors will the get the oxygen of exposure in daily newspapers. Coming on the heels of an AP announcement that it's no longer sending out a package of book reviews, this news is devastating -- especially for fiction. You simply cannot buy a book if you've never heard of it.

    Sometime this spring, the Los Angeles Times is expected to announce that it is folding its highly esteemed Sunday book review into a new section that will combine books with opinion pieces. That would reduce to five the number of separate book-review sections in major metropolitan newspapers still published nationwide, down from an estimated 10 to 12 a decade ago. The reason: not enough ads.

    Book publishers in recent years have moved away from buying ads in standalone book-review sections in favor of paying to stack mounds of books in the front of chain bookstores. Some small literary publications, such as the New York Review of Books, are showing growth, but the book review as a separate section is endangered not only at the Los Angeles Times but at other major newspapers like the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and San Diego Union-Tribune.

    The New York Times Book Review is an exception. "In 2006, our [ad] revenue from books was up almost 10%," says Todd Haskell, vice president, business development, for the Times. (The figure refers to the book-review section plus the paper as a whole.)

    "Our book review is a vibrant part of the Sunday newspaper and will continue to be," says Mr. Haskell. "We aren't backing off an inch."

    In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores -- the average 25,000-square-foot store in the Barnes & Noble Inc. chain now stocks between 125,000 and 150,000 titles -- the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.

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    Don't Want to Read "The Lost Tomb"?
    Thursday, March 1, 2007

    But want to read something else on religion? Amazon has posted my list of Top Ten Books on Religion. Here are the top three:

    3. Constantine's Sword by James Carroll

    Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History: A rare and beautiful book by a towering, humane writer. Novelist and critic James Carroll explores the 2,000-year history of the Church's battle against Judaism and writes of his own struggles with Catholicism. This may be the best book ever written about one of the central tragedies in Western civilization.

    2. The Bible As it Was by James Kugel

    The Bible As It Was (Belknap): Clear, simple, and profound. A wonderful companion to the Bible, written by Harvard scholar James Kugel, that shows how ancient interpreters took the central stories of the text--from Creation to the Exodus--and introduced the commentaries that allowed it to survive.

    1. The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks

    Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations: At a time when the world braces for religious war, Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, has written the definitive book on finding common ground through faith. Penetrating, learned, and highly readable, "The Dignity of Difference" belongs on the bookshelf of any thinking believer and could help those struggling to find ways to reach out to others of different religious backgrounds.

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    Your Life Would Make a Great Movie
    Monday, February 26, 2007


    Final results are not in yet (my sister wasn't watching live...) but I seem to have come out on top, along with several others in our annual, high-stakes Oscar pool. We heavily weighted Best Picture, and you had to nail that to win.

    With that in mind, I thought I would link to this story I saw a few weeks back that has special echo. Maybe it's because I've been spending a lot of time talking with folks in the entertainment business about turning some of my books into film or television projects, but this story struck me as hilarious. My first experience came in 1991, the month that LEARNING TO BOW was published, about the year I spent teaching English in Japan. Japan, you must recall, was hot at the time, as was DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D., and the person they wanted to play me was Neil Patrick Harris. Sixteen years later he's turned into quite the star, but at the time he seemed like half my age. As to what happened, this reporter's story rings very true:

    I recall with embarrassment the first call of this sort I received, not long after that novel came out in '71. It came from a person who represented an outfit I'd never heard of, but he was in Los Angeles, or said he was, anyway, and that was mighty close to Hollywood, wasn't it? That fellow actually came to my house and drank my beer and talked two hours about our movie, and everything he said sounded delicious. He left saying that I would soon receive a firm offer from his group.

    So I celebrated. I told the neighbors. I called friends. I wrote letters to the family. I told the mail carrier when he came by, and anybody else who'd listen, that my book would soon be a movie.

    The fellow from Los Angeles? I never heard from him again.

    Even that was not my worst mistake. My worst one was, one day when I was feeling especially needy I sold the film rights to that novel. I wouldn't mind telling you how much I got, but this story is already sad enough. Anybody with an ounce of business sense would have sold only an option, but selling the rights was a mistake I hadn't made yet, so I added it to my list.

    Since then the rights to my story, over which I have no control, have been resold three or four times, and every new owner has had a script and made plans to start filming in the spring. If I ever hear that they really have started, I probably won't believe it.

    My observation over 35 years is that the closer to the West Coast you get, the harder it is to hear the truth about turning books into films.

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    Salman Rushdie Redux
    Friday, February 9, 2007

    Two literary feuds in one week! I think of the National Book Circle Critics Award as being one of the more respected, but sleepier of the literary awards. Suddenly this week it finds itself in the center of the religious wars. GalleyCat first got wind of the dustup. Now the NYT has picked it up.

    Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

    The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

    The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims — books including “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips, “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion” by Robert Spencer, and “America Alone” by Mark Steyn.

    Most have been written by conservative authors and published by conservative presses, but not all: the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died last year, so angered Muslims with her strident books, like “The Force of Reason,” that she was sued for defaming Islam. The publication of such books coincides with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and reports of violent attacks and plots by radical Muslims in Europe. Bombings in London and Madrid, heated disputes over bans on women wearing the veil, gang attacks on young Muslims, rioting in Paris and violence in Berlin by disaffected Arab immigrants have brought to the surface anxieties over the growing number of Muslims in Europe. In December the European Union reported that Muslims faced deep-seated discrimination in education, housing and jobs, but that they should also do more to integrate into society. In this environment, it is no surprise that the books have elicited a mixture of praise and contempt, raising the question of where the line is between legitimate criticism and bigotry.

    For Mr. Bawer, the condemnations are more evidence of liberals’ one-sided blindness. “One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor, etc., etc.,” he wrote on his own blog, www.brucebawer.com/blog.htm.

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    Was Adam Gopnik Put On This Earth to Annoy?
    Thursday, February 8, 2007

    Nothing gets the blood boiling more than a good, old-fashioned literary feud ... if you're in Britain that is. America seems mostly devoid of them. In this country, they seem mostly aimed at chipping away at the pedestal of some anointed one. James Wolcott, he of Vanity Fair, uses The New Republic to execute a take-down of Adam Gopnik, he of The New Yorker and the bestselling FROM PARIS TO THE MOON.

    The great Amazon book blog (new but consistently fun), offers this review:

    No semi-confessed murderers today, just the kind we're more used to in these parts: the literary evisceration. Today's victim: New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, at the bloody hands of James Wolcott in a New Republic review of Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York (I think you need to register--though not subscribe--to see the review). He starts with indiscriminate fire:
    I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished. Mind you, he finds himself in fine company in my illustrious literary perp walk. Francine Prose, with her pinched perceptions and humorless hauteur--every time she brings out a new book (she is depressingly diligent), I find myself grumbling, "Her again?" I've never gotten the point of Paul Auster and his swami mystique and probably never shall, unless I move to Brooklyn and achieve phosphorescence. Walter Kirn, what a hustler. But no tactician of letters has shown a greater knack for worming his way into our hearts whether we want him there or not than Adam Gopnik.
    But he soon bores in on Mr. Gopnik alone, and it's a memorable performance. I was once a Gopnik fan (and sometimes still am) but at some point the tide turned for me. Part of it was when he started writing about his kids so much, but partly I'm ashamed to say I must have been infected by Renata Adler's bitter New Yorker memoir, Gone, which subjects him to one of the cruelest literary portraits I've ever read. Wolcott seems under her sway too, as he quotes her twice, including this finely chiseled dagger:
    I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.
    Mrs. Feiler Faster is a big fan of Gopnik (though she recently saw him on TV and was a bit taken aback). I wonder what she'll think of this. For my part, I haven't read the book, but I think his essay on Kirk Varnedoe of the Museum of Modern Art, which is reprinted in the above eviscerated book, is the finest piece of magazine journalism I've read in the last decade.

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    Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM 1 comments

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