Philip Christman has ranked and encapsulated (sort of) 22 works by Muriel Spark. He says, The Hothouse by the East River comes off like overripe fruit. For Robinson and The Bachelors, he says “Spark was pretty much kicking ass right out of the gate; these are ‘the worst’ of her early novels, and yet they would have represented a quite respectable peak for anyone else.”
The Girls of Slender Means
This first of three books is free for Kindle, and I suspect you may enjoy it. It’s a western-style fantasy framed by the stories of a deceased fantasy author. Fans of his books discover they aren’t entirely fictional, and there are big stakes at risk in the war they find.
Essays are a dead form, says author David Hughes. “But today we no longer have access to the state of mind in which such useless but diverting conceptions appear in the unanchored intelligence [another nice phrase]. Our conceptions must be vast or hasty or topical; to ride the storm of the uneasy mind we are in, an idea must be sensational, it must walk on the water or fly faster than sound. A poet manqué does not write essays: he joins the staff of an advertising agency, where one word is an expensive item, or he talks about the films he is going to make.”
Patrick Kurp spells out the joys and perils of Hughes’ opinion on essays in today’s post. “Good essays,” he says, “even the most impersonal, are suffused with the essayist’s sensibility. No one else could have written them.”
Hachette, one of five largest U.S. publishers, has acquired the imprints of Perseus Books Group, giving it more clout in its dispute with Amazon, though that’s not the reason they made the deal. It follows the pattern of a major merger 2011 of Random House and Penguin. The new publishing megagroup is said to have the most bargaining ability with Amazon, which controls a third of bookselling market.
The city of Leawood, Kansas, shut down a nine-year-old boy’s free book exchange or “Little Free Library” after blood tied to a grisly murder was found on several pages of the books inside.
Ok. The blood part is an irresponsible lie, but the city did shut down the kid’s library this month because it violated an ordinance against detached structures. The news reports tie the decision to a complaint, leading me to wonder if the covered bookshelf would have been left alone had no one complained. The boy is wondering whether tying his library to his house with a rope would make it an attached structure and circumvent the code. He is also studying the law with plans to speak to the city counsel in the near future.
Lemmings don’t run in herds, following their leaders off a cliff if so directed. Do you know how that myth got started? Disney filmmakers thought it would make good television, so they staged it for their 1958 documentary White Wilderness. Tossed the little buggers right off the cliff, they did. That’s cold.
Rodney Stark, distinguished professor of the social sciences at Baylor University, talks about his new book, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity
One of the most blatant [myths that has gained currency today] is blaming the West for all the problems involving Muslims, specifically terrorist attacks. Reflecting what is being said in the classrooms, academic conferences devote many sessions to “Islamophobia” (hatred of Muslims) but none to terrorism—except for the explanation that it is provoked by the many wicked things the West has done to Islam, now and in the distant past….
Another pernicious myth is that Europe slept in ignorance through many centuries following the fall of Rome—an era known as the Dark Ages. But it never happened. Many professors, even if they know it, are reluctant to admit that the major encyclopedias now acknowledge that the notion of the Dark Ages was invented by Voltaire and his friends to vilify the Church and makes themselves seem important. It always should have been obvious that the centuries denounced as the Dark Ages were an era of remarkable invention and progress, at the end of which Europe had advanced far beyond the rest of the world.
“God’s mercy is so great that you may sooner drain the sea of its water, or deprive the sun of its light, or make space too narrow, than diminish the great mercy of God.”
“A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears.”
“If you are to go to Christ, do not put on your good doings and feelings, or you will get nothing; go in your sins, they are your livery. Your ruin is your argument for mercy; your poverty is your plea for heavenly alms; and your need is the motive for heavenly goodness. Go as you are, and let your miseries plead for you.”
Relevant has 20 Spurgeon quotes for today. I think I’ll tweet Spurgeon quotes all day. (via Jared C. Wilson)
Mike Duran interviews Eric Ortlund about his zombie novel, Dead Petals. Ortlund says, “At some level, I am an endlessly hungry dead thing; but I’m also watching to see how I might survive that evil. And it got me thinking about what the apostle Paul says about humanity being dead in sin in Ephesians. Then I wondered, if a zombie could talk while still undead, what would that sound like? Then the writing started happening. . . .
“The influences are many. First, the Old Testament is the first apocalypse—i.e., it first got that particular way of looking at reality going. Second, the OT has a fund of cosmic symbols (the abyss, the storm, the holy mountain, the tree) which cannot be translated or decoded without essential loss. . . . Third, the OT has this really interesting way of protesting the surrounding idolatrous culture and also “highjacking” it—taking over symbols and themes and images and using them to talk about the real God.”
James Stewart asked someone at Hachette about their dispute with Amazon. “This person said that Amazon has been demanding payments for a range of services, including the pre-order button, personalized recommendations and a dedicated employee at Amazon for Hachette books. This is similar to so-called co-op arrangements with traditional retailers, like paying Barnes & Noble for placing a book in the front of the store.”
Stewart report describes the efforts Third Place Books has made to capitalize on Amazon’s refusal to pre-order a popular book. They offered The Silkworm at 20% off with free, personal delivery the day it was released. The owner, Robert Sindelar, “along with several other store employees, delivered the books (although a surprising number of customers said not to bother — they wanted to come into the store for their copy). He also handed out what he called ‘Hachette swag bags’ with a T-shirt and advance copy of a coming Hachette novel. Some buyers also received a surprise visit from a local author, Maria Semple, who wrote the best-selling book Where’d You Go, Bernadette.”
Sindelar calls the promotion successful. He sold 60 books that day. Normally, he doesn’t believe he would have gotten any pre-orders and maybe a few sales on the day of the release. (via Shelf Awareness)