thebookishowl.com

Best-selling French novelist Francoise Sagan has died in the north-western town of Honfleur aged 69.

She died of heart and lung failure a few days after being admitted to a local hospital.

Sagan published her first and best-known work Bonjour Tristesse – an anthem to disillusioned youth – in 1954 at the age of just 18.

She produced more than 40 novels and plays, including A Certain Smile, Incidental Music and The Painted Lady.

She had been ill for several years and was taken to the hospital earlier this week, hospital officials said.

With her passing, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive authors

President Jacques Chirac

She had been staying in the Normandy town of Honfleur, and passed away with a close friend and her son by her side, a hospital official told French radio.

French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin immediately paid her emotional tributes.

Mr Chirac called Sagan “a leading figure in her generation” who helped raise the status of women in France.

“With her passing, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive authors…

“With finesse, emotion and subtlety, Francoise Sagan explored the spirit and passions of the human heart,” he said in a statement issued by his office.

Mr Raffarin called Sagan “a smile – one that was melancholy, enigmatic, distant, and yet joyous”.

Early literary success

Sagan was born into a wealthy family in the south-west of France in 1935.

She was expelled from her convent school and took seven weeks in the summer of 1953 to write her most important work.

She was the archetype of the teenage rebel in a post-war Paris abuzz with jazz and existentialism, says correspondent Hugh Schofield in Paris.

Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) tells the story of a bored, bourgeois teenager who filled the emptiness of her existence by conspiring to destroy her father’s new girlfriend.

It was about adolescence, love and loneliness, and it had an immediate echo in a world looking for new ways of expressing emotion and human identity, Hugh Schofield says.

The novel gained instant success because of its irreverent tone and was considered at the time shocking because of the emotional intimacy and subversive subtext.

It was later translated into 22 languages and sold five million copies around the world.

Later in her life, Sagan proved just as controversial, collecting a number of convictions for tax fraud and drug abuse. She was also known for her love of gambling and fast cars.

“The laws are made to be adapted to people and not the other way round. I have always advised everyone against cocaine,” she said at the time of one of the convictions.

Classic Literature

This story was written by Jane Austen

This part is called, Chapter 37

Read by Sibella Denton

Download the show

Classic Literature Podcast

I have a follower?!?!?!? I’m honored and shocked and feel  like I should have prepared a speech for the occasion! Wow! While I am recovering from shock, I will fill you in on the latest happenings of my adventure. It amounts to absolutely nothing. I filed for unemployment though. Maybe getting that money will enable me to have enough money to support my reading habit. Maybe I should read some of the paperback novels I have at home for now. I haven’t official started my search but at least I don’t have idle hands!

The Search to Conquer Classic Literature

The Keats-Shelley Association of America’s annual awards dinner at MLA will be held this year on Saturday, 8 January 2011. A cash bar opens at 5:30 PM and dinner begins at 7:00 PM, at the Standard Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, 550 S. Flower at Sixth Street. This year the Association will honor distinguished scholars Christopher RIcks and Julie Carlson.

For reservations, send by 15 December 2010 to:

Steven Jones
Loyola University Chicago
Department of English
Crown Center 421
1032 W. Sheridan Road
Chicago, IL 60660

Contact Steven Jones: sjones1@luc.edu

Romantic Circles Blog

The Guardian reports that Pulp will reunite for live dates in 2011.

---

The Daily Beast lists the politicians who have sold the most books.

---

Shearwater has a new instrumental album, Shearwater Is Enron available at Bandcamp.

The band’s drummer Thor Harris shares his 21 rules of how to tour in a band or whatever.

---

Under the Radar interviews A.C. Newman of the New Pornographers.

---

Publishers Weekly examines the movement of bigger authors to smaller publishing houses.

The midlist is dying. That sentiment has been a mantra in publishing circles for years as agents, authors, and editors have decried that corporate publishing will no longer support the kind of author that was once an industry staple—the moderate success who was a consistent seller, if not a bestseller. With the “big six” demanding bigger sales numbers from all their authors, indie presses, which have long been the province of riskier, harder-to-market literary fiction, are finding that more commercial writers are showing up at their doors, as well as writers with serious accolades and lengthier track records.

---

i(heart)music has compiled its annual list of the hottest bands in Canada.

---

Financial Times reviews the new book, Saul Bellow: Letters.

---

At the Guardian, Tessa Hadley praises novels set in the present day.

---

NPR is streaming Stereolab’s new album, Not Music (out November 16th).

---

Kate Bernheimer talks to Weekend Edition about the modern fairy tale collection she edited, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

---

Win the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World DVD in this week’s Largehearted Boy contest.

---

Follow me on Twitter and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

---

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Online “Best Books of 2010″ lists

Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s comics & graphic novel releases)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

First and foremost, Happy New Year everyone!

I hope you had a wonderful time and here’s to 2010 and all that lays before us.

It being a New Year, it is of course time to talk about the future and in particular e-books. Yes again, don’t give me that look. Specifically I’d like to talk about the perception of e-books and readers and mention some of the hurdles ahead. Part of this comes from two articles Regis linked me to and part of it is from good old personal experience.

Starting with the articles we have two big ones in the e-lit world, DIY book scanning and Copyrights & The Blind. In a way both are related in that they each deal with copyright, but both also show a glimpse of a possible future.

We won’t deal with the loaded issues that are DRM and copyrights, rather some of the comments made. There are already e-readers for blind people, but never one to miss an opportunity, Amazon plans to make a blind accessible Kindle. Daniel Reetz, in the scanning article, was prompted to make his cheap book scanner by book prices for his college courses.  As that community grows, there will be more and more available for people to download. It may be free, it may be pirated or it may come from the industry itself.

“There have to be things that you get with an e-book that you don’t get by making your own copies,” says Samuelson. “It’s not such as stark challenge for copyright owners, because not many people are going to take the trouble to make their own scanner system. Most of us want the convenience of buying digital books for the Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader.” -Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law.

Webcomics have even commented on the possibilities of greater uptake in e-readers. Anyone who has ever had a packed commute next to someone trying to read a broadsheet newspaper would welcome Mr. Business getting his news through a reader or a phone. Perhaps it is a little too sci-fi to imagine, but I would love to see school children up to college students being freed of the burden of expensive and oftentimes heavy schoolbooks. That same device could be used for your morning paper and your evening read. Some companies already have readers planned for professionals. Dvd sales nowadays include special features above and beyond the movie, even in the “regular” edition of a disc. Some authors already publish companions to their universes that further flesh out and explain the book in your hand. The one I saw most recently was a fable and folklore book based in the Discworld which can be used to give greater background to Unseen Academicals.

In the end it comes down to how it is used and why. Certainly this is something I ran into with my father this Christmas. Trying to pick a gift for me, he knew I wanted an e-reader. I had my eye on the Sony Reader before they shelved it and re-launched with two versions of the same. I would love to own a Kindle, but they were unlikely to be on sale. My father, who has been a technology early adopter all his life, couldn’t understand why I’d want such a device, or why he’d pay so much for what he saw as a one trick pony. In the end it was easier to tell him to get me something else (I’ll tell you what it is when I actually get it). This Christmas I myself picked up several books. We asked here before if you prefer paper or plastic and people were divided. However e-readers are here to stay and they are no one trick pony, not for long anyway. E-readers are e-volving, if you’ll pardon the pun, and they aren’t just about the book in your hands anymore. I have my novel for my commute beside me and I admit freely that I love the feel and smell of the paper, but I would adore a device to fill in for all the other paper in my life. The paper we’re forced to live with or have to carry for whatever reason.

I foresee the fight between e-reader and print book going on for a while more. It is like the battle waged between digital cameras and film cameras. Both have their supporters and detractors, however going forward the cold plastic device you may imagine a reader to be may not necessarily be trying to replace your warm fantasy printed world. In my mind, nothing will beat a coffee, biscuit and good book in your hands, no matter how many buttons it has. At the same time, I want one. Not for that warm time with a good drink and good book, but for all the other times I’d be carrying material that needs or deserves reading.

Perhaps e-readers will win us over in the end by offering those special features like our movies, earning their place beside the paperback and your favourite cup, the handy tool for textbooks and papers tasked to support our fantasies.

Quilldragon

New @ New Criterion:

One of the slow-burn methods by which terrorism lives up to its name is to cause a state of absolute, literal-minded stultification in laws and writs of the society being terrorized. We complain daily about long, bare-footed queques at airport security gates, witless government “watch lists” that seem to include everyone not participating in global jihad but exclude everyone doing just that, and the absence of trash bins in the London Underground (or at least, I complain about those daily). A public transport system under omnipresent video surveillance and heavily populated throughout the day is unlikely to be idle once a man is seen stuffing a bomb into a receptacle marked “Trash.” So why the categorical ban on bins and the implicit encouragement of an older public infraction again decency: littering?

The misdemeanors against common sense and rational precaution in the age of terrorism are manifold. However, none compares to the more aggravated crime of arresting a harmless person for a casual tweet. Nick Cohen has a column up at the Observer about the plight of Paul Chambers, a 27 year-old automotive manufacturer who was so frustrated about not being able to fly from Doncaster into Northern Ireland to visit his girlfriend that he tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!" The airport monitor for such things saw this, considered it innocuous, but duly passed it along to his superiors. The rest is security-state history:

A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers’s work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception.

"Do you have any weapons in your car?" they asked.

"I said I had some golf clubs in the boot," Chambers told me. "But they didn’t think it was funny. I kept wondering, ‘When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?’ Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.”

Chambers lost that job and only last week lost another in Northern Ireland, where he repaired to be with his girlfriend after being handed a criminal record and a £1,000 fine for saying on the Internet the kind of meaningless hyperbole we all say every day to air our grievances. Why was he fired from that second job? Because his employer heard him mention his forthcoming court appeal and its probable media coverage along with the words “bomb” and “airport” — admittedly not wise water-cooler palaver in Northern Ireland. Yet Chambers’ attempt to preempt further misunderstanding was enough to do the opposite for the new boss.

In solidarity with this victim of a real-life Czech parable, people are planning a mass Twitter inundation Friday, the day of his appeal, of gobbets of good or great literature that would likewise indict the original authors under current counterterrorism statutes. These include John Betjeman’s verse, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” (which was the basis for Morrissey’s equally tweetable lyric, “Come Armageddon…. Come, come, nuclear bomb” in “Everyday is Like Sunday”). Also on the roster is Shakespeare’s famous prescription, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” against which it might truly be said that the skin of an innocent lamb has not made a scribbled-over parchment that undoes a man but that the parchment needs re-scribbling to see that innocent men are not undone.

Snarksmith: new york. gossip. art. politics. pop culture. literature. etc.

Authors, poets, playwrights and journalists will be in Durham over the next month as the city hosts its annual Literature Festival.

This year marks the 15th festival and local writers will be performing alongside international names like Iain Banks and Ian Rankin.

Novelists will be discussing their work and there will be political debates and historical lectures.

Workshops will also be held for visitors to get involved.

Events will be taking place throughout the city when the festival opens on Sunday, and will continue until 23 October.

Classic Literature

A newly discovered manuscript by the young Ernest Hemingway is unlikely ever to be published after his family refused permission.

The five-page story – titled My life in the Bull Ring with Donald Ogden Stewart – is expected to fetch at least ,000 (£10,000) at auction.

The piece, written in 1924, is said to be a parody about a bullfight in the Spanish city of Pamplona.

Hemingway expert J. Gerald Kennedy said the work was “not great literature”.

Classic Literature

“It’s pretty typical of the kind of after-hours parody Hemingway was writing in Paris in the mid-20s.

“He’s still a year away from writing The Sun Also Rises,” added the Louisiana State University professor, talking about the writer’s classic tale.

To publish a new Hemingway find, permission must be granted by both the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the Hemingway estate.

The Foundation wanted to publish it – but the family did not.

Suzanne Balaban, vice president and director of publicity at Scribner’s, Hemingway’s original publisher, said the estate did not feel they had “explored the best way to present this story to the public”.

Envelope

Christie’s auction house in New York plans to auction the carbon-copy manuscript and a handwritten letter from Hemingway on 16 December.

Donald Stewart, who owns the manuscript, had the documents for more than 20 years without realising it.

He made the discovery recently in an envelope left by his father, Donald Ogden Stewart, who died in 1980.

Hemingway had asked his father, who was a successful satirist and screenwriter, to try to get the story published in Vanity Fair, but he kept it instead.

Classic Literature

This week we are reading a novel by Brandon Sanderson, one of the current generation’s best  fantasy writers. The novel is Warbreaker and besides being built on the usual conventions of the genre, many conventions being reversed or surprisingly twisted, it also makes use of structures and motifs that seem perfect for gaming, as if the novel is also being constructed as a gaming platform. We want to take a look this week at the interrelationship between gaming and the fantasy genre, the ways in which gaming has affected the development of new conventions in fantasy and how the fantasy novel as world maker is expanding genre elements across media. 

Literature of Horror, Fantasy & Sci-Fi