We suppose a text message novel has some antecedents in sonnets or haiku or something. And we hear that writing to a very tight formula really frees the mind (yes, we’re not entirely comfortable with this level of rigidity, but we usually a take a while to get rolling). So we applaud the author’s creativity and marketing savvy. But we also advise some readers of his steamy tale of illicit romance to take care that these tiny chapters don’t fall into the hands of conclusion jumpers. Chinese author moves into texts

Our world is place where artists are afraid to offend because it affects the bottom line. Of course, there are exceptions to this statement (though we do love a sweeping generalization — it gets the blood going!). Yet (and this is a favorite rant of ours) more often than not interviews and commentary is safe. You will never hear an actor say, “He was torture to work with. I’d rather have a root canal without drugs than spend another hour in his company.” This, despite months of lurid “they hate each other” stories. We can only presume the speakers needs

We like to view novel writing much in the way we view mountain ranges — things change in such a way that you don’t necessarily realize it happens. Then there’s the occasional strip mining — where the landscape changes dramatically and sometimes forever. There is something in the artist’s mind that latches onto ideas and refuses to let go. Sometimes these are the worst possible ideas (we believe Jackson Pollack was a victim of this). Authors, too, fall prey to gimmicky writing; we must only look the Suttree, voted “Our Worst Read Ever” by our bookclub. It was so unreadable

By now, news about the decline in literary reading in the United States has trickled through the media (though, we’ve noticed, it hasn’t received the sort of prominence we feel this should). Reading at Risk, the report prepared by the National Endowment for the Arts, contained a lot of disturbing data, not the least of which was a correlation between the decline in reading and a decline in commitment to social service. The news and report had us thinking a lot about reading (even during those moments when we were, theoretically, engaged in that particular activity). We took a trip