Quote of the Week

In Dickens’s spirit, I believe we need to take action against Google. Its quest to monetise for its own benefit the literature of the world must be stopped. So I call upon internet users worldwide to boycott the Google search engine until it ceases to scan books in America without prior permission, and desists from its mission to place ambient advertising on the great literary works. Switch your search engine from Google to MSN or Yahoo today, until you hear Google has withdrawn from the type of activities that have been described in another context as acts of “kleptomania”. Google’s […]

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what is plagiarism? The least sincere form? A genuine crime? Or merely the work of someone with less-than-complete mastery of quotation marks who is in too great a hurry to come up with words and ideas of his own? Plagiary, It’s Crawling All Over Me

To Americans, Paris suggests the idea of happiness as surely as an arrival in New York suggests hope and Los Angeles, in literature at least, hopelessness. French leave: Bohemian yet bourgeois, Paris is a city of contradictions. No wonder American artists have always been dazzled by it, says Adam Gopnik

“I wasn’t thinking out of the book. That’s what the reader brings,” he [E.L. Doctorow] said. “Reading is a very creative act; until the book is read, it’s really not completed. Lines on the page are like a circuit that the reader’s life flows through.” Doctorow’s ‘The March’ Wins Top Honor: Pen/Faulkner Award Is Novelist’s Second

Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, “Well, at least people are writing again.” Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would. Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

In some ways, it’s a natural fit. Like the French, book editors enjoy languorous lunches and batting ideas around. Like the French, some U.S. publishers and editors (viz. l’affaire Frey) seem to have adopted Derrida-esque attitudes toward the nature of truth. The French work 35-hour weeks. Ditto for publishers. France is a one-time giant that, having lost its status in the world, is fighting a rear-guard action against 21st-century capitalism. Check. Das Book: Why German, French, and British companies are devouring American publisher

In his prime, a century after the Declaration of Independence, Twain was a Yankee original who rendered the vocabulary and tone of the American vernacular, previously despised, in a way that was neither parody, nor caricature, but literature. The voice of America: Through his novels – and heroes – Mark Twain was indisputably the United States’s first literary superstar. Ron Powers examines his life and work in an exhilarating new biography, says Robert McCrum

. . .an email seen by L.A. Weekly suggests that Barrus is already attempting to parlay his newfound notoriety into a tell-all memoir. In an ironic twist, he calls the new work a novel. Nasdijj Shops Tell-All – And signs his real name to blog

Though his stories were based on truth, it was somehow understood that the truth was always worth bending for a good story. Source Notes by David Masiel

“When I ask if anybody has any questions,” he [Louis Sachar] says, “every hand goes up.” Louis Sachar: Hot novelist of the sandbox set.