Is there anything more disrespectful to a book–and its authors and would-be readers–than burning? Book burnings are inevitably associated with censorship and repressive ideology, from the Third Reich to the more recent Quran-burning controversy. Even without those connotations, burning any book–for any reason–sends a shiver down my spine.

But can book-burning sometimes be justified? On Cracked, S. Peter Davis writes about book-burnings that are occurring now, all over many countries–and why:

For the past year or so, part of my job has been to walk through library warehouses and destroy tens of thousands of often old and irreplaceable books. [...]

Industrial-scale book destruction is going on at the British Library, possibly the most prestigious library in the world (you can tell because it’s British). Recent book-pulping scandals have hit the University of New South Wales in Australia, as well as several other institutions. Hell, when Borders bookstores went belly-up earlier this year, they decided to destroy all the unsold books instead of donate them.

And no, I’m not just talking about duplicates and old TV Guides, either. Imagine holding a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover, and throwing it straight in the trash. I’ve been there, more than once. I could have kept it and maybe gotten a few hundred dollars for it on eBay, if my supervisor wasn’t watching with specific orders to prevent me from doing that.

Before you write Davis any hate mail, read his entire piece. He offers six reasons these book-burnings occur, including “It’s cheaper than giving them away,” “Libraries can’t grow fast enough,” and yup, you guessed it, “The books are going digital.” In the end, Davis concludes that these book-burnings are inevitable in today’s world.

What do you think? Are book-burnings like this evil? A necessary evil? Or just… necessary?

What if an agent agreed to represent your book–IF you changed the main character from gay to straight?

That’s what happened to writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown and their YA novel, Stranger, according to a post they wrote in Publisher’s Weekly:

Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Now, here’s where things get sticky. Smith and Brown explicitly refused to name the agent in question in order to focus attention on the larger problem: the difficulty of publishing a YA novel with LGBT characters. Yet a few days later, the agent was “outed” in an angry rebuttal that accused the authors of misrepresenting the situation. And then things got really messy. Occupation Girl has an excellent summary of the whole situation, including rebuttals to the rebuttal and evidence about whether there’s support for LGBT novels in the world of YA. The Guardian reports on similar cases, including one where an editor simply deleted all gay references without telling the author.

Why does all this matter? I think Smith and Brown (and many other authors) got it right in their original post–this is part of a bigger issue:

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

We knew this was a pie-in-the-sky offer—who knew if there would even be sequels?—and didn’t solve the moral issue. When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can’t even be allowed to exist in fiction.

And this wonderful essay from The Millions, by Steve Himmer, offers a powerful argument for letting young readers read what they choose:

Thirteen is a liminal moment between childhood and adulthood, so who am I to say what’s appropriate for someone that age, and for this particular thirteen year old I don’t know in the slightest. And let’s face it, there are probably lots of parents who’d worry about their son or daughter (or nephew or niece) buying a novel about a hermit who spends most of his story naked from a scruffy guy like me. That’s easy enough for me to accept. As my protagonist says, “if I saw myself bursting out of the woods, I might not offer help either.”

Yet I can’t help but remember that reading — both the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself — was among the first freedoms I had. Those early choices, and being trusted to make them, seem like foundational experiences now, decades later. [...]

This isn’t just about marketability, or literature. It’s about affirming–or denying–the lives that many teens are already living.

Further reading:

• Does YA help teens with dark thoughts?
• After some controversy over what counts as “feminist YA lit,” BITCH magazine tries to start an online feminist YA book club
• YA authors team up to fight bullying

When I heard The Great Gatsby had been rewritten for intermediate readers, I did what many lovers of the novel probably did—checked the online version to see how my favorite passage had been changed, shook my fist, and then re-read the original, penciling all kinds of ecstatic remarks into the margins.

In case you missed Celeste’s post, Macmillan has released a simplified version of the novel as “retold by Margaret Tarner.” Essentially, it relates the events of the Gatsby story without all the big words and elaboration.

And so my favorite passage, two beautiful paragraphs of imagery and movement and metaphor, becomes one plain, plodding sentence: Wind blew through the room until Tom closed the window. Or something like that. I can’t double-check, because Macmillan yanked the content from the web shortly after Roger Ebert attacked it in this diatribe.

But compare that sentence to Fitzgerald’s original:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Infinitely better, isn’t it? But why? What good does all that extra writing do?

First, it gives us a sensory experience rather than merely conveying information. That is, we get to witness this wind for ourselves. We see it in the wild movements of loose fabric, hear its flutters and snaps and groans, feel the buoying and ballooning sensations.

Second, the imagery in the scene parallels the action of the novel. One of these women is Daisy, who for five years has lived in Gatsby’s fantasies, built up by his romantic imagination into something like the figure presented here—one of impossible lightness and freshness and freedom. This is the first we’ve seen of her, and immediately Fitzgerald aligns our perception with Gatsby’s. Notice the openness, the movement, the elevation, the whiteness. It is, of course, Tom Buchanan who ultimately puts an end to Gatsby’s vision, just as he puts an end to the breeze here, bringing everybody back down to earth.

Third, the precise, vivid, metaphorical language launches the novel’s emotional arc. The room is “bright” and “rosy-colored” and “fragilely bound into the house,” sharp descriptions that further echo Gatsby’s vision of Daisy. There is also, however, a “wedding-cake” ceiling, which captures that frosted texture perfectly, but complicates Gatsby’s vision, too—she is, after all, married. Ah, but the “wine-colored rug” suggests class, extravagance, inebriation, and even—because of Prohibition—illicit behavior, all of which play roles in Gatsby’s attempt to seduce her. The paragraph ends as the novel does, with a note of insubstantiality and transience, the curtain “making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”

Now, this is only page eight. At this point, readers haven’t been introduced to Gatsby’s dreams and disappointments, so on first read, they will have no inkling of what is being developed here. Even on subsequent reads, its exact nature may elude them. But that doesn’t mean it has no effect. These things build and resonate even when readers aren’t aware of them. That’s why stories so often leave us with an emotional detonation we don’t fully understand. It’s why stories can move us even when we can’t explain why we are moved.

And that’s what gives stories their value—they’re aimed at our hearts, not our heads. Understanding that there is a wind isn’t the same as experiencing it. As Flannery O’Connor puts it,

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. [. . .] When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

That is, you can’t tell the same story with different words. When you change the words, you change the experience and thereby change the story.

I think most readers understand this intuitively, and that’s why so many of us are put off by Tarner’s rewrite. It’s also why so many have decried the new version of Huckleberry Finn in which the N-word has been removed. And it’s why so many Raymond Carver fans were upset when Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, republished unedited versions of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

It might also be the reason Tarner’s ending seems so different from Fitzgerald’s:

Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

In the original, Gatsby ends up rejected by the woman he loves, hollowed out by the failure of his dream, murdered in his swimming pool, and abandoned by nearly everyone before his funeral. It’s difficult to call that a success. But Tarner has changed the words, and so we must assume she is ending a different story.

Ebert, whose column brought such notoriety to Tarner’s retelling, seems to recognize this dynamic, but he overshoots his mark. He argues that “Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told.” That’s approximately correct. He means, I think, that the writing is as important as the story, which is true. But to say that Gatsby isn’t about a story—well, that only reduces it, the same way Tarner does.

The problem is the idea that one of these elements is secondary to the other. Tarner’s rewrite indicates that the sequence of events matters, not the language; Ebert contends the language matters, not the events. Perhaps the more basic problem is the idea that these elements are divisible in the first place, as if one can exist without the other. They aren’t; they can’t. To Ebert, I would say that the language builds the story. To Tarner, I would say the same.

You have probably heard by now that V. S. Naipaul issued a broad-handed diss to women writers, claiming no female writer could be his equal:

He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.

He added: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

In response, the Guardian puts Naipaul (and you) to the test with a 10-question quiz. For example, can you tell whether this passage is by a man or a woman?

“A tall, broad-shouldered man came to stand in the doorway, dressed in faded jeans and an untucked tan chamois shirt, his feet shod in moccasins. Maggie could hardly take him in. Brown curly hair, a light stubble of beard, piercing green eyes framed by laugh wrinkles. Cookie halfway to her mouth and uncharacteristically breathless, she admonished herself, Get a grip. He’s just another man…”

Take the quiz, if only for the quips it displays when revealing your score. (No, I’m not telling.)

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times highlights a German artist who switches the genders on book covers, shaking up our gender expectations with titles like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Mr. Dalloway, and Woman and Superwoman. Visit the Times’s site for pictures of her work, including covers. I wonder what Naipaul would think about Dona Quixote?

New York Public Library (CC)

Last summer, I worked a few blocks away from the regal main branch of the New York Public Library near Bryant Park. During the interlude between the end of the work day and the start of a class I was taking, I’d sometimes take refuge in the humbling building, its architectural beauty and breathtaking murals never ceasing to amaze me. So when I came across the story of a young girl aiming to keep the city’s libraries open by writing comical postcards to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I was not only amused but also grateful that someone else, too, couldn’t imagine New York without its famed literary landmark.

The tween, called “Tara” by New York City public librarian and “Screwy Decimal” blogger Rita Meade, drafted a series of postcards with creative threats to Mayor Bloomberg when funding for the city’s public libraries was in jeopardy late last month.

Here’s one of them:

via ScrewyDecimal

Explains the Village Voice:

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer of Sunnyside, Queens, initiated a postcard campaign to express to Mayor Bloomberg how important it is that the libraries continue to receive full funding. Librarians and library supporters had people fill out and collected the postcards.

And while Tara’s intimidations might have been cause for concern if they hadn’t come from a ten-year-old girl, the motive behind them was simply a love for books and the city’s public libraries. So I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t alarmed once he realized this most innocent of intentions.

On her blog, Meade chronicled several of Tara’s postcards. In another postcard draft, Tara wrote that she would organize a school protest:

Image via Screwy Decimal

Meade encouraged Tara to try again:

Well, I thought the idea of a school protest was wonderful, so I was completely in Tara’s corner until the ‘six feet under’ comment. (Which was followed by maniacal laughter on Tara’s part, by the way.) Since she had escalated her message from a vague threat to more of a thinly-veiled threat, Tara scrapped that postcard and filled out yet another one.

After yet another draft that included Tara writing that she “will scream [her] bloody head off and put it on a golden platter” if the library system’s budget is reduced, Tara and Meade settled on a final postcard:

Image via Screwy Decimal

Lucky for Tara and other public library lovers, the New York Public Library system, which was facing a $40 million funding reduction, ultimately was not put on the chopping block. But even after hearing the good news, Tara wasn’t ready to give Mayor Bloomberg a break just yet. After learning her library branch would remain open, Tara said:

“Bring it ON! Let’s see this mayor. If he comes here, I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind.”

Meade added:

“I couldn’t help but laugh, even as I explained that the Mayor and City Council voted to restore most of the library’s funding. (Although, truth be told, I wouldn’t mind someone giving the Mayor a piece of his/her mind for doing this ridiculous budget game every year.)

Thank you, Tara, for defending the New York Public Library, your humor, and your steadfast desire to keep reading. The next time I’m in New York walking up those magnificent marble steps, I’ll think of your postcards, laugh quietly to myself I’m sure, and have a new appreciation for the city’s literary gem.

My friends who are literary agents have told me about the many ways authors try to catch their attention: packages of cookies sent with their manuscripts; queries tucked into oven mitts shaped like sunflowers (of all things). But this might be the ultimate guerrilla book promotion: faking a kidnapping to promote your book.

Yes. Mark Davis, a thriller writer, did just that. Reports the News Advance of Lynchburg, Virginia:

His main character, Perno Morris, is a failed novelist who has grown weary (and, perhaps, been pushed over the edge of sanity) by a discouraging series of rejections by publishers. So he finds an uber-successful agent, kidnaps her daughter, and gives her 90 days to get his latest novel in print. [...]

“I went on as many Internet writers’ boards and chat rooms as I could, as Perno Morris, and vented about how unfair the publishing business was,” [Davis] said. “Then I told them I had a plan, and started a countdown to when I would reveal it. That sent a lot of traffic to my website (www.thelastrejection.com), where I had posted the first three chapters of the novel.”

But that was just the beginning. Davis staged and filmed a kidnapping (“I checked with a lawyer first to make sure I wouldn’t get in trouble”) to post on the website, then sent an e-mail to a wide variety of agents. It began: “By the time you receive this, I will have already kidnapped your child.”

“The first phone call I received the next day was at 7:30 in the morning, from an agent,” Davis recalled. “She was yelling at me, saying, ‘Are you crazy?’”

We talked for a little while, though, and I told her: “The most important thing for any novelist these days is to stand out, to attract attention. Based on the fact that you’re calling me this early, I’m assuming I’ve accomplished that goal.”

Is this a brilliant idea—or a cruel one? As a parent, I can only imagine how traumatized I’d be if I got an email claiming my child was kidnapped, even in jest. (Maybe even especially if it were in jest—or in the service of a promotion.)

And here’s the thing: the scheme worked. Davis landed a book deal. I’m not surprised.

But I wish he hadn’t.

Which came first, the moody teen, or the YA fiction that moody teens often gravitate towards? Linda Holmes of NPR responds to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that criticized YA fiction for being “too dark”:

I’m more intrigued by the aspirational nature of the quaint but sad idea that teenagers, if you don’t give them The Hunger Games, can be effectively surrounded by images of joy and beauty.

While the WSJ piece refers to the YA fiction view of the world as a funhouse mirror, I fear that what’s distorted is the vision of being a teenager that suggests kids don’t know pathologies like suicide or abuse unless they read about them in books.

Do you remember being 15?

For some people, it was a breeze. There are absolutely, positively people who had a very easy time as adolescents, who feel a little guilty about the fact that they didn’t actually find youth all that difficult, and it’s unfair to declare their experiences invalid or uninteresting or inauthentic.

But there are plenty — plenty — of people for whom, if they are honest, it was a time of isolation and bafflement and plain old gutting it out until they got older. And even when it wasn’t miserable, it was often complicated, and a lot of kids who don’t experience abusive dating relationships or self-harm or eating disorders? They already know somebody who does. Surrounding them with books full of joy and beauty is fine, but confining their reading to those things because we are afraid that they cannot tolerate being exposed to the things they are already so often exposed to does them a terrible disservice. It’s difficult to say to a teenager, “We don’t even let you read about anyone who cuts herself; it’s that much of a taboo. But by all means, if you’re cutting yourself, feel free to tell a trusted adult.”

Honestly, the kids who are reading the scary YA fiction — the dark stuff, the creepy stuff, the adventurous and weird and dirty stuff — are the same kids who, if YA fiction weren’t dark and creepy sometimes, would just read dark and creepy books for adults.

When I was a teen, I remember my mother sitting me down for a serious talk about the music I was listening to: she was concerned that it was “too depressing,” that it might be making me angsty. Okay, she had a point; it was pretty angsty stuff (hey, it was the ’90s, the era of bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana, where the anguished wail became an art form). But to my mind, the music expressed what I was already feeling. That was why I listened to it: it spoke to me.

So do young adults need to be shielded from “dark” YA lit? Or does it help them to express what they’re already feeling and convince them—crucially—that they’re not alone? I have to say I’m with Holmes on this one.

What happens when you take The Great Gatsby and try to make it more “accessible”?

This:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

becomes this:

Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

At least, that’s what happened in the “Intermediate” Macmillan Reader edition of The Great Gatsby (full text here). Roger Ebert is not a fan, calling it “an obscenity”:

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look. [...]

What depresses me is what this Macmillan Reader edition says about our American educational system. Any high school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read. That student has been sold a bill of goods. We know that teachers at the college level complain that many of their students cannot read and write competently. If this is an example of a book they are assigned, can they be blamed?

Now, before you join Ebert in throwing his hissy-fit, I should point out that the Macmillan Readers appear to be geared towards ESL students. In an interview, the book’s adaptor, Margaret Tarner (who has written over 40 of these readers since the ’70s), discusses the value of the books in helping students learn proper English:

Well it helps them to work by themselves. I mean, the teacher can read them in the class, they can do various things together, but basically reading is an individual accomplishment and it teaches them that they can use the skills they’ve learned in reading their own language – they can take those over into English, and they can read about interesting events, interesting things, widen their knowledge and it is essential that the re-write is written in really good English.

Over at The Guardian, writer Alison Flood takes a slightly more measured approach. She argues:

I’m with Ms BookSlut, Jessa Crispin, who read adaptations as a kid and doesn’t feel they “prevented me from reading the real versions once I was ready, nor did it do any brain damage or put me off books. I read them for the story as a kid – murder and intrigue and violence and revolution – and then for the prose later on, when it wasn’t so off-putting.” Like Imogen Russell Williams, I read the Ladybird adaptations of the classics and loved them, coming amazed to the proper versions when I grew older, not put off in any way.

Where do you stand on this? Are editions like the Macmillan Gatsby “obscenities,” or do they serve a legitimate educational purpose? Or (gasp) both?

Via.

What’s wrong with these two sentences?

We will keep the book in our stacks for another two weeks. If you decide to order a review after that time, we will ask you to send another copy.

That’s from an email Chad Post of Three Percent received recently from ForeWord Reviews.

Yes, you read that right: “if you decide to order a review.” ForeWord Digital Reviews, as the email explained, charges authors to have their books reviewed:

Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print magazine. Each issue of ForeWord only allows us to cover a few great pre-publication books, and many books come to us that we’d love to review if we had the space. Our Web site has lots of space!

[...] Digital Reviews are different from ForeWord reviews in that they are a fee-for-service review. A $99 fee covers the expense of writing and posting the review.

As Post points out, this means that “the only reviews on the site are ones that are bought. That makes for a very skewed representation of what the new books are… ” Here’s my question: isn’t a paid book review pretty much like… an ad?

What do you think? Are fee-for-service book reviews as helpful to readers (and authors) as the more-typical, non-sold ones? Would you trust a “bought” review?

According to NPR, in his apology post on the blog, MacMaster defends himself by claiming he was writing fiction:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

In fact, the headline of the New York Times story on the subject read, “‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact.”

This story reminds me of another I saw recently, also involving an elaborate online hoax and extended correspondences with a completely made-up person. In that case, a woman believed she was in an online romance with a firefighter from Colorado—only to discover that the whole thing was an elaborate fiction made up by a Chicago woman:

When the Colorado volunteer firefighter she loved died unexpectedly of liver cancer in 2006, Paula Bonhomme tenderly re-examined his gifts to her: a rubber duck with a firefighter hat, a lock of his hair, a flattened quarter he’d stuck on the train tracks as a kid. [...]

Even though they had never met, Bonhomme left an unhappy marriage in Los Angeles and was set to move to Colorado in 2006 when she learned James was dead. He hadn’t told anyone else of his diagnosis, James’ sister said, and didn’t want a memorial service. “You all have temples within you,” he wrote in a last note, “go there if you want to honor me.”

About seven months later, Bonhomme’s friends uncovered the creepy truth. James, his young son and about 20 other friends and family members Bonhomme had been communicating with for months were characters allegedly created by a woman in Chicago’s west suburbs.

The depth of the alleged deception stunned Bonhomme. Janna St. James, who lives in Batavia, had allegedly used a voice-altering device to pose as Jesse James on the phone, coordinated numerous storylines with her characters that advanced in emails and instant messages, and sent and received mail — including children’s drawings — from all over the world.

The alleged perpetrator, St. James, also takes refuge in the terms of fiction. According to the Chicago Tribune St. James’s defense included

[an] argument that she was creating fiction and therefore wasn’t liable.

“The concepts of falsity and material fact do not apply in the context of fiction,” her attorney had written, “because fiction does not purport to represent reality.”

But do these kind of hoaxes count as “fiction”? One of the key terms of fiction, it seems to me, is the reader knowing that the story is made up. Fiction is a kind of contract a reader must enter willingly: You’re going to tell me something that isn’t true, but that has meaning anyway, and I will accept your story with the knowledge that it isn’t true.

If the reader doesn’t know the story is false, he or she invariably ends up feeling deceived when the truth is revealed—because that’s exactly what happened. If it’s written down—even if you’re writing in character—it might be a fiction, but it’s not fiction. It’s just a lie.