How to co-write with a dead author

Ben H. Winters chose a Ms. Jane Austen for a collaboration. He writes for the Huffington Post on how this is done.

BHW: Writing with the deceased is not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, you're really on your own when it comes to publicity; our book came out two months ago, and Jane Austen has yet to turn up for a book signing or radio interview. More...

Portrait of Sir Richard Francis Burton

Powells goes into great detail about one of the most over-the-top literary characters of all time.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton was a completely crazy nutjob who had more adventures on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night than most lesser humans manage to cram into a two-week vacation inside the stomach of a still-breathing whale. This author, soldier, adventurer, explorer, geographer, translator, linguist, fencer, duelist, anthropologist, and pretty much anything else you can ever think of –ist spoke a mind-crushing 29 different languages and dialects fluently, wrote 50+ books ranging in content and sanity from travelogues to erotic fiction, explored uncharted lands in India, Africa, and the Middle East, and was the first person to translate the borderline-pornographic content of The Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights into English. He also had a gnarly attitude, a glorious beard, and a hot temper that drove him to kill more people than a Dirty Harry movie. More...

Crime novels

Jason Pinter in the Huffington Post rounds up and interesting panel to discuss the state of the crime novel today. As Pinter says, "crime novels have been responsible for some of the most beloved (and loathed) characters of our time, while telling some of the most important stories and peeling back society's flesh to reveal its bare bones. Crime novels can keep us entertained during a long plane ride, or comment on the most relevant issues of the day. Sometimes they do both." More...

Interview with John Updike

The Second Pass blog points us to an interview from a Croatian magazine in 1979, recently republished in the New Yorker. (Sorry to put in all these connections, but it seems to make sense to me that I should point out how I found things, given the nature of this blog.) Second Pass offers a wonderful take-out quote:

Updike on Moby-Dick: “The wish to say all there is about whales is certainly very much there, and one puts the book down convinced that Melville has said a great deal about whales.” Via.

Narratives at length

Even though we're in the business of editing down novels, we are firm believers in the long form of narrative. We love books, and we believe in books. That we create a shorter version of books is as much as anything a reflection of that love of books, an attempt to put them in another format for another sort of reader who might not see these books otherwise. So it's nice to read a piece, like this one in the Washington Post, that agrees with our own thought that the need for narrative is part of what it means to be human. And that the whole everything-is-getting-shorter brigade may not exactly be right.

WP: It's not simply the appreciation of fiction that's adaptive. It's the appreciation of any kind of narrative. Kids at bedtime don't specify true or false: They just say "tell me a story."... Kids today have no attention span, we are told -- and then devour all seven of the Harry Potter books multiple times. More...

Interview with Malcolm Gladwell

Meet the author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

The Guardian: In the boardrooms of publishing houses in New York and London, editors regularly deploy the phrase. As in (spoken with faint hysteria in voice): "Will someone please tell me where our next Gladwellian book is coming from?" More...

Cheap books = fewer books

Sure, you can grab a bestseller cheap at the local megastore. But that aggressive pricing has consequences because it's only the bestsellers that come cheap, and if this keeps up, maybe it will be only the bestsellers that get published. But that doesn't make sense, either as a business or as a way to develop new authors. This piece by William Petrocelli laids it all out.

WP: Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer. Some readers think that if their favorite store closes they can always buy the book they want somewhere else. But that's a dangerous delusion -- the books they want may not be there at all. In fact, these types of disruptions in how books are sold or distributed has a profound effect on what publishers decide to publish in the first place. More...