For those of you who don’t know it, there’s a great podcast that comes out of San Francisco’s NPR affiliate KQED called Writers’ Block.  It’s a weekly reading series with a little bit of everything — and we mean everything.  Junot Diaz, John Waters, Audrey Niffenegger, Daniel Handler (I could go on forever…) … all reading from their work on air!  Last week when T Cooper was out in San Fran (for a fabulous City Lights event, a great indie bookstore), he stopped by KQED and taped the first four chapters of his new book The Beaufort Diaries.  Listen in below, and if you want to subscribe to the series, you can do it via NPR or iTunes, whatever your preference.

“Two civil rights organizations are suing Virginia prison officials because they banned inmates from receiving a book teaching them how to file lawsuits against prisons,” reports an Associated Press wire story.

The story says the National Lawyers Guild and Melville House authors the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, as well as “officials at Coffeewood Correctional Center and members of the department’s Publication Review Committee,” for banning prisoners from reading The Jailhouse Lawyer’s Handbook.

According to the CCR’s website, the Handbook — which is available as a download here –

… explains how a person in a state prison can start a lawsuit in the federal court, to fight against mistreatment and bad conditions. The Handbook does not assume that a lawsuit is the only way to challenge poor treatment or that it is always the best way. It only assumes that a lawsuit can sometimes be one useful weapon in the ongoing struggle to change prisons and the society that makes prisons the way they are.

The NLG and the CCR charge the ban violated prisoners’ First Amendment and due process rights.

Prison officials had no comment.

It’s Independents Day, at least in our neck of the woods. We’ll be back tomorrow.

“I have rifled the poor man’s underwear drawer,” says Sam Weller, biographer of Ray Bradbury. “Such is the invasive snooping endemic to the role of the biographer. Along with the BVDs and the boxer shorts, I’ve combed his tax records, gone through his lineage with the precision of an OCD-addled genealogist, and I’ve clocked, oh, about 500 hours of audio recordings of our intimate, far-ranging and often wildly tangential conversations.”

All that, to put together Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, about to be released by Melville House under its Stop Smiling line. In a commentary for Time Out Chicago, Weller discusses how he set about being THE biographer of such a giant writer. As he notes,

For the last decade I have worked to document Ray Bradbury’s life story. Most people know Bradbury by his 1953 chef d’oeuvre, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopic staple of middle-school reading lists. But his résumé also includes no less notable literary feats as The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and Dandelion Wine …

Ten years is a long haul. The term that comes to mind is immersion journalism. For just more than a decade now, I have spent a truly unprecedented amount of time with a man recently hailed by Slate.com as “The Mythologist of Our Age.” His stories have, without question, seeped into our collective consciousness.

So what was it like,after all, to work with Ray Bradbury for ten years? Several things come to Weller’s mind, most notably that it was …

Weird. On November 17, 2004, we went to the White House. Bradbury was given the Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush. Afterward, drinking copious taxpayer-funded white wine in the East Room, VP Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, told me that she dreamt the night before that she visited Mars. You don’t say….).

Hey! Melville House and MobyLives get some love on the Huffington Post. We’re featured in a survey of the best publishing websites — right up there with the big boys. Check out the post, and cast your vote (favorably, please) for us!

This October, a new YA novel fictionalizing the life of Anne Frank is being released by Houghton Mifflin.  Four months out, it is already causing controversy.  The latest cause for concern?  The sexual content of the book.  The UK press that is publishing the book told the Times of London that there was indeed a sex scene cut from the book — now whether this is to drum up more publicity or is in fact true, I guess we have to leave it to editor.  But outside of the concerns that the book is overly sexualized, many are wondering why the book was written in the first place.

The director of the Anne Frank Trust, Gillian Walnes, told the New York Times that it was “not fair on someone who was a living person… I really don’t understand why we have to fictionalize the Anne Frank story, when young people engage with it anyway. To me it seems like exploitation.”

I have to agree with Ms. Walnes, although I haven’t read the book.  Why confuse the story of this very famous young girl, whose diary is read in schools, synagogues, libraries, and homes all across the world with a fictional account?  What is gained by it?  It is not the story itself that is offensive, but rather the use of such a celebrated historical figure.  If one wants to right about a fictional girl in hiding during the Holocaust who falls in love with the boy with whom she is hiding, be my guest!

But it is unnecessary to fill in the unknown gaps of the historical record as such.  And while we do have a record of Anne’s thoughts, dreams and everyday existence, we don’t have such from the boy, Peter van Pels.  This book then hurts him more than her, but he is left with no defenders.  I only hope the two of them aren’t rolling in their graves (who knows, maybe they think this is hysterical, maybe its true!) and that she can continue to be remembered as the girl in the diary, and not the girl in the book.

Bao Pu, publisher of confiscated memoir

Hong Kong publisher Bao Pu, of New Century Press, “has been forced to halt the much-awaited publication of former Chinese premier Li Peng’s memoirs of controversial events leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protests,” according to this Reuters report.

20,000 Chinese-language copies of The Tiananmen Diary of Li Peng had been scheduled to go on sale in Hong Kong on June 22, but the publisher stopped publication Friday because he did not have copyright ownership, Reuters reported.

“‘Relevant institutions provided information related to copyright (ownership) before publication. According to Hong Kong copyright laws, we have no choice but to scrap our original publication plans,’” Bao Pu told Reuters on Saturday. He would not elaborate on who approached him to stop publication

Reuters also reports that they “obtained an advance copy of the memoirs in which Li reveals that China’s revered reformist leader, Deng Xiaoping, said the government had to “spill some blood” to quell the June 4, 1989, protests.”

As Reuters points out, by mobilizing to stop publication, the authorities appear to be “giving credence to the authenticity of the memoirs.”

Bao told reporters, “The memoirs have historical value and significance and the public have a willingness to know. Hence, it’s very natural for us to decide to publish them. It was a prudent decision.”

Bao gave no indication of what will become of the copies he printed nor would he comment on the losses that his press will incur.

Thursday at 19:36 Marc Prud’hommeaux, founder and chief developer at Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza e-book reader, announced, via his blog, the exceeding strange news that the Stanza e-reading app is now, against expectations, available on the i-Pad. Read his note in its charming entirety here.

Why strange? Charlie Sorrel in a commentary at Wired repeats the consensus that “Amazon had bought out Stanza only to kill it and reduce competition for its own Kindle for iPad,” adding,  “It turns out we were wrong.” (Wired’s headline, “Stanza for iPad Adds Comic-Book Support,” is a portent that may distress book publishers as much as or more than e-book innovation.)

In short, it seems that Amazon, which owns Stanza, has again produced an app for its arch-competitor Apple’s device which makes of the i-Pad an e-book reader superior to Amazon’s own Kindle. Of course, e-books from Amazon cannot be read on Stanza, as this post explains on Lexcyle’s website (on the i-Pad you will need Amazon’s Kindle app – also free).

Sorrel calls Stanza “our favorite iPhone e-reading app ever” and it has another fan in CNET’s Scott Stein, who in a review calls it “a longtime favorite of iPhone and iPod Touch users.” (iPhone and iPod Touch are both less than three years old. I wonder what the original meaning of  “longtime” was.)

Here is a summary of some of Stanza’s i-Pad app features:

1. It’s free.

2. Supports “an amazing amount of font, spacing and color customization.” (CNET)

3. And PDF and DjVu documents: “DjVu allows for the distribution on the Internet and on DVD of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs.”
http://djvu.org/

4. Supports full color Comic Book Archive files CBR and CBZ, “and it’s fast.” (Wired)

5. “You can also share e-books (or any file in Stanza) via e-mail….E-mailing a CBR comic file directly from Stanza is easy.” (CNET)

6. “Stanza 3.0 also reports itself correctly to the iPad OS, telling it that it is ready to open EPUB files. This lets you open books direct from the web or found elsewhere on the iPad, such as in email attachments or inside Dropbox.” (Wired)

7. “Unlike the Kindle and Barnes & Noble apps, Stanza can still browse Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and several other book collections directly within the app.” (CNET)

8. “[A]ny e-books you may already have in Stanza can be gotten out and copied to your computer” (Wired)

9. “Stanza incorporates page-turning that makes the experience just like other e-books, but without requiring conversion.” (CNET)

10. Turkish & Bulgarian translations.

It’s the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., and we’re trying to make it memorable by reading and not responding to outside stimulus …. Back tomorrow ….

So you’ve written a book and think you’ve got the perfect title. Then you see there’s another book coming out with the same title. Problem?

The answer, of course, is clear-cut: Maybe, maybe not. Which breaks down to a brief but interesting-enough discussion in this blog post called “Drowning in the Title Pool” at Editorial Ass. (”Ass is short for ‘assistant,’ but also describes more accurately what exactly is thought of an editorial assistant, and what their job description entails.”) As the proprietor recalls,

I got a book into production that had the same title (same genre, slightly similar plots) as another book at a much, much larger company. We had both announced our deals in PW, and just missed each other through neglect. At the last minute, the big house called me and tried to bully me into changing my title–but we were already close to press, and so we won (they had to change). There is no moral to this story, really; it only proves that it could come about that no one ever notices your title match.

Okay so the conversation doesn’t go much deeper than that — neither the, er, Ass, nor any of his/her correspondents offer many examples or discuss knowledge of any actual repercussions involved in cases of matching titles (although someone does write in to point out to the, er, Ass, that someone else had already posted an article using the same title).

But in this old conversation at Library Thing, discussants offer numerous examples of matching titles — such as Sanctuary, by William Faulkner and, also, Edith Wharton; The Homecoming, by Harold Pinter and Ray Bradbury; and, appropriately, The Double, by Fyodor Dostoevski and Jose Saramago.

Or how about Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, not to mention Meg Cabot, Cate Tiernan, and Elie Wiesel.

Then there’s Night Shift, by Stephen King, Jessie Hartland, Nora Roberts, Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott, Valerie Sinason, Brad Curtis, Henry Brewis, David Belbin, Carl Hanni, Greg Biehle and Martha Moore, Maria Gitin, Dermot Bolger, Maritta Wolff and George Salter, Mark Murphy, Margot J. Fromer, Dave Shive and Michelle Lovric, John F. Kirch, Mike Staier, Inez Holden, Zondervan, Lowell Ganz, and Marc Blitzstein … so far ….