Fidel Castro in a recent public appearance at the Havana aquarium

Don’t count him out yet: Cuba’s Fidel Castro, long considered at death’s door, has announced that he is publishing a new book. According to this CNN report, Castro will “publish a new book in August on the fighting more than 50 years ago between his ragtag rebels and the 10,000-strong army under former dictator Fulgencio Batista.”

According to a (Spanish language) post on the state-run website, www.cubadebate.cu, Castro says the book will be called The Strategic Victory, and “I didn’t know whether to call it Batista’s Last Offensive or How 300 Defeated 10,000, which would sound like a science fiction story.” Always the jokester.

Castro, according to CNN’s report, said “the 25 chapters contain photos, maps and illustrations of the weapons used during a series of battles that lasted 74 days in 1958 and paved the way for his bearded revolutionaries to declare victory on January 1, 1959. “The enemy suffered more than 1,000 losses, more than 300 of them deaths and 443 taken prisoner,” he writes, seeming to indicate that math may not be his strong point.

Since 2006, when illness caused Castro to cede his head-of-state powers to his brother, Raul, he has been posting his “Reflections of Comrade Fidel” for cubadebate.cu. Now, with his announcement of the forthcoming book and a concurrent increase in his public activity—making seven appearances in the last few weeks— it sounds like he is ready for his comeback tour.

And there’s more. According to CNN, “Castro said he would now start work on a book covering the second half of the fighting, called The Final Strategic Counteroffensive.”

Which all brings to mind a classic Chevy Chase routine from way back when on Saturday Night Live. For those of you too young to remember, you can catch it here:

Today is the birthday of the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this day in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England. Raised Anglican, in an artistic and prosperous home, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, and he decided to become a priest himself. He entered a Jesuit novitiate near London in 1867, and he vowed to “write no more…unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of his poetry and would not write poems again until 1875.

Nonetheless, when he began writing again, on the occasion of a shipwreck that took the lives of five Franciscan nuns, it was an outpouring unlike anything English language poetry had seen. His highly compressed, musical language introduced new aural affects, often using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Straining at the boundaries of sense, he pushed poetic language into the 20th Century.

For a full taste of Hopkin’s accomplishments, try the magnificent poem below — perhaps the first cri-de-coeur for environmental sensitivity in English Letters:

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

If the above piqued your interest, the Poetry Foundation website has more here on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The cover of the Pope's new children's book

Emperor Palpatine Pope Benedict XVI has published his first children’s book!  The pope, apparently already an author of many volumes, has taken it upon himself to educate young ones about his religion.  Maybe entice them to get into it a bit more.  Granted, I can’t really tell you what its about (the title is Gli Amici Di Gesu?!) because I don’t even know two words of Italian, but from the cover illustration, it looks like its about Jesus.  If I had to guess, I would say its about the friends of Jesus (Amici IS one of the words I know!).  So I’ll have to trust Shelf Life’s brief summary:

It features a collection of the Pope’s descriptions of Jesus’ relationship with his “first companions,” including the original 12 apostles, Matthias, and St. Paul.

(That sounds like a terribly boring book to me, but heck, what do I know.  If I were a kid, this would not sell me on Catholicism.)

And, side note, when does he have time to do this? I mean, come on–if Obama doesn’t have time to write a book about ‘Bo, how does the leader of the entire Catholic Church have time to do this?  Can’t he at least cop to a ghostwriter?  Everybody does it.

Don’t worry, English and Spanish versions are forthcoming.  Maybe some nice US editor will spruce it up a bit… make it look less, well, church-y.  Its a kids book after all!  Can’t wait to give it a go.  I hope they have a nice Judas chapter…

Okay, religiously-offensive post over.

Sam Weller and the Skyped Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, reigning King of Sci-fi, was transported via fiber optics from his home in Los Angeles to New York City yesterday.

According to this post on the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog, “Although Ray Bradbury resides in Los Angeles, he made a 45-minute appearance in New York Wednesday night to chat with his biographer Sam Weller about Weller’s book, Listen to the Echoes; The Ray Bradbury Interviews (Melville House).” The 90-year-old Bradbury video-phoned in via Skype from his living room to speak with Weller, who sat next to a projection of Bradbury in front of a 120 people in Soho’s McNally Jackson Bookstore.

Bradbury, a benign king, is well-loved among both literati and the sci-fi set, so the place was packed. According to the Journal:

In order to accommodate the massive crowd, the SoHo independent bookstore staff rearranged the front of the store as Bradbury lovers eagerly grabbed available chairs. The café closed early to ensure the sputtering cappuccino machine would finish its noisy rounds before Weller began. Complete silence fell upon the room as if a sacred event was to begin.

Dialing California, the coffee machine dared not sputter as the audience hung in anticipation of the Skype session.

The first call attempt failed, then all at once sunlight mixed with big black glasses and filled the screen. Bradbury waved, Weller waved, like two old friends meeting once again. For the duration of the conversation Weller softly and comfortably questioned a smiling Bradbury, knowing how the man would respond to each of his questions.

Addressing the shear magnitude of his output—over 600 short sstories alone—Bradbury told the audience, “I’m a great big pomegranate that exploded all over the place and now my seeds are everywhere.”

He also told the story of writing his famous, and still best-selling, Fahrenheit 451:

“I found a typewriter in the back of the library at UCLA. It cost 10 cents for a half hour. I spent nine days at that typewriter and it cost me $9.80 to write Fahrenheit 451,” said Bradbury.

As Weller’s interview drew to a close, he turned the computer toward the audience, which enthusiastically waved good-bye to Bradbury. Bradbury waved back, said good-bye, and signed out.

Really good glasses

In a piercingly smart article called “Pass the Gestalt, Please” on his Black Plastic Glasses blog, Evan Schnittman gives a master class on ebook royalties that transcends to a luminous consideration of even larger core issues besetting the place where literary art meets commerce.

He was set off, Schnittman says, by repeatedly hearing “forcefully stated pronouncements” from people such as Andrew Wylie and British writers’ union head Tom Holland declaring “The publisher has little or no incremental out of pocket cost to create ebooks, therefore the income should be split in the same manner as subsidiary rights, which is generally 50/50.”

But, Schnittman — who runs the runs Global Business Development at the Oxford University Press — says…

… there is a huge flaw in this view, as it is built on the self-serving and reductive assumption that ebooks can and should be viewed as separate from the book’s overall economy. By attacking ebook royalties in this manner, a trap is set by those seeking to maximize short-term profits at the expense of all else. The object of this ploy is to dissect the intellectual property into as many different pieces as possible and negotiate them on the open market in order to maximize the “deal.”

For example, it’s pretty much a bald faced-lie — not an error or inaccuracy but a lie — to call ebook rights “subsidiary rights.” As Schnittman deftly explains,

Publishing contracts grant two kinds of rights to publishers—primary rights and subsidiary rights. Primary rights grant the publisher the right to create and sell a product, be it in print, audio, electronic, or any other form that the publisher invests and distributes directly to buyers, resellers, and/or agents.

Subsidiary rights, (aka subrights, rights, licensing) enable the publisher to license the work to a third party for the purpose of that party creating a new work—one that the publisher may not be equipped or desire to do. A good example of a classic subsidiary right is translations. Traditionally, the publisher shares the income it receives from this license 50/50 with the author, as the publisher does not bear the expense of creating and selling the translated work.

Looking at ebooks, publishers have clearly, universally, and without hesitation, put ebooks into the primary rights category. We all create ebooks and sell them directly and through resellers and agents. Any implication that ebooks are a subsidiary right is flat out wrong.

But agents such as Andrew Wylie know this (which is what makes it a lie). So what’s going on? “It all comes from a long established program of negotiations that I call ‘win at all cost,’” says Schnittman.

When one decides on a win at all cost negotiation strategy, one is looking only at the deal on the table and how to get the absolute most for oneself, and ostensibly one’s clients.  One of the most effective tactics in win at all cost negotiation is divide and conquer. Divide and conquer purposely disaggregates issues and boils them down to one issue at a time negotiations. Examples of this in publishing are when territorial rights are sold separately for English language books, when e-rights or translation rights are sold for additional advance income or, worse, withheld and sold elsewhere, etc. Publishers have seen a marked acceleration in the practice of disaggregating rights to works.

The net result of this practice is that no one can create anywhere near a coherent marketing and publicity program for trade books as no one knows who owns what. Furthermore, it is impossible to align efforts, as competing publishers often own different portions of rights to the same work. It’s the authors who suffer in the end.

Thus does the discussion of dishonesty about ebooks spread to a brilliant dissection of a core problem facing the industry today: the fracturing of intellectual properties from the champions who would invest in their promotion, while simultaneously embittering the creators of those properties against those champions.

As Schnittman observes, “a book’s value is a very gestalt concept. The whole work has FAR greater value than the sum of the individual rights. Allowing each individual part, or right, to be disaggregated and auctioned to the highest bidder serves only those who make profit from short-term gain.”

So who might that be? Schnittman makes clear who he holds responsible for this scenario in a final, telling anecdote:

Recently a colleague told me of a letter he received from an author bitterly complaining that the publisher in question had not been selling his book in the UK. The publisher responded, in a state of incredible frustration, that the author’s agent had withheld UK rights in order to try and extract an additional deal for the UK. This strategy backfired, no one bought the rights in the UK without corresponding US rights, and the author and the publisher were harmed in the process.

British author Alan Shadrake speaks during the launch of his book Once a Jolly Hangman in Singapore on Saturday.

British author and freelance journalist Alan Shadrake, 75, who was arrested in Singapore while promoting his book on executions (as reported earlier on MobyLives here), was released on bail Tuesday pending further investigations by police.

According to a Agence France Presse wire report, “a local activist posted bail of 10,000 Singapore dollars (47,000 pounds) for him.” Shadrake is facing charges of criminal defamation and contempt of court, which are punishable by jail and fines for his book—Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock which addresses the governments use of the death penalty.

“Critics say Singapore, which has only five million people, has one of the world’s highest rates of executions but the government refuses to disclose any numbers and maintains that capital punishment helps keep crime rates low,” observes the AFP report.

Upon release a haggard-looking Shadrake told the AFP “he had hardly slept ’since they dragged me out of bed. I’ve had a few hours of sleep on a very hard floor and I’ve been sitting at the desk being interrogated all day long explaining all the chapters of the book and going through the history of the book, my research, why I did the book.’”

According to the AFP:

Amnesty International earlier urged Singapore’s government to immediately release the elderly author.

“Singapore uses criminal defamation laws to silence critics of government policies,” Donna Guest, Amnesty’s Asia Pacific Deputy Director, said in London.

“The Singapore government should release Shadrake at once.”

She added: “If Singapore aspires to be a global media city, it needs to respect global human rights standards for freedom of expression… Singapore should get rid of both its criminal defamation laws and the death penalty.”

Shadrake’s passport has been impounded to prevent him from leaving Singapore until the case is resolved. Hearings for the case are scheduled to begin July 30th.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does a sound check, then talks about how he came up with the idea for Sherlock Holmes, as well as a bit about some paranormal experiences he’s had in the amazing footage below …

Jules Verne’s long-forsaken novel about the supernatural and the un-dead, is back from the dead! Pre-dating Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Castle in Transylvania (Melville House), is an eerie tale of the supernatural set in a forgotten valley in the mountains of Transylvania.

We’ve just republished the novel in a beautiful new translation that does justice to Verne’s prose, and a spiffy new package, not to mention its first new translation in over a century. And, according to author Paul Di Fillipo in this wonderfully considered review in his column for the B&N Review, “Verne’s tale remains compulsively readable…”

After complimenting the translation, (”let us pay homage to the fine new translation by the experienced and talented Charlotte Mandell“) Di Fillipo goes on to say, “…this book is an illuminating rarity among Verne’s output, a Gothic-steeped romance whose scientific aspects are kept hidden till the climax.”

Not to spoil anything, but the story goes a little something like this:

In a tiny village, cut off from the outside world, unnatural events are menacing the populace. Apparitions of vampires and zombies terrorize the townsfolk who come to believe that the Devil occupies the abandoned castle looming over their town. A visitor to the region, a young count, vows to liberate the town from this thrall—pitting his reason against the forces of evil and superstition. Yet he too must confront the limits of reason when he views, in the depths of the castle, his long-dead love…

In this simple plot, Di Fillipo cites Verne as anticipating much that came after in Sci-Fi and Gothic writing, as well as your basic TV and movie suspense tropes. He even notes that while, “Verne’s handling of a love affair is anomalous and intriguing…it prefigures the then-unwritten The Phantom of the Opera in fascinating ways.”

Though unique in Verne’s oeuvre, according to Di Fillipo, “The Castle in Transylvania stands as an example of Verne at his most pleasurable and educational, exploring the remarkable reality of our simultaneous technological plummet and ascent.”

One of our favorite journals is featuring one of our favorite authors: T Cooper, author of the newly released Beaufort Diaries (Melville House) is featured here in the most recent issue of One Story Magazine. Check out the great Q&A with T wherein he discusses his short story, The Husband, writing, sex, and various body parts, here.

Here’s a teaser from the interview:

One Story: Where did the idea of this story come from?

T Cooper: Short answer: When my wife casually asked me to unzip her dress one night.
Long answer: Probably because I think about masculinity a lot, and with reference to this story, I recall thinking specifically about how women generally tend to be more fluid with their understanding and acceptance of gender, while men who are born male, they rarely seem to get beyond the dick/no-dick thing. I find that a lot of dudes refuse to accept female-to-male (FTM) transguys’ masculinity or maleness solely on the basis of there not being a natal penis present on the body in question—as though all the trappings and traits of masculinity are wrapped up in that one tiny appendage. It’s a lot of responsibility and pressure for any appendage to handle. I mean, following that thinking, I suppose the soldier who loses his little guy when an IED explodes under his Hummer is no longer male when he’s sent home on medical discharge. So it got me thinking about a character like the husband, an aging fellow whose masculinity (member) is failing him, what it would feel like for him to recognize he’s slowly and steadily being “upstaged” in the manly department by someone who wasn’t even born male—and his own offspring no less.

One Story: What is the best bit of advice about writing you have ever gotten?
T Cooper: Don’t be an asshole. It wasn’t necessarily specifically about writing, but I think it nevertheless applies.

Reading room at the NYPL

There is something innately appealing to book lovers about a secret place to read and write. This article in the New York Observer blows the cover on just such a place — a secret writers’ room, hiding in plain sight at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library, the Allen Room.

“‘It’s like Aladdin’s cave,’” author Alexander Rose, a current Allen Room initiate, told the Observer, “‘I looked it up, and it actually did exist.’”

“Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors,” reports the Observer. “Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card.”

Says the report,

In a 1971 essay for New York, Avery Corman described the Allen Room as ‘elite stuff,’ a place where ‘Saul Bellow probably couldn’t get in.’ Six years later, Noemie Emery spun an Allen Room tale of sex and insanity for Publisher’s Weekly, counting among the room’s residents a German countess who wrote of her helicopter rescue from an asylum and the granddaughter of a famous psychiatrist who spent her library hours investigating lesbian witches in Staten Island. Betty Friedan, who wrote a portion of The Feminine Mystique in the room, was known to drive people nuts with her noise.

Though it may seem forbidding in it’s exclusivity, with only 9 cubicles, Allen Room liaison Jay Barksdale told the Observer that “40 to 50 people hold key cards at any one time, and if a term of access officially ends after one year, many people request (and receive) extensions. ‘We don’t want to create obstructions,’ he explained.”

The Observer writes that on closer inspection the Allen Room is a remarkably bland, unglamorous place, with little to distract working writers, “Novelist Jennifer Vanderbes notes, ‘An exciting week at the Allen Room is when a non-member rattles the door handle trying to get in.’”

No exciting Norman Mailer-style hi-jinx here. But, there are benefits, as Barksdale notes, “it might be the last place on earth where silence is respected.”