TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Paperback Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin3. I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, by Tucker Max4. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls5. BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell feeds.nytimes.com |
Enthusiasm for Palin, and Echoes of 2008 Divide On her book tour, Sarah Palin has skipped the big cities authors usually visit in favor of smaller places where she and Senator John McCain performed well in 2008. feeds.nytimes.com |
Books of The Times: Communism’s Path: A Once-Vigorous Idea That Has Lost Its Muscle A stolid and largely by-the-numbers recitation of communism’s rise and its spread, in various manifestations, across the globe. feeds.nytimes.com |
Is it time to revive the Christmas tradition of the chapbook? In these straitened times, how about taking a leaf out of the Victorians' book and presenting friends and family with pamphlets of our own literary endeavours during the festive season?Last year at Christmas, feeling a little credit crunched along with most of the population, I watched a seasonal TV show that advocated making your own gifts - probably presented by Kirstie Allsop. I liked the idea, but fiddly, mistletoe-festooned table decorations have never been my forte. So I decided to give the only homemade gift I had at my fingertips - writing.I wrote a short story called Christmas Blues, a gentle, seasonal ghost story, ran off 25 copies, and put them in green card covers. Channelling Julie Andrews, I tied them up with string, signed and numbered each one, and gave them to friends and family.It was a chapbook, I suppose: a cheaply produced pamphlet of original writing, sold by itinerant peddlers known as chapmen as far back as the 16th century.My contemporary chapbook was a moderate success (one reader reported a tear in their eye) so I repeated it this year with another Yuletide supernatural tale, One More For Christmas Dinner. It now appears that I have set myself an annual task, with some self-imposed parameters: the story shall be around 2500 words, and it will be written in one sitting some time in the month of December. It will always be a ghost story, but with no sex, profanity or violence - my Mum and Auntie have to read it. Well, I say no violence - someone does get hit over the head with a lead pipe in the latest one. But you can't really escape death in some form with a ghost story.It's a hugely egotistical exercise, I admit, but no more so than hoping people you know will shell out hard cash for a properly-published piece of fiction. Chapbooks of this kind are homemade, personal and inexpensive - and have an illustrious literary history.Privately-printed stories, poems and essays have long been circulated among acquaintances of writers, especially during Victorian times. Indeed, a fascinating essay was published in the New York Times in 1899 bemoaning the apparent death of the trend in the face of the rise of mass-market publishing. "The era of privately printed books, so far as this department of literature is concerned, is at an end," it read. "Comparatively large numbers of memoirs and family papers are issued by the press all year round, especially in the Winter publishing season. Almost all of them are now put on the market in the ordinary way and are not, as was formerly the fashion, privately printed at the expense of the authors or of the families most concerned, and distributed exclusively among friends."Many much-loved stories began life in this way, especially as Christmas gifts. Philip van Doren Stern's The Greatest Gift: A Christmas Tale was presented as a Christmas card to his friends in 1943. It later became the basis for that most seasonal of movies, Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Herman Melville, meanwhile, when he took to writing poetry in later life, found his 1876 epic Clarel http://www.melville.org/hmclarel.htm largely ignored, and he only distributed his subsequent works privately to friends. Henry James wrote a dramatisation of his own novella Daisy Miller, which he again presented as a chapbook for acquaintances.Original chapbooks can also command high values - a copy of a 25-print run poem by Thomas Hardy was recently on the market for $3,500. I don't expect my own efforts will ever amount to that, but I did give a copy to a work colleague who, while not particularly interested in supernatural fiction, accepted it with a slight glint in his eye and mused: "Just imagine if JK Rowling had done that before she was famous."Actually, she did. Her Potter spin-off Tales of Beedle the Bard was originally handwritten and illustrated, and limited to just seven copies. Well, it's nice when people have faith in your literary ambitions, especially at Christmas time …David Barnettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Trade Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold2. A RELIABLE WIFE, by Robert Goolrick3. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson4. PUSH, by Sapphire5. OLIVE KITTERIDGE, by Elizabeth Strout feeds.nytimes.com |