TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Glenn Beck: the Oprah of right-wing fiction Fox News's champion hatemonger has become a potent force in publishingIn many ways Glenn Beck is the anti-Oprah. While her show is the televisual equivalent of a soft embrace, his Fox News slot is Orwell's Two Minutes Hate on steroids, an almost literal call to arms, preying on fear and relying on patriot bombast. One fought to get Barack Obama elected, the other thinks he's a dangerous, racist radical. What they do share is enormous influence, especially in the world of publishing. For years Oprah's seal of approval has been enough to shift millions of copies of novels in a near instant, from the sentimental (White Oleander, Tara Road) to the literary (House of Sand and Fog), bringing classics like Anna Karenina into the mainstream along the way.Beck's tastes are a little less refined. Currently he's very excited about Pursuit of Honour, a political thriller centring on Mitch Rapp, an undercover CIA counter-terrorism agent specialising in the type of aggressive behaviour that the Bush administration were so adept at coining euphemisms for. The author, Vince Flynn, was invited on Beck's radio and television shows, where the host got particularly excited about Chapter 50 in the book, the point when Rapp gives Congress a passionate defence of his strong-armed tactics to Congress. Beck's analysis was as follows: "It is almost conservative porn … you almost think, 'Oh, yes. Oh, that's erotic'".These mightn't be sentiments you can imagine Oprah sharing with Toni Morrison, but Beck's endorsement has made Pursuit of Honour a big hit, at number three in the bestseller list, just behind Dan Brown and Patricia Cornwell. Beck has also ensured the successes of thrillers like The Doomsday Key, The Dark Tide and The Last Patriot, the author of which, the improbably named Brad Thor, crowned Beck "the new Oprah". Though all his recommendations seem to be based exclusively on what's available in airport bookshops, Beck doesn't recommend these books as escapism; these novels about terrorist plots and brave patriots feed his world view and the authors, many of whom were tangentially linked to the Bush administration, are invited on as authorities on American foreign and domestic policy.So keen is Beck on these ideological thrillers that he's writing his own, due for publication next year. Beck obviously has the requisite imagination for fiction (a fervent believer in Obama's "death panels" and denier of global warming) and he's already something of a publishing phenomenon; this weekend he's expected to break records, becoming the first author in history to have books debut at number one on four different New York Times bestseller lists. As you'd expect from a man who thinks Jimmy Carter is a "bigger waste of skin" than Kim Jong-il, these books are foaming right-wing polemics with titles like Arguing with Idiots and Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-control Government, apparently inspired by Thomas Paine.Last Christmas he even expanded his repertoire with A Christmas Sweater, a schmaltzy "instant holiday classic" on the true meaning of Christmas, complete with life lessons and a happy ending. Maybe he and Oprah have more in common than you'd think.BooksellersPublishingGlenn BeckFox NewsGraeme Allisterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham2. LAVENDER MORNING, by Jude Deveraux3. CROSS COUNTRY, by James Patterson4. YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME, by Dean Koontz5. TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION, by David Michaels feeds.nytimes.com |
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story First appearing in the New York Times, and later the basis for the film Smoke, Paul Auster's Christmas fable has been reinvented in a new edition by illustrator ISOL feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The myth of the writer's 'former life' As is often the case, news that one of this year's Costa winners is a 'former scooter salesman' is a little misleadingWhen I got the email from Costa revealing the winners of this year's prizes, one thing in particular struck me: after bulleted lines noting that Colm TóibÃn had defeated Hilary Mantel for the best novel award, and announcing the winner of the biography prize, thethird headline stood out: "Former scooter salesman Raphael Selbourne scoops the Costa first novel award for Beauty.""A scooter salesman," I thought. "I wonder how one goes from being a scooter salesman to writing prize-winning fiction. Would selling scooters help me to realise my own literary ambitions, unlike my actual former life as a Starbucks barista and a dictaphone typist at a urology clinic?" A quick Google search revealed that his publisher points out that scooter-selling is only one string to Selbourne's bow – he also holds a degree in politics, has worked as a teacher and translator, and was studying for an MA in Islamic Studies. All of this, I felt, was rather more enlightening biographical information for the reader wondering how Selbourne came to write so well about the experience of a 20-year-old Bangladeshi woman in England. Costa seemed to be selling Selbourne a little bit short.But this wasn't just the slightly perplexing editorial decision of one press release writer. Reducing the biographies of new novelists to a litany of quirky pre-writing professions has been a convention of publishing promotion for a long time now. A swift click through the lists of authors on any big publisher's or literary agency's website will reveal a host of writers whose past lives as waiters or cleaners or bus drivers are flagged up prominently in their biographies, even when this work is not remotely related to their writing (and closer inspection reveals that these jobs were undertaken when they were teenagers).It's not that I can't see why this approach seems appealing. Writers and readers alike remain fascinated, and a little bit in love, with the idea of the novelist as a sort of picaresque hero who struggles against all odds – once signified by a garret, now more likely to be illustrated by a string of character-building jobs – in order to make ends meet in the course of the journey to resolution and redemption in the form of publication. For those aspirant writers who are stuck working in jobs that are far from dreamy, I suppose it's encouraging to think that they, too, might rise above their current lot. But this modicum of appeal is overridden by the condescending perspective that goes with it. The belief that a writer of fiction can only justify his or her accomplishment if it has been accompanied by a sufficient amount of suffering can also have the effect of making the unsuccessful writer feel that being a butcher or baker or candlestick maker is only redeemable if you can make good your escape with a fat advance cheque. Many writers, of course, have to carry on working in dispiriting jobs long after their novels have hit bookshelves – but we rarely hear about that, because it's so very unromantic.At heart, making great fuss about the minutiae of what's come before a great book in a writer's life seems to serve as an unnecessary distraction from the truth, which is that at the heart of the vast majority of writing careers is a dedication to careful thinking, and observing, and writing. Whether or not a writer learns to do it via a formal education or not, writing is ultimately an intellectual exercise, and it seems rather unfortunate that there's not more enthusiasm for focusing on this as the most interesting part of any author's life story.  Costa book awardsJean Hannah Edelsteinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Father's memoir wins B.C. book prize Toronto journalist Ian Brown has won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, Canada's richest non-fiction prize. cbc.ca |