Penguin

Lest you think Penguin was holding out for a good deal: it ended up paying more than all of the other publishing defendants, at a total cost of more than $90 million in payments and fees. By contrast, according to PublishersLunch, the total bill will be “more than the $78.9 million paid by the first three Settlers combined.”

The New York Times phrases the cost to Penguin at a much smaller amount, reporting only $75 million in consumer damages “plus costs and fees.” But, as the PublishersLunch dispatch clarifies, the fees add up to nearly $15 million…. a enormously bad break for Penguin. To put that number in context:

Hachette had incurred the largest penalty, paying $31.7 million in compensation, plus costs… When Macmillan settled earlier this year, they agreed to pay $20 million in consumer restitution and roughly $6 million more in costs and fees. Total consumer payments secured now add up to $164 million, with another $31 million or so in costs and fees.

In a press release, the law firm of Hagens Berman, which “was appointed lead counsel to represent the rights of consumers in the consolidated class-action lawsuit first filed on Aug. 9, 2011,” claims credit for the savvy negotiations that led to the massive settlement, but it’s hard to imagine that the size of the settlement is anything other than punishment for Penguin’s threatening to go to trial.

The size of the settlement and related fees likely come as something of a shock to even Penguin, which, in a February 2012 filling, estimated possible charges at only $40 million.

The settlement is subject to court approval, but if accepted Penguin would withdrawal from the trial scheduled to begin June 3, which will—if all goes according to plan—have only one defendant, Apple, now said by the government to be the “ringleader” of a conspiracy to raise ebook prices.

Jeff Bezos is my new favorite Marty Stu.

“Blair,” Jeff whispered, his lips almost touching her earlobe, “I have something I need to tell you.”

“Jeff, please,” Blair danced away. She laughed coyly, mercilessly. They’d both had too much to drink.

“It’s important you listen to me, Blair.” Jeff ran his hands over his gleaming scalp. He was sweating.

“Fine, talk, ” she said, looking away. “But don’t bore me, Jeff. I’m warning you. There are plenty of other rich boys in tight pants at this party, and some of them can dance.”

The air was heavy in this velvet-curtained room on Park Avenue. Her necklace glinted in the lights from cars passing far below.

“Blair, I’ve started a new program to make money off of fan fiction,” he pleaded. “I’m letting authors sell stories on a platform I’m calling Kindle Worlds. We’ve licensed three so-called ‘worlds’ from one company, to start. So now authors can submit fan fiction using the plots, setting, and characters of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, or The Vampire Diaries.”

Blair stalked past him over to the balcony doors. “Jeff, that sounds like a fine and interesting thing. So good, in fact, that I find it all a little…” she tossed her hair and let her empty martini glass fall to the deeply carpeted floor “…boring.”

“Wait, wait!” Jeff could feel himself growing shrill. He wished he had a bookseller or temp worker or British Prime Minister to rough up. That always calmed him down. “It’s not so simple. I’m paying the fan fiction authors, it’s true, but at half the rates I pay the rest of our self-publishing authors. And the licensing is downright evil!”

Blair opened the heavy balcony doors and the city noise, the city air, rushed in. It smelled of youth and wealth and a hint of her perfume.

“Listen…” Jeff unfolded his arm and revealed the bioelectric screen embedded there beneath his definitely-not-the-Borg-because-we-don’t-have-licenses-for-that-franchise human skin camouflage. “This is from our first announcement about the program:

Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.

You will own the copyright to the original, copyrightable elements (such as characters, scenes, and events) that you create and include in your work, and the World Licensor will retain the copyright to all the original elements of the World. When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other’s ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.”

Long form journalism is time-consuming, research-intensive, and often expensive to produce. How does anyone continue to publish it? What recent changes in journalism are most apparent to you?

“I think the biggest change that could cause people to present this ‘long form is dead’ mentality is the STRONG emergence of the type of and sheer volume of new media,” said Shankman. “The emergence and shininess of [Tweets, Facebook updates, and pageview turning blog posts] have just taken the spotlight off of long form to a certain degree.”

“The most important shift in the last five years,” said Lammer, “has been the move to mobile. The web browser is a crappy place to read at any length, and phones and tablets are built for it…. As smartphones and tablets become completely commonplace (we’re already close), the audience will grow, and I expect a diverse set of publishers will connect with them.”

“The main change,” wrote Ratliff, “that’s most apparent is that an area that five years ago was considered a backwater, being drained of its life by the heartless Web, is now bordering on some kind of trend. In some ways I’m not sure which is more scary. But more and more places are concluding that their readers may not be idiots, and that actually a lot of people still want—or even need—context and beauty amidst their daily deluge of information. And that to me can only be a good thing.

“It’s still a struggle for writers to make a living creating this kind of work. But the truth is, at least in my career, it’s always been so. “

How can publishers make the work remunerative for writers?

Ratliff says of The Avatist, “Readers pay for what they want, and a lot of what they pay gets passed right through to the author. Because we are doing direct sales, and not relying on advertising, it’s much easier to share royalties from each story with the writers. And I think that’s a model (a fee + a royalty that’s usually 50%) that allows us to get a lot of great work. We’ve paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and royalties in two years. A writer is taking on more risk with us than they are with a typical fee-based magazine piece (although depending on who they write for, our fees may even be competitive). But they also have a much bigger possibility for an upside… I would never suggest that our model is something that publications should replicate. We’re one way of approaching it, mixing book sales model with a magazine approach, and ask readers to pay for the work.

“Whether long form work within that model is remunerative at some acceptable level for writers has too many variables to calculate. People write for all sorts of reasons, different types of writing may or may not deserve different levels of remuneration depending on where you are sitting.”

Editors from The Awl discussed this at length in a conversation on Branch. Some writers said they’d consider working for free to build professional relationships or get a byline at a new publication.

What about the economics of long form?

“Anecdotally, I’ve heard that for many [publishers], long form stories drive a significant portion of their monthly unique [views], so there are some clear upsides,” said Lammer.

“Longform doesn’t publish original writing (we occasionally seek out the rights to reprint something great that isn’t online) so I can’t speak directly to the economics.  The trajectory we’ve seen in three years of running Longform is that more great work is being produced and from a wider variety of sources.

“Stories that get linked to from Longform are produced everywhere from the biggest magazines and newspaper all the way down to personal blogs, so there isn’t a consistent economic model for them. Some appear in print and online, some originate on the web, some are produced by non-profits with grant funding, others might even be sponsored content.”

Ratliff adds, “We actually do two things at Atavist: publish digital long form journalism (sometimes now called “e-singles”), and we make a software platform that other people and organizations pay us to use. So we have found multiple ways of making money, and they are all mixed up together. All of which is to say that we have found some ways to make money creating digital long form, but that doesn’t always mean that it is always profitable in and of itself.

“We’ve been working to combine single-copy sales with subscriptions, foreign sales, movie deals, and more to try and make each piece worth its while.”

What do you believe is a responsible way to handle sponsored content?

Shankman said, “The minute you try to fool the audience or present something that’s a terrible fit, you get in trouble. My experience, though, has shown as long as you are honest about what kind of content this is and its origins (sponsored versus pure editorial), the readers are cool with it and it makes for effective marketing.”

Longform doesn’t do sponsored content, but it does promote its sponsors weekly. “We try to label them well and not clutter the site with too many of them, and since they’re only once a week, people seem to click through, which is nice for everyone involved,” said Lammer.

When does it stop being a marketplace?

“The only time it really stops being a marketplace is when a publication has some source of outside funding (whether it’s a non-profit approach or something else) that will continue no matter what audience you have,” said Ratliff.

“Otherwise, no publication, including us, can completely ignore what it readers want and plan to be around for very long. We have both the advantage and disadvantage that it’s often very hard to tell what will catch on and what won’t, when it comes to long form nonfiction sold as e-singles. So that makes it hard to pick winners, but also gives us the freedom to do stories that we feel are worth telling, without always focusing on sales. But one reason I always emphasize that we’re not trying to create some kind of generalized model for other publications is that there are certain stories that probably just won’t ever work as well in this format.”

Longform‘s model is a bit different than the others; it has had NPR as an ad partner for the three years since the publication began. Lammer said, “The only shift [in those three years] has been towards getting more of what we do—our podcast, newsletter, etc.—sponsored. Currently, the Longform app has no advertising.”

What’s coming in the next five years?

Lammers predicts, “Readers will probably focus more on the writers they like than the publications who put them out, and significant numbers of writers will probably shift to publishing directly. I think a blurring of the difference between article and book will probably follow, with lots of writers focusing on delivering 50-100 page works that can be read in a few hours.”

When asked if he planned to launch other verticals, Shankman answered, “Possibly? Definitely maybe?”

Ratliff says, “If I had even moderate predictive powers, I’d be out at my local OTB right now.”

I can’t say I disagree with the vandalism.

When a sign is typo-laden, what is being conveyed? Carelessness? Artlessness? Lawlessness? I walk through an installation, whether in a museum or in a courtyard, partly to take pleasure in how the placards contextualize the work, even if they reveal only the year or the artist’s name. If consistency and clarity are evident in the signage—as Xu Bing insists in his experimental novella, Book from the Ground, which consists solely of signs—then so too authority of the art being presented.

Unless, of course, the signage is meant to call attention to itself.

This is the loose theory held by some of my fellow production editors, copy editors, and proofreaders, whom I like to poll for opinions and observations about all things punctuation-driven. (None of them, by the way, cop to being the vandal.)

Meryl Gross, an associate managing editor, starts off with:

As a Pratt alum I can only say that I wish someone would edit the sculptures as well. When I was there, we tossed folding chairs off rootftops and got graded on it: now, that was sculpture.

To which John Wolfman, a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, adds:

In my experience with art schools, good writing, without typos, is considered to be the mark of someone who’s not a real artist. You’re expected to be a sloppy writer (as long as you remember to use whatever clichés are in vogue: “paradigm” is de rigueur).

Rosa, a former editor of Grapefruit: An Occasional for the Bibliophiles says:

The typos and writing errors on the plaques are like potholes in a road: they cause a bump or jolt as you read. Your brain works to correct them instead of absorbing the information smoothly and remaining focused on the artwork. Then the corrections to the typos, made in this overt way, add further bumps to the road, so that the viewer is now entirely distracted by the plaque and the quality of its text—and taken out of his or her engagement with the work of art. The art is now secondary to the plaque.

Kevin Bourke, a senior production editor, says:

I love that the [New York Times] comments are on the side of the copy editors. The human interaction—perhaps better described as audience participation instead of vandalism—is something I imagine the artists probably enjoy. It doesn’t sound like anyone at the school itself is complaining about this, and it saves Pratt the expense of having to make revised placards.

Am I the vigilante? I carry with me only Waterman pens, not Sharpies.

And Mareike Grover, a senior production editor, asks:

Perhaps that Vigilante Copy Editor is a guerrilla artist? The edits themselves could be seen as artworks in progress. Perhaps if you string them together and play them backward, they form a message.

The overall conclusion from my colleagues is that Pratt needs to hire a copy editor. John McPhee recounts the story of how Emily Gould was taken in by The New Yorker, in 1925, as its general copy editor, and remained at the job for fifty-four years:

When [Gould] finished [reading a copy of The New Yorker with a blue pencil in hand], the magazine was a mottled blue on every page—a circled embarrassment of dangling modifiers, conflicting pronouns, absent commas, and over-all grammatical hash. She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was “Find this bitch and hire her!”

*

I contacted Dockendorf to see if the Vigilant Copy Editor ever surfaced. The answer is yes and no: After the New York Times article and video appeared, VCE sent him an e-mail via his website to thank him for “the flattery.” They made a date to meet one Monday by the cannon in Pratt’s courtyard, but two hours before the set time, VCE canceled, preferring perhaps to keep up the “romanticism,” as VCE put it, of not being known. Dockendorf has not heard from the vigilante since.

Dockendorf concludes in his e-mail:

When I last checked a few days before the piece went live on the Times, some of the placards were still marked; Pratt scrubbed most of them clean in the past year. I saw some new copy-minded graffiti recently that looked unusual. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, so I suspect others have taken up the mantel from VCE, who first struck (to the best of my knowledge) in summer of 2012, and whose handwriting by now I know well.

This all makes sense for the IFFP, which is awarded only to fiction in translation, and is also one of the few prizes, along with the IMPAC, that splits the prize money between author and translator. But, to close observers, it might also seem like a natural outgrowth of the apparent warmth of Bakker and Colmer’s relationship. In fact, when Bakker won the IMPAC for his previous book, The Twin, in 2010, he was quoted as saying that it wasn’t until he read Colmer’s translation of it that he realized that “it really is a book, and I am a writer.”

When Colmer began to work on The Detour, Bakker had initial doubts about the possibility of translating it at all. He tells it like this, in an interview with Tasja Dorkofikis on the PEN Atlas blog:

Dorkofikis: Your novel is translated from the Dutch. How closely do you work with your translator, David Colmer?

Bakker: For this novel very close, because I woke up one night, almost two years ago now, almost in a panic. I thought: one cannot translate this novel, there is far too much language-stuff in it, and it is about the translation of an English poem into Dutch! So I contacted David and he stayed very calm and said: “That’s my problem, relax.” He is wonderful. But for the first time I read a translation of one of my novels before it was sent to Harvill Secker. And we worked on it, I had some comments, and then David had counter-arguments, and so on. It was nice to do it like this.

What’s exceptional in this situation is the relative calmness of all concerned: Colmer’s confidence when faced with a panicked author and what may indeed have been some very tricky translation questions, Bakker’s obvious pleasure about the course of the editing process. Though many translators who work on books by living authors have satisfying working relationships with them, you don’t often hear about it on an international stage: the Kundera and Albee horror stories take occasional showy pride of place.

Profiles of Colmer and Bakker together—like this one, where they’re watching the World Cup in a Irish pub—also shed light on the length and depth of the relationship that translators and authors can have with each other, with translators acting as advocates, sometimes over and over again, for a book and an author. Colmer recalls having first read The Twin for a publisher in Holland: “I loved it and wrote a favourable reader’s report, urging them to publish it, but they didn’t.” It wasn’t until some years later that the book was finally picked up, by Harvill Secker in the UK and Archipelago in the US, and Colmer was asked to translate.

In a business that is sometimes dominated by the quick turnaround and the “book of season”—due soon to molder and curl on the back of the toilet seat—it’s good to see such steadfastness rewarded.

Sigrid Rausing, Granta’s owner and publisher, will be taking over “full operational and executive control of Granta Publications.”

A month ago, Granta announced that editor John Freeman was leaving to teach creative writing at Columbia University. Three weeks ago, it was reported that the New York office would be closing and that three other staffers—deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, art director Michael Salu, and associate editor Patrick Ryan—were also on their way out. Yesterday, The Bookseller revealed that Philip Gwyn Jones, executive publisher for Granta Books and Portobello Books, is the latest longtime staffer to leave Granta and that publisher Sigrid Rausing will be taking over “full operational and executive control of Granta Publications.”

According to The Bookseller:

Jones’ departure is described as part of a reorganisation which follows the resignations of magazine editor John Freeman and deputy editor Ellah Allfrey. When he leaves, a single, editorial-only role of editor-in-chief is to be created, covering both the editing of Granta magazine and the commissioning of books for the Granta and Portobello imprints. The role will be filled later this summer.

Rausing said: “The economic realities of [a] small imprint publishing today has made it obvious that we need the magazine and books to be a single entity to exploit the synergy between them.” She went on: “Philip has been with Granta and Portobello Books for some eight years now and I am very proud of the list we have created with both imprints. His unwavering commitment to literary quality, and his commitment to the company, have been invaluable.”

In short, Granta will be hiring one person to fill the roles of both John Freeman and Philip Gwyn Jones; the new editor-in-chief will serve as editor of the magazine, Portabello Books, and Granta Books. This person’s job will be to maximize synergy, which is a great word and not at all a terrible and overused corporate cliche.

As we indicated in an earlier piece about the recent turmoil at Granta, this whole situation is strikingly similar to one the journal faced in 2009, when six staffers left and The Bookseller reported that “Granta‘s owner, millionaire philanthropist Sigrid Rausing, said at the time that she and husband Eric Abraham would be taking a more “hands-on” role in the enterprise.” Though surprising, Rausing’s increased role in the wake of recent changes at the journal is not unprecedented; that said, the fact that this is happening for the second time in four years may not speak well for Granta’s long-term stability.

Still, both the press release announcing Freeman’s departure and comments given by Jones to The Bookseller indicate that Granta is intent on telling the outside world that there’s nothing to see here, folks.

When Freeman left, Granta issued a release boasting that “the total global circulation of the magazine will be 100,000 when Japanase Granta begins publishing next March.” And Jones, who will be taking a “summer break in New England,” told The Bookseller yesterday that:

“For the first and only time in my life I feel like Sir Alex Ferguson. I am immensely proud of all the achievements of the Granta/Portobello team over these past eight years but most especially of the manner in which my team has played the publishing game.

I want to pay tribute to Sigrid for making it all possible, and allowing us such freedom and security. She is ready now to take over the running of the team, and I wish her all luck with this next phase in Granta’s illustrious history.

The squad is in really great shape, with some very exciting young talents coming through, authors and staff alike. As of today, nine different books of ours are on nine different prize shortlists, and there will be more to come later this year, I’m certain.”

And yet, all the recent turmoil—the flurry of departures, the closing of the New York office—suggests that everything is not fine and dandy, and that an increased need for “synergy” is not the only thing ailing Granta at the moment. A month ago it was record-breaking global circulation; yesterday it was vague talk of “economic realities” and a leaner, “synergized” staff. Whatever the truth is, it doesn’t look like Granta is telling.

Forget the band, these are The Smiths you’ve got to know about.

Last week I reported on the astonishing and inexplicable news that Amazon’s UK operation received more money in government grants than it paid in tax. Since those reports came in, the tax dodging of Amazon and other online giants such as Google has made it to the front page of every British broadsheet, and ‘doing an Amazon’ is now being employed by news reporters as a code word for ‘companies that weasel out of paying the millions they owe the state in taxes.’ Lots of words (which is positive and encouraging), but still no action.

Now, Keith and Frances Smith, who run two independent bookshops—Warwick Books and Kenilworth Books—in Warwickshire are urging the government to promise ‘that instead of words we have ACTION.’ We reported in March on how the Smiths were petitioning David Cameron to ‘pressurize Amazon into paying UK taxes on their UK earnings’; they delivered that petition to Downing Street at the end of April with nearly 170,000 signatures. But due to these new revelations, they have spoken again for the need of action to be taken against Amazon.

Their reasons are those shared by many. They argue that Amazon should pay tax because the UK high street is disintegrating, consumer choice is disappearing, and small businesses are not receiving the positive support they need from government. Quoted in the Guardian, the Smiths described how:

“All around us the high street is, essentially, collapsing. It’s too simplistic to say that this is just because of online retail – online is a reality and we compete as best we can. It’s simply not fair that Amazon starts at a an advantage on every sale because it’s not paying its fair share of tax. We love competition, we love making our shops inviting for customers. We are not happy to sit by and watch our high streets fall to pieces because of the sharp practice of a few companies and the inaction of our government.”

Surely the Smiths speak for all indie booksellers when they argue, quite rightly, that they are doing all they can and it’s not competition they’re scared of—it’s a deeply unfair playing field and an online behemoth for whom different rules apply.

In a blog post on their website, they issue a reminder that local bookshops are part of a fragile high street which deserves to be protected, as well as a culture of reading, sharing and quite simply human contact that deserves to be fought for:

“people, our customers, are very angry that all this is going on. They desperately want the High Street to survive. They do not want a life lived entirely through their pc’s [sic] and mobiles. They want real shops with real goods and real people. Let Amazon have their way and shops will disappear.”

What’s most galling, of course, is that small businesses such as those owned by the Smiths, which devote themselves to serving a community and providing it with a irreplaceable resource of education, stimulation, and entertainment, and which pay what is asked from them, are being left to suffer. Aren’t these small businesses perfect examples of brilliant entrepreneurship meeting mighty effort, which the government should be celebrating? As the Smiths argue:

“when Warwick Books and Kenilworth Books sell a book, we pay corporation tax on our profits and add a few thousand pounds per year to government coffers as a result–thus paying our bit towards the infrastructure we all enjoy in a civilised society. It doesn’t seem too much to expect from our leaders that they stand up equally for small retailers like us as they seem to do for bigger companies.”

No, it doesn’t seem like too much to expect from the UK government. So when are they going to do something about it?

You can mail a letter with this very short story.

Dublin, Ireland has unveiled a 60¢; postage stamp printed with the full text of a short story by Eoin Moore (cue headlines with puns related to “licking“). Moore’s story was selected from Dublin’s Fighting Words creative writing program for primary and secondary students; he was seventeen when he submitted this work. At 224 words, his story aims to capture “the essence of Dublin.”

The stamp was commissioned to celebrate Dublin’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2010, and it was designed by the Stone Twins, two Irish designers based in Amsterdam.

Ireland has honored its literary history in stamp form before, proudly adorning envelopes with images of William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett, but this is the first time they’ve printed an entire story on one stamp.

How do you capture the essence of a city in 200 or so words? I’d like to see other cities release short story stamps, like  Yalta or Galveston or New York. Should New York post offices consider releasing a stamp that captures the essence of the city, I wonder which authors they might pick.

Rebecca McClanahan’s “Signs and Wonders” would make a lovely stamp for the spring:

When we first moved to the city, we couldn’t believe how cheap the flowers were. “What a city,” we said. “We can buy flowers every week, fill the apartment with them, the bathtub. What a city!” Then we went to the grocery store, and when I saw the prices I started to cry. “How can we possibly afford . . . we’ll have to give up . . . oh my God,” I shrieked, “what will we eat?”

“We’ll just have to eat flowers,” he said.

Last week I would have signed a hundred-year lease. After all this is the best city in the world, and I was just coming off one of my New York highs, the kind that hits when you least expect it and suddenly it’s like first love again, first lust, and you wonder how you could possibly live anywhere else. Then a steam pipe bursts, the couple in the apartment above you straps their steel-toed boots back on, you step in a puddle of urine on the subway platform, and some guy with three rings in his nose calls you Bitch and spits on you because—who knows?—you look like his second grade teacher, or some president’s wife, or his mother, and you think, Live another two years in this jackhammering, siren-screaming, piss-puddling city? In someone else’s apartment—because who can afford their own? Someone else’s bed, plates, forks, spoons?

And O. Henry’s “The Pride of the Cities” could be sold in the summer:

Said Mr. Kipling, “The cities are full of pride, challenging each to each.” Even so.

New York was empty. Two hundred thousand of its people were away for the summer. Three million eight hundred thousand remained as caretakers and to pay the bills of the absentees. But the two hundred thousand are an expensive lot.

The New Yorker sat at a roof-garden table, ingesting solace through a straw. His panama lay upon a chair. The July audience was scattered among vacant seats as widely as outfielders when the champion batter steps to the plate. Vaudeville happened at intervals. The breeze was cool from the bay; around and above — everywhere except on the stage — were stars. Glimpses were to be had of waiters, always disappearing, like startled chamois. Prudent visitors who had ordered refreshments by ‘phone in the morning were now being served. The New Yorker was aware of certain drawbacks to his comfort, but content beamed softly from his rimless eyeglasses. His family was out of town. The drinks were warm; the ballet was suffering from lack of both tune and talcum — but his family would not return until September.

Then up into the garden stumbled the man from Topaz City, Nevada. The gloom of the solitary sightseer enwrapped him. Bereft of joy through loneliness, he stalked with a widower’s face through the halls of pleasure. Thirst for human companionship possessed him as he panted in the metropolitan draught. Straight to the New Yorker’s table he steered.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” could be released when the weather turns:

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came.

Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.

Perhaps that’s too bleak. How about a cozy excerpt from Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking?

For eight years I lived in a one-room apartment a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia. It is lucky I never met Wilt Chamberlain because if I had invited him in for coffee he would have been unable to spread his arms in my room which was roughly seven by twenty.

I had enough space for a twin-sized bed, a very small night table, and a desk. This desk, which I use to this day, was meant for a child of, say, eleven. At the foot of my bed was a low table that would have been a coffee table in a normal apartment. In mine it served as a lamp stand, and beneath it was a basket containing my sheets and towels. Next to a small fireplace, which had an excellent draw, was a wicker armchair and an ungainly wicker footstool which often served as a table of sorts.

Instead of a kitchen, this minute apartment featured a metal counter. Underneath was a refrigerator the size of a child’s playhouse. On top was what I called the stove but which was only two electric burners – in short, a hot plate.

Many people found this place charming, at least for five minutes or so. Many thought I must be insane to live in so small a space, but I loved my apartment and found it the coziest place on earth.

My cupboard shelves were so narrow that I had to stand my dinner plates on end. I did the dishes in a plastic pan in the bathtub and set the dish drainer over the toilet.

Or just about any passage from Teju Cole’s Open City:

At first, I encountered the streets as an incessant loudness, a shock after the day’s focus and relative tranquillity, as though someone had shattered the calm of a silent private chapel with the blare of a TV set. I wove my way through crowds of shoppers and workers, through road constructions and the horns of taxicabs. Walking through busy parts of town meant I laid eyes on more people, hundreds more, thousands even, than I was accustomed to seeing in the course of a day, but the impress of these countless faces did nothing to assuage my feelings of isolation; if anything, it intensified them. I became more tired, too, after the walks began, an exhaustion unlike any I had known since the first months of internship, three years earlier. One night, I simply went on and on, walking all the way down to Houston Street, a distance of some seven miles, and found myself in a state of disorienting fatigue, laboring to remain on my feet. That night I took the subway home, and instead of falling asleep immediately, I lay in bed, too tired to release myself from wakefulness, and I rehearsed in the dark the numerous incidents and sights I had encountered while roaming, sorting each encounter like a child playing with wooden blocks, trying to figure out which belonged where, which responded to which. Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks. My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and assume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city, and only then did my hectic mind finally show some pity and still itself, only then did dreamless sleep arrive.

I don’t think New York capture the city’s “essence” in a single stamp. As E.B. White points out in “Here Is New York,” there are at least three New Yorks going on at any given time:

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh yes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company. . . .

Collectors or those interested in mailing letters in Ireland can find Moore’s story in Dublin’s post offices and online.

By withholding the digital rights to his book Joyland, King is hoping his fans will patronize their local bookstores, to the delight of booksellers everywhere. As King said to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal,

“I have no plans for a digital version…Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one.”

Trachtenberg also notes that this is an interesting about-face for the author, who has been unusually active and saavy in taking advantage of the opportunities of ebook publishing.

“Mr. King’s latest move to make “Joyland” only available as a physical book is essentially the reverse of what he did in 2000, when he became one of the country’s first writers to make a new work available exclusively in a digital format. Then, CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster publishing arm issued Mr. King’s 16,000-word ghost story “Riding the Bullet” as an e-book priced at $2.50…Mr. King’s effort was treated as a potential turning point for a small but growing digital-publishing industry.”

The New York Times wrote at the time, that another of King’s projects, an ebook-only novella, published by Scribner and released on his website, scared publishing “out of its wits”. King even wrote on his site, encouraging readers to buy the book using his unusual model, “My friends,we have the chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare.” The book was about a flesh-eating plant sent to a publisher by an author whose manuscript was rejected, natch.

Perhaps King reserves his ire for the Big Six — his latest move might also be considered a gesture of support for independent publishing. The publisher of Joyland is Hard Case Crime, an indie that publishes paperback crime-fiction.

King’s decision to forgo ebook sales in order to support his publisher (who might earn more from print given its higher price point) and bookstores, while admirable, is obviously one that the bestselling author has the luxury of making. Not to mention, the flexibility of working with a smaller house.

King’s big book of the year, a sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep, will be published by Scribner, who will surely make a huge windfall from both print and ebook sales, and were perhaps not as open to any gimmicks.

Not to mention, it’s also a savvy publicity move and has been widely covered. King has won the benefit of being the first well-known author to publicly make the anachronistic announcement of a print-only book. Will anyone follow?

Kristy Kennedy reported for the Chicago Tribune yesterday that a group of parents in the Indian Prairie School District (in the Chicago suburbs) have taken up arms over a menace facing their children—a book that depicts a family with two dads. The book, which Kennedy doesn’t identify, is one of several chosen by the school district to “supplement curriculum in kindergarten through middle school.”

While the focus of this handful of malcontents is the children’s book about same-sex parents, they’re apparently displeased with a slew of books on the list, complaining that “the materials overall focused too much on diversity and not enough on unity.” So not only are they opposed to diversity (opposed! to diversity!), but they’re using “unity” as their euphemism for intolerance, which would be kind of outrageous if it weren’t so transparent. Perhaps driving this point home, Estrella Ibay complained about the book in question, saying, “This will give the impression to our young children that homosexuality is a normal behavior.”

Members of the school board defended the purchase of the books on the supplemental list, albeit in a way that seemed more cautiously diplomatic than anything else. Chief Academic Officer Kathy Duncan told the Tribune, “Of course at any moment in time, to any person, any one of those books could be controversial;” and board member Mark Rising said, “I may not be in favor of some of the controversial subjects; however, we are a public school district. As long as there is sufficient professional development around some of these subjects, I think it is good. What I’m hoping is that this will spark conversations at home.”

Of course it’s helpful to open up a dialogue about subjects like homosexuality and various family configurations, but the word “controversial” is used just a few too many times in Kennedy’s article to describe books like the one about two gay dads. It makes the issue seem like a legitimate topic of debate and gives credence to the protesters’ argument, and the board’s response is frustratingly neutral. If they’re going to stand behind the books, the much more satisfying response would have been, “We refuse to engage with parents who are acting like homophobic jerks,” though bringing the unnamed book into the curriculum is certainly a promising first step.