“Nobel Prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.”

-George Bernard Shaw

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The sea change of print media is what drives the anecdotes in Harold Evans’ memoir, MY PAPER CHASE: TRUE STORIES OF VANISHED TIMES.

Words like ‘effective’ and ‘blandly’ paint a textbookish picture of Nicholas Thompson’s THE HAWK AND THE DOVE: PAUL NITZE, GEORGE KENNAN, AND THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR.  Still, learning is learning and this sounds worth the effort.

Penelope Lively’s FAMILY ALBUM is deemed exquisite in Chicago.

A story of cleverness, creativity, and determination in the face of what-the-heck-are-you-doing makes a fascinating read of William Kamkwamba’s quest to build a windmill in THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND.

BBC World Service’s Dan Damon interviews Nabeel Yasin, the subject of the upcoming documentary “The Poet of Baghdad: Enemy of the State,” along with director Georgie Weedon:

Alexandra Alter explores “The Dark Side of Alice Munro.”  (Wall Street Journal)

AL Kennedy reminds us that sex in a story is not always an end in itself. (Guardian Books Blog)

Sarah Duncan reminds us, in the midst of the bad sex awards, that getting it right ain’t always easy. (Guardian Books Blog)

Nabokov’s unfinished, posthumous novel, The Original of Laura, excerpted in Playboy. (GalleyCat)

Walmart.com’s CEO says the company’s $9 book pricing isn’t predatory. (Bloomberg)

The longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction has been announced. (The Literary Saloon)

Sarah Palin sells 300,000 copies of Going Rogue on the first day. (The Daily Beast)

The Guardian takes a ride in the way-back machine to the death of Proust. (The Guardian)

On this day in 1934, Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour” opened on Broadway. (Today in Literature)

“Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.”

-Paul Auster

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M.V. Lee Badgett had to love this in the review of WHEN GAY PEOPLE GET MARRIED (as well as the entire review) - “her book is an ideal passive-aggressive gift for that homophobic uncle you’re tired of debating at family reunions”.

Middling warm for Nick Hornsby’s JULIET NAKED.

THE FIVE GREATEST WARRIORS by Matthew Reilly gets the good nod in Adelaide.

Four books about important women get reviewed in USA Today.

From the GalleyCat descripton:

In this special National Book Awards video feature, GalleyCat prowled the red carpet asking the nation’s most critically acclaimed writers to comment on the country’s most popular book series. We expected a snooty series of reactions to the upcoming adaptation to Stephenie Meyer’s “New Moon” and the Twilight Saga, but we found something else altogether.

Chris Cox examines why people still like to rag on Dave Eggers… and why it really doesn’t matter. (Guardian Books Blog)

Lynn Neary presents an excellent segment on doctors who write. (NPR)

Is Stephenie Meyer America’s JK Rowling? (The Independent)

Calvin Reid recaps the winners of last night’s National Book Awards. (Publishers Weekly)

Disney pulls the plug on the Michael Chabon-penned, $150 million production of “Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” (LATimes)

Andrew Motion to chair the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010. (The Literary Saloon)

If you’d like to relive the magic of last night’s ceremonies, Jason Boog live-blogged them. (GalleyCat)

Philip Roth, Amos Oz, Paul Theroux and Nick Cave all make it to the shortlist for the bad sex award. (The Guardian)

Happy birthday, Margaret Atwood (one day late, yeah, but it’s the thought that counts…). (Margaret Atwood)

On this day in 1692, British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell (tagged by Dryden as “The King of Dullness”) died. (Today in Literature)

“Truth is always duller than fiction.”

-Piers Paul Read

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National Lampoon skewers TWILIGHT (to good result according to one blogcritics reviewer) in NIGHTLIGHT.

Dave Wood is as reliable and speed-reading as ever.  The man’s eyeballs are probably insured with Lloyds of London.  Here’s his latest list of book reviews.

Wally Lamb goes for the warm fuzzy in WISHIN’ AND HOPIN’.

Adelaide’s Independent Weekly thinks you could really get a lot out of David Thompson’s THAI STREET FOOD.  I’m hungry at the moment, so this was quite cruel.

From the Barnes & Noble “Tagged” description:

Molly welcomes Augusten Burroughs to the Studio to celebrate his hilarious holiday read, You Better Not Cry:

Filmmaker Georgie Weedon discusses her documentary on “Poet of Baghdad,” Nabeel Yasin. (Al Jazeera)

Margaret Webb Pressler profiles the tumultuous life of children’s author Anthony Horowitz. (Washington Post)

Sheila Heti chats it up with screenwriting guru Robert McKee. (The Rumpus)

Abigail Deutsch imagines Palin poetry, and it ain’t pretty. (Harriet the Blog at The Poetry Foundation)

Aldiko eBook reader for Android smartphones hits the ground running, with 120,000 downloads since September. (GalleyCat)

Tony Davis fires back at Anthony Cummins’ criticism of “Penguin’s continued brand evolution for the 21st century.” (Guardian Books Blog)

Agent Irene Goodman auctioning off 25 critiques of partial manuscripts on eBay. (Irene Goodman Agency)

High-octane auction nets NYT writer Jodi Kantor a seven-figure deal for Obama book. (The New York Observer)

Lock your doors and hide your daughters. The Kindle has arrived in Canada. (Publishers Weekly)

On this day in 1865 Mark Twain published “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog,” giving him his first taste of fame. (Today in Literature)

“I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice.  The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.”

-Anton Chekhov

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The Washington Times would have been more pleased to have had Nabokov’s wishes honored and THE ORIGINS OF LAURA (DYING IS FUN) left private at least or destroyed as instructed.  They cite the cruelty in exposing the rough sketches of a writer who would never have put less than his best foot forward.

Chris Wooding’s MALICE is a graphic novel about a comic book - don’t get confused!  The Trades seemed to like it.

Geared strongly to teen girls, AVALON HIGH by Meg Cabot gets a superlative review from one of her target audience.

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer makes a nonfiction case for vegetarianism in EATING ANIMALS.

Chad the Intern talks with comedian and author Lewis Black about (among other things) his new book, Me of Little Faith:

Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption wins the Man ‘Asian’ Prize. (The Literary Saloon)

Sarah Crown kicks off her call for nominations for the best books of the decade. (Guardian Books Blog)

Canadian authors say “no, thanks” to Google deal. (theBookseller.com)

“Secret Diary of a Call Girl” author Belle de Jour outs herself as British scientist, Brook Magnanti. (NYTimes)

Harlequin and Author Solutions team up for a new imprint for self-published romance authors. (Publishers Weekly)

Mark Medley chats it up with Cory Doctorow. (National Post)

Big Business: Random House’s eBook sales increased by 400% in the first half of the year. (GalleyCat)

Wayne Gooderham looks at the appeal of the unfinished novel. (Guardian Books Blog)

R.I.P. Donald Harington, novelist. (Nashau Telegraph)

R.I.P. Ron Sproat, television and stage writer. (Playbill.com)

On this day in 1968, novelist, poet, children’s author, artist and illustrator Mervyn Peake died at the age of fifty-seven. (Today in Literature)

“It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.”

-Gustave Flaubert

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Publishers Weekly keeps us all up to speed with the goods on a list of new non-fiction.

Elizabeth Kostova follows 2005’s THE HISTORIAN with THE SWAN THIEVES, a book that seemed a bit confounding to the reviewer at Kirkus.

PUBLIC ART IN VANCOUVER - ANGELS AMONG LIONS, by John Steil and Aileen Stalker, is praised in January Magazine.

And USA Today has a little something for everybody.

From the YouTube description:

Stephen King discusses his next novel ‘Under the Dome’ in this exclusive PopEater interview, a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice in the 1980s. It is expected to be the largest novel ( 1088 pages) he has written since 1986’s ‘It’, coming in at around 900 pages.

Last week, I had the pleasure of reviewing author and editor Mark Garvey’s Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (if you missed it, check it out here). Today, we present an exclusive interview with Garvey, discussing his motivations and process in putting together this excellent history of, and homage to, Strunk and White’s “little book.”

AuthorScoop: For those who haven’t yet read “Stylized”, tell us a bit about your introduction to “The Elements of Style” and the impact it had on you and your writing.

Mark: I first became aware of The Elements of Style in high school (in the late 1970s), when it was a required text for several of our English classes. The book really hit home with me in college, when I began writing for my own pleasure, and I was becoming interested in how other writers had approached writing’s basic questions. What I found in Elements was a slim, succinct guide that laid out some useful, fundamental principles for writers in a memorable and enjoyable way. It covered the more mechanical concerns (punctuation and such) but it also expounded a philosophy of writing that seemed eminently sensible and attractive to me, a philosophy that stressed the values of simplicity, concision, and clarity and that pointed the book’s writing reader toward the discovery, the blossoming, of his own voice on the page. Elements gave me confidence in the idea that if I managed to internalize the fundamentals of grammar, spelling, word usage, and such, and if I absorbed the book’s lessons about clarity and brevity and naturalness, my own voice as a writer would eventually develop.I think that’s the promise Elements holds out to every writer.

AuthorScoop: When you first conceptualized the book, how close was your original vision to what it would eventually become?

Mark: The final shape of Stylized actually ended up being fairly close to the original conception. I had several goals in mind for the book when I began: to unearth new biographical detail on both authors, particularly as it related to The Elements of Style; to tell the story of the book’s history and influence; to include the thoughts of some of my favorite writers on Elements; and to weave in my own ideas about the reasons for the book’s long success. I think I got pretty close to reaching those broader goals. Now, as to whether my prose itself matches my initial vision—does it ever? Doesn’t it always seem to the writer that, given just one more week, just one more edit, the prose will really start to sing? But we do the best we can. One thing I’ve learned from working with writers in my longish career in publishing, and in my own writing, is that a deadline is a writer’s best friend. It keeps us productive and, I hope, keeps things from getting too precious and overdone.

AuthorScoop: I really enjoyed the quotes from various writers sprinkled throughout “Stylized”. Had you already collected them by the time you began work in earnest, or was it a process of discovery for you as you wrote?

Mark: I’m glad to hear you enjoyed the writers’ quotes. I think they add a nice dimension to the book, and I feel very fortunate that so many great writers wanted to participate. As for the timing, I conducted most of the interviews with the writers early on, as I was doing the other parts of my research, so when it came down to the actual writing, the interviews were available as part of my raw materials, and I was able to place them into the structure in a way that fit with my overall plan. But certainly, talking to the writers was a process of discovery for me. They contributed an interestingly nuanced range of opinions about Elements and about the style-related questions I posed. I still love hearing from writers about how they get their work done.

AuthorScoop: In your rather intriguing blog entry on Joyce’s “Ulysses”, you note that you don’t read a lot of fiction. In terms of the distinction between quality non-fiction and quality fiction (the quest for clear and concise prose in non-fiction versus a more elastic, “voice”-centric approach in fiction) do you think “The Elements of Style” serves one discipline better than the other?

Mark: I think Elements is commonly thought to be of more use to nonfiction writers than to fiction writers. I suppose there’s something to that, but much of the book’s advice, particularly the Strunk-heavy sections in the first four chapters—those chapters concerning things such as punctuation, word usage, and organization—are as pertinent to fiction writers as to anyone else. Fiction isn’t exempt from the necessity to pay attention to those elements. White’s essay in Chapter 5, “An Approach to Style,” does perhaps seem more directed at nonfiction writers, but to my way of thinking it would be the rare fiction writer who couldn’t find something of value in that chapter, too. Certainly there are books that are of more substantial help on the techniques of fiction writing, and I would expect would-be fiction writers to look to those books for advice that’s more specific to their work.

AuthorScoop: Considering the rapid evolution of language, the rise of experimentation in literature and the influx of slang into the mainstream over the past 50 years, do you think The Elements of Style can continue to hold its influence and intellectual authority for another half-century?

Mark: I think as long as Elements undergoes reasonable updating at reasonable intervals, particularly in the chapter called “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” as it did during White’s lifetime (he made changes and adjustments over three editions and countless printings), it should remain a standard. I don’t see its core premises being debunked any time soon. As New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson says in Stylized, “Show me something better. Show me a better model. Lack of clarity? Slovenliness? Sloppiness? Show me something better.”

AuthorScoop: The history of “Elements”, particularly White’s determination in extending and expanding its influence, is really a very touching illustration of carrying forward the torch — not only for the benefit of future generations, but also as a way of honoring the past. Do you feel that your book has some of that to it?

Mark: I hope so. That’s a nice way to think about it. I know I undertook the project as a labor of love. Stylized is an homage to a book that has meant a lot to me and to countless other writers. Of course, neither E. B. White nor William Strunk Jr. needs me to keep the Elements legacy alive. Their work speaks for itself, and to far more readers than I will ever reach. I just wanted to tell the book’s story and express my enthusiasm for its message.