Kerry Jones has reported here that Zoo Press sent the following email to its contestants:

Unfortunately, the entry fees for the relatively few number of submissions we received went toward promoting the prizes;(specifically we received approximately 350 submissions for two prizes totaling less than $10,000, which we put into a full page ad in the Atlantic Monthly and two other smaller email campaigns, to our financial loss).

He also notes that Zoo Press did not place a full-page ad, but took out a digest-size ad in the September 2003 issue. (Question: Even accounting for hosting, email is relatively free, no?)

Azevedo has yet to return any of my calls. I will try and confirm the nature of the Atlantic ad in the next few days.

[UPDATE: I’ve heard back from the Atlantic. As reported here by Kerry Jones, the half-page ad rate is $5,390. The Atlantic has confirmed with me that they did run a half-page ad (not the full-page one implied by Azevedo) in September 2003. However, quite understandably, they cannot divulge details about what Zoo Press paid and what the terms of the contract were. So whether Zoo Press negotiated the price or not remains a mystery. Azevedo does not return my calls. As always, the forum here is open for us to hear his side. But he would seem to prefer silence.]

Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon: “And should I get in past your Blade for a few playful nips, and manage to, well, break the old Skin, — why, then you should soon have caught the same, eh?”

The End of the Road by John Barth: “So when I’d a real maniac on I nursed it like a baby, and boils plague the man who spoiled it!”

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren: “The old man was on the front steps now.”

About a Boy by Nick Hornby: “He never managed to strike up much of a rapport with Maisy, Angie’s mysteriously sombre five-year-old, who seemed to regard him as frivolous to the core.”

Allan Quatermain by Rider Haggard: “Poor fellow, he had died of fever when on his return journey, and within a day’s march of Mombasa.”

I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane: “The case was turned over to them.”

Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber: “And the mirror-decorations on my hats and bags and dresses — you’ve guessed it, they’re Tibetan magic to reflect away misfortune.”

You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett: “I leave the note folded by his side.”

The Tenants by Bernard Malamud: “Back in his study, he wrote hurriedly, as though he had heard the end of the world falling in the pit of time and hoped to get his last word written before then.”

Familiar Studies by Robert Louis Stevenson: “If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?”

A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky: “It was during my first season in the troop that time no longer stood still for Solomon, that the inevitable shadow of mortality finally took form as Uriah.”

[Apologies to the ladies.]

Some news on Ian McEwan’s next: a day in the life of a neurosurgeon. McEwan is reportedly at 8:00 PM. and spent some time following a doctor around. (via Sarvas)

From Caterina via David Chess:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

RESULTS: D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “My God!”

You can’t win ’em all.

Neal Stephenson can’t even win over the Scots: “The author biography says that having discovered his ‘pretty humour for the writing of Romances… he took up the Pen and hath not since laid it down’. To which one can only add: Please do. ” Ouch. (via the Saloon)

Paul Di Filippo also remains unconvinced: “But if we wanted this kind of pure historical romance, we’d be reading Patrick O’Brian. Where are the observations and insights that relate all this ocean of storytelling to our current era? Lost in a welter of (mostly) entertaining Pirates of the Caribbean material. A single sentence from Enoch Root that parodies Clarke’s Law—’Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo’—is hardly enough to carry the day.”