Question: Will the moralists now go after Chuck Palahniuk with the same vigor that they go after music, films, and video games? Come on, you fundies, you’ve got your smoking gun!
First, Orhan Pamuk. Now Abdullah Yildiz. In Turkey, it’s all literary persecution, all the time! Note to the hypersensitive Turkish nationalists: Georgie Porgie only served you pudding and pie and kissed the girls and made them cry! Let the little fucker run away and learn to deal.
An interesting review of Park Honan’s Marlowe bio, wondering how much of biography is fiction.
The playwright Gary Mitchell has received serious death threats and was attacked by men with baseball bats and gasoline bombs. Serious shit.
Another million dollar debut deal. This time, for Diane Setterfield, a Yorkshire French teacher whose turned out a gothic novel in the vein of Jane Eyre, et al.
Lynn Johnson’s “For Better or For Worse,” the only comic strip that has featured characters growing up in real time (and dared to tackle homosexuality) , is ending next year. (via Komickcast)
The National Reviewtalks with James Ellroy: “What shocks people is when they find out that I’m not a liberal. When you don’t hold to the liberal orthodoxy in publishing and films, people are shocked. And they take that oh-how-can-you-be-that tack. Or they may take that how-can-you-be-so-uncool tack.”
Bush and Alberto Gonzales have now come out for greater coyright laws. Gonzales wants serious jail time for intellectual property offenders. But what he isn’t telling you is that, in light of the fact that he advocates torture, he wants to throw all teenagers who downloaded last week’s episode of The O.C. into a CIA-funded gulag. We all know who the real criminals are, don’t we?
So are these folks in Renoreally turning to self-publishing because they can’t wait two years? Or because they are amateurs who fear rejection?
Chinua Achebe has called for Nigeria to speak in its mother tongue, preaching against “language colonialism.”
Proving that the Welsh often come up with batshit crazy ideas, there is now a 3D talking head of Dylan Thomas reading “Do not go gentle into that good night” on loop. It was employed during the Dylan Thomas Festival. The idea apparently was that a bigass talking head would somehow get young people more excited about poetry. However, great attention was paid to Thomas’s facial niceties. Too bad that there isn’t any video online.
Tod Goldberg notes that the Los Angeles Times has picked up on the Koontz racist remarks story. Apparently, Bantam Dell has been receiving feedback on what Koontz said and Lee Goldberg and Koontz talked on the phone, without apparent success. Meanwhile, Koontz is claiming that the remarks involved “some political incorrectness, but nothing mean.” Tod Goldberg concludes, “Whatever the case may be, I suspect saying, ‘Sorry if I offended anyone, it certainly wasn’t my intention’ would have been a far better response than, ‘You’re all out to get me!'”