Move over, David Mitchell. The Literary Saloon has gone gaga over Lars Saabye Christensen’s The Half Brother. And they’re not the only ones. Paul Binding says it’s “a deeply felt, intricately worked and intellectually searching work of absolutely international importance.” Anna Peterson calls it “a great river of a book.” And Boyd Tonkin calls it “a total knock-out of a novel ” Norman Mailer, however, remains convinced that he wrote it first, writing longhand in 1972 in Norwegian.

Ian Samson offers an unapologetically scathing assault on John Fowles:

The chronology of John Fowles’s friendless and hallowed experience is as follows: he gets born, goes to prep school, boarding-school, Oxford, then goes to teach at the international school on the Greek island of Spetsai, returns to London with the wife of a colleague, teaches at various unsuitable colleges, enjoys enormous success with his first book, The Collector (1963), and buys a big house in Lyme Regis where he writes very long books, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977) and A Maggot (1985), which sometimes get made into films and make him a lot of money (large parts of the Journal are filled with his totting-up of income and expenditure). It may have taken him a while to achieve the success he feels he deserves, but he hit his stride straight off in his journal, setting the tone in the first entry, on 24 September 1949: ‘A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, “As much chance as you have of being a genius.” It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least.’

Of course, given how Fowles goes after Scrabble players (“‘The poverty of minds that can spend such evenings playing such rubbish”), the apparently joyless and smug scribe has it coming. Personally, I keep a daily journal (in addition to this weblog and everything else), but I would never deign to show anyone my prattle, let alone profit off of it when I couldn’t write a new novel.

(via Rake)

Toni Morrison’s next project is very intriguing. USA Today reports that her next book, Remember: The Journey to Story Integration, is framed around early black-and-white photos of school integration, with Morrison writing the hypothetical dialogue and emotions of the children. The book has 52 photographs, and marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Independent reports that Michael Moore knew that Disney wasn’t going to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 a year ago. Here’s the CNN interview in question. The full quote is this:

Almost a year ago after we’d started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent that he was upset that Miramax had made the film — Disney owns Miramax — and he will not distribute this film.

Miramax said don’t worry about that, keep making the film, we’ll keep funding it. The Disney money kept flowing to us for the last year. We finished the film last week, and we take it to the Cannes film festival next week.

On Monday of this week we got final word from Disney that they will not distribute the film. They told my agent they did not want to upset the Bush family, particularly Gov. Bush of Florida because Disney was up for a number of tax incentives, abatements … whatever. The risk of losing this — we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars — they didn’t want to risk it over a little documentary.

So the big question here is whether this is a trumped up publicity stunt or a legitimate case of Moore defiantly raging against the machine. Granted, the semantics don’t help Moore’s case. But in light of the deflating Disney image, part of me wonders if this was a ploy by Miramax to stir up a Pixar-like shakeup.