Publisher’s Lunch reported this morning that Houghton Mifflin issued a press release that sales were down from last year, with the sentence, “The decrease was due mainly to lower Tolkien book sales and lower sales of children’s titles.” However, in confirming the info, I noticed that the press release had been removed. Is it possible that Houghton Mifflin is deliberately withholding some pertinent info and that Tolkien has lust its potency? As Uncle Matt Grambo might say, DEVELOPING.

[UPDATE: Never mind. Here’s the release.]

Tonight, the National Book Critics Circle finalists will be announced. Among the nominees is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Richard Powers, whom the Chicago Tribune catches up with. Powers, the Tribune notes, really talks in the same cerebral way as his books. That isn’t really a revelation for Powers fans. But what’s really hilarious about the interview is how the Tribune sexes Powers up: “His pale green eyes resemble chips of stained glass. His fingers are long and thin. His hair is dark brown, with the occasional thread of gray, and it falls in a thick curtain, without so much as a hint of curl. Powers, in fact, seems composed entirely of straight lines and right angles: He’s tall and lean, and he moves with the efficient grace of an animated T-square.”

What next? David Foster Wallace described as “a bracing, tobacco-chomping stallion” for GQ?

Even so, it’s good to see Powers getting this kind of major coverage months after his last novel, The Time of Our Singing, was issued quietly in hardback (and all this is a month or two after the trade paperback edition).

The Book Babes respond to the petition. Margo writes that “literary conversation has been left too long in the hands of an elite whose approach is too stuffy for my taste.” I couldn’t agree more. Which is why it is every literary journalists’s duty to maintain literary standards that can be imparted to more people. It’s taking the good aspects of the Oprah Book Club idea and raising the bar a bit, getting people excited about books without coming across as a pretentious or ditsy ass. People want to read, and they want to read good stuff. They’re always on the lookout for new authors. And the most ardent readers hope to find books and ideas that challenge them. These two have managed to get away with soft interviews with Norman Mailer and Joe Eszterhas, have perpetuated largely uninformed ideas of books, and kept up profiles of popular and middlebrow books that people would read regardless. And that is why I object to these self-described bimbos.

Again, I urge people to sign the petition. Get two people at Poynter who know what the hell they’re talking about and who won’t devote precious column-inches to whether a middle-aged woman can be a babe or not. Which wasn’t the point of Mark’s petition.

[UPDATE: Comrade Mark responds in pointed and hilarious form.]

More Rankin. Okay, provided I can find the first Rebus novel, deal me in (in no small part, thanks to Sarah).

The New York Daily News: Women Who Blog. Lots of swell folks, but no Rack?

Years ago, a manuscript thought to be authored by a white abolitionist turned out to be written by former slave Harriet Jacobs. Literary scholar Jean Fagan Yellin published the MS (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself) and the book sold 200,000 copies. Yellin’s getting a grant from the Ford Foundation to publish all of Jacobs’ papers.

Two books about the notorious John Gardner are compared.

Write a well-regarded novel in Japan, and get stalked.

And digital tools are being used to restore texts from a Georgian monastery.

The Free Dictionary comes very close to beating out dictionary.com. For one thing, there aren’t any pop-ups. But the real geeky advantage they have is the contextual examples from classic literature. For almost every word, you’ll get at least three quotes from Wilkie Collins, O. Henry or Mark Twain, and you’ll be able to click on the precise place they appear. There are some minor problems with this approach. Davenport, for example, seems to bring up character names and the city rather than the sofa. But short of paying big bucks for The OED Online, this isn’t too bad of a substitute.

Neglected to mention it, but Choire’s at the NYTBR.

J.M. Coetzee came out of the woodworks for the Adelaide Festival of Arts Writers’ Week, only to scare the bejesus out of people. Coetzee insisted that he will never give a lecture again, and that he would snap necks if anyone suggested that his Nobel speech or anything coming out of his mouth was a lecture. Coetzee wieleded a truncheon while speaking, randomly beating empty chairs between questions, and sometimes howling to the moon just before stating a declarative sentence. The Nobel winner can no longer be seen during the day. There are unconfirmed reports that fresh blood could be seen trickling down the corners of his mouth.

Jennifer Graham hates Dr. Seuss, noting facetiously that he was a failed novelist because To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street was rejected 43 times. Although I think the figure was actually 24 times, even 43 times is still par for the course. Alex Haley received 200 rejections before writing Roots. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected 121 times. Silence of the Lambs was rejected 28 times. The Naked and the Dead was rejected 12 times. Catch-22 was rejected 21 times (hence, the eponymous twenty-two). And, as an experiment (well before his big scandal), Jerzy Kosinski changed the names of the author and manuscript to see if his book would sell. Thirteen agents and fourteen publishers rejected it.

The moral of the story: Just as one can’t judge a book by its cover, it’s impossible to weigh a manuscript’s merits based on the number of rejections.

Spider-Man 3 is in the works. No word yet on whether Michael Chabon will be involved with this one, though Chabon himself doesn’t know what’s happened to his words on the second film. This confidence does suggest that we might see a continual story arc picked up from the second film, similar to Mario Puzo’s work in the first two Superman films. Variety reports that no director or actors have been signed, and the script has not been finalized. Furthermore, Harry Knowles has not yet bombarded the Web with half-assed rumors, near-lies and “inside sources.” So perhaps it’s premature to report anything before the hype.

Not only is more hip-hop lit being published, but it’s selling.

New NYRoB up. To be read later: Richard Horton’s “The Dawn of McScience”.

Jayson gets petty, claiming that quotes run in the Times broke the embargo and committed copyright infringement. The article quoted a total of 156 words from Blair’s book, roughly half the number of words quoted by The Nation in a precedent-setting 1985 Supreme Court decision. Things here aren’t helped by Bill Keller, when the ass claimed that copies of Blair’s book “have begun to circulate.” Chip McGrath’s review will run on March 14. Given how petty Blair and New Millenium have been with the Master’s House, I hope McGrath gives this little punkass hell.

First, Adam Moss to New York, now Frank Rich?

Sara Nelson weighs in on the Amazon flap. She dishes some dirt and brings up the obvious question of why Amazon is overinflated. But isn’t it a bit ironic that she’s using column-inches to plug her book in a column probing tainted influence?