Notes in the Margin Weblog

50 States of Literature: Heading On Down to Colorado | Columbia Spectator
The Columbia Spectator cruises into Colorado with Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:

Here, patches of snow sit among blue mounds of sandhill and dead sunflowers drop their loaded heads onto the black-top roads. In this atmosphere we find a land at once modernized and rural, brisk and dusty, where ice clings to the edge of sand-colored mountains.

Hoaxes hit bookstores - Los Angeles Times

It’s a scam aimed at independent book stores holding author appearances: Someone calls claiming to be the scheduled author, relates the story of an emergency, and asks the store owner to wire money to Western Union. Most of the events seem to be occurring in southern California. And although most of the scams are aimed at making money, one was apparently politically motivated, aimed at forestalling an event featuring a political writer that was supposed to be filmed by C-SPAN.

This is from The Writer’s Almanac, which is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media:

It’s the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were “good training for a writer.”

To support herself while writing, she worked for several years as a reservation clerk at British Overseas Airline Corporation and at Eastern Air Lines. In December of 1956, some of her New York friends gave her a year’s salary along with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” She decided to devote herself to writing and moved into an apartment with only cold water and improvised furniture.

Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times “Go Set a Watchman” and “Atticus”). She called herself “more a rewriter than writer,” and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.

To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960 and was immediately a popular and critical success. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. A review in The Washington Post read, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Lee later said, “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

50 States of Literature: Georgia On Our Minds | Columbia Spectator

Tayari Jones’ debut, Leaving Atlanta, is set during the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders, at which time a total of 29 black children were killed. Three kids tell their stories: Tasha, struggling daily to stay in favor with her friends, Rodney, branded as too soft and different to be accepted, and Octavia, whose dark skin earns her the nickname “Watusi” and makes her a pariah. The three struggle to comprehend their classmates’ disappearances while dealing with the everyday, from divorce and first crushes to unraveling what grown-ups mean by “the truth.”

Four quite different memoirists help to prove the vitality of the literary form

John Marshall, book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, briefly discusses four memoirs that “demonstrate the genre’s vitality and variety.” The four cover very different subjects:

1. childhood in Africa
2. divorce
3. alternative lifestyle–”living green”
4. mental illness

50 States of Literature: Exploring in Maryland | Columbia Spectator

Columbia Spectator’s 50 States of Literature series continues with Anne Tyler’s novel A Patchwork Planet, where the main character, Barnaby Gaitlin, lives just outside of Baltimore:

The quiet neighborhood outside of Baltimore serves to nestle Barnaby with its “big, tall spruce trees” and “damp, chilly feel” that leaves a permanent mist on car windows. More so than the land itself, however, the northeast crispness of Baltimore attitude, which leaves characters like Barnaby’s clients more satisfyingly prickly than cuddly, serves as the perfect setting for the struggles of a promising loser.

Like all of Tyler’s novels, this one is character driven and delightful in a quirky way.

Borders Bookzone

Seeing and hearing an author speak can personalize a book.  Borders new Bookzone offers  videos of writes talking about their own books as well as about their favorite books. And it looks as if site visitors can also upload their own book reviews, although the only one I found there so far was by a Borders employee.

A similar site, which has been at it longer and therefore currently has more content, is BookVideos.tv

Amazon’s Kindle is stoking sales of e-books

The debate over e-books and the future of publishing continues, here centered around Amazon’s new e-book device, the Kindle.

One person involved in the publishing industry compares e-books to audiobooks. If that’s an apt comparison, then we can only expect e-books to become increasingly more prevalent relatively quickly.

Hollywood’s James Ellroy enigma - Los Angeles Times

“Which did you like better, the movie or the book?” Readers almost always choose the book. But because the book and film are different mediums, each with with its own traditions, requirements, and limitations, a direct comparison between the book and the movie is usually unfair or, even, uninformative. A more fruitful discussion question might be “How true to the spirit of the book is the film adaptation?”

This article considers the difficulty of adapting James Ellroy’s books to film. With their convoluted plot tapestries and telegraphic postmodern writing, Ellroy’s novels appear unsuitable for film adaptation. Yet my husband and I both think the film version of Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential is one of the best film adaptations of a book we’ve ever seen.

The occasion for this article is the upcoming opening of a film with screenplay by Ellroy:

Friday marks the arrival of Ellroy’s first produced screenplay: “Street Kings,” a racially charged tale of police corruption and conspiracy starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker. While the film, set in contemporary Los Angeles, lacks the sweep of “L.A. Confidential” and is unlikely to make the same impact, its language, characters, sardonic morality and fast-reversing plot feel like an Ellroy novel.

Amazon Tightens Noose on Print-On-Demand Publishers; Insists They Use Company’s Own Service - washingtonpost.com

Amazon is causing quite an uproar in the print-on-demand publishing world with its apparent attempt to create a monopoly for itself. Be sure to read the Writers Weekly article linked at the bottom of this piece.