In Defence of Bret Easton Ellis
The London Review of Books wonders if he's a smarter writer than most people think.

It is perhaps not surprising, given Ellis’s obsession with the fables and foibles of inattention, that he should demand a great deal of attention from his readers. And at the same time he makes it easy for them not to notice things: the gags, the sex, the glamour, the horror that Ellis does so well, all seduce us into not looking too long, into not seeing just how artful he is. Right from the beginning of Lunar Park we have to keep our wits about us. The first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied there.’ The only problem with this sentence is that it’s only half of the sentence in the play. Ellis – obsessed as he is with the way everything becomes an excerpt, the way the context is taken out of everything – has extracted part of the speech in Act 1 Scene 5 that follows Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father.

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smartest writer _ever_.

English language fiction sales get hit with the ugly stick

Welcome to my world, you pampered novelists. Ladies and gentlemen, I would definitely say it's time to panic. Please prepare to run amok in an orgy of grief and, in turn, violence. Apparently we can blame the trend on either Dan Brown, Harry Potter or Osama Bin Laden. That's just spooky, because those are the exact same three suspects for who left the empty toilet paper roll in the bathroom at our house this weekend past...! Coincidence?


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I'm not seeing any fiction crash. The current year is loaded with quality and Canadian fiction in my little corner (Waterloo) is doing just fine, thanks. Perhaps the Chain is selling more yoga mats and fewer books

Did Don DeLillo predict the Buncefield explosions?
The Guardian considers the eerie similarity between the recent explosions in England and DeLillo's White Noise.

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Fiction News:

Bad year for books says Philip Marchand.

Meeting JT Leroy.

Da Vinci Code blamed for crowds at the Louvre. Here I thought it was all the art.


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Michiko loves Nick

I normally don't link to reviews, but Laird seemed like a nice guy in the minute I met him and IFOA and this particular review contains a line I will print out for my wall of fame: "his prose has none of the self-consciousness or preciousness sometimes displayed by poets-turned-novelists." Ah. Endorphins. Niiiiiice.


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A Criminal and Addict? Or a Fraud?
The Smoking Gun investigates James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. Threats of lawsuits follow.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."

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Children of the corn
Jessa Crispin wonders what happened to all the adults in literature.

Boredom during a Chicago winter can lead to all sorts of odd behavior, like rearranging furniture for hours on end, as if the right feng shui will make the sun burst through the clouds. I finally settled on moving the bookcase of unread books into the bedroom to give myself reason to get out of bed in the cold, cold morning; then I started going through the books as I removed them from the shelves. There was The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Ali Smith's The Accidental. Galt Niederhoffer's A Taxonomy of Barnacles. Dara Horn's The World to Come. Evan Kuhlman's Wolf Boy. Amanda Boyden's Pretty Little Dirty. David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. They all had one obvious thing in common: the adolescent protagonist.

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The best fiction author of all time is Paul Stewart with his wonderful illustrator Chris Riddel.......The Edge Chronicles is probably the best series ever to have been created.....so much morso than that stupid, perposterus series "Harry Potter." In my opinion, The Edge Chronocles could and would be a much better film series than Harry Potter and it would probably rival Lord Of The Rings. But yes, Paul Stewart...I congratulate you and your magnificent imagination.