More accumulated stuff

There's a book out which is an anthology of material from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (recommended by Jessa Crispin at Bookslut). Should be good. It's the world's best title for a magazine, anyway.

Bet you don't know where the title comes from, do you? No, thought not. I think I did know once, but I've forgotten.

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Cyberbook Buzz will publicise your book on the web. For a fee.

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Lynn Lurie's Corner of the Dead is a novel, but an unusual one. Set in Peru, it is told from the perspective of a witness. More on the web site, including an extract.

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Don't miss the latest Jimston Journal, just out and free online. There are quite a few things in it which you will have heard of before if you're a regular reader of this blog. There's some of Mr Losovsky's Doorbells, a bit of Mr Fenman, and some Gladys. If you can't find anything to interest you there, then I give up.

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Here is a cultural announcement of considerable significance:

After the limited print-run of only 52 sold out last week, the forward-thinking publishing house Upside-Down-Then-Backwards is offering readers the opportunity to download Jean-Pierre Sertin’s experimental novel 'p.52' for free. This unique work contains 52 pages, each of them representing p.52 of 52 non-existent works. Hard to follow? Fortunately, Sertin has written an introduction in which he explores at length the process through which the novel was created. The full work can be found here.

As you may or may not know, Sertin is the co-creator of the literary form of ‘Intercuttings’ - various examples of which can also be found at Underneath the Bunker – the online home of Europe’s Premier Cultural Journal (as well as many other things).

May the treacle of culture continue to drip upon your faces.

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Abebooks is celebrating the 50th anniversary of On the Road. That book never quite worked for me, but then I am English.

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Worried about book coverage in newspapers? Then you must read Steve Wasserman's long article in the Columbia Journalism Review. (Link from Publishers Lunch.) Wasserman also has things to say about the conglomeration and digitisation of the book business, and changes in the culture of literacy. The author was formerly head of the Los Angeles Times's book-review section.

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Mr Mahfouz gets his name in the Washington Times. And serve him right. (Link from Lori at Bonusbooks.

If you've been following the Sheikh Mahfouz story, you may wish to know that Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil, is the director of the American Center for Democracy, which is a good place to go for news and information about this and similar issues.

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John Heath and Lisa Adams have written a book about popular and bestselling books (Why We Read What We Read), and what such books tell us about their readers and the society we live in. If you like radio, you can hear the authors being interviewed by Steve Roberts. I'd like to say that you can also read a free transcript of the interview, but you can't. (Link from Dave Lull.)

To get a quicker flavour of this book, you might do better to read a good review.

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Not that you and I care, of course, because we are much too grand for that kind of thing, but self-publishing services provider AuthorHouse has taken over the similar outfit iUniverse. You can read all about it in the press release (link from Publishers Lunch).

It seems that the guys who runs these businesses see no chance that people are going to stop writing books; neither do they see any likely diminution in the desire to see the books in print. What's more, they're going to open up a new competitor for Lulu.com, called Wordclay.

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P. Viktor is an Englishman who once worked for Oxford University Press. Now he has a novel out (via Lulu). Its title is Veneer, and you can read the first three chapters online.

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Abebooks are running an auction of 14 signed books, published by Penguin. Proceeds to English PEN, which, I am sorry to say, is not my favourite charity.

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Redstone Press is an odd business, even by publishers' standards, but very professional despite its oddity. Go take a look. I can find no word about who runs it, but many of the books are by the artist David Shrigley, so perhaps he has a hand in it somewhere. The name Rothenstein also crops up regularly.

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Charles Hugh Smith offers aspiring writers what he claims is the worst advice they'll ever read. Actually, most of it is quite sound. (Link from Jon.)

Reading Charles's stuff, you would be forgiven for thinking that he is a complete failure as a writer, but actually, if you explore his web site further, you will see that that is far from the case. He has written quite a lot of journalism. He's also had a novel (I-State Lines) published by the Permanent Press, an outfit which says that it receives 6,000 submissions a year and publishes 12 of them.

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Back in August, I mentioned a novel by Wesley Carrington Greayer. In earlier life, Wes flew in a world-war II bomber crew. Now he has started a blog, on which he is posting some of the thoughts he has had about that experience.

For many years Wes's WWII memorabilia were locked away in a box in the attic; his memories and emotions from that period likewise. Now, while he still can, Wes is putting some of it on to paper, and into circulation. Well worth reading.

Everybody of any age has a story, I guess, and the men who fought in WWII have darker stories to tell than most. I met such a man recently, and quite unexpectedly he told me how much he was troubled, even now, by the memories of his appalling experiences in those days. I hope it helped for him to talk. All I could do to help was recommend that he read Marcus Aurelius.

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Last Saturday's Financial Times provided an amazing experience, possibly unique in recent UK newspaper history. It contained, so far as I could see, not a single word about the McCann family. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, my advice is: stay ignorant.