I recently had the honor of blogging the Rumpus Book Club’s first selection, Citrus County, in four posts: #1, #2, #3, and #4. The comments are not to be missed!

There’s an interesting event in Berkeley on Wednesday night at 7:30. PEN World Voices, with the assistance of Berkeley Arts & Letters, The Believer, and the Center for the Art of Translation, are presenting Tommy Wieringa (of the Netherlands) and Christos Tsilokas (of Australia) in conversation with Oscar Villalon, discussing their work and their lives, and reading from their current work. The event is cheap, $6-$12 sliding scale. Here’s the ticket page, with further details about the authors.

A writer named Charlie Stross just posted a fascinating article on his blog about why novels are the length they are.

The reasons have to do with market dynamics — costs faced by publishers and bookstores. In the Victorian era, novels could get tremendously long because they were published serially: writers could go on week after week providing chapter-length installments indefinitely, until either they or their readers threatened to get bored.

And remember those fat mass-market paperbacks in grocery stores in the 80s and 90s? Publishers had been forced to raise the prices on paperbacks owing to inflation, and distributors “pushed back,” according to Stross, demanding fatter novels for the higher price. (Production costs weren’t much higher.) Hence all those 4×6″ doorstops by Stephen King. Stross concludes with the hope that ebooks, if widely adopted commercially, will separate considerations of form from production considerations for the first time in history. Which is a thought we’ve heard before, but it’s an interesting piece all the same.

Jason Epstein started out as an editor and publisher in a now-vanished era — his first editorial job was at Random House in 1949 — and he was a co-founder of the New York Review itself and also the Library of America. He’s of an old school but he’s not a Luddite — in fact he was also a co-founder of the company that markets the Espresso Book Machine — and he maintains the sensible (if somewhat unexciting) view that e-books will be an inevitable part of the publishing landscape from now on, but paper books will remain important too.

A couple weeks ago, the New York Review of Books ran a lengthy, somewhat rambling piece about the future of publishing by Jason Epstein, which is nevertheless worthwhile spending time with.

In the essay he makes a few remarks about about each aspect of publishing that is changing today, but refreshingly, he refuses to speculate too far into the future, limiting his predictions to only the few steps ahead that can really be foreseen, and where he has concerns, he voices them without immediately proclaiming that this problem will lead directly to the end of civilization. It’s a worthwhile read for anybody interested in the future of publishing.

The Codex Seraphinianus — a mysterious book by an artist named Luigi Serafini, which is often described as seeming to be “a visual encyclopedia of an unknown planet” — has been placed online in its entirety.

Back in 2007, Justin Taylor wrote about the book in the Believer, and in 2009 he wrote a follow-up article about reader response to it over at HTMLGIANT. You may want to save these links for the weekend; it’s worth spending half a day or more with this amazing book and the stuff Justin has written about it.

The Center for the Art of Translation has an interview up with Susan Bernofsky, translator of Robert Walser’s novel The Tanners, among other works. She talks about the six volumes of Robert Walser’s miniaturized shorthand that has come to be known as the “Microscripts.” Her translation of selections from these are forthcoming from New Directions.

But wait, what are Microscripts?
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Recently I was reminded of this lovely little essay by the cartoonist Seth, about the solitary art of cartooning. From his description I’d say that cartooning — at least fiction cartooning such as Seth practices — sounds exactly like fiction writing, except you have to draw pictures. Which by rights should make it even harder.

Of course, nonfiction cartooning, such as Joe Sacco practices, is exactly like reporting — except you have to draw pictures, so that practice should be even more difficult.

Anyway, at Seth’s essay, don’t miss the little included strip, Down the Stairs. And here’s an illuminating Q&A with Seth from the same magazine.

Last month Cory Doctorow gave an eloquent and often-amusing speech at the National Reading Summit to an audience of “librarians, educators, publishers, authors and students” called “How to Destroy the Book.” The transcript was published yesterday by the University of Toronto’s student paper, The Varsity.

Doctorow begins by describing the threat of a group of copyright pirates who “dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity,” and that “what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it.” Read more »

“Nerval is remembered as a minor literary figure, an eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a ribbon in the Palais Royal, gabbled his poetry in doorways, read at night with a candlestick on his head, and slept in coaches with his head in a noose, habits that endeared him to aesthetes and literary anecdotalists.”
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“Someone said there are only two ways to live your life: one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is. I’ve always been convinced Havana is an annexed colony of the latter…

“I was sitting in the rafters next to a father and son for the morning set of fights going on during the Cuban National Boxing Championships held at Kid Chocolate gymnasium in Old Havana. My high school gym might’ve cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t recreate what this place looks like.

“The murals and chipped paint and scoreboards and rafters and ceiling takes your breath away — yet it’s the faces in the crowd that steal the show. The tickets don’t cost anything for Cubans. Everyone can come. There’s no advertising anywhere. Even though there are Olympic champions in the ring periodically who could cash in to the tune of millions, most don’t. Nobody here is making a dime off world class ability.”

Brin Friesen writes about Cuba, and boxing in Cuba, in an excerpt from his ongoing memoir/novel The Domino Diaries, over at the Nervous Breakdown.