In Amanda Knox Tale, a Delicate Bet for Publishers

Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Amanda Knox at the appeal of her murder conviction in Perugia, Italy. She spent nearly four years in jail before being freed.

By JULIE BOSMAN

In person, Amanda Knox came across as soft-spoken, smart, almost scholarly, naming literary novels that she found moving. She said it was a longtime dream of hers to be a writer. And her book, she told the publishers, editors and publicists who listened raptly, would be the true and unvarnished story of what happened in Perugia, Italy.

“Everybody fell in love with her,” said one publishing executive who attended a meeting, echoing the sentiments of a range of people who have met Ms. Knox recently to discuss publishing her memoir.

Her personal charm aside, however, Ms. Knox’s story is complex, disturbing and still hotly debated by an American public that loves to take sides when it comes to did-she-or-didn’t-she crime tales.

This makes the next step trickier for publishers vying this week for the rights to her memoir, whose blockbuster allure has a backdrop of unsettling details: Ms. Knox was arrested in 2007 in the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what prosecutors described as a sex escapade gone wrong, spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and was exonerated last October after an appeals court overturned the original conviction.

The surge of media attention that will surely accompany the book’s release — normally good for publishers — comes with risks. To some members of the public, Ms. Knox was an innocent abroad who was imprisoned for a crime she did not commit. To others, she is a cunning femme fatale who got away with murder.

And that brings some difficult questions: do book-buying Americans see Ms. Knox as a sympathetic figure? And if the book commands a seven-figure advance, as is widely expected, will it be worth it?

 

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The Extraordinary Syllabus of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's teaching syllabuses don't read the same as most Photo by Keith Bedford/Getty Images.

What his lesson plans teach us about how to live.

By Katie Roiphe

Lately David Foster Wallace seems to be in the air: Is his style still influencing bloggers? Is Jeffrey Eugenides’ bandana-wearing depressed character in The Marriage Plot based on him? My own reasons for thinking about him are less high-flown. Like lots of other professors, I am just now sitting down to write the syllabus for a class next semester, and the extraordinary syllabuses of David Foster Wallace are in my head.

I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace’s name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. I am suspicious generally of those sorts of hushes and enchantments, and yet I do feel in the presence of his careful crazy syllabuses something like reverence.

Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof — points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”

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How to Write 50,000 Words in a Single Month

Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 50 novels, 30 short story collections, and 10 books of poetry—as well as plays, children's books, and works of nonfiction—in 2009. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

By June Thomas

There’s one week left in November, which means that a few hardy souls have seven more days to complete the National Novel Writing Month challenge—that is, to compose at least 50,000 words of a new work of fiction over the course of one calendar month.

If you’ve never attempted NaNoWriMo, it probably sounds like a thoroughly pointless project. Who could possibly produce a worthwhile piece of writing in such a short time? Well, as Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, advises in his book No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel, “There is no pressure on you to write a brilliant first draft. Because no one ever writes a brilliant first draft.”

The tight, non-negotiable deadline and the challenging minimum word count are the secrets of NaNoWriMo’s genius, because they focus the mind remarkably well. I speak as a successful NaNoWriMoer (I did it in August rather than November; the television is way too good at this time of year), despite having previously written nary a word of fiction since high school. The shaggy-dog tale that I ended up with is weird and perverse, but the writing experience was astonishingly fun. I consider it one of my greatest achievements, despite the intense strangeness of the finished product.

If you’re deep in the throes of NaNoWriMo, however, fun may be the last thing you’re experiencing. You may even be struggling with NaNoWriMo block. If so, allow me to offer a few words of advice.

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The fight hasn’t gone out of literature just yet

The row between Bernard-Henri Lévy, left, and Michel Houellebecq kept Paris entertained for much of 2008. Photograph: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

Niall Ferguson’s spat with critic Pankaj Mishra is the latest in a long line of literary feuds.

By Robert McCrum

“I will hound him in print in a way he has never experienced before.” Professor Niall Ferguson’s declaration of war on critic Pankaj Mishra for a hostile notice in the London Review of Books will have brought some pre-Christmas cheer to those who row in the galleys of literary journalism.

For a moment it seemed as if this would be the year in which peace broke out on the slopes of Parnassus. In May, Theroux shook hands with Naipaul. In America, the critic Dale Peck made up with his long-term foe, “the worst writer of his generation”, novelist Rick Moody.

So, thank God for Prof Ferguson’s thin skin. The only question is: will this “spat” descend into a full-blown “feud”? In the taxonomy of literary bust-ups, which takes in Dickens v Thackeray and Henry James v HG Wells, there are three basic categories.

First, there’s the Row-Literary. This is really no more than the cost of doing business in Grub Street. The Row-Literary is usually inspired by a bad review. John le Carré’s review of The Satanic Verses in the Observer is a locus classicus.

A small domestic incident quickly became an international bushfire when lifelong literary fire-raiser Christopher Hitchens merrily chucked kerosene on some smouldering embers. Feud watchers will know that it’s the sign of a really good literary row when outsiders get dragged in.

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Mackenzie memoirs banned for spilling spy secrets to be republished

Sir Compton Mackenzie. Photograph: Dennis Oulds/Getty Images

Sir Compton Mackenzie was prosecuted in 1932 for revealing information about intelligence service in Greek Memories.

By Richard Norton-Taylor

The first world war memoirs of Sir Compton Mackenzie are to see the light of day 78 years after they were banned after the intervention of MI6 and MI5.

In 1932 the author of more than 90 books, including Whisky Galore, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for revealing information about Britain’s intelligence service in Greek Memories.

Mackenzie was charged with identifying wartime intelligence officers and revealing that passport control and visa sections of UK embassies were often used as cover for the secret service. He also disclosed the existence of a department of the Secret Intelligence Service‚ now known as MI6 but then known as section “M.I.i.c” of the War Office.7

Worst of all, Mackenzie revealed that the first head of MI6, the one-legged Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, was referred to as C. It is a moniker that his successors, including the incumbent, Sir John Sawers, maintain. They sign their telegrams and correspondence‚ sent to the Queen as well as the foreign secretary, C in green ink.

The unexpurgated version of Greek Memories will be published next week by Biteback Books. It includes a memo sent to the government’s law officers by Valentine Vivian, then head of the intelligence service’s counter-espionage section. “The keynote of this book is authenticity”, warned Vivian, adding that Mackenzie was clearly determined to “outdo in outspokenness and realism” an officially approved account of British intelligence during the first world war that had been published earlier.

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Jane Austen ‘died from arsenic poisoning’

Portrait of Jane Austen, c.1790. Photograph: Getty Images

Crime writer Lindsay Ashford bases claim on reading of author’s letters and claims murder cannot be ruled out.

By Alison Flood

Almost 200 years after she died, Jane Austen’s early death at the age of just 41 has been attributed to many things, from cancer to Addison’s disease. Now sleuthing from a crime novelist has uncovered a new possibility: arsenic poisoning.

Author Lindsay Ashford moved to Austen’s village of Chawton three years ago, and began writing her new crime novel in the library of the novelist’s brother Edward’s former home, Chawton House. She soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen’s letters, and one morning spotted a sentence Austen wrote just a few months before she died: “I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour.”

Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause “raindrop” pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.

Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen’s hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.

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World literature tour: Argentina

Buenos Aires' celebrated El Ateneo bookstore. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images

This month we’re off to the country that gave us Jorge Luis Borges, as well as many lesser-known but equally dazzling writers.

By Richard Lea

After a month in Colombia, the tour returns with recommendations ranging from Jorge Isaacs’s Maria, described by dande as “One of the most notable works of the Romantic movement in Spanish literature” to Tomás González’s La Luz Difícil, a newly released novel which according to K “Colombian Literature junkies are giving … outstanding reviews”.

Along the way Daryl suggested Elena Garces’s Colombian Women “deserves to be read as an indicator of the contemporary situation of women in many other Latin American countries”, while Rafael Leal cited the “reactionary” philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who apparently “did not believe in translations and read everything in its original language” – though his own works, consisting “mostly of aphorisms” are available in “Polish, German, Italian and French”. For Leandro, whereas Gabriel García Márquez describes “Latin-American reality”, Fernando Vallejo “describes Colombian reality” in particular, so that Colombians reading Vallejo feel “pain, anger” from descriptions which “destroy our hearts”. Thanks for all these recommendations, especially the outpouring of love for Victor M Roselló’s East of the Orteguaza.

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Alan Hollinghurst puts Booker snub behind him with Galaxy triumph

Alan Hollinghurst. Photograph: Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images

Having been a shock omission from the Booker prize shortlist, The Stranger’s Child author declared author of the year.

By Alison Flood

He was overlooked by the Booker judges last month, but the book trade has spoken and named Alan Hollinghurst its “author of the year” for his novel The Stranger’s Child.

An academy of 750 book industry experts voted for Hollinghurst as their writer of the year, ahead of Booker winner Julian Barnes and his short novel A Sense of An Ending and Carol Birch’s Booker-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie. Hollinghurst, who failed to make the final Booker cut for his novel about two families, ranging from 1913 to 2008, also beat poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection The Bees.

His win was announced at the Galaxy National Book awards on Friday evening and reflects, said the prize’s organisers, “the acclaim for Hollinghurst’s novel and the support from many in the industry who were dismayed to see it omitted from the Man Booker shortlist last month”.

“It’s fantastic that he won. It would have been ridiculous if he had gone the year without winning a major award for that title, so it is wonderful he has been recognised,” said Jon Howells from Waterstone’s, which sponsored the author of the year prize. “Everyone was surprised and disappointed that he wasn’t on the Booker shortlist … Everyone felt it was the one glaring omission so it is good he is getting this. It is the book trade saying, this is our book of the year.”

Hollinghurst, who won the Booker in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, said that “in a year when so many exceptional books have been published” he was “especially thrilled to be named the Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year”.

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Occupy: the intellectual high ground

Star Books' library at the Occupy London protest. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Public intellectuals have often been prominent in protest politics, and the Occupy movement has attracted plenty of thinkers.

By John Dugdale

“Sartre: be brief, be clear”, was the disconcerting message Jean-Paul Sartre found on a lectern before he addressed angry French students in 1968. When Sartre had earlier interrupted work on his giant Flaubert biography to offer support to those occupying the Sorbonne, there were no such embarrassments. But Danny Cohn-Bendit, the uprising’s main spokesman, said he was neither inspiration nor mentor, and also dismissed as “a joke” claims that Herbert Marcuse, author of One-Dimensional Man, was their “intellectual leader” (“none of us had read him”). Revolts against fathers don’t need fathers.

More than 40 years later, Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs (including Occupy London) have been similarly backed and courted by intellectuals. Naomi Klein, Jeffrey Sachs, Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek are among those who have spoken to the New York or Boston protesters. Naomi Wolf was arrested while backing a related demo. Noam Chomsky delivered a public lecture in Boston. Writers, including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, have signed the Occupy Writers online petition. There’s the same sense as in 1968, though, that the protest is its own thing and gurus are nice accessories but not necessary; the witticism about Marcuse saying “they are my followers, so I must follow them” sometimes seems applicable.

Nevertheless, some figures are credibly cited as influential, notably David Graeber, an American anthropology don at Goldsmiths in London, who helped organise what became the Wall Street occupation in its early weeks; his books include Direct Action: An Ethnography, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. And the initial spur for Occupy Wall Street came from Adbusters, an organisation that spoofs ads and runs anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist campaigns, and which does have a guru – looping back to May ’68, its tactics are modelled on Guy Debord’s Situationism.

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Occupy first. Demands come later

'The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end.' Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Critics say the Occupy cause is nebulous. Protesters will need to address what comes next – but beware a debate on enemy turf.

By Slavoj Žižek

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: “They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time.”

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

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