Watch worldwide book sales, live

  By Carolyn Kellogg

The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It’s hypnotic. That’s partly because it’s a simple, elegant interface. But it’s also because it shows what books other people are purchasing, and that’s inherently interesting to people who like books.

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Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died

Photo: Adrienne Rich. Credit: Robert Giard / Norton

Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream, has died. She was 82.

The recipient of such literary awards as the Yale Young Poets prize, the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Dorothea Tanning Award given by the Academy of American Poets, Rich died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis, said a son, Pablo Conrad.

She came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and was best known as an advocate of women’s rights, which she wrote about in both her poetry and prose. But she also wrote passionate antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged.

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Christopher Hitchens has died: Fighter, doubter, provocateur

Photos: Christopher Hitchens. Credit: Christian Witkin TwelveBooks

Christopher Hitchens has died at age 62. From around the Web, notes on the death of Hitchens, essayist, provocateur, American:

– By Richard Fausset

David Frum:

A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club.

No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

Christopher was never a man to back away from a confrontation on behalf of what he considered basic decency. Yet it would be wrong to remember only the confrontational side.

Christopher was also a man of exquisite sensitivity and courtesy, dispensed without regard to age or station. On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food –- lamb tagine -– to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests -– and as guests, we must have champagne.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair:

He was a man of insatiable appetites — for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. …

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs.

Benjamin Schwarz, the Atlantic:

I met Christopher (never Chris) in 1997. Perry Anderson, a mutual friend, had invited us to debate the wisdom of American intervention in the Balkans. We were, unsurprisingly, on opposing sides — a position that all his friends have experienced, formally or informally.  Hitch’s friends were comrades always; but allies only occasionally — that was a role impossible to hold consistently.

Hitch, an idealist committed to protecting human rights and to putting thugs in their place, embraced a muscular internationalism consistent with the stand he’d taken on the Falklands war (in 1982, Christopher, a then-uncompromising socialist, was at one with Mrs. Thatcher) and that he would take on the two wars against Saddam Hussein. I held to my usual parsimonious view of the national interest, and so our debate fell into a well-worn groove.

Early on I made a smart-sounding point, using a recondite historical analogy, which the audience — largely anti-interventionist — liked. But 10 minutes later, although the argument had moved on, it dawned on me that I’d scored a cheap shot, and I said so, explaining why my facile analogy didn’t hold water. Christopher held me in his gaze, touched his right hand to his chest (one of his characteristic gestures), and gave me an almost imperceptible bow. That was it for us. I had passed the only test that mattered to him, one in which he touchingly, anachronistically conflated intellectual honesty with a decidedly masculine, martial sense of honor.

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Has book blogging hit the wall? William Morrow’s blogger notice

The end of the flow of free books, which will soon be reduced to a trickle.

– Carolyn Kellogg

Has book blogging hit the wall? A marketing department email sent to bloggers on Thursday by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins, indicates some kind of horizon is in sight. What’s on that horizon? The end of the flow of free books, which will soon be reduced to a trickle.

“Message is essentially: if you don’t review enough of the books we send you, in the timeframe we want you to, you’re out,” Rebecca Joines Schinsky tweeted Thursday. Schinsky, who writes and edits The Book Lady’s Blog, is one of the leaders of the latest generation of committed book bloggers.

“Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or The NYTimes?” added Pam Coughlin, who blogs at MotherReader.

Many publishers enthusiastically send books to bloggers, and today’s book blogger may rake in free books like leaves after a windy fall day. But it wasn’t always that way.

When blogging about first began, publishers, like many other long-established businesses, looked at the form with justifiable skepticism. If just anyone could start a blog, what role could bloggers have?

Eventually, that skepticism faded. People who like to read books, it turns out, were reading things on the Internet. Those things included blogs. They included book blogs. As time passed, many early book bloggers, many of whom focused on literary titles, moved on to other things — book reviewing, publishing short stories, writing novels, even writing for newspapers.

Full disclosure: I am one of those bloggers. And yes, this is a blog.

As early literary bloggers began shifting into other roles, a new generation of book blogging enthusiasts swelled behind them. The scope of their conversations was broader than ever — in addition to focusing on literary fiction, book blogs emerged where readers could discuss romance, horror, fantasy, and many other genres, some of which had struggled to find mainstream coverage. Book blogs were something publishers began to see as a way to expand the discussion of their books in new and exciting ways.

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Writers, including Jonathan Franzen, rally for novelist Charles Bock and his family

Friends of writer Charles Bock are throwing a party to raise funds for him and his family and calling it the World’s Most Literary Rent Party Ever. The lineup shows that Bock has some stellar literary supporters, including Mary Gaitskill, Richard Price, Gary Shteyngart, Josh Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Franzen.

Why is Franzen, the man whom Time magazine dubbed “Great American Novelist” last year, chipping in to help another author pay rent? Well, he, and the rest of Bock’s supporters, has a good reason….read more