The Center for Fiction goes to the backlist for its Clifton Fadiman Medal, which is awarded to a living author for a work at least 10 years old that "deserves renewed notice." This year's winner, selected by Jane Smiley, is "Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid.

The book was Kincaid's first novel -- her debut was a short story collection. When it hit shelves in 1985, it was praised by L.A. Times book columnist Elaine Kendall.

The narrator grew up in the capital city of St. John's, hardly a metropolis by mainland standards but cosmopolitan compared to the tiny farming and fishing villages hugging the shore. St. John's had electricity, supermarkets, an amazing number of modern banks, the deep-water harbor, and by the end of the '60s, an international airport; amenities putting it a decade ahead of the rural villages. In the period covered by the novel, the colonial legacy was still intact; schools, government, economy and manners British through and through. Annie's father was a skilled carpenter; her mother had come from the equally small but lush island of Dominica.

As an only child, Annie was indulged, adored and meticulously instructed in proper behavior -- Victorian behavior. Change comes slowly to the Leeward Islands and even now, 18th- and 19th-Century words and phrases linger in Antiguan English, lending it a quaint stateliness. Traces of that formality appear in Kincaid's prose, giving the story a timeless quality, adding substance and weight to the smallest incident and detail....

[Eventually] Annie becomes rebellious and defiant. She learns to lie and to steal.... she longs "to be in a place where nobody knew a thing about me and liked me for just that reason." Convincing her parents she wants to study nursing in England, she leaves Antigua, stage by stage, first in her mind, then in her heart; finally to the dock and the boat that will take her to Barbados and ultimately to Southampton. "My heart swelled with great gladness as the words 'I shall never see this again' spilled out inside me. But then, just as quickly, my heart shriveled up and the words 'I shall never see this again' stabbed at me." Thousands of first novelists have described those same emotions, but reading "Annie John," you can almost believe Kincaid invented ambivalence. 

"Annie John" went on to be nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction (which was won that year by Louise Erdrich for "Love Medicine.") In being honored by the Center for Fiction, Kincaid will receive the Clifton Fadiman Medal and $5,000 at a ceremony in New York on April 14.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

There are people out there who know why Jenni Farley goes by "J-Woww" and understand how a show based on people in New Jersey is, for its second season, being shot in Miami. The answers, I'm afraid, elude me. But I can report that Farly, with costar Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and co-writer Marc Shaprio, are coming out with a book, "Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore."

Publishers Weekly reports that the book will "explain how to balance work, love, and partying, while properly taking care of hair, nails, and skin -- as well as everything else that goes into living an authentic Jersey Shore lifestyle." It is scheduled for a summer release to coincide with the show's second season.

St. Martin's Press scored the deal, telling PW that because 4.8 million viewers watched the finale of Season 1, they expect the book to be "wildly popular."

Even a TV ignoramus like me expects this won't be the last literary thing we hear from "Jersey Shore."  Because really, what's a "Jersey Shore" library without books by Snookie or the Situation?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Thanks to the Ministry of Gossip blog for finding this shot of Jenni "J-Woww" Farley celebrating her 25th birthday at Moon nightclub at the Palms Casino Resort on Feb. 27 in Las Vegas. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images.

The National Black Writers Conference begins Thursday in New York, where its panels, readings and events will continue through Sunday. Organized by the Center for Black Literature at the City University of New York's Medgar Evers College, the conference is now in its 10 year.

Panels include The Impact of Hip Hop and Popular Culture in the Literature of Black Writers, The Black Writer as Literary Activist and Shifting Identities: The Black Writer in the African Diaspora. Authors Edwidge Danticat, Chris Abani, Tayari Jones, Colson Whitehead and Victor LaValle are among those scheduled to participate.

And while literary conferences aren't known for their musical highlights, the Friday night off-site event -- featuring Talib Kweli, Gil Scott-Heron and Gary Bartz -- promises to raise the bar. A lot.

There will be no music at Long Beach's second annual Black Authors Festival on April 3. It's smaller in scope -- it will be held at the Mark Twain neighborhood library, and take place during a single afternoon. It's in celebration of Long Beach's Black Authors' Day and will kick off National Library Month.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Edwidge Danticat in 1998. Credit: Colin Braley / Reuters

National Book Award winning poet Ai died unexpectedly of natural causes in Oklahoma on Saturday. She was 62.

Born Florence Anthony in Texas in 1947 of mixed racial heritage -- said to include Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche -- she legally changed her name to Ai, Japanese for "love." She was raised in Tuscon and earned an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine in 1971.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and 1985, and the 1999 National Book Award for her poetry collection "Vice." She was a recipient of the $50,000 United States Artists grant in 2009. From 1999 until her death, she was a professor at Oklahoma State University.

In its bio of Ai, the Poetry Foundation writes:

Aiming her poetic barbs directly at prejudices and societal ills of all types, Ai has been outspoken on the subject of race, saying "People whose concept of themselves is largely dependent on their racial identity and superiority feel threatened by a multiracial person. The insistence that one must align oneself with this or that race is basically racist. And the notion that without a racial identity a person can’t have any identity perpetuates racism…I wish I could say that race isn’t important. But it is. More than ever, it is a medium of exchange, the coin of the realm with which one buys one’s share of jobs and social position. This is a fact which I have faced and must ultimately transcend. If this transcendence were less complex, less individual, it would lose its holiness."

A new collection of poetry by Ai, "No Surrender," is set to be published by W.W. Norton this fall. Today, friends and family are remembering Ai at the Palmer Marler Funeral Home in Stillwater, Oklahoma; an Oklahoma State University scholarship is being set up in her name.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Charlie M.P. Sirait, courtesy Oklahoma State University

Looks like the economic downturn is about to hit L.A.'s libraries. The Board of Library Commissioners will vote Thursday on a proposed plan to close libraries on Sundays and curtail weekday hours. Maeve Reston reports:

Under the proposal, which would take effect in mid-April, all of the city’s libraries would also close two hours earlier -- 6 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. -- on Mondays and Wednesdays. The eight regional libraries -- Arroyo Seco, Exposition Park, Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood, Mid-Valley, North Hollywood, San Pedro, West Valley and West Los Angeles -- would open at noon rather than 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What the early closures might mean for the ALOUD reading series and other evening programs is not yet clear. Yet librarians seem to have made their peace with the idea of the reduction in hours; what concerns them most are additional cuts that might be coming at the behest of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Reston writes:

With the city facing a $485-million budget gap next fiscal year, the city's libraries could face far more drastic cuts. Twenty librarians, 20 library clerks and 60 messenger clerks are on the list of the first 1,000 job cuts authorized by city leaders this year.

Librarians and other library supporters plan to attend the L.A. City Council meeting Wednesday to speak up against the drastic cuts they may face.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Central Library history department. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Historian Tony Judt is, Tim Rutten writes, "a scholar of remarkable breadth and erudition and one of the West's foremost and most outspoken public intellectuals. That alone would be enough to make his new book, "Ill Fares the Land," something that merits attention.

That Judt composed the book while suffering from the pain and paralysis of ALS makes it particularly remarkable. Diagnosed with ALS -- Lou Gehrig's Disease -- at around age 60, Judt, a professor at NYU, has continued writing as the disease progressed. He breathes with the aid of a machine, and, apart from some marginal movement, is, he wrote in a January essay for the New York Review of Books, "effectively quadriplegic." Yet:

...this disease has its enabling dimension: thanks to my inability to take notes or prepare them, my memory --already quite good -- has improved considerably, with the help of techniques adapted from the "memory palace" so intriguingly depicted by Jonathan Spence. But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably -- as it now appears to me -- by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

"Ill Fares the Land" combines Judt's personal essays such as this with his historian's eye for analysis. Grounding his argument in a reading of Austrian economists and their (mis)interpretation, he cautions: 

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

Rutten finds the book, "a deeply learned, deeply humane heart's cry for the rediscovery of the language and values" that would enable, at Judt's urging, a new discussion of justice and equality.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Archive photo of Tony Judt. Credit: Penguin Press.

Pictory magazine takes something incredibly simple -- a photo and a caption -- and makes it art. Like the radio show "This American Life," each issue has a theme -- and with a good theme, a single large-format photo and caption really become a story. Like in these two examples from the Feb. 17 issue, "The One Who Got Away."

Krasivaya: “pretty” in Russian. It was never hard to take a good photo of Lidia during our four years together -- she smiled often, and she loved the camera. It was much harder to acknowledge that we were on different paths. But I wouldn’t change a thing; we both grew into beautiful beings. -- Jonah Pauline

To the Five Boroughs. The minute I stepped off the bus and into Washington Heights, we were no longer just close friends. We ran down the streets at night, drank wine in the park, took in musicals, and marvelled at museums. The city was alive all around us; I had never been so happy. This magical week turned into months of distance. Things had been easier when we were friends. I chastised myself: I never should have visited, and I never should have gone back. Sometimes you fall in love with a city instead of the person in it. -- Johanna Fulk

Pictory has been around since December 2009, and editor/designer/curator Laura Brunow Miner has run enough solicitations and themes to put up a new set of a dozen or more photo stories every few weeks. There are features on food that make the mouth water, and neighborhood secrets -- like this used bookstore -- revealed.

As fun as those are, they tend toward the literal. It's when the photos and captions are trying to express an idea or emotion that they really become stories; some of the most interesting stories are in the issues on returning home and growing old. Pictory magazine's big photos and well-told stories emphasize the storyteller's point of view; the focus quiets the Web's noise.

It's enough to make the storyteller pick up a camera, or the photographer try to fix the right words. Upcoming themes include portraits of London, Danger, and -- just in time for Mother's Day -- "Sorry, Mom."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Top, copyright Jonah Pauline. Bottom, copyright Johanna Fulk. Both used with permission of Pictory Magazine.

Publishers Weekly's final tally of 2009 books sales has a few surprises. Who would have guessed that California author Lisa See was selling as many books as E.L. Doctorow and Margaret Atwood put together? Or that political tomes from Sarah Palin, Edward Kennedy and Glenn Beck have replaced the slimmer South Beach Diet and self-help books that used to rule the nonfiction list?

It takes until March to get the tally together because booksellers can ship unsold books back to publishers. Those returns have now been subtracted, so these are supposed to be pretty good real numbers for 2009. The business of actual sales -- and shipping, sales and returns -- is a touchy one in publishing, and some companies provide these sales figures to Publishers Weekly on a confidential basis, for ranking purposes only. It would be nice if we had hard stats, but this is about as close as we're going to get.

Not surprisingly, Dan Brown topped the fiction bestseller list with "The Lost Symbol," his "Da Vinci Code" follow-up. "The Lost Symbol" sold 5.5 million hardcover copies -- short of its predecessor, but about five times more than each of the other books in the top 10. Janet Evanovich, Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer -- all usual subjects -- have bestselling spots. Michael Crichton makes his first posthumous appearance with "The Pirate Latitudes," while Patricia Cornwell, very much alive, has two books in the top 10. 

So does John Grisham -- but in a twist, he's got one legal thriller, "The Associate," plus his debut collection of short stories, "Ford County." Common wisdom says that short stories don't sell, so Grisham's powerful showing -- "Ford County" was the No. 5 bestselling hardcover fiction book of 2009 -- indicates either that common wisdom is due for revision, or that John Grisham can do whatever he likes, regardless.

In nonfiction, Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" outsold Edward Kennedy's memoir "True Compass" three-to-one. While Palin undertook a high-profile tour to promote the book -- Kennedy, who died weeks before his book's release, could not -- it's clear that the appetite for all things Palin extended to book buyers. Faith (in books by Mitch Albom and Joel Osteen) and sports (memoirs from Joe Torre and Andre Agassi) also performed well.

This is the last year that PW's list will not include ebooks. How might those sales have affected the rankings? Would Palin be even more popular? Would some classic -- say, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" -- make a surprise appearance? This year, the number of hardcover books selling more than 100,000 in both fiction and nonfiction was down. Would ebooks make up the difference? Sadly, we'll have to wait a year to find out.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Letters from Virginia Woolf's set, being opened to the public for the first time, cast new light on the Bloomsbury group of, as one wrote, "dirty intellectuals." The newly opened archive, at Cambridge University, consists of two collections of letters, the Guardian reports.

The two collections belonged to the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the diarist and writer Frances Partridge, once described by fellow group member Clive Bell as having "the best legs in Bloomsbury." Lehmann and Partridge became friends at Cambridge University, later getting to know the group of intellectuals that also included Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and JM Keynes.

Of particular note are those letters by and pertaining to Woolf. On April 3, 1941, when Woolf was missing, yet had not been declared dead, Bell wrote to Partridge:

I'm not sure whether the Times will by now have announced that Virginia is missing. I'm afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday. She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa [Woolf and Bell]. Her stick and footprints were found by the edge of the river. For some days, of course, we hoped against hope that she had wandered crazily away and might be discovered in a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is abandoned; only, as the body has not been found, she cannot be considered dead legally.

This is an intimate look at what it was like for friends and family of Woolf in the weeks between her disappearance and when her body was finally discovered.

Aside from the letters directly relating to Woolf, there is much more about Bloomsbury in the archive -- it includes more than 1,000 pages of letters and 30 photo albums.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Virginia Woolf. Credit: Associated Press

David Shields, the author of "Reality Hunger," couldn't help but notice the buzz when a new biography of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, above, said he invented some of his nonfiction. It's the latest in a series of small turmoils about truth and fiction -- James Frey's memoir, Charles Pellegrino's history of World War II -- that Shields has been tracking. "Why does this keep happening over and over and over again?" Shields asks in Off the Shelf. "Have we suddenly become a nation of liars? Of lawyers?"

From the beginning of time, nonfiction writers have invented. In "The History of the Peloponnesian Wars," Thucydides made up the generals' speeches. Thomas DeQuincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" is a heavily fictionalized account of DeQuincey's addiction to and recovery from opium. Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son" recounts page after page of supposedly verbatim dialogue from 50 years earlier. George Orwell's classmates questioned virtually every detail of "Such, Such Were the Joys."...

Nonfiction isn't "true." It's a framing device to foreground contemplation, or at least it is in the nonfiction I love the most -- nonfiction at the highest reaches of literary art. I want to redefine nonfiction upward -- taking nonfiction's limits and reframing them so that nonfiction can be a serious investigation of what's "true," what's knowledge, what's "fact," what's memory, what's self, what's other. I don't want a nonfiction full of "lies." I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

To make his case, Shields recommends 26 shifting, unstable nonfictions. That list is after the jump.

In today's book pages, paranoia takes off. Author Howard Hampton looks at "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History" by David Aaronovitch and "Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia" by Francis Wheen. Aaronovitch does a fine job debunking conspiracy theories, Hampton says, but "his peevish, plodding common sense is hardly a match for the burning near-religiosity that not only makes a Communion wafer of JFK's assassination, but also extends to the overdose death of one-time Kennedy paramour Marilyn Monroe." Wheen, he says, "more effectively captures how conspiracy theories and botched conspiracies such as Watergate entered the collective psyche."

A psychic uneasiness extended into the fiction reviewed this week. Tod Goldberg was impressed by James Hynes' novel "Next," featuring an obsessive 50-year-old who had "an amorphous fear without discernible boundaries."

...at first "Next" seems to be just an exceptionally well-written comic novel about middle age. But with great subtlety and nuance, Hynes begins to move the narrative into deeper, more compelling territory until the reader comes to find that Kevin isn't merely looking for sex, he's looking for a reason for his life, an order to his mistakes, a compelling set of answers to the questions he's avoided addressing: Whom does he love? What does he really fear? What is it all worth? Did he get what he wanted from this life?

Sarah Weinman enjoys Walter Mosley's "Known to Evil," his second Leonid Trotter McGill mystery:

Like the Easy Rawlins novels, Mosley's new detective canvas informs us about what it means to be a man of endless struggle, even knowing that "once you've seen the battlefield, you can't pretend that it doesn't exist."

Ella Taylor finds Lionel Shriver's novel "So Much for That" to be "gleefully mutinous":

Careening giddily among realism, horror and farce, "So Much for That" is an angry black comedy about the heartlessness of (could it be more timely?) the American healthcare system. Shriver ... writes in precise, dynamic prose that reads almost like literary journalism ... if anyone's going to perk up the often-limp niceness of the women's novel it's Shriver, who has no use for earth mothers or noble victims.

Which sounds not unlike the work of Caroline Blackwood; I reviewed her posthumous collection, "Never Breathe a Word":

Most of Blackwood's characters ... inhabit danger zones of keen intelligence, amused manipulation and something else -- self-indulgence, or maybe self-importance. They are sometimes funny, unwittingly revealing and rarely nice. At the core, they're out of sync with underlying societal assumptions, women who are unselfconsciously and dominantly at the center of their worlds.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Illustration: Jason Greenberg / For The Times

The 2010 PEN World Voices literary festival will feature 150 writers from 40 countries. The festival's lineup includes literary fiction heavyweights Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Salman Rushdie, Sherman Alexie, Elias Khoury, Roddy Doyle and Aleksander Hemon; musical icon Patti Smith and filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles.

In a series of panels and conversations around New York, authors will talk about a wide range of topics, including mythology, writing about torture and the future of journalism. There are big-ticket events, including a cabaret featuring Natalie Merchant; proceeds from ticket sales go to support the organization, which promotes the freedom to write around the globe. And many of the festival's events are free.

For the first time in my memory, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and PEN World Voices are not happening on the same days. This year, a literary jet-setter could spend the weekend of April 24 and 25 enjoying the sunny Festival of Books at UCLA, then pop over to New York for PEN World Voices from April 26 to May 2.

Those who can't can still catch a bit of PEN World Voices here on the West coast. Two authors -- Christos Tsiolkas and Asaaf Gavron -- will be appearing at the Festival of Books while they're in the U.S. 

Last year, PEN had a bounty of bloggers chronicling their panels and readings for those who couldn't be in New York.  It was almost too much to keep up with, but it was a nice way to vicariously enjoy the many, many offerings of PEN World Voices. I'm hoping they blog like crazy this year, too, but at the very least we can follow them on Twitter.

Photos: Left, Aleksander Hemon. Credit: Velibor Bozovic / Riverhead Books . Right: Melvin Van Peebles. Credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders / HBO.

Was Amazon's removal of "buy" buttons of MacMillan's titles in January just a practice run? Two reports this week -- in subscription-only Publishers Marketplace and the New York Times -- say that Amazon is threatening to stop selling books by publishers who do not meet their terms for e-book sales.

The impetus for the conflict is Apple's iBookstore. Amazon currently dominates in the e-book sales marketplace, but when the iPad is released in April and Apple begins selling e-books, the company may become a major player. That in itself wouldn't be a big deal, except that the two e-retailers have different sales models -- and each is pushing publishers to adhere to just one.

Amazon follows a tradition wholesale/retail model that allows it to set the price for the end consumer. They've set that price point low -- a new book might sell for $10 on the Kindle while the hardcover costs $25 -- and this has made many Kindle readers happy. But publishers have said that the low e-book price is unsustainable.

Apple will use an "agency model," as it has in its iTunes store; the owner of the work keeps 70% of the retail price, and Apple, the "agency," takes 30%. This model has its own problems -- it doesn't quite match up with the contracts authors have signed with publishers -- but publishers like that it allows them more flexibility in pricing. Five major publishing houses have signed on with Apple -- Random House is the only holdout remaining among the big six.

As the launch of Apple's new e-book store opens, Amazon is pushing to renegotiate contracts, according to the New York Times. Smaller publishers are likely to really feel the squeeze. And authors can do little more than sit on the sidelines and hope that their books wind up for sale in both places.

Well, they can do a little more: the Authors Guild's watchdog tool, Who Moved My Buy Button, which launched at the tail end of Amazon's showdown with MacMillan, may have a new life. Authors can sign up to receive updates in the event that Amazon stops selling their books.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

The Orange Prize for Fiction, a $45,000 award presented annually to a female writer, announced the long list of those in the running for the 2010 prize this week. It includes bestseller Barbara Kingsolver for "The Lacuna," Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning "Wolf Hall" and two women who will be at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Attica Locke and Laila Lalami.

Locke is a finalist for the L.A. Times book prize in mystery for her debut novel, "Black Water Rising." Lalami, an occasional L.A. Times contributor, is nominated for "Secret Son," her second book and first novel.

Years ago I sat with Lalami at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, back when she was writing mostly for academia and her blog, Moorishgirl, and it's a thrill to see her work receive this recognition.

But this year's Orange Prize longlist is not without controversy. Author Daisy Goodwin, chair of the judging panel, went public with her complaints about the selection. It wasn't the process that was so bad: it was the product -- too much "misery literature." She told the Independent:

There was very little wit, and no jokes. If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists.

The misery memoir has transformed into misery literature. There were a large number of books that started with a rape, enough to make me think ‘Enough.’ Call me old fashioned but I like a bit of foreplay in my reading... I turned my face against them....

The pleasure of reading counts for something. I don’t think editors think enough about this pleasure [when they publish a book]. The reader gets forgotten, and the absorption and pleasure of reading.

The 15 books that made the longlist, apparently, provide enough of the kind of pleasure the judges hoped to find. The complete list is after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

For the first time, the Ridenhour Book Prize will be given to a graphic novel. On Monday, it was announced that Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" will win the $10,000 award, which will be presented in April in Washington, DC.

Ron Ridenhour was the Vietnam Veteran whose 1969 letter to Congress and the Pentagon brought the My Lai massacre to light. Ridenhour went on to have a successful career as an investigative journalist until his death in 1998, at age 52. The Ridenhour prizes -- a book prize, a career prize and a prize for truth-telling -- are awarded to those who work in his tradition, striving to "protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society."

Sacco, Reed Johnson wrote in the LA Times, is carrying forward a tradition of empathetic, morally driven journalistic novelists including Balzac, Dickens and Upton Sinclair. His  "Footnotes in Gaza," is "built around two forgotten incidents (the 1956 mass killings of Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis)," David L. Ulin wrote in his review. "[I]t is a book that digs deep, exploring the relationship of past and present, memory and experience -- rigorously reported yet always aware of the elusive nature of testimony, the way that stories solidify and harden over time."

But Sacco's work has drawn fire from some who feel it takes sides. Jose Alaniz of the University of Washington told the Associated Press, “Very often he will pick angles in his artwork that favor the perspective of the victim: He'll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering."

That perspective is deliberate, but should not be oversimplified. "I do want to bring Palestinian voices to the fore," Sacco told Johnson. "Which isn't to say I'm going to sugarcoat the Palestinians." 

Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" is also a finalist for the inaugural graphic novel LA Times Book Prize.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image credits: Illustrations by Joe Sacco. "Footnotes in Gaza" published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co.

Elizabeth Gilbert's blockbuster memoir "Eat Pray Love" is headed to the big screen with big star Julia Roberts in August. On Thursday, Universal released the first trailer for the film.

The movie seems to have some of the appeal of the book: lush settings, revelations, handsome men (some caddish, some not). On her website, Gilbert says, "There is something surreal" about seeing her memoir being turned into a movie, "but then again, there has been something surreal about 'Eat Pray Love' from the beginning. I have never entirely understood the rocket-like trajectory of that book, and so -- with the movie as with all of it -- I stand back, amazed, watching it all unfold and wondering at this strange turn of destiny."

Having very briefly met Gilbert, I was struck by how much Julia Roberts -- who always seems a lot like Julia Roberts to me -- has absorbed some of Gilbert's aspect. As an author, watching that on screen must be a bit surreal. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used-bookstore owner, wrote about the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, for Jacket Copy.

In Cory Doctorow's recent novel "Makers," a couple of punk geek tinkerers help reinvent society through repurposement. With a little startup capital they salvage trashed Dancing Elmo dolls to perform cute tricks in a Smart car and modify garden gnomes with gait-recognition software. But their coup de grace is to give Disney a run for its money by turning abandoned big box retail space into a fun house of the imagination, a crowd-sourced museum and a memory mashup.

Flying back to New York from Texas, it dawned on me that devotees of SXSWi never hated publishing or wanted us to roll over and die: They just wanted us to repurpose. This past weekend several publishing experts suggested how that repurposing might look. While last year's future of publishing panel met with hostility, this year the response was generally civil -- a major improvement.

SXSWi can feel that way sometimes. Float a trial balloon and hope the natives don't shoot. If my colleagues on that panel are correct -- and I have no reason to believe they are not -- publishing will be put through the media grinder in the next several years. Authors will become hybrids a little like the Elmo dolls. Picture Flannery O'Connor's head on Jessica Rabbit's body. Deluxe editions of "A Remembrance of Things Past" packaged with madelaine-scented cork. Faulkner's Snope family will have separate Twitter accounts.

If, as was suggested, New York publishers become more like L.A. film companies, expanding into an author's intellectual property, then it will happen at the big houses: Bertelsmann, Macmillan, Pearson, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Harper. Random House already has a film division to develop their backlist. What's stopping someone else from crossbreeding "On the Road" with manga? Video games with "Best Friends Forever"?

Since I have worked my entire career at midsized to smallish publishers, I can't help but feel a little remorseful about this projected future. I'm not being nostalgic before the fact or protective of my job. But I have to ask, when does a publishing house stop being a publishing house and morph into an entertainment agency?

Publishers are not above the rules of the marketplace. Publishing will survive -- in some form. Beware.

On my first day in Austin, I took a detour to the Center for American Studies to look through the old clip files of the defunct newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune. I had contacted the center a week before and asked to see their archives -- called "morgues" -- for a few categories: burlesque, lost Manhattan taverns and radio.

Most of the radio folders were from the 1960s and, oddly enough, focused entirely on TV. But change TV to the Internet and this Jan. 2, 1966, piece could have been presented at SXSWi 2010:

A technological revolution is in the making which will touch off an explosion of wired and over-the-air services of many kinds into virtually every home. In the United States, commercial television, a booming billion-dollar advertising medium, will be swept out of its seemingly intransigent programming ways in the next decade. Scores, maybe hundreds, of new TV stations will crop up. More TV networks will be born. Recorded TV "programs" will be packaged in cartridges to be inserted in home playback machines. Color TV sets will range from hand-held sizes, possibly powered by the heat of the human hand, to eight-foot living-room picture screens. The world will be linked electronically by Early Bird-type synchronous satellites beaming TV to every corner of the globe. And, in the ultimate, all media may become one.

I slipped the newspaper article into its folder and sent it back into oblivion.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: SXSWi 2010 conventioneers on laptops. Credit: George Kelly via Flickr

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, wrote about the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, for Jacket Copy.

There was no missing Jaron Lanier at SXSWi in Austin. He's one of the most revered legends in the tech and computer science community, a pioneer of the digital age who played a central role in developing virtual reality as a term, a concept and, well, a reality. And he's a physically imposing figure, a large man with long dreads playing on the Laotian instrument called a kaen.

But one on one, he's disarming. Lanier is all about shrinking the distance between people and challenging expectations. As an early adopter and booster of the Internet, it's easy to assume that SXSWi is his natural environment. Yet he looks and feels slightly out of place in its triumphant, depersonalized atmosphere. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a stern critique of the world he and his colleagues helped bring into existence. He offers up something not typically discussed at the Austin festival -- the darker side of Web 2.0.

He pulls few punches, going after Google, Facebook, Twitter, the noosphere, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Silicon Valley. But these are mere symptoms of our true modern ailment: the hive mind. What pains Lanier more than anything else is that we squander the promise of the original World Wide Web. Instead we relinquish control and imagination to a few "monster sites" in the cloud.

It's that mindset that Lanier is trying to shake people out of with his book. To remind them that there is a choice between the Maoist freedom of open culture (give the music away so you can market the T-shirt) and Rupert Murdoch's imperial consumerism (pay you must, create you must not). Both options, Lanier argues, insult human potential and leave us all in the same position, impoverished "lumpen" -- marginal and disenfranchized.

The Internet was supposed to bring much more; Lanier says it's not too late to revive its creative potential, before social networks make us addicted to "followers" and Google gets rich off of our data. In his talk, he joked that today the National Security Agency could privatize and set up business as an ad agency. Lanier argues for a third way, inspired by the Internet's first visionary, Ted Nelson. Nelson created a proto-Web in 1960 called Xanadu that simplified the user's experience. One password and fee to enter the world, and one logical copy of each file, instead of the endless file sharing that clogs our bandwidth and cheapens the discourse.

I asked him if he was worried about the discourse at the festival and the reaction to his ideas. "Maybe two months ago before the book was officially out," he said, going on to say that he has been surprised by the "astonishingly warm reception" from the very community he criticizes.

I asked him about some of the publishing panel's predictions for the future, that authors will have to become better self-promoters and publishers Hollywood-style development offices. That unrelenting advertisement and pursuit of followers saddened Lanier a little bit. "Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable," he said. Authors may survive only through "long tail distribution," he mused. "But if it requires you to be a master politician, then your writing becomes political." He worries about the loss of individual voice with a crowd-sourced book, just another mash-up in a Wikipedia world where "everything loses meaning."

He found hope, though, in the panel's suggestion that publishers may finally make an end run around the traditional intermediaries of the business and reach out more directly to readers. For Lanier, everything comes down to human contact. His answer to my question about what role a publisher plays today shocked me enormously. "Even if no distribution function existed in publishing," he said, "there is value in their particulars as people."

When it was time for him to leave for his talk, a SXSWi escort gave him two placards for the podium, one with his name, the other with the Twitter hashtag. Lanier took the second one and put it to the side and ever so quietly (and politely) said: "I think I will ask the audience to shut down the tweeting during the discussion. I'd like them to try it as an experiment in alternate consciousness."

The escort said that was the first such request she was aware of at the festival. Then she smiled and looked relieved. "Good for you."

After three days and more than 24 hours of jargon, PowerPoint, and panel discussions, Jaron Lanier had suggested something no one else dared say in Austin: that this whole endeavor is nothing more than the people who create it. And then he asked all those people to quiet their offline conversations and engage with the people in the room.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: Jaron Lanier at SXSWi in Austin, Texas. Credit: Peter Miller

The jets returning from SXSW Interactive had hardly cooled before one of publishing's more innovative divisions, HarperStudio, announced a major change. Bob Miller, who has headed HarperStudio since its launch in 2008, will be departing to become publisher at Workman.

That position has been held up until now by Peter Workman himself, who said in a statement that he is "kicking himself upstairs" to take a more supervisory role as chief executive. Workman Publishing includes the Workman, Algonquin and Artisan imprints.

"I am very proud of what we have accomplished at HarperStudio," Miller said in the statement. A publishing veteran who founded Hyperion, Miller has been among the more adventurous of his generation, making genuine efforts to adapt to the shifting publishing environment. "I am sorry to leave this exciting venture behind," Miller said, "but the opportunity to play such a significant role at Workman Publishing is impossible to resist."

HarperStudio, a small imprint, served as a kind of laboratory for new ideas. One was borrowed from independent publishers: Rather than offering substantial advances, which can take years for authors to pay back from their sales, HarperStudio paid authors only modestly up front and then split profits 50-50.

Another innovation was to offer booksellers a higher percentage of profits in exchange for ending the practice of returns. Miller said that bookstores return 40% of hardcovers to publishers; many in publishing are looking for ways to change this part of the business model. And then there was a welcome embrace of e-books and new formats.

More visibly to the end consumer, HarperStudio took its activities online. Its website is, compared to the rest of the publishing world, a model of new media engagement. It includes videos, links to Twitter and Facebook, and a prominent calendar of author events. Miller himself blogged, and the small house allowed its energetic staff to stir up marketing momentum in the course of their jobs. 

Miller's place as HarperStudio publisher will be overseen by Michael Morrison of parent company Harper Collins, MediaBistro reports. But that doesn't go far to explain what this move really means. Will  HarperStudio's successes be adopted by Workman? Will those remaining at HarperStudio -- including the online advocate Debbie Stier, just back from predicting publishing's future at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas -- continue to innovate? What does Miller's departure say about the experiments that HarperStudio made?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

"Diary of A Wimpy Kid," Jeff Kinney's series of illustrated children's books about a wise-cracking pre-teen, has sold more than 28 million copies since 2007. Not too shabby for a book that took nine years to write and was originally intended for an adult audience.

His first book in the series introduced readers to the awkward, scheming and at times misguided Greg Heffley and his amiable best friend Rowley on their first day of middle school. The painful yet comic reminders of just what kids will do to fit in, be cool and simply survive each day has been made into a film that opens in wide release Friday.

"The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary," a behind-the- scenes look at the making of the film, releases Wednesday.

Kinney, who served as a producer on the movie, spoke with Jacket Copy contributor Liesl Bradner from his home in Boston about the perils of turning his stick-figure cartoon into a living, breathing angst-ridden pre-teen.

Jacket Copy: What was your biggest concern with the book being made into a live-action movie?

Jeff Kinney: I felt like animating the movie would have been the safe way to go. I think what's exciting about bringing the story into live-action is that it adds emotional content that’s missing in the books. It's very moving on top of being funny. The audience can really become invested in the friendship between Greg and Rowley. I don’t think if you used my cartoon drawings in a film it would’ve packed that same punch.

JC: How did the movie come about?

JK: I'd been approached to do all manner of things based on the book -- puppets, an animated TV series.  Film seemed like the best option. It was clear to me that Fox Studios, the producers and I were all going to be collaborators. The spirit of partnership was something we all agreed on.

JC: The books are told from a young boy's perspective, yet there is a wide crossover appeal to both genders. Why do you think that is?

JK: I think that in one sense Greg is a bit gender- neutral. He’s not too masculine or over-masculinized. He’s somebody that both boys and girls can relate to. I also think there's a little bit of a skew because more girls are readers. They’re going to come to books more naturally than boys do. I was trying not to write a book about boys so much as write a book about relationships and relatable situations. 

JC: You have another book releasing later this year. What’s on the agenda for Greg? 

JK: The next book is going to resolve the question of whether Greg and Rowley will still be friends. I plan on making puberty the central issue.

JC: Will we be following them all the way through high school?

JK: No -- I think Greg and Rowley are more cartoon characters than literary characters, and cartoon characters, the best ones, don’t age. That’s why I chose middle school. I wanted to have this kind of nebulous time period where you don’t know exactly what grade they are in or how old they are.

I think I'll make an artistic decision after the next book and decide whether or not I’ve still got enough in the tank to go forward. I would like to write three more books. I'd like to have a seven-book series.

JC: So you're following the standard comic-book format where characters never age?

JK: Yes, like how Charlie Brown has the first day of school every year but you never know what grade he’s in.

JC: Your books have transformed formerly reluctant readers into excited fans who anxiously await each new installment. How does that make you feel?

JK: That’s been a huge surprise to me -- I really wrote the book for adults. My publisher thought it would be better positioned as a children's series. I didn’t set out to get kids reading, but I’m happy that’s been the result. I do feel proud of that as an outcome. In another sense, if I would have tried to have written the book for kids, I likely would’ve written down to them. I don’t think it would’ve worked out as well. 

I never thought for a moment I was writing for a kids audience. It was a little bit shocking to me.

-- Liesl Bradner

Upper photo: "Diary of A Wimpy Kid" cover. Credit: Amulet Books

Lower photo: Jeff Kinney. Credit: Rob McEwan