A Different Stripe

Google cracks down on those LibraryThing pornographers

Tim Spaulding reports that he received a letter from the Google Adsense moral hygiene robot explaining that, unless LibraryThing removed the mature content  from its site, Google would terminate its enrollment in the program.

They gave one example, the LibraryThing.fr page for the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) "Erotic stories." No doubt some algorithm caught a few keywords, like "sex" or the common porn-word "Lolita."

Read the entire post.

In other LibraryThing news, the site is sponsoring a book pile photo contest. So far, all the photos seem to depict nice neat posed stacks of books. Let's see some candids, teetering messy piles. Piles with a little character.

Don't forget about the NYRB group at LibraryThing.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

Yes, it's July and miserably humid in Manhattan, but we were greeted this morning by a bracing sight: just-printed copies of our Christmas offering, Rock Crystal  (Bergkristall).The book will go on sale in time for the holidays, but  it might have been more useful as an August release. After all, snow (and the blizzard-transformed alpine landscape) is as much a character in this novella as are its ostensible protagonists, a brother and sister who lose their way in a Christmas-eve storm.

The photo above does not do the volume justice, but it should give some idea of the beauty of the finished book, which is due in large part to its cover art. Kenneth G. Libbrecht, chairman of the physics department at Caltech, and taker of the cover photo, has turned his scientific research into a natural wonderland. Check out Snowlfakes.com to see his many beautiful photographs of snow crystals, taken with a special photomicroscope.

Luckily, the novella is as beautiful inside as it is out. The story transcends its Christian particulars to embrace the entirety of the natural world—which is not to say that it abandons its underpinnings in Stifter's Catholic faith. In an unpublished review (collected in Reflections on Culture and Literature), Hannah Arendt writes of Stifter's

"overwhelming, neverending gratitude for everything that is. Out of this grateful devotion, Stifter became the greatest landscape-painter in literature...: someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements—the movement of the horse as well as that of the river or of the road—into sentences.... For Stifter, reality actually means nature and, for him, man is but one of its most perfect products. Again and again, he describes the slow, steady, and blessed process of the growth of a human being as it lives and blossoms and dies together with the trees and flowers of which it takes care during its lifetime."

Along these lines, John (aka Johannes) Urzidil, in a 1948 review of Stifter's Abdias that appeared in The Menorah Journal, writes about Stifter's universalism:

"Born into the simple popular Catholicism of his Bohemian backwoods, Stifter occasionally describes how he adhered to it with pious devotion during his childhood. Later on he filled in this Catholic outline with the purified values of Humanität and of Catholic Christianity. It was Goethean Humanität that transformed the dictum “Anima naturaliter Christiana” into “Anima naturaliter humana.” At least, he bestowed upon his Christianity such a world-wide sympathy that it led to an understanding of all forms and fates and destinies."

Which is all a fancy way of saying that, even if you're the Grinchiest of Grinches, you should still give this book a try. But don't take our word for it, read what what Stewart, Mark, and Terry had to say about it.

Monday Multimedia: Prairie Lights Recommends

Prairie Lights bookbuyer Paul on why we all need to read The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards. Watch and see if you agree that Paul may be something of a young Ebenezer himself.

More videos from Prairie Lights.

50 Outstanding Translations of the Last 50 Years

A list compiled by The Translator's Association of The Society of Authors (UK) in honor of its own fiftieth anniversary.

Two NYRB Classics are included.

#6: The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Archibald Colquhoun (and Arthur Oliver)
#48: Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler

The Society of Authors, by the way, is a fabulous institution, which fulfills its mission "to protect the rights and further the interests of authors" fairly and with grace, acting as advocates for its members, and as representatives for many estates. As far as we know, there is no American sister institution, which is a shame.

Peter Carey and The Magic Pudding

Image: The Pudding himself in Lavender Bay, Sydney; by  SpacePotato via Flickr

How did we miss this? A character in Peter Carey's novel Theft has a thing for Norman Lindsay's Magic Pudding. For him it is a shibboleth, an internalized text constantly throwing up references the way earlier generations were everywhere reminded of tales from the Bible. Carey was asked about the connection between the two works on Australian National Radio's Book Show:

Ramona Koval: Peter Carey, finally, what is The Magic Pudding doing in the book? It's a favourite of Hugh and Marlene's; is it a favourite of yours too?

Peter Carey: I do love The Magic Pudding. I think everywhere...and I've travelled around a lot and I seem to lose my copies of The Magic Pudding and get new ones, and the truth of the matter is things find their way into your books because...a word might come into a book because of something someone said at dinner last night and it isn't the dinner that you're interested in it's the word and you pick it up and you love it and you use it, and The Magic Pudding I was rereading when I was writing the book. But Hugh does seem very much...I do think The Magic Pudding is one of the great Australian works, and Hugh somehow seems to fit...Hugh having an affection for The Magic Pudding just seemed right to me, and there are things that it just gives you an excuse to celebrate and put in the book that said something about Hugh's character, it celebrates the book, it's a very distinctive Australian book which I love.

Blogs we love

 Some recent discoveries

Publishing Insider
for his rants about the daily annoyances of life (see: tangled ipod cords and stuck sliding screen doors).

The Kenyon Review Blog
for being so wide ranging: their 4th of July entry was on the Chinese poet Tu Fu—one of the seven poets featured in Poems of the Late T'ang.

Caustic Cover Critic
for alerting us to the dangers of stock photography.

Simon Gray's Last Cigarette

The post about the film version of A Month in the Country neglected to mention one of the most appealing things about the production, that the screenplay was written by playwright and memoirist Simon Gray. Gray's Smoking Diaries is one of the most engaging first-person narratives we've read in the past few years. And now it appears that a third volume of these "diaries," The Last Cigarette, was released in the UK the other month. It features an attractive trompe l'oeil cigarette-box cover (as the first volume did). 

      

This excerpt (stolen from the book's Amazon page) gives a sense of Gray's mocking voice, which dares you to find him endearing despite—or more likely, because of—his flaws:

"So here I am, two hours into my sixty-sixth year.... The truth is that I'm nastier than I used to be back when—back when I was sixty-four, for instance, when I was nastier than when I was at sixty-two and so forth, back and back, always the less nasty the further back, until I get to the age when I was pre-nasty, at least consciously, when the only shame I knew was the shame of being found out, which was when I was, well, about eight, I suppose."

I wonder if Da Capo will release the book in the US as they've done with the other volumes. If they do, perhaps they'll drop the misguided cover they chose for volume one—which appears to show the author at a carnival, posing before a cardboard cutout Rousseau painting.

 

Sorokin author note always amusing

It really is old news by now, but this line from the bio we have for Vladimir Sorokin always makes us laugh:

in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book ...

Best of Booker:Last chance to vote for Siege of Krishnapur

It's the last week to vote for J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur as the Best Booker book ever (it's made a shortlist of six books). Though the 1973 winner may look like a long-shot, we can be heartened by a BBC story about an experiment done in a small English village, in which copies of all six finalist books were distributed and The Siege of Krishnapur beat favorite Midnight's Children. As reported on the Booker Prize site:
 

Despite being one of the earlier winners, the villagers called the book a "rip roaring yarn", enjoyed the humour and adventure, and likened it to the "Indiana Jones" films. Tim Samuels suggested the Best of the Booker award might bring the book back in to circulation after it had dropped off the radar for modern readers.

[when did the word "modern" come to mean anything that happened more than five years ago? is there some meaning drift happening, making "modern" a direct synonym for "contemporary"? maybe the shift is inevitable and we should stop being prescriptivists.]

We've finally tracked down Lavinia Greacen's Farrell biography, which turns up some other tidbits:

• Mary McCarthy and Edna O'Brien were judges that year
• John Banville was on the unofficial longlist; he would not win until 2005
• Iris Murdoch, who was the presumed winner, did not attend the award ceremony
• After criticizing the prize's sponsor in his acceptance speech, Farrell eased up on the company, which produced Tia Maria: "An acquired taste, perhaps, but delicious poured over vanilla ice-cream and served with a sprinkling of Ovaltine for the texture. I call it Sepoy's Surprise."

Vote here and spread the word!

Search for us at Google Books

It's finally possible to get limited previews of many NYRB titles—Classics and otherwise—at Google Book Search. Have a look at what's available by searching New York Review [of] Books under publisher.