Our latest review is by Margarita Shalina, who reviews Alexandr Skidan’s Red Shifting, a collection of poems which won the Andrei Bely Prize in 2006.

I’ve been checking my mailbox every 5 minutes, hoping that this strange ritual will result in a ARC of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 mysteriously appearing . . .

It’s interesting to see how many posts have popped up about this galley. The most recent is from Michael Orthofer, who recaps some of the others and provides a few tantalizing tidbits about the book itself:

What can we tell you about it ? For a start, we like the promise of the epigraph, from Baudelaire:

“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”

Part one of the five-part novel is: ‘The part about the critics.’

I can’t remember the last time that a galley of a 900-page book from a dead international author was getting so much hype . . . And by the way, the second this appears in my mailbox, I’m taking the next month off to read it non-stop . . . See ya’ll in July!

This actually arrived a few weeks ago (we’ve been a bit busy . . .), but the new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available both in print and online.

Estonian Literary Magazine is published by the Estonian Literature Information Centre, which, in my opinion, is one of the best cultural organizations in the world. They—in particular Ilvi Liive—do a fantastic job promoting Estonian literature, arranging for editorial visits, producing beautiful and useful publications, including ELM, which comes out twice a year.

There are a number of interesting articles in this issue worth checking out, including one on Jaan Kaplinski, who sounds rather interesting:

Kaplinski says: “We mostly write according to plan, knowing what we want to say. A poem, essay or story means growing flesh on bones, clothing a naked thought in images, examples, turning it into literature. My path is the opposite. I start with images, pictures and associations, and try to reach the thought, the understanding, through them” (Ice and Titanic 1995, p 13). The aim, therefore, is to understand. Kaplinski’s manner of writing does not concentrate on external activity, but on the inner states of a character, meditations, flows of thought, memories and dreams.

Also included are pieces on the Estonian Literary Society and Three Women in Quest of Narrative, which features three younger Estonian women all incorporating folklore into their work.

My favorite section though is the Short Outlines of Books by Estonian Authors. This is a fantastic book review section that is incredibly helpful in deciding which titles to look into . . . In this particular issue, nine titles are highlighted, including works by Tonu Onnepalu (whose Border State came out from Northwestern University Press a few years back), Toomas Vint (whose Woman With a Memory Gap sounds really interesting), Aino Pervik, and Mihkel Mutt. Covering fiction and poetry, this is a great way of getting ones bearings in terms of contemporary Estonian lit.

The book/author that jumped out at me from this section is Ene Mihkelson. I remember Ilvi raving about her new book back at the Frankfurt Book Fair and this review has resparked my interest, not just in the most recent title—Plague Grave—but in her first book—The Sleep of Ahasuerus—as well.

n some respects her new novel, Plague Grave is a mirror image of her previous one, The Sleep of Ahasuerus (2001), though it is, of course, a free-standing work. The first-person narrator of The Sleep of Ahasuerus, who stands in close relationship to the author, reconstructed the story of her father’s death as a Forest Brother through interviews and archival documents; the novel had an exciting plot and even included spy games. In Plague Grave the protagonist’s father is also a murdered Forest Brother; to piece together the story of his death the protagonist hunts down the memories of her 80-year-old aunt Kaata and her mother. The result is a depth-psychological novel, utterly focused on its subject of inquiry, and presenting the empathic reader with a formidable ordeal. The narrator as ‘memory hunter’ is not prepared for her ‘prey’, for the hearing of the confessions that await her. The truth that unfolds—betrayals in the distant past that lead up to murders—are clearly too hard to bear. The memory hunter’s ‘imagination of truth’— a paradoxical compound noun of Mihkelson’s own invention – is shot to pieces in the end. However, the writer cannot pronounce unambiguous judgment on what has happened: what hinders her is the justification given for the betrayals: at a time when making ethical choices was impossible, people needed to provide the next generation safety and security. Trivial, self-justifying sentences such as, “Everyone wanted to live. Let whoever has no sin throw the first stone” are thus given specific, painfully personal content.

The story told in the novel is not in itself that complicated: what makes the novel difficult is the impossibility of giving simple, one-dimensional explanations. Mihkelson`s purpose is to question trivializing interpretations of history, clichés, and class differences. To accomplish this, the novel calls upon analogies and digressions, which evoke the Baltic Germans, Jews, and identity issues both in earlier periods in Estonian history as well as the contemporary world.

Overall, a great issue . . .

Max’s recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American “Prizewinners” got me wondering… what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period? And how many of them are currently available in English? I assumed that, in an Internet age, this information would be easy to come by in consolidated form; as it turned out, I was wrong. And so, by way of a remedy, I embarked on a tortuous research process.

The first step was to figure out what prizes I should be looking at. I tried to identify awards that recognized a single work of fiction annually, or biennially; that focused on a specific linguistic tradition; and that would give a book traction in a market sizable enough to facilitate comparison. That is, I was looking for analogues for the National Book Award or the Booker. The list of prizes I ended up with covers a slightly expanded version of the U.N. Security Council – France and its former colonies, the Spanish-speaking world, Germany and Austria, Italy, Russia, and Japan – which may, in itself, tell us something about the nature of literary laurels.

Ironically, I just got today’s PW Daily and the lead story is about the fourth annual Book Industry Study Group’s “Making Information Pay” conference that took place last Friday, at which Michael Shatzkin (author of the article I just wrote about) and Michael Healy, executive director of BISG, talked about the results of a BISG survey on the “state of experimentation and innovation” in the publishing industry.

Not a lot of details online about the actual survey, except what’s in Jim Milliot’s write-up:

Approximately two-thirds of trade publishing respondents said they believe experimentation is crucial to the future success of the industry, while more than 75% of educational and professional publishers believed innovation is critical to the future. Just over 81% of trade publishers said experiments have led to changes in their normal work practices, while 87% of nontrade publishers reported changes.

The most common experiments involve the Web, either through new marketing techniques or redesigns of corporate sites. Nearly 69% of trade publishers said experiments had resulted in new products, while 77% of nontrade publishers said they had created new products. The source of innovation comes from a number of places, ranging from top management to “literally anybody” at the company, the survey found.

The most interesting bit is about the Espresso Book Machine though:

Todd Anderson, director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, gave his unqualified support to the Espresso Book Machine, which the bookstore installed last November 1. The $144,000 machine allows the bookstore to print individual books from a variety of different files. “Our model is sell one, print one,” Anderson said. Through the early part of February, UAB had printed 2,364 books, totaling 537,754 pages, Anderson said. Since that time, the bookstore has printed another 1,500 books with the Espresso.

So they’ve printed almost 4,000 units, which, assuming an average list price of $15, comes out to $60,000 over the first 6 months . . . Looks like it could pay for itself in about a year . . . And I think we can assume these sales will increase with the new Lightening Source list of available titles.

Last week, Idea Logical posted a speech that founder Mike Shatzkin (really, you should read his bio, it’s incredible) gave to the Danish Book Trade. The article, entitled The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers is one of the best I’ve ever read about the current publishing situation and what’s to come. It’s that perfect blend of insider publishing talk, theoretical statements about the future, and business analysis that I’ve come to really love . . .

It’s almost impossible to summarize and excerpt from this—the whole essay is so good—but it is incredibly long, so here are a few highlights . . .

Shatzkin starts off making an incredibly useful distinction between horizontal and vertical organizations:

he 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter — that is, very broad — and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and institutions that have traditionally relied on other horizontal institutions (like newspapers, magazines, etc.) to get the word out about their books.

Leaving this idea aside for a moment, Shatzkin then runs through the list of things that are changing/developing in the publishing industry, including ebooks, print-on-demand, audiofiles, etc. And he doesn’t just recap the technology or the concept, rather he explains how the distribution system is currently set-up, what major players are influencing the different segments, how this might evolve, etc.

He also looks at the ways these technologies are/will influence publishers and booksellers. Especially worth mentioning is this piece on the Espresso Book Machine:

The Espresso prints and binds one book at a time — one-color and paperback only, although with a full-color cover — and is intended for in-store use. There are only a handful of them in place, but they offer the entrepreneurial bookstore some very intriguing opportunities to expand their business. We have encountered a very entrepreneurial bookseller at the University of Alberta in Canada who has made one work profitably in his store within months.

Last month, Espresso announced a deal with Ingram by which the Lightning repository of files will be made available for delivery on Espresso. That suddenly makes the Espresso proposition a lot more likely to succeed.

I’ve been making fun of the EBM for a while now (seriously though, just look at this thing) but this agreement changes the entire game. Now if it only looked a little more like a Mac product instead of a contraption built out of spare parts in someone’s garage . . .

He also covers some of the implications of social networking sites and the way that data is being tagged and categorized these days:

My hunch is that we’ll see vertical “portals” for every conceivable subject: an overall organization that serves as a guide to every topic of interest. Think of wikipedia entries turned into entire web worlds. [. . .]

The taxonomies by which information is organized in each niche will be constantly evolving. The standards experts of the future will be much more concerned with reconciling taxonomies across niches. Some obvious ones will need to be rationalized, like farming and gardening, cooking and dining, business travel and pleasure travel and adventure travel.

Leaving the horizontal media of the 20th century behind will mean that multi-niche successes, what today we call mass market successes, will become relatively rare. As people find it easier and easier to delve deeply into what interests them most, they will spend less and less time exposed to things that interest large numbers of people. Word-of-mouth requires that people be speaking to each other to work.

And to leave no concept untouched, he gets a bit into the “long tail” idea of Chris Anderson’s:

The concept is simple. In the days before the Internet, the choice of products available — let’s say, books — was pretty much limited by retail shelf space. If a book wasn’t in a store, the barriers to discovery and purchase were very high and the book essentially left the field of commerce.

Amazon.com, of course, changed that overnight. On the net, shelf space is unlimited. By using Ingram and Baker & Taylor, America’s two large wholesalers, to start, Amazon offered many times more books than any terrestrial bookstore. [. . .]

What this means is Amazon can sell a copy or two of a nearly unlimited number of books, which, taken cumulatively, far exceeds the number of copies sold of the 10-20 uber-bestsellers that are everywhere at any given moment. Basically this theory rewrites the business model that supports the major chains, arguing that in the long-run, it’s better to sell a few copies of an infinite amount of books than to sell a ton of copies of a handful of titles. There are problems with this idea though . . .

What this says to me is that the long tail Anderson has identified is great for consumers and great for the retailers that can sell the long tail books, which primarily means Amazon. It’s great for Lightning. But the long tail is not a good thing for publishers or authors. From their perspective, the primary impact of the long tail is to bring them competition that 10 or 20 years ago would not have been on the field with them.

Anyway, going back to the original point about horizontal vs. vertical organization and how this is impacted by all these techno-social changes, Shatzkin echoes something I’ve been thinking for a while: thanks to the combination of a fragmented culture and the digital revolution, smaller presses with more specific publishing interests (in contrast to a press that does fiction, cookbooks, travel guides, and biographies) stand to gain a lot more from changes in technology and the marketplace than large, “legacy” (to steal Shatzkin’s term) publishers.

Shatzkin actually lists some of the challenges these big presses face, which seem pretty daunting:

It’s not an accident that the biggest trade publishers have been slow to move in the direction of change. The speedboats can zip around the harbor; the supertanker has a devil of a time trying to turn around. That’s a generalization which masks the very specific reasons big publishers remain stuck in old models.

First of all, the horizontality of their history leaves them a legacy list that reflects the randomness of mind by which it was acquired: there are few niches with any critical mass of content. [. . .]

The second big problem of the big houses is that their brands, which were built over a long time and are perceived to have great value, have only business-to-business, or what we call B2B, value. Consumers don’t know who published the last book they read, and they pretty much don’t care. [. . .]

(He does go on to indicate that there’s a very big difference between Chelsea Green branding itself and HarperCollins—something that I completely and totally agree with. I’m 99% sure I’ll love a NYRB or New Directions book and make my purchases based on “loyalty” to their “brand,” but with Random House, I buy on a book-by-book basis, rarely taking chances on purchases, since their books are all over the place.)

The third challenge for big companies is the requirement to keep making money with their current models, which are horizontal and which are book-specific. Smaller, owner-managed companies can more nimbly make decisions about experimentation with their future direction than big companies that report to investors about the value of their holdings.

The fourth challenge for big companies is that they are, of necessity, more highly structured than smaller ones. In the Internet age, when editorial, marketing, and sales functions get harder to divide neatly, structure and hierarchy can be the enemy of constructive change.

I strongly encourage anyone who’s made it to this point to go read the whole article. It’s much more illuminating and interesting that I can convey . . .

Sancho’s Panza mentions that galleys of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 have begun to surface:

So it looks like the fat advance copies of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 in English translation have begun arriving in reviewers’ mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how this book is received, after the gush of critical (and reader) enthusiasm for The Savage Detectives last year. My opinion, which goes against the opinion of many writers and critics (such as pioneering Bolaño booster Francisco Goldman), is that The Savage Detectives is the better work, more satisfying, less self-conscious, more fun, more a book that will outlast whatever hype becomes attached to it. And I think The Savage Detectives is a deeper book in the end though the themes of 2666 would seem perhaps to carry more ballast: death and evil.

Paul Verhaeghen, the man who translated his own book into English and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize yesterday, has decided to donate his prize money to the ACLU. From his blog:

In the light of all this, and to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink – its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second — but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.

We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.

Just announced today that Flemish author Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor.

Moving back and forth through the last century, Omega Minor, translated from the Dutch, is a story of love and death on the grandest possible scale. Its whirlwind plot takes in Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and characters including neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, a Holocaust survivor going over his trauma with a young psychologist and an Italian postgraduate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe.

Verhaeghen’s an interesting guy. Not only is he a Pynchon-esque author, but he’s also a cognitive psychologist. And translated the immense Omega Minor himself, thus taking home both halves of the £10,000 award that is supposed to be split between author and translator.

(Well, not exactly “taking home”:

“It’s always amazing when people like your work, and it’s absolutely amazing when four leading intellectuals say it’s the best book they’ve read all year,” Verhaeghen said after learning of his victory. However, while he is delighted to receive the endorsement, he has decided not to take the money. “Part of this book is about the rise and aftermath of Fascism in Nazi Germany. And it’s hard to miss the analogous things happening in the US. I refused the Flemish Culture award after I realised around $5,000 (£2,555) of the winnings would go to the US treasury. So this time, I decided to give the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, which works for civil rights. The money won’t be liable for tax.”)

Unfortunately, this book hasn’t gotten a ton of attention in the mainstream U.S. media, although Michael Orthofer wrote a very thoughtful, praising review of it some time back.

Our latest review is by Kelly Amabile—of the fantastic Book Culture book store in NYC. She takes a look at Olivier Rolin’s Hotel Crystal.