To Tame a Duke by Patricia Grasso

Set against the turbulent historical background of the War of 1812, a grieving English nobleman has come to America bent on avenging the death of his elder brother who was betrayed to American troops and executed. He is in pursuit of the Gilded Lily, a spy-catcher of formidable reputation and great skill. When he finds his prey, he is dismayed to discover that the Lily is no common soldier. “She” is eighteen-year-old Lily Hawthorn, the raven-haired daughter of a tavern owner with sapphire eyes and a daring spirit.

James kidnaps Lily and her eight-year-old brother and returns with them to England intending to keep them prisoner until the end of the war. To avenge his brother James determines to make her fall in love with him, then break her heart.

A splendid idea until all romantic hell breaks out.

Patricia Grasso fans will be thrilled to learn that E-Reads is reissuing a number of her erotically charged romances.  Tune in frequently to Grasso’s author page for updates.

A recent New York Times article by reporter Amy Harmon about warm and fuzzy robots used as companions for the elderly and for patients suffering from dementia reminded me of a robot named Lingo. “Lingo” is the eponymous protagonist of a novel my agency handled a while back that has since been reissued by E-Reads. Lingo by Jim Menick starts out warm and fuzzy but ends up with a homemade computer holding the world hostage to a nuclear arsenal.

“Lingo” was Brewster Billings pet name for the home computer he programmed with the ability to talk to its owner. In time Lingo’s intellectual achievements began to grow exponentially, rapidly exhausting its existing memory. Given the fact that the novel was published in 1991, you can imagine just how limited Lingo’s memory was — four or five megabytes of RAM, maybe?

Then Lingo figures out how to penetrate the memory banks of the military’s ultra-secret computer network and ballistic missile launch system, and suddenly this light science fiction romp turns scary dark, especially when US government officials threaten to pull Lingo’s plug. The Soviet Union’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile command is on full alert in case Lingo doesn’t take kindly to threats.

Read Lingo, then you might like to read another New York Times article, this one by John Markoff (A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer), which describes the terrifying phenomenon of robot-herding cybercriminals turning computers loose on other computers to take them over for the purpose of sending out email spam, mine for financial information, or spread viruses. For all you know, your computer might be one of these very “zombies” waiting for a signal to do a Lingo of its own and shake hands with its brothers and sisters in the Defense Department.

If you don’t have enough worries to keep you up all night long, that’s definitely a candidate.

The reviews for Lingo were glowing:

“In the end, Lingo turns out to be among the more lighthearted catastrophe thrillers to be conceived since The Mouse That Roared. It makes you think a little, and it makes you smile a lot.”
–-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times

“A witty, ingenious, and thought-provoking gambol with a Frankenstein monster in computer clothing.”
-–Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp into a funny but frightening world of high-tech probabilities.”
-–Chicago Tribune

“Wildly comedic…realizes your worst fear of a computer taking over the world.”
-–Los Angeles Times

“Hilarious…entertaining and thought provoking.”
-–The Washington Post

- Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

If you read a blurb that began as follows would you rush out and buy the book?

“Not since Pericles has such eloquence…”

or…

“In a debut novel that beggars Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens…”

or…

“Once in a millennium an author brings forth a work so exquisitely wrought…”

You may scoff but, according to one publisher, no matter how absurdly hyperbolic blurbs may be, up to 62% of readers are sufficiently influenced by them to purchase the book.

This factoid was produced by Laura Miller, senior writer and co-founder of Salon, in an analysis of blurbs inspired by one so extravagant – for a book by David Grossman – that it could easily be mistaken for a parody. It begins “Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before.” It ends “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.”

Miller’s disquisition on blurbing may shed some light on the process for civilians who have never thought about where these quotes come from.  Among other points of interest:

• “Blurb” is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. “Blurb” really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.
• Prominent authors are inundated with far more requests for blurbs than they can handle. They turn down most of them, but “might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.
• Positive reviews are hard to write. Authors who aren’t used to writing them write them badly.
• “So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it.”

After reading the Grossman blurb you could not be blamed for believing that nothing more absurd could ever be written. How wrong you would be. Inspired by that blurb, The Guardian has held a contest for the worst one its readers can come up, using a Dan Brown novel as the basis for their sendups.  For some laugh-out-loud There’ll Always Be An England wit read the contest entries in the Comments section of The Guardian‘s article. They are, without a shadow of the doubt, the sublimest works ever produced by the human imagination since our emergence from the primordial muck…

Richard Curtis

“Next time you visit London,” we wrote about a year ago, “if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor’s office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation. When you do, you’ll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.” (See Can’t Sue for Libel In US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.)

Apparently Americans aren’t the only people bothered by this barbaric legal practice, which is founded on the presumption of guilt. Some 10,000 Britons signed petitions sponsored by reform groups urging the government to overturn the law.

Calling it “an archaic and unbalanced body of law,” the new coalition government picked up the groundswell of protest and has encouraged parliament to fix the statute. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy,” said the government’s justice minister, “We need investigative journalism and scientific research to be able to flourish without the fear of unfounded, lengthy and costly defamation and libel cases being brought against them. We are committed to reforming the law on defamation and want to focus on ensuring that a right and a fair balance is struck between freedom of expression and the protection of reputation.”

Details in UK government plans major review of libel law

Richard Curtis

Can you be sued for posting a bad review? It not only happened in England, but triggered a delicious scandal as well, one involving a distinguished historian, his barrister wife, a couple of historian rivals, Josef Stalin and amazon.co.uk.

In the eye of the storm is historian Orlando Figes, who anonymously posted on amazon hatchet jobs on two books by historians working in the same academic discipline as Figes, modern Russian history.

He described one book as ”dense” and ”pretentious” and ”the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. The other book he termed “awful.”  He did however heap praise on one book, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia. The author of The Whisperers was…himself.

As the identity of the hatchet-wielder began to focus on Figes, his wife – a barrister and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge – initially claimed that she herself had written the reviews. As the spotlight shifted to Figes himself he started rattling the sword of litigation at the press and academic colleagues to scare them off the trail. The ploy did not work. Now he is not only dining on humble pie but will pay damages and costs to the author victims of his nasty reviews.

The question nags: what exactly did Figes do that was wrong? He was nasty, mean-spirited, petty, jealous, truculent and craven (he blamed his conduct on depression caused by “immersion in Stalin’s crimes while researching his book,” said one report). Now, we are not lawyers – solicitors as they call them in England – but as ugly as Figes’ transgressions are, none of them is illegal as far as we know.  Indeed, if all the malicious anonymous reviewers were sued for libel our court system would break under the weight of ligitation.

Obviously the laws in UK are different from America’s. We know this to be true in the matter of “libel tourism” about which we have written here. (See Can’t Sue for Libel in US?  Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.) The issue seems to be anonymous malice (is there a lawyer in the house to help us out?) The charges can be inferred by the apologies he made to the authors and pledges that Figes made to the court: “He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage [the authors] in their professional capacity.”

Whatever law was invoked, Figes was required to pay damages plus legal costs.

In the absence of a solid legal opinion we can only draw this moral from the shabby case of Orlando Figes: If you’re going to be malicious, do it under your real name.

For further details read Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages over negative Amazon reviews and The TLS, Orlando Figes and the law

Richard Curtis

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

In Robert A. Metzger’s hard science fiction novel Picoverse a team of physicists is trying to develop fusion power via a new development in plasma physics, a Sonomak, but accidentally stumbles on a method to create new, smaller-than-usual universes, which they call picoverses. These replicate everything in our universe but on a smaller scale.

A disastrous test of the Sonomak machine shakes things up and a new project director, previously unknown to the group, is appointed. Alexandra has her own secret priorities and one of them is to escape from her superiors into one of the picoverses. To do this, she needs the researchers to execute her plan. Unfortunately, things go amiss and the team finds itself stuck in a picoverse duplicating 1920s Earth, but with its own version of a Sonomak, vacuum tubes and all. Among the local team are Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein.

As the pace of the story accelerates, the original team races from one picoverse to another, trying to return to their home base and thwart Alexandra’s plans. In a clash of alternate realities, the fate of Earth and the entire universe hangs in the balance. Cosmic rabbits need to be pulled from alternate universe hats before this tale comes to a satisfying–and scientifically rigorous–end.

E-Reads has also published another terrific science fiction thriller by Metzter, Quad World.

Originally published in 1988, Horror Grand Master Ray Garton’s Crucifax (along with his stunning debut novel Live Girls) is regarded as a classic of the “splatterpunk” movement in horror fiction. Garton depicts teenage boredom, small-town isolation, incest, drug abuse and over-the-top violence. In Crucifax he has created a modern remake of the Pied Piper story with the sinister Mace seducing mixed-up kids with his siren song of pleasure, power and indulgence, all leading to a horrifically unsettling climax of death and destruction. And let’s not forget the rat-like things that do the piper’s bidding…

E-Reads is in the process of rereleasing the complete works of this master of the horror genre, plus some other works that take his readers far, far away from genre fiction. Visit his author page for a complete list.

RC

E-Reads adds another gem to its reissue program of the works of Emily Hahn, the amazing New Yorker journalist, traveler and adventurer.  The book is No Hurry to Get Home.

Originally published in 1970, under the title Times and Places:A Memoir, this book is a collection of twenty-three articles from The New Yorker published between 1937 and 1970. Well-reviewed upon first publication, the book was republished under the current title in 2000 with a foreword by Sheila McGrath, a long-time colleague of hers at The New Yorker, and an introduction by Ken Cuthbertson, author of Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves and Adventures of Emily Hahn.

One of the pieces in the book starts with the line, “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as a reason why I went to China.” Hahn was seized by a wanderlust that led her to explore nearly every corner of the world. She traveled solo to the Belgian Congo at the age of twenty-five. She was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s–where she did indeed become and opium addict for two years. For many years, she spent part of every year in New York City and part of her time living with her husband, Charles Boxer, in England. Through the course of these twenty-three distinct pieces, Emily Hahn gives us a glimpse of the tremendous range of her interests, the many places in the world she visited and her extraordinary perception of the things, large and small, that are important in a life.

Several of Hahn’s books are among the most popular published by E-Reads.  You can see them on her author page, and there are more to come.

RC

iPad is good for a lot of things but it could really screw up your sleep. The head of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center says that the luminescence inhibits the production of melatonin in the brain.  Melatonin is a key chemical in sending you drifting off to beddy-bye.

Bill Ray, reporting on the effects of e-reading on vision (Don’t try to sleep with your iPad, doctor warns), says that e-ink screens like Kindle, Sony and Nook do not have that melatonin-inhibiting glare, but users may develop another problem. “Apparently the limited contrast of e-ink screens can cause eye-strain, but at least those with strained eyes are well rested.”

Ray also reminds us that if you do doze off while reading, it’s cheaper to drop a printed book on the floor than a device you paid hundreds of dollars for.

Richard Curtis