Mr. Curtis said he expects to eventually see product placement in digital books that will generate ads for e-books. “If you see a link in a novel to a product being advertised, you’re generating synergy between the content and the advertiser. It will be the same principle as product placement in movies and television,” he said.
(Richard Curtis, New York literary agent and digital book publisher, commenting in the Wall Street Journal on Amazon’s introduction of a Kindle carrying advertising.)

Product placement in novels? Hmm, just how would that work….?

Donna applied one last dab of lipstick and critically appraised her makeup in the magnifying mirror on her vanity table.  She frowned as the  image revealed the merest hint of a wrinkle on her brow. Tonight she had to be perfect: she’d been casually dating Todd for three weeks but she knew that tonight he was going to make his move. For the third time in five minutes she peered out of her bedroom window searching the street for his familiar car with the dented right fender. From the moment she’s set eyes on his face she’d wondered what it would be like to kiss that sensuous mouth…

Richard Curtis

In the annals of tragic and forbidden love, the names of Abelard and Heloise seldom appear far from Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde. But while the characters glorified by Shakespeare and Wagner are drawn from legend and imagination, Abelard and Heloise are historical figures.

You would guess that there is not a lot of latitude for reimagining their story. Yet this tale of delirious passion and the gruesome price the lovers paid for it has been interpreted and reinterpreted differently in every age according to the temper of the milieu. In Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard novelist Marion Meade has re-created the story in a unique and compelling way that carries special resonance for contemporary readers. A hint of the viewpoint may be seen in her reversal of the customary order of the lovers’ names.

In twelfth-century France, two of Europe’s greatest minds met and fell in love. It was a love forbidden by the world around them and eventually they were torn apart from each other. But, the spark of it remained smoldering inside the lovers until their death and beyond.

Heloise and her tutor, Peter Abelard, share a devotion passionate in its depth and beautiful in its thoughtfulness. They marry, and Heloise bears a son whom she names Astrolabe. However, all of this must be done in secret, for Abelard is forbidden to wed by the church which considers him a cleric. When the truth of their relationship is exposed, they are separated and punished both in body and soul.

Marion Meade has written novels, biographies and non-fiction books, many focusing on women cut from heroic cloth: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Victoria Woodhull, Madame Blavatsky and Dorothy Parker. E-Reads is bringing a number of them back, plus bios of some males who have gripped her attention too: Woody Allen and Buster Keaton. Keep your eye peeled on Meade’s author page to discover new releases.

Whole Foods uses it to update product information;
The L. A. Fire Department uses it to alert firefighters to blazes;
NASA uses it to break news of Mars Lander discoveries;
And a certain presidential candidate used it to update voters on his political activities.

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters. To give you some sense of what that means, the previous two sentences are 187 characters long, meaning that if they were a scene in my novel I would have to trim 47 characters to bring it down to the length of an acceptable “tweet,” as Twitter posts are called. If you tend to logorrhea, Twitter is an excellent antidote. I have revised the above two verbose sentences and pared them down to a 139-character miracle of concision:

Pre-Twitter:

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters.

Post-Twitter:

Now Twitter, the social networking service, is being used by novelists to blast installments of books in progress to friends. Blogs must be less than 141 characters.

It’s possible that, at 140 characters per installment, a work of Jamesian length and quality is achievable, but don’t count on it. In fact, authors are loath to dignify their creations with the term “novel”. Even “novelette” may be far too grandiose. Teeny-Weeny Novelini? Actually, there is a word for the new genre, according to Matt Richtel, writing about the phenomenon in the New York Times. It’s called a Twiller – that is, Twitter-thriller. The author – or perhaps tweeter, to avoid confusion with such practitioners as Tolstoy and Balzac – delivers blasts to other users signed up to receive them, and voila! – in three or four centuries, you have a full-length book! Here’s the plot of Richtel’s story:

It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cellphone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.

Where can I sign up? Here.

We’ve been updating you on the Japanese proclivity for cellphone fiction, but it would seem that our Asian counterparts are far too long-winded for American twiller tweeters impatient to claim their Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, tweeters, work on discarding those adjectives and adverbs. And while you’re at it, cut down on those character-bloating verbs and nouns. And I’ve always wondered just what the hell we need pronouns for, anyway.

Richard

In his early novel Spider Kiss Harlan Ellison welds an eloquent tribute to Rock and Roll with a frightening portrait of the bitch goddess Success that drives a rock star into the jaws of hell.

Amazon reviewer “punkviper” says,

I can’t believe the bevy of 2-star reviews regarding this work! by people who claim to be H.E. fans, no less!! should i mention this is routinely cited as one of the best rock & roll stories EVER?! people, this novel was published in 1961, it’s one of Harlan’s early works & like many such pieces it has a very gritty & urban quality about it. the story may seem trite in this day & age, but remember that 1961 was far before the whole “debauched rock star” persona was etched into the collective American unconscious. and even though the story might be familiar, don’t forget that the protagonist of the tale ISN’T the rock star! and his story makes the book that much better (btw, it wasn’t Elvis that the rockstar character was based on, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.) i believe there are a cabal of “Harlan purists” who chafe at the idea of a young H.E. cranking out such hardboiled non-fantasy-oriented material, and as such seem to roll their eyes at anything this isn’t I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, or Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World. possibly because Spider Kiss is one novel that you don’t have to be a rabid H.E. fan to enjoy. pick this one up and judge for yourself. not to mention, it’s always worthwhile picking up an Ellison book before it goes out of print, as they all-too-often do.

Thanks, punkviper, for reminding Harlan’s fans that his books all too often go out of print. E-Reads is remedying that by reissuing no fewer than 32 of them in both print and downloadable formats. Watch this space for news of new releases.

– Richard Curtis

Harlan Ellison was awarded an honorary degree from UCLA for the excellence of his imaginative writings. Some smartass might even call him “Dr.” Ellison. But only once. Because even though Ellison has come a long way since he started writing in the Fifties, he’s still the street fighter who assumed a phony name and joined The Barons, the toughest gang of juvenile delinquents in Brooklyn’s Red Hook area, just so he could write a novel about life in the slums. The real-life story of those ten weeks in hell was published as Memos from Purgatory. But the actual novel that came out of that period has been out-of-print for quite some time. Now, with its original title restored, e-reads is pleased to re-issue Web of the City, the book by a streetwise “Dr.” who risked his tail and talent to write about the dark underbelly of city life.

“Harlan Ellison is the dark prince of American letters, cutting through our corrupted midnight fog with a switchblade prose. He simply must be read.”
-–Pete Hamill

Amazon reviewer “Eman Nep” says,

Parts of this book make the movie On the Waterfront with Marlan Brando seem tame. Basically it is the story of Rusty Santoro, President of a gang called the Cougars. But he feels that he can do better in life, so he drops out of his gang–they aren’t too happy about it. And just as soon as he’s about to break loose, he gets snared back in again. This is what Harlan Ellison means by The Web of the City. Harlan Ellison does everything well in this novel: from the distorted language of the lower class, to the atmosphere of the bad parts of town, and the types of people that live there. Although written in the 1958, this book reads as if it were written not too long ago. This book was first published as Rumble, but Web of the City is the title that Harlan gave it. I highly recommend this book, this author, and anything he writes.

Web of the City is one of more than thirty great works by this master writer that E-Reads is reissuing in print and downloadable formats. Harlan has refreshed a number of his titles to replace earlier editions.

Watch this space for news of new releases in print and downloadable formats.

– Richard Curtis