This set has a heavy helping of covers that work as trompe d'oeil -- 2008's favorite, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," has a cover that appears to be the spines of a bunch of other books lined up in a neat row. But those lose some of their charm when reproduced digitally (it's hard to tell the difference between a clever cover made up of a picture of spines of books and a simple picture of the spines of books). And on balance, the top choices seem to be on the somber side, like a mix tape recorded on a gloomy day.

So there's good reason to go exploring the Book Cover Archive's archive. There are close to 1,200 covers on (cyber) display, sortable by publisher, designer, title. The archive is created with some serendipity -- generally, book covers are added around their publication date, but some are late additions.

But the sorting isn't the point so much as the gazing. Because the archive only includes those covers that merit appreciation, every one is worth a second look -- and displayed in arrays of 70 or more, they're a book lover's eye candy.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Book covers for "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" by Chris Ware and Penguin's 70th anniversary reissue of John Steinbeck's "The Murder."

This week, there were some small books competing for attention against some blockbusters. Andre Agassi's memoir, "Open," is charming everyone, including our reviewer David Davis:

This literate and absorbing book is, as the title baldly states, Agassi's confessional, a wrenching chronicle of his lifelong search for identity and serenity, on and off the court.

Peter Mayle, best known for "A Year in Provence," begins in Malibu but swiftly heads back to France, in a wine-and-food fiction this time around. Reviewer Bernadette Murphy writes:

"The Vintage Caper" is just that -- a caper -- a lighthearted romp through Bordeaux and Marseille, in which picking the right restaurant, choosing the best dish on the menu and, of course, finding the perfect wine (and female companion) to accompany the feast is every bit as important as catching the thief.

Well-known French children's author Jean-Claude Mourlevat has tried his hand at young adult fiction, and the results are not good. George Ducker writes:

For the characters in "Winter's End" -- and this should go for the readers as well -- the book's end just can't come soon enough.

And don't forget Sarah Palin. The former vice presidential candidate visited with Oprah, hit the road in a decorated tour bus and remained at the top of Amazon's bestseller list. As for the book itself, Tim Rutten says:

"Going Rogue" is so obviously a campaign biography that a reader comes away trying to figure out what he thinks of Palin's presidential chances rather than what he thinks of her.

So far, Palin isn't running for anything. Officially, that is.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Andre Agassi, honored at the U.S. Open in 2009. Credit: Charles Krupa / Associated Press

The English-language bookstore on Paris' left bank, Shakespeare and Company, has been a draw for generations of expatriate writers. That goes for both its first iteration, owned by Sylvia Beach, who was the original publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses," and the more recent version, opened in 1951 by George Whitman. And those writers are rendered in portraits in a new mural in the shop, on the stairwell between the ground floor and the upstairs browsing/reading room.

On its website, Bomb Magazine has a slideshow of the mural's creation, and an interview with the artist, Badaude (a.k.a. Joanna Walsh). 

I’m somewhere between being a writer [and] an illustrator. I look with envy at other artists’ sketchbooks which are full of pictures and are beautiful objects. Mine tend to be pages of scribbled notes with the odd sketch thrown in....

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers -- looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used -- I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth [of] their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter ("Quartet," " A Moveable Feast," "Tropic of Cancer"). This is why I chose the quote from "Ulysses" ...  hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he -- and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator -- furnished his Paris persona.

Today, the shop is run by George's daughter Sylvia Whitman -- George, now in his 90s, is mostly retired. It continues to offer events with French and American writers, like Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant in June and Charles D'Ambrosio later this month.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Paul Morris / Bomb Magazine

British magazine the Literary Review has announced the shortlist of finalists for its Bad Sex Award. The contenders list could be plucked from any highbrow literary award competition: John Banville has won a Booker, Amos Oz has been awarded the French Legion of Honor and Philip Roth has one Pulitzer and two National Book Awards. But maybe they'd prefer not to add the Bad Sex Award to their achievements.

"Nobody wants to win that award," Margaret Atwood -- who is not in the running -- told Jacket Copy in October. 

Not all the finalists feel that way. Nick Cave's "The Death of Bunny Munro" follows the sexual misadventures of traveling salesman Bunny. "Frankly, we would have been offended if he wasn't shortlisted," his British publisher Canongate told the Guardian. Maybe that's because Cave deliberately rendered a crude, sexually obsessed character. "I think it’s a hard look at a particular aspect of masculinity," Cave told Jacket Copy in September. "It’s fronting up to that and railing against the kind of misogynistic and predatory element of the male psyche."

There's a tension about the way the sex appears in Philip Roth's "The Humbling" that caught the judges' attention. In the book, over-the-hill actor Simon Axler woos a young lesbian named Pegeen -- who brings in another woman. The cited passage begins:

This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.

OK, enough of that! We're not going to get to the devices part. This is a family newspaper.

The trouble, they note, is in the effort to claim literary respectability. Why write "This was not soft porn," an editor at Literary Review asks, "unless you're worried that it might be taken as such?"

Our reviewer Richard Rayner is a little more diplomatic. "Readers, according to their taste, may find the sex scenes in 'The Humbling' shocking or arousing or just plain silly."

The complete Bad Sex Award shortlist -- silly, sexy and shocking -- is after the jump. To read the passages themselves, you'll have to crack open the books.

John Banville for "The Infinities

Nick Cave for "The Death of Bunny Munro"

Jonathan Littell for "The Kindly Ones"

Richard Milward for "Ten Storey Love Song"

Sanjida O'Connell for "The Naked Name of Love"

Amos Oz for "Rhyming Life and Death"

Anthony Quinn for "The Rescue Man"

Philip Roth for "The Humbling"

Paul Theroux for "A Dead Hand"

Simon Van Booy for "Love Begins in Winter"

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Nick Cave. Credit: Polly Borland

It's hard to fill a bookstore at noon on a weekday, but that's exactly what happened at Skylight Books in Los Feliz today when Amy Goodman appeared to talk about her new book, "Breaking the Sound Barrier." By 11:45 a.m., all the seats were filled, decent standing room was taken and people were queuing up behind high bookshelves -- even if they couldn't see, they could listen.

Listening is what they're used to doing with Goodman, a longtime left-wing radio host. In Los Angeles, her show Democracy Now!, now in its 13th year, airs on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Out on the street, a leafletter concerned with changes at the radio station loudly attempted to intercede with Goodman's fans. Some stayed to listen, others hurried into the bookstore. But it seemed fitting; a strong political voice like Goodman's isn't doing its job if it isn't attached to some controversy.

Goodman's book tour will take her to Pasadena tonight and continue through early December. While she's making lots of stops and traveling far, she won't be crossing book tour paths with that other strong-opinioned woman, Sarah Palin. Although that would be some crowd.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Skylight Books audience. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Oprah Book Club fans in the Southland can see Uwem Akpan this evening at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library. The author is set to appear at 5:30 p.m.

Akpan, a native of Nigeria, is the author of Oprah's latest book pick, "Say You're One of Them." The book marked two firsts for Oprah's Book Club: It was the first set in Africa and the first short story collection.

"He is the author of the most powerful collection of short stories that I believe I've ever read," Oprah said on her book club broadcast.

Akpan is a Jesuit priest who received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Michigan. After earning his degree, he has returned to Nigeria, where he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.

"I started off going into the priesthood," Akpan said on the "Oprah" broadcast, "and the writing came later. For me, the two are very intertwined, right now, connected."

It is not Akpan's first visit to Southern California. Last year he appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Uwem Akpan. Credit: Comfort Ukpong / Little, Brown & Co.

Los Angeles-based Wordtheatre lines up actors to read short stories, a pairing that shows both in a flattering light. Perhaps that's why they get such glittering lineups -- it's a chance for actors to dig into  excellent writing.

On Nov. 29, Wordtheater takes the stage in London. Headlining the lineup is Alfred Molina, pictured above as Dr. Octopus in "Spider Man 2." That's him at his most striking, perhaps -- but to me he'll always be Kenneth Halliwell, the supportive/tortured partner of playwright Joe Orton in the biopic "Prick Up Your Ears." Although he's got the unavoidable Hollywood dreck on his resume (an appearance on "Miami Vice," for example), Molina has done more than his share of literary pictures, including "Manifesto," based on a Zola novel, "The Trial," which was Kafka via Harold Pinter, "Anna Karenina" and more. And oh, yes, "The Da Vinci Code." At this event, he'll be literary and a bit sassy: He's reading Nick Hornby's story "Nipple Jesus." 

Also scheduled to perform are Ian Hart ("Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone") reading "Man in the Water" by Rose Tremain; Sally Hawkins ("Happy-Go-Lucky") reading "The Wave" by Julie Myerson; Lucy Brown ("Primeval") reading "Up at the Villa" by Helen Simpson, and John Schwab ("The Complete Works of William Shakespeare") reading "Stories" by John Edgar Wideman.

Proceeds benefit Fairbridge, a charity for inner-city youth in the U.K. The show is at the private Shoreditch House in London, so Soho House members get a discount. But anyone with $33 -- and airfare to England -- can attend.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Alfred Molina as Dr. Octopus in "Spider Man 2." Credit: Melissa Mosely / Columbia Pictures

The National Book Award for Fiction went to Colum McCann for his novel "Let the Great World Spin," a story of New York in 1974 that doubles as an allegory of 9/11. It was the final award at the black-tie event Wednesday evening in New York City.

"In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books," McCann told the L.A. Times last week. "I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time."

Juried awards were presented in three other categories. The nonfiction prize was awarded to T.J. Stiles for "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt." Poetry went to Keith Waldrop, for "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy," published by the University of California Press. Phillip Hoose took the award for young adult literature for "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice"; Colvin joined him on the stage. 

Two awards were known in advance: Gore Vidal received the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Dave Eggers the Literarian Award. Those were presented before dinner -- downsized to chicken from last year's lamb -- after which the competition awards were announced.

A new award -- the Best of the National Book Awards -- was presented to celebrate the awards' 60th anniversary. After weeks of revisiting all the previous winners, five finalists were set to a public vote. More than 10,000 people voted online, and tonight, Flannery O'Connor's "The Complete Stories" beat out books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty to take the honor.

Since its start in 1950, the National Book Foundation, led by publishing professionals, has striven to reward excellence in American literature. It may not be the Oscars, but it's about as close as the publishing world gets.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Gore Vidal at the National Book Awards with presenter Joanne Woodward in the background. Credit:  Tina Fineberg / Associated Press

In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy -- maybe if he'd gotten the job, we would have had "CSI: Studs Terkel." But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that would last for more than four decades. Our report has the details:

Terkel's paper trail started in 1945. It references Terkel speaking at a Paul Robeson rally in Chicago and quotes a source who questioned Terkel's "loyalty to the United States" because he worked with the BBC on a piece about the "sordid side of life in Chicago."

Terkel was an energetic journalist who lost his broadcasting job during the McCarthy blacklist era. He went on to write landmark oral histories of working-class America, including "Division Street," "Hard Times" and "Working," which made him either a patriot or suspect, depending on your point of view. After he died in 2008 at age 96, New York's City News service filed a Freedom of Information Act request, leading to this week's release.

Terkel was aware he was being tracked by the FBI, and several accounts of his life recall him joking that his file wasn’t as thick as the one compiled on his wife Ida Goldberg, a social worker and anti-war activist.

The FBI stopped following Terkel in 1990. More than 100 pages of Terkel's 296-page file remain undisclosed for "privacy and other reasons," City News reports. Exactly whose privacy is mysterious -- Terkel outlived most of his contemporaries.

The Chicago History Museum has a selection of his recordings online; his final book, released last year, was "P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: What's that, an agent upstairs? Studs Terkel at home in Chicago 2003. Credit: Aynsley Floyd / Associated Press

Until now. New Yorker contributor Bruce McCall has a helpful roster of non-reading book activities in "50 Things to Do with a Book (now that reading is dead)." The thing is, sad to say, another book, but it includes his illustrations in additions to the words. So you can look as well as read. That's two things.

And then there is the list, revelatory in its demonstration of just how many purposes a book might have. You can schlep books down the Nile and stack them in the form of pyramids. Or gather copies of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and chuck them at real live birds (mockingbirds not required). Another suggestion: strap a couple of thick tomes to your feet to create a pair of elevator books. 

I would tell you more of the 50 things, but I can't be bothered to read this book, can I? Besides, I'm using it as a cheese plate right now.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Books as furniture in the bookchair, on display at the London Design Festival 2008. Credit: Gill Rickson via Flickr.

A new audio-book version of the Bible, jam-packed with stars, has made it to shelves in time for the holidays. Richard Dreyfuss does Moses, Max Von Sydow does Noah and Gary Sinise is David, but they're just the beginning. The cast of 600 includes John Heard (Matthew), Lou Diamond Phillips (Mark), Chris McDonald (Luke) and Louis Gossett Jr. (John). Luke Perry is Judas. Who's Jesus? James Caviezel, who played the role once before, in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ." Producer Carl Amari told The Times that he pitched the project to Christian publisher Thomas Nelson.

"I always thought it would be cool to do a radio drama of the Bible," said Amari, who grew up "not real religious" in the Catholic Church. "You're dramatizing the greatest story ever told. It's God's word. How can you make God's word lift off the page? With great actors, great sound effects and music."...

When Amari projected that the venture would cost $4 million, the entire Thomas Nelson board of directors "looked at me," he recalled. It would be a leap of faith, given that the company's previous audio Bibles had cost at most $17,000 to produce. Then again, just 20,000 copies constituted a bestseller.

The audio Bible -- which is a faithful rendering of the New King James Version -- includes a musical score and evocative sound effects, just like a film."It's verbal Cinerama," said actor Michael York, who narrates both the Old and New Testaments. The 79-CD, 90-hour set costs $125.

This fall also saw the release of R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated"; is there a renewed interest in the Bible from secular quarters? "If you remove divinity from the equation, 'Genesis' becomes a human creation," David Ulin wrote in his review. "'A powerful text,' in Crumb's words, 'with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.'" Angelenos can see for themselves -- Crumb's original "Genesis" artwork is currently on display at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Actors Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in 1975's "Jaws." Credit: Universal Studios

Jacket Copy: Right now we're surrounded by post-apocalypse fictions: The movie "2012" just topped the weekend box office, the movie version of "The Road" is coming out, there's your book and Margaret Atwood's. What do you think the appeal is of setting stories after an apocalypse?

Marcel Theroux: I didn't embark on it to be a post-apocalyptic novel -- I can see why people say that about it – but I started with the character of Makepeace. I suppose to answer your question, I think one of the attractions is it gives you another angle on the way we live now. It's a way of writing about the present without seeming to write about the present. That's one of the things I liked about it. It makes you realize that things we take for granted are contingent and could change, and things haven't always been this way. In a very huge way, it situates the time we live in a much bigger historical perspective. In the case of post-apocalyptic books, it makes you think about the present from the point of view of disaster.

When I was writing "Far North," I was thinking a little bit about how the achievements of ancient Rome would have appeared to a Medieval peasant. For such a long time in Western history, the greatest technological and scientific achievements appeared to be behind us. It's only now that we feel like we're living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there's nothing natural about that, if you look at history.

JC: Makepeace is someone who is both savage and civilized, because she has a moral code.

MT: Yes, she's got a moral code. She's also got a possibly misplaced respect for her predecessors on the planet. She looks back at us and thinks we knew all sorts of things and were impressive and civilized and smart. I often think she got the wrong end of the stick about us. But there's something kind of noble about her desire to preserve what she sees as best about human beings.

JC: In some ways, that's made tangible in the books that she saves, which is how your book begins.

MT: She saves them, but she doesn't actually read them herself. She feels like she ought to, but it gives her a headache when she reads them. She feels kind of inadequate when she considers these treasures of her civilization, but she's the only person there.

JC: There are some mysterious elements that are beyond her.

MT: I think it's true of all of us that we're surrounded by things we take for granted but we don't actually understand. I'm looking around the [hotel] room, I see my mobile phone and my computer and a plasma-screen TV. I couldn't take one of these apart and put it together – I have a very primitive understanding of the way these things work. I think there is a huge gap between the technological sophistication of things around us and our actual understanding of them. I was interested in that gap.

Makepeace is a very resourceful person who is hugely capable. Like a lot of people in traditional societies, she can fix anything that goes wrong. She's mastered all the technology that she needs to master, albeit on a more basic level than mobile telephones. She feels an awe and inadequate when she's confronted by these things that we take for granted, like planes and cars and internal combustion engines.

It's somehow compelling when you have a narrator who's doing their best but somehow knows slightly less than the reader feels they do. I think it's good to feel superior to the narrator in a way – I think it's a good device. My knowledge about the world is greater than hers – there's a lot of things she's ignorant about, and she's aware of it. I was kind of interested in the idea that it's possible for knowledge to disappear.

JC: When she sees an airplane, it inspires her.

MT: It's pretty amazing, isn't it? An airplane is pretty amazing. Actually, traveling in an airplane is horrible, and it doesn't feel anything like amazing, but the idea of it. When was the first powered flight, 1906? [1903]. It is a miraculous thing. It's a device for letting the reader know – it's hard now, because the book's been reviewed, but I was thinking that at the beginning you could be in the American West in the 19th century. It's only the plane that makes you know for sure.

JC: Makepeace is such a loner. She spends much of the early part of her life alone, and she is often remote from the people around her. Was it hard to render the world around her? She's always the filter.

MT: I never felt like her landscape was that empty, because there was so much in it, she had so many things she needed to do. There were all kinds of sources of conflict for her, and she'd had a very rich and interesting past. I guess I'm quite interested in isolation, anyway. That never felt like one of the difficulties of writing the book.

It's a real place – the place where she is having her adventures in Siberia – I've visited maybe five or six times for other reasons before I wrote the book. So it was a place that felt very real to me. Things in it – quite surprising things – I've actually seen. I felt confident rendering her world.

JC: By things you've seen, do you mean the way people live in that environment?

MT: Partly that. Things in the far north – I've been into reindeer herders' huts in north Siberia. But even smaller things. I went to Chechnya in 2000, which then was in the grip of a terrible civil war. The place -- Grozny, the capital – had been bombed to hell, and it was very, very dangerous. There were Russian soldiers in checkpoints along the streets, and they would kind of hide in their little posts at night because it was even too dangerous for Russian soldiers to go around. There was a guy whitewashing the sidewalk outside his apartment, which was an insane bit of punctiliousness. The whole place was horrible. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was cleaning it. His name was Shamsudin. I kind of put him in the book, to commemorate him, that civilizing impulse. He was a guy who decided he needed the sidewalk to look nice outside of his largely ruined apartment building, which I thought was kind of amazing and improbable.

JC: You've been in some pretty rough places as a journalist.

MT: I've tried to avoid them, but I have occasionally. I suppose Chechnya was the hairiest place.

JC: What are the different responsibilities of the journalist and the novelist toward violence and brutality?

MT: In fiction, you're saying, "look at this horrible brutality," but at the same time, the author made it up. So the author's weirdly complicit in the brutality in a way that a journalist isn't. I'm sort of haunted by violence, I suppose everyone is. I find it – I'm sort of fascinated by it. I suppose one of the things I'm interested in is that human beings have composite brains that reflect different stages of evolution -- we have a lizard brain that is violent and impulsive and ugly, and we have successive layers of more sophisticated brain that have higher functioning, empathy, the capacity to love and care for each other. The ghastly truth about human beings is that all these things coexist in the same person. And the structures of civilization are a restraining influence on our capacity to do horrible things to one another. I suppose that's another reason why post-apocalyptic – I prefer calling it speculative – genre is interesting, because it allows you to explore what would happen when some of these civilizing influences are taken away, the same way that [William Golding] does in “Lord of the Flies.”

JC: How did you first come to go to places like Siberia and Chechnya?

MT: I studied Russian in school, from when I was 13. My Russian is pretty ropey, considering I'm supposed to be studying it for such a long time. I did various films and documentaries in the Soviet Union, and I used to visit myself, because I think it's an amazing place, fascinating. It has a history of such incredible extremes – the history of Russia in the 20th century is just mind-blowing. I worked on various documentaries and would end up going to Chernobyl and north Siberia and I was happy to go. I guess it comes from a childhood fascination with learning Russian, with the weird letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.

JC: Do you have any favorites in Russian literature?

MT: I'll tell you specifically. Because I didn't think of “Far North” as post-apocalyptic, exactly; to me, it had different progenitors. One of them was this book by two brothers, Boris and Arkade Strugatsky, “Roadside Picnic.” That was quite influential on me. It was the book that was the basis of the Andre Tarkovsky film “Stalker.” When I went to Chernobyl the guys there were very into “Stalker” and “Roadside Picnic,” and they talked about it a lot, because in “Roadside Picnic” there's a zone. The premise of “Roadside Picnic” is that aliens have visited Earth, have stopped and gone away. They didn't really find anything to detain them on our planet, but they left a lot of stuff behind in this zone. And the stuff has very weird properties, and the Stalkers travel around in the zone. You can see that clearly left an imprint on me.

JC: Yet it's also informed by real-world problems.

MT: One of the reasons I didn't think of it as post-apocalyptic was I'd been thinking a lot about climate change and global warming. I met this famous scientist James Lovelock – he has this notion that the world is an organism, which he calls Gaia. He understands it as a single organism, and the idea is that Gaia acts in her own best interest. So we, as humans, do things to Gaia – like put too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Gaia has to figure out a way of regulating her temperature. Much like if you or I had a virus, our bodies would figure out a way of getting it out of our system. Lovelock's idea is basically that human beings have become the virus on Gaia, and that global warming is one of the responses to us.

There's a lot of talk about climate change, and people focus on carbon emissions and using the SUV less. What was interesting to me about it was that the repercussions of climate change are very simple: They get very hungry, or they don't have enough water, and they start moving around to find it. And that could be profoundly destabilizing, particularly for weak states, to have masses of people on the move.

There are nomads in Kenya – there's been terrible droughts – that really bring home what climate change is. It's desperate people who don't have enough water. People who are desperately thirsty, or watching their children die, are desperate in every sense. It's a tragedy.

JC: Can fiction, or storytelling, elucidate some of these issues that are anchored in the real world?

MT: I don't know. I didn't set out to write a didactic book. I'm just interested in the world and constantly surprised by things in it. The climate change thing – it was a real shock to think, what this really means is hungry people. Hungry people are desperate people, and human beings being what they are – what wouldn't you do, if your children were hungry?

I suppose that's what a speculative novel does, is that it asks various what-ifs, with the guiding principle being that whatever you've changed in the experiment, human nature has got to be the same.

JC: At the same time, with these ideas in the back of your head, it must have been kind of fun to write about this survivalist woman.

MT: It was totally. I loved writing about it.

I felt when I was writing that she was so much better than me. One of the seeds of the book was that I was writing in a diary when I was stuck on something else, and I wrote, 'You've just got to buckle on your guns and go patrol the dingy city.' It just didn't sound like me, it sounded very resourceful and practical and uncomplaining, and I became curious about who that voice was. So many of her qualities are not like what I'm like.

I'm writing something else now, it's not a sequel, and I really miss Makepeace. I miss working on that book, because I really enjoyed it. It's work and tenacity, to stick with a book and finish it. But I did feel like I was lucky to meet Makepeace. I found her presence very uplifting, and I think she was good for me.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A village in Siberia. Credit: sashapo via Flickr.

If you're skeptical about Sarah Palin being the type to drop references to a 17th century French scientist and philosopher in her memoir "Going Rogue," you've got something in common with Tim Rutten, who reviews the book in our pages Tuesday. "It's customary for  politicians and celebrities to collaborate with a professional writer on books like this," Rutten writes."However, the name of Palin's collaborator -- the evangelical Christian writer and pro-life activist Lynn Vincent -- doesn't appear on the cover of 'Going Rogue.'" Rutten continues:

Collaborators sometimes trade such credits for higher fees, but their names usually appear prominently in the acknowledgments.

Palin's first acknowledgment goes to ... herself: "I'm very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I'm thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl...."

...the hand most obviously working throughout "Going Rogue" is Vincent's. The narrative is sprinkled with literary and philosophical references that one somehow doubts sprang from the copious pages of Palin's diaries, including the role of Blaise Pascal's philosophy in her girlhood conversion from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism.

Rutten notes that much of the early media coverage of the book focused on Palin's anger toward the news media. In addition, they found some sensational sound bites.

• Palin's counter to rumors of a possible split from husband Todd: "I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house.... Seeing Todd’s blue eyes smiling, I chuckled. 'Dang,' I thought. 'Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?' "
• Her affection for meat. "I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes."
• Criticisms of the McCain campaign handlers, Steve Schmidt in particular, who she says called her after she spoke on the phone to pranksters pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "Right away, the phones started ringing," she writes. "One of the first calls was Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. 'How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?!'" [Schmidt told Larry King his portrayal in the book is "total fiction."]

For Rutten, one of the most important aspects of Palin's book is the use of Ronald Reagan as a touchstone. "Palin is genuinely convincing in her admiration for Reagan, but one of the things she misses about his appeal was the utter absence of resentment from his persona," he writes. "This book, on the other hand, fairly seethes with resentment, particularly in the more than 100 pages devoted to the McCain-Palin campaign." But has she got the Gipper's magic? Read Rutten's conclusion here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Associated Press / Harpo Productions, Inc. George Burns

So what was he thinking when he advised entrepreneurs today to eschew traditional funding streams -- banks and venture capitalists -- and go the publishing route?

It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever.

No fancy bookkeeping, no board meetings, no worrying about the accounting. Instead, you pay a royalty on income. The rest is up to you.

Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.

As elegant as this may sound -- no board meetings! No fancy bookkeeping! -- it's plain fantasy. Anyone who's ever published a book knows that the bookkeeping is fancy. And more important, everyone in publishing is becoming increasingly concerned that publishing, as a business model, isn't working.

One of the challenges facing publishing is that not all books are equal. A very few books sell very well; a few more make marginal profits; many never generate income at all. It's not much different from other creative industries, like music and film. Except that publishing historically created a mix in which the profits were modest, even wee -- rarely at the level that corporations expect. And in recent years, most publishers have been vertically integrated into a handful of corporations.

Then there are the bookstores, which are closing. And the online retailers, which are discounting. Ginormous unrecoupable celebrity advances. Archaic modes of delivery and returns. Readers going online -- scattering -- to get their content. Can books survive the online content boom? Will today's toddlers even give what we think of as a book -- the kind with covers and paper pages -- a second glance? How can the publishing industry go digital and avoid the piracy and swapping issues the music industry faced?

You don't have to listen to me go on. Here's New York magazine with the big picture (the story, from last year, includes comments like "It's a very trying time" from the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

If publishing is the best model Seth Godin can think of, it seems like the real trick here is finding the willing investor. And for that, you'll need a couple of Max Bialystocks and Leo Blooms -- they were great at securing matrons with fat wallets in "The Producers."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing" discounted from $25 to $5.99 by Border's Books; the company laid off nearly 900 people between January and April 2009. Credit: wombatunderground1 via Flickr.

People rarely make 'em like they used to. The video above shows, in 3,000 photos, how one woman created 35 handcrafted copies of her book, "The Complex of All of These." It took her two months. But isn't it beautiful? (via Coudal Partners)

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Last week, Craig Ferguson beat Jimmy Fallon in the late-night race for the first time. What put him over the top? Could it have been his recent memoir, "American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot"?

Eh, probably not.

Nevertheless, the book is a charming read. Unlike some in Hollywood, Ferguson writes his own books -- he published a novel, "Between the Bridge and the River," in 2006. And this memoir is, not surprisingly, full of the same humor Ferguson displays on "The Late Late Show."

"I don't say this to impress you, but I was a bed wetter until I was around eleven years old," he writes, continuing:

Then I stopped, but not for long. I started drinking alcohol regularly when I was in my early teens, at which point I returned to intermittent bed-wetting until I was 29. I haven't peed myself since the 18th of February, 1992, the day I got sober. Therefore I suppose I was a bed wetter until I was almost thirty. But I did stop before I was thirty, and I think my family and the people of Scotland should take a great deal of pride in that.

Ferguson outlines his childhood in Scotland (in a grim suburban development), his school years (undistinguished) and his career as a punk-rock drummer (intermittently successful and dissolute). Then came the comedy, which took off with his inappropriate character Bing Hitler.

Although this isn't a recovery memoir, there is a lot of drinking, because he did a lot of drinking. There are wild tales interspersed with nights (or weeks) where he has nothing to tell because he'd blacked out. He manages to avoid the trap of seeing his drinking as tragically glamorous, portrays it (without nostalgia) as both disastrous and fun. He survived it -- he might not have -- but his first marriage did not.

If Ferguson appears more candid about his early failures and successes than he is about his current late show life, it may be because he's so open about his past. He's self-deprecating without being self-pitying and shows little nostalgia for what's left behind. About his present, he details some public events -- including the decision to eulogize his father on his show, a risk that endeared him to many viewers -- but he's a bit quieter about the decision to switch agents or the daily task of putting on the show. He probably shouldnt' say too much -- he's still working in Hollywood.

And he's a true Southern California immigrant. "I proudly took the Oath of Allegiance and received my citizenship," he writes, "at Pomona Fairgrounds in Los Angeles in January 2008 along with three thousand other new Americans from Mexico, and no others from Scotland."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Mark von Holden / Getty Images

Now Nabokov is recognized as a master novelist; his greatest accomplishment, "Lolita," frequently tops best-of lists. Even in the moment, it was possible to see that with "Lolita," Nabokov had written something extraordinary. It was, at least, for LA Times books editor Robert R. Kirsch, who reviewed "Lolita" on August 31, 1958. The review, in its entirety, follows.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Esthetic Bliss in Satirical Novel

In a postscript to his novel "Lolita" (Putnam, $5) Vladimir Nabokov answers the question which teachers of literature are apt to ask: What is the author's purpose? he says, "Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to write a book has no other purpose than to get rid of the book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination -- which I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining by one trick performing another."

The simplest part of the matter is that he had to write the book because it would not allow itself to remain unwritten.  Books have such a away with serious and dedicated authors, a life and almost will of their own. "Once or twice," he writes, "I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft... when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life."

Why, you may ask, does a writer feel it necessary to explain a book? There are so many novels being publish which are never explained, are in fact unexplainable. The answer lies in the publishing history of "Lolita." Nabokov, a professor of European literature at Cornell, an amateur lepidopterist and a writer of unique style and talent, offered the manuscript of "Lolita" to four American publishers, who were so shocked by it that they would not publish it. The novel deals with a middle-aged European man who has an obsessive love for nubile, pre-adolescents, whom he calls "nymphets." Very likely behind their reasoning was the haunting possibility of litigations and bans. They just didn't want to take a chance. This would have been understandable had one of them not suggested to the author that he turn Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)." Nabokov refused. the book was publishing in France in a two-volume paperback. American customs authorities, displaying unusual literary taste, allowed the book to be imported to the United States where it was promptly sold under the counter at black market prices. The matter came under discussion in the Anchor Review and other publications and ultimately Putnam's decided to publish an American edition. 

Word-of-mouth reports hinted that "Lolita" was hot stuff and the implication was that the book was a high-class "Peyton Place." Nothing could be farther from the actual fact. "Lolita" is not a lewd book and if it arouses any prurient interest in anybody, I will be very much surprised. Those who are seeing thrills would be well advised to go elsewhere to those novels which have no other purpose than the collection of sexual scenes bathed in cliched lust.

What you will find in "Lolita" are other pleasures and other sadnesses. If you like Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, if the comic novel of the 18th century appeals to you, you are in for a treat. "Lolita" is a small masterpiece, an almost perfect comic novel, a rare thing in these days when we have lost sight of the purgative and pleasurable effects of comedy and when tragedy has become the small and poverty-stricken province of southern effetes and New England housewives.

Whether intended or not, "Lolita" is savage satire on inadequacy of 'psychological realism.'

Far from celebrating perversion, this novel somehow communicates the utter hopelessness and bitterness of it. And not the least through the irony of Humbert Humbert's mixture of blindness and lucid vision about his obsession. He is an intelligent and gifted man but he is also a disabled man and his cleverness, his puns, his play on words, his ability to fly in the depths does not in the end save him.

From the foreword, bu a fictitious PhD who gratuitiously provides the rationalization (which even Samuel Richardson used) that reading about these things should make "parents, social workers and educators -- apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a better world," to the end, "the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord," the reader is bemused by that sense of esthetic bliss which great works provide. Whether intended or not, it is a savage satire on the inadequacy of "psychological realism." There is  no lack of insight in "Lolita" but it is enhanced by its relationship to all else in the world and by implication, the cosmos.

Photo: Vladimir Nabokov. Credit: International Portrait Gallery

Will Michael Mewshaw ever slow down? At age 66, Mewshaw continues to be productive as a novelist, book reviewer, travel writer, investigative journalist and tennis reporter. "Lying With the Dead," his 11th novel, has just appeared (his 19th book, "Between Terror and Tourism," will be published this winter). And yet, NPR's Alan Cheuse has called him “the best novelist in America that nobody knows.”  If that’s true, then it must be said that Mewshaw has been hiding in plain sight. In the course of a varied career, the experiences Mewshaw has had are quite unique, as he suggests: “I’ve played basketball with Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving, played tennis against Roy Emerson and spent two weeks in Rome with Sharon Stone when she starred in the film of my novel, 'Year of the Gun' -- and I never scored with any of them.” Jacket Copy talked to Mewshaw on the occasion of his new novel and its relationship to his past.

"Lying With the Dead" has the feel of a novel with deep personal meaning.  You end with an afterword connecting it to incidents from your childhood.

All my novels have personal meaning for me. But while the Dresbach murders, which directly touched my family and which I wrote about in "Life for Death" in 1980, can be seen as the genesis of "Lying With the Dead," it would be wrong to read the book as autobiography. Rather than a factual account, it’s a meditation on possibilities, a reflection on the impact of similar events on different characters.

The mother in "Lying With the Dead" seems frighteningly real. Where did she come from?

A much different place than my biological mother. The fictional Mom came from my imagination. The character in the book isn’t my mother, any more than the character of Candy is my sister. In real life, I had polio as a kid. In the novel, Candy’s life is defined by the disease. That’s how fiction works, through a process of selection and rearrangement.

Still, there are the murders from your childhood. Why go back to them?

I’ve never really gone away from them. Murder, family turmoil, confusion about names and identities run through my books -- the nonfiction as well as the fiction. Call them themes, call them obsessions. I believe the Greeks had it right: Man hands on misery to man. But he hands on other things too: forgiveness, hope, redemption.

For all the references to Greek tragedy in "Lying With the Dead," there’s a lot to suggest you’re also a Catholic novelist.

Well, I’m Catholic and I write. But the category of "Catholic novelist" has never gained traction in the U.S.  In a 40-year career I’ve never been referred to as a Catholic writer. Maybe Catholicism has simply passed into midstream America, and its beliefs and rituals have lost any stigma -- which is a good thing -- yet have also lost any great resonance ... which is a shame if true.

Your work is divided between fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism.  Did you plan it that way? Does one feed the other?

There was no plan. I published five novels and expected to continue teaching creative writing. But with "Life for Death," my first nonfiction book, I found a different way to make a living. In that sense, the nonfiction didn’t just “feed” my fiction. It fed my family. But I don’t want to leave the impression I did hackwork to pay the bills. I turned down some plum jobs that didn’t interest me. I refused to do a script for Goldcrest Films about Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II, and backed out of a $150,000 deal as a ghostwriter for a top political advisor. But then, in 2008, for an advance barely big enough to cover expenses, I traveled overland across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco to do a book. What real writer wouldn’t want to do that when there’s supposed to be a clash of civilizations?

-- Desmond O'Grady

O'Grady's books include the novel "Dinny Going Down" and a travel book about Italy's Abruzzo region, "The Sybil, the Shepherd and the Saint."

Photo: Michael Mewshaw. Credit: Sharon Wohlmuth

The independent bookstore has been a favorite of children's book authors. "It's a tough job to be a bookseller," Cornelia Funke ("Inkheart") told the L.A. Times three years ago while helping the bookstore celebrate its 11th birthday.  "For me, it's always special to do something for an owner of a store who I know has worked hard to keep their business."

This year, the celebration focuses on "Mitzi's World." Author Deborah Raffin and artist Jane Wooster Scott will both be at the store at 1:00pm on Saturday to sign books.

There will also be food, drinks, games, and activities for kids -- it is a birthday party, after all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Story time at Storyopolis. Credit: Ken Los Angeles Times

After being locked up in a Swiss vault for decades, Vladimir Nabokov's final work, "The Original of Laura," has been published by his son, Dmitri. Although Nabokov left instructions with his wife that his last novel-in-progress -- written on 138 index cards -- should be destroyed, she couldn't bring herself to follow his wishes. As she'd saved "Lolita" from a similar fate when he'd tried to burn it, her hesitation is understandable.

"The Original of Laura" doesn't look much like a novel. Nabokov's index cards are faithfully reproduced on the upper half of each page and fully transcribed in prose below. Noted book designer Chip Kidd surrounded the index cards with perforations so they can be punched out, stacked and reshuffled -- just as Nabokov used to shuffle them himself. But that still doesn't make it a book, and "the lavish packaging is more than a little disproportionate," our reviewer James Marcus writes. "As a novel -- even as the sketch of a novel, with operating instructions enclosed -- 'The Original of Laura' is largely an exercise in frustration."

The plot of "The Original of Laura" is described by the Wall Street Journal: "A flighty adventuress named Flora, the daughter of an artistic couple, becomes, as the years pass, the subject of a scandalous novel, 'My Laura.' It has been written, we are told, 'by a neurotic and hesitant man of letters' (a former lover, it is suggested). Young Flora experiences sex early, not excluding a groping encounter at age 12 with a lecher named (drum roll) Hubert H. Hubert, a paramour of Flora's own flighty mother. Years later, she marries fat, wealthy Philip Wild, another older man, with whom after three years she becomes bored—then faithless."

In our review, Marcus writes: "At once we are given to understand that Flora, with her protective carapace of contempt, is not only the heart of the work but is also herself a walking, talking, fornicating metaphor. 'Her exquisite bone structure,' we read, 'immediately slipped into a novel -- became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.' No doubt we are encountering the original of 'The Original of Laura,' who the enchanting author will now put through her metafictional paces." But Nabakov fails to follow this through in much length.

Instead, he switches focus to Flora's husband, Philip Wild, who is attempting to imagine erasing himself out of existence, in a "process of self-obliteration." In the N.Y. Times, Michiko Kakutani writes, "Most hauntingly, given the circumstances of its composition, 'Laura' explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency."

"Philip Wild's 'dying by auto-dissolution' is a clever device of a particularly Nabokovian sort, with the added heft of Nabokov's actual dying looming over it," Aleksander Hemon writes in Slate. "The editing and packaging  of 'The Original of Laura,' complete with the subtitle 'Dying Is Fun' and the obliteration list at the end, suggest a concerted effort to exploit to the hilt this possible relation to Nabokov's own disintegration: His illness and suffering are meant to enhance the weak text and fuel the industry-orchestrated drama. Otherwise, the fragments dealing with Wild's self-eradication traverse the border between plain silly and ridiculously serious -- and are, at times, sloppily prolix...."

At Bookforum (free registration required), John Banville doesn't mind. "The book is deeply interesting, not so much for what it thinks itself to be as for what we know it is: a master's final work." What does set his teeth on edge is the son's introduction. "Dmitri Nabokov's introduction is a lamentable performance, stridently defensive, slippery on particulars, and frequently repellent in tone."

But while most reviewers, including our own, think the work makes for an interesting artifact, Hemon disagrees. "It is safe to say that what is published as the novel titled 'The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun)' is not a result Nabokov desired or would welcome," he writes. " 'The Original of Laura' can't escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man's stained cravat; the lonely figurines that used to be part of a cherished set; the mismatched, overworn clothing -- all are brought out in the hope that there might appear a buyer for those sad objects, someone blinded by literary nostalgia and willing to rescue the family possessions from the waste basket."

As for estate sales, well, the Nabokov estate is having one. The blog the Literary Saloon points us to this auction at Christie's: Nabakov's 138 "Original of Laura" index cards are up for auction and are expected to sell for $400,000 to $600,000.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Vladimir Nabakov in Switzerland in 1973. Credit: R.T. Kahn