You had to see this one coming

From io9 ---

Amazon Secretly Removes "1984" From the Kindle
By Annalee Newitz


Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.

In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing digital records of what has happened. Amazon's action flies in the face of what people expect when they purchase a book. Under the "right of first sale" in the U.S., people can do whatever they like with a book after purchasing it, including giving it to a friend or reselling it. There is no option for a bookseller to take that book back once it's sold.

Apparently, until last week, Amazon claimed it wouldn't take back purchased books either: The New York Times' Brad Stone reports:

Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a "permanent copy of the applicable digital content."
But this isn't the first time there has been a problem with secret deletings. Stone adds:
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.

Now that the public is up in arms over the Kindle deletions, Amazon is once again promising good behavior. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told reporters:

We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.

That "in these circumstances" bit doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Sounds like books will be removed again under other (undefined) circumstances.

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

I'm afraid my little reading project is not working out exactly as I'd hoped. I wanted to push myself to read more, to catch up on some of the books people have recommended, but I've gotten hung up on this one, which took much longer than I'd expected. I think I saw Hemon read once at Prairie Lights, and I must have enjoyed it quite a lot because I was inspired to buy whatever of his I could find. True to form, though, those books have remained unread on the unread-books shelf in my living room, and it wasn't until The Lazarus Project that I managed to motivate myself to finally read something he'd written. And I'm not sorry that I did, exactly--his writing is terrific, and there are some really vivid moments (and good jokes), but ultimately I'm starting to wonder if I'm just in too critical a frame of mind to enjoy anything right now, because I just couldn't get into this one. The premise is that a Bosnian expat in America decides to write a book about a murdered Jewish immigrant in early 20th century Chicago and travels back to Sarajevo for research. The present-day story is written in the past tense, with references back to the murder storyline written in the present tense, and presumably there are all sorts of connections between the two storylines that I couldn't begin to fathom. I'm hoping one of you might have read and liked it and can fill me in on what I'm so obviously missing.

Also reading and not particularly enjoying: Penelope Lively's The Blue Flower, given to me by the same friend who introduced me to Perdido Street Station and Little, Big, both excellent, so perhaps I can be forgiven not understanding the hype over this one, though it could just be my general distaste for historical fiction; Zoe Heller's The Believers, filled with some intensely unlikeable characters, something that somehow worked in The Corrections but doesn't fly all that well otherwise (though, to be fair, I did like What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), even though the narrator in that one was clearly batshit crazy).

Next up: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has been so universally praised that I'm hoping it will jar me out of this streak of negativity. Onward!

That Old Chestnut

James Wolcott considers a world without books.

Now that I have an ipod touch, I find that I read on it all the time and with much greater ease than I do on an actual computer. Using Instapaper, I read more fiction-- and longer articles--from the internet than I ever did without it. The urge to skim is gone. I don't feel my attention being pulled to another browser tab. The fundamental difference is both unexpected and physical. It doesn't seem to be a matter of screen size so much as my ability to hold the device in my hand and twist and turn with it like it is an actual book. The architecture of the ipod itself helps too, the way it eschews multitasking. You can do a lot with this little guy but you can't do it all at once. Really, that's what I love about it.

Are readers the petty snobs Wolcott suggests we are? Probably yes and no, but I'm glad to see the e/book debate moving away from stark grandiosity and into the tangible and banal. That's ultimately where it will reside for each reader, isn't it? Once the novelty and fear of e-books have worn off these decisions won't be so freighted and we'll all make them in private moments for reasons under no obligation to be articulated--or even articulable. As a prognosticator and a librarian, my sense is that this will make for a messy and uneven reality of practice, in which both technologies more or less coexist without incident or even much heady symbolism. But what do I know? They say people always overestimate the impact of a technology in its early period and underestimate it by the time it has managed full adoption.

ps-hey, guess what? A and I just moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where, as of next week, I'll be the English librarian at a university here. Seems like a good town. People sit on their front porches and the pizza is surprisingly good. Come visit when you can.

Great detailed analysis of Sarah Palin's modus operandi

If you, like me, find yourself inexplicably fascinated by this character whenever she struts onto the national stage, you may have been wondering WHYYYY??? Why in God's name do I pay attention to what she says, does, thinks? According to this careful reading of her methods and presentation, it's because she is a kind of intuitive cultural genius. (h/t to Alex Chee)

Cheeni reading tonight in the IC

Cheeni Rao, whom many of you may remember as your relentless softball coach, will be reading from his highly praised down-and-out drug enlightenment memoir In Hanuman's Hands tonight at 7 p.m. CST, Prairie Lights. It will also be streamed live on the World Wide Interwebs (check out that site for more upcoming readings).

Google book settlement

Published a book? You need to read this Web site, because if you do nothing you will be opted into the Google Book Settlement. Which may not be a bad thing. Or which may be.

Remainder, by Tom McCarthy

Mission accomplished, deadline achieved. The draft's a disaster, but hey, it's a disaster with an ending, so at least there's something to revise, right? And since I'm not going to be a 16-year-old wunderkind (thanks for that one, Grendel), I'll just shoot for Ben Fountain status, which means I've got some time.

In the meantime, I have some reading to do. I was pretty excited about Remainder because I have one friend who loves it and is bff with the author (who's a bit of an odd duck, from what I can tell), and another friend who loathed it with every tasty oatbran fiber of her being. Exciting! Plus there's Zadie Smith's article on the two paths for the novel, one of which (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland) I wasn't crazy about, which begs the question of whether I'd have any interest in the other path. Add to that the extremely mixed reactions over at the Tournament of Books, which I always enjoy, and you've got to figure you're in for something unusual.

And it turns out "unusual" works pretty well as a descriptor here. This is definitely not a Workshop-friendly type of read--the characters are made out of the thinnest cardboard, with the main character nameless and the only other real person of interest described only in terms of the whirring of the gears in his brain. Our narrator has been struck down by some sort of airborne technological detritus, which has left him unable to remember how to do even the most basic things, but which has also left him with a giant cash settlement as long as he never tells anyone what happened. Not a hard deal to accept given that he can't remember anything in the first place. After a misleading blip where he seems to be trying to use the money for good (charity) or evil (hookers and blow), he settles on using it to recreate settings that interest him--first an apartment building filled with residents who do things like practice piano and cook liver, and then the scenes of accidents that happened nearby.

If this all sounds a bit plot-free, rest assured, it mostly is. It's also quite readable, which I wasn't really expecting but which was a pleasant surprise. With that said, though, while I enjoy a novel of ideas as much as the next girl, I'm not quite convinced that the ideas we're dealing with here elevated the book enough to make up for the fact that it's basically impossible to get invested in the characters (and thus the situation). And if you're someone who reads for the pleasure of getting to know the people in the book, you're probably going to want to throw the book at the wall. I look forward to hearing if anyone actually did.

16-year-old sells novel she wrote when she was 13

Read it and weep, bitches.

UPDATE: Vantage Press turns out to be a Vanity publisher, as pointed out by Gun in a comment. So she didn't sell her novel at all -- she bought it.

Oh snap

Warning--Impending Usurpation of Blog for Selfish Purposes

I'm finding myself a bit motivationally challenged of late, having blown through an arbitrarily-set May 31 deadline for finishing a draft of this stupid book I'm working on (props to E. McCracken for noting, years ago, that the terminology for one's first novel is anything but "novel" [i.e., "project," "giant thingy," etc.] but that the second is always "stupid f*%&ing novel"). I also haven't been reading much of note--lots of crappy mysteries, but I'm feeling behind in terms of the good stuff. That's where the usurpation of the blog comes in--I have a plan that perhaps you'll be able to help me with. I'm making the second arbitrary deadline of the end of June a firm one, and after that I'm going to start catching up on my reading. I'm designating the month of July read-all-the-crap-people-keep-telling-me-about month, and I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I think, with the goal of eliciting similar comments from you guys because, frankly, I miss talking about this stuff with all of you. Or at least those of you whose user names I can remember.

And here, just to give a sense of the plan, I'll start early. I just finished Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which I found very readable and intelligent but somewhat unsatisfying. It's about a man who believes, upon his wife's return home one day, that she's actually been replaced by a simulacrum of herself. Though the phrase "Capgras syndrome" is never mentioned, anyone who's read Richard Powers's The Echo Maker will likely call it to mind. Given that the main character is a psychiatrist (and therefore a medical doctor), the missing term looms a bit too large for my taste, though I'd be curious to hear what others think, if anyone's read it. (And I do recommend the Powers--really enjoyed it.)

More Paul Ingram

By popular demand -- and because it's just so awesome when Paul talks about books.

Random cool music video

White Winter Hymnal from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

So You Can Read It in the Bathroom

Remember wondering, at the announcement of its publication, how they would stretch DFW's commencement address at Kenyon to book-length? Well, the solution is one aphoristically-presented sentence per page.

Summer Reading with Paul Ingram

SF Chronicle interview with Ethan

is here, in advance of the Litquake festival.

Marilynne Robinsom wins Orange Prize

Another feather in her illustrious cap.

NYer article on writing programs

In case you hadn't seen this...

Practically Perfect

Count me among Alice Munro's admirers. But I've got a question: what is it about this woman's fiction that continually elicits descriptions of perfection? I'm looking for a nitty-gritty discussion of craft here.

Perfection implies fidelity to a pre-existing template. Formalism. I think with Munro the template is one largely of her own invention or, at least, stylization. It's hers, but we can recognize it from a mile away. Sometimes, also, "perfect" describes a nakedness of technical prowess, perhaps even of such impressive proportions that it eclipses emotional response. We admire perfection, but do we love it? In neither way is "perfect" a word that makes me want to read something (maybe a rhetorical text, but not a fiction.)

What does perfect mean when we're discussing Munro? Because I guess I can admit that I don't have as much love as I have admiration for this writer. Of the later, I have copious amounts. I don't want to understate that and thus invite misunderstanding. I think she's one of a kind, and she deserves all the laurels she gets. But I read her dutifully and without craving. Of course it's never very long before I'm engrossed and wondering why I don't read more Munro. But it never quite hits me where I live. As they say.

Should perfection be something fiction aspires to?

Does perfect fiction suggest one of those problematic but often fruitful conflations of a subjective model for a universal one? There's no subjectivity like the one so passionately experienced, so eager to be manifest for others, as the one that believes it is universal.

The "Bechoosing": EU elections

We received in the mail, like everyone in Europe, our "Candidate List for the Leaders of the European Parliament," for the election (the "bechoosing" -- love that) on June 4. There's not much excitement about this that I can see. I've seen two political signs in Haarlem so far. I'll translate the names of the Dutch parties vying to represent the Netherlands -- bearing in mind the admonition at the top: "The head of the household is requested to give this list to the other household members for reading."

But whom should we vote for?

1. European People's Party (aligned with no. 6)
2. European Social Democrats (aligned with no. 4)
3. European Liberal Democrats (aligned with no. 7)
4. Green Left
5. Socialist Party
6. Christian Union
7. Democratic 66
8. Newropeans
9. Europe Affordable and Durable
10. Solidarity
11. Party for the Animals
12. European Whistleblowers Party (literally: "Loud Bell Clapping")
13. The Greens
14. Party For Freedom
15. Liberal Democratic Party
16. Party for European Politics
17. Liberty

Instructions include:

* Valid ID required
* Your ballot, which is coming in the mail, will contain your voting location. If you prefer to vote somewhere else in the city, you can do that.
* Voting is between 7:30 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Cristina Henriquez interview: The World in Half

Illustrious classmate Cristina Henriquez, author of Come Together, Fall Apart, has published her first novel, The World in Half, to rave reviews from readers and critics alike. We'll spare you the enviable blurbage and get straight to the interview. Cristina was kind enough to talk to us once again to us about the book and her writing process.

Can you give us some background on how the novel got started and how long you worked on it?

It started with a very vague idea to write something about the Panama Canal. It's probably the most salient association many people have with Panama, and I was interested in telling the story of it from a perspective that's underrepresented in most historical accounts of its construction -- that of the West Indian laborers who were brought in by the boatloads to do the dangerous and messy work of building the thing and of the Panamanians whose country it irrevocably changed and has consequently defined.

So I started down that path and had written about 300 pages when it was brought to my attention (by my editor) that perhaps there was a better way to tell the story. I was writing in third-person, with a huge cast of characters, and she thought that maybe one of those characters -- Mira -- should tell the story. As heartbroken as I was to have to throw out 300 pages of work, I suspected maybe my editor was right. I'd always had the feeling the something was off in the first version. So I told my editor I'd give it 50 pages and see if having Mira as the narrator felt any better. Of course, as soon as I shifted the point of view, the entire story changed. Some of the stuff about the canal is still in the book, but it became Mira's story, which soon enveloped me in its own way.

From that first failed start until the end, I was working on the book for
about four years.

How was writing a novel different from writing stories?

The main challenge for me was this idea that I could never see the novel as a whole. I couldn't wrap my head around something so large and unwieldy. With stories, I have a fairly strong handle on what it is by the time I finish a first draft, but that was never the case as I worked on the novel. I¹m always aiming for a finished piece that feels spherical, and I rely a lot on that sense of shape to tell me whether something is done and whether its successful. Because I never felt like I could see the whole of the novel all at once, I never felt like I could accurately ascertain the shape of it. I had to rely much more on outside readers to tell me whether it all made sense from beginning to end because I just lost sight of it at some point.

It's kind of hard to talk about your book without spoilers, but your protagonist goes to Panama looking for her father and finds something -- a few things -- other than what she was expecting. How did you decide what would happen -- I mean, did you know the whole time, or did the solution emerge somehow more or less on its own?

The solutions emerged as I wrote. Generally speaking, I'm a very practical writer. I don't subscribe to the idea of Writing As Mystical Experience. But at the risk of sounding hokey, I do often find that the story leads me more than I lead the story. Characters say things I didn't expect them to say, they change the course of the action, they respond to a question and something in their response suggests a whole character trait that then, as the author, I want to track down and come up with back story for and everything spins outward and outward. For me, that's how I HAVE to write. The less I know in advance, the better the writing, the more natural the plot. So I tried -- I always try -- to know as little as I could when I sat down each day. Or even when I thought I knew which direction I was headed, to be willing to deviate from the plan. That's more or less how I operated throughout. Naturally, because it was a novel, I had to work ahead a least a little bit, but for the first draft I tried just to follow the story for the most part and to deal with the sense-making/fine-tuning/does-everything-match-up stuff in revision.

The character of Danilo felt especially real to me. Did you make him up whole cloth, or is he based on someone you met, or did certain Panamanians or national characteristics coalesce into him, or...?

I saw a photo years and years ago of a boy whose expression had always intrigued me. I mean, I just saw it randomly on a website or something. But I saved it as inspiration for a character one day. So I think, physically at least, I had that boy in mind when I was writing Danilo. But otherwise, he's entirely invented.

Your father's family lives in Panama. How often do you visit and do you speak Spanish down there?

I visit every year on average. The last time I was there was in February. I speak Spanish when I have to (meaning, when I'm not near anyone who can translate for me) and I can make myself understood. But I'm SO self-conscious about my Spanish and so crippled by the expectation that I SHOULD be able to speak it, that I tend to withdraw and not practice it as much as I could while I'm there.

Your book strikes me as essentially about communication -- what it conveys, how the simple presence of information changes people, what is lost when it is blocked or hidden. This theme occurs both in the uncovered secret that ends up changing Mira's life, but also in the opposite way with her mother, whose Alzheimer's is systematically stripping her of information. Did you consciously set that up -- that Mira's mother, who hid information from Mira, would be herself "punished" by a disease that does the same thing to her?

I would love to say I set it up that way from the start. That would make me seem very clever. But no, it was more a case of having those two elements in the book and then seeing much later how they related to each other and deepened the themes of the book. I had a teacher once who said that the goal of writing was to bring the unconscious to consciousness. And that's exactly how it works much of the time. I'm just writing, writing, writing and I don't necessarily know on first glance why I'm throwing in the things I am. It's not until I step back and look at it that I can start to suss out the ways my unconscious was doing work for me -- in magical, amazing ways that my conscious mind probably never could -- and then I can start drawing all of that to the surface and making connections more explicit and shaping the narrative in response to what's already there.

You've said you looked at your Panamanian stories and your American stories and realized your Panamanian ones were better. Better in what way, and why do you think that was so?

I've been thinking and thinking about this question, and I'm still not sure about the answer. I think I just found that the stories set in Panama were truer in some way. To break that down even further, I think they were more personal. I was writing about something closer to my heart than than anything I had written before, and that showed. I also think that a lot of the "American" fiction I was writing was terribly derivative. I was trying to imitate the writers I loved -- George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme -- even though each of them is of course inimitable. But when I started writing the Panama stories, that felt like untreaded terrain. Those stories were mine. I stopped imitating and just wrote.

You recently complete a book tour. How was it? Where did you go? Did you get a good reception? What's happening out there in the world of readers?

I started off in Little Rock at the Arkansas Literary Festival, where I met some great authors (including Kevin Brockmeier -- Iowa represent!) and had a lot of fun. Then I was off to Seattle for two readings, then to Austin, Houston, New York City, and finally I did a reading in Dallas. I love to tour because friends I haven't seen in ages come out and say hello, and also because it reminds me how many people out there are honestly interested in reading. People get very excited to have a book signed or to ask questions about characters they've fallen in love with, and that's so, so heartening to see.

Are you using social media to promote your work? What are you doing in that arena and how is it working for you?

I'm on Facebook (become my fan!) and Goodreads. Facebook in particular has been great for spreading the word. Book sales are largely generated by word-of-mouth, and buzz has the potential to spread quickly online. It seems to be very useful in getting people out to events, too, which is great. And, you know, beyond that it gives me an easy way to bug everybody from time to time about what I'm up to writing-wise or to remind them that they should buy my book for their entire family at Christmas.

How is Ryan? How is Sofia? How is Chicago?

Great, great, and finally warm -- hooray!

What's next? I've heard you're already working on another novel. Have you put short story writing on the back burner?

I am working on something that feels novel-ish, but it's so early that it's entirely possible it will fall apart. I've been working on stories, too. I've written two in the past few months and for me, there's just nothing like it. I adore short stories. I will never give them up entirely. But longer work seems to have wormed its way into my system as well.

See the previous Earth Goat interview with Cristina.