Who better to ask about the reasons for the ever-increasing popularity of crime fiction than one of the genre’s most revered practitioners? P D James and I are sitting on the sofa in the living room of her large house in Holland Park. She is bright-eyed as she offers up tea, shortbread and insights into the nature of evil.

“One wonders,” she says, “if people are getting the same satisfaction they did, because what we often get from crime fiction now is not escapism but violence. I notice that a lot of the old cosies are now being reissued.

“You look at the books that have won any major prize over the last 20 years and ask yourself how many are actually in print, how many are being actively read. Then you go into a bookshop and there’s old Agatha, rows and rows. There really is something strange about that.”

She has a crack at explaining the genre’s appeal in Talking about Detective Fiction, an idiosyncratic and entertaining primer written at the suggestion of the Bodleian Library, which is publishing the book and to which James is donating hardback royalties. It is not a comprehensive history - she does not read much contemporary crime fiction apart from books by Ian Rankin and her old friend Ruth Rendell - but an imaginative response to some of her favourite authors" More at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/books/bookreviews/6227400 /PD-James-Queen-of-Detective-Fict ion-Interview.html

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Is It Time for Vooks (Books with Video)?

Motoko Rich in the New York Times writes "In the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment. On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four "vooks" which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read and viewed online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch". More at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2 009/10/01/books/01book.html?_r=2& hp#

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The October 22 issue of the New York Review of Books has a number of articles online, including

Health Care: Can Obama Swing It?

by Elizabeth Drew

By Labor Day of 2009, not only Obama's heath care proposal, but his very effectiveness as a president were widely-if not necessarily accurately-viewed as hanging by a thread. Obama's preference for consensus, his inclination to listen to all sides but not reveal his own thinking, his innate cautiousness, and his desire to please-all these have conveyed a sense of weakness. "Est-il faible?" Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to have asked aides after meetings with Obama.

David Hockney's iPhone Passion

by Lawrence Weschler

Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago. Soon he discovered one of those newfangled iPhone applications, entitled Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen and send them out by e-mail. Over the past six months, he has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day.

http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/23176?utm_medium=email&u tm_source=Email%20marketing%20sof tware&utm_content=91953923&utm_ca mpaign=October+22%2c+2009+issue+_ +kujiyu&utm_term=DavidHockneysiPh onePassion

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Scholar Settles With Joyce Estate

LIS News reports "Following many years of legal wrangling, a Stanford scholar, Carol Loeb Shloss, settled claims against the estate of James Joyce. In the recent settlement, she received $240,000 which will cover her attorney’s fees for the years of legal maneuvering. An earlier settlement in 2007 allowed Shloss to publish online, the research and scholarship that the Joyce estate had forced her to remove in her book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. She was also allowed to include this material in a republished book in the United States. The Joyce estate is well known for challenging use of Joyce’s work, even uses that are clearly lawful. Shloss, represented by the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project, sees this settlement as a critically important development for all scholars working with estates".

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The October Literary Review Newsletter has the following reviews available at:

www.literaryreview.co.uk

Rowdy Arabia

Michael Burleigh travels to Saudi Arabia and discovers that the brutal religious police have failed to suppress heavy metal musicians and a flourishing lesbian subculture.

http://www.literary review.co.uk/burleigh_10_09.html< p>

Unpicking the Myth

Trotsky has been given an easy ride by leftists who have swallowed his own account of principled opposition to Stalin. John Gray hails a new biography that exposes this ‘inhumanly ruthless’ man.

http://www.literaryreview. co.uk/gray_10_09.html

Chin Up

Ann Boleyn was accused of adultery with five men, including her brother. Was it a stitch-up or was there some truth in the charges? Jessie Childs reopens the file on Henry VIII’s second wife.

http://www.literaryreview .co.uk/childs_10_09.html

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Will Books Be Napsterized?

The New York Times reports "YOU can buy The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com. Or you can don a pirates cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites. Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books wont stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube." More at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2 009/10/04/business/04digi.html?_r =2&ref=technology

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Australian Book Review e-news for October contains the following:

“Must I write”?: Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch

David Musgrave considers Gerald Murnane's raison d'être in the celebrated author's new self-referential novel; his first in eighteen years.

'Lifting the lid': Brenda Niall's The Riddle of Father Hackett

Morag Fraser applauds Brenda Niall's biography of Father William Hackett, the 'restless, sociable' Irish priest and node of intellectual Catholicism.

'The greedy, bleeding pen': Dorothy Porter's The Bee Hut

Gig Ryan identifies an unstoppable joie de vivre in Dorothy Porter's posthumous collection, offset by premonitory motifs of mortality and preservation.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ abr/Current/contents.htm

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Digi tizing the Grateful Dead

UC Santa Cruz has received a major grant to help digitize the Grateful Dead Archive at the University Library. The campus was awarded a National Leadership Grant of $615,175 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)--the primary source of federal funds for the nations museums and libraries, one of fifty-one such grants awarded this year. The grant will enable the UCSC Library to digitize materials from its Grateful Dead Archive and make them available in a unique and cutting-edge web site titled, The Virtual Terrapin Station. More at:

http://www.ucsc.edu/news _events/press_releases/text.asp?p id=3237

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Two million digitised pages of 19th century UK newspapers go online

"For the first time ever, genealogists, researchers and academics, regardless of their location are now able to explore over two million pages of newspaper from 49 national and regional UK titles. Developed by the British Library, in partnership with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Gale, part of Cengage Learning, the 19th century British Library Newspapers website is available at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/.

Now family historians, authors, journalists and expats can research some of the big talking points of the 19th century including: the Irish Famine and emigration; Boer War; Great Australian gold rush; Californian Railway expansion; Franco-Prussian War and Indian Railway expansion. With enhanced search capabilities and new imaging techniques, serious and amateur researchers now have access to vivid newspaper reports previously only available via hard copy in Reading Rooms.

Users will be able to read first-hand factual reporting of the Siege of Paris in The Graphic and details of the British ruling class in India in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News. Researchers can also access reports directly at their desktops on the first FA Cup final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers at the Kennington Oval in 1872 or the first England-Australia Test match in 1877. Some of the most famous authors of the 19th century are also represented, including Dickens and Thackeray.

Simon Fowler, Editor, Ancestors Magazine, said: “This new service really does open up a major new resource for family historians. Realistically for the first time it is possible to use newspapers to complement other records to build up a rounder portrait of our ancestors, with information that would not be possible to obtain elsewhere.”

The collection focuses on national newspapers such as the Daily News, English regional papers, for example the Manchester Times, home country newspapers from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Ireland, weekly titles such as Penny Illustrated Paper and The Graphic and specialist titles that covered Victorian radicalism and Chartism such as Charter.

Searches of the site are free and downloads of full-text articles are available by purchasing either a 24-hour or seven-day pass. Users can buy a 24-hour pass (up to 100 downloads) for £6.99 or a seven-day pass (up to 200 downloads) for £9.99. Access to The Graphic and The Penny Illustrated Paper is free."

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Odd Book Title of the Week

Wet Scrubbers. C. Schifftner and Howard E. Hesketh. John Wiley. 1986

Debbie Campbell from the National Library of Australia reports that at least three editions are in Australian libraries:

(1986) http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an4473 818 - at 2 libraries

(1983) http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an2855 264 - at 3 libraries

(1996) http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an1235 2778 - at 6 libraries

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