Bloodthirsty femmes: The Women of Scandinavian Crime Fiction | Nordic Bookblog

And who are these bloodthirsty Nordic ladies of the pen? As this post is for an English-speaking readership, we limit ourselves to authors translated into English. The Swedish members of this set are, for the moment, Karin Alvtegen, Kerstin Ekman, Inger Frimansson, Mari Jungstedt, Camilla Läckberg, Asa Larsson, Liza Marklund, and Helene Tursten. The Norwegians are Anne Holt and Karin Fossum, in Finland there is Tove Jansson, and in Iceland Yrsa Sigurdardottir. So it is a group numerically dominated by Swedish writers.

via Bloodthirsty femmes: The Women of Scandinavian Crime Fiction | Nordic Bookblog.

Pub Rants: Publishers Behaving Badly–Again

Several agent friends have confirmed that Macmillan sent a letter over the weekend asking authors to sign amendments that gave them electronic rights to backlist titles.

Oh Shades of Random House hegemony!

By the way, these letters went out to authors—not to the agents or agencies who represent them.

via Pub Rants: Publishers Behaving Badly–Again.

I don’t know what this email says or its wording.

No matter how they put it, there is only one proper reply: NO!

They don’t care about you. They just want to grab your rights and be able to count them as a corporate asset while you starve because you can’t exercise them.

Weekend Essay by Jonah Lehrer: How Power Affects Us – WSJ.com

This suggests that even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

via Weekend Essay by Jonah Lehrer: How Power Affects Us – WSJ.com.

Stieg Larsson And Company

Stieg Larsson

In search of Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Died Too Soon

Crime in a cold climate

New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images – Yahoo! Finance

As an example of how Wall Street getting in on this techhology, the UBS Investment Research issued its earnings preview for Wal-Mart’s  second quarter, which publicly revealed that UBS had been using used satellite services of private-sector satellite companies to gather the comings and goings of the parking lots at Wal-Mart stores.

via New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images – Yahoo! Finance.

Guest Post: The Purpose Behind Engineered Economic Collapse | zero hedge

Hired thugs, useful idiots, corrupt officials, even hyperinflation, all tiny obstacles when considering the world we could have if the Elites were finally made to face the reckoning they deserve. Americans once took on the greatest empire on Earth. We once took a feared king to task. Are a bunch of frothing corporate bankers really so daunting?

via Guest Post: The Purpose Behind Engineered Economic Collapse | zero hedge.

Who Do You Write For?

I don’t know if the name of writer Og Mandino is widely known today.

But in the late 1970s, early 1980s, you couldn’t help tripping over his little mass-market paperbacks at stores. They all shared the same design motif, evident in this cover of his first book:

The Bookstore Massacre

What once housed a bookstore, now becoming an extension to a chain pharmacy in NYC. Click = big

Get ready for the bookstore massacre

When these things happen, they happen quickly.

When I was growing up, record stores were a place you could hang out. In a really great store — one of those big city leviathans spread over several stories — you could spend the best part of a day flipping through the racks looking for hard-to-find records, obscure titles, things you’d never even heard of.

Teenagers today probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Who goes to a record store? Why don’t you just download your music onto your iPod?

As recently as 2001 there were music stores everywhere. As many as 80,000 people worked in them, according to the Labor Department. And that was a number that had been steady for years.

In 2002 the iPod took off. Today the number working in music stores is 20,000 — a 75% collapse.

As for the book industry: About 125,000 people still work in book stores and news dealers, according to Labor. How many of them will still have jobs in two years? Another 75,000 work in book publishing. When writers self-publish in electronic format, how many publishers will still be left?

I’d Change “Me” To “You”

Given his ridiculous statements over the past year (see the latest), my sentiment is opposite the one in the adult-titled music video after the break.

BBC – Archive – In Their Own Words: British Novelists – Interviews with remarkable modern writers

BBC – Archive – In Their Own Words: British Novelists – Interviews with remarkable modern writers.

Only the BBC would do something like this.  Kingsley Amis! W. Somerset Maugham! John Wyndham! Aldous Huxley! Daphne du Maurier!  And more.  Long live the BBC!