Melville House says:

Although numerous independent booksellers, over the last few weeks, have individually announced they would ban books published by Amazon from their stores, late yesterday the trade organization representing most of the indies in the U.S. as well as many in Canada made it official: The American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced it would be joining competitors Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Chapters Indigo in boycotting Amazon’s books.

This means it's virtually impossible to buy any of Amazon's print books in any brick-and-mortar bookstore in the United States. That's an impressive blockade. While Amazon is by far the biggest bookseller in the United States, it does mean that there's a significant chunk of the book-buying public that doesn't have access to their titles.

The premise of Matt Ruff's new novel probably could have gotten him arrested back in the panicked, paranoid days of 2002. The Mirage (Harper, $25.99) imagines a world where the dominant power is the United Arab States. After Christian fundamentalists topple the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad on 11/9/2001, troops from the UAS flood into the fractured nations of North America to find weapons of mass destruction that may or may not exist. The invasion is highly controversial, and by 2009, the UAS is torn between citizens who support isolationism and more hawkish forces—including beloved Senator Osama bin Laden—who want to see Christianity utterly destroyed. At the same time, Muslims are becoming more lax in their worship and social mores (many people don't even stop their busy workdays to respond to the five calls to prayer that sound around the city), and angry fundamentalists complain that the UAS's necessary religious roots are withering away.

Ruff, a local writer, embraces this twisty concept with an attention to detail that suggests many months, more likely years, of fervent research. He imagines the life of a federal agent named Mustafa al Baghdadi, who, in the patriotic days after 11/9, shifts his focus from arresting smugglers of illegal alcohol to the more serious field of Arab Homeland Security. Al Baghdadi uncovers a plot that stretches from the highest powers in the UAS all the way down to the scuzziest crime lord in Baghdad—a small-time loser with airs of grandeur named Saddam Hussein. Along the way, al Baghdadi discovers artifacts (mostly paper items, including the front page of a nonexistent newspaper called the New York Times announcing the destruction of a twinned pair of nonexistent skyscrapers in New York City) that suggest there is another world out there where the script has been flipped...

(Keep reading.)

I just wish Hyman told this story with a little more skill. As a narrative, Borrow is weighted down with clunky language and a broken structure. We hear the same pieces of information again and again, each time framed as though we were hearing it for the first time. Certain explanations aren't clear enough for readers—like myself—who have a hard time understanding complicated financial matters. As a concept for a book, it's great. As a piece of writing, it's unfortunate.

If you're interested in the concept of debt as a player in the history of humanity, I'd like to again turn your attention to David Graeber's book Debt, which Charles Mudede writes about in this week's books lead. It's wider in scope than Borrow, and a lot more forceful in its opinions. And it's a better piece of writing, besides. Something that publishers of non-fiction need to remember is that the quality of language in a piece matters; Borrow feels like a lashed-together raft of ideas, and Hyman's perspective suffers because of that. Debt has been crafted as an argument and as a piece of writing, and that's why it's the book we'll be discussing ten years from now.

At every income level and in both major political parties, majorities embrace conservative egalitarianism—a philosophy that prizes individualism and self-reliance as well as public intervention to help Americans pursue these ideals on a level playing field. Drawing on hundreds of opinion studies spanning more than seventy years, including a new comprehensive survey, Page and Jacobs reveal that this worldview translates to broad support for policies aimed at narrowing the gap between rich and poor and creating genuine opportunity for all. They find, for example, that across economic, geographical, and ideological lines, most Americans support higher minimum wages, improved public education, wider access to universal health insurance coverage, and the use of tax dollars to fund these programs.

Looks to be super-timely, even though it was published in 2009 and written before the economic collapse. And did I mention it's free? Because it's free. Go get it.

Galleycat says:

Referencing Barry Lynn‘s piece in Harper’s this week called “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets,” the Author’s Guild explained: “Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on ‘Chicago School’ theories of efficiency and consumer welfare.”

Framing the rise of Amazon as a failure of government is a new one on me. The Guild goes on to claim that while Amazon is great for already established authors, it does a great disservice to new authors, announcing that "Literary diversity is at risk.” This is a very interesting charge, and one that could be easily proven (or disproven) as we move into the second decade of Amazon's dominance over the publishing industry.

Please help them.

Ben Marcus's fiction has always felt vaguely sinister. It looks and reads like English, but you can't get very far into it before a bizarre word choice flashes from out of nowhere and sideswipes you. Then everything starts crawling: Sentences slither sideways, and a strange cadence unlike the usual galloping rhythm of most prose develops; it's like an extra hoof is somewhere under there, adding an unsettling extra metronomic beat that you can never quite identify or get used to.

Marcus's new novel, The Flame Alphabet, is the story of what happens when language transforms into an epidemic. Words are making people sick. But not all words—adults only develop painful, flulike symptoms and start slipping toward death when they hear children speaking. Marcus's perverted grammar, written in his deliberate, loping voice, makes you wonder, in some superstitious corner of your brain, if his alien prose can infect your body on a microscopic level, change you fundamentally from what you were before, somehow weaken you. While reading, you become infected by a quiet inner monologue of concern for your own health....

(Keep reading.)

2. But The Odds is far from the only love story in town tonight. Third Place Books is hosting John Green tonight, too. Green is an obscenely popular young adult novelist who the internet absolutely adores. The Fault in Our Stars is his newest book. It's about a love affair between two young people, one of whom has thyroid cancer. Many critical reviews of the book include embarrassed accounts of the critics breaking down in tears. So be warned.

3. Find everything else going on tonight in our readings calendar.

If you have no weekend plans, may I suggest retyping the entirety of Moby Dick onto five or so rolls of toilet paper? Or, if you don't have a weekend to spare, you can just buy someone else's toilet-paper Moby Dick for two hundred bucks.

2. It's almost a shame that Marcus is reading in town tonight, because tonight is also Cheap Wine and Poetry at the Hugo House. Wine costs a dollar a glass, and the authors tonight are Greg Bem, Amber Flame, Peter Pereira and Martha Silano. That's a very good lineup. If for some reason you don't want to go see Ben Marcus—and you should want to go see Ben Marcus—CW&P is a great fallback event.

3. We have a whole calendar of events for you!

This Businessweek story does a very good job of explaining what's been happening behind the scenes in the relationship between Amazon.com and the publishing industry:

For years the marriage between Amazon.com and the big New York-based publishers was mostly a happy one. Amazon was expanding the overall market for books and giving publishers a new way to connect with readers...Back then, Bezos was cultivating friendly relations with publishers and trying to make his e-commerce company profitable. In 1999, when Businessweek asked him whether he would ever move from the business of selling books into the business of making them, Bezos demurred: “We’re really, really good at exactly one thing, which is helping customers discover things that they might want to buy online. And that’s enough.”

The rifts opened eight years later, during Amazon’s development of the Kindle e-reader. Representatives of Amazon streamed through the offices of New York publishers, urging them to accelerate the pace of digitizing their catalogs ahead of the device’s big launch. The book houses cooperated and even obediently kept the successive Kindle prototypes that Amazon showed them a secret from the outside world. Then Bezos got on stage at the W New York hotel in Union Square in November 2007, and as part of the unveiling of the Kindle, proclaimed that he would sell New York Times bestsellers for $9.99.

Publishers were shocked...

You really should read the whole thing.

Slog tipper Ryan points out this website, which challenges people, National Novel Writing Month-style, to write a letter for every day in February:

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.

Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 24 items. Why 24? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 24 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month. You might enjoy going to the mail box again.

I love writing letters. I don't do it as much as I would like—I owe letters to two good friends at the moment—but it's a fine way to get perspective on what's going on in your life, and an even better way to gain a deeper understanding of your friends. And coming home to something personal in the mailbox is one of the great pleasures. I think this is a great idea.

Last year, I told you about World Book Night, in which people gave away free books to promote reading and bookstores all across Great Britain. I ended the post by asking, "Why don't we make World Book Night an actual global event next year?"

Good news: The first American World Book Night is scheduled for April 23rd. Participants will get 20 copies from a long list of very good general-interest books to hand out to light or non-readers. (One of the books is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, by Stranger Genius Sherman Alexie.) You can register to be a giver-away of free books right here.

I think this is a great idea, along the lines of Free Comic Book Day, which has been a huge success for many comic book stores around the country. Some of these books are guaranteed to get the attention of people who haven't read a book in years—A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Stand, Kindred, The Namesake. If you can think of a good way to get these books into people's hands, you should register today.

Businessweek says:

Amazon.com Inc. delved deeper into the publishing business with a new agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, letting the New York company distribute titles from Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group.

The books, including works from authors such as Deepak Chopra and James Franco, will debut later this year, the companies said today in a statement.

This is a big deal, because a lot of bookstores simply won't order books from Amazon.com, but just about every bookstore already works with Houghton Mifflin, which is one of the austere, old-school publishers. It's a sign that Amazon.com doesn't foresee the end of the bookstore market anytime soon. I suspect a lot of bookstores will still refuse to carry Amazon's books, but this deal makes it harder for them to ignore the books and easier for them to order the titles if their customers want them. It's a smart deal for Amazon.