BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis was one of the 500-plus bloggers, journalists, and media elite crowd, that included Gawker’s Nick Denton and the New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger. Jeff told us that Rafat’s PaidContent is the posterchild for the future of journalism - which he states that “small is the new big.”

Darn! We tried to tape the evening’s presentation, a dialogue between Rafat and Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. but didn’t take the time to get a proper sound feed for our video camera. But we were pleased to find this post by Donna Bogatin summarizing

From the video intro: You may have heard them before! You can’t make money from books, you have to be an expert in order to write a book and it is too hard to get published. Discover why all these ideas are absolute rubbish! The truth is you can make lots of money from books, you definitely don’t need to be an expert and it is easy to get published if you learn the tricks of the trade.

The Digital Marketing Team at Macmillan is here to explain and enlighten. In the words of James Joyce, “Books are hard to make. People should buy more of them.”

Joyce Carol Oates talks about “The Gravedigger’s Daughter.”

A family desperate to escape Nazi Germany settles in upstate New York, where the father is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger an cemetery caretaker. What follows is a tale of unspeakable tragedy, as the gravedigger’s daughter begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of ingenious self-invention and bittersweet triumph - Book Passage

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author and the Roger S. Berlind ‘52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978.

She serves as associate editor for the Ontario Review, a literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book publisher, both of which are edited by her husband, Raymond J. Smith.

Oates has also written under the pseudonyms “Rosamond Smith” and “Lauren Kelly.”

To the extent that writing always includes pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic elements, it is not identical with itself. Writing, then, is always impure and, as such, challenges the notion of identity, and ultimately the notion of the origin as ’simple’. It is neither entirely present nor absent, but is the trace resulting from its own erasure in the drive towards transparency.

Writing is neither essential nor phenomenal, it is not what is produced but what allows for the possibility of production. In meditations on themes from literature, art and psychoanalysis, as well as from the history of philosophy, part of Derrida’s strategy is to make visible the ‘impurity’ of writing (and any identity), often by deploying rhetorical, graphic, and poetic strategies at once. Blurring boundaries between disciplines in his texts, such as in Glas (1974) or The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), Derrida shows the inseparable nature between the poetic and/or rhetorical, signifying element of a text, and the content or meaning, the signified element of the text.

Read more of this bio European Graduate School

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years) and The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction—Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.

n among this languid glitter, the book does not develop arguments as such; characters are rather occasionally prone to a rush of epigram and aphorism. The whole, though, is the latest instalment in Rushdie’s lifelong manifesto for the transformative power of narrative, for the storyteller as the conductor of all the world’s chaos. (In this sense, once again, Rushdie emerges as the hero of his own fiction, the man who can shape and shift like no other.)

Critic’s comments:

He has always created the sense of the novelist as plate-spinner: keeping an unlikely number of tales in the air, darting among them to give each one further momentum just as it starts to wobble. The Enchantress of Florence is a virtuoso demonstration of this energetic art; among other things, it challenges you to pay attention, half-believing it could all fall around his ears at any moment, marvelling that it never quite does. …

Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 20 April 2008

From the very beginning of his new novel, “The Enchantress of Florence,” Salman Rushdie plunges us into a world of marvels: “In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. … Perhaps (the traveler surmised) the fountain of eternal youth lay within the city walls — perhaps even the legendary doorway to Paradise on Earth was somewhere close at hand? But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water’s surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight.” And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous. But if I can upset myself over the plight of a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning as a bug, why did this ingenious and ambitious novel — no less than a defense of the human imagination — leave me unmoved? ….

David Gates
NY Times, Published: June 8, 2008