Nobel prizewinning poet Czeslaw Milosz died this weekend. Obituary in the NYT, no doubt also elsewhere.

I've just picked up Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. So far, am very sucked in. Has this one been discussed before? Does this one crop up on people's favorites when discussing Atwood?

Wizard News reports that there is an excerpt from HP+theHBP on the JK Rowling website.

I have to admit, I'm a big fan of titles from Red Dress Ink (or something like that.. owned by Harlequin). But there's a NYT piece on how newer chicklit is causing a decline in more traditional romances.

That's a weird choice of emphasis. Harlequin does not equal the entire field of romance. Harlequin is the most formulaic publisher, the one everybody sneers at, the one that lurches from cowboys to vampires to unexpected babies to SEALs depending on market trends. (Good writers have written Harlequins, just as good writers have written everything from porn to How to Fix Your Car.)

Saying that Harlequin's sales as a whole are down does not say much about the industry. It'd be like saying that people are eating less because McDonalds' sales are slumping.

[Ah.

The real growth in romance is in a sector in which Harlequin is less strong, referred to as the single-title business. Those books typically sell heavily in hardcover as well as paperback. Because they are not part of a series, sales of single titles depend more on the author's name than on the publisher's.

Bingo.]

From a Publishers Weekly article about how booksellers were affected by Charley:

"We couldn't come out of the house on Friday; it was like a holocaust," said Beverly Scudder, a bookseller at Cypress Paperback Exchange in Ft. Meyers. "We locked ourselves in our bathroom and prayed." But by Saturday, Scudder was able to make her way to the store, where the only damage was some wet carpeting that dried quickly in the Florida heat. On Monday, with power in the store restored, Scudder was back at work. "Someone might need a book," she said. "People don't have electricity. They don't have phone service. They don't have air conditioning. But readers of America with continue to read books, as long as they have a candle to read by."

Harlequin does not equal the entire field of romance

Yep. But I was also intrigued because most of the stuff that falls in the chicklit domain seems to me... well... it's a romance. Granted, they don't always end with the girl getting the guy. But they are still romances.

I think romance is one of those labels like science fiction -- many writers prefer to avoid it. See Doris Lessing, for one.

I can understand that. But chicklit is better than romance? doubtful as it's possibly even more dismissive.

Chiming in late to say, I remember characters like Aunt Pitty having the vapors in Gone With The Wind, and taking this to mean silliness, hysteria, and shortness of breath from tight corseting.

Hearing that the Potterverse will include more of Aunt Petunia's story has rekindled my desire for her to tell Vernon to shut the hell up.