Smatterings

Lee Child talks up his business side of writing to the London Times.

Marilyn Stasio takes a genre-centric approach to THE SILVER SWAN, and Mark Sarvas takes issue with Stasio as a result. Me, I guess I fall somewhere in between.

Mystery Ink announces the winners of the 2008 Gumshoe Awards.

Bryan Appleyard’s interview of Nicholson Baker is wonderfully bizarre.

PW’s Peter Cannon does his best to explain how he categorizes mysteries, thrillers and fiction.

Jessa Crispin took the outsider approach in reporting on the London Book Fair.

The Nat Sobel interview in Poets & Writers is certainly catnip for the unpublished writer, but the skeptic in me feels like pointing out that this is one agent’s opinion; any other, based on experience and current savvy, could be (and should be) wholly different.

Also, one of Sobel’s points was about the travails of being a young literary male author in these turbulent climes. Scott Timberg’s piece may not prove him wrong, but it’s certainly an antidote….

The Harwich Oracle profiles Cape Cod writer Peter Abrahams.

Nigel Beale chats with Canada’s sine qua non of legal thrillers, William Deverell.

So Colson Whitehead, Margaret Seltzer and Sidd Finch hang out at the Chateau Marmont. Which part of the above sentence is true?

Also at NYMag, last week I teased out the secret publishing gossip subplot of Megan Hustad’s rather delightful survey of self-help books, and several first novels make the grade.

Woe to be in contracts at Penguin/Putnam and have to sort out the Cassie Edwards situation, now ended under the moniker of “irreconcilable editorial differences.”

Authors and students duke it out for space at the British Library, recently opened up to the public.

And finally, Japan has run out of butter. Seriously. Can we say “Great Depression II” boys and girls?