Book Marks: A Million Pinches of Salt, Self-Writing Satire

Since its publication and release of its film adaptation, Raynor Winn's memoir The Salt Path, which I previusly mentioned here, gained a fair bit of attention. The story of a middle-aged couple made homeless and embarking on a walking journey in the countryside after one of them contracted a terminal disease can be compelling. But a report from The Observer has unearthed disturbing details about the couple's history, throwing into doubt the veracity of what's in the book.

The author disputes the report and defends what she wrote, but it's unclear whether she'll be taking legal action. The publisher, Penguin, meanwhile has stated that it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence, including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read, as is standard with most works of non-fiction," the BBC reported. Nevertheless, Penguin has delayed the release of Winn's next book. Maybe they can take a closer look at it while they wait for the scandal to blow over.

Once again, are publishers obligated to determine whether a memoir is for real? Lucy Knight explores the scandal in the Guardian and while publishers can fact-check or investigate, publishing involves a degree of trust, and as not every publisher can maintain a fact-checking department or hire third-party fact-checkers, that duty often falls to the editor, whose plate might be full already.

Will publishers be more sensitive towards stories that sound too good to be true? For a while, at least, until the next one comes along because, as Knight writes, "The fact that there is money to be made – with very few legal repercussions – by telling the most marketable version of a story, rather than the true one, makes it difficult to believe that this controversy will be the last of its kind." Two other takes on the issue seem to concur.


Elsewhere:

• While some "true stories" sound too good to be true, there are incidents or events that we hope are fake. Another tRump admin, for one. But alas... At a protest against the infamous "Alligator Alcatraz", a sign caught Florida author Carl Hiaasen's attention. America right now is arguably beyond parody and as someone who's known for writing political satire, Hiaasen has his work cut out for him. "After all, even the most brilliant novelist would be challenged to imagine storylines more preposterous than those generated by President Donald Trump in his second administration," writes Stephanie Mencimer in Mother Jones. Well, when satire writes or even outdoes itself...
• "...I reckon we're at the precipice of a major reshuffling, where younger authors are set to replace the ageing ones as the primary voices of the generation. I think many younger readers are starting to identify with their ethnic lineage and traditions more than ever before, and that perhaps explains the boom in demand for local or regional literature." Female Singapore speaks with author Malcom Seah about his book, Swimming Lessons, his writing, regional literature, and his plans. Keep an eye on this young man, readers.
• Leaving books for people to find and read sounds like a thing for bookish fairy godmothers. Maybe that's why Emma Watson called her campaign "Book Fairies". Carol Koh kicked off something similar in Malaysia, and now she has set up a string of community libraries across the Klang Valley. Hopefully, Books on the Move will fare well for many years.
• Is reading books in more than one language difficult? Maybe it's not too big of a deal in Malaysia where the average bookworm may be bi- or trilingual. Malaysian writers tend to sprinkle their prose with the local vernacular, a bit like how Cormac McCarthy inserts Spanish into his work, according to Rachel Ashcroft in Literature Hub. But it doesn't seem to affect her enjoyment of McCarthy's The Crossing. "...I was happy to 'watch' Billy converse in Spanish. Which is what the question of reading books in two languages really boils down to. Are you happy to watch, or do you need to hear and understand every single word?"
• "Although few Australians are totally illiterate, a staggering 44 per cent of adults (about 7.3 million) have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics." The Sydney Morning Herald rings alarm bells with regard to the decline in reading in Australia, a trend that might not be confined Down Under. The piece is grim reading, albeit well researched.
• A report on novelist Barbara Kingsolver's recovery residence, established using using royalties from her Pulitzer prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, sheds light on rural America and the struggles of Appalachians affected by poverty and the opioid crisis. She is a bit less kind towards the current US president and his so-called "hillbilly" of a vice-president.
• "...the journal—often dismissed as 'just a diary'—wasn't merely a space for confessional wallowing, but a scaffolding for becoming, a place to contain a life in progress. I didn't know that this habit I began in childhood—one that I've continued through adolescence, motherhood, grief, addiction, and recovery—was part of a lineage. To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here." Was journalling ever considered as frivolous? Not any more, as Elizabeth Austin writes at Electric Literature.
• Rolling Stone gives us a glimpse into the anti-woke literary scene, which seems to be coming in from the cold since tRump's re-election. "Anti-woke", to some of these people, appears to mean saying and doing whatever you want, however gross and offensive. However, the world isn't free of repercussions. Gatekeeping, for instance, is a response to certain words and deeds, especially in published material. Rolling Stone tries hard to make the people in its article human and relatable, but there are times you are reminded of who they are. Speaking of right wing...
• "After her book became a New York Times bestseller, the right-wing forces in Japan who wanted to cover up that part of history started to attack her. Their articles criticizing her kept appearing in Japanese newspapers using all kinds of methods." Not sure if I believe this report, but if the Japanese government was involved in harassing Iris Chang for The Rape of Nanking, it wouldn't be surprising. Japan's right wing is formidable and the country has never quite acknowledged its wartime atrocities.

To close off: The Malaysian Home Ministry is open to rethinking book ban laws, says PEN Malaysia (article in Malay; the English version is paywalled). I'm sceptical, but we'll wait and see.

Book Marks: AI Marches On, Reading Habits

Last week was bad for authors as two federal judges ruled in favour of tech companies in copyright lawsuits arguing against the companies' methods in training their AI models. While Meta and Anthropic may seem to have won, the judges' decisions do not give them the leeway to do what they want with their AI systems.

In the case of Meta, the judge's ruling was because the authors made the wrong arguments. While Anthropic was found to have not violated US copyright law by using books to train its AI, it was at fault for using pirated books in building the data set. The court rulings stop short of giving tech companies free rein to feed their AI models with copyrighted material, but Aron Solomon at Literary Hub feels it might not be enough.

A group of authors has released an open letter calling on major publishers to restrict the use of AI. The document "asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors' consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators — among other requests," NPR reports.

The letter's core argument seems to be that AI steals from human writers to "write". "These stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores," the letter goes, before asking, "Is this the end goal—to fully remove us from the equation so that those at the very top of the capitalist structure can profit even further off our labor than they already do?"

An intern at the Detroit Free Press lays out her concerns regarding the growing use of AI in writing. "When I eventually publish a book, there is a high chance that some form of AI will steal it. This leaves me with two options: unwillingly become a part of a system that I despise, or never follow my long time-publishing dreams. Ten-year-old me would be devastated if robots got the chance to be bestsellers before she did."

The rulings may have made it more urgent to address the potential for AI to supplant humans in writing and publishing, and what would the future pool of literature look like if machine-generated output becomes the standard? And with AI being more efficient in trendspotting, marketing, targeted advertising and such – so much so that publishers and publishing platforms are employing it to that end – what guardrails need to be in place to ensure it doesn't make people redundant?


Okay, what else?

• Last week, Malaysian Home Ministry officials raided a Fixi bookstore and took copies of Jelik and Jelik:2. ABC dives deeper into the factors behind such raids and highlights the challenges of writing and publishing in this climate. Why these titles were being scrutinised isn't clear, but both seem to be psychological thrillers so maybe they're too disturbing for public consumption? Or did the officials not notice the "For Mature Readers" labels Fixi places on the covers of some of its titles? Or could it be– ooohhh.
• "Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic." Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker asks, "what's happening to reading" in the age of AI.
• "In the past, in Ethiopia—as in many other countries—plays were often published in book form either before or after being staged. A quick look into the subject reveals that many such plays were indeed published." In the Ethiopia Observer, a writer laments the lost art of publishing plays.
• Would you pepper your books with marginalia? Medieval authors had no problems with that, and today, "a growing community of BookTokkers and Bookstagrammers are ... posting images of books embellished with pastel highlighting and marginal drawings of flowers and kittens, wantonly smeared with lipstick kisses, or neatly stuffed with colour-coded tabs" as a form of engagement with authors and their works. Lebih daripada menconteng buku sahaja, okay?
• "I joke that our publishing house's PR department consists of the head of Roskomnadzor, the justice minister, and the prosecutor general — they've done more to promote our books than we ever could." This quote from Georgy Urushadze, founder of publisher Freedom Letters, has a familiar tone. Freedom Letters is among a small clutch of publishers publishing Russian literature abroad, a practice called tamizdat. Authoritairan regimes doing more than publishers in promoting books is an all-too-familiar theme by now, I feel. All these works need to do is win prizes.
• Book prizes can be prestige-granting, not to mention lucrative, but as a source of income for authors, it's unreliable – and out of reach for most. However, for those who do win awards in Australia, the prize is taxable. Punters who pick winning authors – a real thing Down Under, apparently – their winnings are not taxed. With writers earning peanuts and Australia giving away "extraordinary amounts of gas and offers massive subsidies in the form of fuel tax credits", editor, publisher, researcher and teacher Alice Grundy argues that it's time for tax-free prize money for authors.
• "All across the book industry, people watched as the staff at various other media companies and magazines unionized, analogous creative industries that had similarly treated employees like they should feel lucky just to be there. Creative types were not so different from the baristas and warehouse workers in their desire to be treated fairly." Read an excerpt from Maris Kreizman's I Want to Burn This Place Down, an apt title for an anthem for wrung-out peons in publishing if I ever heard one.
• "The Book Society, hosted initially by the bestselling novelist and screenwriter Hugh Walpole, who put together the first selection committee and remained energetically involved until his death in 1941, provided something unheard of in the UK at the time: a book subscription service in partnership with publishers that any member of the public – should they be able to stump up the cost each month – could join." Did these early book influencers invent the book club?
• "The truth is that ideas come from everything you consume – culture, conversations, observations, awkward dinners, humiliating accidents, fabulous parties. It’s perhaps no surprise then that writers, who typically consume a lot of books, are inspired to write about them." E.C. Nevin talks about their book, A Novel Murder, and dives into why we read and write books about books.
• I'm not sure whether this op-ed is satire – or if it's not, where this "non-woke" writer has been to. Right-wing publishing has always been around. If avenues for right-wing authors are shrinking at the moment, could it be because few want to be on the wrong side of history? The return of the tRump administration and the resurgence of the right in the west has galvanised right-wing movements all over, and many authors of that persuasion are cashing in. Missed a boat? No worries, the next one is on the way.
• 8th Note Press, the publishing arm owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance that was founded to capitalise on the BookTok boom, is shutting down. Was this a case of a corporation failing to catch an obvious tsunami-class wave, or are there other factors?