They’re calling this week the bloodiest week in publishing; hundreds of people lost their jobs, salaries are frozen and the once thought recession proof publishing world has been sent into a tailspin.  On Litopia After Dark we analyse the fall out of this shocking week and try to foresee what the future may hold for the book.

Retailers across the United States sold 16.2 million books during the week of Thanksgiving, up 6 percent from a year ago. In the UK, the book trade enjoyed its busiest week of the year last week, with sales passing £50m for the first time, as retailers report what was described as a “genuine uplift” in trading. That’s the good news. Everything else is bad.  Simon & Schuster has eliminated 35 jobs. 54 positions have gone at Thomas Nelson. Random House is restructuring, a few heads have rolled so far and who know how many more may yet go. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has suspended the purchase of most new manuscripts, and at least several hundred of the company’s 5,300 full-time employees are expected to lose their jobs. Penguin have announced that they will not raise the salaries of anyone earning $50,000 or more in 2009.  The panel give some advice to those poor people facing redundancy at Christmas. And we ask… should book publishing still be run as a big-corporation business?  Obviously our culture is rapidly changing, so do books have mainstream cultural relevance any more?

To counteract all the doom and gloom, we lighten the mood with talk of death.  As we reported on Litopia Daily this week, the Nobel prize-winning author VS Naipaul was recently offered the chance by an African witch doctor to put a curse on his biographers. Also, French president Nicolas Sarkozy has lost his attempt to ban a voodoo doll that became a bestselling cult classic in France. Tune in to find out who the panellists would be cursing and why.

Litopia After Dark business maven Martyn Daniels has blogged this week about something you don’t hear about very often – a Google business failure.  “It appears that not everything that Google does turns to gold”, writes Martyn, “and less than six months after its launch their answer to the virtual worlds of Second Life, Google’s ‘Lively’ will close. We ask what is the point of sites like Lively and Second Life?  And do social networking sites really benefit authors?

Again on Litopia Daily this week we’ve covered a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the The Tipping Point and several other huge bestsellers.  A piece this week by Andrew Orlowski in The Register savagely attacks him. You can get an idea of its thrust from the title – “The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell – A guru for the brain dead.  The panel discuss their opinions of the author of The Tipping Point, Blink and the newly released Outliers… do we agree with Orlowski?

For some odd reason, rarely a week goes by without that prolific essayist Theodore Dalrymple saying something that makes one stop and think a bit. This week, Dalrymple writes in City Journal about the evolution of the British character. With two Brits and two Yanks on the panel this week, tension is high – listen in to see if feathers are ruffled.

Of course none of these subjects would sound so impressively intellectual without the philistine workings of our regular games – the competitive Pitch the Nasty Agent, the forthright yet often moving advice column Cry for Help and the frustrating, maddening, infuriating, wearisome… (sorry!)…Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette.

On the panel with Peter Cox this week are Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and Eve Harvey.  They are joined by very special guest Dr Susan O’Doherty, writer, clinical psychologist and the author of Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity.  Her popular advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In”, appears every Friday on MJ Rose’s publishing blog, Buzz, Balls, & Hype. The Ustream chatroom (8pm GMT) was magnificent again this week, providing incisive comments and cheery encouragement.

There will be no Litopia After Dark next Friday, so join us again in a fortnight (19th December) for more erudite discussion and hilarious antics.

Got news for us – or a comment? Then drop it into our Open Inbox: http://drop.io/litopia.

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Richard Brooks in the TimesOnline…

THE Nobel prize-winning author VS Naipaul was recently offered the chance by an African witch doctor to put a curse on his biographers, according to his wife, Nadira.
The novelist, 76, was given the opportunity to “get rid of” someone when he and Nadira visited the shaman in Uganda, she says. Nadira immediately thought of two biographers who had revealed the novelist in the most unflattering way.
Paul Theroux mauled Naipaul, a former mentor nine years his senior, in his 1999 book Sir Vidia‟s Shadow, which explored the end of their 30-year friendship. One reviewer described the last fifth of the book as an “uninterrupted excoriation of Naipaul and his second wife”.
Patrick French‟s biography of the author, published this year, contained frank and damaging revelations by Naipaul about himself. “It exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist,” Colin McPherson wrote in his review in this newspaper.
The visit to the witch doctor took place a few months ago.
Nadira, a former journalist for a Pakistan newspaper, writes about it in an article for the January issue of Tatler.
Born in Kenya, where she was a child during the Mau Mau troubles of the 1950s, she was familiar with witch doctors. She says her husband insisted she accompany him. “I need you to put the witch doctor at ease. Don‟t scowl. It‟s unpleasant, ugly,” he said.
They drove to his shrine, a compound in a semi-forest clearing on the outskirts of Kampala, the Ugandan capital, and entered a hut decorated with a leopard skin. A spear leant against an outside wall.
The witch doctor looked like “a dark version of Alistair Darling”, she writes. “The resemblance is uncanny.”
The couple sat before him, Naipaul on his shooting stick, his wife crosslegged on the floor. She writes: “[The witch doctor] looks at VSN [her husband]. Does he want to be reju-venated? Or is someone in the way? Is there someone we wish to get rid of? I can think of many who are in the way, starting with the wretched two-tim-ing biographers.”

Andrew Orlowski in The Register…

Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell – the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.
Gladwell gave two vanity “performances” in the West End – prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers – the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/22/leaders-and-
It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar “knowledge workers” hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight – and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That’s pretty odd.
So what’s really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that hold so much appeal?

Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal…

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now—and the old modesty is scorned. It is as if the population became convinced of Blake‟s fatuous dictum that it is better to strangle a baby in the cradle than to let a desire remain unacted upon.
Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.
I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm. The same belief seems universal among those who spend hours at soccer games screaming abuse and making threatening gestures (whose meaning many would put into practice, were those events not policed in military fashion).

Thanks to Janesdead on Flickr for the stunning blood red sky.

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