According to Motoko Rich, the New York Times’ authority on publishing, Amazon has begun to right the so-called “computer glitch” that removed gay and lesbian themed books from the website’s sales rankings and searches. The “glitch,” which company representatives later called an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error,” targeted literary classics such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and E.M. Forester’s Maurice, as well as respected nonfiction such as Nathaniel Frank’s book on gays in the military, Unfriendly Fire, and Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir Elusive Embrace, reclassifying these books as “adult” products. While Amazon scrambles to reeducate whatever homophobic software caused the glitch in the first place, perhaps it’s time to rethink whether this is the company we want controlling the future of literature. Not only does the incident reek of blatant bias, it also displays a profound ignorance of literary history. Here is a short list of titles that Amazon might consider for the next round of censorship:

Gertrude Stein (Carl Van Vechten)

• William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets
• Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires
• Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando
• Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems
• Gertrude Stein, The Autobigraphy of Alice B. Tolkas
• Plato, The Symposium
• Sappho, The Love Songs of Sappho
• Dorthy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
• Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
• Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
• Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
• Tennessee Williams, Moise and the World of Reason
• Frederico García Lorca, The Public

If you are going to purge your website of gay and lesbian literature, you should at least do a thorough job of it.

Bloggers, Twitter users, and a few journalists have been fulminating lately over the revelation that Amazon has allegedly maintained a practice of de-ranking purportedly adult material.

First, a couple definitions are in order: to de-rank on Amazon—at least in this context—is to remove a sales ranking for a book and, in some cases, to remove the book from search results entirely. (According to the web giant, search results depend on the use of sales rankings.) The second definition: “adult” for Amazon seemingly means titles with gay/queer content or works that have simply been tagged with the word “gay” or “homosexuality.” The result is that books like an Ellen DeGeneres biography or Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been de-ranked. (Jezebel is keeping a list of numerous de-ranked/de-listed titles.) The irony is obvious and rampant: many seemingly innocuous titles are categorized as adult and are very difficult to find on Amazon, while explicitly anti-homosexuality books, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and sex toys are easily searchable.

Explanations from Amazon have been few, vague, and conflicting. Author Craig Seymour asked Amazon in February why his memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C., had no sales ranking and was unavailable in search results. Seymour had to send at least six e-mails to various customer service representatives and never received a clear response, but eventually, the sales ranking reappeared, as did the ability to find the book in search queries. When Mark Probst made a similar inquiry about the disappearance of hundreds of LGBT books from search results, including his own, he received a generic response about Amazon’s practice of excluding adult materials from search results “in consideration of [their] entire customer base.” Later, an Amazon spokesperson blamed a glitch and promised that the error would be fixed. Yet, as of Monday evening, many titles remain de-listed.

The central question, of course, is whether Amazon is engaging deliberately in homophobic, discriminatory behavior. Why block an Anais Nin title but not A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, which is, as of this writing, the first result in an Amazon search query for the word “homosexuality”? To uncover whether or not this is truly a glitch may be impossible; it would likely require Amazon to open up their system, including their site’s architecture and coding practices, to an extent with which they’re not comfortable. There have been some interesting pieces published about how a foreign coder’s misunderstanding of the word “adult” may have contributed to a legitimate glitch, as well as an informal investigation into how metadata (keywords associated with web pages) may be used to categorize—and discriminate against—certain titles. There’s also a claim of a hack being used to cause the mess, and the resultant security issues may account for Amazon’s lack of communication. The main takeaway: Amazon’s proprietary systems are interconnected, complex, and shrouded in secrecy, making the process of coming to an objective, independent truth nearly impossible—even the company’s often-cited (and here contentious) review rankings are based on an unknown formula.

Amazon is scrambling, and it may be a day or two before a more thorough explanation arrives. (It’s possible that the prominent “Kindle 2 Has Arrived” ad on the Amazon home page will be replaced with an explanatory letter from Jeff Bezos or another executive.) So far, net denizens are largely unconvinced, and petitions, calls for boycotts, blog posts, tweets, and other postings skew towards calling Amazon out for malicious behavior. The entire process is certainly suspicious, and the company’s obfuscation has not helped its cause.

Until more information arrives, whether from Amazon or independent investigations, it’s useful to examine the anatomy of this controversy. The high-speed, broad-spectrum communicative abilities of Twitter created an echo chamber in which this dispute built in volume quickly, with more voices constantly added, providing outrage, more revelations of de-listing, and more intermittently useful information. Similarly, prominent bloggers and industry publications like Publishers Weekly have extensively linked to each others’ posts while also providing contact information for Amazon representatives and continual updates on individual efforts to find more information or establish a broad base of protest. And through it all, this controversy developed very quickly, gaining momentum by the hour—perhaps too quick a pace for a giant company like Amazon to respond authoritatively, clearly, or even honestly.

While it’s appropriate to call for a measure of patience before establishing anti-Amazon boycotts, it may be that the very impatience and frenetic rise to fury of the digital class will produce a response—again, objective truth may be too much to hope for—that, in a previous era, would have been long in waiting—if appearing at all. (It should be noticed that Amazon has been the subject of several scandals in recent years, particularly for mistreating warehouse employees, allegedly bullying small publishers, and attempting to force sellers of print-on-demand books to use Amazon’s own BookSurge POD service.) We need this grassroots outrage and the passionate search for truth it produces. Newspapers, despite their struggles, still have a vital role to play in checking those in power, but consider that in recent years, several important cases of internet censorship or malfeasance have been uncovered and publicized by amateurs. It was an insomniac engineer named Robb Topolski who found that Comcast was blocking file-sharing applications. It was bloggers and public interest groups advocating internet neutrality who raised the alarm on AT&T’s troubling censorship of a Pearl Jam performance.

In an age when phone and internet providers—increasingly, they are the same, as is the manner of delivering such data—collude with government spy agencies to provide information about Americans; when Yahoo’s collaboration with the Chinese government helped to put a dissident in jail, it’s more important than ever to retain vigilance and skepticism towards those who provide us data, information, and products over the internet. Even so, that skepticism must be paired with patience, self-questioning, perspective, and a focus on hard evidence. If the accusations against Amazon are true, the company’s actions are despicable and discriminatory, but not every case is equal—no one’s life has been ruined here, unlike in the Yahoo incident—and this debacle should be treated on its own merits without being subsumed into the potentially deafening mass of the same Twitter-sphere that helped to bring it to light.

VQR editor Ted Genoways and several contributors to our spring issue will be speaking at “The End of Ice—And the Beginning of a New Kind of Literary Journalism” at New York University on Thursday. It’s a presentation of our current issue, and will include contributors Carolyn Kormann, Matthew Fishbane, William Finnegan, Lawrence Weschler, and Ted Conover. The event is being held at 20 Cooper Square, in the 7th floor commons, from 7:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M. All are welcome.

“What’s the big deal with talking on the phone?” my Grandpa wanted to know.

“This text message thing is the death of grammar in this country!” exclaimed the former English professor, who wanted to know what “TTYL” meant, and rolled his eyes in exasperation when I translated.

“Your brother had 3,000 text messages in one month!” my parents called to inform me once. “What a waste of time!” I think that was the point at which they decided their family calling plan was no longer such a good idea, at least without the high-schooler in the house also making a contribution.

Then there’s my phone. I like talking on it, sure. And I use email all the time. I’m even one of the few people left who actually writes letters and sends cards at times other than birthdays. But my phone chirps on occasion too, and when it does, it’s kind of fun to get the surreptitious “Whatz up? Miss you” in the middle of the work day. It makes me smile. When you’re seeing patients in clinic or in between cases in the OR, you don’t make phone calls or send emails to the important people in your life. But there’s always 30 seconds to text back “c u 2nite!”

Regan Wright/CC

And this makes me wonder—what does texting really say about the pace and scope of our lives? Does it mean that we are too busy to really connect in a meaningful way, too chained to our technology to be human, too sloppy with our communication to hold onto the rules of language that have shaped generations of literature and oratory? There are times when I think that each of these might be true. There are entire webpages devoted to texting acronyms, ways to say things without words, including things that shouldn’t be said, as evidenced by the alarming rise among teenagers of so-called “sexting” and associated reports of harassment and even suicide.

Yet at the same time, I can’t help but think of the list of messages in the inbox of my phone. There isn’t a person there who I don’t talk to on a regular basis and whose real words, in proper grammar and in context, aren’t part of shaping my life. It’s just so convenient to know that even in the midst of a busy life I can check to see if someone in a different time zone is awake before calling them, proclaim an emergency, contact someone with important news when I don’t want to be overheard in a public place, let someone know I’m running late, or just say “hello,” “happy birthday,” “thinking of you,” “good luck,” or any one of a thousand things we can never say too often to those who matter most to us. And okay, I admit it: sometimes when you’re somewhere you have to be but you’re bored out of your mind, the occasional text message can be a lifesaver.  (For the record, I do draw the line somewhere: in ten years of higher education, I have never texted in class.)

Life could be lived without text messages. But, like email and cell phones, don’t they make everything easier?

In a recent piece in the New York Times, A.O. Scott praised the current state of the American short story, citing the recently and widely acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and Donald Barthelme as demonstrating that these writers’ short works triumphed over the maximalist aesthetics of 1990s fiction. Scott’s piece rests too much on a simple binary—is the short story “dead” or not? (he assumes that the novel already is, but why are we so often worried about what form or movement might, from one day to the next, be deemed living or otherwise?)—but he does raise some good points. Besides the enduring influence of the three previously mentioned writers, he mentions the lauded debut of Wells Tower, with his short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. He also concocts an interesting scenario for what may be the future utility and commercial potential of short stories:

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

It’s an intriguing idea, a veiled business proposal that might make some old-school types gag, but Scott may be correct that the short story will be the “single” of the digital age. Just as a catchy single can launch a pop musician to the top of the charts, so might a bestselling short on the Kindle market have similar promotional power for a new writer. (But here, too, Scott engages in some excessive reductionism: the iPod didn’t kill the album—it was record labels’ overpricing of CDs and vehemently luddite attitudes towards technology. Similarly, blog posts and tweets thrive not just because of a craving for narrative or pith; pitifully short attention spans, the near compulsive drive to multi-task, and the cultural celebration of narcissism contribute just as much, if not more.)

Until that time though, the short-story-collection-as-debut-work has, I think, more commercial potential than Scott allows. As he accurately writes, “a young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome,” yet besides Wells Tower (whose book, as of this writing, is ranked a very respectable #377 on Amazon), in recent years we’ve seen a small horde of writers have commercial and critical success with short story debuts. Last year there was Nam Le’s The Boat, which won a couple of awards, sold well, and received tremendous praise. And consider some others of the past decade or so: Junot Diaz (Drown), Aleksandar Hemon (The Question of Bruno), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Uwem Akpan (Say You’re One of Them), and Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders). All received an enviable combination of accolades, good reviews, and sales.

So while future short story writers may look forward to a democratization of publishing and possible remuneration through selling individual stories on the Kindle, for now, there are plenty of good writers coming through the pipeline. It only takes a longer view of things to realize that though our digital trends may be ephemeral, our cultural ones, especially the longing for a good story, need not be.

All the Jews, atheists, and fans of The Ten Commandments out there might be interested in my piece on scientific explanations of the Exodus story, which just went up on Slate.com:

For thousands of years, skeptics and believers alike have debated whether the events described in the Passover story—the parting of the Red Sea, the ten plagues, and the burning bush—actually took place. Roman Jewish historian Josephus Flavius speculated that the parting of the Red Sea “might be of God’s will or of natural origin. Let everyone believe at his own discretion.” The skeptic’s skeptic, Sigmund Freud, called the Passover story “a pious myth,” contending that Moses was a rebellious Egyptian prince who worshiped the sun god Aton and made up the Jewish religion as a political ploy. In more recent times, scientific explanations of the Passover story range from formula-laden academic papers like “Modeling the Hydrodynamic Situation of the Exodus” to more popular inquiries such as Cambridge materials scientist Colin Humphreys’ The Miracles of Exodus. Whether or not you subscribe to these theories, they beat listening to your little cousin sing the “Four Questions.”

Those who are especially interested in the topic might also want to check out this video of Florida State Oceanographer Doron Nof explaining how the Red Sea might have parted. And if you still want to hear more about scientific explanations for the parting of the Red Sea, the ten plagues, and the burning bush, I’ll be talking about it Saturday on All Things Considered.

Yesterday, finalists were announced for the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards and VQR, along with Orion magazine, led the pack with three nominations each. We were named a finalist in the categories of General Excellence, International Coverage, and Best Writing.

For each issue of their magazine, the editors at the Utne Reader scour over 1,500 publications from around the globe to bring attention to independent and alternative publishers often ignored or overlooked by mass media. The Utne Independent Press Awards honor the best of those.

We’re in a great group of nominees that includes Audubon, the Believer, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mother Jones, the Nation, the New Republic, New Statesman, Washington Monthly, and World Affairs. The winners will be announced at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Independent Magazine Group Conference in Denver, Colorado on May 17.

For what seems like forever, I’ve been avoiding the stacks of books with those distinctive covers at the front of every Borders and Barnes and Noble. I rolled my eyes at the hordes of giggling (mostly girls) waiting in line for the movie. And with the recent release of the DVD, I shared a moment with the guy behind the counter at my Blockbuster. “Can you believe this?” I asked, shaking my head and pointing at the glossy advance poster stuck to the wall. 

“I know,” he replied, in the tone of one who has had to stare at it all day, every day for far too long.

“Are you guys ripping on Twilight?” another employee asked.

“Yes,” we both said together with a shared smirk.

And with that, I realized something: I think I might be a bit of a book snob. Despite its world-wide popularity and the fact that Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel has sold 17 million copies, I just can’t help my tendency to, well, smirk. Literature is Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy, I would think to myself, smug in the knowledge that my bookshelves at home hold the complete works of the former not to mention most of the novels of the latter two. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are writers, this train of thought continued. And everyone knows that new and compelling voices get reviews in some literary magazine somewhere, not Entertainment Weekly. That’s what defines real writing and good books. Isn’t it?

The funny thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder. In his time, Dickens himself was extremely popular in periodical publications. In fact, the chapters of his novels often have such a cliff-hanger feel precisely because that’s how they were written: chapter by chapter for release to the serial magazines of the time. If there were grocery store checkout lines in Victorian England, would Dickens paperbacks have been stacked up nearby? When Stephen Crane released his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, it was universally panned by critics as being sentimental rubbish. Yet when The Red Badge of Courage was published a few years later, all of a sudden the first novel started to get a second look (and wound up on my high school English teacher’s reading list). And speaking of books that go on and on and on, is anything taken away from the complex brilliance of Les Miserables just because a re-working of Hugo’s novel is also the longest running musical in the history of the West End?

It is true that the brilliance of literary genius, the stories and poetry that stand the test of time from generation to generation, well, this kind of language does not come along every day. The writer who can pen the best of times and worst of times or to be or not to be is truly a master. Yet can’t the definition of a good book also mean more than great literature in the classic, Norton’s Anthology sense of the word?

After all, vampires and the swooning drama of high school love affairs might not be my thing, but I must admit: I am an unabashed Harry Potter fan. I don’t go for the movies or the stickers or the midnight press releases, but I absolutely love the novels. I own them all, I’ve read them more times than I care to disclose publicly, and I was one of those people who read the conclusion to the series (all 784 pages of it) in one sitting. On the day it was released. I just couldn’t help it. When you love to read and you find that most elusive of entities—a good book—sometimes you have to give in to the little voice that pleads, “Just one more page.”

And that’s the thing: any writer who can create a world so vivid and compelling that it pulls us away from reality and into a place created solely through words and imagination, well, then I think that’s what makes a good book.

Since you’re a fan of the VQR blog—which seems like a fair guess, since you’re reading it—you’ll be interested to know that you can subscribe to receive our latest blog entries by e-mail. Just enter your e-mail address here:

You’ll be sent the full text—not just a teaser—every time we post a new article to our blog. And if you’re not yet convinced, but decide to sign up a few months from now, you can find the form on the sidebar of our blog.

At a time like this—with the economy floundering and cultural critics gleefully proclaiming the end of the Guttenberg era—one would not expect to find a small, middle-aged literary press flexing its muscles. But expectations be damned, the 35 year-old Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press has recently piled up a series of accomplishments, both literary and commercial, that would make a Knopf or a Houghton Mifflin proud.

The most obvious place to date the beginning of Graywolf’s renaissance is the publication in 2007 of Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses. Translated from the Norwegian, the book sold 230,000 copies, won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin literary award (often called the “mini-Nobel”) and was selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2007. The success of Out Stealing Horses gave Graywolf the cachet and capital to go head-to-head with major houses in bidding for new work, which it has done to great success. In the last six months, Graywolf books and authors have won a raft of major literary prizes. For example:

• In October 2008, fiction writer Benjamin Percy was awarded the Whiting Writers Award
• In November, poet Katie Ford won the Lannan Literary Fellowship
• In January, poet Elizabeth Alexander gave President Obama’s inagural poem “Praise Song for the Day”
• In February, poet Matthea Harvey won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
• In March, fiction writer Salvatore Scibona’s novel The End won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award (The End was also a finalist for the National Book Award)
• In March, poet Lind Gregg’s book All of It Singing won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award

The success of Graywolf is not just a good news story in a bad news cycle. It is a reminder that literary fiction and poetry are very much alive and kicking. It is a validation of Graywolf’s small-batch editorial philosophy, “introducing and promoting the most exciting and creative writers of our times,” with the aim of “keep[ing] fine literature off the extinction list.” They publish only twenty-seven books a year, but all twenty-seven are distinctive works of the highest quality.