Crosseyed and Swagless: After 10 years of semi-professional literary criticism, I have come to one inescapable conclusion: I am just not enough of a whore. Don’t get me wrong, book reviewing has been rewarding intellectually and spiritually, but materially it sucks rocks. I’m speaking specifically of swag, merch, promo gimmes and perks, none of which seems to find its way into the great PR game when it comes to books. Music critics get CDs, T-shirts and guest-listed; movie critics get screeners, premiere passes and goodie bags. Book critics get… well, books. That’s it. Because I review new books I am a de facto shill for the publishing industry, the big-box bookstores and Amazon and yet, after a decade, book reviewing has yielded me exactly one T-shirt. I am chagrined and deeply dissatisfied.

What I’m saying, publishers, is let’s do some business. Send me swag. I take a size L T-shirt, I like baseball caps and coffee mugs, and I never turn down electronics. In exchange I’m willing to plug whatever you’ve got—astrology guides, vampire porn, how-to origami, whatever. I’ll trick this column out like it’s NASCAR. Don’t worry about my journalistic integrity—I’m no Edward R. Murrow. Hell, I’m not even David T. Lindsay. This space can become the newsprint equivalent of “The Billy Dilworth Show,” and you in turn will reap all the myriad benefits of a mention in the book column of a small Southern hippie socialist alternative newsweekly. Win-win all around. Think about it.

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In the News: There are few things in the bookstore quite as odious as the pastiche novel, the work that purports to be a sequel to a beloved classic or the “further adventures” of a popular character. There have been countless takes on Sherlock Holmes, for example, from teaming him up with other detectives to cryogenically freezing him and shooting him into space. Unofficial sequels to Huckleberry Finn and Wuthering Heights have come and gone over the years, and at the moment there are at least six different sequels to Pride and Prejudice on the bookstore shelves. Aside from the sheer presumption it takes to suggest that one is good enough to rewrite the ending of a classic novel—if the original author saw no need for a sequel, it should be assumed that the story is over and done—the pastiche author faces the same problem as a tribute band. If you are good enough to write as well as Jane Austen, why aren’t you writing your own novels? And if you’re not as good, why invite a comparison you can’t live up to?

Usually the pastiche writer circumvents questions like these by taking on something in the public domain, free from potential litigation from authors’ estates. Not so Fredrik Colting, a Swedish publisher writing under the name “John David California,” who has put out his own sequel to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later. The book envisions an old and broken-down Holden Caulfield reflecting on an adult lifetime of disillusionment since the adventures of his younger foul-mouthed self. If anything could bring the notoriously reclusive Salinger out of hiding, this could, and it has. Salinger has brought every one of his enormous legal guns to bear on Colting in order to recall all copies of the European edition of 60 Years Later and to prevent its U.S. release, scheduled for September. Colting claims his book is a parody and thus proof against censure, much as Alice Randall’s epic joke The Wind Done Gone survived a challenge from Margaret Mitchell’s estate a few years ago. If he’s going to rouse a sleeping beast like Salinger, not to mention three generations of devoted fans, however, this parody had best be awfully damn funny.

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Here in Town: A revised and updated edition of Frances Taliaferro Thomas’ book A Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, with pictorial research by Mary Levin Koch, has just been released by UGA Press. As this issue hits the street, Thomas will be signing at the Taylor-Grady House, so unless you’re psychic you missed it, but expect more events surrounding the book to come. The book is a welcome sight in the local market. While there is no end to the panoply of available books on the University of Georgia and especially the Bulldogs, books about our fair town, its environs and its rich history are few and far between. For residents of Athens, past and present, this is a big deal.

For those of you who are less interested in what happened around here in the past than about outfitting your hipster selves in the here and now, The Junkman’s Daughter’s Brother rated a slot in consultant George Whalin’s new book Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America (Penguin, 2009). Whalin’s book looks at 25 non-affiliated stores around the country, including our Junkman’s, the original store in Atlanta, and one of my all-time favorite places on Earth, Powell’s Books in Portland, OR. Books about the success stories of megachain stores abound, but it’s particularly gratifying to see someone giving props to independently owned and operated retail businesses that are still standing despite the worst intentions of the Wal-Marts, the Gaps and the various wrong-headed Chambers of Commerce hither and yon.

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In Memoriam: I’ve never read the work of David Eddings, author of The Belgariad and a whole bunch of other works of fantasy, but I have friends who have read and reread his stuff with no loss of entertainment and wonder. For fans of the genre his passing on June 2 at the age of 77 is a very big deal, and it is clear that he will be missed.

J.G. Ballard was an author I have read and enjoyed very much, and I regret not hearing of his passing on Apr. 19 until much later. Although he worked primarily in the fields of speculative fiction and weird fantasy, in which he was always smart and wonderfully disturbing, Ballard is perhaps best known for his fictionalized memoir Empire of the Sun, about the part of his childhood spent in a Japanese internment camp, and Crash, which David Cronenberg made into a film everyone hates. It is hoped that more of Ballard’s backlist will find its way back onto bookshelves, because he was a truly great writer.

John G. Nettles