Ever since Bookslut linked to Is Greater Than last week, I've been eager for an opportunity to write about it. Partly because the site, a Webzine dedicated to independent culture, gives me some confidence that the worldview that the late Punk Planet magazine held hasn't died off. (Disclosure: My editor here used to be a PP editor, and I wrote for PP once or twice, but nobody bent my ear to write about IGT.) And I'm also thrilled that it runs a regular series called Preserving Our Independents, written by Laura Pearson dedicated to small presses.

The publishing industry, at least when it comes to literary fiction, isn't as craven and money-chasing as the pop-music world; it's a world where, by and large, concerns about quality still abide. But it's also an industry that's as susceptible to marketing and hype like any other, loudly promoting books that sometimes deserve all the noise (Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, say) and many that'll be forgotten two years from now (Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men). So even the "successful" small presses---Soft Skull, Unbridled, Macadam/Cage, Coffee House Press---could use all the help they can get (even if Soft Skull hooked up with a larger company), and Pearson's doing a service by digging even deeper. Her piece on Featherproof Books covers much of the relevant backstory, and her piece on Small Beer Press discusses how its give-books-away-for-free (sometimes) model has helped it build a brand name....

In Washington D.C., where I live, there's a low-power TV station called WUFO-TV that specializes in (as the name suggests) televising shows about conspiracy theories, UFOs, crop circles, and other strange doings across the universe. Like most people, I tune in for the humor value, but it's also something of a connection to my childhood. Like a lot of children of the New Age-y '70s, I watched a lot of "In Search Of..." and read books like the silly one pictured above, Chariots of the Gods?, a flimsy but popular book claiming rock-solid evidence about space aliens. It was on the shelves of my grade-school library---shame on you, grade-school library---and I happily devoured it a few times.

I bring this up because Chariots of the Gods? has made the Telegraph's list of the 50 best cult books. Naturally, "best" is something of a relative term here, and "cult" is a little slippery too. Says the piece's introduction: "We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula " whacko"; books our children just won't get..."

What it seems to mean, roughly, is a list of books that people connect directly to their lifestyles in a way that's more intense than usual. The Catcher in the Rye and A Confederacy of Dunces and Dianetics and On the Road all have...

Here's a line from a new work of fiction by Arthur Phillips, acclaimed author of the novels Prague, The Egyptologist, and Angelica:

You cannot be more officially grown-up than accepting a wedding proposal and a job offer in the same week and then buying yourself a sweet Lexus sedan with your own money.

Well, that's debatable, of course, but then that's fiction doing its job--giving us characters whose ideas and beliefs are often open to debate. So, reasonable people can argue over whether buying a Lexus is the epitome of adulthood. But Phillips makes it pretty clear what he wants you to believe, not so much through his prose stylings as the context of the story itself: It's published in Lexus Magazine, published by the luxury-car manufacturer. The project collects a handful of writers to contribute a chapter to In the Belly of the Beast, a novel about a road trip: Phillips, Richard McCann (Mother of Sorrows), and Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep) have written the first three chapters, and according to the litblog Galleycat Jane Smiley (Seven Days in the Hills) is also slated to contribute.

There's precedent for this. Most famously, Fay Weldon published a novel in 2001 titled The Bulgari Connection which was financed by the jewelry maker--it paid her an undisclosed sum (Wikipedia says £18,000) to mention the word "Bulgari" at least a dozen times.

Is anybody hurt here? Weldon's reputation seems a little shaky;...

The litblog the Literary Saloon has regularly beat the drum for the importance of following world literature. (So I always feel a little shamed reading it, given that my personal litblog is pretty provincial.) It's done a fine job of pointing out that many of the mainstream book reviews don't spend much energy covering works in translation, or even, really, covering much literature outside of the American and British power centers. But this week it points to an intriguing project that might start taking care of the problem. The English PEN Online World Atlas is designed to be a user-driven database of global literature, and as it launches its focus is specifically on writers from the Arab world.

There's not much there yet: profiles of authors Mourid Barghouti, Yasmina Khadra, Turki al-Hamad, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, along with a profile of Alaa al-Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building. But given the dearth of available information in English elsewhere--the Wikipedia page on Egyptian literature merits only a paragraph--there's plenty of room to grow here.

The PEN American Center is mostly known as a fairly serious organization that works to defend free-expression rights around the world. (It recently stepped up to defend deported author Sebastian Horsley, who I've written about before here.) But it's not without a sense of humor, and there's a great sense of play in its online Public Lives/Private Lives project, where readers are invited to write their own stories based on photos submitted by PEN members. The photos are supposed to reveal "intimate details and privates spaces in their lives," so I'd really like to know what the deal is with the photo above, submitted by novelist Chuck Palahniuk.

The remainder of the photos aren't quite so provocative, but they're each in their own way revealing: The blackboard of physics professor Janna Levin; the very densely filled notebooks of essayist Susan Shapiro; the CD collection of critic Wayne Kostenbaum.

These efforts are are all tied into PEN's upcoming World Voices Festival of International Literature, which starts April 29 in New York City. I'm deeply jealous of anybody who gets to be in town then: Among the participants are Andre Aciman, Bolivian crime novelist Juan de Recacoechea, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many more.