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And so the end of the year. So much to say, so little time. I’m off until mid-January, and I wish all Booktwo readers the very merriest of Christmases. No final comments (and I have so much to say!), no best-of lists (although I have to say, this was definitely my book of the year).

I just helped launch Coversourcing, which should provide some diversion for the more artistic of you during your time off, Tom McCarthy’s Surplus Matter has received a quick redesign, and I can’t not recommend Cooking With Booze for those still…

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I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It�s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I�ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and

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