Shelfari

End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

By Paul

Quick links from around the kid-lit blogosphere:

Multicolored medals. Check out some old-school Caldecott and Newbery stickers--along with the front and *back* of these mysterious medals--thanks to another fun history lesson from Peter at Collecting Children's Books.

"A jub-wobbling glob bag." Flanimals Pop-Up comes out in just over a week, and Publishers Weekly talked to Ricky Gervais about the book--and even his role in the upcoming Flanimals movie(!). ("I know already that I'm playing Puddloflaj, a little, fat, sweaty thing. This is more typecasting, as I'll be playing the putz again. Like all my roles.")

March 2: Read Across America Day. The NEA's annual Read Across America Day is right around the corner, and you can go to their site for activities and resources. Teachers and librarians might also like Random House's snappy, downloadable event and activity guide. (Speaking of "Read Across America Day," don't miss the related Diary of a Wimpy Kid sweepstakes.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars "fan pleasers." Our nephew is crazy for Clone Wars in just about any form. School Library Journal has a good rundown of all the latest book tie-ins for the series, which just might keep him busy until Lego Clone Wars comes to the Wii.

Sedaris + Falconer = awesome. Ian Falconer, the author and illustrator behind the storied Olivia series, is teaming up with David Sedaris on a book of animal fables for this fall, titled Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. (According to PW: "Sedaris will be doing a lecture tour in October, which will also serve as the brunt of his tour for the new book. However, Little, Brown plans to tack an additional 10 days of bookstore events in early November onto that tour.")

"My Favorite Book Is Facebook." After hearing about Disney's upcoming Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, Jezebel imagines "how other children's favorites might be updated for today's young MySpacerati." (E.g., Wikipedia Brown, Boy E-Tective.) (via Educating Alice)

"Ten Tips for Reading Aloud with Your Preschooler." Check out this great list of tips, including #3: "Read wordless picture books with your children. Create a story for your child based on what is happening on each page. If your child is old enough, ask your child to 'read' the story to you." One of the "wordless" suggestions is Tomie dePaola's wonderful Pancakes for Breakfast. (Hat tip to Jen Robinson at PBS Booklights.)

Who is the Necromancer? Fans of Michael Scott's The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series should check out this, the first in a series of new teaser videos:



--Paul

What's Next from Yann Martel, and What's Next for Stephen Harper?

By Tom

On April 13, over seven years after he came out of nowhere to win the Booker Prize for what has remained one of the most popular novels of the last decade, Life of Pi, Yann Martel will release his next novel, Beatrice and Virgil. In the meantime, he's put his plans for the new novel through many versions (which you can get a hint of from what seems a very autobiographical opening to the new book, which tells the story of how a bestselling author named Harry had to abandon his great plans for a flip-book version of his new book, one half a novel and the other a nonfiction essay, a plan that Martel himself described to me, and no doubt to many others, for Beatrice and Virgil a couple of years ago). I've just had the chance to begin reading Beatrice and Virgil, and I can report that it is fully in the Martel style: graceful, funny, and provocative, as he embarks on a fictional experiment whose outcome you can't come close to guessing (50 pages in and I still haven't seen any sign of the donkey and monkey I know are coming at some point).

But in the past few years, he's also been fully immersed in another experiment in fiction, a two-person (and apparently one-way) book club he started called What Is Stephen Harper Reading? Starting in April 2007, inspired by the prime minister of Canada's indifference toward the arts and by what Martel sees as the shortage of "stillness" in his busy administrative life, Martel has sent a book to Prime Minister Harper every two weeks, along with a letter explaining his choice (which he also posts to his blog of the same name). He has only received a few replies, all of them form letters sent by Harper's office, and as far as I know no other public acknowledgment from the PM. (The first two years of letters were collected last fall in a book published in Canada under, yes, the same name.)

But now that he's about to embark on a lengthy book tour for Beatrice and Virgil, Martel's going to take a break from his biweekly correspondence. On Monday he posts his last letter for a few months, and he's allowed us to post a sneak peek at it over the weekend. His book choice is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and you can read the full text of his letter here. And as you will see below, Harper's reading schedule will not be neglected while Martel is on the road: he's asked a series of fellow Canadian authors to make their own selections, and write their own letters, while he's gone. Their names, and their choices, will be surprises, beginning on March 15.

Maybe one of them will send Harper a copy of Beatrice and Virgil...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 1, 2010

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The coolest thing happened to me last week. There was a stiff, mid-size envelope in my mailbox. I don't get as much mail as you do, but I do get my fair share (and I don't have any staff to help me with it). So what was this, what request, what demand? I noted that it came from the US. I opened it. Between two pieces of cardboard, a smaller envelope slipped out. On the front, top left, was the return address: The White House, Washington, DC 20500. I was intrigued. Not The White House. I opened the envelope, and there it was, on White House letterhead, a handwritten note from President Obama. I do believe my heart skipped a beat. A week later I'm still gingerly taking the note out to marvel at it. The President of the United States wrote to me"”to me! For sure I'm going to have the note framed. If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the gratuity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I'm not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him.

Not all heads of government are as good. For proof, the book I'm sending you this week, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Joseph Stalin made his people miserable for all of his reign as leader of the Soviet Union, from 1922 to 1953. Or to put it more accurately, whatever good he did was obliterated by the nearly immeasurable evil that came with it. The title of most heinous dictator of the 20th century of course goes to Adolf Hitler, but Hitler burned out quickly, in twelve years, and was atypical of German leadership. Stalin, on the other hand, he lasted, he died an old man while still in power, he was a beacon of steady and stable evil. And while his crimes"”social upheaval, economic catastrophe, massive and systematic human rights violations, widespread famine and poverty"”were worse than those of his predecessors or successors, Russia didn't fare well before him under the Tsars, didn't fare well after him under the Soviet leaders that followed, and isn't faring well under the authoritarian regime now in place. I am reminded of that adage, "Man's inhumanity to Man", but with a variation for this case: "Russians' inhumanity to Russians". It has always puzzled me how the Russians, despite the blazing individual geniuses they have produced in the arts and sciences, have otherwise been such a calamity to themselves (and to the Europeans who had the misfortune of living in the shadow of their empire). What other country has produced a Nobel Peace Prize winner"”Mikhail Gorbachev"”who sought only to liberate his people from themselves? And this, in a country that has never been colonized and whose ills cannot be blamed on others.

There's a paragraph on page 104 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that summarises the attitude I'm talking about:

He could barely stand any longer. But he kept on somehow. Shukhov [that is, Ivan Denisovich] had once had a horse like that. He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death. And then they had skinned the hide off him.

He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death"”and with no explanation as to why. It's just what you do. And the "he" mentioned at the start is not another horse but a human being, a fellow prisoner, one whom Ivan Denisovich also thinks highly of and will just as blithely see worked to death. One feels like crying out, Where's the humanity, the benevolence, the compassion? Well, there's precious little of that in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This short novel tells the story of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag, the massive forced labour camp system that was nearly a parallel society in Communist Russia. At most, the roughest of fraternity is fleetingly expressed during moments when fear and want have momentarily abated. At all other times, each prisoner strictly looks out for himself. It makes for appalling living, lucidly documented by Solzhenitsyn, and a searing indictment of what Stalin did to his own people.

I sent you, nearly three years ago now, Animal Farm, by the English writer George Orwell. It's interesting to compare that novel and Ivan Denisovich. Both works cover the same ground, but very differently. The first portrays the evil of Stalinism by means of allegory, the second by means of realism. Which do you prefer?

I need to inform you of a temporary change in our little book club. Up till now, it's just been you and me. But I'm leaving on a four month trip soon, in part to promote my next novel, and I was worried that the logistics of getting a book and a letter to you every two weeks while on tour would be too much of a strain. So I've decided to invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey. I'm glad about the decision. This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you? My knowledge of the book world is very limited. Why not plumb the literary depths of other writers?

So your next book and letter, to be delivered to your office in exactly two weeks, on Monday, March 15th, will come from a different Canadian writer. I won't tell you who"”let it be a surprise"”nor do I have any idea what the next book will be. That too will be a surprise.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

"Genre is a maximum security prison": David Shields Talks to Heidi Broadhead Somewhere Else

By Tom

Heidi Broadhead doesn't do all her good blogging for us: she's also the "Arts Nerd" over at our local politics/culture/etc. blog, Publicola, and yesterday she posted an excellent interview with David Shields (also local) about his new literary "manifesto," Reality Hunger. The book has often been seen as an argument against fiction (which it is in some ways) but here's a section from the interview that explains that it's really an argument against genre:

AN: And I wanted you to talk a little bit about
the"”wait, I wrote it down"”"the reality continuum""”somewhere between
J.R.R. Tolkien and a list of facts.

DS: Right. I talk about this guy who actually died a
year or two ago named Shields who live in Eastern Washington. He kept
the longest-running journal ever. He kept a journal of every single
thing of every day. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages.
That would be close to something quasi-real. And someone like Tolkien
is obviously quite fantastical and even there, people who knew him say
how unbelievably autobiographical that book is if you know how to read
it, because it all just tracks very closely to his own life in a
strange way....

It's taken me a long time, but some of the work I love has a
nonfictional frame to give the work a sense of urgency or risk or
discomfort or nakedness or authenticity. So many of the works I love
the most want to investigate the world rather than entertain the reader.

But I'm just as much opposed to, say, a straight-ahead memoir as I
am to a conventional novel because they both seem to me to be way too
comfortable with conventions of genre. There's a line in the book where
I say, "genre is a minimum security prison." And also there's a
wonderful line by Walter Benjamin in the book, "All great works of
literature either invent a genre or dissolve one," which I really love.

To me, what happens when you dissolve a genre, you get to this:
"When we are not sure, we are alive." The ones that really knock me out
are works in which we're sort of off the click track and we don't know
where we're going. Again, going back to Maggie Nelson's book
(which we had been talking about earlier): What is that book? Is it a
memoir? Is it a philosophical meditation? Is it a history of the color
blue? Is it a cri de coeur about her breakup? Is it art criticism? You
don't know where you're going from paragraph to paragraph. All that you
do know is that you're going deeper into, you know, a human heart. I
just love that feeling, and I think the best books have that quality.
I'm interested in work that hovers between things because when you
hover between things you can go anywhere you want and your loyalty as a
writer becomes investigating something rather than going through the
paces.

One thing that's striking to me: this "manifesto" has to this moment received 21 customer reviews on Amazon: all 5 stars. That unanimity is rare for any book, but especially one that aims to be provocative. I know customer reviews are a noisy piece of data--maybe they're all friends and family of Mr. Shields (surely he has one enemy out there somewhere!)--so I'm not sure what it means, if anything, but I wonder if his provocation is in fact so consistent with the cultural moment that no one disagrees with it (at least no one of the sort who will buy and read a literary manifesto right when it comes out).

Meanwhile, here's the "author video" we have on the site for the book, which captures a bit of Shields's mashup style and his taste for autobiographical reality:

--Tom

Omni Daily News

By Jon Foro

Serving the sentence: The New Yorker's Book Bench blog reports on a clever project by Electric Literature: recruiting visual artists to create short animations of single sentences from authors such as Aimee Bender, Rick Moody, and Michael Cunningham. A sample:

Trail blazers: Peter Robins at the Guardian looks at the emerging trend of jacketless hardcovers, calling them "unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance[s]." Collectible dealers may disagree.

"Imagine if you will": Not exactly news (or even book news, for that matter), but this 1981 story from KRON TV (San Francisco) on the first newspapers to test the waters of the Internet is interesting, if only for ironic hindsight: a mention of "both local San Francisco newspapers," and an editor's remark that they're "not in it to make money."

Moving & Shaking: Bruce Feiler's American Prophet: Moses and the American Story takes the top spot today on the Mover's & Shakers list. Please appreciate my restraint in stretching metaphors here.

--Jon

Graphic Novel Friday: "Hellboy: The Wild Hunt"

By Alex Carr

Rejoice, Hellboy fans: On March 17, Mike Mignola will finally provide the truth behind his titular character's heritage with Hellboy: The Wild Hunt. It's a storyline that's been cryptically brewing for years, and it must be terrifying and liberating for Mr. Mignola to finally reveal his grand scheme. I started Dark Horse's latest collection without any knowledge of the answers
laid bare within its fiery-tinged pages, but then pieces began to fall into place--bits of Hellboy esoterica that I hadn't thought about in years started to become increasingly relevant to the story.

Readers would do well to bone up on Darkness Calls and, shockingly--at least to me--Strange Places. I thought the latter to be more of a cast-off story in the Hellboy mythos; one to read and enjoy without having to dwell too long on the possibility of its effect on greater continuity. But it's testament to Mignola's planning and patience that such stories would eventually flourish as part of the whole. Strange Places is one of my favorite collections (and the third "Library Edition" hardcover more than does it justice), and when its plot points were referenced in The Wild Hunt, I knew something was up Hellboy's duster sleeves.

Artist Duncan Fegredo, who partnered with Mignola on Darkness Calls, returns here with the unenviable task of drawing Hellboy. I'm pleased to note that there is no disappointment in The Wild Hunt. Fegredo stays close to what made the series such a success: the chiseled, jagged details are here, as are the stark panels with shadowed images nearly indecipherable upon first glance. But, as noted in Mark Chadbourn's introduction, there are moments where the body language of a much-maligned villain gives the reader reason to linger. As apparent in the bonus features section, Mignola is still very hands-on when it comes to visuals, but it's in these quiet panels where Fegredo's work lends emotional weight. And where Mignola's female characters tend to haunt and lurk, Fegredo adds a tenderness to Hellboy's partner in the later half--but not to worry, fans need look no further than the principle villainess, The Queen of Blood, for their fix of femme fatales.

When a writer builds his fiction on a foundation of mystery, it's rare for the answers to be as interesting as the questions (see how Lost's sixth season has floundered thus far--sorry, fans, I'm right there with you, but it's been a snooze-y first few episodes), yet The Wild Hunt delivers. This is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the series. I wish I could say more, but I do not want to be the guy to let slip one of the most surprising, satisfying, and well-played revelations in popular fiction. At the book's close, my own imagination bested, I realized that no matter how obscure or how deeply Mike Mignola selects the folklore with which to tell his stories, there are universal legends at work that never rest.

The Wild Hunt releases in March, and readers left reeling can steady themselves with the promise of more Hellboy-inspired titles in 2010: May sees the publication of B.P.R.D.: War on Frogs and Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels, and then B.P.R.D.: 1947 is rumored to release later this summer.

Omni Daily News

By Lauren Nemroff

Grisham's Writing for a New Audience: Look out kids, the long arm of the law is coming.  Well, the long arm of John Grisham's pen, anyway.  Grisham--the author of numerous mega-bestselling legal thrillers--follows the trend of the past few years of adult trade authors expanding their reach into the children's book market.  According to this morning's Publisher's Weekly Children's Bookshelf,  he's writing a new series for middle grade readers (and older fans, of course) which features a 13-year-old legal prodigy, Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer.  The first book hits shelves on May 25.  We'll keep you posted when the product page goes live.  

Joe Hill's Latest Reviewed:  Catch Janet Maslin review of Joe Hill's new novel, Horns. This is the second novel from the critically-acclaimed author of Heart-Shaped Box. 

Moving & Shaking: Powerful minds prevail on today's Mover's & Shakers list as psychiatrist and researcher Richard Restak's Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance takes the top spot today. 

--Lauren

10 Rules for Writers: Top 10s from the Guardian's Top 10s

By Tom

You need never ask a novelist "Do you have any advice for young writers?" at a reading again: thanks to the Guardian, you have all the answers you could possibly choose from. In honor of Elmore Leonard's now-legendary 10 Rules of Writing, which is about to come out as a book in the UK, they asked 28 fiction writers to list their professional pointers (see part one and part two). There's a lot of agreement over doubtless the two most important tips: "Read lots" and "Write lots" (to quote Ian Rankin's versions). There are hits and misses among the lists (Geoff Dyer's is the one to my mind that could deserve its own book, but I also recommend the advice of Anne Enright, Jonathan Franzen, A.L. Kennedy, Colm Toibin, and Sarah Waters), and if you enjoy these things like I do you'll have fun paging through them, but I thought I'd pull together my own top 10 of the top 10s. Unsurprisingly, though, I couldn't keep it to just 10, so here are two top 10s: one on technique, and one on life:

How to Write:

1. Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov. (Geoff Dyer)
2. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction.
   When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them,
   that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
   People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so
   when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard
   to instruct the reader. (Hilary Mantel)
   
3. Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on. (Andrew Motion)
   
4. Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life
   in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things
   have to be altered to take account of these changes. (Rose Tremain)
   
5. Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life,
   everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth
   thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though
   they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. (Sarah Waters)
   
6. You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings "“ those
   turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they
   appeared on the page "“ but go back and look at them with a very beady eye.
   Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every
   little twinge of satisfaction is suspect "“ it's the ones which amount
   to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.) (Diana Athill)
   
7. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you
   ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live
   self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop
   arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. (Anne Enright)
8. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous
   research for a novel is devalued along with it. (Jonathan Franzen)
9. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it. (David Hare)
10. Talent trumps all. If you're a ­really great writer, none of these
    rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the
    pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity
    of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would
    have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela
    Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would
    be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules
    remain important. And, Â­crucially, only by understanding what they're
    for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them. (Sarah Waters)
    

How to Live:

1. Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant. (Hilary Mantel)
2. The first 12 years are the worst. (Anne Enright)
3. You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you
   feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the
   awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no
   matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic
   to the real business of writing and should be cherished. (Will Self)
4. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. (Margaret Atwood)
5. Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from
   family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It
   might be better to celebrate those you love "“ and love itself "“ by
   writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity
   intact. (A.L. Kennedy)
6. You see more sitting still than chasing after. (Jonathan Franzen)
7. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard. (Helen Dunmore)
8. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)
9. No going to London. (Colm Toibin)
10. My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away
    from my proper work. (Philip Pullman)

Meanwhile, in response to all these, Laura Miller at Salon has posted five rules for writers from readers (or at least from one reader who reads (or at least starts) many, many books a year). They can be pretty much summed up as "Stop messing around and tell a good story" (which is how you can sum up Leonard's original 10 as well). No doubt that's healthy advice. But I do have to differ with her regretful pox on style:

But whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind
that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by
specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and
photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of
breathtaking sentences.

Really? People don't go to movies to see lighting and photography? What are all those people (still!) lining up at Avatar to see? Pretty much "lighting and photography," as far as I can tell. I'm sure they wouldn't be there if there wasn't a story to hang it all on (that's known as a Terrence Malick movie), but sometimes people want to see differently, and style, more than anything, is what makes that happen.

--Tom

Hanging on the Colophon

By Jon Foro

What's in a logo? With MIT Press, apparently more than I realized.

Scorsese's new flick, Shutter Island, put me in the mood to browse one of last year's creepier books, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals--published by MIT and written up in this space in October of last year.

Now, I've seen the MIT colophon thousands of times over the years, stamped on spines of books I'll never be smart enough to read. But today it hit me that it's not just a classy little icon, but it actually represents the letters MITP. It's the P, for Press, that had made it such an uncrackable code all that time. It took three seconds to confirm this at the MIT Press blog, and to discover that:

• It was created in 1963 by Media Lab designer Muriel Cooper, whose work with early computers greatly influenced user interface design
• Some people mistake it for the Black Flaglogo
• The online MITPTyper application converts a text-string into an MIT-style logo, which is both very cool and possibly useless
• My original title for this post (High Colophonic) had already been scooped

--Jon

Book Nostalgia Trip: How a Book Used to Be Made

By Tom

Oh my goodness. For a word fetishist like me, this 1947 video from Encyclopedia Britannica is enough to bring tears of ... I'm not sure what: nostalgia? Not really--it was a pain in the neck to make a book this way. Maybe just wonder, at all the obsolete ingenuity of it, and at how physical the process was: lead, wax, copper, wood, and all those intricate machines and burly hands. And for some reason I find it equally affecting that all that labor and attention would go into printing ephemeral crap, just as it did for more immortal 1947 releases like Under the Volcano or The Diary of a Young Girl. (From Book Patrol, via Maud)

--Tom

Omni Daily News

By Dave Callanan

Spy Games: Mosab Yousef, the son of a Hamas founder, reveals in an upcoming memoir that he served as a top Israeli informant for over ten years and helped prevent dozens of terror attacks against Israel.

Yousef, dubbed "the Green Prince" by his handlers, told [Israel's] Haaretz daily that he was one of Israeli intelligence's most valuable sources in Gaza. His reports led to the arrests of several high-ranking Palestinian figures during the violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that began in 2000, the newspaper said.

Son of Hamas is also currently #1 on our Movers & Shakers list.

$0.10 to $1M:  The sale of a 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1--the first comic to introduce us to Superman--fetched a record $1M on Monday and is considered to be the "official public record" for a comic book sale.  Omni blogger and comics fan Alex Carr has been unavailable for comment due to prolonged fainting spells.

Sci-Frey: New York Magazinespeculates that novelist James Frey might also be the mysterious John Twelve Hawks, the never-been-seen science-fiction author of the Fourth Realm Trilogy.  Frey, who is already penning six-part sci-fi series under the pen name Pittacus Lore, had this to say in response: 

"I will neither confirm nor deny that I am John Twelve Hawks, Pittacus Lore, or anyone else ... I will say that I have done, and I am continuing to do, projects that will come out anonymously or with invented names on them."

Thanks for clearing that up, James.