In her review of John Matteson's “The Lives of Margaret Fuller,” Laura Skandera Trombley poses an interesting question: “What must it have been like always to be the smartest person in the room without any of the privileges accorded to men?”

That's what Fuller continually had to contend with in a circle that included Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne and Horace Greeley. The newspaper editor and reformer Greeley hired her to become the New York Tribune’s first literary editor and then the paper’s first foreign correspondent. Emerson asked her to serve as editor of his transcendentalist journal the Dial. Less charitably, Poe considered her a “busybody” and an intellectual anomaly of her sex. Skandera Trombley, an eminent Twain scholar and president of Pitzer College, offers a long-overdue look at one of the more interesting intellectual figures of 19^th century America.

It’s hard to believe that 50 years have passed since Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
was first published.  And now it's back again in an anniversary, hard-cover edition with the original jacket art. Carolyn Kellogg knew the story of the book and the popularity of the movie starring Jack Nicholson and Randall Patrick McMurphy. But until now she hadn't read the book and wondered if it deserved all the hype it has received. You can find her verdict in this Sunday's coverage.

Times book critic David Ulin reviews Nathan Englander’s short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” noting that much of this work involves the “tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.”  Englander shows his range and skill, tilting “toward the magical realist or, more precisely, toward the tradition of Jewish fable writing as embodied by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem.”

More after the jump

To celebrate the Super Bowl face-off between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, two publishers have made a little wager. If the Patriots win, New York-based Other Press will promote two of Boston-based Beacon Press' books for a week, and vice-versa if the Giants take the trophy.

In a press release, Beacon Press wrote, "The classic New York-Boston sports rivalry struck the publishers, both independent presses, as a ripe opportunity to engage in some fun, harmless, book-loving competition." Neither Beacon Press nor Other Press focus on books about sports. Both are independents with scholarly, literary lists. Gender studies, fiction, and the environment? Yes. The gridiron? No.

If there is a history of cross-promotion, this may be the first winner-take-all promotion. "I’m thrilled to be working with our friends at Beacon Press on this promotion," said Terry Aikers, manager of online publicity and social media at Other Press in its competing press release.

The two sides -- I mean publishers -- have adopted the boastful stance of pro sports players. “I think it’s great that Beacon is basically volunteering to do my job for me for a week," Aikers added. "Maybe I’ll take a vacation."

There is also a giveaway connected to the contest. The publisher located in the winning city will give away a selection of books in celebration. Beacon Press writes, "Details of the giveaway will be posted online after the inevitable Pats victory." Confident that that the Giants will win, Other Press is already sending out a link to the publishers' giveaway entry page.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Credit: Elise Amendola / Associated Press

In less than four years, the Concord Free Press has given away thousands of books, free of charge. Its founder, Stona Fitch, admits that it's not exactly a business model, but there's more to it than just freebies. In exchange for receiving a free paperback, the Concord Free Press asks that a charitable donation be made to a worthy cause of the reader's choosing.

Last week, it crossed a major benchmark: Concord Free Press readers have given away more than $250,000.

"Getting something beautiful in the mail for free makes people’s heads spin. Once they get over trying to figure out what the catch is, it inspires them to be generous. They really get it," said Fitch in a phone interview from the publisher's modest office in West Concord, Mass., which boasts a view of a prison. The press is a registered nonprofit, staffed entirely by volunteers, with support from donors that include the novelist Russell Banks.

As for the catch, there is none. Really! The books are free. Readers are asked to make a donation, of whatever size they like, to whatever organization they like, and then log their gifts on the Concord Free Press website. It's all done on the honor system.

"We cannot be the charity police," Fitch admits. "If anything, I think that number’s low. A lot of people do something, donate to a charity, and forget to go online and tell us about it."

Concord Free Press does a limited run of each book -- about 3,000 copies -- and numbers them to aid the donation tracking. Since they encourage readers to pass the books along when they've finished, they can see when a book spawns five, six or seven separate donations. They travel all over the world, to readers as far away as Argentina and Russia. Fitch notes that the books are particularly popular in Britain.

For a project like this to work, the books have to be good, things that people actually want to read. And they are. Its authors include Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Lucius Shepard, Fitch himself and a collection of writing about money with pieces by Mona Simpson, Michelle Huneven, Jonathan Ames, Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky and more.

The press' highest profile writer is Gregory Maguire, the author of "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," which was turned into the successful Broadway musical. Maguire's book "The Next Queen of Heaven," set outside of the world of Oz, was turned down by his regular publisher, so he gave it to the Concord Free Press.

He did, in fact, give it to the press. All writers provide work to the Concord Free Press for free; its designers, who are excellent, donate their time. When he came up with the idea, Fitch's wife sighed, "I think you've come up with another way for writers not to get paid." And then she threw herself into the project. "It's a labor of love," Fitch says.

It's not exactly intuitive, connecting free books to a plethora of charitable donations. Fitch, who was once the kind of musician who could be found playing "at VFW clubs and traveling around in crappy vans," has an old-school DIY ethic. He also spent years managing the Gaining Ground organic farm, located at Henry David Thoreau's birthplace; it's a nonprofit that donates its harvests to food banks and homeless shelters.

"I learned the value of giving away something beautiful for free to someone who would be incredibly appreciative," Fitch says. "It's an ancient idea, the gift economy."

Earning a quarter-million dollars for charity was not what Fitch had expected. "When we first started it, we weren’t sure whether people would take the books and never writes us back, or maybe they wouldn’t even bother to take the books and I’d be sitting here in our office on a big stack of them," he says. "My agent told me not to do it, a lot of my friends told me not to do it. But a couple key people said 'Why not?' We took a big step to start it up, and three years later, we don’t want to stop. It’s just too much fun."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Syzmborska died Wednesday at home in Krakow, Poland.

The 88-year-old poet had been afflicted with lung cancer, the Associated Press reported. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an "irreparable loss to Poland's culture."

When Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, the committee cited her "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Szymborska published her first book of poetry in 1952; her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she once said. 

Her last collection, "Here," was published in the U.S. in 2008. The poem "Greek Statue," our reviewer Dana Goodyear wrote, is "a piece that, in gently touching on the great lyric themes of time, death and art-making, shows Szymborska at her subtle best, finds the perfect metaphor for that pause. At once fleeting and frozen, the statue's torso, she writes, 'lingers/ and it's like a breath held with great effort,/ since now it must/ draw/ to itself/ all the grace and gravity/ of what was lost.' Her most skillful poems — think of them as broken friezes or bits that suggest rather than encompass the whole — do this same work."

In 1996, after the Nobel announcement, the Times' Warsaw bureau chief, Dean E. Murphy, spoke to Szymborska -- "a retiring woman with wispy gray hair who cherishes her solitude" -- about her work. "The award came as a surprise to Szymborska -- and most everyone else in Poland -- not because she is considered unworthy, but because her poetry speaks mostly to universal themes rather than the parochial political subjects that have distinguished Eastern European verse since World War II," he wrote. Selections from that Q&A follow.

Q: Is your poetry an expression of vanity?

A: If you mean, is it a form of exhibitionism, probably it is. I have never really thought about it seriously, but telling one's feelings to unknown people is a little bit like selling one's soul. On the other hand, it brings great happiness. All of us have sad things happen to us in our lifetimes. In spite of everything, when those terribly horrible things happen to a poet, he or she can at least describe them. There are other people who, in a way, are sentenced to live through such experiences in silence.

Are you an ultra-modern new parent who wants to raise kids the tried-and-tested mid-century way? "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care," the bestselling child-rearing bible, will be available as an ebook starting next week, Skyhorse Publishing has announced. Dr. Spock's manual has sold more than 50 million copies and gone through nine editions since its initial publication in 1946; now parents can read it on Kindle, Nook or iPad. Three other Dr. Spock books have already made the ebook leap: "Dr. Spock's The School Years," "Dr. Spock's The First Two Years" and "Dr. Spock's Pregnancy Guide."

The literary website The Millions looks at the practice of book blurbing. Book blurbs, the quotes that appear on the back of a book from other writers, were dubbed "disgusting tripe" by George Orwell. Back in 2005, Nick Tosches tackled the same topic for Book Forum, from the perspective of both a book blurbee and blurber. He confirmed the suspicion that many authors don't actually read the books they blurb. "I like you. I don't need to read it," he told a new friend who'd asked for a blurb for his first book. "Just tell me a little about it and I'll give you the blurb." Tosches writes that his blurb -- "a howl of laughter from the abyss of horror, a comic nightmare from the sick, troubled sleep of this century's desolate end" -- did appear on the book, but doesn't reveal the title. What was it? Jerry Stah's "Permanent Midnight."

The website Book Riot, launched late last year by a roster of experienced book bloggers, has upgraded its design. Instead of looking like a blog, it now looks like a magazine, better showcasing the work of its writers.

Did you know that Newt Gingrich likes pandas? The N.Y. Daily News parsed eight years of the Republican candidate's Amazon reviews -- at one point, Gingrich, who when he's not running for office writes historical fiction, earned the site's "top reviewer" status. Books he commented on included Henry Kissinger's "Does America Need a Foreign Policy," "The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War" by James Brady, and Terry L. Maple's "Saving the Giant Panda." Sadly, for Gingrich, there are not many pandas in Florida.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Barnes & Noble won't carry print books from Amazon's new print publisher, according to reports that surfaced today. The news may signal a growing division between the online retailer and the nation's largest brick-and-mortar bookseller.

The word came from Brad Stone, who recently wrote Businessweek's cover story on Amazon Publishing and its head, publishing veteran Larry Kirschbaum. Calling this "a declaration of war," Stone posted an excerpt of an email from Jaime Carey, Barnes & Noble's chief merchandizing officer, On Google+.

"Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms. Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain eBooks to our customers," Carey wrote. In addition to exclusive deals Amazon has announced with specific authors, in December it launched KDP Select, a way for authors to participate in an unusually structured Kindle lending library and payment pool,  as long as their e-books remained exclusive to Amazon.

 "Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content," Carey continued. "It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest."

Amazon has partnered with one traditional publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which has agreed to distribute the print editions of Amazon Publishing's books through its New Harvest imprint. Those books, too, would not be welcome at Barnes & Noble, the publishing industry newsletter Publishers Marketplace confirmed.

Carey concluded, "We don’t get many requests for Amazon titles, but If customers wish to buy Amazon titles from us, we will make them available only online at bn.com." This points to something Californians became aware of last year: Amazon is exempt from paying sales tax because it has no retail establishment in the state. The California Legislature  passed a bill mandating that the retail giant collect taxes;  Amazon retaliated by threatening to launch a ballot initiative to repeal it (even canvassing in front of brick-and-mortar bookstores), and the two sides came to an agreement postponing the sales tax mandate.

Amazon has been publishing books for some time through small imprints based in Seattle. Its New York imprint, with Kirschbaum at the head, seeks to move into the same territory as traditional publishers, with high-profile signings of James Franco, Tim Ferriss, Penny Marshall and Deepak Chopra.

But it will have to figure out how to get those books into people's hands.

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Barnes & Noble stays in Leonard Riggio's hands

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A Barnes & Noble store in Coral Gables, Fla. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Former L.A. Lakers coach Phil Jackson is working on a memoir. Oh, he coached the Chicago Bulls too? Whatever. It's a follow-up to his book "Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior" and will be coauthored by the same writer, Hugh Delehanty. The memoir, about his championship seasons, will be titled "Eleven Rings" and published by Penguin.

Happy 10th birthday to the books and music blog Largehearted Boy, creation of David Gutowski, which celebrated with an event at Brooklyn's Word Bookstore. Electric Literature documented the festivities, and Book Bouroughing, a new New York literary events website cofounded by Gutowski, got backstage photos.

Do not steal these snapshots of beat poet Allen Ginsberg in his New York apartment in a tux, in red suspenders, and, at a pool with William S. Burroughs, in a bathing suit. But do check them out. (via WFMU)

New York Review of Books Classics brings forgotten books back into print. For the last few years, that's meant bringing them alive as e-books, too. Which is one of the publisher's strongest e-book sellers? Editor Edwin Frank says it's "The Long Ships," by Swedish author Frans T. Bengtsson, first published in the U.S. in 1955. It has an introduction by Michael Chabon.

NBC tells Wired why its e-books will be better than other ebooks: video. The company has lots of it,  knows how to shoot and edit it, and has clear ownership. Now all NBC needs to add is the books part. Right? Right?

Goodreads has stopped using Amazon's data. The site that has most effectively combined social networking and books has decided that the world's biggest online seller is not a good partner for its book listings. "Quality book information — such as titles, authors, publication dates, and cover images — is the life blood of a site dedicated to book discovery and literary discussion. Since its inception, Goodreads has relied on Amazon's public API for much of this information," writes founder Otis Chandler, "and while Amazon data was free, it came with many restrictions. For instance, we couldn't use their information for our mobile apps or link to competing bookstores." If I were a betting woman, I'd wager Goodreads will be rolling out some new local features very soon.

From the Atlantic, a listicle: contemporary authors' favorite books, culled from the 2007 book "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Then-Lakers coach Phil Jackson listens to the national anthem before the start of Game 3 of the 2009 NBA finals in Orlando, Fla. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

Two years after the death of her husband, David, longtime Cosmopolitan Magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown announced a whopping $30 million donation to fund new media. The funds are being given to both the Columbia Journalism School and the Stanford School of Engineering to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Does 32 years at the helm of a magazine really rake in that kind of money? Could it have been the success of her bestselling how-to book, "Sex and the Single Girl"?

Well, no. David Brown, who attended Stanford and Columbia, was a film producer who had an enormous hit with "Jaws," going on to make "Cocoon," "The Verdict," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Chocolat" and "A Few Good Men."

Commenting on the gift, Helen Gurley Brown said in a statement, "David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge."

The institute will have an East Coast director and a West Coast director, located at Columbia and Stanford, respectively. Each university will receive $12 million to endow the institute, with additional funds going to set up a hi-tech newsroom at Columbia and to provide fellowship grants for new media innovation.

It's interesting that the gift is blurring the line between content and technology, encouraging crossover and collaboration; media have been slower than some other industries to develop the two in tandem.

Helen Gurley Brown, who retired from her editorship at Cosmopolitan in 1997, will celebrate her 90th birthday on Feb. 18.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Helen Gurley Brown with husband David Brown in 1979. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

"The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?" That was Jonathan Franzen speaking at a book festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing -- that’s reassuring," he said, the Telegraph reports.

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that."

Scottish author Ewan Morrison is equally skeptical. In the Guardian, he describes a self-published e-book bubble, putting author Amanda Hocking -- who is said to have made $2.5 million writing and selling e-books on her own -- in what he calls Stage Five: Market Reversal/Insider Profit-Taking. "For the hundreds of thousands of newcomers to self-epublishing to believe that they can become as successful as these role models is a dangerous delusion," he writes, "one capitalised on by companies who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising." Morrison's saddest conclusion? "I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things."

But not everyone is bashing e-books. On Monday, Open Road media announced an e-books partnership with ProPublica, the first online news organization to have won a Pulitzer Prize."Ebooks are a very promising platform for publishing journalism with high impact, and therefore a critical venue for ProPublica," Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief and CEO of ProPublica, said in a statement. Open Road's ProPublica e-books will include multimedia such as video, maps, photos and additional documentary material.

At the core of books, e-books and print, is story. And one story that won big at Sunday night's Screen Actors Guild Awards was "The Help." Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, a long-lived bestseller, has proved successful on screen, taking three of the major SAG Awards: best actress for Viola Davis, best supporting actress for Octavia Spencer and best ensemble cast, the actors union's highest honor.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jonathan Franzen reads in Los Angeles in 2010. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Are you going to see "Albert Nobbs"? The film, which has been nominated for three Oscars (cross-dressing Glenn Close is thought to give Meryl Streep some competition) may be among the award season's most literary. It was adapted from a short story by Irish writer George Moore, the screenplay was co-written by Booker prize-winner John Banville, and it was directed by Rodrigo Garcia, son of Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Speaking of literary people and the screen, writer A-J Aronstein writes in The Millions about HBO coming to the suburban neighborhood he grew up in to film "The Corrections." Aronstein's childhood home was up to be the Lamberts', right at the center of the book; Aronstein wrote his undergraduate thesis on Franzen's 2001 novel. What are the odds? Too great, apparently. They picked another house. Which was probably for the best; John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about the mixed experience of his North Carolina home being used in "One Tree Hill." That essay, which appeared in GQ, is in "Pulphead: Essays:," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award.

Susan Straight's 2001 novel "highwire Moon" was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Southern California writer has made her hometown, Riverside, the setting and center of much of her work. Now she's writing at KCET about the Inland Empire; she has explored a sheep farm, looked at metal sun shades and visited her grandmother's old trailer park. Her fantastic essays are accompanied by photographs that make the place look like a mid-century heaven that time forgot.

A fantastic new essay by Emily Rapp appears in The Rumpus, where she writes of the power of female friendship. "Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, 'bonus' relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children." If that last bit sounds alarming, wait until you reach the end of her piece.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg