Jean Hannah Edelstein

Oh we want a montage ... Tonya Harding at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Photograph: Jack Smith/AP

If you are not entirely pleased with the BBC coverage of the Beijing Olympics (I, too, can become quite agitated when there's not enough time devoted to the ladies' table tennis competition), spare a thought for your counterparts across the pond, whose suffering is so much greater. For every two years, Americans must suffer through two weeks of NBC's particular brand of earnest Olympic television coverage, designed to fill viewers' hearts with sincere patriotic warmth, often against their will.

Write and wrong ... Rapper Foxy Brown exits Manhattan criminal court in March 2007. Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP

As if writers needed to feel any more pressure to add to their performance anxiety, news from New York indicates that we won't be getting our deadlines extended indefinitely. The American branch of Simon & Schuster has actually sued two high-profile putative authors - rappers Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown - for the return of advances for books that they were contracted to write, but never actually got around to finishing. While the cancellation of these respective authorial debuts may not be a great loss to world literature, that the publisher's attempts to recoup their advances is somewhat unusual in the industry makes me wonder if this could be the beginning of a troubling new precedent in publishing: greater intolerance for procrastination.

Horsing about ... Revellers, possibly inebriated ones, enjoy the Latitude festival at the weekend. Photograph: Louise Wilson/Getty

I arrived at the Latitude festival full of determination to loathe it, because I am one of those people who cannot be distracted by any number of jolly attractions, greasy food stands and poncho concessions from the essential fact that I am sleeping in a field with a lot of drunk strangers and portable toilets, which is just not very nice.

In a city bereft of a location with equivalent bookish cache to the British Library, entrepreneurs in Manhattan have provided New York's literati (as in anyone, published or not, who can afford to pay a hefty annual fee) with an opportunity to get out of their shoebox apartments into an atmosphere that is designed to be more conducive to wordsmithing: the space at Paragraph has been specially designed to provide the kind of atmosphere that brings forth beautiful prose and poetry.

Our nation's most-loved spy ... James Bond, as played by Daniel Craig

I feel sorry for Sebastian Faulks this week, just a little bit. Having given over only six weeks of his life (he says) to what must have been the rather jolly undertaking of turning out the rompy Devil May Care, I can't imagine that he will be exactly prostrated with grief to learn that some of the most dedicated fans of Mr Bond are taking to the streets - or, at least, the internet - to express their outrage at what they perceive to be Faulks' not totally accurate portrayal of our nation's most loved spy.

When I started kindergarten, aged five, I was already an independent and enthused reader (this makes me sound annoyingly precocious, but I also couldn't tie my shoelaces until I was 12). Of all the exciting things that formal education had to offer, it was the weekly visit to the well-stocked school library that put a spring in my step as I boarded the yellow bus.

Confide in me ... Join the 'confession' at the Victoria and Albert museum tonight. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Remember time capsules? Once upon a time (embarrassingly recently, actually) we considered it a good idea to ensure the endurance of our collective cultural legacy through burying vessels packed full of artifacts to be unearthed and marvelled over by future generations. But all of that enthusiastic digging now seems like it may have been a waste of time, thanks to our current inclination to document and disseminate news of our every embarrassing act. But is there artistic merit in this constant exposure of self and search for some form of absolution through modern exhibitionism?

Good news, perhaps, for would-be authors who fear their work has been forever lost in the hard-copy slush pile ("Oops, I seem to have filed the unsolicited manuscripts in the recycling bin!"), for with the launch of HarperCollins' Authonomy, the pile not only goes online, it goes (apparently) democratic.

A trip to Chicago and a ringing endorsement from a friend who is a passionate fan of Saul Bellow saw me ploughing through The Adventures of Augie March late last week. In keeping with a particular vein of 20th-century, American-dreamy fiction, Augie claws his way up from modest beginnings to have a series of increasingly bizarre and hair-raising adventures - now he's training eagles in Mexico! Now he's trapped on a drifting ship with a mad scientist! - which somehow require relatively little suspension of disbelief, as Bellow presents each further debacle with uncompromising forthrightness and audacity. I liked it. But I didn't love it. "Ah," I found myself thinking, "This book is so ... picaresque."

Page-turner? ... Damien Hirst's I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now. Photograph: Nigel Young/ © Damien Hirst and Booth-Clibborn Editions 1997

En route to the Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book exhibition at London's V&A - which the museum describes as being presented "at a time when the notion of the book is being challenged by the advent of the screen and computer" - I found myself sitting next to a woman who was reading an e-book on the tube with a handheld device. Peering over her shoulder (rude, I know, but it was for the sake of journalism) I could see that the book in question was a novel, with the text scrolled starkly across a light-grey screen. Reading fiction in such a fashion struck me as a deeply joyless affair: if that is the future of reading, then sign me up to the Luddite Society.

Hard-hearted as I am after my slush pile years, I didn't have high hopes for the "How To Get Published" masterclass at the London Book Fair on Saturday. Whatever could the panel, composed of a literary agent, editor, and several authors (including a self-published one), have to say that was original or informative about their prohibitively impenetrable industry? "One day I want to go to Spain," explained the gentleman sitting next to me, describing his goals for his writing career. He'd been sent to the event by his wife after years of work on his first book. I swallowed my urge to shake him, to shout, "You're not going to Spain! We all want to go to Spain!"

The muffled voice of things to come: novelist Edward Hogan

The favoured few ... Writers are unlikely to join the ranks of bestsellers. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty

Those inclined to think that writers are becoming the least important people in the publishing equation might feel that the recent news of "innovative" no-frills publishing endeavours fuels their suspicions.

Someone to talk to: Anna Maxwell Martin in Poppy Shakespeare. Photograph: Channel 4

In need of a comic couplet ... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Ohio, February. Photograph: Michael Czerwonka/EPA

Modesty: it's not exactly Americans' most beloved character trait. And as I watch the ongoing battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as they fight to clinch the Democratic nomination, I am struck by a profound sense that the candidates should have slightly less high self-esteem.

Timmy joins the google generation ... a publicity shot from the forthcoming Disney adaptation of Blyton's Famous Five

Can you hear it? The jolly hurrahs issuing forth from households across Middle England at the news that Enid Blyton's Famous Five are being revived for the noughties? No, neither can I. I was under the impression, actually, that we had generally agreed that the Five were a bit pallid and best left in the mid-twentieth century. But someone in the offices of Disney is sporting a smug smile, because they have hit upon a brilliant plan for reviving the scrappy crew. The Five have lain fallow long enough, it seems. And thus they will shortly be lighting up the lives of a new generation of British children with their particular kind of beloved literary mediocrity, in the form of an animated series on the Disney Channel and accompanying series of books.

Bundles of the New York Post rest on a Brooklyn sidewalk as New York gears up for another day ... Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

I love Mondays. I live for Mondays. On Mondays, the new podcast of This American Life is available for download.

If I can stop myself from listening in the morning (more than once it has caused me to be late for work), then my friend and fellow American ex-pat Sebastian comes round for dinner. We gather around my laptop with bated breath, as our grandparents and great-grandparents once huddled 'round the wireless to listen to FDR's fireside chats.

Face-painting is a fine (if a little itchy) way to mark World Book Day, but has anyone actually considered what the world is reading? Oh, yes! Amazon has: with their dedicated websites for the world's top book-consuming nations, it was a doddle for them to work out the bestsellers in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan. And - just wait for it - the earth-shattering survey confirms that in terms of literary consumption, denizens of these five great nations are committed to maintaining some of our most beloved derivative national stereotypes.

Not just a stag weekend destination ... Tallinn's Kumu art museum. Photograph: Dan Chung

"Have you fallen in love with Estonia?" asked one of my tour guides when she finished showing me around the baroque palace in the Kadriorg park. I demurred; love was not the word, quite. I was still trying to figure it out. Before work took me to Tallinn this week, I was mostly aware of Estonia as a place that was once part of the Soviet Union, a supplier of hearty entrants to the Eurovision song contest, and a common destination for stag weekends.

Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Put the cork back in the bottle ... winner's champagne, but no winner. Photograph: Vladimir Rys

If you are waiting to hear the fate of your entry in this year's Willesden Herald International Short Story competition, I have some unfortunate news: you didn't win. Nobody did. In a rather surprising move, the competition has announced - via a blog post by judge Zadie Smith - that the panel has decided not to present the prize this year to anyone, because of their disappointment with the standard of the entries. "We could not find the greatness we'd hoped for," Smith writes. "It's for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year."

Should a prize always be the necessary culmination of a competition? The assertion that the prize is not going to be awarded because of a dearth of greatness seems to imply that the field is being compared with fields in previous years when the necessary greatness was indeed discerned. This sort of approach doesn't really work in contests that are held at regular intervals: Olympic athletes aren't refused gold medals because they were a bit slower than the crop four years prior and Miss America contestants aren't penalised if they fail to be quite as winsome as the previous year's contenders.

Aren't you helping enough already? ... Oprah inspires another audience. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP

Quoth Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday when making her earth-shattering announcement, her new project is "part of the fulfilment of my life's purpose". Ooh, I thought. What else can Oprah possibly do? Isn't her life's purpose fulfilled by the extraordinary philanthropy, the king-making, the general televisual excellence? Why, it must be that she's running for president herself, thus eliminating the quandary suffered by me and legions of other Democrats who can't decide whether we want a female or black president! Hurrah!

But alas, my pen remains wavering uncertainly above the tick boxes on my absentee ballot. In fact, Oprah was not referring to a White House run of her own, but rather to the latest selection for her eponymous book club, a self-help tome called A New Earth by one Eckhart Tolle. (He is also the author of the best-selling self-help book The Power of Now, which was recently spotted in the hands of poor Britney Spears.) And not only is it the book club pick, but Oprah and Eckhart will host a series of 10 webcast discussions, each centred around one chapter - an unprecedented book club feature. This is going to be huge.

In terms of provoking stimulating book club debate, Ethan Frome was not necessarily the best choice: it's a sharp little novella, with nary a spare word or thought, and thus it wasn't really possible to pick at it in the way one can almost arbitrarily locate flaws in any kind of more substantial book. Our only point of contention was really who loved it the most: we sat round the table, munched cake and waxed lyrical about how much we adored each perfectly executed sentence.

Giant imagination ... 12 Steps Down

As a reader, I'm often quite averse to illustrations of my favourite texts. I much prefer to have the limitless opportunity to visualise narratives myself than to have the images dictated to me by an artist. Often my imagination is terribly literal and quite uncreative (every domestic scene takes place in my childhood home, every park is the one down the road from my flat). But the intriguing premise of 12 Steps Down, an exhibition in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall in London prompted me to let down my stubborn inflexibility: 25 artists collaborating to produce a body of work installed beneath the hall, inspired by JG Ballard's short story The Drowned Giant.

No offence? ... the Salt and Pepper creative writing group in Brighton. Photograph: Martin Godwin

It seemed innocent enough. Indeed, I was flattered: a friend of mine had begun penning a novel and asked me for my opinion on the opening chapters. With careful consideration, I sent back my comments - what I believed was a sensitive, constructive criticism of what I was told was an early draft. "Thanks," came the curt reply. And then I didn't really hear from him again. I thought I'd supplied helpful, encouraging suggestions for improvement. He'd heard me telling him his baby was really quite cute, but would be ever so much more adorable with a bit of plastic surgery.

I was filled with regret: I had evidently screwed up, and I wasn't sure how or where I'd gone wrong. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that I am a fan of having my work unsentimentally assessed. If I am looking for loving blandishments, I need only send writing to my mother. When I want to improve my work, however, I much prefer a heartless critic who will slash an early draft to bits with a red pen and throw it back in my face with the challenge to swallow my pride and fix it. And, no doubt because that's the style which I find most beneficial to my own writing, it's my natural inclination when I am playing the role of critic to be similarly challenging. Isn't that the point?

Don't do it yourself ... Government poster for wartime Make Do and Mend campaign

Perhaps not since my parents got me a puppy has a Christmas present caused me such rapture as a 1957 edition of James Norbury's The Penguin Knitting Book, presented to me by my friend Lucy to add to my collection of vintage instructional volumes with rules and rubrics for things I will never do.

For when I am not going mad for postmodern fiction, there are few things I enjoy more than perusing the pages of an old school how-to. The Norbury volume will fit nicely on my shelf between a book I have on learning to drive from the early 70s, presented to me by my mum when I first started learning ("Now driving can be easy...even for your wife!") and a tome on etiquette unearthed at an estate sale which advises that if one regrets one's choice of roast chicken over beef at Sunday lunch, no whingeing is allowed. Rather, you must "bury your regret deep in your own heart."

Booze to schmooze. Photograph: Don McPhee

When the call went out for extras to be in a Christmas party scene for the film version of Martin Wagner's play, The Agent, I naturally didn't hesitate to volunteer, interested to see if art would imitate life. After all, I got quite good at sneaking in to literary dos when I was working in publishing.

No depiction of publishing in books or films is complete without a scene at a bookish soiree. To wit, this particular scene in The Agent in which I was lingering in the background pretending to eat the same canapé over and over again was crucial in the build-up of the searing power struggle between the poor, exploited, down-to-earth author - bearded, carries a knapsack, expresses no preference for colour when offered a glass of wine - with his impeccably-groomed, flash-suited agent. But is it authentic?

At parties when conversation lags a little, my new favourite trick is to ask people what musical instruments they used to play at school. In any gathering of twenty- and thirty-somethings it seems it would be quite easy to assemble an orchestra of former youth musicians. One recent dinner I was at included an ex-cellist (me), a retired violist, a former clarinettist, and two erstwhile French horn players who compared distressing tales of various lip ailments that they'd acquired through strenuous blowing efforts.

Won't someone save us from this madness? ... Santa prepares for a Christmas without snow. Or common sense. Photograph: Patrick Pleul/EPA

When you awake on Christmas morning this year, don't get too excited by the sight of a square bulge in your stocking: odds are, you will be among the millions of lucky recipients of the book which Amazon has already pegged as this year's Christmas bestseller.

Somewhat surprisingly, it's not the latest culinary masterpiece by everyone's favourite buxom cook, nor the memoirs of Britain's most beloved sex-addicted television presenter: this year Santa's sleigh will be laden with handy paperback copies of Do Ants Have Arseholes? And 101 Bloody Ridiculous Questions. And this is not just, or not only, PR buzz: at the time of writing, it is actually Amazon UK's top seller.

Caveat emptor ... a Christmas bookshop display. Photograph: Martin Argles

For years, my brother and I have fought a war of Christmas book attrition. The battle is founded on mutual disrespect for each other's literary taste, which, unlike our prominent jawline, is apparently not genetic. I am almost exclusively a reader of fiction, while his choices tend to be altogether more serious: he memorably spent one of our family holidays reading Machiavelli on the beach.

Thus, I buy my brother contemporary novels; he gives me books about science, or classics which I perceive as stodgy; the volumes gather dust on our shelves. The obvious solution, of course, is that we should simply buy books that we fancy for ourselves and do away with the pointless exchange, but of course that would interfere with the spirit of giving, not to mention the amusing moment where we feign mutual gratitude.

Perhaps it's because I've now hit the elderly side of 25, or my new gig as a dating columnist, but lately I've sensed a disproportionate degree of interest in my failure to secure an ideal husband. After the most recent cousin's wedding, at which an unsettling number of relatives exclaimed, "What, no boyfriend? A nice girl like you? Here, you must take the number of my neighbour/friend's cousin/gastroenterologist. You'll love him!" I did begin to wonder if, perhaps, I am being too picky - or, as I prefer to describe it, "discerning".

Family romanticised ... Norman Rockwell's vision of Thanksgiving. Image: Corbis

Today is, alas, the sixth year in a row that I will be spending Thanksgiving away from my family. Like many an ex-pat American, I've sorted out arrangements for the evening such that my desire for turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie will be satted. But the Thanksgiving holiday is ultimately about sharing special times and rehashing ancient arguments with one's own family, particularly since - unlike Christmas - there's no façade of gift-giving or religion to hide behind. This means that the dinner party I'm attending tonight will inevitably fall short.

But don't despair, my fellow homesick Yanks (or Brits, for that matter)! Instead of sitting around, sadly munching a turkey sandwich from your local deli, you might as well indulge your melancholy: Thanksgiving away from home is the perfect opportunity to visit, or revisit, that great sub-genre of American literature: the dysfunctional American family epic.

Worker of the publishing world, unlikely to rise up ... Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones

Low Salaries Lead to Facebook Revolt was the headline in last week's Bookseller, but the fact that people in junior jobs in publishing don't get paid very well is not particularly a press-stopping revelation. (The emergence of a Facebook group commemorating anything is not, in my opinion, a newsworthy topic, but perhaps that's because I'm a member of "Schwartz's Deli Fan Club" and "Guardian arts bloggers".)

But while the question of whether low-level publishing jobs are badly paid is not up for debate (you always know who the assistants are by the way that they greedily consume canapés at book launches) the article did prompt the question of whether these low salaries contribute to the lack of diversity in the industry, which is (according to Richard Charkin, anyway, dominated by "Emmas") because those who don't have their parents bankrolling them can't possibly survive on the pittances which they earn for years of slaving in the hopes that they will somehow be able to snatch their bosses' jobs.

Look at this man's evident pain. Someone must pay ... Photograph: Czarek Sokolowski/AP

It happens to most readers, once in a while: we read a book; it's not very good; we wish there were a way we could reclaim the brief portion of our lives which we devoted to it. But we don't usually ask for our money back. Until now. After a novel legal judgment, 1,729 readers of James Frey's fictional addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, are getting their money back.

A quick summary for those who didn't follow the Frey saga, which was a very exciting scandal in the fishbowl world of New York publishing last year and a totally unimportant event in the grand scheme of things: AMLP was featured on Oprah's Book Club, became a massive best seller, apparently inspired lots of people to fight their own addictions, and then was exposed to be a significantly embroidered take on Frey's rather mundane experience with substance abuse. (Amusingly, it seems that his agent shopped the manuscript around first of all as a novel to no avail; when pitched the second time round as a memoir, publishers clamoured, as publishers do.)

Multiculturalism, according to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, is done. And he claims the British literary canon, along with a cohesive British national identity, is a regrettable casualty of a movement that was intended to give everyone an opportunity to feel at home but which has ended up giving no one an incentive to assimilate. In an excerpt from his new book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society, published in the Times, Sacks laments the decline of the British literary canon as a result of the current revolution in information technology:

From Iain, with best wishes and deep embarrassment ... Iain Sinclair signs books at the Hay festival. Photograph: David Levene

I was walking through Covent Garden at a rapid clip on my way back to the office from a meeting when I saw him: approaching in the other direction, a man with plastic-rimmed glasses, neatly cropped dark hair, a preppy jumper-shirt combination. "Where do I know that guy from?" I thought to myself as he strolled towards me. "School? Work? Does he live in my building?"

And then it hit me: I knew him from the jacket photo of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which (despite critical maligning) is one of my favourite books. "Jonathan Safran Foer!" I cried out, "You're my hero! Your book moved me to tears! And I'm really not a weeper!"

Oops, I did it again ... Britney Spears at the 2007 MTV Awards. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty

I am really sad about Britney Spears.

Room for a wider view ... wheat harvesting in Saskatchewan. Photograph: Craig Aurness/Corbis

At less than 200 years old, Canada is an infant in national terms: like the bullied younger sibling of a high-achieving elder one , it is often dismissed as a bit innocent, naive and unformed. Robertson Davies, one of Canada's foremost writers, described it as "a country you worry about" and the prime minister Stephen Harper recently established a cabinet portfolio for "Canadian Identity", perhaps in an attempt to help the nation define itself on the international landscape as something other than a left-wing, polite America awash in maple syrup.

But though I can't help but bristle when I come across people being dismissive of Canadian writing - I was disheartened when I worked in publishing to find that "Canadian" is an adjective often used to justify not publishing a book in the UK - I can't really blame those who overlook CanLit. I was once equally uninformed. Although I grew up a mere 200 miles from the border, which is inches in North American terms, I am sorry to say that I spent very little time even thinking about Canada, much less reading about it, while I lived in the States.

List, list, O, reading list! ... Thrilling times in the school library. Photograph: Graham Turner

Even though it's nearly a decade since I finished school, there's something about the crunch of leaves and autumnal breezes of September that gives me an urge to purchase new stationary, play sport in a skirt, and fire up a Bunsen burner. What I don't get nostalgic for, however, is the school reading list. Despite the fact that I studied English Literature at university and went on to undertake a variety of bookish professional pursuits, my central recollection of English Lit at school is of how much I disliked most of the books that I read for my classes. It seems to be quite a universal feeling: "Oh, I read that at school" is a sentence often accompanied by a disdainful curl of the lip, even by passionate book-lovers.

What's the cause of this phenomenon? I've considered a few possibilities. One is the quality of the teaching. Listening to someone who lectures from a script they have been using for the past 25 years and with which even they are bored to tears is uninspiring, particularly if other students aren't terribly interested, either. One of my classmates used to cry out in despair, "Too deep!" as our class was led through tedious line-by-line analyses of Jane Eyre and similar canonical landmarks. That said, I also had some outstanding, creative English teachers who I really admired: one, in particular, encouraged us to produce anything but standard essays in response to our assigned reading. I remember with fondness the time some friends of mine constructed a public toilet out of cardboard in order to demonstrate their comprehension of one of our set texts. (In case you're wondering, the book was Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. It kind of makes sense if you know the story.)

Typical British children enjoying a jolly time ... Ladybird Books' Peter and Jane

While other American kids were busy shooting squirrels out on the prairie or watching professional wrestling or whatever it is that they do instead of reading, my nerdy siblings and I strove to raise the average, thanks to the steady stream of British fiction that our mother ensured composed the bulk of our literary diet. Although my father's career caused the family to move to New York, compelling my Scottish mother to raise her kids in a hostile, foreign place, she was determined to ensure that we would maintain a sense of British identity through reading.

It was highly effective in making me long for Britain. Shirley Hughes was a favourite when I was really small: from her books I learned that I was missing out on an idyllic childhood in a warm, cosy, but slightly ramshackle semi, having tea parties in the garden and dwelling in a state of glorious untidiness that was utterly foreign to the scrubbed Stepford-y suburban homes of our sub-division.

Ship of foolishness ... visitors enjoy a boat ride at DickensWorld. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

I'm not precious about tourist attractions. I remember with fondness my family's 1992 trip to the Lake District, where we took in both the Cumberland Pencil Museum and the Sellafield Visitor Centre, and the time that we drove to Maine to witness the coronation of the Lobster Queen. When my American visitors suggested that we see it, I hoped that our trip to DickensWorld last weekend would recapture the pleasure of these classic family jaunts.

But I am sorry to say that such jauntiness was in short supply. The problem is not only that a lot of money has been spent on creating a damp, dark semblance of architecture that you can see for free around London Bridge. It's not simply that it's housed in what is basically an outlet shopping centre in the middle of a charmless Kentish parking lot. It's not just that the bar resembles a Wetherspoons and doesn't serve gruel. Where DickensWorld really goes wrong is in casting much of the focus of its major attractions - a "4-D" film, an animatronic extravaganza - on Dickens: The Man as opposed to Dickens: The Canon.

Beautiful texts, terrible body language ... Jean-Paul Sartre with Simone de Beauvoir in 1946. Photograph: David E Schermann/Getty

It was so sweet it could have come straight from the pages of a Harlequin romance: according to the New York Times article published on the occasion of their 1995 wedding, novelists Robert Olen Butler and Elizabeth Dewberry "knew they were meant for each other when they could sit in a room together and not only write but also write well." But now, with Elizabeth having abandoned her Pulitzer prize-winning husband for media mogul Ted Turner, their marriage now seems rather more like something from a book by Jonathan Franzen.

In a beautifully-written email to the graduate students he teaches in a creative writing programme at Florida State University, Butler explained that among other reasons, his relationship with Dewberry had become untenable because: "Elizabeth has never been able to step out of the shadow of the Pulitzer ... the multitude of small reflections of regard that came my way inevitably threw a spotlight on the absence of those expressions of regard for her."

Newsflash! Publishers and agents don't read all of their submissions! Sometimes they send form rejection letters! David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, must be rubbing his hands together in glee, having exposed the failings of the British publishing industry through his canny submission of plagiarised Austen to a range of agents and publishers, all of whom rejected it. How clever.

Magic at the tills ... Harry Potter books go on sale at Waterstone's. Photograph: Kim Myun Jung Kim/PA

"There has never been a place like Hogwarts. There has never been a writer like JK Rowling. And there has never, ever been a character like Harry Potter. Millions, perhaps billions of us love reading his adventures, and we never want them to end."

This would be a rather sweet plea if it was drafted by the 8-11 year-olds who were originally the target demographic for the Harry Potter series. But that tell-tale "W" at the bottom of the website that touts itself as the epicentre of "the international campaign to SAVE HARRY!" betrays the truth: this crusade is brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood bookselling behemoth, Waterstone's.

It's got to be a literary first: following the failure of his career as an investment banker, but not bereft of self-belief, Roderick Gordon sold his own home in order to finance the publication of his first novel, Tunnels, co-authored with Brian Williams, a friend from university.

Poor Patricia Cornwell. She's not exactly suffering from material deprivation, I presume, as the author of numerous zillion-selling bestsellers, loved by travellers on their way across the Atlantic who need something bracingly murderous to distract them from the discomforts of economy class. But I do feel sorry for Patricia Cornwell, because she's in court, testifying in a libel suit against one Leslie Sachs, who she claims has been making her life miserable with a prolonged campaign of bullying and harassment.

"I won an award in my reception class for writing, and ever since then I have known that it is my destiny to be a writer. I enclose the first 600 pages of my fantasy space opera."