LISNews: Librarian News

John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3
I think we can all agree John McPhee is the greatest nonfiction writer of all time. The Paris Review has a great interview.

"And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it."

In Elite Library Archives, a Dispute Over a Trove
In a move that has turned scholarly heads, Paul Brodeur, a former investigative reporter for The New Yorker, who donated thousands of pages of his work to the library, is demanding that the papers be returned. He claims that an institution renowned for its careful stewardship of historical documents has badly mishandled his.

The charges are roiling the genteel world of research archivists, who usually toil in dust-jacket obscurity, and inciting a lively debate about which pieces of the past are worth preserving.

Author Dean Koontz has written more than 100 books - including thirteen number one bestsellers.

"You're incredibly prolific," says CBS' Anthony Mason. "Where does that come from?"

"The imagination's a muscle partly. And the more you use it the easier it becomes," says Koontz.

His success - he ranks number six among the world's best-paid writers - has built him a stunning California home he calls "Amazing Grace," with carved book cases in his library.

Interview transcript and video available at CBS News' Sunday Morning

Was John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley a fraud?
"My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years."