Anecdotes on Literary Popularity and Difficulty

When interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal regarding Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer was asked: "Can Ligotti’s work find a broader audience, such as with people who tend to read more pop horror such as Stephen King?" His response was, it seems to me, accurate:

Ligotti tells a damn fine tale and a creepy one at that. You can find traditional chills to enjoy in his work or you can find more esoteric delights. I think his mastery of a sense of unease in the modern world, a sense of things not being quite what they’re portrayed to be, isn’t just relevant to our times but also very relatable. But he’s one of those writers who finds a broader audience because he changes your brain when you read him—like Roberto Bolano. I’d put him in that camp too—the Bolano of 2666. That’s a rare feat these days.

This reminded me of a few moments from past conversations I've had about the difficulty of modernist texts and their ability to find audiences. I have often fallen into the assumption that difficulty precludes any sort of popularity, and that popularity signals shallowness of writing, even though I know numerous examples that disprove this assumption.

When I was an undergraduate at NYU, I took a truly life-changing seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway with the late Ilse Dusoir Lind, a great Faulknerian. Faulkner was a revelation for me, total love at first sight, and I plunged in with gusto. Dr. Lind thought I was amusing, and we talked a lot and corresponded a bit later, and she wrote me a recommendation letter when I was applying to full-time jobs for the first time. (I really need to write something about her. She was a marvel.) Anyway, we got to talking once about the difficulty of Faulkner's best work, and she said that she had recently (this would be 1995 or so) had a conversation with somebody high up at Random House who said that Faulkner was their most consistent seller, and their bestselling writer across the years. I don't know if this is true or not, or if I remember the details accurately, or if Dr. Lind heard the details accurately, but I can believe it, especially given how common Faulkner's work is in schools.

And this was ten years before the Oprah Book Club's "Summer of Faulkner". I love something Meghan O'Rourke wrote in her chronicle of trying to read Faulkner with Oprah:

Going online in search of help, I worried about what I might find. What if no one liked Faulkner, or—worse—the message boards were full of politically correct protests of his attitude toward women, or rife with therapeutic platitudes inspired by the incest and suicide that underpin the book? But on the boards, which I found after clicking past a headline about transvestites who break up families, I discovered scores of thoughtful posts that were bracingly enthusiastic about Faulkner. Even the grumpy readers—and there were some, of course—seemed to want to discover what everyone else was excited about. What I liked best was that people were busy addressing something no one talks about much these days: the actual experience of reading, the nuts and bolts of it.

We often underestimate the common reader.

Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter J. Kalliney

It is unfortunate that, so far as I can tell, Oxford University Press has not yet released an affordable edition of Peter J. Kalliney's Commonwealth of Letters, a fascinating book that is filled with ideas and information and yet also written in an engaging, not especially academic, style. It could find a relatively large audience for a book of its type and subject matter, and yet its publisher has limited it to a very specific market. [Update 22 Nov 2015: Commonwealth of Letters is now, and newly, available in paperback! It's still somewhat expensive, but not by academic book prices, which means that those of us who really really need our own copy can perhaps afford it. I picked it up at the Modernist Studies Association conference this weekend (conference discounts are a nice perk), and told so many people about it that I think it sold out. Which might not have been my fault. Or maybe it was...]

I start with this complaint not only because I would like to be able to buy a copy for my own use that does not cost more than $50, but because one of the many things Kalliney does well is trace the ways decisions by publishers affect how books, writers, and ideas are received and distributed. A publisher's decision about the appropriate audience for a book can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (or an unmitigated disaster). OUP has clearly decided that the audience for Commonwealth of Letters is academic libraries and rich academics. That's unfortunate.

Modernism and postcolonialism have typically been seen (until recently) as separate endeavors, but Kalliney shows that, in the British context, at least, the overlap between modernist and (post)colonial writers was significant. Modernist literary institutions developed into postcolonial literary institutions, at least for a little while. (Kalliney shows also how this development was very specific to its time and places. After the early 1960s, things changed significantly, and by the early 1980s, the landscape was almost entirely different.)  Of course, writers on the history of colonial and post-colonial publishing have traced the effects of various publishing decisions (book design, marketing, etc.) before, especially with regard to how late colonial and early postcolonial writers were sold in the mid-20th century. Scholars have toiled in archives for a few decades to dig out exactly how the African Writers Series, for instance, distributed its wares. The great virtue of Kalliney's book is not that it does lots of new archival research (though there is some), but that it draws connections between other scholars' efforts, synthesizes a lot of previous scholarship, and interprets it all in often new and sometimes quite surprising ways.

The Hudson Prize and Blood: Stories

 
The first book written for adults that I ever coveted and loved and read to pieces was a short story collection: Stephen King's Night Shift, from which my cousin read me stories when we were both probably much too young, and which was one of the first books I ever bought myself. Ever since then, short story collections have seemed to me the most wonderful of all books.

I started publishing short stories professionally with "Getting a Date for Amelia" back in 2001. I barely remember the kid who wrote it (in the summer of 2000). I'm not a prolific fiction writer; I've been lucky enough to publish most of the stories I've written in the last decade or so, but I average only two stories a year. Fiction is the hardest thing in the world for me to write. Some stories have taken many years to find a final form. The kid who wrote "Getting a Date for Amelia" also managed to write a novel; it was mostly terrible (or, rather, not terrible, which might be interesting. Just nothing at all special. Rather boring, in fact. An extraordinarily useful exercise, though, dragging yourself through a novel-length piece of writing, even if the end result isn't all that great). I like fragments and miniatures too much to ever write a proper novel, I expect.

And—

What? Get on with it? Ah.

Yes, I am dithering here.

Because I am about to write a sentence that still feels unreal, though I've been writing various forms of it into emails to friends for a little while now:

I am the 2014 winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press for an unpublished manuscript titled Blood: Stories that will be published by BLP in January 2016.

Poetical Needy-brains, empoisoned pens, obscene invective...

via Rutgers University Community Repository

Two passages from Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot by Anna Beer, concerning the early 1640s:

As with the Internet in this century, people expressed real fears about the sheer number of new works appearing. Others condemned the whole notion of publication, particularly for money. Publication was imagined as "epidemical contagion", and "Pamphlet-mongers" were castigated for writing for "a little mercenary gain, and profit", as "poetical Needy-brains, who for a sordid gain or desire to have the style of a witty railer, will thus empoison your pen". The proliferation of new pamphlets was also resented by more (allegedly) serious writers, who complained that "such a book as that of thirty or forty sheets of paper is not likely to sell in this age were the matter never so good, but if it had been a lying and scandalous pamphlet of a sheet of paper ... to hold up Anarchy" then the printers would print it, knowing it would sell, be "vendable ware". (128-129)

Print proliferated because almost every opinion generated a response, which in turn necessitated a counter-response from the maligned author. When the Smectymnuans, for example, attacked Bishop Hall, he replied, condemning their views, to which their response was a 219-page answer. The speed of these exchanges was often remarkable. Milton's own first pamphlet on Church reform received a reply within days of its publication. Vicious abuse of one's opponents characterised much of the debate. When in May 1642, around the time of his marital expedition to Oxfordshire, Milton wrote An Apology against a Pamphlet (in itself a response), he claimed to be furious at the way he had been personally attacked. Immersed as he was in this world of cheap print, he cannot have been genuinely surprised. Colourful, personal, and at times obscene invective was the order of the day, the religious and political pamphlets picking up the techniques of the earlier forms of popular writing, whether ballads or jestbooks, almanacs, or tales. (139-140)

VIDA at AWP

One of the most interesting discussions I saw at the AWP conference was one sponsored by VIDA, with editors and writers talking about the results of VIDA's 2013 count of female and male writers in various publications. This year, they were able to offer a particularly revealing set of graphs showing three year trends in book reviewing at major magazines and journals.

The only report of the discussion I've seen so far is that of VIDA volunteer Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown (although I'm sure it was covered by Twitter when it happened). Hoover gives a good overview of the panel and the issues. I took lots of notes, so will here add some more detail to try to show how the discussion went.

After introductory remarks by moderator Jennine Cap籀 Crucet, the first responses were made alphabetically by last name, and so two men began: Don Bogen, poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review, and Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review. Bogen noted that, inspired by VIDA, he'd done a count of the poetry published by CR during his 7-year tenure and discovered to, really, his surprise that he'd achieved parity between male and female writers (or at least male and female bylines). How had he managed to do this unconsciously, he wondered? The best hypothesis he had was that he seeks real diversity of experience and point of view in poetry and has eclectic taste — indeed, the only poems he said he's not particularly interested in are ones that reflect his own experience. He noted that certainly the idea of parity depends on where one is counting from, as particular issues of the magazine would go one way or the other, and he tends to organize blocks of poems in between other genres in each issue in ways that have sometimes been balanced but also sometimes been entirely female or entirely male. Many times, too, he said, he does his best to read blind, paying little to no attention to a byline, and has often discovered that material he thought was "male" or "female" had been written by someone of another gender. Thus, the magic of literature.

The Worst Years of the Book as an Object

A fascinating interview at Boston Review with the always-already-fascinating Richard Nash:

...I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years. [...]

Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored.

And much more about publishing, reading, Cursor, communities, etc.

A Contribution to Schaller-VanderMeer Studies

After my own previous contribution to the burgeoning academic field of VanderMeer Studies, I am happy to christen yet another field: Schaller-VanderMeer Studies, a discipline inaugurated in ivy-covered halls with the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit. True (Schaller-)VanderMeer Studies scholars do not limit themselves to the study of half a VanderMeer, however, and so I am happy to present here a monograph by Eric Schaller about the woman who was described by Xaver Daffed as "the better half of VanderMeer" (325).

This monograph was originally published in the Fogcon program book, March 2011.

ANN VANDERMEER

by Eric Schaller

Something was happening back there at the tail end of the last millennium. And I’m not talking about The Gulf War, McDonald’s opening a franchise in Moscow, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Spice Girls, or even Bill Clinton demonstrating new uses for a cigar. Although all these probably figure in there somewhere. What I am talking about are THE SILVER WEB (1990-2002), CRANK! (1993-1998), CENTURY (1995-2000), and LADY CHURCHILL’S ROSEBUD WRISTLET (1996-date), four magazines that helped define a new course in speculative fiction. Whereas before, most notably in Damon Knight’s ORBIT series, there had been attempts to define science fiction more broadly, so much so that the old guard hesitated to call it science fiction, here the editors of these new magazines basically said, “Definitions be damned, we’ll publish whatever gives us that certain feeling we got when we first encountered genre fiction, when it seemed to open a new vista on the world, blew our collective consciousness, so to speak. Oh yeah, and we do care about language, so don’t destroy the waking dream by confusing an adjective with a unicorn.”

I notice that I didn’t mention the name of Ann VanderMeer in the previous paragraph, although her presence suffuses it. Ann was, of course, the editor for THE SILVER WEB, the first of these magazines to see print and the one that cast the broadest net in terms of what you might discover between its covers. Completists please note, the first couple of issues were published under the name of THE STERLING WEB. This quickly morphed into THE SILVER WEB but, reports by CNN pundits to the contrary, this change of name had nothing to do with any confusion brought on by the strange coincidence of Bruce Sterling having coined the term ‘slipstream’ and THE STERLING WEB, being an early proponent of strangeness and the surreal in fiction, having no connection to Bruce Sterling himself. But, back to the matter at hand, in THE SILVER WEB you never quite knew what to expect and this was all to the good. There were the short stories of course, but there were also poems, interviews, and essays. There was rock’n’roll (Ask Ann about her years playing bass with Grandma’s House). And there was the art! Great stuff, printed large, that complemented but did not repeat what was in the stories. I know of no other editor who has cared more about the relationship between art and text. Everything played off of each other to create a unique experience greater than the sum of its parts.

An Autobiography in Books

Ray Russell of Tartarus Press has just put a lovely short film up on YouTube, a sort of autobiography via his book collection. Anyone who has ever felt the passions of bibliomania will find the film irresistible, and the shots of some of the rare books, especially by Arthur Machen and Sylvia Townsend Warner, are sensuous and gloriously bibliopornographic.

Just Be Glad You're Not Trying to Sell a Poetry Book

I was working on a post about the BlazeVOX asking-writers-to-help-subsidize-poetry-publishing brouhaha, and its connections to the criminal idiocies of so much academic publishing, and what the idea of "legitimacy" in publishing does for us as writers and readers, but the post got long and banal and so boring that I started falling asleep while I wrote it, which is a bad sign, so I abandoned it, but I've still been keeping one eye on the discussion.

Today's post of note is from the blog of No Tell Books, a small, respected indie press:

No Tell Books' best selling title broke even after three years and is now earning a very modest profit. This is by an author whose work has appeared in places like Poetry and Best American Poetry. This title has been taught at universities. How many copies does one have to sell to be the best selling title at No Tell Books after four years? 228. That is not a typo. This number doesn't include what the author has sold herself, probably around 200 copies on her own. But the press doesn't earn money on those sales.  

So if that's a best seller, what's a flop? 74 sales after five years (again, this number doesn't include what the author sold on his own, which was maybe 50 or so). (UPDATE: Gatza states, "In general, books by new authors sell around 25 - 30 copies." Shocking? Only if you don't know the first thing about poetry publishing.)

This is the reality of poetry publishing. There are certainly presses that sell more copies. A poetry title reviewed in The New York Times can sell 2-4k copies, it is true. But small, independent presses, those small shops, usually run by one or a few people, rarely see those kinds of sales. University presses, for the most part, don't see those kinds of numbers for poetry. I attended a panel by the publisher of Grove/Atlantic and he said his press' poetry sales was around 800 per title. They publish "big-name" poets, their books are often shelved by chain bookstores, they have good distribution, a strong reputation . . . and that's what they sell. Publishing poetry is their charity--their poetry titles are subsidized by their fiction and non-fiction sales.  

I know of prose books where the publicity machine exploded spectacularly (or didn't exist), the publisher seemed to do everything possible to bury the book, and it only ever appeared at tiny bookstores in uninhabited regions of the world -- and still managed to sell over 300 copies!

I was going to say that obviously America hates poetry, but that's not true. To hate it, we'd have to pay attention to it.

Changes at Weird Tales

I was distraught to learn that Ann VanderMeer will no longer be the editor of Weird Tales.

During Ann's tenure, first as fiction editor and then as editor-in-chief, the magazine has been more exciting, alive, and contemporary than it had been in at least 60 years, publishing all sorts of different types of fiction from writers young and old, new and famous; writers known within particular popular genres and writers known better among the literati.

The magazine has been a joy to read. More than a joy, really, because it became an exciting magazine of surprises, and we need all those that we can get.

Ann's a great editor and will go on to many marvelous things in the future, as will the rest of the extremely talented staff. They worked wonders with limited resources, and I have no doubt the future holds great things for them all.

Today, though, is a sad one.

Thank you to everybody at Weird Tales over the last five years. You've got a lot to be proud of, and you've made a lasting contribution to the history of a magazine with a history that was already pretty impressive.

Help Writers Decorate Their Hovels! Buy E-Books!

The only e-book device I have other than my laptop is an iPod Touch, and neither the laptop nor the iPod is anything I want to read an entire book on (reading on the iPod is only slightly more comfortable than reading the The Compact OED through a magnifying glass), but I very much like the idea of e-books, even if I don't read them, and one of these days perhaps I'll break down and get one of them there gadgets that's designed for the durn things.

Anyway, as a public service announcement, here are some recent e-book announcements that piqued my interest:

Minister Faust's new novel, The Alchemists of Kush, is now available for $2.99, and it broke the Amazon Top 1,000 on its first day, which moves it closer to reaching the goal of breaking the Top 100, at which time Minister Faust will donate $500 to send textbooks to university students in South Sudan. For more info, check out this interview of Mr. Faust by Jeff VanderMeer.

Speaking of Jeff VanderMeer, he and his wife Ann were worried that they were spending too much time lounging around and staring at iguanas (or whatever fauna they have down there in Tallahassee), so they decided to get off their butts and be productive for once (since writing novels and stories, editing anthologies, running Weird Tales magazine, going to conferences, and teaching writing workshops just don't really take up enough hours in the day) and so they have started Cheeky Frawg, an e-book publisher. Jeff just announced the first set of titles today, and it's pretty amazing -- eclectic, international, and downright odd.

Speaking of eclecticism and anthologies, Ellen Datlow just listed which of her books are available in the format of e. Anthologies seem to me ideal for ebooking, and while I do love my shelves (literally) of Datlowian goodness, imagine what a wonderful resource it would be to have them all available at the fingertips... (With appropriate royalties, as well.)

Speaking of royalties, James Patrick Kelly is the king of all things electronic (you should see the Christmas lights he's strung on his Hugo Awards!), and now he's launching an e-book magazine of his own work, with a couple of stories and some nonfiction and other goodness for 99 cents a pop. Check out his website for more info. The first issue contains one of my all-time favorite JPK stories, "The Propagation of Light in a Vacuum", which is the tale of a man who discovers an extraordinary new way to vacuum the dust off of Hugo Awards when they're covered with Christmas lights. (Egads, I forgot a spoiler alert! Sorry!)

Speaking of Christmas, if I had an ebook reader it would feel like Christmas because I'd be buying lots of things from Weightless Books, which is run by famous Santa J. Claus impersonators Gavin J. Grant and Michael J. Deluca. They offer not just Cheeky Frawg books (see, too, the chance to win a book-book [b-book?] copy of the limited edition Secret Lives), but also books from Apex Book Company (get Nick Mamatas's Starve Better for only $3.99 -- it's a great manual for how to make enough money from writing to get some decorations for your hovel! The key insight is that you should write like that pretentious, overrated, plot-hating foreigner modernist James Joyce! Oh, forgot the spoiler alert again! Bad me!) Also, Weightless offers stuff direct from the authors themselves, all of which you should buy, or else these people will not be able to decorate their hovels, and their misery and abject poverty will be your fault.

Speaking of abject poverty, the British pound is worth 1.62 U.S. dollars at the moment, which means if you American readers convert all of the dollars you've stuffed under your mattress into pounds, you'll have more space under your mattress and you'll be able to buy e-books from the great Wizard's Tower Press, where you can get e-book versions of novels, anthologies, and magazines published by such good presses as Aqueduct and Prime and Lethe. You already have seventeen copies of the b-book of Genevieve Valentine's first novel, Mechanique, but because you've preserved them all in a vault to keep as collector's items that will make your ancestors independently wealthy, so it's important that you buy the e-book to be able to read the most-talked-about (in my head) book of the season! I haven't read it yet, either, because I haven't had time to read anything except stuff for work for months, but Genevieve rocks, so how could it not be great? And if you're not British, buying stuff in pounds will help you feel cosmopolitan, so you really should do it. And if you are British, you should do it, too, because you can feel like you're lording it over your poor American cousins.

And now we have come to the end of today's public service publicity announcement. I'm heading off to decorate my hovel...

Wizard's Tower Press and Salon Futura

One of my favorite people in the science fiction community, Cheryl Morgan, is one of the people launching a new publishing company, Wizard's Tower Press.  From their own description of their primary publishing purpose:

We concentrate mainly on making out-of-print works available once more as e-books, and helping other small presses exploit the e-book market.

We will also publish a small number of limited-print-run anthologies with a view to encouraging diversity in the science fiction and fantasy field. 

In addition to that, though, Wizard's Tower will be launching a nonfiction webzine, Salon Futura, which Cheryl will edit.  This is great news, because in my own experience working with her, Cheryl has been a thoughtful, intelligent, and persistent editor, which is an ideal combination of qualities for an editor to possess.

Salon Futura needs submissions.  Read their guidelines and submit!  They pay money, and you need that, I know you do!

Happy Birthday, Tor!

Yesterday -- Friday, April 23, 2010 -- Tor Books turned 30.  Irene Gallo celebrated at Tor.com with a marvelous photo gallery of the Tor folks.

On my last visit to New York, Tor editor Liz Gorinsky gave me a tour, which was great fun -- not only because I got to say hi to lots of great people, some of whom I'd only ever met via email or press release, but also because Tor is housed in the Flatiron Building, and the view from some of the offices (and especially the conference room/library) is fabulous.

Tor has published plenty of books by people who've become friends of mine over the years, and the only two professional fiction writers I knew when I was young, Jim Kelly and L.E. Modesitt, were both published by Tor when I first met them.

It seems appropriate, then, that on Monday I'll be discussing a Tor novel with one of my classes -- Brian Slattery's Liberation (in a class that also used another Tor book, The Dark Descent edited by David Hartwell), and so my students -- all of whom are, I'm sure, spending their weekend diligently reading! -- are, without knowing it, wishing Tor a happy birthday themselves...

Salinger of New Hampshire

We've had to say goodbye to one of our residents, Mr. Salinger.  He wasn't a native, but lots of folks up here aren't, and we try to treat them all the same.  (We don't give them a special sales tax just for them, we don't tell them they can't have guns.)  Mr. Salinger lived pretty close to the border of the People's Republic of Vermont, but he was still one of us, not a dirty commie.  They say he had some peculiar habits, but that was none of our business.

I've been through Cornish, where he lived, but never sought him out.  Folks from the big cities called him a recluse, but I'm not sure that's true.  He didn't go around on book tours, he didn't give lectures, he didn't seek out his fellow scribblers, so therefore he must be crazy, they thought.  Plenty of people said they'd seen him in town.  He and I enjoyed the same library, so we might have roamed the stacks together for all I know.  Not wanting to be pestered, he didn't post his picture up on every telephone pole, and I expect he didn't look much different from all the other men his age around here, stoic and grizzled.  People who knew him, knew him; people who didn't, didn't.

I read all the books when I was an adolescent, or just before.  I started with Catcher in the Rye when I was about 12, and I loved it.  I'd never read anything with such a strong and idiosyncratic voice.  Then my uncle told me it wasn't much of a novel in comparison to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and eventually I read that one, and yes, he was right, but then, most novels aren't much in comparison to A Portrait of the Artist.  Of Salinger's other books, I liked the pieces in Nine Stories best, especially "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".  I haven't read any of them in at least a decade, though.

I twice had to teach Catcher to high school students, 9th graders both times.  I say "had to" because it's not a book I would ever assign of my own free will.  If I were inclined to make students read Salinger, it would be some of the stories.  Catcher should be a book you discover on your own.  It's a perennial favorite of English teachers, though, many of whom encountered it themselves in high school, and now there's a whole industry of study guides and lesson plans to go along with it, making it into a school institution, like little cartons of milk.  Holden Caulfield, hater of schools and phonies, beloved of so many counter-culturists, has been tamed and institutionalized by an infinite battery of tests and quizzes and short essays.  Just as The Great Gatsby is the sanctified text from the first half of the 20th Century for American high schools, so Catcher seems to be the sanctified text from the second half, at least by a writer from the U.S. (Lord of the Flies is the only competition I can think of).  Sure, it gets banned a lot, but that's both a sign of and an aid to its popularity.

None of my students ever admitted liking Catcher to me, and many of them found Holden insufferable.  Maybe it was my fault -- I find Holden insufferable and could live a perfectly contented life without ever rereading the book.  Or maybe it wasn't my fault -- none of my students ever admitted liking Lord of the Flies to me, and that's a novel I gain more respect for every time I read it; conversely, many of my students have enjoyed Gatsby tremendously, and the only thing I much enjoy in it is its last page.  (Lesson learned: I have no effect on my students' opinions of books!)

So yes, I like the idea of J.D. Salinger more than I like most of his writing.  (But the writing was important to me at a particular time in my life, it taught me a lot about voice and point of view, and the short stories strongly influenced my perception of story form.)  I have a lot of respect for writers who stop publishing, even if they are primarily able to do it because some of their books provide more royalties in a year than most writers will see in a lifetime.  Salinger got close to the sun and found its flames too hot, so he hunkered down on the moon.  Reportedly, he kept writing, but felt no need for much of an audience beyond himself.  He let the byline on the four books do his public work for him, and for nearly half a century he, the person, lived a fairly anonymous life in the Granite State, growing old and deaf, occasionally having his army of lawyers send out a sortie of suits, but mostly just trying to keep people from bothering him.  Good for him, I say.

Meanwhile, if you want to glimpse the young J.D. Salinger (the byline, not the man), subscribers of the New Yorker can see digital copies of the first appearances of many of the stories, including the first appearance of Holden Caulfield.  Those of you who don't subscribe to the magazine aren't out of luck, though -- Salinger fans have posted all of the stories at various websites.  Search for one of the unreprinted titles via the Google and you'll find them.  The man himself wouldn't have wanted you to do so -- he spent a lot of money trying to keep anything that wasn't in one of his four books from being reprinted or distributed -- but that's one of the perils of publishing: the byline keeps on living.

Jury, Meet Peers

Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here."

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

(Be sure to read the whole essay; it's a smart and sharp attack on a problem that we should be past at this point.)

The good people at Publisher's Weekly are probably speaking what they think is the truth when they say, about their all-male list of 10 "best" books of the year, that "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz." I believe them when they say, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

But being disturbed is not enough. What they have done is shameful.

This is not just some blogger's list of favorite books of the year. This is the publishing industry's trade journal telling the world what ten books from 2009 deserve most acclaim and attention. This list will affect how books are stocked in stores and it will affect what books are bought by libraries. The fact that the list only includes male writers contributes to a problem.

The editors who created this list have chosen to perpetuate sexism. They have deliberately and knowingly made it easier for male writers to have access to sales and publicity at the expense of women writers. Their list perpetuates the idea that the best, most serious, and most consequential books are written by men, and that idea will continue to have an effect out in the world.

Our society has made plenty of great strides over the past centuries and decades in terms of reducing institutional sexism, but moments such as this highlight just how entrenched the patriarchy is. Yes, patriarchy. Male dominated, male identified, male centered. It's insidious, and it is self perpetuating.

There is no objective, essential "best". There is stuff we like and stuff we don't -- texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as "great". Perceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other broad social categories mix with our experiences as readers, our educations, etc., to produce the judgments we make. Though we may struggle to create vivid and convincing justifications for our judgments, there are still mysteries to any evaluation that strives for nuance. But even so, we can expand our awareness, question our gut instincts, analyze our justifications, wonder why we are doing what we do and saying what we say. To assume that we can simply "not pay attention" to some of the central forces structuring our perception of reality is naive. We might be powerless to change them, but we might also be in a position to avoid perpetuating them and adding strength to them. We don't have any choice about whether the society we're born into is racist, sexist, heterosexist, whatever. But we do have some choice about how we relate to that society, how we work within it, what we pay attention to, and how we choose to make our choices.

I'm not ranting from a position of innocence -- most of the writers I most deeply value are men (many of whom are white, middle class, born within the last 150 years, and not from the U.S.). I have some hunches for why this is, hunches related to early reading experiences, prejudices about language and its relationship to reality, etc. Personal taste and judgment are too complex to explain simply or conclusively. Individual readers are strange creatures, full of prejudices and whims and blind spots and allergies. Individually, I expect there are weird particulars other than race, class, and gender that affect our taste more profoundly, more forcefully than those social categories themselves (if those social categories could ever be isolated, which I am skeptical of anyway -- any discussion of them is provisional and strategic). But when we move beyond the individual, as lists try to do, we're moving into the realm of systems and social structures -- means of distribution and consumption, gravitational forces that shape and warp how we talk about the realities we perceive, the tides we choose to sail with or against. And that talk itself then goes on to shape some more realities and turn some tides.

All of which is just me noodling around and trying to say the same basic thing: An institution with the power of Publisher's Weekly has more responsibility than an individual has, because the power that institution wields is greater than the power of most individuals (certain folks like Oprah excepted, although I can imagine people could argue that "Oprah" should be considered more of an institution than an individual).

Or, more basically, what I said above: The editors at Publisher's Weekly should be more than disturbed. They should be ashamed.

Here's a book to add to a best of the year list: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter. I've got plenty of quibbles with the book, especially Showalter's dismissive attitude toward Gertrude Stein, but I'm also finding it (still reading; it's big) a rich source of information and delight. I've already begun seeking out writers I hadn't heard of until reading Showalter, and revisiting ones I had not paid enough attention to. Check out Katha Pollitt's review of Showalter at Slate or Rebecca Hussey's at The Quarterly Conversation or Sarah Churchwell's at The Guardian or Susan Salter Reynolds's at The L.A. Times.

Or watch Sarah Nelson, former editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly, interview Showalter.

I haven't read nearly as many books published this year as the editors at PW have, but I'm perfectly happy to propose A Jury of Her Peers as the best book of the year on a single criterion: It's the book we, the litterateurs and taste proclaimers, seem to need the most.

Rude Words and Piracy: A High Wind in Jamaica and the Child Reader

Richard Hughes's first and most famous book, A High Wind in Jamaica, is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, which is really saying something. It's both delightful and disturbing in the way it presents -- in an unfailingly light tone -- children as amoral aliens. The novel is rich with irony, and it's not a satire so much as a relentless attack on sentimental notions of childhood. The possible interpretations of the novel are likely endless, but in many ways the book itself is about interpretation -- about the futility of trying to interpret a child's experiences and thoughts through adult eyes. (It's also worth noting that the novel was first published in the U.S. under the title The Innocent Voyage, which I'm rather more fond of than its better-known title. It was also once illustrated by Lynd Ward.)

I was surprised this morning to discover an essay by British teacher Victoria de Rijke in a 1995 issue of Children's Literature in Education, "Reading the Child Invention", in which de Rijke explores the very concept of "children's literature" by having children read A High Wind in Jamaica. The majority of the essay consists of transcripts of a conversations de Rijke had with an 11-year-old who read the novel, Ayeshea Zacharkiw. It's possible that Zacharkiw was extremely precocious, but de Rijke writes of many other children who read and appreciated the book, too. Toward the end of the discussion, she asks Zacharkiw if she thinks Hughes's novel is a book for children or for grown-ups, and Zacharkiw says she thinks it depends on reading ability, and a child's willingness to use a dictionary.

AZ: ...It’s an old book as well, so it’s got all these old expressions, but I think anyone could read it whether they’re children or grown-ups. Yeah. It might take the children longer than older people, but cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages.
VdR: Right. I agree. And do you think there’s anything in it that adults now wouldn’t like children to read?
AZ: I don’t know why it’s been republished for adults. There are words in it I suppose, rude words (laughs) and piracy, but you can get horror books especially for children, but adults read them. Well, anyone can read any book. It’s just what level you are at reading, whether you like that particular type of book, and if you don’t like it, you can always put the book down.
VdR: Mmm, absolutely. You’re free to do that, aren’t you? It’s not in control of you! (laughs)
AZ: (laughs) No, course not. Once you’ve bought it. It doesn’t matter who you publish it for. Anyone can buy it and read it, or get it out of the library.
VdR: So what kind of particular type of book do you think this is?
AZ: Well, it’s about life. It’s about life on the schooner, and about children, as they’re the man characters, and about the difference between grown-ups and children, who’s in control.

De Rijke draws some interesting conclusions from this exchange:

Children’s observations are often valued by grown-ups for their blunt honesty and wisdom, for cutting through the adult flannel and exposing simple truths, most often because adults are already uncomfortable about hypocrisies which they are concealing. Ayeshea reminded me that there are a number of basic requirements for effective reading: a level of basic literacy, information retrieval and developmental skills ("cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages"). What a terrifically blunt reminder of the low expectations teachers and adults have of reading potential! ... The act of reading cannot be controlled by publishers’ reading-age targeting, or price, given access to the library and a free choice of genre. In conversation, Ayeshea and I also emphasized, by the repetitive use we made of the word control the significance the book places on power relations, in terms of its subject. The term subject could be applied to both reader and plot.

It's a fine reminder not to underestimate readers.

For another view of the book, Francine Prose's introduction (PDF) to the NYRB edition is a good overview of some of its strange wonders and terrors. And I'm entirely in agreement with Mr. Waggish: "The sheer oddness of this book really defies summary."

In place of summary or analysis, I'll leave you with a direct quote from the middle of A High Wind in Jamaica:

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

It is true they look human -- but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, everyone recognizes they are animals -- why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a Praying Mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child at least in a partial degree -- and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?

Archipelago!

I'm a big fan of the great work done by Archipelago Books, one of the few publishers in the U.S. specializing in literature in translation.  I first discovered them around the time I read B羹chner's Lenz in the beautiful edition they released a few years back.  Since then, they've released a bunch of marvelous books that might otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers (while I'm making recommendations, Mandarins is a magnificent collection of stories.  Oh, and any fan of weird fiction should take a look at Palafox.  And you can't go wrong with Breyten Breytenbach.  And-- Well, take your pick...)

Archipelago recently sent out an email saying that the current economic environment has hit them pretty hard.  All of their basic sources of funding -- book sales, grants, donations -- have suddenly been reduced, causing Archipelago to have to scramble to stay alive.

Basically, they need some help to get through this.  If you don't want to just send them money, you can buy their books -- preferably from them, because that way they get the biggest percentage of what you spend.  Or you can subscribe to a season or a year of their books, which is a really great deal (I mean, you're going to buy Breytenbach's book for writers, Intimate Stranger, and Kleist's Selected Prose and a bunch of others anyway, so why not get them all for a good discount and help a valuable publisher keep publishing?

We need books in translation.  We need books from beyond our own provincial shores.  Very few publishers specialize in such work.  Archipelago is one of the few and one of the best.  They're the good guys.  Let's help them survive this difficult moment and build a strong foundation for the future -- we'll all be better off for it.

Bookstore Economics

Andrew Wheeler is my favorite writer when it comes to the practical minutiae of everyday publishing and bookselling. He explains things clearly, thoroughly, and often with a good sense of humor. His perspective is that of someone who does marketing for a living (he's a science fiction fan who markets business books these days), and he is more practical in his approach than many of us who just wish every corner had an independent bookstore stocked with all the sorts of books we like.

His recent post on why some books get stocked by chain stores and some don't is one of his best yet, and it moves through all sorts of different subjects having to do with publishing. Idealists will be annoyed, but before changing the world, it's important to know what the state of the actual world is.

I considered excerpting a paragraph and posting it, but that might prevent people from reading the whole thing.

Today's Must-Read

Kassia Kroszer on writing, publishing, publicity, the internets, and the future:

I am not worried about the future of the book. I am not worried about the future of reading. I am not worried about the future of spelling (I am almost-but-not-quite ready to accept the “spelling is relative” argument, !@#$ British and their extraneous use of “U”). I am worried about the future of publishers.

By publishers, I mean traditional, bound-copy based, royalty-paying publishers. Oh, I don’t think they’re going away for a good long time, but I do think we’re seeing the beginning of a serious challenge to the status quo. This means a slow (publishing being a very slooow business) shift from authors who are grateful for any crumbs thrown their way to authors who will ask “So tell me again, what can you do for me?”.

The rest of the post is full of ideas, hypotheses, and possibilities. It's also worth comparing it to this Galleycat post about Tim O'Reilly's presentation at the Tools of Change conference, where O'Reilly discussed the difficulties of giving content away for free.

Trunk Stories

I reviewed the first two issues of Trunk Stories for SF Site back in 2005, and so I am happy to see that William Smith is continuing with the venture -- not as a print zine, since costs have become prohibitive, but online. The first story, "Dame Morehead's Sea of Tranquility" by Tobias Seamon, is now available as a PDF download from Smith's Hang Fire Books blog.