Most Everything Is Terrible

Most images grabbed off the internet are terrible.

A few days ago, I wrote a draft of this post that was a snarky attack on a badly thought-out essay by J. Robert Lennon at Salon. It would be nice if sites like Salon would expend more of their energies in bringing attention to some good writing that doesn't get noticed rather than running yet another quick-and-dirty "contrarian" takedown.

After writing the snarky draft, I realized my problem wasn't with Lennon or the essay per se. My problem was more with the people who seemed so desperately to want to like his essay.

Lennon sets himself up against some comments by Dan Chaon that have been bouncing around the internet for a while (for some unfathomable reason, that website doesn't clearly date its material). These comments by Chaon are intelligent and accurate. He says writers need to read widely and eclectically, and he even suggests some good things to read. Specific, helpful advice.

Lennon decides to contradict Chaon's advice. And that's where he goes off the rails, making vague accusations that something called "literary fiction" is "terrible" and "boring".

3 New E-Books

I have contributions in three new e-books that offer all sorts of wonders and joys:

• Don't Pay Bad for Bad is a collection of rare and previously unpublished short stories by Amos Tutuola (author of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, etc.). The e-book includes an introduction by Tutuola's son Yinka, and an afterword by me in which I try to give some of the context for how Tutuola's writing has been perceived by readers over the years. [Available from Weightless (Epub & Mobi formats), Wizard's Tower (Epub & Mobi), Amazon.]
• Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn is a nearly-indescribable novella, easily one of my favorite pieces of writing of the last few decades, and so I'm thrilled to have provided an afterword for the e-book. [Available from Weightless (Epub & Mobi formats), Amazon.]
• The second issue of the lit journal Unstuck includes all sorts of stories, poems, essays, whatzits, etc., including a little story of mine, "The Island Unknown". The list of authors is awesome: Steve Almond, Kate Bernheimer, Jedediah Berry, Gabriel Blackwell, Edward Carey, Brian Conn, Rikki Ducornet, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Caitlin Horrocks, AD Jameson, J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem & John Hilgart, Paul Lisicky, Elizabeth McCracken, Ed Park, Donald Revell, Mary Ruefle, Tomaz Salamun, David J. Schwartz, Mathias Svalina, Daniel Wallace, Dean Young, Matthew Zapruder, etc. You can get the issue as a beautiful paperback, and/or you can download the e-book version from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Kick Unstuck!

I don't generally publicize Kickstarter projects, etc., here, because it would be easy to get overwhelmed, but here's one I've got multiple personal interests in: Unstuck: New Literature of the Fantastic and Surreal.

Unstuck is a new(ish) annual(ish) journal out of Texas. Their first issue included fiction by Aimee Bender, Matthew Derby, Amelia Gray, J. Robert Lennon, Meghan McCarron, Rachel Swirsky, Leslie What, and others who are just too fabulous to name.

Their upcoming (at the end of the year) second issue will include work by Other People You Know, plus me (a very short story about Victrolas and turtles that I read last year at Readercon). The rewards for funding the project are pretty great.

Also, one of the editors is Meghan McCarron, someone whose life I nearly ruined once by hiring her to teach at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She's beginning to forgive me. She'll forgive me more if you fund this project. (But don't use that as an excuse not to send money!)

Meghan's in the video above. She says, "Barbarians who collect heads," in what may be the world's most perfect line reading.

Also, Tyler Stoddard-Smith, who demonstrates how to use Unstuck to combat insects and rodents, is my new favorite superhero.

Metaphor Systems, Fictive Moments, and False Arrests

Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions and writer of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent, in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions:

I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that American fiction isn’t pulsing with life. Like I say, I could list dozens of authors here whose work I admire and follow with care and excitement. That said, I do think that much contemporary criticism is stuck in the past and that too many reviewers want those who are exploring ways to revolutionize genre to stick to the rules. I think of them as genre police. They make too many false arrests and lead potential readers astray, keep them caged away from renegades whose work they might well dig reading.

Paris Review 197

The latest issue of The Paris Review includes not only fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bola簽o, David Gates, and Amie Barrodale along with poetry by, among others, Frederick Seidel and Cathy Park Hong, but it also includes interviews with Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson.

An excerpt to whet your appetite:

DELANY

Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?

DELANY

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. That's about the cloest I come to categorizing myself as one or another kind of artist.

And another:

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of your last three books as being science fiction?

GIBSON

No, I think of them as attempts to disprove the distinction or attempts to dissolve the boundary. They are set in a world that meets virtually every criteria of being science fiction, but it happens to be our world, and it's barely tweaked by the author to make the technology just fractionally imaginary or fantastic. It has, to my mind, the effect of science fiction.

20 Under 40 and the Fantastic

With one post, Larry Nolen simultaneously offers a thoughtful and well-informed response to folks who got all "wwaaaahhrrr!  waaaahhhhrrr!  genre good!  waaahhhhrrrr!" about the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" promotional list (whereas I just offered snark) and he proves what we already knew -- that he was the perfect successor as Best American Fantasy series editor, because his perspective is exactly the one we wanted for the book when we created the series (and he's a much faster reader than I am, which will make the work perhaps a bit less arduous for him than it was for me).  It's a post well worth reading -- one of the things being inundated with piles of lit mags does is show you the extraordinary variety of writing out there, both in terms of content and form.

Now if I can just get him to stop calling it "mimetic fiction", I'll have achieved all of my goals for world domination, bwahahahahahahahaaaa!

Update: The link for "20 Under 40" above goes to interviews with the 20.  Here are some questions and responses:

Chris Adrian:

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Ursula K. Le Guin and Marilynne Robinson, John Crowley and Padgett Powell.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

Kate Bernheimer asked me to contribute a piece to her new anthology of fairy tales, “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,” and I was excited to have a chance to revisit a story that disturbs me: Goethe’s “The Erlking.”

What are you working on now?

A story about a haunted house.

Karen Russell

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

[...]I wanted to try a sort of fantastical-historical story—Hitchcock meets the swamp.

What are you working on now?

New stories and a novel about a whacked-out imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Just a very few on a long list would be George Saunders, Kelly Link, Joy Williams, Ben Marcus, Jim Shepard, and whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones.

Tin House Genre Fiction

A reader writes to Tin House:

I have read several issues of Tin House, including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance.
—Confused in LA

And Tin House responds.

Now, I happen to like Tin House very much. We've reprinted stories from the magazine in each volume of Best American Fantasy. Their "Fantastic Women" issue was awesome. Their current anniversary issue is also awesome. Just about all of their issues are awesome.

But the response to Concerned in LA is not awesome. It's disappointing.

I spend too much time, perhaps, defending writers, editors, and publishers of "literary fiction" from being maligned by writers, editors, and publishers who would never utter the term "literary fiction" without a sneer. I do this because some of my best friends happily embrace the term "literary fiction" for themselves. I don't even mind being seen in public with such people, any more than I mind being seen in public with my friends who insist the only thing they write is "science fiction". I'm all about the kumbaya.

So please, literary fiction people, STOP MAKING MY LIFE SO DIFFICULT!

Let me try to address some of the things I dislike in the three paragraphs that most annoyed me in the response, one by one:

I think you know genre fiction when you read it. My personal definition goes something like this: fiction that almost purposefully avoids the literary, in hopes of keeping the reader (or the writer, for that matter) from having to “work” too hard. It also tends to employ some stock tricks, like ending very short chapters with cliffhangers, often hopping predictably from one POV to another. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, with the kind of awkward and false-sounding dialog you’d expect.

Maybe I'll mail Tin House a copy of Peter Swirsky's useful book From Lowbrow to Nobrow, which counters some of the assumptions about certain forms that appear in "genre fiction" and are supposedly absent from "literary fiction". But I actually don't have a big problem with this paragraph on its own; it's a statement of personal taste, and there are certainly general differences that it is, generally, somewhat accurate in general about, sort of. How this paragraph moves on to the next bothers me more:

Genre writers know their audience, and it’s a large one: John Grisham sold 60,742,288 books during the 1990s. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, and I won’t do that here. But that audience, for reasons that sometimes seem obvious and sometimes are madly mysterious, is almost universally not interested in the same things we are.

We move from: Genre fiction is lazy, formulaic, predictable, one-dimensional, awkward, and false ... to: it's more popular than the Pope ... to: why is it so popular? huh. ... to: that's not what we're interested in.

What are they interested in? So glad you asked:

We’re interested in good stories. Contrary to what many people think, it’s not work to read them. A good story is a thing to savor, something you want to make copies of and pass around, something you might find yourself inexplicably wanting to read out loud. (Or not so inexplicably—good writers all have musicians living somewhere inside them, whether they know it or not, and have perfect pitch when it comes to the sounds of the words they use). If you read a lot of good stories, then you know what they are. If you don’t, then you should start, beginning with the summer reading titles on this blog. Sometimes it takes me days to parse out what made a good story so damned good, sometimes I never can.

Ah haaaaa! Genre fiction is not good stories! So all these writers who just want to write crap for the masses are not interested in good stories! And the fans who love cliffhangers and want good plots and hate stories about two vegetarians on a hunting trip -- they don't want good stories, either! These gazillions of people making those genre fiction lame-os rich don't savor what they read, don't pass it around, don't want to read it aloud. And why? Because they haven't read good stories and don't know what they are. (Oh, and though genre fiction makes sure you "don't 'work' too hard", "it's not work to read [litfic]". Apparently the economy has hit Tin House hard, too, because ain't nobody working around there...)

The problem here is one I've blathered on at length about many times before -- the problem of confusing descriptive and evaluative labels. (Come to think of it, in the package including From Lowbrow to Nobrow, maybe I'll include a copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw...) There is simply no such thing as a universal "good story", and so using a term like "good stories" as a euphemism for "stuff I like" is not useful. Replace the term "good story" in the Tin House post and much of it becomes less objectionable. Banal, but less objectionable. There are still contradictions and ignorances, but none of us could survive without contradictions and ignorances, so I'm not as upset about those.

I could go on. I don't have time or energy. (Ugh, that James Wood quote later in the post! Who is this universal "the reader" and why should that person's narrow idea of what is worth falling in love with matter for anybody else? If I think a work of fiction has taught me how to read it, am I wrong if you think otherwise? Vice versa?)

Please -- friends, Romans, countrywomen -- send your best writing to Tin House, regardless of whatever label happens to seem appropriate to it right now. It's a great magazine. The new issue even includes a poem by Stephen King. They publish all sorts of different stuff, and that eclecticism is part of what keeps me coming back to read it again and again. They publish what I think are often really good stories (and poems and essays and interviews and miscellanea...). But don't listen to what they say on their blog about "good stories". That's just crazytalk.

Update 8/13/09: Tonaya Thompson, the assistant editor at Tin House who wrote the post I criticized, responded thoughtfully in the comments section to this post, as did her friend and co-worker Tony. I wrote a comment that was way too longer for Blogger's commenting system to handle, so I'm posting it here:

Thanks to Tony and Tonaya for responding and clarifying -- I expect if we were sitting around chatting, we'd probably agree way more than we disagree, once we were able to figure out terminology, or at least show how we're using terminology, what assumptions we're bringing to it, etc. I expect, too, that we'd find our tastes in fiction even overlap a lot (I do, after all, love a lot of the fiction in Tin House).

I think it's important, though, for editors and spokespeople especially to be careful in how they talk about their perceptions of fiction -- and I mean this for editors of magazines, journals, and anthologies devoted to all sorts of fiction. We're at an exciting time, I think, in the history of short stories and novels, a time when we've all learned a lot about what this thing called "fiction" can do and be. I'm especially excited by publications such as Tin House (and Conjunctions and McSweeney's and A Public Space and One Story and LCRW and Electric Velocipede and Weird Tales and, when Gordon's feeling particularly edgy, F&SF, not to mention a plethora of wonderful webzines, anthologies, etc.) that do not have as settled a sense of what fiction is and can be as do some more conservative venues. (And honestly, I think we need both -- because there are all sorts of different types of readers and writers, but more importantly because a vital dialogue exists between cleary "core" types of writing [die-hard kitchen-sink realism; hard science fiction] and the crazier kids on the margins. It's the crazy kids at the margins that particularly excite me, but that's just me.)

And that's why I responded so vociferously to your post -- I don't question that it represents what you think you are looking for, or that it's what at least a part of the staff at Tin House thinks the magazine represents ... but as a loyal (premiere-issue owning!) reader, I'm saying I think what the magazine does is actually bigger, greater, and more complex than you've found the words for. And that the words you have found, at least in the original post, could lead to some unfortunate misperceptions and misconceptions.

I like your response here a lot, Tonaya, and so if I dig into it a little bit more, I hope my tone does not come off as that of someone trying to -- well, I don't know, but I fear that I'll sound smug and patronizing when I mean to simply offer a perspective of somebody who has enthusiastically attended both Bread Loaf and science fiction conventions.

Editors frequently say they want "good stories" and don't want "lazy writing" -- I don't know a genre editor who would say the opposite! Actually, the best response to the question I know of is one written by Nick Mamatas when he was editing the online (genre) magazine Clarkesworld. Nick's penultimate paragraph could fit Tin House, too, I suspect. And I love that!

The question of genre -- what it is, if it is, how it is -- is a huge one, and I've written tens of thousands of words about the topic over the years, with very few of those words ever really getting at what I was hoping to get at. (Thus, I keep trying...)

Take your example, a wonderful one -- Player Piano. I've got a first edition of the paperback of the book, and it's been renamed Utopia 14. You can see the cover here. Is it a science fiction novel? You betcha! Genre? That's a thornier question. By my definition, yes, because to my mind a "genre" is a set of publishing practices and reader expectations. Science fiction is, in that sense, a genre -- one that became particularly differentiated in the U.S. in the 1920s, developed its own groups of writers, editors, fans, and publishers, then history, which affected expectations that in turn affected production in a complex way.

Only the tiny minority of science fiction readers who think SF must always include complex astrophysics would not recognize that novel as a science fiction novel. Would non-SF readers recognize it as a literary novel? When it came out in hardcover, some did, sure (see the original NYT review), because it was a dystopian novel and so fit into a tradition broader than that of SF, though one which SF is generally happy to overlap with and exploit. But Bantam clearly thought the key to sales for Vonnegut was to market him as an SF writer. It didn't work all that well, for various reasons -- he was about ten years ahead of his time in the SF world (though C.M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and Robert Sheckley were doing somewhat similar things to what he was up to) and when he did become popular, it was through a widening of his audience among the younger readers who liked the Beats, etc., but many of whom were also happy enough to read Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune. Also, Vonnegut wrote in a marvelously -- deceptively! -- simple and accessible style, which is helpful in reaching a mass audience.

You're absolutely right that what any sensitive reader would probably be tempted to identify as lazy writing gets published within certain marketing categories -- some of those categories rely on tried-and-true formulas that their audiences enjoy, and it would be self-defeating to stretch those formulas too much because then it would be something other than what it's expected to be. If Harlequin were to sell Jane Austen novels using the same packaging and marketing they use for their regular books ... well, they'd have some pretty perplexed and annoyed customers (as well as some who discovered a new favorite writer). If genre fiction is fiction that is necessarily formulaic in a particularly narrow way because the audience will not recognize it otherwise, then of course it would be foolish and silly of any of you at Tin House to say it's something you're open to reading.

But I'm betting that's not what Confused was asking. I would guess that Confused wanted to know what you emphasized in evaluating a story -- if you, for instance, like stories that are more plot than character. Or stories that are more about stuff than people. Or stories that use such things as aliens and dragons as primarily literal items within the narrative rather than primarily as metaphors.

To which I would also bet your most honest answer would be something along the lines of, "Well, it depends." What does it depend on? Language is one thing, maybe the thing -- by "not lazy writing" what I take you to mean is prose that achieves a certain deliberate effect, that is, in and of itself, a kind of music. Go ahead, put Mars in your story, but tell that story the way, for instance, Theodore Sturgeon did with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" (or, rather, don't tell it like that; find your own voice, but find a voice). After all, why publish a story that sounds just like ten thousand other stories? That's no fun!

And don't be afraid to make the reader work -- great art is demanding, and I think Tin House is in the business of seeking out great art. Why bother otherwise -- I somehow doubt the work is making you astoundingly wealthy.

"Demanding" isn't a bad thing for writing to be. Not every novel has to be Gaddis. The beauty of Vonnegut's best writing is that there's a whole lot more to it than will be perceived on a superficial reading, and, indeed, the apparent ease of reading him can conceal the complexity of what he offers (I've taught Mother Night at both the high school and college level and every time have learned something new from the book. It is a wonder.)

Perhaps really what we're talking about is readers and their expectations and desires. If I can put words in your mouth for a moment, you want readers who are seeking stories that they do not treat as disposable consumer items. Adventurous sorts of readers, ones who have neither a narrow idea that all stories must be a Raymond Carver spin-off or ones who think all stories have to have a clear plot, rising action, and "transparent" prose (prose is transparent when it is at its most conventional, and prose at its most conventional is not particularly fulfilling for readers who desire music and stories that don't sound like ten thousand other stories).

You raise an important issue (or two or three!) at the end of your response to me -- dozens of manuscripts arriving daily that are obviously inappropriate to the magazine, and the mass popularity of certain things that are not Tin House. I think these issues are significant ones, but tangential to the idea of what makes a story exciting to those of us who are excited by the sorts of stories Tin House publishes.

I can assure you that editors around the world face the same problem of receiving lots of manuscripts apparently sent to them at random. Heck, even with Best American Fantasy, a series of explicitly reprint anthologies, I inevitably receive a pile of unpublished manuscripts every year. We human beings have an extraordinary capacity for obliviousness.

If Tin House sold 60 million copies, it would no longer be the Tin House we love; it would be toilet paper. The kind of person who possesses both the interest and the skills to appreciate complex literary expression is probably roughly the size of the part of the population that possesses the interest and skills to appreciate advanced theoretical mathematics. There are lots of reasons certain books are bestsellers, and those reasons have little to do with genre -- bestsellers are their own category. Some of them are even pretty good by the standards of somebody who actually does appreciate complex literary expression (I'm in a minority that fervently believes Neil Gaiman's American Gods has been underestimated by many readers who mistake the genius of its structure for raggedness; I also think Thomas Harris's Red Dragon is among the great American novels of the 20th century, better than any of Hemingway's novels -- yeah, I'm a weirdo, and should probably burn my Literary Elitist membership card right now...)

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Thanks for the work you do, Tonaya. I hope my criticisms are of the sort that spur you on rather than bum you out.

And meanwhile, everybody should subscribe to Tin House because, as I said before, it's awesome.

Middlebury College to Kill New England Review

According to Inside Higher Ed, Middlebury College has announced that it will pull funding from The New England Review by 2011 "if the publication doesn't become self-supporting."

This hits home for me in a few ways -- NER was one of the first lit mags I ever read, because at the time I became interested in such things, the local college library subscribed (and still does). As a teenager, I attended the Bread Loaf Young Writers' Conference, met the managing editor, and got her to sign a copy of the magazine for me (for a while, NER was known as The New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly, and I still tend to think of it as NER/BLQ). Later, I attended the adult version of Bread Loaf, and though NER's official relationship with the conference was less by then, many of its staff members still attended, as well as numerous writers it had published.

NER was also one of the earliest supporters of Best American Fantasy, and I'm thrilled that BAF 3 will be reprinting a story they first published (no, I still can't release the list of stories -- we're still trying to get rights to a couple).

Most literary journals survive either through institutional support or from major donors. Some people have argued that literary journals are outmoded, useless, filled with mediocre writing, etc. Some are. But not NER -- it's one of the great ones. Its mix of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is among the best and most diverse in this country.

I hope that whoever is in charge of this decision at Middlebury will reconsider; if they don't, I hope NER is able to find a new home that is worthy of it.

One Story: Respect for Tradition

One Story is a marvelous magazine (and not just because they published me -- that should, perhaps, be held against them...) and I can testify that it makes a great gift for people who like to read but generally feel too busy to do so, because receiving a nicely-produced story every three weeks or so in the mail is great fun.

One Story now and then asks for donations, because the magazine is a non-profit and doesn't run ads. Clifford Garstang pointed out that a recent solicitation included this description of the "Editor" donation level:

Editor: $100 – I’ll pay one author for their story

Mr. Garstang notes that there is, according to certain interpretations of English usage, a problem with agreement between the one author and the plural pronoun their.

What he doesn't say, though, is that One Story is simply showing their respect for the history of English literature and the language itself. According to the indispensible Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, here are some of the writers who have used this construction:

Chaucer: "And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,/They wol come up..." ("The Pardoner's Prologue")

Shakespeare: "And every one to rest themselves betake" ("The Rape of Lucrece")

The King James Bible: "...if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses"

Jane Austen: "I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly" (Mansfield Park)

Thackeray: "A person can't help their birth" (Vanity Fair)

W.H. Auden: "...it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy" (Encounter, Feb. 1955)

For further exploration of this fine tradition, click here.

HPL in NER

When we were working on the first volume of Best American Fantasy, I said to Jeff and Ann that I wished we could reprint some nonfiction, because some of the most wondrous things I'd encountered were essays. I had New England Review at the forefront of my mind when I said this, because I sit down and read each issue that arrives immediately, and most of what excites me is the eclectic nonfiction they publish (which is not to say the poems and stories they publish are not exciting, too; many are, and I've passed some on to Ann and Jeff. Yes, we're still working on BAF 2, the "patience is a virtue" edition...)

The latest issue of NER contains an essay by J.M. Tyree, "Lovecraft at the Automat". It's not an essay that will offer too much that's new to a Lovecraft devotee, I expect, but I'm only a casual Lovecraftian, and generally more interested in his life and circumstances than in his writing. It's fun, though, to see a journal like NER giving pages to a serious look at Lovecraft in an essay that more than once references not only Richard Wright, but also China Mi矇ville.

The essay is mostly about Lovecraft's brief time in New York, its effect on his racism and xenophobia, the manifestations of that racism and xenophobia in his writing, and how such attitudes, transmogrified into cosmic terrors, become general enough to appeal to any of our own insecurities and neuroses. The essay begins:

In his 1945 memoir Black Boy, Richard Wright describes how as a child he became addicted to the pulp fiction supplement of a racist white newspaper. What Wright loved was reading a "thrilling horror story" in the magazine section of a Chicago paper "designed to circulate among rural, white Protestant readers." There is no reason to suspect that Wright was reading H.P. Lovecraft -- in fact, the habit was probably acquired before Lovecraft began to publish. But Wright's sense of shock and recognition when the awful truth dawns on him parallels the feelings many readers have when they discover the racism that manifests itself in Edgar Allan Poe or Lovecraft.

Later:

There is a poignancy in Wright's generosity and gratitude to such stories that implies an essential role for them in his overall intellectual growth. Could we borrow or adapt this notion from Wright for a more judicious reading of Lovecraft? It is almost as if pulp fiction, by hinting at the possibility of other worlds, whether real or fantastic, cannot help but liberate a young mind hungering for something different from the everyday reality in which it is confined. Certainly the curious desire that young writers feel to copy Lovecraft's stories does not come from a fixation on their explicit or submerged prejudices; it seems to come instead from a desire to create art suggesting hidden dimensions and extraordinary circumstances lurking invisibly in the creases, cracks, and corners of our humdrum world.

This is a familiar idea (perhaps even clich矇d, which isn't to suggest wrong) about a reader's relationship to such fiction, but I think it's one worth reiterating, particularly within the context Tyree puts it in, because it highlights the reader's agency -- it recognizes that readers use texts in lots of different ways. Even stories created from a racist impulse can have an effect that is quite different from what the writer intended. Such a recognition does not excuse the original impulse, but it helps us remember that texts have all sorts of different and often contradictory contexts: the context in which they were created and the contexts in which they were, and are, received. (I wish Tyree had mentioned Nick Mamatas's Move Under Ground, which adds yet more context to all of this in a clever and thought-provoking way.)

Tyree's essay ends abruptly, and on the whole it feels more like an interesting and potentially illuminating beginning of something longer than it feels like a satisfying essay in and of itself, but there are some marvelous passages. I was particularly taken with some of the connections Tyree makes between Lovecraft and other writers -- he brings in Conrad a few times, and compares Lovecraft's xenophobia to Henry James's similar ideas, and how the similarities manifested themselves in very different responses to New York. He also mentions Thoreau, who lived in New York in 1843:

Their writing about the city was inextricably bound up with their feeling of revulsion toward an urban scene they had no wish to understand. And in New York, both writers discovered not only what they hated, but what they loved: in Thoreau's case, Concord and the possibilities of natural wilderness, and in Lovecraft's case, colonial Providence and the survivals of the past. Interestingly, both writers started on the first literary productions of their maturity while sunk in urban unhappiness. Perhaps it was a matter of imagining anotehr world to inhabit besides the one they found themselves in.

(Tyree mentioned Thoreau's time in NY in an earlier NER essay on William Gaddis which is well worth reading and is available online.)

One of the interesting tidbits in the essay is that Lovecraft met the poet Hart Crane -- the two lived in the same part of Brooklyn Heights -- and almost met Allen Tate. This made me think that perhaps the best text to set alongside Lovecraft's New York years is Samuel Delany's "Atlantis: Model 1924" (in Atlantis: Three Tales), which doesn't mention Lovecraft, but Crane is essential to the story (Tate makes an appearance, too), and one passage about a young black man's excitement over pulp magazines' tales of exotic Africa ("the sound of the twentieth century infiltrating the silence of a past so deep its bottom was source and fundament of time and of mankind itself") ends:

...the magazines were in a shopping bag leaning up by the brick wall when he lifted it on the paper beneath was a picture of KKK men in bedsheets holding high a torch menacing the darkness of the black newsprint from within the photo's right framing the shopping bag just sitting there Sam thought where anyone could have taken it

Anyone at all.

One Day of the AWP Bookfair

Due to various technical mishaps, I wasn't able to get into the AWP Bookfair on Friday to help the ever-erstwhile Clayton Kroh with the Best American Fantasy/Weird Tales table. Saturday, though, was no problem, and I spent the day in the labyrinthine world of the Bookfair -- three floors of tables and booths. It took me fifteen minutes just to find our table, placed as it was against a back wall of the farthest room, and once when I wandered out alone I managed to walk in circles for at least ten minutes before realizing the source of the profound sense of deja vu filling my brain.

Tempest Bradford stopped by, and I quickly convinced her to take over the table so I could wander around and give copies of BAF to any magazine or journal whose representatives I could convince to take one. It can be amazingly difficult to give things away at AWP, because so many people are traveling by airplane and cannot carry away piles and piles of the many things it is so easy to accumulate (although BEA is worse by an order of magnitude). But I persevered, and got to learn about a bunch of publications that were new to me. I also got to see folks I hadn't seen in a while, including Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi, Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn, various members of the staff of Tin House (whose amazement that I no longer have a beard made me realize just how long it's been since I saw them last...), Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's, Aaron Burch of Hobart, a bunch of folks from Redivider, the wonder that is Richard Nash of Softskull/Counterpoint, and the great and glorious people of One Story, including editor Hannah Tinti, who, I learned, has a novel coming out in June: The Good Thief (Hannah's story collection Animal Crackers is excellent). I spent a bit of time chatting with Lawrence Schimel, who loaned me a lovely baby-blue bag in which to carry things. Small Beer Press was there in the force of Gavin Grant, Jed Berry, and Kelly Link, and I glanced at an advanced copy of John Kessel's upcoming collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, a book all upstanding citizens will want to place on their bedside tables (no word yet on the deluxe coffee-table edition, which will feature photos of John Kessel and Jim Kelly acting out scenes from the stories). Finally, I got to talk briefly with Charles Flowers, of the Lambda Literary Foundation, who assured me that his excellent literary magazine, Bloom will, indeed, be producing a new issue soon.

And now a list of some of the journals I picked up copies of because they were new to me, though in some cases they are quite venerable publications (listed in the order of which I have pulled them out of my backpack): Third Coast, HOW, Dos Passos Review, So to Speak, Phoebe,The Yalobusha Review, Knockout, and Practice.

By the time I got back to the table, Theodora Goss had joined Tempest. Dora was at AWP to, among other things, help promote Interfictions along with her co-editor Delia Sherman, and there seemed to be a lot of interest among the AWP crowd in the book, as well as in such things as Omnidawn's Paraspheres and our Best American Fantasy. Core genre fiction is still not something that most people who attend AWP seem to get excited about, but particularly among the younger attendees, I noticed a great excitement for fiction that isn't in a strictly realist mode, fiction that draws from all sorts of different sources. Dora said a panel on fairy tales had been extremely popular, as was the panel on realist/nonrealist fiction. There was more interest in Weird Tales than I expected, too, with at least five people asking me, "Is that the Weird Tales?" -- people who seemed to think the magazine had died some years ago. It is very much alive, though, and new fiction editor Ann VanderMeer is working hard to bring its old traditions into the new century.

By the end of the day, I was completely exhausted, and my only regret was that I hadn't been able to be at the entire conference, nor did I get a chance to attend any of the panels, presentations, or parties. Chicago, though, is not so far away...

Post-Pboz-Party Post

Pindeldyboz is migrating from being a print-and-online magazine to being only an online magazine, and so they held a party Monday night, and I went. So did other people. Including Richard Larson, Dustin Kurtz, Ed Champion, and Sarah Weinman. The last print issue of Pboz is actually only appearing as a free PDF download. It's 16 megabytes of worthwhile reading.

Of last night's readings from the last issue, I was particularly taken by two. Here are excerpts:

As internships go—is that still what this is? -- you could do a lot better than zig-zagging through no man’s land carving up no man’s cows all summer. It’s not for credit, what the hell kind of major would give you credit for that? It’s more like an apprenticeship, but with no hope or desire to take over the business. Every Wednesday $250 is direct-deposited into my account back east. This job makes a lot more sense on Wednesdays.
--from "Every Creeping Thing of the Earth"
by Patrick Rappa


I agreed with you -- wholeheartedly, in fact -- that it was a relief that you were upgrading your BlackBerry that evening. If you hadn’t, then you wouldn’t have returned to the office and received the call from the Committee Chair, confirming that she did receive the proposal and she thought it was "exceptional." I also agreed with you that the shock you suffered was unfortunate and upsetting. And yes, I do understand that just because you had -- as you stated -- a "brain fart" it was not my responsibility to take it upon myself to complete the mandatory proposal for a grant that increases our project budget by two million dollars. I was to find you and have you view the final edition so that you may “put your spin on it” and I didn’t do that and, as I said, I am sorry.

What I really wanted to say was that you would certainly know that you had a "brain fart" because your head is so far up your ass you could probably smell it.
--from "What I Wanted to Say"
by Kristin McGonigle

The good news is that the Pboz website is going to continue to publish five new stories every other week, as they have done for a while now, and impressively so -- in fact, for Best American Fantasy (which makes a great holiday present, by the way) we reprinted more stories from Pindeldyboz Online than from any other source.

How to Save the SF Magazines

Paolo Bacigalupi, who used to work for High Country News, takes some lessons learned from his previous employment and speculates about the ways science fiction and fantasy magazines could save themselves from their ever-declining circulations. Paolo's thoughts appear in three blog posts: Part 1 (overview), Part 2 ("Marketing in Meatspace"), and Part 3 ("Online Marketing").

I don't have any great knowledge of marketing, so I will defer to Paolo and others on that, but I do hope the magazines are able to survive, partly because I respect the history they represent and partly because I like the idea of monthly magazines full of fiction being able to survive in our world.

But honestly, I only pay money to subscribe to one of them. I receive subscriptions to some others because once upon a time I reviewed them more frequently than I do now (I certainly still read them for Best American Fantasy), but for the others, when it comes time to make selections for BAF, I rely on recommendations from reliable readers for good work from them. I used to subscribe to a few of the magazines, but with one I realized I hadn't finished reading a story they published for an entire year, and another became so incredibly ugly that I found myself unwilling to read it -- the binding was so tight it made holding the magazine open difficult, the pages were crammed with small-print words on cheap paper with tiny margins, as if the whole thing were produced on a Mac 128K. I hated everything I read purely because of how it was presented, and so I stopped sending money to that magazine. (That you may now be having trouble figuring out exactly which of the possible magazines I'm talking about says an awful lot in and of itself...)

The magazines I subscribe to and read are ones that are either useful to me or ones that, when they arrive in the mail, I am usually tempted to put everything else aside and sit down and read them for a while. When Interzone arrives, for instance, I always tear the packaging open and look at every page, then at least skim all the nonfiction. The fiction isn't often to my taste, so I usually save it for later, but the design of the magazine is always so eye-catching that it simply gives me pleasure to flip through its pages, and the nonfiction is eclectic and rewarding more often than not. This is a magazine that feels like it was produced to appeal to people who are alive right now, rather than to the denizens of 1950.

The other magazines I at least skim immediately are Harper's and A Public Space. Harper's I love for the diversity of material it offers -- it's rare that an issue completely bores me -- and I would now never think of letting my subscription go, because subscribers get full access to the entire Harper's digital archive. It's not an expensive subscription, and it comes with 150 years of material. The best deal I know of in publishing.

A Public Space is beautifully designed and intelligently edited, with a range of writing of all sorts: nonfiction, poetry, fiction. Inevitably, there are things I don't read, things that don't interest me, things I don't like ... but it doesn't matter, because the variety of material and the pleasant design of the magazine causes it to maintain a strong grip on my attention.

None of what I've said here about my preferences and predilections has much to do with marketing, but it does have to do with the content delivered after the marketing has done its thing. It's hard to get me to subscribe to a magazine, yes, but it's even harder to get me to renew a subscription. I doubt I'm alone in this, particularly these days when there are so many other ways to find entertainment and fulfillment than by reading magazines.

(I'll have more to say about various lit'ry magazines that excite me in Monday's column at Strange Horizons.)

"Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall

Whenever I encounter a piece of writing that blows the top of my head off, I try to settle down and figure out how it works and what I so forcefully responded to within it. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes I can't. Sometimes the top of my head just won't go back on.

So it is with "Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall, published in the latest issue of Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. You might not have heard of Porcupine, but it's worth your attention; this issue in particular is rich with good poetry, prose, and pictures. But "Akhil and Judy" is the standout for me, and a standout among all the stories I have read this year, or, for that matter, any year.

I have a few hypotheses for why I find this story so affecting, so impressive, but I don't have much in the way of solid reasoning, though I'm going to try here to make my hypotheses hold some water. I know the story's effect on me: during one of my three readings, it brought me to the verge of tears; during another, I was struck by how charming and even funny it sometimes is. Each time I read it, the story took hold of my attention and imagination in a way few stories ever do -- I heard nothing other than the words, imagined nothing other than the images those words expressed.

It's a difficult story to summarize, and that's often a good sign. Summary cannot really convey how (and how well) this story works, because its subject matter is so vividly and inextricably connected to the narrative structure.

Nonetheless, there are things I can say. I can say it is the story of Akhil, who was born in India and then was brought by his father to Rwanda, where the family settled in Kibeho, where an orphaned girl named Isobelle saw apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and then, a few years later, everyone was in hell. Akhil and Isobelle met in a refugee camp and fled, eventually ending up in California. That's where the story begins:

Akhil and Isobelle first set eyes on each other while they were fleeing for their lives-- Akhil, amongst a throng of screaming people, from the east end of the camp, Isobelle, in a frenzied crowd, from the west. They stared, slowed down, crossed paths, turned to keep their eyes connected then continued their flight from the men with machetes and machine guns. Akhil hid in a toilet hole along with a mother suffocating her child. Isobelle buried herself beneath a pile of recently inaugurated corpses. When Isobelle later appeared, looking into the toilet hole, yelling for Akhil to get out, Akhil was convinced he finally had a real vision. Now the vision ends, or walks out the door, slamming it vengefully behind her.

Akhil decides to leave, and so he gets on a train to Portland, and there he meets a family from India with a little boy, and the little boy thinks Akhil is his lost brother, Mohammed. The family is from Ahmedabad, and left in 2002, a year after a terrible earthquake, and the year of a month of riots that began with a train on fire.

There's even more to the story, both foreground and background, but that's enough to let you know there's a lot. Yet "Akhil and Judy" isn't even twenty pages long. That's where some of its wonder lies: it compresses three continents and three decades of history into remarkably few words, and it does so without reducing the continents or the history to simple lessons or easy emotions. The affect of the sentences is flat, yet they gain power from Lall's careful control of tone and diction, with surprising (and effective) choices of words popping up every few sentences to keep the story from falling into an inappropriate deadpan. It stays, instead, tensely matter-of-fact, jutting now and again into lyrical images that would be much less effective were the whole striving for the same effect.

I would quote some passages to prove my point about the prose, but (in this case) to rip the words out of the story hobbles them. The sentences and paragraphs need each other for their rhythms and patterns, and what looks in an excerpt like too much or not enough proves itself to be, in the story itself, exactly right. The familiar doesn't lose its familiarity, doesn't become completely strange and new -- rather, it becomes both familiar and exact, satisfying in its inevitability, amazing in its ability to contain so much in a form that would, anywhere else, be mundane.

The title points to one part of the story I haven't yet mentioned. Early in the story (though not in their lives), Isobelle tells Akhil, "We have to become different people." Later, we discover what this means:

Their date was at a pier in Newport Beach. Akhil was supposed to come upon Isobelle and approach her as if for the first time, using an alias and a past made of fiction.

It doesn't work the first time -- Isobelle scoffs at Akhil as he pretends to be other than himself, and she walks away. But they try again, and this time they talk, with Akhil calling himself Jack, and Isobelle ("in a Jamaican accent that faded in and out") calling herself Judy. As the characters talk, fiction leads to something that sounds too convincing to be anything other than a horrible truth.

One of the reasons I find the story so effective, aside from how much it crams into its sentences and how well crafted those sentences are, is that it is not linear, and yet it is patterned. We move back and forth from the present-tense travels on the train to past-tense reminiscences and meditations. We gain glimmers of the past until, by the end, the accumulated bits of collage gain a shape in our minds, and all the previous sections grow richer and revelatory.

And so we have a story about time and memory and vision and loss and faith; about exile, truth, and family; about religion and politics, Akhil and Isobelle, Jack and Judy, Kibeho and Ahmedabad, us and them. It's a story so achingly sad at its heart that it is nearly unreadable, and yet the sadness is leavened with a hope in the possibility that comes from new beginnings, though that hope is tempered with the knowledge that survival is a blessing tempered by the ineradicable taste of ash on the tongue.

Brooklyn Book Festival

Tempest and I spent the day at the Brooklyn Book Festival, mostly just wandering around harrassing various vendors. I finally got to meet Hannah Tinti, editor of One Story, in person, and she told me about the Save the Short Story project, and even got a picture of me reading Calvin Baker's "Dominion", a very fine story indeed.

We also got to meet Tom Roberge of A Public Space, another person I'd exchanged plenty of emails with, but had not yet encountered in person. I convinced Tempest to subscribe, which was one of my better accomplishments of the day. There are only a few magazines I really wouldn't want to be without for even one issue, and A Public Space is one such magazine.

Gavin Grant and Jed Berry manfully manned the Small Beer Press table. Tempest and I had discussed the fact that there haven't been any good, physical literary fights recently -- plenty of internet flamewars and such, but nobody actually punching somebody out -- and so we tried to convince Gavin that he should start such a fight, perhaps at the upcoming World Fantasy Convention, but he didn't like the idea, citing certain impracticalities and long-range effects. (Why do people have to be sensible and ruin our grand plans for entertainment?)

I tried to find Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press to catch up with him, since we haven't had a chance to chat for a while, but he was off watching some hockey game or something involving steel. I thought for a while that this was just a ploy to get me to go away and stop scaring customers away from the Soft Skull table, but Ed got the same info.

(Except I never saw Ed. Sure, there were 10,000 people at the festival, but still. If anybody can stand out amidst 10,000 people, it's Ed. I think one of us doesn't exist. Actually, during the entire day the only litblogger I encountered was Levi Asher. I think they were all hiding from me. Or wearing disguises. After all, it took me a moment to recognize Levi...)

Tempest and I had lunch at a wonderful place serving wraps and smoothies, a bunch of blocks away from the festival, down some roads. (Brooklyn remains a mystery to me.) We had many fun moments during lunch, but one particularly fun one for me was watching somebody reading today's Times, utterly engrossed by Maria Headley's amusing and touching essay about being a stepmonster. I restrained myself from going up to the poor, unwitting soul and screaming like a little girl, "Hey, I know her! She's great! Omygawd you're reading her essay!!!" It took a lot of self-denial and inner strength to avoid doing this, but I somehow persevered.

The only panel/reading we went to was a reading by Uzodinma Iweala, Doreen Baingana, and Mohammed Naseehu Ali, all of whom were excellent. I knew Iweala's and Baingana's work, but Ali was new to me, and I will now most certainly seek out his collection The Prophet of Zongo Street. Doreen Baingana, who I first became acquainted with in Kenya last year, read part of a story from her excellent collection Tropical Fish, and Iweala read a story from the latest Paris Review. (And I guess here is the place where I have to admit I don't read The Paris Review much anymore because it has become so thin. A few stories, an interview or two, a handful of poems, some pictures. The design has gotten better, but the contents have been put on such a diet the magazine just doesn't hold much interest for me anymore. Alas.)

There were other panels that looked fascinating, but there were long lines to get tickets to see them, and getting tickets would have required planning and organization on my part. So we only saw the one. And a good one it was.

After the reading, I found Tom Burke, who is one of the organizers of the Summer Literary Seminars program through which I visited Kenya last year. Tom kindly introduced me to some of the people behind one of my favorite websites, Words Without Borders, and pointed out a new lit mag to me, the St. Petersburg Review, which is published from my home state of New Hampshire and features a bunch of excellent writers, including George Saunders, Gina Ochsner, Padgett Powell, Josip Novakovich, Aimee Bender, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Mark Halperin, Timothy Liu, and, appropriately, many Russians whose names are at the moment unfamiliar to me. It also includes a special section of poetry by women from the Gulags.

By the end of the day, I was too tired to make the trek over to the Sunday Salon, so that's going to have to wait for another Sunday. It's good to have things to look forward to.

Kwani? and Binyavanga Get Blogs

Potash just let me know that there are two new blogs worth keeping an eye on.

First, the Kwani? literary magazine and organization now has its own blog (not to be confused with the Kwani? litfest blog). I was thrilled to see that Kwani? 4 has officially been published, and I hope copies find their way to the U.S. soon (the first three are available at various places, and are worth seeking out). I saw a preliminary edition of Kwani? 4 when I was in Kenya in December, and it's a big book rich with fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of all sorts.

Second, Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog. Actually, that should be Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog!!!, because it gives me great joy that one of the most astute writers I know is now going to be (at least occasionally) posting new material online. Binyavanga is presenting not only some of his own writing, but that of writers he knows and admires, including Jackie Lebo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.