Oprah and her minions must read my blog because a little bird told me that her next book club selection is a book that also happens to be on my reading queue. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a somewhat forgotten classic by Carson McCullers. From what I’ve heard, the book resembles To Kill a Mockingbird and several other works of fiction by Southern women authors. And now it will be a bestseller. If you are one of those people who gets annoyed about the Oprah logo, hurry and get one before they run out of unbesmirched copies.
News Flash
Selling Yourself: Tao Lin and Wallace Shawn
Tao Lin, a young writer with a flair for cleverly drawing attention to his work, is in the news again. His latest scheme is to take investments from “the public” in his novel-in-progress in exchange for a portion of the royalties.The move appears to have been successful; shares are no longer available and Lin got written up in several mainstream publications, including a fairly lengthy piece in the Telegraph, and dozens of blogs. What nobody mentioned, however, is that this has been done before, some 40 years ago, by another outsized, New York personality.In the early years of his career, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn did the same thing, according to a John Lahr piece that originally ran in the New Yorker and is collected in his book of profiles, Show and Tell published in 2000. Shawn, son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, was a struggling writer going out of his way to achieve literary success without tapping into his father’s considerable influence. Lahr writes:Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He told me he’d “sold stock in himself” – his way of rationalizing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan he took from a consortium of friends in the sixties, in order to go off and write his plays. (To this day, the investors receive a small yearly check).The juxtaposition of the two schemes presents an interesting notion. $2,500 40 years ago got you some small percentage of a budding artist’s career in perpetuity. $2,000 now only gets you 10% of the royalties for a novel. Inflation, I suppose.Finally, despite Shawn’s scheme (I believe) initially being revealed in a New Yorker piece and despite Shawn’s obvious ties to the magazine, The New Yorker, in its (admittedly very brief) mention of Lin’s plan on its own blog, did not catch the Shawn connection.Given the fractured state of publishing and the enthusiasm for trying new models, perhaps this shareholder form of patronage will take off, but it will have been Shawn, not Lin, who was the first innovator.
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Title Your Novel in Three Easy Steps! or, The Abstraction of Abstraction
We’ve written about how difficult it can be to find a proper title for a work-in-progress. Lately, however, we’ve started to notice a certain trend that may make things easier on the budding novelist. Consider the following novels, all published within the last couple years: The Inheritance of Loss; The History of Love; The Story of Forgetting; The God of Small Things; and The Secret of Lost Things.Certainly there’s some precedent for titling a work with the prepositional construction “The Blank of Blank.” (The Wings of the Dove, The Heart of the Matter, and The Nightmares’ forgotten R&B classic “The Horrors of the Black Museum…” come to mind, and and that’s just off the top of our heads.) Indeed, pairing a wispy abstraction with something surprisingly concrete can be a recipe for piquancy: Think of The Possibility of an Island or The House of Mirth.The innovation represented by the recent spate of prepositional titles is the pairing of two abstractions. A writer willing to settle for the tried-and-true might consider recombining some of the nouns above to create a title for her manuscript, such as The Secret of God, The Lost Things of Small Things, or The Inheritance of History. But for the truly ambitious, may we suggest the following approach: roll some virtual dice, take the corresponding abstract nouns from Column A and Column B, insert a “the” (or two) and an “of,” and you’re off to the races!Column A:1. Earnestness2. Persistence3. Irritability4. Malodorousness5. Malice6. WhimsyColumn B:1. Splendor2. Etiquette3. Particle Physics4. Numismatism5. Large Things6. Medium Things
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The Secret Life of Dan Brown
We think we know people so well, but then real honest to God information comes out about them in a court proceding (or a Smoking Gun investigation) and we find out how wierd they really are. This is doubly true for celebrities, though, it turns out, not always literary ones. Case in point, Dan Brown, who I never thought of as much of a public figure and who always seemed to me to be nothing more than the bland face behind the Da Vinci Code juggernaut, has his quirks, but not very exciting ones it seems. We’re discovering this as a result of the plagiarism trial currently under way in England where he’s been accused of lifting the premise for his book from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. On to the quirkiness: according to a story in the Guardian, “his witness statement reveals his working method, beginning at 4am, seven days a week, with an antique hour glass on his desk to remind him to take hourly exercise breaks.” “push-ups, sit-ups and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood – and ideas – flowing,” adds a story in the Independent. Well, if that’s all it takes… Also noted at the trial: Blythe, his wife, does the lion’s share of his research; he moved on to writing after a failed career as a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles; his parents hid his Christmas gifts and he had to decifer a treasure map to find them.(via the Publishers Lunch newsletter. The free one. It’s all I can afford.)One more thing. I haven’t been following this trial very closely, but I do know one thing: Holy Blood, Holy Grail has been an incredibly huge seller ever since Da Vinci Code came out. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Covering the Catalogs: Grove Atlantic Spring/Summer 2006
I get a fair amount of catalogs from publishers these days, and since they’re always chock full of new and interesting books that I’m guessing people will want to know about, I’m thinking about instituting a semi-regular feature called Covering the Catalogs wherein I pick out a handful of items that I deem interesting from the most recent catalog to cross my desk. And since I received the newest Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press/Black Cat/Canongate catalog yesterday, this one’ll be the first.Recently, Maud was expressing her discomfort with the impending media coverage of the upcoming Samuel Beckett centenary: “I await commemorative events like this centenary with excitement that tends to mutate, as the press coverage appears, into dread, then lamentation, and finally, resigned disgust.” The “news” that arises from the anniversary of the birth of a dead writer isn’t always scintillating, but, on the upside, such occasions give publishers – wanting to cash in on said press coverage – an opportunity to reissue and repackage the work of the great writer. As such, Grove is putting out two different items to mark Beckett’s centenary. The first is a bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot. The play was originally written in French by Beckett, and he translated it into English himself. This edition provides both texts, side-by-side. Grove is also putting out a four volume set of Beckett’s collected works with introductions by well-known writers. The first volume of novels is introduced by Colm Toibin and the second volume of novels is introduced by Salman Rushdie. The volume of collected dramatic works is introduced by Edward Albee, and the volume of collected poems, short fiction and criticism is introduced by J.M. Coetzee.Coming in April from the author of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden is Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden is well-known for his immersive coverage of armed conflict, and in this book he is setting out to provide an account of, as the book’s subtitle calls it, “the first battle in America’s war with militant Islam,” the Iran hostage crisis.Coming in July from Atlantic Monthly Press is Tom Drury’s first new novel in six years, The Driftless Area. Drury was among the “Best of Young American Novelists” named by Granta, and his stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, including “Path Lights” from last fall in which a bottle falls from the sky.I plan on continuing to cherry pick items that interest me from other catalogs as I receive them, so stay tuned. If you are a publisher and would like to send me your catalog, please email me.
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New from Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby, the British novelist and professional music fan who folks love to hate will have a new novel out in the US in June. Though Songbook is good bathroom reading, Hornby’s books are just too fluffy for me. At Yossarian’s Diary they’ve already had a look at the new book, and the prognosis isn’t good:April brings A Long Way Down, a new novel from Nick Hornby, and sadly I don’t think the showers will wash it away. Yossarian so wants to like Hornby’s fiction, but each book seems to be so much poorer than the last (although his non-fiction is always enjoyable to read)–and How to Be Good was a very poor work from such a high profile author. However, if you liked that book, then you’ll undoubtedly like this tale (known around here as The Pizza Suicides) of four strangers who meet on a roof as they all decide to end it all by jumping off. One of them, a pizza delivery boy, is an American. You can tell this by the way he says “man” a lot. Hmmmm.
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Tonight on 4th Avenue: Paul Beatty and Matthew Sharpe
Tonight’s installment of the Pacific Standard Fiction Series here in Brooklyn features two Millions favorites: Paul Beatty, author of Slumberland and The White-Boy Shuffle, and Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown and The Sleeping Father. Books will be for sale on-site, and drink specials will be chosen by dartboard. The reading starts at 7 p.m. at Pacific Standard. Hope to see you there!Bonus link: Matthew Sharpe’s “Year in Reading” 2007
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Firmin Week
If you haven’t been there already, it’s not too late to check out the LBC’s discussion of Firmin by Sam Savage, our Autumn Read This! selection. Also, don’t miss the post from author Savage. By the way, I highly recommend this tale of a literary rat. Firmin is among the few animal protagonists who is neither moralistic nor an allegory, he’s just a sentient rat living in a bookstore near Boston’s decrepit Scollay Square.Update: If you hurry, you can still get in on the Firmin giveaway going on at the LBC right now.
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