I came across Narrative Magazine this weekend, which, if you register, offers a free online subscription. The magazine comes out twice a year and includes several short stories and novel excerpts as well as interviews, non-fiction, and classics. Under classics, the magazine has published work by Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, and Ivan Turgenev. Recently they have also published a sizable chunk of the Rick Bass book I mentioned yesterday, The Diezmo. Once you’ve registered, go to the Archive page to see all the stuff they’ve got online.
Narrative Magazine: Lots of fiction online
Survey Says: People Are Reading
Here’s news. In a new survey conducted by polling firm Harris, “over one-third of Americans read more than ten books in typical year.” As regulars on the literature-is-a-dying-art beat, we know that this flies in the face of countless other surveys which have found that the typical American home contains just six books, all of which are used as doorstops.To pull a couple such surveys at random from Google, a National Endowment for the Arts study “Reading at Risk” (PDF) found that in 2002 only 56.6% of Americans had read any book at all that year, while the percentage having read a work of “literature” was just 46.7%. An AP-Ipsos poll last year found that one in four hadn’t read any books over the prior year (though presumably three out of four had).To compare apples and apples, Harris finds that 91% of Americans read a book over the last year, though of those, only 27% read “literature.”Can anything be made of these surveys other than that they are a little silly?
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The New York Times ‘Funny Pages’
No the Times isn’t getting comics, but they are taking a cue from the New Yorker by adding a graphic novel-type comics section to the Sunday magazine. Everybody’s been saying for years that “graphic novels” are on the cusp of taking the book world by storm. Is this a step in that direction? The first artist to appear will be, you guessed it, Chris Ware. Get the gory details here.
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Short Fiction Ripped From the Headlines
I wasn’t a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Landfill” in last week’s New Yorker. It felt to me a little too obvious, this story about an insecure college student’s drunken and accidental death thanks to the carelessness of the brothers at the fraternity where he was a pledge. It seemed too “ripped from the headlines,” too after school special, and on top of all that it was emotionally cheap – designed to provoke outrage with little complexity. So, it was interesting to discover that Oates’ story was indeed ripped from the headlines. The death of Hector Jr. very closely resembles that of a young man who had attended The College of New Jersey, so much so that Oates was compelled to apologize “for any offense she caused.”Obviously, quite a lot of fiction is drawn from real life events, but I think in this case, because Oates’ story was so one-note and so geared toward generating disgust, the connection was simply to stark to ignore. (via Jeff)
The Lively and Maybe Lost Art of the Literary Reading
As writers become more available online, face-to-face interactions may be put behind a paywall.
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Writing in limbo: Censorship in Iran
CBC journalist Ghazal Mosadeq recently returned to Tehran from Toronto and filed an audio report for the Dispatches program on the current state of publishing and censorship in Iran. Writers, readers and book-sellers are all trapped in a system of rules which are often tacit, confused and haphazard.Of particular interest is the lack of trust that has developed between reader and publisher as a result of years of censorship. Mosadeq also reports from a cemetery which contains the gravesite of twenty Iranian writers, some specifically requesting that they be buried there as a final chance to be separate from the repressive state. The government, meanwhile, tries to stop this, in an effort to avoid turning the cemetery into a shrine to its critics. Censored while alive; still censored after death.Hear the 8-minute audio dispatch here (RealPlayer)
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Deeper into the Quicksand
Today’s Elliot Spitzer scandal sent me back to the New Yorker archives, to revisit Nick Paumgarten’s excellent profile, from December 10. This time around, I was struck less by the “what you see is what you get” thesis of some Spitzer intimates, than by this proposition, from an unnamed source: “Spitzer lunges. He seems not to be a person of strategy. He slipped on a banana peel, or six, and once down has thrashed around.” It remains to be seen if, amid the thrashing, his newfound talent for “extracting oneself from an intractable position” holds up.
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Narrative Magazine (www.narrativemagazine.com) has easily become my favorite literary magazine – it is super accessible, and publishes lots of new voices as well as those of the well-known variety. Narrative's mission resounds: to bring great literature to the world, for free. It doesn't get much better than that, readers.