There was lots of discussion late last week about Ed Wyatt’s NY Times article talking about publishers “offering books by lesser-known authors only as ‘paperback originals,’ forgoing the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life.” I’m all for this development as are many other folks. Sarah at GalleyCat commented, as did Miss Snark, who led me to Levi Asher making some very good points at LitKicks. I’m not a big fan of hardcovers, either. Personally, I prefer pocket paperbacks when I can get them.
Trending away from hardcovers
The Shop Around the Corner
How does an independent bookshop not only survive, but remain vital amid the encroaching chains? How does a tightly-knit community bolster its authors in a cut-throat industry? Independent bookshop owner Heidi Hallett has tackled both these issues by doing what the best independent shopkeepers do – opting for the intimate, the local.As this recent Globe and Mail article explains, Hallett’s Halifax bookshop, Frog’s Hollow, has its fortunes interwoven with that of her community. By hosting book launches and in-store author appearances of regional scribes, Hallett keeps her dream alive: “Local literature is a vital part of our culture here, and I am concerned that if more independent bookstores like mine start going under, we risk losing that history and heritage forever.”
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The literary crush
The “My First Literary Crush” piece that Slate posted on Tuesday, in which various notable folks discussed the books that they swooned over in their younger years, has generated some great blog posts. Ed, Jenny and Liam (guesting at Old Hag) all wrote about their literary crushes. Before I get to mine, I noticed some entertaining juxtapositions in the Slate piece. In particular, it was interesting to see that George Eliot was a favorite of both Neal Pollack (who loved Middlemarch) and Christopher Hitchens (a fan of The Mill on the Floss).My first literary crushes, in high school, were for Kurt Vonnegut, T.C. Boyle and John Irving. In college, I first read Ernest Hemingway and was quite taken. Feel free to share your literary crushes in the comments.
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Figuring out 9/11 with fiction
In her review of Deborah Eisenberg’s collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, CSM reviewer Yvonne Zipp leads with this declaration: “The Great American Novel used to be literature’s giant glass mountain. Now, it seems, we’ve switched to Making Sense of Sept. 11 as the ultimate unattainable goal.” I don’t know if that’s really true. Is this something American fiction writers are grappling with these days? Is this the great question of our generation? I don’t know, but then again, for whatever reason, I would love to read a work of fiction that takes on 9/11 in a challenging and illuminating way – so maybe 9/11 should matter to writers. Zipp goes on to say that “none have come closer to the top” than Eisenberg does with the title story in this collection, surpassing, in this contest to make sense of 9/11, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Anita Shreve.Zipp also calls Deborah Eisenberg “the American Alice Munro,” which is funny because I always thought Alice Munro was the Canadian Joyce Carol Oates.See Also:Michiko Kakutani has a review of Jay McInerney’s new novel, The Good Life, which takes on 9/11.
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Books and Politics
Hillary Clinton may have bested Barack Obama at the voting box in New Hampshire, but Obama remains a big winner at bookstores, according to a recent report:According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 per cent of industry sales, [Clinton’s] Living History averaged around 1,000 sales a week in December and early January, compared with more than 7,000 a week for [Obama’s] Audacity of Hope and more than 2,000 for Dreams From My Father.Elsewhere, it turns out that recently assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto submitted her memoir to HarperCollins just days before her death. As the world watches Pakistan, the publisher is rushing to get the book out, according to Reuters:”No one could have known that these would be Benazir Bhutto’s final words, and somehow that makes them carry even more weight, especially at a time like this,” said Tim Duggan, the editor at HarperCollins who acquired the rights to the book.
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Stomping Acorns
Ian Frazier’s piece in last week’s New Yorker is one of the oddest, funniest essays I’ve read in a long time. I laughed to myself as I read it the other day while sitting on the steps of the Art Institute in downtown Chicago (following an edifying meetup with fellow book bloggers Deep and Sam). The essay, “Pensees D’Automne,” is about a grown man’s passion for stomping acorns in the fall, and it contains many asides about things like health insurance and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Frazier, who has long written odd and funny things like this, has a new book out this week called Gone to New York: Adventures in the City. The book collects thirty years of Frazier’s journalism about New York. From a review in the Sun-Times:The non-linear way Frazier’s mind works is a delight to follow on the page. And don’t let the emphasis on New York City fool you. Frazier is one of us. In the introduction to Gone to New York, Jamaica Kincaid gets it right when she calls her pal “the authentic American,” whose work “is meant to form an arc, an arc that has not yet begun its curve.”Kincaid and Frazier are also involved in another recently released book, this year’s edition of The Best American Travel Writing. Kincaid is the editor this year and Frazier is joined as a contributor by luminaries like John McPhee, William T. Vollmann, and William Least-Heat Moon.
From the Newsstand: Ian McEwan Week
Last week, The New Yorker ran a profile (subscription required) of Ian McEwan that was scarcely shorter than McEwan’s most recent novel, On Chesil Beach. For all its expansiveness, however, the article failed to offer readers the supreme pleasure of McEwan’s best fiction: a kind of psychological X-ray. And where writer Daniel Zalewski did manage to see inside McEwan the man, he seemed to discover there – perhaps unwittingly – a certain metaphysico-aesthetic complacency. For example, of John Banville’s quite valid complaint about Saturday’s “rosy” view of marriage (the wealthy and brilliant protagonist starts his day with wake-up sex), McEwan remarked, “The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife’s teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book.”A measure of pride may be in order – Atonement sold 2 million copies! Still, self-satisfaction represents one of writing’s occupational hazards, in both senses of the phrase. Doubt is for the novelist what faith is for the priest.Anyway, I’m pleased to report that my worries about McEwan were short-lived. His meditation on John Updike in the New York Review of Books shows us an empiricist still capable of wonderment. Better yet, unlike the New Yorker piece, the NYRB essay is free to all online. If time constraints force you to choose between reading Ian McEwan and reading about Ian McEwan… well, you know what to do.
You may find this interesting.
http://www.thepublishingcontrarian.com/2006/03/22/publishers-package-literature-as-original-paperbacks-to-lower-prices-and-slow-returns/
Two of the loveliest books I've read over the past year–Kirby Gann's "Our Napoleon in Rags" and Ander Monson's "Other Electricities"–were paperback originals. So I vote yes!