My nominee for this season at the LBC, The Cottagers by Marshall N. Klimasewiski, is being discussed this week. I hope you’ll join the discussion over there. My first post is on suspense and the contemporary novel.
Cottagers Week
Broadway Bashing
In today’s Public Editor column in the New York Times, Daniel Okrent takes the opportunity to mercilessly bash the Tony Awards as well as the Times’ lavish coverage of them. The only productions eligible for Tony’s are ones that take place “on” Broadway as opposed to “Off,” despite the fact that “the various Off or Off Off Broadway houses … launched all but one winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama in the last decade (the exception originated in a nonprofit theater in Florida).” Meanwhile back at the Times, Okrent claims that there will soon be better coverage of theatre: “the Times is on the brink of a long-planned, apparently expensive and unquestionably overdue renovation of its cultural report, scheduled to premiere in the fall.”
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Let Me Be Your Bracketologist
You recall a couple of weeks ago when I previewed The Morning News 2007 Tournament of Books. As it turns out, they’ve incorporated a contest for readers – an office pool – into this year’s Tournament and I’m involved. How to play along:Here’s how the contest works. In addition to this year’s brackets, below you’ll find a set of brackets filled out by each of our selected Office Pool Book Bloggers. Review them, then select the one you think is the most likely to win – the bloggers will be scored for each match they predict correctly, with scores updated each day of the Tournament. Email us at the address below with the name of the blogger you like in the email subject line, and your full contact information in the body of the email. (You can only enter once.) We’ll randomly select one reader for each blogger to “play for,” and the winning blogger’s reader will win every book in the tournament, courtesy of Powell’s Books. Note: The contest will close at 6 p.m. EST this Wednesday, March 7So, go there and pick The Millions’ bracket, there could be a whole bunch of books in it for you.
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The challenges of digital magazine editions
An article in the Wall Street Journal talks up some of the drawbacks of the 8 DVD-ROM Complete New Yorker set:Web-savvy users accustomed to navigating easily through online content find The Complete New Yorker a bit of an anachronism. Each page of content is literally a picture of a magazine page. Readers can’t copy text from a story and paste it elsewhere. They can’t search for keywords within the text of articles, only within titles and abstracts. If they want to jump from issue to issue, or article to article, they first have to go back to the index and sometimes change DVDs.The problem obviously isn’t the technology, it’s the 1976 law that requires publishers to get permission from free-lancers before republishing their work in another medium. The lawyers have determined that anything before 1976 is fair game to be converted into a new format. And while most publishers negotiated away the rights of free-lancers in this realm in the mid-1990s, there still remains a legal limbo for material published in between the two dates. Based on case arising from a similar set put out by National Geographic in 1997, by simply creating digital versions of the magazine pages, publishers are in the clear, and this is the route that the New Yorker has taken. The article linked above also looks at how this issue is affecting similar archiving efforts by other venerable magazines like Harper’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.(via and via)
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More on the Best Current Writer Question
After some email discussion, it appears that the consensus is that Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is the lone book by a young writer from the past few years that will have the staying power to last generations. [Embarrassing author’s note: due to an unhealthy aversion to hype and a disproportionate dislike of Franzen because of his self-involved non-fiction, I have until now held out against reading this book. Now chastened, I will begin reading it by Monday] Meanwhile a couple of folks followed my lead to add some names to the slightly older than 50 category. Garth suggests Salman Rushdie (age 56), who is undoubtedly a highly skilled writer, but one who I think may be better remembered for his role as a pawn in the Ayatollah’s dalliance with contemporary literature, and less for any of the particular novels he has written. He does have an incredibly attractive wife though. Brian meanwhile suggested that the late W. G. Sebald (dead at age 57) is sure to be considered an indispensible, classic author one day. As is often the case, his already stellar reputation as a writer jumped up a notch as eulogizers strained to deliver Sebald the praise that he surely would have recieved, parcelled out over the remainder of his years, had he not died. As so often happens, Sebald’s untimely death may boost him towards immortality in the eyes of readers. His reputation aside, he is undoubtedly worth reading: both Austerlitz and The Emigrants are highly recommended.
A Travesty
One more thing, I almost forgot. Oprah’s Book Club reappeared today with the odd selection of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. As always, there is a special new “Oprah” edition of the book. I think the cover for this one is by far her most self-aggrandizing yet, especially when you consider that this is a classic of American literature. Oprah’s cultish Book Club has, from the start, been offputting to real readers, and, despite the hiatus, it’s clear that little has changed. Maybe Oprah is trying to take the moral highground here by picking a book by a dead writer for whom winning the Oprah lottery could mean nothing (Steinbeck won’t be rocketing from obscurity to fame like some of Oprah’s previous annointed ones). Another plus: Steinbeck can’t pull a “Franzen” and complain about being selected. Furthermore by calling Steinbeck’s masterpiece “The book that brought back Oprah’s Book Club,” she can freely imply some kind of intellectual parity between the book and the Club. The phrasing of the blurb, as well as it’s huge font and placement on the cover, is just shocking, as though East of Eden. is some blockbuster of Oprah’s creation and not the staple of American fiction that most folks read in high school. It seems that Oprah is quite smug in her assumption that not only has the American public never read this great book, but we’d never even heard of it until Oprah was kind enough to bring it to our attention. Wonders never cease… Coming next week, another healthy dose of Harry Potter Mania. Open Wide.
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What about JT Leroy?
The people behind the JT Leroy* scam (our other literary scam), must be happy about the breathing room that the James Frey saga has given them. But is that it? They were called out by the press, but does it end there? As far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong), there has been no public declaration by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop and Laura Albert in which they come clean, apologize and promise to donate all their ill-gotten gains to charity. Frey did it; shouldn’t they?Meanwhile, adding to the list of people who are unburdening themselves of their unwilling involvement with this scam, actress Ann Magnuson, with whom I had the pleasure of discussing Leroy during my recent trip to Los Angeles, lays out her correspondence with Leroy and also discusses how the scammers demeaned the state of West Virginia.*Now that we know Leroy isn’t a real person, I suppose I should quit making his name boldface, a stylistic treatment that I usually reserve for real people.
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