Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

Essays Notable Articles
August 23, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 72 5 min read

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In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon’s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Just let me be dramatic for a moment, okay? Murdered! My book was murdered!

Or was she? A friend pointed out that I was waiting to sell my book to publishers, when I could sell it to readers, all by myself. That’s true, of course. Self-publishing is as easy as it’s ever been, and if done well, it can even be lucrative. But, in most cases, self-published authors spend money, not make it, and they have to be their own editor, copy editor, publicist, and book cover designer (which can lead to this and this and this). I certainly could self-publish my novel, but I don’t have the cash, time, or talent to do it successfully. Plus,  there’s still a stigma to publishing your own writing. Though this is changing, I’ve never been an early adopter. (I used my AOL email account well into the new millennium, y’all; I leave the experiments to the innovative types.) The truth is, I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.

So, okay, I’m willing to let my book die, if that’s to be its fate. With all my talk of murder and barbecued souls, I’ll be the first to admit I’m letting myself wallow. But can you blame me? I’m grieving nearly five years of hard work. I’m mourning sentences, characters, and scenes that I’m still proud of. Letting go hurts. A lot. A friend of mine once said she didn’t want to write a novel because she couldn’t stand the idea of working for years on a project that might fail. One of my writing students recently told me she’s so afraid her book won’t sell that the very thought makes her hyperventilate. Another friend said she might die if her novel wasn’t published. I identified with all of these confessions. I felt them myself. Not-selling my novel was my biggest fear, and it’s happening. It happened.

(I was in natural, unmedicated labor with my child for 36 hours. For 24 of these hours, my cervix remained only 5 centimeters dilated. No matter how relaxed I remained, how deeply I breathed, there was no progress. None. More than once during the process, I thought, “This is like trying to sell a fucking novel!”)

(There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail, when his face wrinkles up, collapses in on itself like an imploding building, and sorrow, pure and clean sorrow, sweeps heavy across his features. I know this feeling.)

Goodbye, goodbye, Novel #1.

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The thing is, rejection is instructive. Over the past year I’ve learned that hearing “no” doesn’t get easier if the stakes are higher. Reject my piddling short stories and I will barely flinch; mess with my dear book and I’m rendered immediately vulnerable: “immobilized, apologetic,” as Alice Munro writes in her masterful story “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I urge my students to go for it and send out their work, that they have to get used to a life of disappointment if they want to be writers. As if one can get used to such a thing.

I’ve also learned, however, that a thoughtful rejection is a valuable one, especially coming from an overworked, underpaid editor. To have taken the time to read my work, and written feedback — that’s something I appreciate. This is called relationship-building, I am told. I have more than one friend who sold books to editors who rejected their previous one(s).

Lastly, these months of rejection have taught me the difference between being tenacious and being stubborn — and being stubborn and being desperate. My agent can continue to shop my novel around, but I have already attended its funeral. I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer. I haven’t lost my tenacity, I’ve simply refocused it on my next book, which I’m more than halfway done with. (This is the upside of a submission process that takes forever). Novel #2 deserves my full attention and care. Without it, my work — and I — will suffer.

And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.

 

Image credit: Evelyn Marin/Flickr

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

Essays In Person

Letters in the Wind: A Writer’s Evolution

Essays In Person
January 18, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 7 4 min read
The first time I learned what it means to be really good at something was in high school, on a golf course, with my hands cracked raw in the cold. I was on the 17th hole at Cape Arundel, a short, tricky course on the coast of Maine where the Bushes played in the summer. But as I stood there contemplating my tee shot in a hard wind off the Atlantic, all the glorious rounds I’d played on long August days felt very far away; I was who-knows-how-many strokes over par, my swing disintegrating in the elements. Not everyone’s game fell apart that day. When I finished my round I was surprised to learn that several of the state’s best players had managed to turn in good scores. The pudgy, towheaded Ben Daughan had been atop the leaderboard at junior golf events all summer and he was there again that day, just a few shots over par even in weather better suited to a snowball fight. Upon seeing his score, I remember thinking that real ability thrives regardless of conditions. I had that same thought in mind when, four years ago, I decided to make a career as a writer. My first assignment was a book review for The New York Observer -- Jon Meacham’s American Lion. I spent six anguished days working virtually nonstop to squeeze out barely 900 words. Most of that time I spent in a high pulse-rate pace around my apartment, waiting for conditions to clear just enough to let out a sentence. I realized that my writing at age 28 was a lot like my golf game as a teenager: a single gust of wind and it went to Hell. Around that same time I met Seth Mnookin, then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair with a best-selling book to his name. I emailed him, cold, looking for advice about starting a freelance career. He replied with a friendly admonition (Journalism is dying! Run away!) and a few weeks after we first talked, asked me if I wanted to help him write his next book, the contract for which had just been finalized with Simon & Schuster. Over the next 20 months, I spent more time talking with Seth than I did with my wife. His book was about the spurious but dogged idea that vaccines cause autism. He lived in New York, I lived in Philadelphia, and during our first year together I transcribed interviews, summarized journal articles, and tracked down contact information while he flew around the country to autism conferences, tried to wrangle a conversation with actress-turned-anti-vaccine-crusader Jenny McCarthy, and put together a rough outline for the book. I kept waiting for the day when Seth would start to actually write the book. It came, finally, in October, five months before the manuscript was due. I’d always imagined writing a book as a meditation, but what followed was more of an ecstatic experience. Seth kept long hours at his rented desk in a freelancers’ office in Manhattan. Often he’d send me a rough draft of a chapter in the early evening and tell me he was going out for air and some Chinese food. I’d work on the trouble spots he’d called to my attention -- usually transition sentences, or synonyms for words like “increasingly” that we’d already used a dozen times, or working on the order of a few knotty paragraphs. I’d send the text back to him before I went to bed and wince at the thought of the long night that awaited him. But when I woke up the next morning and checked on the chapter, I’d always find that Seth had managed to knock things straight. He did this day after day, for months on end, with deadlines close, his professional reputation on the line, his first child born in the middle of it all. And from watching this I learned that a real writer shouldn’t need a cup of tea at his side or a cabin with a view of the ocean or things just so in his own mind in order to get his work done. My work with Seth on The Panic Virus, as it came to be called, ended in the middle of 2010 and I went on trying to make it as a writer. Most of my assignments were short pieces for college alumni magazines or book reviews for The Christian Science Monitor.  Over time I found that my palms weren’t sweating as much when I sat down at my computer, and that I’d learned to do just enough of the writing process automatically to give me room to think as I wrote. Around that same time I remember watching tennis's U.S. Open. It was a windy day in Flushing and all the players were complaining about how it had been impossible to serve given the conditions. Then Roger Federer entered Arthur Ashe Stadium and aced out his opponent. Afterwards he was asked how he’d been able to serve so well in such bad weather. I remember Federer looking amused, like the question made no sense. “I've practiced my serve a whole lot my whole career,” he replied. “If I can't serve in the wind I've got a problem. You can wake me up at two or four in the morning I can still hit serves." I’ve tried writing in the middle of the night and the results usually aren’t good. But four years in as a writer, I’m less sensitive to my surroundings than I used to be. Just before Christmas, I was hired by The Boston Globe to write the paper’s “Brainiac” ideas blog. I’m writing 10 pieces a week, often about unfamiliar topics; four years ago I would have had a heart attack contemplating this kind of job, but now I feel practiced enough to do it well. I still can’t write like Seth, or like Federer can serve, or that kid Ben could golf, but I find that at least I can apply consistently the talent I have. Image Credit: Wikipedia
Essays In Person
| 1 book mentioned 7 4 min read
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Essays

At Night, All Books Are Bright

Essays
June 20, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 12 9 min read
“If a musician’s insomnia allows him to create beautiful music, then it is a beautiful insomnia.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight 1. I learned many things when I read Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist. I learned, for instance, that Balzac was addicted to coffee to a point where he would munch on raw coffee grounds, and that the best way to make ice cream is by freezing it with liquid nitrogen. I also learned, in the essay “Night Owl,” that there are two types of people: owls and larks. I am definitely of the latter category: my favorite time of day to work is in the morning, I need over six hours of sleep to be functional (eight to be in a good mood), and I start yawning as soon as it gets dark. Anne Fadiman is one hundred percent owl: when she starts working on a project — say a book, or an essay — she switches her schedule around and begins to write and research at night and she sleeps during the day. Imagine being awake to see it: the inspiring pools of light, the surrounding darkness, the computer screen shining in the gloom like a beacon, the quiet hum of the sleeping world, beyond the room… I’ve always wanted to be an owl myself. It seems to me that reading and writing are essentially nocturnal activities. To say “I’ve read through the day” or “I just spent the day writing” makes it sound like a mind numbing nine-to-five job. But to say “I’ve read through the night” or, even better, “I spent the night writing” speaks to my romantic side, elevates these activities to something compelling and secret. Writing requires a plunge into the imagination, so it’s no surprise that many associate literature with the night. We populated it with the monsters of our nightmares: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and everything else that shifts in our closets and whispers under our beds. These creations thrive at night because they embody our fear of the dark and, by extension, our fear of death. It’s the same thing; after all, Dylan Thomas’ famous line reads “Do not go gentle into that good night.” In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood compares literary inspiration to katabasis: writers go deep down in some dark place, the place where stories are, and emerge with something to tell — just as the epic heroes travel to the land of the dead and negotiate with its spirits to learn their future. Then why shouldn’t night also be a time for readers? To read is to slip into that dark place, lulled by the voice of a writer, which the act of reading summons from the page. The phenomenon, surely, occurs more powerfully, more completely, in the quiet, nocturnal darkness. The day is too bright and noisy; there’s always something to do; the real world crowds around you and won’t let you take a stroll down the shaded path of imagination. Night offers shelter for the mind. At night, when the world is asleep, when windows are mirrors, when the light you read by is the one you must turn on yourself, you can almost hear books whispering. They call you. They quiver on their shelves, ready to open up and reveal what’s inside them like clams in heat. At night, all books are bright. 2. At least, that’s the way it goes if you’re an owl. When you’re a lark, you start yawning uncontrollably after 9 o’clock, your mind begins to drone with fatigue, thereby drowning out the sound of the words on the page, and your body equates your bed with sleeping, not reading, which means you can’t hope to read more than 10 pages before falling asleep. Luckily, when you don’t get to enjoy the inspiring nighttime calm because you’ve succumbed to Morpheus’ spell, you can read about it in books during the day. Leave the long hours of solitary insomnia to others, like Alberto Manguel. His bibliomemoir The Library At Night recounts the construction of his library (which houses 30,000 books) in an old presbytery in France, and riffs on the subject of libraries more broadly. The night he finished shelving all the books in the library he built himself, Manguel slept on the floor, between the bookcases — in the words of his partner, in order to mark his territory, like a dog urinating in the corners. For Manguel, his library takes on all its meaning and all its magic at night, when he is prone to wake up, grab something on the shelves at random, and read through his insomnia. “At night,” he writes, “thoughts grow louder.” For Manguel, during the day the library suggests order, classification, and work; but from dusk to dawn it is joyfully chaotic and random. At night, it seems, all books are equal. The to-read pile recedes into the shadows and all the other books get their chance to shine — the one’s you haven’t read yet, or the ones you dropped halfway through. It’s not a question of who the author is or which one won a prize. Night lets books speak for themselves, reveals what they’ve really got to offer, and allows readers to jump from one to the other effortlessly. Manguel, libraries, night: how can I go further without mentioning Jorge Luis Borges? Here’s a man who knew something about living in the dark: he spent over 30 years of his life completely blind, and several more years in progressive stages of blindness. He lived in the night, he roamed the night, and he read the night. His poems on the subject, translated from the Spanish, are collected in an elegant volume by Penguin: Poems of the Night. On the book’s cover, the silhouette of Borges’ face in profile, against a charcoal backdrop, is speckled with golden stars, as if his mind had been drawn out in the night sky like a constellation. The poems reveal the purity of Borges’ wisdom and the beauty of his thinking. Here, again, night is not something to be feared; rather, it is the stuff of inspiration, “good fertile ground / for the sower of verses.” Night is the muse that inspires the poet; he feels “in the crack of night / the verses that are to come” (“The Forging”). Night is also a time for reading: Borges became director of the National Public Library in Buenos Aires in 1955, the year he went blind, an irony he appreciated. “God granted me books and blindness at one touch,” reads the English translation, by Alastair Reid, of “Poem of the Gifts.” The Spanish original reads rather “los libros y la noche”: “books and the night.” Thus night and blindness — in the eyes of readers, writers, and translators — are interchangeable. I’m not certain Borges himself would agree, however, because his depictions of night are manifold. In “History of Night,” Borges conceives night as a human construct: “Down through the generations / men built the night.” Night is a myth, a kind of playground, a drug, even, “which would not exist / but for those tenuous instruments, the eyes.” With no eyes to see it, Borges either exists in constant night, or else he exists outside night — and, therefore, outside time. If night is a place, then it is a place of suspension and solitude, as in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (Night Flight), which often describes night as an ocean, with its islands and tides. (The connection between both authors is also geographical: Night Flight takes place in South America, notably Buenos Aires, where Borges spent most of his life.) In Night Flight, night isolates postal plane pilots. Conversely, darkness reveals man to man, bridges the distance between them: And now, in the core of the night like a watchman, he finds out that night shows Man: these calls, these lights, this worry. This lone star in the shadow: the isolation of a home. One of them is blown out: a house that closes itself in on its own love. (…) Those men think that their lamps shine for the humble table, yet eighty kilometers away one already receives the call of their light, as if, from a deserted island, they were swinging it desperately before the sea. Night, in this short, beautifully crafted novel, is at once limitless — “it contained Buenos Aires, but also, like a vast hall, all of America (…) under the same, deep vault” — and finite, holding in its belly dangers that may end a plane’s flight, kill the men aboard, and destroy the precious cargo of words. 3. Saint-Exupéry treats night as the frontier to a vast land full of dangers and wonder. Man must traverse this frontier, explore the unknown beyond the darkness, familiarize himself with it. That, then, is how I should approach night and its literature: I must undertake to discover it tentatively and slowly, minute by minute. I need to shed my lark habits and learn to peer into the folds of darkness like an owl. One of the best books on the subject remains Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams, by British man of letters Al Alvarez. Anne Fadiman talks about it in her essay on night owls. Alvarez offers a very complete exploration of night through literary criticism, psychoanalysis, historical inquiry, and even autobiographical writing. He melds all these different strands to form a cogent, fascinating whole. His premise, essentially, is that most people have lost contact with night in the last hundred years because, instead of learning to inhabit its darkness, artificial light has allowed us to turn night into another day. For Alvarez, our attitude toward the darkness of the night is linked to a primordial fear of what lies beyond the ring of firelight. I remember, as a child, when my parents asked me to turn off the lights downstairs before going to bed (Alvarez tells a similar story in his book): I would hit the switch and race up the stairs as fast as I could, imagining the smoky shadows at my heels, enveloping the staircase and threatening to swallow me up. For years, Alvarez lost contact with the night and forgot about its existence, until a stay in Italy made him fall in love with dusk, and the hours that follow: the dipping of the sun into the horizon, the light bleeding slowly out of the sky like watercolors, the comfortable coolness that brings people out of their homes, the night sky like a vast cathedral ceiling, speckled — in the absence of man-made light — with innumerable scintillations. Alvarez’s book is a testament to the richness and beauty of nighttime. Night cannot be merely ignored or illuminated away; it must be dealt with, dwelt in. 4. I wish I could say that this essay was the product of quiet, nocturnal activity, but, alas, I wrote most of it in the glare of warm spring mornings. Still, I like to think that I’m writing this under the influence of night. I’m getting used to living more nocturnally: I work long hours in a restaurant this summer and I often come back home past midnight. Split between exhaustion and excitement, I need to unwind before I head for bed: I eat a bit, I read a few pages, I write a couple of lines. I inhabit the dark, solitary space as best I can. I peer into the extremities of night and ponder its meaning. But restaurant work has not made an owl of me yet; I’m still waiting for my beautiful insomnia, the one that will drag me away from my bed for hours on end and send me out into the night to discover what lies beyond the reading lamp’s light. Charles Dickens had his beautiful insomnia, although it wasn’t as directly productive as you’d expect. In “Night Walks,” he describes all the things and people he encountered during “a temporary inability to sleep” that led him to walk around London in the middle of the night: the drunks, the tramps, the night workers, the whores. Night, again, is an ocean: Dickens feels, as he coolly observes these nocturnal specimens, “much as a diver might, at the bottom of the sea.” There is beauty in Dickens’ night, but it is more twisted and macabre than in Alvarez or Saint Exupéry: [T]he river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river. No friendly clams opening in the heat, then, and no quiet hours under studious lamplight, reading or writing — only the ghosts of the damned and a bleakness that is oppressing. But also, inspiring. This passage recalls what Atwood discovers about literature in Negotiating with the Dead: Dickens used night and its odd characters to populate his stories. Gritty, scary nocturnal London was his land of the dead; walking was his way of negotiating with the spirits and feeding his imagination. Perhaps that’s the trick: night can also be retroactively productive. You’ve got to learn to revert your vision. Dickens understood his city when most of its inhabitants were asleep. Borges read and wrote at his best when he was blind. Saint Exupéry grasped the meaning of solitude when darkness enveloped his plane. So the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 sees his lover best in dreams, when his eyes “darkly bright are bright in dark directed” and “through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay.” “All days are nights […] / And nights bright days” for Shakespeare. If literature is my mistress, then nights are made brighter by her books and days are darker in their absence. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 12 9 min read
Lists Notable Articles

Literary Fiction is a Genre: A List

Lists Notable Articles
October 22, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 42 6 min read
A few weeks ago, whenever I told anyone I was reading Molly Ringwald's novel-in-stories When it Happens to You, they either said, "Wow, cool!" or, "Ugh. Why?" To the latter, I replied, "Why not?" Ringwald has always presented herself as well-spoken and well-read, and being an actress isn't necessarily a detriment to writing: after all, actors, like fiction writers, must inhabit characters and seek out a scene's power. (And, dude, if you were in Pretty in Pink, you're basically qualified to win a Nobel.) I devoured When it Happens to You in a day or two. It was an engaging and pleasing read, with lines like, "Greta had always been most beautiful to him when emerging from water. Swimming pools, oceans, bath tubs." Ringwald treats her characters with compassion, and I enjoyed seeing how each story would connect to the next. Overall, though, I was underwhelmed, perhaps because the territory mined is so familiar: there's an affair, there are blah sentences like, "The color had drained from her face." There's even a description of a woman who, after almost being run over, raises "a furious fist" at the driver, like some irate extra in an action flick's chase sequence. I longed for a more daring and complicated book; Ringwald has one in her future, I know it, but this isn't it. Even so, as I said, I devoured the novel, and, in general, enjoyed it. Its predictable content and structure were comforting, like a catchy pop song or a romantic comedy. You know, as Adorno might say, its familiarity helped me ward off death. Or something. In a recent profile of Justin Cronin in the New York Times Magazine, Colson Whitehead is quoted as saying he'd "rather shoot [him]self in the face" than have another discussion about literature genres. I don't blame him. When people ask me what kind of fiction I write, I usually say, "It's about people," and leave it at that. But as I read Ringwald's book, I found myself pondering literary fiction: as a genre, as a taxonomical category. When It Happens to You, you see, is a sterling example of literary fiction, if we were to consider literary fiction as a straightforward genre like romance or science fiction, with certain expected tropes and motifs. What, you ask, are some attributes of this genre? Read on, my friend, read on. 1. The Long Title When it Happens to You is not only a long title, it's also in the second person, as are many titles in the literary fiction category. I think we should blame Dave Eggers for starting this trend with his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity. Or maybe Miranda July's story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, really got things going. I, too, am guilty of joining the bandwagon with my hard-to-say novella title, If You're Not Yet Like Me. Uwem Akpan demanded us to Say You're One Of Them, and Elliott Holt will comply with her forthcoming  You Are One Of Them.  Ramona Ausubel's debut,  No One Is Here Except All of Us, switched things up with the first-person plural; perhaps she was inspired by fellow UC Irvine alumnus Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. If Ringwald hadn't chosen the long second-person title, she might have picked one with a full name, a la, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, or Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, or The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey, or Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures by Emma Straub. Sheesh. I should call my next book And So Olivo D'Havellind and You Will Move Away From this Place I Call Home. It's sure to win the Pulitzer. 2. Adultery A decade later, Sean Carman's "Lessons Learned from My Study of Literature" still makes me laugh. But the third lesson, "The thing about adultery is it’s the highest expression of pure human freedom," has its inverse as well: that adultery in literary fiction (and in real life, too, I presume) also leads to stress, despair, and a complicated regret. Let's just go ahead and credit Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for making extra-marital affairs in fiction so popular. Anton Chekhov also gets points for his enormously influential story, "The Lady with The Lap Dog." And all contemporary tales of domestic unrest must also pay dues to Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, with its depiction of The Wheelers, an unhappy, unfaithful couple living in the suburbs. If you aren't sure what kind of literary novel to write, I suggest starting with an English professor who has an affair with his (her?!) student while the wife (husband?! life partner?!) sculpts and flails at home. Abortion plot-line optional. 3. Scene, Exposition, Scene, Flashback, Scene, Cue Epiphany The reader of literary genre fiction should feel the structure in her body, particularly with short stories. It's a recognizable rhythm, it's a shimmering in one's veins as one moves from opening scene to well-placed background information to the next, more tense scene to that special, oh-so-revealing flashback about the time our protagonist ran over his rubber horse, or the time he knew he was in love with a real horse, or the time he -- oh you see what I mean. In the genre of literary fiction, this structure must lead to a moment of revelation, suggested but never explained. The image of our protagonist in a Safeway parking lot, pushing his cart as if he were a cowboy riding a horse, the wind roughing up his hair, the distant neighs of horns in the far off distance. (Can you feel it? I can.) Let's go ahead and give James Joyce his rightful due for such faintly falling, falling faintly moments of reverie and character change in literary fiction. (Damn that horse! Now I'm sobbing!) 4. A Dog barks, someone eats a watermelon, a car drives away. In his terrific and funny Slate essay, Rosecrans Baldwin unveils how many authors write barking dogs into the backgrounds of their novels. Though he points out barking dogs in genre novels as well, I'd argue that you find them in literary fiction precisely because they show time passing. As Baldwin says, "Most authors...employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time." In literary fiction, there is so little event, authors need that dang dog; without it, there's only the mind, there's only emotion, and the reader is floating in a vacuum. As James Wood has said of the aforementioned  "The Lady With the Lap Dog," Chekhov needs Gurov to eat a watermelon for half an hour in front of his new mistress in order to show time passing. Otherwise, nada is happening! For good measure, I suggest adding to your scene a car driving away. Or even better, the distant rumble of a motorcycle. Ooh. Yes. 5. The plate drops! Years ago, Maud Newton lodged the phrase "tea towel fiction" in my brain, and it's stuck with me. Newton quotes a judge for the Orange Prize, Katharine Viner, who said of the many submissions she read: They are books with 500 pages discussing a subtle but allegedly profound shift within a relationship. They are books where intricate descriptions of a man taking a glass out of the dishwasher, taking a tea-towel off a rail, opening out the tea-towel, then delicately drying the glass with the tea-towel, before pouring a drink into the glass, signify that he has just been through a divorce. This is a "nothing happens" book, the former it girl of literary genre fiction. In my classes, I like to describe these stories as: "A man and a woman buy dishes at the store. When they get home, she goes to lie down, barely talking, something unsettling her. A dog barks in the distance. The man starts to put the plates away, and one breaks. The end." What I love about this kind of narrative is that it's often deliciously readable. How is that possible? Of course, this kind of narrative is a bit out of vogue -- there's a new it girl on the scene. It's the same man and woman, but now time travel or zombies or tiny people who live in walnuts are involved. Raymond Carver is to blame for the popularity of the first kind of narrative, with his profound stories of small actions, uninterested as they are in directly exploring the inner lives of characters. That genius George Saunders is to blame for the latter: damn him and his faxing cave man! I have certainly missed other tropes of this rich and admired genre. Feel free to add more in the comments -- I need some tips for my next story. (I'm thinking of making it about a woman named Edan Lepucki. Woh...woh...mind melt!)
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72 comments:

  1. You call the book your darling… so you love it. Of course you love it, you wrote it. And an agent must have loved it (especially in this day and age) to for them to take it on. What about your husband? Your friends?

    If everyone loves the book, then there’s something there.

    And you can’t put it in a drawer.

    Yes, self-publishing isn’t easy. Yes, it’s a steep learning curve. But, here’s the thing: for the most it’s everything you need to do as a traditionally published author anyway… Every author needs to learn how to create platform and use that platform to tell people who they are. Every author, traditional and, especially, self.

    The great news is that there are so many tools at your fingertips. Social media, message boards, open mic nights, you name it! The audience is out there and they are looking for you. You just have to find them. It’s by no means easy. But you’ll meet a lot of great people on the way.

    And you might just find a publisher. There are a lot of publishers who are watching self-publishers to see who can create a platform, who will buy what books, and who has the drive. Look at all the recent success stories of self-pub to traditional: Hocking, Locke, Michael J Sullivan, and many, many others.

    At this point, going self-pub cant hurt you. So what’s to loose?

  2. Sometimes, the timing isn’t wrong. There seems to be a different trend, or there are books on similar topics on the list. When I worked in publishing, we faced this several times. As a reviewer, I get cycles of 14 books in a row where the theme is “I’m a mess because my mother is crazy and it’s all her fault” — one stops being able to care after awhile, as much as one wants to fall in love with every new book that arrives on the doorstep.

    As a full-time,working writer, I’ve found that some books aren’t timed right. I put them away. Take what I learned and write other work. Publish it. Take out the older work with fresh eyes. Fix it or decide it stands well as it and try again.

    Eventually, everything finds a home.

    it’s like dating. It’s highly unlikely you will find your soul mate the first time out. You have to date around a bit. Here, you’re trying to find the soul mate for your book.

    Remember, as writers, nothing is ever wasted. Every word we put down gets us somewhere we couldn’t be without it.

  3. A wonderful blog. As writers, there are many projects that never get off the ground despite the fact that we may love them. Sadly, even if editors love them in return, many decisions in publishing today are predicated on numbers and marketing. Luckily, it is a changing environment in that there are more opportunities for being able to get your work to the public without losing thousands. Thanks for sharing your writing experience.

  4. at least you managed to attract an agent. i can’t even do that. i’ve written three novels, and two of them are actually good. it’s a much worse feeling when you can’t even find a publishing professional to at least advocate for your book.

    i’m not saying you’re not right to feel upset or hurt that your agent hasn’t sold your book yet. but it could be much worse, and you ought to know that.

    i truly dread querying with the new novel i’ve completed. in fact, i’m seriously thinking of giving up on writing. at all. as much as i love to write, love to tell stories, this is what i’ve come to: i’ve battered my head against the stone wall of agents and come away empty and hurting. maybe it’s time to put away this dream before it kills me.

  5. Pingback: General Writing: When Is It Time To Say Enough? « What Did You Learn?

  6. I relate to the personification: novel as a friend, novel (implicitly) as a baby, novel as someone you love, someone you talk too: “Goodbye, goodbye, novel #1”
    I’m struck by two competing thoughts. On the on hand, there is a certain liberation in letting something go, once and for all, when you realize that it’s just not working, and no matter what you try, you just can’t fix it.
    The hard thing about this post is that’s not what’s happening here. You clearly still love, believe in, even cherish this novel. It’s not you that has determined it’s not working — it’s the system, and the system can be capricious and arbitrary.
    Your raw feeling about the book really comes through, which makes me wonder if it still might have a faint pulse afterall. And the very good news is you have another novel coming on its heels, which makes me hope, perhaps, this might prove to be a case of the queen is dead, long live the queen.

  7. This is a heartfelt, brave, well-written piece. My first novel is in a drawer. I have published three novels since. I have yet another novel that is in a drawer–that I wrote, and it left me/died on me when I was 400 pages into it. I find that for me, the key is to remember is that just because a book is in a drawer does not mean that it can’t someday rise out of that. It doesn’t mean it will. But it doesn’t mean it won’t. It doesn’t mean you have to push through it now and make it happen, unless that is what you feel led to do. Sometimes you can go back and strip-mine those pieces, those passages and pages, that still have life, that you can’t bear to lose, torque the details, and transmute them to the page, and let them take a different kind of life in a new story. And sometimes you just need to leave the integrity of those pages intact, in that drawer, and trust that there may be a time for them to resurface down the road. I loved this piece. It was honest and it moved me. Well-done.

  8. I do like it when writers are brave enough to write something like this and I thank you for this essay. Reading your bio, with your list of stellar credits, that your stories have been published in a number of well respected journals, that you’ve had a novella published and that an excerpt of your current novel won a prize and, lastly, that your MFA is from the number one MFA program in the country — the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I can imagine the pressure you feel to get your novel published.

    But you’ve also had great success and I guess you need to concentrate on the positive. In this crazy world of publishing (which is getting crazier by the minute), there is always something we’re not getting. Whether it’s not being able to get an agent, or when the book *is* published not being able to get reviewed in the NY Times (or reviewed at all), or not getting a good advertising budget from the publisher or the book not selling well or getting a hardcover deal but no paperback release or *only* a release in trade paper, there are just, well, so many other things to look forward to. :-) So I guess we all have to just keep writing. My “debut” novel, by the way, was the *fifth* I’d written.

    You could, though, self-publish on the platform of an Iowa MFA grad who puts out the e-book of the novel she couldn’t sell traditionally. That might not be a bad way to go. :-) Best of luck to you!

  9. Almost all writers who take their craft seriously have a novel in a drawer somewhere. And that’s okay. Because sometimes these “failed efforts” become Lazarus novels, works that were declared dead, perhaps for decades, and then somehow arose.
    Right now my agent is helping me edit a novel that I wrote in 1986. That is not a misprint. I was a young mother, sometime between the birth of my children who are now 26 and 22 and I got this wild idea for a novel about Jack the Ripper. There was no Internet in those days so I researched it in the local library with my baby strapped to my chest.
    Of course it didn’t sell.
    Fast forward a quarter of a century. I now have an agent who says to me one day, in an offhand way ,”I’m looking for a mystery.” I said “Really?” and that night I rose up out of a deep sleep at 3 am and thought “Wait a minute. Didn’t I once write a mystery?”
    And I walked into my garage, opened one of those big tupperware containers where I keep old work and it was right on top. Looked like the frigging dead sea scrolls – paper turned yellow, typing barely legible, and it had been printed on a dot matrix printer so the edges of the pages were bumpy and serated.
    But the story was pretty good.
    Pretty good. I could see why it didn’t sell. I’m a far better writer than I was 25 years ago so I set to work on an eviserating re-write. Changed more than I kept. The resultant book is very good. I think my agent will be able to sell it.
    I’ve heard of other writers who went back to early work, cannibalized or culled from it, and created whole new things that had the kernel of the original book.
    So maybe your darling isn’t dead. This is a fairy tale industry. Try to think of her as sleeping.

  10. This is a very brave and moving piece. If it makes you feel any better, I endured two (2) years of maddening “we loved it but we have no idea how to market it because it’s weird that it’s two genres at once” rejection letters before my first novel finally sold. I’d long since given up on it and had almost finished my second novel by the time the phone call came.

  11. My paradigm has already shifted, apparently, because when I read the title of this post I thought you were saying that your published novel wasn’t selling in the marketplace – lol! When I got an agent with my third novel I thought, “And it took Nicholas Sparks 4 novels to get an agent.” – lol! Unfortunately, my agent didn’t sell it so I pubbed it myself and with the digital world, it is still selling in the marketplace.

    Like Wendy said, with so many things that can go wrong, we must celebrate what is going right!

    Let us know which way you go…

  12. I published a book which, due to various factors beyond the book’s control, sank like a stone. My second book, which I guess I’d subconsciously thought would be published, wasn’t, and that hit hard.

    Reading your piece reminded me of what I went through, but I can say, now that distance has deadened the initial panic, that it made me a stronger writer, even, perhaps, a stronger person. I no longer wrote to publish but wrote, as I originally did, as we all should, for fun. If you think something might not be published, if you write without that expectation and hope that it will one day be published–a hope which, I think, every young writer who enters into a workshop harbors, to some degree–then you are writing first and foremost for the story itself, and it will be a better story because of it. Easy to say, hard to implement. And rejection hurts like a bitch. I still haven’t published another book, might never again. Probably not a day will pass when some kind of anger wells up inside. What if my agent sent it out for one more week? What if I changed the title? And you’ll probably write yourself into circles for a while. But when you break through–when you really shed the shell of writing-for-publishing–you will do something that surprises you, that pushes the boundaries not only of your own imagination but our collective imagination. And that, I have to believe, will find its way out into the world somehow.

    Long before any of my own publishing hard knocks, I wrote to one of my favorite writers, DeLillo, and to my surprise he wrote back. His advice applied to what happened to me after my first book came out, and it still applies to everything I do. “Don’t place all your hopes on one book. The ones that follow, in the long scheme of a writer’s life, will eventually count for more. Keep going, keep reading, keep learning.”

  14. First of all, thank you for sharing this. It’s an act of courage to be so honest and raw and vulnerable. Secondly, I’m so sorry to hear that it’s been so hard. As an aspiring writer, I can totally feel this angst for and with you. Lastly, I can only imagine that nine months seems endless…but I do think there is still MUCH to hope for! I don’t think it’s time to cash out the chips and mourn the loss yet.

    Back in December, Natalie Whipple wrote very bravely about being out on sub for 15 months (and that was 8 months ago!) and sure enough, a few weeks ago, her book sold! Even though I’ve never met her (only read her blog), I was absolutely THRILLED for her. And I hold out the same hope for you.

    Good luck!!

  15. “There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail…” If you can can write like THAT, the fault’s gotta be on them, not you….

    I heard somewhere that when Robert DeNiro was a struggling actor going to auditions he never worried about them, or about getting parts- in fact, he’d apparantly fall fast asleep in his chair, right in front of the directors! He said rejection never bothered him because its was so impersonal- they didn’t know him for more than 5 mins, so why feel rejected?

    I’d like to second (or third) the comments which remark what a brave and moving piece this is- I really enjoyed reading it, it resonated with me, and I hope that you self-publish your novel at least, because I for one (and I’m probably not alone in this) would love to read it!

  16. The best thing you can do is write another book. Then after that, another. With three manuscripts take the world by storm and self-publish. Success in self-publishing is down to two things…a terrific book, followed by others. Approach the situation from a place of empowerment, not fear. And watch the magic.

  17. I happily shelved my first novel. I just couldn’t live with it anymore. (I’ve always thought first novels held more instructional value than actual value anyway.) But, I’m with you – I’d be pretty devastated if my second didn’t sell. Good luck with darling #2.

  18. Traditional publishing is on its last legs.

    Self-publish it as an ebook.

    I sold eight books to big houses, and I’ve made more in the last six months on ebooks than I made in the previous ten years with the Big 6.

  19. The comments here show such an outpouring of empathy and support from other writers. Puts the lie to all those stories about competitive snarky writers. But it is also interesting how the major reaction to the true emotions you have so honestly revealed is to tell you how you should/could feel about your situation. Though this is obviously well meant my reaction was, wow, I really get how you feel. Over the past few days I have been accepting that a cherished dream of mine is quite probably not going to happen. It is a dream I have been pursuing for 40 years. It hurts like hell in all the ways a feeling of failure can hurt. Someone very close to me was giving me “understanding” and “moral support” by pointing out how it was just the way things go, I didn’t do anything wrong, it might be for the best, blah, blah, blah. Last thing I wanted to hear and no, I didn’t want a hug either. So Edan, I will just say it again. I really get how you feel. And thanks for putting your experience into words.

  20. Condolences, and congratulations. Thanks for a great blog memorializing the season and the sentiment.

    Give yourself permission to enjoy burping the baby, show those incongruous boobs to the man who imagines you as a man, and see if in time the first book becomes the “previously unpublished!” book spanning books four and five when your readership and the reviewers are clamoring for more, and you need a break from success. Cheers!

  21. Pingback: Don't Shut Your First Book in The Drawer: Saving Your First Novel The Branding Yourself Book blog

  22. Edan,

    I felt so bad for you, I wrote a new blog post about how you COULD self-publish your first book with a minimal cost, and some extra marketing effort (which you would have to do anyway).

    You can read “Don’t Shut Your First Book in The Drawer: Saving Your First Novel” at http://bit.ly/opZzCI .

  23. I can’t imagine that self-publishing your novel as an ebook on Amazon.com, for example, could be prohibitively expensive. There isn’t much design work involved, but you should get a proof-reader (didn’t you say you had a husband?). Several writers used their success at ebook publishing to get themselves book deals at major publishers. On the flip side, many big-name authors are abandoning the publishing houses to self publish.

    If you don’t feel like promoting the book, isn’t it still better to have it available to readers to stumble upon (and hopefully do the promotion work for you afterwards) than to let it languish un-read in a drawer or computer file?

  25. Love this post. I’m just beginning my first novel. And the confidence building it took just to get brave enough to say that is staggering. To find myself on the other side of all that work having to bravely “kiss it goodbye” is hard to imagine. Thank you so much for sharing this. Because the only thing I’d hate more than NOT getting my first novel published is letting that rejection stop me from writing the next. Kudos to you for sharing!!!

    And p.s. kudos for finding the most horrible self-publishing disasters imaginable. The last one was just sad. The first one made me laugh out loud. And the third one?Pretty sure I threw up in my mouth a little. Thanks for that. :)

  26. I had consigned my baby to death, too. But a friend of mine suggested, “Publish it on Smashwords. What the hell? Give it a chance to live before nailing it into a coffin.” I felt just like you about self-publishing (I’m a writer not a copy-editor, PR agent, promoter, designer, etc.) and the stigmas attached (yeah, a lot of dreck out there but a surprising amount of good work, too).

    But I did it. It’s taken some time, no money, and it’s not flying off the ether-shelves but it’s gotten very good reviews. That is tremendously gratifying and encouraging. This way I’ve at least given my kid a chance. It’s out there in the world. An 18-year old with car keys. I’ll help where I can, but now she is in Fate’s hands.

    Hope to see you on Smashwords someday.

    Baxter Clare Trautman, author The River Within

  27. Thank you, everyone, for your perspectives, encouragement and/or support. I went out on a limb and wrote as honestly as I could about the process, and it’s lovely to have received all this feedback. Thanks for not trolling me, trolls.

    I have many more opinions on self-publishing, which I don’t have time to outline here (see: newborn baby). However, I appreciate all the opinions, and I am never one to rule out an option forever and ever (Except jeggings. You will never ever see me in jeggings ever). Perhaps I will write more extensively about self-publishing and its perceived drawbacks and wondrousness in a later essay.

    Thanks for reading, and happy writing to all!

  28. I know how you feel. The worst of it is that I’ve shelved that first novel myself. I got to the end of it and knew it wasn’t working. (That process took a few months, tears etc. etc.) It was hard, it was painful and it felt as if I was gnawing my own arm off. But I did it.

    I am making good progress with my second novel and am tucking my chin in and going for it. Best wishes with your project. I am looking forward to reading it. :)

  29. It could be worse – you could be one of those writers who does get published but who is then forced to watch in dismay as the marketing team gives it an inappropriate cover and the sales team fails to get it in shops or reviewed, so that after six months you’ve sold almost no copies and effectively advertised to the whole industry that “nobody wants to read your books”. It happens. Publication can kill dreams just as easily as not being published – only more comprehensively. It’s more difficult to pick yourself up after that. believe me.

  30. Pingback: What happens when a novel doesn’t sell? « Against Dumb

  31. Beautifully written and honest post, Edan. It doesn’t really help to know that others have had similar experiences, but as has been said many times, if you have faith in your novel, eventually it will see the light of day and be read given this new world of self-publishing. Hang in there, best of luck with book 2, and congrats on the newborn!

  32. Edan,

    I suppose I’m curious about your “failed book” sentiment. Is your novel failed because it didn’t sell or is it failed because you’ve finally come to realize that you’ve written a failed novel? Because I think there’s a difference. And, as Caridad pointed out, you and your novel might simply fall outside the current marketing trend. I’ve seen bona fide failed novels published because the author and the material were “hot” and probably wouldn’t have been published otherwise…

  33. Like so many other authors I have three manuscripts sitting in a drawer, books 4 & 5 are published via a small publisher. I needed that validation, but I’ll venture into self-publishing soon.

    Keep writing, and listen to Mr. Konrath!

  34. I loved reading your tale of woe, and your comparison of selling the novel and childbirth labor was too true. The whole business of selling is mysterious.

  35. While I think you’re correct that there remains a certain stigma regarding self-published books (one that I share to a degree), I’m bothered that you appear comfortable mocking self-published books. By posting the links you did, presumably these books represent your idea that self-publishing is for “bad” writers.

    Criticism is one thing, but I’m never comfortable when one writer bad-mouths the work of another. Stephen King did that to the author of the “Twilight” novels. Literary merits aside, Mr. King’s dismissal of her work reflected poorly on him, not her work. (And frankly, Stephen King is a genre fiction writer; surely “literary” types dismiss his work too.)

    I’ve read some excellent self-published books, and I’ve read some horrible self-published novels, just as I’ve read horrible literary fiction and excellent genre work.

    As a copy editor by trade, I can certainly commiserate with poorly copy edited books. However, sloppy copy editing is not just found in self-published books; examples abound in the “real” publishing world.

  36. Why is the book dead to you, though? Is a book dead because it is unpublished? Perhaps the question one should ask in times like your last months seem to have been, is this: Why did you write. Publication, of course, and all that it entails. But, is it there, and only there, that writing is “alive” for you? (And: if the honest answer is yes, perhaps you shouldn’t try a second time –not worth the effort, too much at stake.)

  37. Regretably my first book’s manuscript got lost in the move between one house and another and I never saw it again. Oh, yes it went a round of rejection notices and praise-while-not-being-a-fit letters. But its cannibalized soul has been shared between three new books, so I can’t say it’s gone forever. But here’s something I will say to the idea of shelving a book which has not sold:
    “Never give up; never surrender.” Because it never sold in the promotion phase means nothing. People would rather see that the physical exists before they buy, so preordering is nice but not an accurate guage of how well the actual book will do. And there is nothing wrong with tinkering with the thing until it works. Self-publishing is the only way to be sure your book will see print, so don’t be afraid to try it out. Since I started out on my own I have published 14 books, one of them now out of print, and I have never looked back since. It is refreshing to know that you have total control over all aspects of publishing, so that your book looks the way you want it to, you can offer different formats of the content, and so on. Sometimes being traditionally published is not the end to the means, so dust off that thing and republish yourself.

  39. The trick to making a mint in self-publishing is the same trick used in commercial publishing: write a boring thriller.

    I bet our author hasn’t done that.

  40. Take a look at the IsoLibris website, if you believe in your book enough to take a chance, and put up with being edited send it to me, I’m not saying I’ll take it, but I’ll read it.

  41. “I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer.”

    Too perfect. The entire writing process is such a humbling experience. Thank you for a story that all writers can, unfortunately, relate to.

    Onward I say, ever onward :)

  42. I had a neighbor once who had been in the same writing program as Chabon and was bitter because, yes, she got her first novel published, but it didn’t sell like Chabon’s.
    I kept thinking: “For Pete’s sake, you got PUBLISHED.”
    You have an agent – a step up the ladder of success that many never reach.
    There are of course frustrations at every step of the process, but it’s important to register the successes as well.
    Certainly I think the basic idea that the first novel is just part of a larger process is an important one. Maybe if the next one sells, they’ll want to see that first one. Though that’s not always a great idea; I adore “Geek Love” but her first novel looks unreadable. Never mind the novel that came before “A Confederacy of Dunces”. (I only saw the film, mind you, but it didn’t make me want to read the book.)

    This said, I think you have some strange ideas on self-publishing. Print on demand costs the cost of a proof copy; ebooks cost nothing at all. And if you’re afraid self-pubilshing will hurt your image, do what authors have done for centuries: use a pen name. Either way, if the book sells, people will be interested in the author and you can decide whether to “decloak”; if it doesn’t, the question is moot.
    No, this is not as satisfying as having a publisher stand up for your work, but it beats burying your baby forever. And maybe getting it “off your plate” so you can focus on the next one.
    Personally, I have a few “traditional” publishing credits in various collections, but I’ve made thousands of dollars from self-publication.

    Meanwhile, think of all those fillmakers who spend years trying to get financing, struggle to pull together the actual production and then… watch the end result sink like a stone in a few days.
    Fiction writers have it easy when you think about it.

  43. As a thoroughly unemployed copy editor/compositor, I would be happy to edit and lay out your book for e-publication and take a small percentage of the sales. I’ve done this with several other authors. Their books weren’t terribly successful, but they didn’t owe me much money, either :)

  44. Several big-selling authors are good and long-time personal friends of mine, Edan, and most didn’t make it on ms #1. You might be heartened to hear, though, that one of them wrote twenty-seven full novels before he cracked it and immediately became a huge hit … and ALL twenty-seven earlier books on his rejected pile have since been published on the back of continued success and all have done well.

    It’s not the luck of the draw, it’s talent, practice and, mostly, perseverance born of faith in your work that wins the day.

    And there is a middle route you might consider. Several smaller but seriously selective and pro publishers will look at unsolicited submissions that don’t necessarily have agency representation. I’m talking ‘true’ publishers here who will ask for no financial contribution or anything else from an author other than the raw ms and reasonable cooperation through the editorial process, but who freely offer sound professional editing, professional text design and cover art, and everything else they can.

    Their pockets are shallower than those of the big boys, so you should not realistically expect overnight fame and fortune backed by a huge promotion and marketing budget. But you can expect fair but rigorous selectivity of an ms, professional and warm treatment, experience to be gained and respectable publication if your book is accepted.

    I’m afraid our own wee house is closed to new subs until Jan 1 to clear a backlog of releases scheduled for this year and early next (with only a small editorial team we’re limited to a release schedule of between a dozen and twenty new titles a year).

    Meantime, though, if you pop into the ‘For Authors’ section of our website, you’ll find a warts-n-all piece about what a small press can and cannot do for an author. And the submissions guidelines there give a pretty good idea of what a smaller house will need from an unsolicited source. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post an actual URL in this section, but if you Google my name, you’ll very easily home in.

    If you don’t get a bit by then and decide to give us a whirl, Edan, please feel free to send your sub (synopsis and first two chapters) direct to my own desk (address on site) and remind me of this piece. Even if we can’t go with the book, we should be able to offer sound and helpful advice.

    Good luck and very best wishes. Neil Marr

    PS: And remember what Yogi Bear told his discouraged and hungry wee pal Booboo after yet another picnic basket raid had been foiled by Ranger Smith:: “Cheer up, Booboo. It’s impossible to fail if you don’t stop trying.” Wise advice from a cartoon character, eh? N

  45. PS: Typo apology. I did, of course, mean in the last paragraph before by signature, ‘if you don’t get a BITE by then … ‘ A quick re-read suggested something altogether different because of a finger-slip on the keyboard in a rush. Sorry, Edan, but I must admit to a chuckle at my own wee blooper. Neil

  46. I’ve been an editor for almost 10 years, and I’d really like to read your book and give you some feedback. If you got as far as getting an agent, there had to be some merit to the book. He or she thought it could sell. It might have been something as simple as the book was too long or too short or didn’t have a clear enough genre that made publishers pass because they couldn’t take it as is.

    Also a smaller traditional publisher might not be attractive to your agent, but would be very attractive to you. Smaller presses give smaller advances and 15% of small is pretty damn small, so why would an agent bother? You however could resurrect your baby from the ashes.

    Don’t give up quite yet. Please send it to me.
    Candice

  47. Pingback: These Months of Rejection | Grierson Huffman
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  51. I have to agree with Raymond. I don’t think you can really put the book you love away for GOOD. Maybe put it on a time out for a while as you work on other projects. This book may not be ready to sell now, but who says it won’t if you publish something else?

    I have two book projects. One is my baby and I’m not writing it at the moment. I’m not because I recognize it’s a much, much harder sell. It doesn’t make me love it any less, but I decided to dedicate my time to the one that I think has a better chance. I won’t ever give up on that first book. I’ll go to the grave first.

    You shouldn’t give up on yours either. Maybe a much earned break is what it needs. :)

    Great post though! I’m right there with you on the self-publishing!

  52. My experience with my agent and ‘almost getting there’ charred my soul too. this is a powerful piece and the writing within must be indicative of your style, your reading tastes, and your love of language. Alice Munro is my hero in many ways and I can see by how you write here, that she must influence you too.

    Self Publishing through ebooks has restored some of the flesh beneath the char.

    I’m so glad I read this. You touched me deeply.

    thankyou

  53. If you consider your novel truly dead and you’ve given up on traditional publishing, post it to Kindle & Nookbooks. Use a pseudonym if you want to keep your real name for the traditional publishing. No cost to post and believe me, it feels good to see the sales.

    Your second novel, third novel, fourth novel–Keep sending those to the publishing houses. In the meanwhile, your first book will give you an audience that you can later (if you choose) tie to your publishing company.

    An “Almost Book” is a book worth publishing. The fact that your agent, a professional in the field, likes it and thinks it worth selling, means that someone on Kindle will, too.

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  55. It saddens me to see you giving up on your story. No writer should ever let the gatekeepers of the traditional publishing machine stop her from sharing her story and reaching her readers. When it comes down to it, the readers have always been and will always be the REAL gatekeepers to publishing success.

    Listen to J.A. Konrath: “Traditional publishing is on its last legs. Self-publish it as an ebook. I sold eight books to big houses, and I’ve made more in the last six months on ebooks than I made in the previous ten years with the Big 6.” The man knows what he’s talking about.

    You don’t need permission anymore. Technology has completely changed the publishing industry playing field. Evolve or perish.

  56. Is it possible, and I know I’m going to be criticized here … but is it possible that it isn’t good enough for publication? I think agents and editors are cruel in their ability to spot the flaws and weaknesses of a substandard MS and clearly they didn’t think yours was ready for primetime. This will make you better.

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  60. Late to the party as usual–sorry about that!

    I just wanted to say I have a novel in a drawer, and not listening to those people who wanted me to keep going, but instead listening to myself and putting it aside, was both one of the hardest and best things I’ve done as a writer.

    You are right to make grief analogies. It’s absolutely grief. In my case the book was one I had worked on for over eight years, through two babies. It was going to prove to the world that I had a brain, that I wasn’t just a mommy. Only it didn’t. So I put it aside and had another baby, and eventually wrote another book, which was published traditionally, and am working on my next one (for which I already have a contract, hallelujah).

    About self-pubbing: I have nothing snarky to say, but if you don’t want to go that route then don’t. There are lots of very good reasons not to. I didn’t want to either. There is a lot of honor in saying this book didn’t make it, and I’m accepting it and moving on.

    Best of luck to you–I am sure you are going to make it.

  61. Pingback: Best of the Web Book Marketing Tips for the Week of August 29, 2011 - Author Marketing Experts, Inc.
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  68. Hang in there! I wrote my first novel at 29. Not published and never will be….thank God. Last year, aged 39, I sold my second novel…and my third. Currently, I am in negotiations to sell my fourth. This is probably depressing for you in a…oh my god, I will slash my wrists if I have to wait another decade. Don’t worry, you won’t have to. I waited nearly 9 years to write the second novel. Get working on yours now and enjoy! A.

  69. This is a very moving article that will stay with me for a long time. I applied for a writing workshop and only knew I was rejected after the dates had pst. I kept hoping I would be reached–I never was. It is your choice eventually, to go self publishing under a pseudonym and a (possible) sex change or to le your baby die. You still love your baby and so did your agent, the idea of it not being good enough is bogus. For books, goodness is in the mind of your readers. I think you should a least let them read it, for a fee or free.

    Congratulations on your new baby, I’ll be rooting for you which ever way you go.

  70. sounds like to me your buying into the publishing system. If your book doesn’t sell, get a new agent and try and sell it again.

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Essays

Fifty Years On: Jane Jacobs and the Rebirth of New York

Essays
September 15, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 6 10 min read
1. A few weeks ago I took a break from reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to visit the block of Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village where Jacobs lived when she wrote her classic book on urban planning. One block over, on Bleecker Street, the storefronts bear the names of some of the most iconic brands in fashion – Steve Madden, Juicy Couture, Coach, Michael Kors – but Jacobs’ old block of Hudson between Perry and West 11th retains its scruffy charm, mixing small residential buildings with restaurants, a bar, a nail salon, a bodega, and a dry cleaner. Then I stopped in at 555 Hudson Street, the building where Jacobs lived with her husband and three children, now occupied by a store called Glassybaby. It is, to be frank, a curious place. The store, spacious by the standards of the neighborhood, is dedicated to a single product, a short, stout, handcrafted glass votive holder that comes in two sizes and a rainbow of colors ranging from “smooch” (hot pink) to “wet dog” (dark brown). If this were a novel, I thought as I browsed this queer crop of retail monoculture, the Glassybaby store would be symbolic of something. But what? Is the store an example of the quirky, one-of-a-kind businesses Jacobs said cities must attract to remain vital? Or is there something vaguely ominous in the building that once housed Jane Jacobs, the queen of urban diversity, becoming home to a store that stocks shelf after shelf of whimsically useless objects lovingly hand-made to look identical except in color? Jacobs surely would have had something to say on the subject, but she died in 2006 and all we have to go on are her books, the first and most famous of which turns fifty this fall. Vintage Books is coming out with a 50th Anniversary edition of The Death and Life, and there will be numerous commemorations and re-evaluations this fall. All of this is richly deserved. The Death and Life is a terrific read, tart and personable, larded with great gobs of commonsensical observations about how large cities work, presented in clear, straightforward prose. But wise as The Death and Life is, it doesn’t take a degree in economics to see that Jacobs’ observations on the virtues of walkable streets and diverse neighborhoods offered little insight into what was really killing America’s great cities in the middle of the last century: the loss of their manufacturing base. This is why anyone who wants to understand Jacobs should read her later books, particularly The Economy of Cities. Together, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities – the first a classic, the second far less known – form a single, groundbreaking treatise on how cities succeed and fail. Jacobs’ message is simple: a city, and thus a society, lives and dies by how well it can build a creative environment for its citizens to innovate their way out of trouble. This argument is too simple, in that it underplays the role external forces – the depletion of natural resources, the unexpected rise of rivals, and plain dumb luck – can play in the fate of a society. But this country faces a strange conundrum: New York City, which forty years ago was headed for bankruptcy while the rest of the nation was booming, is now clicking right along while the rest of the nation falters. There are many reasons why this should be so, among them dumb luck, but anyone wishing to bring about a version of New York’s miraculous rebirth in his or her own city would do well to reread Jane Jacobs. 2. Born in 1916 and raised in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs moved to New York in the mid-1930s and soon found her way to Greenwich Village. Untrained as a city planner, she rose to prominence in New York politics through her work as a neighborhood organizer, most famously opposing über-planner Robert Moses, who wanted to run a ten-lane expressway through lower Manhattan, a travesty of a project which, had it been built, would have leveled great swaths of Little Italy and Soho. Moses, the Machiavellian central figure of Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker, earns only passing mentions in The Death and Life and The Economy of Cities, but the books are in many ways an extended polemic against Moses and his vision for a 20th century New York. Moses and like-minded architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier sought to clear cities of squalor by replacing tenement slums with vast housing complexes surrounded by parkland and ribbons of highway. In practice, this meant razing entire neighborhoods and stuffing thousands of poor people into high-rise “projects” that soon devolved into crime-ridden towers of drug addiction and despair. Jacobs’ first great insight was to see cities not as machines for living, but instead as living, breathing organisms. Future planners, she says in The Death and Life, must “think of cities as problems in organized complexity – organisms that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.” But if a city is a living thing, then it can die, and Jacobs’ second great insight was that cities are a self-propagating species. To dump money indiscriminately on a city from outside, in her view, is like sticking a feeding tube down a patient’s throat: it might keep the patient from dying, but it’s not likely to help him get out of bed. The best way to grow a city’s economy is clear away the impediments, architectural, governmental, and economic, that stand in the way of individuals working together to make things for themselves. Jacobs begins her study of how cities function at the atomic level of a single block, using her own stretch of Hudson Street as her test tube. With a sharp eye and great good sense, she describes how a successful block attracts a diverse set of users, not just residents, but local shopkeepers and visitors from other areas of the city who, without really being aware they are doing so, look out for one another. When it works, she writes, a successful block is the setting for: an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. Jacobs builds upon this image of a “sidewalk ballet” to tackle the knotty problem of how to create a city full of successful blocks. Streets should be short, with wide sidewalks, a good mix of old and new buildings, and a broad range of businesses likely to attract a true diversity of residents and business owners. If you want to see how these ideas have influenced modern city planning, visit Battery Park City, a planned community at the southern tip of Manhattan built atop displaced fill from the Twin Towers, where short residential blocks are interwoven with pocket parks, playgrounds, shopping areas, and public buildings like schools and libraries. If you live in a big city, chances are that you live near a residential complex like this one, and chances are that, like Battery Park City, it is among the most popular neighborhoods in your city for young urbanites with kids. 3. The ideas in The Death and Life are so sensible, so profoundly American in their promotion of diversity and tolerance, that it is easy to forget that, while Moses’ public housing towers were just as socially destructive as Jacobs says they were, so were the squalid tenement houses they replaced. For more than a century, from the Irish Potato Famines in the 1840s until the peak of the African-American Great Migration in the late 1950s, waves of immigrants landed in New York’s poorest neighborhoods. These newcomers endured crime-ridden, rat-infested tenements, first, because lousy as conditions were, it beat how they had been living, and, second, because they knew their children and grandchildren could rise out of the ghettos into the American middle class. And rise they did, decade after decade, borne aloft an ever-expanding American manufacturing base – until, that is, the late 1950s when manufacturing jobs began to seep away, first from big cities like New York and, later, from the country as a whole. In The Death and Life, Jacobs is curiously silent about the twin economic dynamos, shipping and manufacturing, that made New York great, and then, by disappearing, nearly sank the city into bankruptcy. “[T]he economic foundation of cities is trade,” she writes. “Even manufacturing occurs in cities mainly because of attached advantages involving trade, not because it is easier to manufacture things in cities.” Without the context from her later works this sounds absurd, and if one stops with The Death and Life of American Cities, one might conclude that, while Jacobs was a visionary urban planner, she didn’t grasp the economic realities that cause big cities to live and die. Jacobs must have entertained similar thoughts, because she appears to have spent the next twenty-odd years of her life studying this very issue. In the two books that emerged from this prolonged study, The Economy of Cities, in 1969, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, in 1984, Jacobs lays out just what great cities like New York needed to do to bring themselves back from the dead. 4. In popular lore, the tale of New York’s rise from the abyss turns on Mayor Giuliani and the Squeegee Men. In the early years of the Giuliani Administration, drivers at busy intersections of Manhattan would be approached by homeless guys bearing squeegees who would clean the windshield without being asked and then hassle the driver for a tip. Giuliani took on the Squeegee Men and busted kids spraying graffiti on subway cars, and so the story goes, crack magically vanished from the streets, ordinary people could ride the subways again, and Rev. Al Sharpton had so little to complain about in New York he had to run for president. This is, of course, fanciful. In fact, the story of New York’s turnaround is primarily an economic one. After decades of stagnation caused by the decline of local industry, New York finally caught the return wave of globalization, which needed a world capital for finance, media, and high-end product design. The rise in these industries, in turn, drove a booming service economy that sopped up waves of immigrants, and faster than you can say Mike Bloomberg, New York was again a world colossus. But why did a city like New York recover when a city like Detroit, which had a more durable industrial base, fell into blight and decay? The answer, Jacobs argues in The Economy of Cities, turns on the ability of a city’s inhabitants to innovate. Cities grow, she says, through a process she calls “import replacement.” This occurs when local tradesmen produce for themselves the goods and services they had previously been importing and then use the skills learned from this local production to create new products, which they can then export in great bulk. Detroit, she notes, began as a port for shipping flour across the Great Lakes. Soon, local manufacturers were building their own steamships to make the lake crossings and got so good at it they began making ocean-going ships for use in other cities. This not only put money into local coffers, but supported the dozens of local engine-parts makers Henry Ford drew upon when he founded the Ford Motor Company. But here’s the rub: the auto industry was so successful that once Ford arrived at his greatest innovation, the assembly line, the industry so dominated Detroit’s economy that there was no local market for further innovation, and, as Jacobs points out, it was only a matter of time before another city – in this case, cities in Japan – improved upon Ford’s ideas and made better, cheaper cars. The Economy of Cities came out four years before the gas crisis that set Detroit’s long tailspin in motion, but it eerily predicts the dilemma the city faces today, in which a moribund auto industry, out-innovated by foreign competitors, had to be bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer to avoid collapse. Like Detroit, New York began as a port city, but in New York’s case a principal byproduct of its shipping trade was a robust banking industry, which survived the city’s manufacturing collapse. Even as New York was begging for a bailout from the federal government in the mid-1970s, young hotshots like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants who had filled the ghettos earlier in the century, were inventing new ways to own and finance large companies. Think of all the financial innovations of the last thirty years: junk bonds, hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, asset-backed securities, credit derivatives, subprime mortgage markets, and on and on. Yes, bankers are evil, and, yes, the banking industry required a federal bailout even larger than that of the auto industry’s, but like it or not, New York is the safest large city in America, with a vital private sector and a buoyant real estate market, largely because the living, breathing organism we call Wall Street has spent the last thirty years innovating its way out of obsolescence. 5. Which brings us back to the Glassybaby store. When I walked out of Glassybaby, I felt certain Jane Jacobs would have agreed with me that the store was a sad commentary on what had become of her beloved West Village. An entire store devoted to votive holders? What’s next, a store that sells only Tibetan prayer flags? A pet store specializing in fair-trade chew toys? Now I can see I was wrong, mostly because I, possessor of a less subtle mind than Jacobs’, let my personal prejudices get in the way. Whatever Jacobs may have thought of Glassybaby as a product, she would have seen the store for what it is: a small, niche business that neatly encapsulates her economic theories. According to its website, Glassybaby started when its founder Lee Rhodes was battling cancer and found solace in glass votives that she spread around her house. She soon taught herself to make the votives herself and began distributing them, first as gifts to friends and later as products sold to strangers. The market for these items was so strong that she taught other glass blowers to make Glassybabies and then opened retail stores, first in her native Seattle and now in New York. In 2009, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos acquired a 22 percent stake in the young company. Thus, just as Jacobs describes, a smart, creative person has adapted an imported product to her needs, hired others to help her produce and sell it, and has now found financial backing to export it to other cities. What’s more, now that Rhodes has identified a market niche, she has found ever more creative uses for her product, including programs that allow percentages of sales of certain colors of her votives to go charity. Rhodes, with nothing more than some colored glass and a good idea, has created money and jobs where they didn’t exist before, and in the process, found an original way to serve a market niche that others can now exploit. I could be wrong, but I suspect Jane Jacobs wouldn’t have been a big Glassybaby customer, and I am certain she would have deplored all those Wall Street hotshots selling each other worthless tranches of securitized home loans until the system blew up. But I think she would have acknowledged the uncomfortable truth that those guys brought New York back from the dead to the point it could support a quirky, marginal business like Glassybaby. Today, as we as a nation stare down the double barrels of high debt and low employment, the question is whether we can follow Wall Street’s example of serial reinvention or turn our backs on the lessons of Jacobs’ work and end up a nation of proud, decaying Detroits, blaming other, more creative folk for our failures?
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 6 10 min read
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Lists Notable Articles

Most Anticipated: Rounding Out 2009, An Epic Year for Books

Lists Notable Articles
July 1, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 26 14 min read
At the beginning of the year, we noted that "2009 may be a great year for books." With the publishing schedule for the remainder of the year filled out, calling 2009 a great year for readers is now a certainty. If anything, 2009 is backloaded, with new titles coming in the second half of the year from legends like Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and fan favorites like Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem. A peek into 2010, meanwhile, reveals more literary excitement on tap, with new titles on the way from Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Ferris, and others. Below you'll find, in chronological order, the titles we're most looking forward to right now. (Special thanks to the illustrious members of The Millions Facebook group who let us know what they are looking forward to. Not everyone's suggestions made our list, but we appreciated hearing about all of them.)In July, Dave Eggers continues the trend he started with What is the What, working closely with his subject to produce a work with elements of memoir and non-fiction. In Zeitoun, the subject is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, "a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four," who lived in New Orleans and disappeared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A few weeks ago, The Rumpus ran a long interview with Eggers that touches on Zeitoun, among several other topics. Eggers first encountered Zeitoun when McSweeney's put out Voices from the Storm, an oral history of Katrina, and he told The Rumpus, "Their story intrigued me from the start, given that it's at the intersection of so many issues in recent American life: the debacle of the government response to Katrina, the struggles facing even the most successful immigrants, a judicial system in need of repair, the problem of wrongful conviction, the paranoia wrought by the War on Terror, widespread Islamophobia." (Scroll down to October for more "Anticipated" action from Eggers.)William T. Vollmann is known for his superhuman writing output, but his forthcoming book Imperial is a monster, even for him. Weighing in at 1,296 pages and carrying a list price of $55, this work of non-fiction is "an epic study," in the words of the publisher, of Imperial County, California along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ed offers quite a bit more discussion of the book. Don't miss the comments, where it's said that Vollmann has called the book "his Moby-Dick."August kicks off with what will no doubt be a peculiar literary event, the publication of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. It is a rare thing these days when a flurry of media attention centers on someone who has no interest in basking in it. And so, perhaps as Pynchon intends, the focus will be on the book. Inherent Vice promises to be odd. It's 416 pages, shorter than the typical Pynchon doorstop, and the publisher Penguin, in its catalog, notes that Pynchon is "working in an unaccustomed genre" this time around. "Genre" seems to be the buzzword here. The book sports neon cover art and follows a private eye (Doc Sportello). The book begins: "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to." Review copies are already out, and the early word is that the novel overlaps somewhat with and bears some similarities to Vineland.Inherent Vice shares a release date with a new book by Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic, which Entertainment Weekly has already called "very beach-y." (Sadly, it appears to have come in last in their poll to determine the "Must book of the summer.") It sounds like fairly standard "suburban malaise" fare in which a mid-life crisis is endured over the course of the summer, the upside for the reader being that Russo is bringing his considerable skills to the table. PW is fairly tepid on the book, "Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered... the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work."Of Roberto Bolaño's forthcoming, newly translated novels, Millions contributor Lydia writes: "I almost never know about the hot, up-and-coming items, but I do happen to know about this one, and I feel that, like many readers, my relationship to Bolaño has been one of breathless anticipation since the moment I first heard his name. Which was like this: at my old job, I was going through the mail. There was a New Directions catalog of aforementioned hot, up-and-coming items. I haven't historically had a lot of interest in contemporary trade publications, but New Directions has a very warm spot in my heart because I associate it with The Berlin Stories. Anyway, in said mag I read a blurb about Nazi Literature in the Americas, and thought it sounded really neat, and then learned I would have to wait a year to read it, and since then it feels like there's been a lot of waiting - sometimes with glorious gratification at the end (2666), sometimes not (Nazi Literature in the Americas, ironically). It's thrilling that they keep coming! The Skating Rink in August, Monsieur Pain in 2010. It's like new the James Bond franchise (btw, I'm a Craig, not a Brosnan). I just love having something to look forward to. I hope I don't wet my pants on the way to the bookstore." (Bolaño fans will also be looking out for Melville House's Bolaño: The Last Interview And Other Conversations)Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply returns to the territory of separated siblings (You Remind Me of Me looked at a pair of long-lost brothers.) This time, the focus is on twins, one of whom has been missing for ten years. The book garnered a blurb from Jonathan Franzen, who will appear later in this list and who says of Chaon's book, "I've been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it"Let's just get this out of the way: In September, you are going to hear a lot about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.More importantly, we'll get Richard Powers' follow up to his award-winning novel The Echo Maker. In Generosity: An Enhancement, Powers explores the idea of patenting the human gene for happiness. Last year, Powers wrote about the human genome for GQ. There's not a lot of info available about this one but Ed Champion writes he "foresee(s) some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels," and Sarah Weinman "tweeted," "Richard Powers' new novel Generosity is about as audacious as a novel gets, and has fucked with my head as a reader every which way."Lorrie Moore is set to deliver her first novel in over a decade, A Gate at the Stairs. All those Moore fans out there are faced with a huge dilemma this week. Do they read the "Childcare," the excerpt of the novel that is the fiction offering in this week's New Yorker, or do they avoid the magazine and hold out for two more months until the novel comes out? We've never been big fans of the New Yorker's packaging of novel excerpts as short stories, so to all the Moore fans out there, we say - avert your eyes when you reach page 70 of this week's issue!Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is already out in much of the rest of the English-speaking world. In The Guardian, Christopher Taylor described the book as "a carefully arranged sequence of interlocking stories" and said, "while many of the stories hinge on artistic talent - the risks and unkindnesses associated with it; who's got it and who hasn't - the strong focus on more widespread problems in life makes Nocturnes more than a writer's thoughts on his job." The Complete Review rounds up the rest of the early reactions.Pete Dexter returns in September with Spooner. This one sounds like another dark, Southern tale not unlike Paris Trout, the book that first put Dexter on the fiction map. The first line of Spooner is "Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic, honeysuckled little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a make-shift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Wood."We'll also get a new novel from E.L. Doctorow about a pair of brothers. Homer & Langley is about Homer and Langley Collyer, two famous Manhattan hoarders and recluses, who, after gaining notoriety for their obsessive habits and reportedly booby-trapped home, were found dead in 1947 surrounded by, according to Wikipedia, "over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Newsweek has an excerpt of the book. The novel's first line is "I'm Homer, the blind brother. I didn't lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out."Dan Brown is no doubt getting serious bank for his return to airport bookshelves and grocery store check-out lines, but he's not the only one having a great recession. Audrey Niffenegger reportedly took home a $5 million advance for Her Fearful Symmetry, her follow-up to her very popular The Time Traveler's Wife. Niffenegger describes the book on her website: "The novel concerns a pair of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina Poole... Julia and Valentina are inseparable, and function almost as one being, although in temperament they are opposites."Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood will have a new novel out in September called The Year of the Flood, which has been described as "a journey to the end of the world." The Random House catalog, meanwhile, called it a "dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power." If that all isn't intriguing enough, it appears that the book is maybe (or maybe not) the second book in a trilogy that was kicked off with Oryx & Crake. Atwood and her publishers have offered mixed signals on the trilogy question. Quill & Quire looked into the question, and included a quote from Atwood saying, "It's not a sequel and it's not a prequel... It's a simultaneouel." Ah, one of those.In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker covers well-trod literary ground by focusing on a writer protagonist. However, PW gave the book a starred review, calling it "lovely" and saying "Baker pulls off an original and touching story, demonstrating his remarkable writing ability while putting it under a microscope." Baker's protagonist is Paul Chowder, who is tasked with writing an introduction for a poet friend's anthology and delivers the book's stream of consciousness narration. By all early accounts the book is quite funny and also deeply immersed in poetry, with digressions on a number of history's great poets. The Simon & Schuster catalog calls the book a "beguiling love story about poetry."It's my feeling that John Irving's fiction has fallen off quite a bit in recent years (the last really good read for me was A Son of the Circus), but I still keep an eye on Irving's new novels for any sign that he has regained his early career mojo. His last several books haven't tempted me, and it's probably too early to tell whether the Last Night in Twisted River will. Reading the first sentence of the publisher's description, we already find a couple of Irving's authorial tics, New Hampshire and bears: "In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear." Don't be surprised if a wrestler figures into the action somewhere in there. Still, Irving has compared the new book to The Cider House Rules. That's a good sign.The venerable William Trevor will have a new novel out, Love and Summer.Millions reader Matthew looks forward to Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star, due in September, "because Laird's novels are fantastic." Of Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez, he writes "This is his sophomore novel; his first, Part of the World was bizarre and funny." He plans to read The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Macedonio Fernandez (arriving in 2010) "because Borges sez so."October is sure to bring Wild Things mania and Dave Eggers is going to be right in the middle of it. He worked with Spike Jonze on the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. And, in what is sure to be the most literary novelization of a film (adapted from a children's book) ever, an Eggers-penned version of Wild Things is set to hit shelves when the movie comes out. There's also the fur-covered edition.New Yorker readers have already gotten a taste of Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming book Chronic City. Of the excerpt, packaged as the story "Lostronaut," I wrote, "This story was pretty awesome. It was the only speculative fiction to land in The New Yorker this year, not quite making up for the absence of Murakami and Saunders from the magazine's pages. This story is told in the form of letters from Janice, a 'Lostronaut' aboard some sort of space station, to her 'Dearest Chase.' She and her fellow astronauts are trapped in orbit by Chinese space mines and that's not even the worst of it for poor Janice. While the premise and epistolary style are intriguing, Janice's unique, irrepressible voice really carries the story."Readers are soon set to see the fruits of an ambitious project by R. Crumb, his illustrated Book of Genesis, a surprisingly faithful rendering of the first book of The Bible done in Crumb's unique style. Crumb talked about the project four years ago with Robert Hughes: "I was fooling around with Adam and Eve one day. Doodling about Adam and Eve. At first I did this satirical take off on Adam and Eve - lots of jokey asides and Jewish slang because they're Jewish right? God is Jewish... Finally I got over fooling around and I realized I just had to tell it straight."Booker winner A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, according to publisher Knopf's description, "spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves." The book is out already in the UK, where a review in the Telegraph included this intriguing aside: "Byatt's publisher is keen to present The Children's Book, her first novel for seven years, as an equal to Possession, the work that secured her reputation and her mass-market appeal nearly 20 years ago. It certainly compares to its popular predecessor in its daring and scope and, unlike the more cerebral parts of Byatt's output, is its equivalent in terms of storytelling and readability."J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a follow up to Boyhood and Youth in Coetzee's series of memoirs. The NYRB recently published an excerpt.Quite a lot of sub-par material has been published in order to satiate the ravenous demand for Hunter S. Thompson's writing. Thompson's essays for ESPN in his later years were uneven at best, but fans may find something to like in The Mutineer, which Simon & Schuster says is "The highly anticipated final volume of the previously unpublished letters of Hunter S. Thompson, king of Gonzo journalism and one of the greatest literary figures of our time." Insofar as HST,in his latter years, may have been more entertaining and lucid in his letters, this may put The Mutineer slightly above the low bar set by other recent HST collections. On the other hand, the book is edited by Johnny Depp, implying that the book is more about venerating the cult of HST than unearthing new work on par with his best efforts.November will bring the publication of Michael Lewis' much anticipated chronicle of the financial crisis, The Big Short. In October last year, when economic uncertainty was at its height and fears were voiced in some rarefied quarters about the possibility of some sort of structural collapse, we wrote, "The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why." There have already been several books about the collapse and what caused it, from The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown to The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, but many readers have been waiting for a book by Lewis, both because of his long history writing about Wall Street's excesses and because of the powerful essay he penned on the topic for Portfolio magazine in November. Some readers may be weary of the topic by the time the book comes out, but it's sure to garner some interest.The great Philip Roth keeps churning out new novels. This year's offering is The Humbling, Roth's 30th novel. The publisher copy says "Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance." The NY Times reported that yet another Roth novel, Nemesis, is due in 2010.Jonathan Safran Foer will have a non-fiction book out in November called Eating Animals, which most are guessing focuses on vegetarianism. An interview with Foer at Penguin's UK website would seem to confirm this. It doesn't mention the book, but the introduction says "Jonathan Safran Foer on why he doesn't eat anything with parents."Millions reader Laurie points us to My Bird by Fariba Vafi, translated from Farsi and originally published in Iran in 2002. The publisher Syracuse University Press says: "The narrator, a housewife and young mother living in a low-income neighborhood in [modern] Tehran...[is] forced to raise [her] children alone and care for her ailing mother... One of the most acclaimed and best-selling contemporary Iranian writers." Laurie adds, "The novel won several literary awards in Iran and, according to a 2005 article in the New York Times, Vafi never attended college and writes when her children are in school."2010: Probably the most anticipated book of next year will be the The Pale King, a coda to David Foster Wallace's sadly shortened life as a writer. We already know a fair amount about the book - it will center on an IRS agent - and three excerpts have been published already, "Good People" and "Wiggle Room" in The New Yorker and "The Compliance Branch" (pdf) in Harper's. A piece by D.T. Max went into some detail about The Pale King following DFW's death. Given the amount work that lies ahead for DFW's editors, this may be a second half of 2010 release.Also possibly arriving in the second half of 2010 is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which we are just beginning to hear about. The book is the long-awaited follow-up to Franzen's loved, hated, celebrated, Oprah-snubbing novel of nearly a decade ago, The Corrections. Franzen has been coy about the title - the book is reportedly called Freedom - but readers got a taste of what Franzen has in store in "Good Neighbors," an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.Joshua Ferris will follow up his blockbuster debut Then We Came to the End with The Unnamed. The Book Case writes, "The novel focuses on Tim and Jane Farnsworth, a long-married couple who seem to have it all. But Tim has twice battled a bizarre, inexplicable illness." Beattie's Book Blog mentions that the illness is that he "can't stop walking."John McPhee has a new book due out called Silk Parachute. McPhee wrote a 1997 Shouts & Murmurs piece called "Silk Parachute" about his elderly mother. It begins "When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur."Time Out NY says Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is about "Milo, a New York father who is on the brink of economic ruin, and covers themes including but not limited to 'work, war, sex, class, race, child-rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, the old-model brain, the commercialization of sadness and the eroticization of chicken wire.'"British publisher Faber says Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations "is a powerful novel about how our choices and our loves and the family life we build will always be an echo - a variation - of a theme played out in our own childhood."In the comments or on your own blogs, let us know what books you're looking forward to.
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