Caleb Crain, author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation discusses the mixed feelings that a writer is subject to when it’s time to let go of a book.
Not Letting Go
Stuffing This Curiosity Full of Taxidermy
Anjuli Raza Kolb reviews Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, which “tracks the history of whole animal and animal specimen preservation, particularly taxidermy, which refers to the stretching and mounting of the skins of vertebrates, from the seventeenth-century European explorers to the present, with a heavy focus on Victorian practitioners and collectors.” No word on whether or not Poliquin remarks on this curious Danish Facebook group of terrible taxidermy. (Bonus: Caitlin Horrocks’s new story on FiveChapters, “The Lion of Gripsholm – Part Four: IV. The Taxidermist.”)
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Facts and Feelings
“Historical fiction was not—and is not—meant to supplant literature from the period it describes.” Year in Reading alumnus Alexander Chee on historical novels and creative liberties.
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Can You Figure Out Dutch Ovens While You’re at It?
Is Scotch tape Scottish? The Paris Review asks a question that has to be asked.
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Amazon responds to Hachette furor
Amazon, whose tense negotiations with Hachette in the past months have led them to slow ship-times for its books, offered last night “to fund 50% of an author pool—to be allocated by Hachette—to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%.” Of course, Hachette may find calculating and allocating damages awkward so soon after authors flexed their social-media muscle. Sidebar: Amazon claimed “989 of 1000” items sold would be unaffected by this continuing “business interruption,” which might mean a full 1.1 percent of their business comes from just one mid-sized traditional publisher—heartening news from an unlikely source.
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Chabon: Friend to the Geeks
You may not know this, but Michael Chabon co-wrote the script for Disney’s latest blockbuster, Shirtless Martian Tim Riggins John Carter. In an interview with Wired, Chabon defends genre-writing, and also talks about his sci-fi influences.
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“Mea maxima culpa”
At The New Republic, Andrew Wylie talks about how he made millions off strictly “highbrow” fiction, a category which (for those who are curious) does not include the works of James Michener and the late Tom Clancy. Wylie — whose clients include Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Mary Gaitskill — suggests that a modern literary agency “needs to be able to expand infinitely, like a Borgesian library.”
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More XX at the C-Level, Please
“Are things getting worse for women in publishing?” The Guardian asks, and while the article focuses on the UK, it also touches on the state of affairs in the U.S. What both situations share is a lack of female representation at the executive level, based partly on “a generation of women retiring and the amalgamation of publishing houses, which has left fewer c-circle jobs to compete for.” Oh, and sexism.