“These are terrific diversions, but their status next to the book is a little ambiguous. Isn’t using animation to advertise a book a little like using sculpture to promote poetry?” asks Lindesay Irvine in this article about book trailers in The Guardian. If you’re looking for a diversion, this video short based on César Aira‘s Ghosts is certainly worth watching.
On The Rise of the Book Trailer
Epic Fail
When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
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Docudrama
Recommended Reading: Daniel Green on Harold Jaffe’s Induced Coma.
On Race and Rankine
Recommended reading: Nick Laird writes about Claudia Rankine‘s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric and “A New Way of Writing About Race” for the New York Review of Books.
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An Accomplished Saxophonist
Here’s a great interview with Colin Stetson, the saxophonist who’s lent his talents to such acts as Tom Waits, Bon Iver, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, and Feist.
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Small Fish
Over at The Guardian, Kevin Duffy argues that small presses do the heavy lifting in the publishing world. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.
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Mo Yan’s “Bull”
Recommended Reading: “Bull” by Mo Yan, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Women at War
From The Things They Carried to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, veteran literary fiction has always been popular, yet women are almost nowhere to be found in war literature. At The New York Times, Cara Hoffman argues that leaving women out of combat literature makes returning from war even more isolating. “They would be made visible if we could read stories that would allow us to understand that women kill in combat and lose friends and long to see their children and partners at home.”
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Book trailers haven’t fully found their form yet, but there’s definitely an artistic connection to be found between the forms. I runs a company that creates book trailers that are cinematic, affordable, and hopefully stylish. One way or the other, authors and publishers need a visual component to build fan bases and sell more books. Why not make something really cool and cinematic rather than the same old slide show with still frames that makes people not want to read anything.