Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
The Art of Stealing
All Toured Out
There are book tours and then there are book tours. You either get the full-scale, all-expenses-paid treatment from your publisher, or else you get a request to plan it all and pay for it all yourself. In the weeks after his latest novel came out, our own Bill Morris set off on a DIY tour — all driving, no flying — about which he’s been writing dispatches for The Daily Beast. This week, he thinks about the changing nature of book promotion, recounts his nights in dumpy motels and compares his experience to that of our own Edan Lepucki. (FYI, they talked about writing their novels in a Millions piece.)
●
●
Brace Yourselves
A graduate of Iowa’s esteemed Writer’s Workshop has reportedly inked a seven figure book deal for a fantasy trilogy being billed as “a female version of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.” Also? It was inspired by Barack Obama.
●
●
Steinbeck’s Journalism
For This Land Press, which you really should be checking out regularly, Millions contributor Brian Ted Jones looks into John Steinbeck’s work as a journalist, and also the “New Joads” of Oklahoma.
●
●
BTBA long list announced
The 2012 Best Translated Book Award long list has been announced. Among the contenders in the fiction category are Edouard Levé for Suicide, reviewed on The Millions here; Mathias Énard‘s Zone, which our own Garth Risk Hallberg described as “the kind of book that can tie a critic in absolute knots“; and Jean-Philippe Toussaint‘s The Truth About Marie, which The Millions Staffer Mark O’ Connell called “a strange and unsettling novel that upholds its author’s status as one of the most exciting figures in contemporary fiction.” One of Chad Harbach‘s year in reading selections, Dezso Kosztolányi‘s Kornél Esti, also made the list.
●
●
Unfamiliar Discourse
Recommended Reading: Je Banach on what literary discourse offers in an age of extremism. For Banach, literary discourse is “the language of our future because it is the language of confronting that which is foreign to us.”