What writers are actually earning money? Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel takes a look at the new Author Earnings report, which scours Amazon bestseller lists and extrapolates the data to make claims about the state of publishing and self-publishing. Here’s an older Millions piece by Edan Lepucki on self-publishing as supplemental and influential to the traditional route.
The Paper Trail
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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Choose Life
“The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.” Year in Reading alumna Sarah Manguso on envy and the purpose of writing. Pair with Jaime Green’s Millions review of Manguso’s Ongoingness.
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Speaking with Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman spoke with NPR’s Weekend Edition about his issues with depth perception, his work habits, his changing art interests, and how Maus came about. Bonus: Charles-Adam Foster-Simard checked out the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Spiegelman exhibit last summer.
Hazlitt, will publish.
Random House Canada launched a new website yesterday, and a new internet magazine to go along with it. There's a piece from Hari Kunzru on Werner Herzog, and I'm especially taken with this one from Emily Landau on Christopher Hitchens and David Rakoff.
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Class with Harry Crews
When asked about his tenure as a professor of creative writing, Harry Crews used to say, "I may be at the university, but I damn sure ain’t of the university." But in talking to his former students, Crews's biographer, Ted Geltner, found that in spite of the writer's efforts to distance himself from academia, he really was a passionate, memorable teacher. (Bonus: Yours truly named one Crews work his "most representative" Florida book.)
The Wives of Russian Masters
“Russia's most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.”
Poets on Poets
Editing poetry can be tricky, and the work is often misunderstood. Many of the best houses leave the work to the experts: actual poets. But is that the best route? Indeed, as this Telegraph article puts it, "a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others."