The publishing industry is roughly 86% white. Yet comparative titles, or “book comps,” are whiter still, the L.A. Review of Books has found, arguing that this makes it exceptionally difficult for writers of color to place their books with imprints at Big Five publishers. “Comps,” in other words, “perpetuate the status quo.” Here’s how.
How White Are Your Comp Titles?
“A record encapsulating all that is America”
You should check out George Saunders’s “Liner Notes” piece about “2776: A Musical Journey Through America’s Past, Present & Future,” which is set to accompany a forthcoming musical-comedy album from Patton Oswalt, Aubrey Plaza, Ira Glass, and Yo La Tengo, among others. If that hasn’t sold you, consider the fact that Saunders’s piece contains this line: “Truth be told, there were a number of regrettable omissions. Beyoncé and Jay Z’s piece ‘Bomber’ had to be left off the album. (‘Driver of this plane, this / B-52 on the way to Nagasaki / Stuff your ears with cotton and / Close those eyes / Me and my man are about to do it all over this / Here bomb’).”
The Kirkus Is Back in Town
The recipients of the 2016 Kirkus Prize have been announced, among them the novel The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan and In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi, a meditation on her father’s gender transition, in the non-fiction category. We reviewed two of the other fiction finalists this year: Carousel Court (here) and The Underground Railroad (here).
Tuesday New Release Day: Beattie; Weiner; Phillips; Clayton; Hassib; Sie; Choi
New this week: The State We’re In by Ann Beattie; Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner; The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips; The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton; In The Language of Miracles by Najia Hassib; Still Life Las Vegas by James Sie; and Subway Stations of the Cross by Ins Choi. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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The Nobel Curse
A simple question: has the Nobel curse killed Orhan Pamuk? You could just ask President Obama, who recently picked up a copy of Pamuk’s most recent work, A Strangeness in My Mind.
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Zen and the Art of Headlines
This handy guide from The Week shows how to identify which website a headline comes from, from Gawker to The New York Times. Pair with Janet Potter’s Millions piece on rewriting book titles to get more clicks.
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Writ Large
“Welcome to another night in the life of Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court justice, current queen of the best-seller list and suddenly the nation’s most high-profile Hispanic figure. She may be a relative newcomer to national life, plucked from circuit-court obscurity less than four years ago. But the release of her new memoir, My Beloved World, suggests that she has broader ambitions than her colleagues, to play a larger and more personal role on the public stage.”
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My Backward People
“Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?” This piece by Matthew Neill Null at The Literary Hub raises a lot of extremely important questions about what gets published and why.
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Ayobami Adebayo: Rising Star
Ayobami Adebayo is interviewed by Abigail Bereola for Hazlitt and it’s fantastic. They discuss proverbs, romantic love, sickle cell anemia and writing your first book. “At the risk of sounding very narcissistic, I’m going to say I write for myself ultimately. And maybe my sister. I think that when I’m working, it’s very difficult for me to think about an audience, perhaps because sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. I’m trying to figure out so many things that I really don’t start thinking about the idea that other people might read this thing until, ‘Oh my God, it’s publication day’ and I have a panic attack like ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I think the awareness of an audience is something I’m just coming into because this is a first book.”
“The dearth of minority employees directly affects the types of books that are published, industry members agreed, and for this issue to be addressed, there needs to be more advocates for books involving people of color throughout the business.”
Publish books according to how good they are; don’t publish according to the authors’ phenotypes. Problem solved. Yes: find great writers, shepherd their creations to publication, trust the readers to validate talent regardless of the various writers’ skin tone or hair texture or genital configuration. Maybe a few dark-skinned geniuses will finally make it through the racial-quota gate-keeping bottleneck… ?
“How many books by writers of color are published annually? How many reviews are dedicated to books by writers of color? How many books feature people of color in a substantive manner (a sort of Bechdel test for racial diversity)?”
How large is the Black target-demographic for literary fiction? How is “writers of color” supposed to be a meaningful or clarifying term, encompassing as it does a “racial” spectrum representing most of the planet’s population? Isn’t defining (and aggregating) a mass of wildly heterogeneous humans, by the crude fact of their non-whiteness, rather… racist? Are we supporting Artists of Color or enforcing a kind of inadvertent White Cultural Purity, the way the one-drop rule defined the broad-church of “blackness” by its not-whiteness? Maybe some Writers of Color would prefer to write about whatever-the-hell-they-please (like most Writers-of-Not-Color have been doing for centuries) instead of recycling comfy tropes assigned to their skin-tones…? Maybe Writers of Color should be allowed to infiltrate the lofty theoretical aeries of anglophone Literary Fiction sixty or so years after Jews (Roth, the great Brodkey, Malamud, Mailer, et al, and the runt of the litter, Saul) made it in…? Roth’s ascent should have been our signal that the country club gates were down: not yet? Race Rules still operative? Got it.
You know what they say: “The path to race-obsessed Hell is paved with virtue-signalling intentions.”