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?
Zooey Deschanel on New Girl
Every Wednesday, Vanity Fair bloggers dissect Zooey Deschanel’s performance on New Girl and quantify each quirk as “adorkable” or “tweepulsive.”
Applying Emerson to Post-Pandemic Friendships
Jane Hu reflects on how the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson have allowed her to see post-pandemic friendships in a new light.
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Where Is My Mind?
Do our brains determine how we write? Joyce Dyer explores the possibility that genre is influenced by how our brains are wired but wonders if that limits us. “The page may be forcing compromises that the brain, in such close relationship with the mind, must rightly refuse,” she writes.
Book-Buying While Intoxicated
“Because I am a writer, people sometimes ask me how ebooks have changed the literary landscape. The short answer, for me, is that I have developed a compulsion to drunk-dial Agatha Christie several times a week.” Elif Batuman on buying (and reading) while intoxicated, at Guardian.
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Nabokov on the Run
One hundred years ago this week, a teenage boy named Vladimir Nabokov fled revolutionary Russia with his family for the safety of Western Europe.
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I work nine to five and ain’t a damn thing changed
Jeff Chang, whose Can’t Stop Wont Stop I just can’t recommend enough for anyone interested in the history of hip hop, has a great piece in the LARB on rap music and the 1992 LA Riots. The LA Times also ran a compelling essay on Toddy Tee, N.W.A. and other prescient west coast MCs, the forefathers of what became commercial gangsta rap.
“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.”