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?
Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”
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Lament In The Night Excerpt
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Japanese author Shoson Nagahara’s Lament in the Night, courtesy of AAWW.
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“The old songs are so easily lost.”
Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan discusses Don Wahle’s Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard box set for The Paris Review in a quick piece that makes you sad he ever left The Oxford American.
Reality in Fantasy
“When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.” Lev Grossman writes for The Atlantic about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and why fantasy isn’t escapism. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s review of Grossman’s latest novel, The Magician’s Land.
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“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.”