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?
Significant Thinking
“Over the course of our conversation, I’ve come to understand that he has not written (Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings) to provoke or to engender a self-serving sense of shock; he has written with a belief in the possibilities of liminal space and in the revelations that occur at the point of tension. The result is a book that jars, unequivocally, and that disquietingly brings to the surface the anguish of past and present America.” Stephen O’Connor’s poetic reimagining of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings has certainly raised some eyebrows. This interview with Melody Nixon at BOMB gives O’Connor a platform from which to explain his idea.
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A Poetry Reading Workshop
“Poets ought to learn how to present work as well as produce it,” says Joe Weil, who shares some invaluable Tips for Doing a Poetry Reading. (Bonus: our own Janet Potter offers a tutorial on the appropriate way to introduce an author [or poet] before their reading.)
“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’).”
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Tinkers’ Chain
At Slate, The Pulitzer win for Tinkers continues to shine a light on what’s broken about the publishing industry right now. “Instead of relying on the Great Chain of Publishing… Tinkers’ chain jumped several links to get to the Pulitzer.” (Thanks, Craig)
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Point and Click
Recommended Reading: Owen Hatherley at the London Review of Books discusses postcapitalism and a world run by clicks: “The sin of ‘original research?’ – a solecism nearly as grave as ‘citation needed’ – is another reminder that the non-postcapitalist labour of academics is the basis of nearly the entire operation. Wikipedia is less a new form of knowledge than a novel packaging of an old one.”
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Are Young Writers in Their Prime?
Sam Tanenhaus, musing about the New Yorker “young writers” list points out that, far from being a writer’s formative years, many of the great classics in literary history were penned by writers in their 30s, or younger.
Stalk Famous New York Readers
Have some fun with this New York specific feature highlighted by Atlas Obscura. The New York Society Library is private member-based library and it has some pretty famous members, going all the way back to Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Due to the library’s excellent record keeping you can trace these famous members reading histories. “In the early 20th century, Library staff switched from big, blank ledger books to index cards for record keeping. Henceforth they archived cards only for “prominent” members, discarding the rest. The gap is major, but the surviving cards offer a lifetime of book recommendations.”
“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.”