There is news now circulating, confirmed by the New York Times, that Amanda Congdon’s contract hasn’t been renewed with ABC. Which makes me wonder if the DuPont conflict of interest was publicly supported by ABC only because ABC had every intention of letting Congdon’s contract run out.
Month / September 2007
Two Guys Reading Gregory Corso
And here’s a report of the evening from Richard Grayson. As Mr. Grayson notes, someone did indeed leave in a huff midway through the reading. Many thanks to Levi Asher for inviting me.
(Mad props to Caryn)
And They Wonder Why We Raise a Stink About Habeas Corpus
Washington Post: “The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.”
Oh, and, by the way, as of February 2008, if you leave to and from the United States by air or by sea, you will need special clearance from the same Automated Targeting System listed in this article. Your name will be fed into a computer and, before you can get your boarding pass, your name will be checked against a “risk factor” saved for forty years in the computers. The DHS, of course, has been sketchy about what details it has been collecting.
Brooklyn Declared Source of Liteary Pestilence by The American Scholar
American Scholar: “To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: ‘I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.’ Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.”
I don’t entirely disagree with Melvin Jules Bukiet, but there are several hysterical statements in this article that I will leave others to respond to.
I’ll just point out that Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s operation are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Alice Sebold is also in California, and that Benjamin Kunkel is, as I understand it, based in Manhattan. So while I appreciate some of the sentiments in this article against superficial books, I think that Bukiet is foolish to wag his vitriolic finger to Brooklyn as the source of this apparent “Books of Wonder” epidemic. This is the kind of scummy and atavistic mentality that eventually gets people forcibly removing Japanese people from their neighborhood and placing them in internment camps.
And Bukiet doesn’t know Brooklyn very well if he thinks the hipsters ride the F train. If we’re going to reduce speculation upon the five boroughs to base generalizations, as anyone who actually gets off the island of Manhattan from time to time knows, it’s the L train to Williamsburg where you’ll find the ponytails and goatees.
(Thanks, Sarah)
A Candid View of the Publishing Industry
I had intended to link to this earlier, but for anyone wanting an inside glimpse of the publishing industry, the Virginia Quarterly Review has put up a podcast and a transcript of four publishing heads discussing the state of the industry. Among some of the more interesting highlights:
- Grove/Atlantic head Morgan Entrekin doesn’t believe that literary fiction is under siege and believe that now is the best time for literary fiction in his thirty-year career.
- FSG president Jonathan Galassi believes that the success of The Emperor’s Children was the exception to the literary fiction rule, saying that it’s “harder and harder to get people to care about something new, to get things to turn over.”
- This probably ties into Levi’s ongoing discussion about hardcovers vs. paperbacks, but Entrekin relaunched the Black Cat imprint as a paperback original imprint, because he found that the Black Cat hardcovers were getting a 70-80% return rate.
- HarperCollins president Jonathan Burnham noted that in positioning books for newspaper coverage, it helped to have “just a story behind the creation of the book.” (Knopf president Sonny Mehta agreed, citing Irène Némirovsky as an example.)
- There seems to be a consensus that a book landing on the National Book Award shortlist has little effect on sales.
- Entrekin and Mehta both admit that fifty percent of their business is in the backlist.
- Galassi believes that writers shouldn’t write for the market. “They should try to develop confidence with their voice and then find professionals to help them with the other, but if you try and sort of play the market, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse, myself.”
- An audience member brought up Soft Skull’s book bundles, causing Burnham to remark that Knopf or Harper couldn’t effect something like this. So perhaps there are certain advantages in being a small press with a personality and focus.