Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under Roundup
- If anti-Obama books are the new bestsellers, I intend to write an anti-bestseller that is the new literary Obama. The novel will presented with a hopeful corona, keeping you spellbound in its initial narrative campaign, only to betray you midway through with shameful appeals that confirm the prejudgments of literary cynics. But since you’ve read this far into the book, you’re obliged to go the distance. Even though you’ve realized that the book in question is just another pandering novel. (And perhaps this type of book may be close to what Wyatt Mason describes.) I do not know if anyone can make money from an anti-bestseller structured along these lines, but if someone can make a persuasive case that one can, I may commit a modicum of labor for such a narrative experiment. (Latter link via The Publishing Spot)
- I’m with Matthew Tiffany on this: This has to be one of the most appalling literary interviews I’ve read in a while. Who is Drew Nellins? And why is he wasting Chris Adrian’s time? One could easily obtain more substance from a telemarketer trying to sell you a $16.99 delicacy, with dung and a chickenhawk’s cloaca listed as the main ingredients, shipped third-class from an island nation that you’ve never heard of, than the hopeless results emerging from Nellins’s bradykinetic four-lobe throttling pattern. Step it up, Mr. Nellins. Intelligence will be rewarded, but slum it at your own peril. This has been a shot across the bow.
- Tayari excavates an ethical dilemma brought on by the Stephenie Meyer contretemps, where loyal Meyerites have become heartbreakingly aware of the author’s deficiencies: Should you return a book to the bookstore if the book fails to live up? I think Ms. Meyer represents a very special case. Particularly when this trash, in turn, causes a reviewer to waste her talent on a needlessly long and quite ridiculous essay.
- And while David Kipen continues to speak to the buttoned-up crowd, Jeff unearths a more hearty stratagem in New Zealand.
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