Roy Miller's Blog, page 197

‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Sets Opening Night on Broadway

This content was originally published by ANDREW R. CHOW on 4 May 2017 | 3:51 pm.
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Jamie Parker, left, and Sam Clemmett in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in London.



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Manuel Harlan

The smash-hit London play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” will open on Broadway next April 22, the producers announced on Thursday, setting the stage for one of the cultural of 2018 in New York.

The play, set two decades after J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series ended, is based on an original story by Ms. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany. The London production shattered records at the Olivier Awards last month, winning the coveted best new play award and honors for the actors playing Harry; Hermione Granger; and Draco Malfoy’s son, Scorpius.

As in London, the production will arrive at Broadway’s Lyric Theater in two parts, which audiences can watch over two days or in a single marathon day. Casting has not been announced, but John Tiffany will stay on to direct the production.

Tickets will go on sale this fall. Before the opening, the Lyric will undergo a dramatic overhaul, shedding one-fifth of its seats to create a more intimate space for a nonmusical play. (Cirque du Soleil’s “Paramour” just vacated the theater last month.)

There’s been plenty of news coming out of the Potter-verse recently: Jude Law was tapped to play a young Albus Dumbledore in the next film installment of the “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” series.

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Letters to the Editor – The New York Times

This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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MARTIN KILSON
LEXINGTON, MASS.

The writer, a professor of government emeritus at Harvard, is the author of “Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012.”

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‘I Am a Rogue’

To the Editor:

I was somewhat puzzled by Jeanette Winterson’s (and, by her account, Harold Bloom’s) insistence, in the review of “Falstaff: Give Me Life” (April 23), that Falstaff is meant to be viewed as “the true and perfect image of life” tout court. This is indeed what Falstaff claims, but it is not all that Shakespeare lets us know. One of many possible examples can be found in the immediately preceding scene, when Falstaff tells the audience that he has caused the deaths of almost all the troops he recruited for the king’s army: “I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered: there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.”

PHYLLIS RACKIN
PHILADELPHIA

The writer is a professor of English emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Making Trouble

To the Editor:

How does John Waters (By the Book, April 23) not have a column in the Book Review? I found myself stopping every other sentence to write down one of his recommendations.

JONATHAN FLEMING
CHICAGO

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To Promote Skepticism

To the Editor:

Yuval Harari’s review of “The Knowledge Illusion” (April 23) was certainly a fine introduction to the human need to distinguish between facts, beliefs, opinions, illusions and the knowledge of others. However, the word “skepticism” was conspicuous by its absence; it was not once quoted from the text of the book, although I suspect it appears there.

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Without some degree of skepticism there can be great danger in how we receive knowledge. Harari says: “Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups.” “Groupthink,” he calls it. It’s well understood that those who speak loudest (advertisers and propagandists) will have great influence over our beliefs. Isn’t that a profound reason to promote skepticism?

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My skeptical antenna pulsed when Harari wrote: “No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft.” I seem to recall that many people have built and flown their own aircraft.

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GEORGE DUNBAR
TORONTO

The Book Review wants to hear from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. Please address them to books@nytimes or to The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Comments may also be posted on the Book Review’s Facebook page .

Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we are unable to acknowledge letters.

Information about subscriptions and submitting books for review may be found here .

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How the Fiscal Crisis of the ’70s Shaped Today’s New York

This content was originally published by JONATHAN MAHLER on 5 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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It was just one example of the great unwinding of the social democratic city. In the years to come, what had taken progressive politicians, labor unions and citizen activists generations to build — a working-class city with a sense of common public life — would be refashioned into the two New Yorks of today, one of breathtaking wealth, the other of searing poverty. To many liberals, it’s been an unfortunate trajectory; to some, a tragic one. But was it inevitable?

That’s the question at the heart of “Fear City” by Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian who teaches at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She offers a very direct answer in the book’s early pages, arguing that the various decisions that set this transformation in motion during New York’s infamous fiscal crisis were not simply ones of practical necessity. They were as much about politics as they were about accounting. As she puts it, “austerity remains a political choice.”

It’s a refreshingly counterintuitive point of view. The conventional wisdom has always been that New York had reached a point where it simply could no longer afford such an expansive network of public institutions and services. Sacrifices were necessary. In order to spur financial growth and protect the city’s economic health in the future, the logic continued, its leaders had to empower private developers and profit-seeking industries while scaling back their own efforts to fight poverty and improve social conditions.

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But, as Phillips-Fein argues, none of this was a foregone conclusion when the city first confronted the fiscal crisis. She revisits the familiar story with fresh eyes, seeing it not as part of an inexorable, if painful, evolution but as a battle between two competing views of the city and its government. “Did its responsibility lie in providing extensive social services and guaranteeing a set of social rights to all?” she asks. “Or should its main commitment be to make the city an attractive place for businesses and corporations by lowering taxes, relaxing regulations and fostering economic development?”

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Caught in the middle was the city’s hapless mayor, Abe Beame, the son of an immigrant socialist agitator and factory worker. Beame grew up on the Lower East Side in the shadow of the Jewish Daily Forward building, its facade decorated with busts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A cum laude graduate of City College, Beame was a bookkeeper by training. (“If you don’t know the buck, you don’t know the job,” was his campaign slogan.) He understood the depths of the city’s financial woes, but was blind to many of the larger forces that shaped how the crisis played out. He assumed, for instance, that the interests of the big banks were too bound up with those of the city for them to cease lending it money, never realizing that these financial institutions were operating in an increasingly global context: “Now the municipal debt was, to them, only an economic proposition — and New York’s economics did not look good.”

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Beame also failed to recognize that the political landscape was shifting. President Ford, who had the power to bail out the city, was a moderate Republican, but his party was moving to the right, beginning its migration toward the anti-government, free-market ideology later embodied by Ronald Reagan. In this sense, New York’s problem presented Ford with an opportunity. Some of his closest advisers, including Alan Greenspan, William Simon and Donald Rumsfeld, urged him to make an example of the city, to treat its fiscal crisis as a case study in the broader failure of big-government liberalism.

Of course, the definition of liberalism was shifting too. The postwar boom that had enabled the ambitious Great Society programs of the 1960s was over, and so too was the full-throated commitment to progressive bulwarks and principles, to labor unions and an activist government. Many of the men — and they were almost all men — who emerged from the private sector to help steer New York out of the fiscal crisis were Democrats, but not of the Beame vintage. A case in point is the financier often credited with rescuing the city, Felix Rohatyn, the master fixer who helped bring together the banks and unions, while persuading the city’s leaders to reduce their spending and rethink their budgets. Here he is portrayed in a less flattering light, not as ill-intentioned but as the most prominent member of a group of unelected financial executives making critical decisions about the future of the city without any input from or accountability to its citizens.

What else might have been possible? This is the one realm in which this powerful and involving work of narrative history comes up short. Phillips-Fein makes a convincing argument that the city’s abandonment of its liberal ideals was a choice. What she doesn’t do is offer a different path, imagine an alternative history for New York. What would have happened if the city had simply gone bankrupt and left the courts to sort things out? If the federal government hadn’t been so relentlessly hostile, Phillips-Fein notes, it might have been easier for New York to renegotiate its debts. Maybe, but this explanation feels facile, given the magnitude of the city’s problems. You come away from “Fear City” with a clear sense of what was lost as New York left behind one set of priorities and embraced another, but not of what could have been salvaged or rebuilt for the benefit of the poor and working class, or of how this might have been accomplished. For that matter, there is no mention of what has been achieved, of models of public-private partnerships that have worked for all the city’s residents, even in the face of its ever-widening income gap.

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Still, this is a book that deserves an audience beyond New York City history buffs, and all the more so because of its relevance to our political moment. The young Donald Trump makes a brief cameo appearance as an icon of the new New York, a real estate mogul who leveraged his father’s connections and the city’s desperation into massive tax breaks, starving the city of badly needed revenues for education and other basic municipal functions as he developed properties for the rich. These buildings are symbols too, reminders that the private investment now driving the city’s economy comes at a cost, one often borne by those who can least afford it.

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Unit Sales Rose 3% at the End of April

This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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At outlets that report to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books were 3% higher in the week ended Apr. 30, 2017, than in the similar week in 2016.


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Audio Publishing’s Internet Boom

This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The significant and sustained growth of the audiobook category, led by digital downloads, has been a familiar headline for a few years now. According to the most recent data from the Association of American Publishers’s StatShot program, sales of downloaded audio through the first three quarters of 2016 grew 29.6% compared to the same period in 2015, and in November 2016 sales of digital audiobooks were up 47.2% over the previous November. The Audio Publishers Association is awaiting the compiled results of its latest consumer and sales surveys, which are due to be released next month. But the 2015 APA findings showed audiobook sales were 20.7% higher than in the previous year, part of a string of year-to-year increases since 2011.

As the demand for, and supply of, audio content increases, so too does the workload of the people producing and marketing that content. How have audio departments been meeting that challenge? PW spoke with audio publishers at several of the larger traditional publishing houses to see how staff size and responsibilities have been evolving.

For audio publishers across the board, the growing popularity of digital downloads has sparked a sharp increase in title output and variety. But surprisingly, most companies report that head counts have not necessarily reflected that same uptick.

Anthony Goff, senior v-p of content development and audio publisher at Hachette Book Group, notes: “Things have changed dramatically: we are producing so many more books and so many more kinds of books. Our staff, however has stayed relatively the same.” Goff’s team of 12 will be producing more than 700 titles this year. “When I started here in 2003, we were doing somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 titles a year,” he says.

Hachette has two recording studios and is currently adding a smaller studio in-house. “We’ve picked up a new engineer, and we picked up a producer,” Goff says. “So we’re growing and our staff is growing, but not nearly as much as the title count and the workload, and so everyone is full-on sprinting to make things happen. And it’s really exciting, but you always hope that things don’t fall through the cracks because you have so many things going, so many balls in the air.”

The situation is similar at Simon & Schuster Audio. “We’ve basically tripled the number of titles we publish from four or five years ago,” says president and publisher Chris Lynch. “So as a group, we’ve had to take a hard look at how we do our jobs. We’ve added a couple of production positions to help absorb the increase in titles, but that’s really it in terms of new people.”

Other publishers are responding to the ramp-up in projects by increasing their staff numbers. Amanda D’Acierno, senior v-p and publisher at Penguin Random House Audio, summed up her division’s growth spurt: “In response to the increased demand for audiobooks, our goal is to produce every Penguin Random House title suitable for recording,” she says. “That translates to a 20% increase in our list over last year. After increasing our studio space in both L.A. and New York in late 2014, we’re again expanding our studios here in New York and have hired additional production and operations staff to ensure we have ample resources to produce more than 900 titles this year.”

Macmillan Audio is looking at an equally robust picture. “We have grown in the number of people, and we’re actually planning to grow again, which is very exciting,” says Mary Beth Roche, president and publisher of Macmillan Audio. “There are 13 of us and I would say by the beginning of summer there will be 16 dedicated solely to audio. The hard part, then, is figuring out where you need the additional resources. If you’re adding more titles, where are the pain points going to be? I’m looking at production, marketing, design, as well as the people who are managing the metadata and making sure that all of that is being optimized.”

In step with the other major publishers we spoke with, Macmillan has an in-house studio. “It’s been fully operational now for a little over a year, and it’s been a huge success,” Roche says. “We’re able to keep it very busy and we use it both for authors and for local talent to come in an use the space here.”

And when it’s warranted by staff, space, or time limitations, most audio publishers have long worked with trusted partners. “We’ve always used a wide array of outside sound engineers and people who do a whole variety of tasks,” says Roche. But, she explains, the completion of all the elements of the recording is still done at Macmillan.

Goff says: “We’re using not only our additional staff but outside firms to help take on some of the production work. We’re recording all over the country simultaneously now, using different partners, different vendors, and employing as many people as we can to keep growing the audio list.”

Audio Leads with Synergy, Innovation

Logic dictates that, as audio departments are producing more titles, they are in turn doing more marketing. And bringing digital titles to market has been a largely digital endeavor.

“Digital marketing has been a real focus,” says S&S’s Lynch. “Social media and email marketing have been at the forefront of our efforts the last couple of years.”

Goff says that at Hachette, “our marketing for the past few years has been focused on all the things you can do while you’re engaged with this type of content.” He adds, “Everybody’s busier and has less time in their day.”

To Goff’s point, Roche cited several examples of her group’s marketing campaigns targeting a now-larger pool of multitasking listeners. Efforts have included a promotion with the Avis rental-car company’s business customers, sponsoring foot races to appeal to those who listen while they run, and working with food companies to do sponsorships and promotions for people who listen while they’re cooking. “These are not things we haven’t done before,” she says. “We’re just doing them in new ways.”

But one of the biggest recent changes for audio departments is where and when they begin planning their marketing campaigns. “At Macmillan we’ve been involved from the very beginning on a lot of projects, and certainly on all the major acquisitions, we’re part of the very early P&L [profit and loss sheet] acquisitions process,” says Roche. “As audio has gotten bigger and bigger, it’s now included from the very beginning on even more books, going deeper and broader. Often we’ll meet the author when they come in even before the book is signed up. Audio is fully integrated into planning from very first launch meeting for the book and audiobook publication—all of that synergy is being optimized.”

Lynch also offers a positive assessment of the corporate synergy his team has participated in. “As a company, Simon & Schuster has done a tremendous job in integrating audio into the marketing and publicity plans for each publication,” he says. “But the key within the division has been thinking digital first, and making sure that we aren’t continuing to do things just because that’s the way we’ve always done them. If something’s not moving the needle in terms of sales or publicity or faster and better productions, we shouldn’t be doing it.” S&S has another advantage when considering corporate strategies and partnerships, says Lynch. “We also have the benefit of being part of a major media company, CBS.”

The use of audio and video is not merely restricted to presenting book content; they’re also increasingly being used in marketing. In Roche’s assessment, marketing people see audio as providing them with more assets to work with. “Audio has gotten sexy,” she says. “We’ll have an author in, and I can’t tell you the number of times the marketers ask, ‘While the author’s in the studio, can you have him read a 30-second spot for this?’ ”

Video is another medium in the synergistic marketing toolbox. “We’re recording video from almost every production that the author will put on their Facebook page, or that will go on the book’s landing page,” Roche explains. “We’re creating assets that obviously help sell the audio but also help sell the book.” She notes that her team has a good working relationship with Macmillan’s e-book division, a set-up that provides opportunities for the groups to exchange knowledge and support.

Roche also oversees Macmillan’s podcast division. Podcasts are a growing format that she says are another source of in-house advertising and another way to create more listeners. “I think podcasts are helping,” she says. “A lot of people who hadn’t previously listened to audiobooks maybe have gotten turned on to listening because of podcasts, and audiobooks are maybe the next thing for them to try once they’ve gotten used to long-form listening again.”

Hachette’s Content Development

In addition to trying to reach various benchmarks of more, faster, or better, most audio publishers agree that in this age of digital proliferation they have more opportunities to create content and production or marketing techniques that are innovative. “We had always experimented, we would dip our toes into lots of waters, looking at new ways to sell audio, new channels, new partnerships,” Goff says. “We’ve really opened that up now.” In fact, it was that audio experimentation that was a factor in Goff’s being promoted last year by HBG CEO Michael Pietsch to lead a companywide strategic initiative from under the audio umbrella. According to Goff, the content development initiative’s mission is to find new ways to branch out in digital and in print to expand the readership and market of authors.

In that new capacity, Goff says that he was able to “hire somebody who was in a parallel universe doing similar business in the children’s division, Tina McIntyre.” He adds, “I asked her to join our team and now we’re doing this not only for audio, but for all the divisions.” McIntyre had previously worked in the Little, Brown Books for Young Readers group, where, as marketing director during the “Twilight years” of Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling vampire series, she says she created “a lot of interesting partnerships and content promotions and things that you would normally do free of charge, but we kind of thought we could probably be charging for some of these things.” She then moved into a business development/digital publishing hybrid role in the company. As for joining Goff’s team, McIntyre says, “Corporate thought it made sense to pair us up and see what we could do.” She was named senior executive of the content development team in March of last year.

The initiative is a good fit with the audio department for several reasons, in McIntyre’s view. “Audio has been doing derivative product in their own way,” she says. “So they’re familiar with the scrappiness involved with everyone rolling up their sleeves and pitching in to help. Everyone gets on board and helps us decide what to move forward with. The other part that’s nice about being absorbed in the audio team is that all the publishers are used to working with this division, so there’s an inherent trust and familiarity that’s already been built up, knowing that they produce these beautiful recordings of their books.”

“It’s not just audio anymore,” Goff stresses. “It’s also not about an audio bottom line vs. a print bottom line. We are now genuinely driving revenue to all of our divisions and working with their editors and their marketers, really intrinsically on a day-to-day basis: brainstorming original content, looking at distribution partnerships, b-to-b, b-to-c, looking at all these different ways we could be selling our books and audiobooks, not only traditionally but with new content based on these writers and what they have in their stable. It could be stories they might have never published, or expanded character development. Or we may engage our authors in conversation about what else we can do to find younger listeners or new listeners.”

According to McIntyre, her first year in the new position has involved “a lot of testing of ideas and concepts: do consumers want chunked content? Do they want serialized content? What more could we do with audio? What kind of partnerships could we explore?” In the future, she notes, “my vision for the group is to be very experimental and innovative while 100% respecting the rights we have in our contracts—looking for authors and agents who are willing to maybe work with us on some of those new, innovative, experimental things, but never doing a rights grab, never trying to go and take a whole category away from an author that they might be able to exploit somewhere else.”

Among the group’s recent content development partnerships based in audio, Goff lists working with Booktrack, a technology company that creates and syncs movie-style soundtracks and ambient sound to e-books and audiobooks, and Novel Effect, a startup tech firm whose voice recognition technology allows readers to read aloud from a print book and have it automatically sync with music and effects. And last month Hachette embarked on a global partnership with online writing and reading community Wattpad to launch Hachette Audiobooks: Powered by Wattpad, which will publish 50 audiobook editions of Wattpad stories this summer.

Content development ideas reach beyond digital, too. “A lot of what we’re doing is not only digital but is really to sell physical and keep physical doing well, and to find new ways to for physical readers and physical audio purchasers to engage in different ways,” Goff says.

Hachette Book Group has demonstrated strong buy-in to the new initiative. Goff says that his team hosted a digital open house with all Hachette employees, and it was standing room only in a room with more than 100 chairs. “I was excited to see how enthused all of the staff was, how excited they are to want to be a part of the next generation of finding new readers and listeners and doing out-of-the-box experimentation,” Goff adds. “Because everybody’s engaged in different ways now—between social media, mobile devices, podcasts, people’s shorter attention spans, you have to try different things.”

The Next Wave

Goff says, “We’re constantly looking for new ways to get particularly younger audiences loving reading, loving listening.” He adds, “And, as we know about audio, once you get people excited about it, they are on board for life.”

At S&S, Lynch knows that flexibility is key for his team. “We need to stay nimble and stay creative in how we produce, publish and market our titles—from where and how we sell them to expanding the definition of what an audiobook is,” he says. “We’ve always published original or first-to-audio titles, but as the medium expands, we can push the envelope there too.”

Roche says she hopes for more rosy scenarios ahead: “We want to see [the audio segment] continuing to grow, and there’s still more audience to find. We’re not mature. There are still a lot of people who haven’t tried an audiobook, which makes the marketing piece of it still really fun. We’re not just fighting over a set group of listeners. It’s, ‘Listen to an audiobook and you’ll find one of ours.’ ”

A version of this article appeared in the 05/08/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Inside the Audio Department

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For Some, Britain Proved a Port in the Storm of War

This content was originally published by HAROLD EVANS on 5 May 2017 | 2:54 pm.
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Having made a good case for selfliberation, Olson raises her bid on behalf of the occupied countries: “Without their help, the British might well have lost the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic and might never have conquered the Germans’ fiendishly complex Enigma code.” The claim invites a challenge, but she is persuasive in dramatizing great deeds done and then forgotten or unappreciated.

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Neutral Norway, at peace for more than a century, had a population of fewer than three million people when invaded on April 9, 1940. It made an impact out of all proportion to its size. Its ships and crews helped keep the Atlantic sea lanes open throughout the war. The path to the West’s atomic dominance can be said to have started with a cheeky smuggling operation at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, organized by a Norwegian company, a French banker-spy and the British Earl of Suffolk. Under the eyes of German spies, they contrived to switch 26 canisters of heavy water to be transported on a plane bound for Amsterdam to one heading for Scotland. Two intercepting Luftwaffe fighters forced the Amsterdam plane to land in Hamburg. Its cargo was crates of crushed granite.

Enigma, the German cipher machine, was every bit as important as the author suggests, and again it advances her case for the occupied countries. The exciting 2014 movie “The Imitation Game” was a fair representation of the British achievements at Bletchley Park, but how many people realize that cracking the “fiendishly complex” code began with three Poles and a Frenchman before Britain’s Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman made their breakthroughs? The Poles, secreted in a forest bunker outside Warsaw, were all in their 20s, led by a mathematics genius by the name of Marian Rejewski. He was the first to get sense out of the German machine. The Frenchman, Gustave Bertrand, was the head of French radio intelligence who, in 1933, bribed a German in the military cipher department for four diagrams of Enigma’s construction. Still fewer will know that after the war, Rejewski, who had done so much to win it, was left to rot in “liberated” Poland under constant surveillance by the Communist secret police. And that the British were shockingly slow to acknowledge the debt to the Poles.

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Churchill’s “action this day” order accelerated the Bletchley Park operations, but he could not save Poland or Czechoslovakia from Communist tyranny. He cast a strategic eye on the smaller European countries, and always wanted to shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible. But he had little help from Roosevelt in the arguments at Tehran and Yalta. Nor did he have the support of Roosevelt in pressing Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower to risk marching into Prague and Berlin before the Red Army. When I interviewed Richard Nixon in 1993, he told me that Eisenhower was haunted by having forbidden Gen. George Patton from entering Prague to join the rebellious Czechs; he felt vulnerable to the possibility of Senator McCarthy blaming him for the subsequent Communist takeover.

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Queen Wilhelmina of Holland



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Olson’s focus is on the leaders of six defeated countries who found refuge in London: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, along with Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the self-appointed leader of the Free French Forces. Her descriptions of royal escapes from the Nazis are gripping. King Haakon’s convoys, painted white, played hide and seek among Norway’s mountains and glaciers with German bombers strafing wherever they thought the king might be. The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, was stuck in a little air-raid shelter in her palace garden while thousands of Nazi paratroopers arrived before dawn as she had predicted they would. She was cut off from her complacent ministers, who were glad to avoid the wrath they deserved for ignoring her warnings that Hitler and his “bandits” had no respect for the country’s neutrality.

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Olson is sensitive to the traumas of the deposed in having to decide whether to stay as hostages in the hope of sparing their populations the torments of Nazi rule or risk the charge of desertion by fleeing to London. It is not as if the last-hope island was a sure sanctuary. That’s hindsight. The neutral countries were stunned by the British-French betrayal of Czechoslovakia and then by their unwillingness to try to prevent Poland’s dismemberment by the Nazis and the Soviets. About six million Poles were killed in the war.

Churchill’s appointment as prime minister on May 10, 1940, ensured a warm welcome for the exiles, out of his natural human sympathies, and his recognition that Britain would need all the help it could get from the foreigners it had despised as inept or cowardly or both. This makes it all the odder that Churchill has portrayed World War II as an unalloyed American-British-Soviet triumph. Throughout the conflict and in his histories, Olson writes, he promoted the idea of plucky little England and its united empire maintaining the struggle “single-handed” until joined by Russia and later by the United States.

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Olson’s histories have well honored Britain’s heroism. In “Last Hope Island” she justifies her toast to the exiles and their compatriots. Alas, their valor and their vision of a united Europe, purged of the lethal nationalisms that cost 60 million lives, were betrayed by the reckless Brexit referendum in June 2016 and by dishonest leaders who have learned nothing and forgotten everything.

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Teaching Writing At the Writers Studio

This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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For many poets, teaching, be it in high schools or M.F.A. programs, is an occupation rather than a vocation—the most sensible way to use their literary knowledge and skills to earn a living. But for Pulitzer Prize–winner Philip Schultz, educating aspiring writers is a second calling.

That’s why in 1987, before the M.F.A. craze swept across the American academy and literary landscape alike, Schultz founded the Writers Studio, a program offering writing workshops designed, according to the Studio’s website, “to help students discover and nurture their own voices.” What was then a small project operating out of Schultz’s West Village apartment in New York has expanded into numerous operations in places including Tucson, Ariz.; San Francisco; New York’s Hudson Valley; and Amsterdam, in addition to an online course and a nonprofit branch that provides free workshops to teens in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and dyslexic students in the U.S. and abroad.

This month, small literary publisher Epiphany Editions put out an anthology that features a mix of original and previously published poetry and fiction by graduates of the school, called The Writers Studio at 30: Fiction and Poetry from the First 30 Years of the Landmark School of Creative Writing and Thinking. The volume’s editor, Odette Heideman Baker, is the editor of Epiphany, the publisher’s sister literary journal, and also a graduate of the Studio.

The Writer’s Studio’s graduates include some big names in publishing; Schultz mentioned Jennifer Egan and Walter Mosley as two of his best-known former pupils. Its advisory board, too, is stacked, with former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky, poet Edward Hirsch, and Egan among its members.

While Schultz insists that he “held no ambition for anything other than to write,” both his résumé and the story of the creation of the Writer’s Studio say otherwise. Schultz grew up with dyslexia—he didn’t learn to read until he was 11 years old—but wasn’t diagnosed until his 50s, when his son was diagnosed with the same disorder. “I always identified with the students who were struggling and it made me want to do something,” Schultz said. “So when I started to teach, I came up with a method that helped me: I told them to take the persona or voice of a writer they really loved and use it to tell their story, as kind of a mask. And instead of using an autobiographical ‘I,’ to use a made-up, invented voice.”

The method worked, and Schultz incorporated it in his first classes in the graduate writing program at New York University, which he launched, he said, because it was “a way of making a job for myself, really, and paying for rent.” Later, he realized he wanted to start his own school where, he said, “I could not be bound by academic rules, where I could put poets and fiction writers in the same class and teach them both writing.” He acknowledged, “It was a crazy thing to do, giving up a paying job with benefits to do something this risky. I probably went three years without making a dime, but it slowly became a school. The last thing I ever wanted to do was become a businessman, but I did.”

Since Schultz struck out on his own, his former students have helped him expand the enterprise; the branches outside of the West Village—all under a single financial umbrella, with teachers and administrators paid quarterly by the organization—were founded by his graduates, who asked if they could start teaching classes in their own cities or regions. The first was in Tucson, where a former student wanted to teach a class. Schultz trained her—“all our teachers are trained, they go through a two-to-three-year training program”—and supervised her first class, then watched as the program grew, with more and more of its graduates asking to come back to teach.

After that, “another student of mine moved to San Francisco and did the same thing,” Schultz said. “Now their program is thriving. It’s probably bigger than the Manhattan one. It isn’t like I sat down in the morning and figured it out. My brain doesn’t work that way. It was organic.”

Like the ancillary branches, the anthology was, Schultz noted, someone else’s idea. In this case, it was the brainchild of his wife, Monica Banks, who helps Schultz run the studio. And though the anthology, which will get a 1,000-copy first printing, boasts some top-notch writers—such as Lisa Bellamy, Therese Eiben, Michele Herman, Lucinda Holt, Peter Krass, Nancy Matsunaga, Cynthia Weiner, Heideman Baker, and Schultz himself—Schultz is adamant that literary firepower isn’t the point.

“The idea wasn’t to help people win Pulitzer Prizes,” Schultz said. “There’s no agents who come to classes. There’s no networking. It’s all about writing—the art of writing and a method to do it. The emphasis always was on helping people express themselves. I believe at root that what we’re all doing is trying to tell our story, in one way or another. And I think that need to discover the story and tell it lies at the heart of happiness, and at the need to be an artist—a writer.”

A version of this article appeared in the 05/08/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: At 30, the Writers Studio Gets an Anthology

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There’s No Escape From Contamination Above the Toxic Sea

This content was originally published by WAI CHEE DIMOCK on 5 May 2017 | 3:08 pm.
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Merijn Hos

BORNE
By Jeff VanderMeer
323 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Jeff VanderMeer likes to imagine nonhuman life-forms. In one sense this is nothing new; it’s the pride and glory of science fiction. But most sci-fi nonhumans tend to be human in appearance, resembling us in size, anatomy and general disposition, and departing from us only in one or two highlighted traits: the ears and super-rationality of the Vulcans in “Star Trek,” say, or the supposed lack of empathy in Philip K. Dick’s androids. VanderMeer turns that differential ratio on its head. His nonhumans are genre bending and taxonomy defying. They have unclassifiable shapes, complicated smells and inexplicable behavior. Especially in their fungal forms, they can be both plant and animal, their alienness at once unabashedly fictive yet almost empirically cataloged. The golden green and highly infectious nodules in the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) show up as English words and sentences — literally, the writing on the wall. The gray caps in “Finch” (2009), new rulers of Ambergris, spend their nights building fungus-draped towers that look “shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood,” while emitting a “smell like oil and sawdust and frying meat.” The mushrooms in “City of Saints and Madmen” (2001) are blue-tinged, four or five feet tall, with a stem as thick as an oak; the locals nickname them “white whales.”

VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in “Borne,” his new novel. At the center is the titular hero, a nondescript object when first introduced by the narrator and aspiring mother Rachel, who plucks him off the fur of the gigantic flying bear Mord. At that point Borne is no more than the size of Rachel’s fist, catching her attention only because “beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.” But he soon gets bigger, sometimes doubling or even tripling in size in a matter of weeks. He will eat anything: crumb, pebble, any worm or insect. Even though so much goes into him, nothing ever comes out, a fact that strikes Rachel as “absurd, even humorously sinister.” The sinister absurdity deepens with the disappearance of five feral children who have tortured Rachel after breaking into her hideout.

Borne, now, is suddenly able to talk, demonstrating knowledge of many things he couldn’t have experienced. He is also suddenly polymorphous, becoming a rock, a lizard, even a human. Rachel tries to parent him, educate him, but it’s pointless, because he’s already a nonstop learning machine, reading, sampling and incorporating into himself everything that comes his way. How can one educate a “hybrid of sea anemone and squid,” a liquid sprawl of “rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens”?

Nautical images are everywhere in “Borne,” though the setting is in fact land rather than sea. But the sea isn’t too far away — not far in memory, anyway, for Rachel is a climate refugee from a submerged archipelago, long dependent on the ocean for sustenance and learning the hard way that what feeds can also drown. She and her parents used to bring out their telescope to look for lights from neighboring islands, until one night they put the useless instrument away for good. The family fled their own island when Rachel was 6, moving from camp to camp, hoping to outrun disaster and never succeeding. Then her parents were lost as well. Rachel is now in a new city, scavenging on her own, finding shelter only when she takes up with her companion Wick in his much fortified and oddly sea-haunted Balcony Cliffs, a warren of apartments with marine objects etched into many of its secrets, including a “diagram of a fish curled inside the outer tube of a broken telescope and a metal box filled with tiny vermilion nautilus shells,” tucked away in a locked drawer.

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Meet the Editor: Parneshia Jones

This content was originally published by on 5 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The poetry editor for TriQuarterly Books on learning under Kanye West's mom and why "there’s poetry for every kind of person."


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The Latest in Crime Fiction

This content was originally published by MARILYN STASIO on 5 May 2017 | 3:25 pm.
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Christoph Niemann

It’s hard to get good help these days. That’s the complaint of the stressed-out Glaswegian gangsters in EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), a piece of writing that lives up to its gritty title. It’s especially difficult to find disciplined professionals like Nate Colgan, an enforcer for the Jamieson gang and the reliable chronicler of Malcolm Mackay’s novel. Although he’s skilled at handling the dirty jobs, Nate is no meathead. “Times had changed,” he explains. “Big organizations had become more sophisticated and the standard of muscle had gone up.”

But with Peter Jamieson in prison, the wheels seem to be coming off his efficient machine. Between the assassination of business associates like Lee Christie and takeover threats from ambitious insiders like Angus Lafferty, it’s clear to Nate that “the old boss, and the old certainties, were gone” and the leadership is up for grabs. “The problem,” in his opinion, is “gunmen. Hard to pick up a good one” and impossible to make a permanent hire, given the sorry state of the organization. It’s in this atmosphere of unrest (some might call it chaos) that Nate is elevated to the role of “security consultant” and charged with keeping a lid on Adrian Barrett, an English mobster escorted into town by Nate’s former lover, Zara Cope, in order to poach on local turf.

It’s a joy to wallow in the muck with Mackay, who writes in a bold style that reflects confidence rather than bravado, occasionally breaking up the tension with a wry joke. (His definition of a “paranoid crew” of hit men: “two to do the work and two to check up on the two doing the work.”) And he isn’t afraid to show Nate at his violent worst because he knows that, like Zara, we can’t get enough of this morally complex antihero. Nate survives by believing himself to be a good man in a bad job, a rationalization Zara brushes off. “The rest of the world knows you’re the bad guy,” she says, “the man that the beasts are scared of.” There’s a reason Nate can’t sleep at night: “The only world darker than the one I lived in was the one I slept in.”

♦

Who better to write a mystery about a transgender woman with identity issues than a transgender woman with identity issues? Jennifer Finney Boylan has designed LONG BLACK VEIL (Crown, $25) as a whodunit — an existential whodunit about living with all your selves. The story opens in 1980 at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a “medieval-looking” pile, long abandoned and thus a tempting destination for some college friends looking for an adventure. The fun wears thin when someone locks them in and ceases altogether when they realize one of them is missing. To the , the prison is more than a setting, it’s also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led.

There are two transgender characters in this novel, and one of them can save an old friend from suspicion of murder when the body of that missing student is found years later, in 2015. But in order to do so, she’ll have to acknowledge the closely guarded secret of her past life, a revelation she fears will alienate her husband and destroy her marriage. Although Boylan’s awkward handling of the two time frames depletes the tension, she has a good grip on the dynamics of her narrator’s current and past selves and the battle to keep them from fighting to the death.

♦

We know that authors get attached to their series heroes, but this is ridiculous! John Sandford has already written 26 novels about Lucas Davenport, and by now you’d think they’d be sick of each other. But no. In GOLDEN PREY (Putnam, $29), Sandford has come up with yet another career move for his superslick action hero, who started out as a lowly cop in Minneapolis and quickly advanced to more demanding posts. Here Lucas has left his stressful job with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and is doing some interesting undercover work as a marshal. It’s the perfect career move for this high flyer, who is being groomed for a future political detail. But for now, he’s on the trail of a career criminal who had the nerve to rob a Honduran drug cartel. Good luck with that.

♦

There’s a Danish word, ravnemodre, that translates as “raven mother” and refers to bad mothers. Ella Nygaard, the 28-year-old protagonist of WHAT MY BODY REMEMBERS (Soho Crime, $25.95), is considered such a woman. Because of debilitating panic attacks, she can’t seem to hold down a job, get off the dole or provide a decent home for her young son. No wonder. As a child, Ella watched her father kill her mother and was so traumatized she grew up full of rage. But for all that, Ella is no ravnemodre. When her son is taken away from her, she kidnaps him and flees to her grandmother’s vacant cottage on the North Sea. But she’s not safe in this village, where strangers ask too many questions and frighten her into revisiting the secrets of her brutal childhood. In this sensitive character study (translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen), Agnete Friis, who writes the Nina Borg mysteries with Lene Kaaberbol, dares us to confront our prejudices against bad mothers and other outcasts.

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