Roy Miller's Blog, page 241
March 19, 2017
In Face of NEA Cuts, Small Presses Worry About Their Futures
With the arrival this week of President Donald Trump’s first budget plan, a number of members in the arts community have become deeply concerned about the proposal to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The elimination of the NEA could have a severe trickle-down effect in the small press world, as many indie publishers depend on funding from the organization to stay afloat.
The NEA, which had a budget of nearly $148 million last year, supports arts participation in American communities. It also supports numerous small publishers throughout the country.
One group particularly worried about Trump's budget proposal is the Berkeley, Calif.-based Small Press Distribution (SPD), which serves more than 400 small publishers. The nonprofit literary distributor was founded in 1969 by bookseller Peter Howard and bookseller/editor/publisher Jack Shoemaker.
SPD has received $1,198,000 in grant funds from the National Endowment for the Arts since 1998—funds that support all the publishers served by the distributor. The group's executive director, Jeffrey Lependorf, said the NEA cuts would have a dramatic ripple effect on independent publishing.
Last year, the money SPD received from the NEA accounted for 4% of the nonprofit's $1 million budget. “While 4% may sound like a small percentage of [our] overall budget, those monies more or less flow through to our hundreds of publishers,” Lependorf explained.
In Lependorf's eyes, if the NEA money stopped flowing to SPD, it would put many small presses out of business. “A 4% cut to the income of our presses could easily make the difference between just covering costs and just failing to cover their costs. It's the difference between existing or not existing." Lependorf recalled that in the 1970s and '80s, the NEA provided about half of SPD's operating budget, noting that "without that support then we surely would not exist today."
During the 2014-2015 sales year, SPD sold nearly 165,000 books, and its sales exceeded $1.75 million. More than 60% percent of those titles were poetry books—a category with historically small print runs and sales spread out over many years. These razor-thin margins give small publishers little wiggle room when it comes to the bottom line. As Lependorf put it, those working at many small presses in the U.S. essentially "donate their labor" and hope to cover costs "without dipping too far into their own finances.”
Despite the shock Trump's proposed budget has sent through the arts community, the attempt to cut off funding from the NEA is not new. The arts organization, which was founded in 1965, has been a popular target for conservative leaders since the 1980s. During his first days in office, President Ronald Reagan threatened to cut NEA funding in half. In the end, the federal budget shaved $16 million off the organization’s $159 million budget that year. Reagan’s transition had considered, though, dropping the NEA altogether.
The NEA’s future remained in jeopardy throughout the 1990s. Controversy over NEA-funded projects early in the decade inspired Republican Congressional leaders to suggest eliminating the organization. In 1997, the House voted to shutter the NEA, but the Senate restored funding for it. By 1998, NEA funding had dropped to its lowest levels in 20 years.
Although Lependorf is deeply concerned about the NEA's fate, he stressed that small publishing will survive this coming storm. His more immediate concern is that, if the NEA cuts happen, it will affect the kind of stories small presses publish, forcing them to reconsider taking chances on marginalized and risky material.
“Without crucial NEA support, we could still find a way to operate,” Lependorf said. "But we would be forced to take on fewer new presses without a proven track record of sales. We would be forced to make more of our decisions based on marketplace potential alone, and this would be critically damaging to literature in the long term.”
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Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers
Ben Blatt's fascinating new book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve, combines statistical analysis and literature. Using a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, Blatt answers everything from what are our favorite authors' favorite words to which contemporary writer uses the most clichés to the controversial topic of adverb usage. Read on for a look at some of Blatt's findings.
The first literary mystery to be solved by numbers was a 150-year-old whodunit finally put to rest in 1963. Two statistics professors learned of the long-running debate over a dozen contested essays from The Federalist Papers, and they saw that they might succeed where historians had failed. Both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison claimed to have written the same 12 essays, but who was right?
The answer lay in how each writer used hundreds of small words like but and what, which altogether formed a kind of literary fingerprint. The statisticians painstakingly cut up each essay and counted the words by hand—a process during which “a deep breath created a storm of confetti and a permanent enemy.” And by comparing hundreds of word frequencies, they came up with a clear answer after so many years of speculation: the contested essays were distinctly the work of James Madison.
Since 1963, similar methods have continued to yield major findings. Take, for instance, last year’s revelation that Shakespeare collaborated with Christopher Marlowe. And in the meantime, the technology involved has leapt from scissors and paper to computer and code, giving rise to a whole new field of study—the digital humanities.
In my new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, I use simple data to whiz through hundreds of classics, bestsellers, and fan fiction novels to explore anew our favorite authors and how they write. I uncover everything from literary fingerprints and favorite words and tics, to the changing reading level of NYT bestsellers and how men and women write characters differently.
If you have a body of literature, stats can now serve as an x-ray. Here are a few fascinating examples from Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve:
Writing Advice
There is a lot of writing advice out there. But it’s hard to test, and it’s often best to judge someone not by what they say but what they do. Novelists may tell their adoring fans to do one thing, but do they actually follow their own advice? With data, we can find out—looking at everything from the overuse of adverbs to Strunk and White’s advice against qualifiers like “very” or “pretty.”
One of my favorite examples comes from Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, where Leonard offers the following rule about exclamation points: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” A writing rule in the form of a ratio is a blessing for a statistician, so I ran with it. Does Leonard practice what he preaches?
From a strict numerical view, no. Leonard wrote over 40 novels which totaled 3.4 million words. If he were to follow his own advice he should have been allowed only 102 exclamation points his entire career. In practice, he used 1,651—which is 16 times as many as he recommends.
But looking deeper, we find that Leonard did follow the spirit of his own rule. Below are 50 novelists, representing a range of classic authors and bestselling authors. Elmore Leonard beats out everyone.
And the picture gets even more interesting when we look at how Leonard’s use changes over time. The chart below shows the number of exclamation points that Leonard used in each one of his novels from the start of the career. He loved the exclamation point as a novice, but he slowly weaned off of it over time.
Interestingly, after he delivered his exclamation point rule in 10 Rules for Writing, his use decreased even further (the one exception was Leonard’s sole children’s novel). He may have been a zealot: no one I looked at uses exclamation points at a rate lower than two or three per 100,000. But Leonard practiced what he preached: he got closer to his magic ratio than any other writer, especially in his final stretch of novels.
He was also on to something. I parsed through thousands of amateur fan-fiction stories online and found they were not only enthusiastic about their story universes, but for exclamation points as well. The average published author relies on about 1/4th as many exclamation points as the average amateur writer.
How Cliché
The book world loves a good list: bestsellers, award winners, “best of the year” lists. But what other superlative lists are there to uncover out there in the literary world? In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, I decided to ask: who uses the shortest sentences, the most adverbs, writes at the lowest grade level or relies on the most clichés?
I took all expressions mentioned in the 2013 book by Christine Ammer titled The Dictionary of Clichés. These are phrases like “fish out of water,” “dressed to kill,” and “not one's cup of tea”—4,000 phrases in total. To my knowledge, Ammer's book is the largest collection of English language clichés. I then scanned through the complete bibliographies of the same 50 authors mentioned above to see who used the most clichés.
The answer: James Patterson.
You’d expect some recency bias in the dictionary of clichés (Jane Austen’s characters, unfortunately, weren’t ever described as “dressed to kill”). So I also looked at every single book that ranked on Publishers Weekly's bestselling books of the year since 2000. James Patterson can't blame his time period alone. Even compared to his contemporaries in genre and time, Patterson comes in with five of the 10 most clichéd books. He’s clearly making it work, though. Of those PW lists, Patterson has 16 books, more titles than any other writer.
Start with a Bang
In response to a question on Twitter about her favorite first sentence in literature, novelist Margaret Atwood answered: Call me Ishmael. “Three words. Power-packed. Why Ishmael? It’s not his real name. Who’s he speaking to? Eh?”
Atwood emphasized the brevity of the Moby-Dick opener, and she is similarly concise in her own work. I compared the median length of her opening sentence to that of the 50 authors in the exclamation point chart above. Only one author, Toni Morrison, beats her out.
Opening sentences are far from an exact science, but keeping them short and powerful by rule of thumb is a smart place to start. Drawing from a range of sources, I assembled a list of the consensus top 20 opening sentences in literature. And of that list, 60% of the openers are short when compared to the book’s average sentence length.
But when you look a much wider sample of literature, most authors in practice opt for long openers. In 69% of all of the books I looked at, the opening sentence is longer than the average sentence throughout the rest of the book. It might be that authors like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood are on to something as they keep their openers “power-packed.”
Beach Weather
In one last example, let's return to Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. His first rule (#1!) is “Never open a book with weather.” Apparently Leonard had strong feelings about this trope, but anyone who’s ever heard too many plays on the old saw, “it was a dark and stormy night,” will know where he’s coming from.
Leonard again lives up to his own advice. But there’s one author who completely flouts it, and it’s an example I love.
Danielle Steel, known for selling hundreds of millions of books, should also be known for talking about the weather. She started her first book off “It was a gloriously sunny day and the call from Carson Advertising came at nine-fifteen.” She’s never looked back.
Nearly half her of introductions involve weather—mostly benign, positive weather (“perfect deliciously warm Saturday afternoons,” “perfect balmy May evening”, “absolutely perfect June day,” or simply: “The weather was magnificent.”). But like Patterson she has made her rule-breaking choice work. It’s a distinctive style that’s all her own—and it’s a quirk that at least this reader would never have been able to pin down without having been able to run the numbers first.
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Bookstore News: March 17, 2017
Buffalo's Talking Leaves to Close One Location; WORD KIDS bookstore to open in Brooklyn, Wild Detectives Facebook clickbait depicts classic novels; and more.
Buffalo's Talking Leaves Bookstore to Close One of Two Locations: The venerable independent bookstore is closing its location close to the University of Buffalo and consolidating operations at its Elmwood Village store. Owner Jonathon Welch said the move to students buying books online and a decline in the store's neighborhood were the reasons for the closure.
Brooklyn's WORD is Opening a Children's Bookstore: The Brooklyn bookstore is celebrating its tenth anniversary by opening a new children's bookstore, WORD KIDS, two doors down from its original storefront.
Dallas' Wild Detectives Clickbait Facebook Campaign is a Success: Last September, the independent bookseller began posting Facebook news items with salacious headlines drawn from the plots of classic novels, boosting their Internet traffic.
Newark Gets Its First Bookstore in 30 Years: The new, 10,000 sq.-ft. Barnes and Noble Rutgers opened in downtown Newark, N.J. in the Hahne & Co. building. Above the store is a 50,000 sq.-ft. arts incubator run by Rutgers University.
Wesleyan R.J. Julia Store to Feature Organic Cafe: The new store in Middletown, Conn., opening later this year, will feature an outpost of an organic cafe concept owned by NBA star Ray Allen and his wife.
Thai Kinokuniya Bookstores Declare March Russian Literature Month: Kinokuniya bookstores in the Thai capital of Bangkok have declared March 2017 as the month of Russian literature, noting "the intrigue between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin has captured the world's attention."
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Introducing Match Book, a New Literary Advice Column
Credit
Joon Mo Kang
Trying to figure out which book to read next? Searching for a book you loved years ago but can’t fully remember? Want to know where to start in a prolific author’s oeuvre?
The New York Times Book Review wants to hear from you. Our new literary advice column, Match Book, written by Nicole Lamy, will start in April and we need your questions.
You’re invited to email matchbook@nytimes.com with details about your reading habits — old favorites, new books that exceeded your expectations, and those that fell short. The weekly column will connect readers with book suggestions based on their questions, their tastes, their literary needs and desires.
Each column will offer personalized suggestions to one reader. Match Book will field queries from readers looking for books for any reason: for themselves, for research, for work, to give as gifts — for adults and kids — and for members of book groups looking for their next big read. All letters from all stripes of passionate readers are welcome: Lovers of fiction, thrillers, memoirs, essays, cozies, art books, biographies, children’s books, history, audiobooks, graphic novels.
Lamy has written about books, food, parenting, photography, dance, and movies for a variety of publications. She has served as books editor of the Boston Globe and previously as an editor at The Harvard Review, Transition Magazine and the Boston Book Review. She recently described for us the role she hopes the column will play in readers’ lives.
“When I was a young reader with a library card, I relied on those lists at the end of paperbacks to help me make my way through the stacks,” she said. “‘Also by This Author’ or ‘More Titles From This Publisher’ — I considered these to-do lists, and checked off the titles as I read them. Those lists were a piece of marketing genius, catching readers at their most vulnerable just as the strange, post-book mix of exhilaration and melancholy takes hold. I hope the next time last-page blues set in, readers turn to Match Book for a list of what to read next.”
Lamy also said her favorite questions will be those that “leave me absolutely at sea,” so send your most vexing book dilemmas to her at matchbook@nytimes.com.
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Louise Erdrich, Matthew Desmond Among Winners of National Book Critics Circle Awards
Louise Erdrich outside her bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis.
Credit
Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
Louise Erdrich’s novel “LaRose,” which centers on two Native American families in North Dakota whose lives are upended by a horrific hunting accident that kills a 5-year-old boy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday.
Ms. Erdrich, who has published 15 novels, won in an especially competitive year for high-profile literary fiction, with Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith and Adam Haslett among the finalists.
“I’m among such dramatically wonderful novels that it didn’t seem that this was possible,” Ms. Erdrich said in her acceptance speech, before making a passionate plea about the importance of free expression and the need for writers and journalists to challenge falsehoods.
“The truth is being assaulted not only in our country but all over the world,” she said. “More than ever, we have to look into the truth.”
Like virtually every other cultural event these days, the NBCC awards ceremony at the New School on Thursday night frequently veered into pointed political commentary. The ceremony took place not long after President Trump revealed his first federal budget plan, which proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, prompting outcries from PEN America and other writers’ groups.
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The novelist Yaa Gyasi, whose debut novel, “Homegoing,” won the John Leonard Prize for the best first book in any genre, thanked her parents for the sacrifices they made to bring her family to the United States from Ghana. “In a time where it feels like every day immigrants and refugees are being met with new affronts to their humanity, I am even more grateful,” she said.
In accepting a citation for excellence in reviewing, the book critic Michelle Dean urged her fellow writers not to become complacent about politics or lapse into solipsistic, navel-gazing work that fails to engage with pressing social issues.
“Every day brings a fresh fear, a fresh outrage,” she said. “It’s natural to want to look away.”
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The award for nonfiction went to the sociologist Matthew Desmond’s critically acclaimed best seller, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” a deeply reported narrative about impoverished people who lose their homes in Milwaukee, which explores how evictions can be not just a result of extreme poverty, but one of its causes.
The NBCC Awards, which are open to any book published in English in the United States, stand out from other major awards because book critics deliver the verdicts. The finalists and winners, in six categories, are selected by the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, which was founded in 1974 and is made up of more than 700 literary critics and editors.
The prize for poetry went to Ishion Hutchinson for “House of Lords and Commons,” which explores the landscape and the author’s memories of his native Jamaica.
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The book critic Ruth Franklin won the biography prize for “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life,” her study of Ms. Jackson’s life and work. The award for autobiography went to “Lab Girl,” by the scientist Hope Jahren, an American geochemist and geobiologist whose engrossing memoir details her coming of age as a scientist, and her lifelong fascination with plants, trees and soil.
The award for criticism went to Carol Anderson for “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.” In The New York Times Book Review, Jesse McCarthy said Ms. Anderson’s book “links scenes that should be familiar to us, yet somehow keep falling by the wayside in the story of America we tell.”
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The Canadian novelist and environmental activist Margaret Atwood, who was given the organization’s lifetime achievement award, delivered the evening’s most memorable and grim political forecast, as she ticked off the stages societies go through as they slip into totalitarianism.
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“Never has American democracy felt so challenged, never have there been so many intents from so many sides of the political spectrum to shout down the voices of others,” she said. “As independent critics, you are part of the barrier standing between authoritarian control and pluralistic, open democracy.”
She expressed gratitude for the lifetime achievement award, but said the recognition was bittersweet.
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“Why did I only get one lifetime?” she said. “Where did this lifetime go?”
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March 18, 2017
Shifts in Marketing at Abrams
Abrams has appointed Melanie Chang to the new role of v-p, children’s marketing and publicity. Chang is moving to Abrams from Little Brown Books for Young Readers, where she was v-p of the integrated marketing unit. Chang will report directly to Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs.
With Chang’s appointment, Steve Tager, senior v-p, chief marketing officer, will give up oversight of the children’s marketing and publicity functions to focus on marketing and publicity for Abrams’ adult businesses, including the new Abrams Plus’ Noterie gift and stationery line, its calendar program, and the new narrative, nonfiction imprint, Abrams Press, whose first book will be released in May.
In a third move, Abrams hired Liz Fithian as director, franchise marketing, Children’s Books, which includes the Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise. Fithian, who had been in marketing at Macmillan, will report to Chang.
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Stories – The New York Times
Park has published nine previous books, and his range in this new one is ambitious. One story is narrated by a shop mannequin, another by an oarsman rowing the dead across what is clearly the River Styx, another by a lonely old widower who becomes involved with a single mother and her 5-year-old son. “Skype” follows an isolated former schoolteacher who lives on a remote and rather inhospitable island, mourning his absent wife and daughter, who have both moved away: “This afternoon the sea looks irritable, slowly working itself up into a brew, and it hits the harbor wall as if startled to find land’s obstruction in its way. It’s always been like that, he thinks, always the sense that nature resents the presence they have carved out for themselves and at every opportunity seeks to dislodge them.”
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In “Man Overboard,” four childhood friends, now in their 40s, set off on a “lads’ weekend,” only to discover that one of them is more seriously depressed than they’d realized. How the other three respond to their mate’s despair represents a small victory in the name of old allegiances. Park is a skilled craftsman who serves up some memorable passages, yet several of the entries in this collection seem too slight, proving just how delicate and elusive the alchemy of the short story form can be.
THE TALKER
Short Stories
By Mary Sojourner
217 pp. Torrey House, paper, $14.95.
Photo
The characters in Sojourner’s second collection are often down on their luck; more likely than not, they turn out to be heavy drinkers and substance abusers with a lot on their chests. They like to talk and pour endless cups of coffee. They live in trailer parks and crummy apartments and take road trips in primer-patched old Broncos and elderly Malibus. They have a knack, it must be said, for making bad choices. Downhill is their customary direction.
The author of novels, memoirs and a book of essays, Sojourner lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., and many of her stories are set in the West and Southwest. Her sense of place is by far her strongest suit, and her descriptions for the most part ring true: The “Mojave Desert burn-you-to-a-crisp sunshine,” the “saguaro rising up like guardians,” the “faint whine off the far highway and the scrawk of a raven,” the clear air of a “blue-brilliant Colorado afternoon.” If only her characters felt as real and specific as her locations. Instead, they can veer dangerously close to caricature. In “Nautiloid,” a tough-talking older woman dying of colon cancer doesn’t want anyone to make a fuss over her. In “Cyndra Won’t Get Out of the Truck,” a depressed young housewife turns a weakness for Palm Springs slot machines into a full-blown gambling addiction. Heavy on the folksy charm, the dialogue never feels quite as right as Sojourner’s deftly rendered settings. “Me? Standard getting-by getting-older single chick in a one-horse town,” one woman says, by way of introduction. (Does anybody anywhere really talk like that?)
Despite the often corny locutions, Sojourner’s stories contain moments of real feeling. The abiding theme is that mistakes will be made, losses will pile up and yet — by accident or luck or sheer determination — most of these characters will manage to endure. Those who fare the best seem to be the people who find some solace in the landscape and the great outdoors. Sometimes, as one of them points out, you’ve just got to get out of the truck.
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At 25, the New Press Thrives In Politically Charged Climate
It’s been 25 years since the late Andre Schriffin cofounded the New Press with Diane Wachtell, who is now its executive director. From the start, the New Press was meant to be a hybrid independent publisher that combined trade publishing expertise and nonprofit fund-raising with a mission to produce books for progressive social activism. Schriffin, who died in 2013, described the New Press as an independent publishing house in the public interest. Now, in the wake of the recent presidential election, the New Press plans to celebrate its anniversary with an energized publishing program focused on the challenge of resisting the new administration’s political agenda.
“I think Andre would be very proud of our postelection books,” said Ellen Adler, the New Press’s publisher, in an interview shortly after returning from ABA’s Winter Institute. “I think he’d be pleased with the fact that we’ve found a niche and our books are widely embraced by booksellers.”
Indeed, as the New Press marks its 25th year, it has a lot to be proud of. In 2016 it published 40 titles (TNP published 23 in 1992), reported revenue of $6.7 million ($1.5 million in 1992), and during the year had two books—Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land—on the bestseller list simultaneously. First published in 2010, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness now has more than 900,000 copies in print; Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right has 100,000 copies in print and was nominated for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Created as a nonprofit, the New Press is supported not only by book sales but by grants, and the house has a four-person grant development department. Although Adler emphasized that the New Press has “higher earned income than usual for a nonprofit with a social mission,” she also points to the fact that nearly $1 million out of the $6.7 million in revenue last year came from grants and individual donations.
The New Press was also founded with a mandate to embrace diversity both in its publishing lists and in its staff. In an industry with a continuing dearth of minority representation at every level, the New Press strives to practice what it preaches. TNP, which began with a staff of five in 1992, has 28 employees today, of whom 39% are nonwhite. The house’s 25-year-old diversity-focused internship program is one of the industry’s longest running and most successful; it has trained and sent more than 550 former interns into jobs in book and magazine publishing, including in-house.
“Many [former interns] do go on to jobs in publishing, both books and magazines, while others have gone on to not-for-profits and, in some cases, grad school and the academy,” Adler said. “We’ve got really interesting people who did not get here in the usual way.” TNP education editor Tara Grove, for example, was a social worker who started as a TNP intern before being hired as an editor.
Wachtell said the internship program has other benefits besides bringing in people with different backgrounds. She said it has also transformed the editorial acquisition climate by adding personnel with different perspectives, experiences and skill sets. The New Press often works closely with a variety of activist and nonprofit organizations, such as the ACLU, to develop books, and in turn uses those organization’s networks to market and sell the book to the communities that can use them. “We work with movements,” Wachtell said. “It’s not easy, and most publishers don’t do it.”
Among the recent books it has produced in this manner are The Fight for Fifteen by David Rolf, in partnership with the Services Employees International Union; Black Power 50 edited by Sylviane A. Diouf and Komozi Woodard, with support from the Schomborg Resource Center in Harlem; and Frackopoly by Wenonah Hauter, produced with the Food and Water Watch. One of the New Press’s lead titles for 2017 is Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton and Cari Lynn. It’s the life story of Burton, a one-time drug addict who spent 15 years in and out of prison before cleaning up and founding A New Way of Life, a nonprofit organization that operates safe housing and provides overall support for female ex-prisoners. “We don’t usually do memoirs, but [Burton’s book] is the individual story behind mass incarceration,” Adler explained.
Responding to the political climate, the New Press is launching Fearless Books for Perilous Times, which is both a new publishing series and a slogan for the house’s anniversary. The “fearless” titles are Wolf Whistle Politics: The New Misogyny in Public Life Today, edited by Wachtell (with an introduction by Naomi Wolf); Rules for Resistance: Advice From Around the World in the Age of Trump, coedited by David Cole and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett; and How Do I Explain This to the Kids? Parenting in the Age of Trump edited by Alva Siegler. The books are all paperback and will be released in April and May.
Adler joked that the press was “occupying” Wall Street (where its offices are located), but she and Wachtell both recognize that the next few years will be no laughing matter when it comes to politics. “The next four years we’ll be working in the social change sphere. New movements will rise up in response to this administration,” Wachtell said. “We plan to start a podcast, and we’re going to build up our online presence. It’s a publisher’s website now, but it will become a content and community site and a hub for social change.”
A version of this article appeared in the 03/20/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: At 25, the New Press Thrives In Politically Charged Climate
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Misfits Burn Fast and Bright in This Tale of ’80s Athens
Cara Hoffman
Credit
Constance Faulk
RUNNING
By Cara Hoffman
271 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
With any luck, one’s late teens and early 20s prove to be an especially queer time — a time for questioning convention and breaking with family, for sexual license and rebellion. These are the years when phoniness chafes, when inherited morality reveals itself to be deserving of interrogation, when choosing safety and sameness over adventure and difference seems not just distasteful, but often impossible. For most, the tethers to the straight world are strong enough to endure some stretching, but others find themselves — or get themselves — entirely unmoored. Such is the case for the three main characters in Cara Hoffman’s heterodox third novel, “Running.”
Hoffman impressively evokes the combination of nihilism, idealism, rootlessness, psychic and economic necessity, lust and love that might set a young person adrift. Unlike the runaway heroes of many queer narratives, these characters are not cast out but looking to get lost; put another way, they are running away from, not toward, a sense of belonging. For Bridey, an orphaned white American raised by her survivalist uncle in the Pacific Northwest woodlands, familial roots never took hold; she is tough, self-reliant, a wildling. Still a teenager in the late 1980s, she gets herself gone, across the ocean, and eventually ends up in Athens, where she meets the drifter couple Milo and Jasper.
Milo and Jasper are both English but opposites in all other ways. Jasper, who is white, hails from spectacular wealth and is an Eton dropout, while the autodidact Milo is black and poor, from a council estate in Manchester. Jasper is fey and feisty, sardonic at best, more often caustic, severely alcoholic; Milo is a boxer and a poet, as broad and muscled as he is earnest and sensitive. In Athens their particular hustle is working as “runners,” riding the trains and convincing gullible tourists to check in at the seedy Olympos Hotel. In exchange they’re given a room on the top floor, and get a little money for every tourist they snare. When Jasper runs into Bridey on a train, there is a spark of rebel recognition, and attraction. He initiates her into the tribe of runners, brings her back to the shabby room he shares with Milo — littered with books and booze and not much else — and she stays, immediately warped into the fabric of the relationship. The twosome becomes a threesome.
Fear no spoilers: We learn this all in the opening pages. In fact, the first words of the novel announce Jasper’s death, and the major narrative thread chronicles the formulation and tragic unraveling of this triad. We watch them revel in their own abandon; we watch them scrounge and scheme, living on as little as possible; we watch them drink and drink, and love. “We washed our clothes in the sink with bar soap and hung them on the balcony to dry, and at night we walked across the city and up into the hillside paths where the trunks of the trees were painted white, to sit by the base of the Acropolis and see the sprawl of lights stretch back until they reached the empty dark where hills rose. We wandered until there was no one out beneath the haunted glow of distant morning but people to fear.”
The Athens on display here is the so-called underbelly: hazy, sticky, seedy, a little claustrophobic, explosively violent, and peopled with rebels and runaways of all kinds, idealists, revolutionary operatives, con men, wayward young scholars, squatters — but the focus, hazed with nostalgia, is always on the three.
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Fans of Hoffman’s earlier books will know she writes with particular strength about the ramifications of violence, political and personal — and that she knows how to do suspense. Although the first half of the book can be frustratingly withholding of information about the circumstances of the tragedy, the plot gets moving in the second half, detailing a dissolution complicated and interesting enough in its political and ethical implications to compensate. Eventually their heedless and self-interested scams have very real consequences, even beyond Jasper’s death.
“Running” is composed of dozens of brief chapters, averaging around five pages, and the book constantly jumps around in time and perspective. Interspersed with the sections set in Athens are chapters covering Bridey’s childhood years spent with her smokejumping uncle, and chapters set in contemporary New York, where Milo has landed a gig at the New School as a visiting writer. While the Pacific Northwest childhood chapters might not hold up to the swelter, triangulation and plotted mystery of the Athens chapters, Milo’s New York chapters both fascinate and bemuse. Milo has published two books of poetry to great critical acclaim and is now a deeply unhappy drunk. He is witheringly hilarious about his talentless students, but his critiques of New York’s culture, from conspicuous consumption to the gay bar, feel too simplistic for a writer of his age and depth. Still, as Milo roams and grasps for connection, an interesting theme plays out about the perception of cashing in on one’s marginal status; about the creeping suspicion that artists like Milo, a queer man of color from the working class, will always have about the merits of institutional support; about fraudulence and authenticity-hunger on the part of both artist and art world.
In Bridey and Milo, Hoffman has created memorable antiheroes: tough and resourceful, scarred, feral and sexy. The book and the characters refuse to conform to type, and “Running,” like all good outlaw literature, takes sharp aim at the contemporary culture’s pervasive willingness to do so.
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Race and Revolution in Claude McKay’s Final Novel
“This debate about the value of communist internationalism over black nationalism is at the core of Amiable With Big Teeth. Written at a time when most scholars thought that black cultural production had come to a grinding halt as a result of the Great Depression (and the consequent dip in arts patronage), Amiable With Big Teeth provides unparalleled insight into this relatively understudied moment in black American history … As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself. The story offers a front-row seat to the polemics that drove (and stymied) black radical organizing in the 1930s … for today’s audience, McKay’s last novel should make for fascinating and timely reading as Americans enter an era in which solidarity-building across racial identities and national borders feels more necessary, and perhaps more difficult to achieve, than ever.”
–Jennifer Wilson, The Atlantic, March 9, 2017
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