Roy Miller's Blog, page 294
January 21, 2017
LitHub Daily: January 16 – 20, 2017
TODAY: In 1884, author, pacifist, and ACLU co-founder Roger Nash Baldwin is born.
“The role of stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more important than ever.” President Obama discusses books and his love of reading with Michiko Kakutani. | The New York Times
“I read my poem, feeling American poets alive and dead by my side, feeling myself as representative in the most grave and beautiful way.” Elizabeth Alexander on composing and reciting a poem for Obama’s first Inauguration. | The New Yorker
The finalists for the 2017 NBCC Awards, PEN Literary Awards, National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media, and Edgar Awards have been announced. | National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, ASME, TheEdgars.com
I think genre is as much a lie as gender is: An interview with Eula Biss. | Fiction Advocate
“What a toll it has taken, this death and grieving and loss!” An excerpt from Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. | BuzzFeed Reader
“As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others.” Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, has destroyed his Green Card. | The Atlantic
Listen to me if you know what’s good for you: An advance look at Han Kang’s Human Acts. | Read it Forward
“They see the same person they’ve always seen—the consummate classroom troublemaker; a vain, insecure bully; and an anti-institutional schemer, as adept at ‘gaming the system’ as he is unashamed.” Speaking with three of Trump’s biographers. | POLITICO
“Those people who believe themselves to be beyond identity and ideology will, sooner or later, charge us with identity and ideology if we dare to commit that most unnatural act of speaking up and out.” An excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies. | BLARB
Following Trump’s attacks of him, Rep. John Lewis’ memoir Walking With the Wind and National Book Award-winning graphic novel March sold out on Amazon. | The Washington Post
Of course I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want: Ottessa Moshfegh speaks with Luke B. Goebel. | Fanzine
“What I call for is a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks.” Aleksandar Hemon on writing in the age of Trump. | The Village Voice
“There is an art to dying and the boy does not have it — never mind he has been dying since first he was born.” A short story by Chanelle Benz. | Electric Literature
Language is the tool we use to build our political and democratic structures.” How writers are resisting Trump (and suggestions on how to give back). | Boston.com, GOOD Magazine
“[Rachel] Cusk apparently had demanded too much—she had become a mother and wished to remain herself at the same time.” On motherhood, Outline, and Transit. | Broadly
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The post LitHub Daily: January 16 – 20, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
A Bookseller Contemplates Selling Her Own Book
I’ve recently become an independent bookseller at M. Judson in Greenville, S.C. My reps have taught me most everything I know. I can order books through Edelweiss and check an event grid. I can pretty much manage Basil at point of sale, but I still push the Back button disastrously when reviewing a reorder in the system. I think I can make a spreadsheet, if somebody walks me through it. I have zero previous experience to qualify me for a job in retail.
Except that I’ve been a writer for approximately two decades, and a reader since my mother taught me how to read. Perhaps more importantly, I have strong opinions. I have particular taste, and an eclectic group of things I like to read about: obsessive collectors, fabulous meals, doomed lovers, dark magic, poetry, your basic brave weirdos who don’t see the world like anybody else. I like to laugh, and my sense of humor is offbeat. And I wrote book reviews for a long time. If I like something, I like to talk about it.
The reason people go to independent bookstores is because they like to talk about books, too. They too have particular tastes and strong opinions, and they know, as I do, that sharing them with someone who might be able to recommend just the right thing to read next is like going on an old-fashioned date, the kind where you get swept off your feet by a sparkling conversation and maybe a corsage of gardenias (superior to swiping right on Tinder). Process matters, is what I’m saying. How you do what you do is what makes up your life.
If I’m good at bookselling, it’s not for my mastery of technology, but because of my relationship with books, how I still read hoping to be surprised and amazed, and probably how I write for those same reasons. With such overlap, you would think I’d be extra good at selling my own book, the place where all these strengths should come together. But in fact, the prospect of talking to customers about my new novel, The Arrangement, the story of a love triangle involving the legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher, the way I’d talk to customers about Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, or Abby Thomas’s Safekeeping, or Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, makes me pretty uncomfortable.
Whereas being a bookseller is a public, social activity, writing is a very solitary one. I write novels at a desk that faces a blank wall, mostly after dark, when the house is quiet and everybody else has long gone to bed. And I carry with me the knowledge that just as I write my books alone, people also read them alone, curled into themselves, hopefully long into the night, too. Sometimes I wish selling my own books could be a similarly private process. I’m bad at all the stuff a writer is supposed to be good at these days: I’m bad at Facebook, I have no Twitter account, and I mostly use Instagram to record great meals and keep up with my kids.
Luckily, the bookstore has all these things—plus a blog!—and even though we’re new at this, a couple thousand people already follow us across these platforms. They come into the store because we’ve talked about events online. They buy a book because we’ve posted about it. It’s different when we do this stuff together, and for the kind of true-believer enterprise that is an independent bookstore. I haven’t found myself able to post about my own book just yet, but I know someone will help me do it—or rather, make me do it—soon enough. Thankfully, I have partners, my friends and an incredible staff, who are helping me start to look at The Arrangement from the perspective of a bookseller rather than purely as its blushing author. They are helping me see the novel as something a little separate from myself, something that’s going to become a part of the life of the store.
And for the store, I’m happy to do anything.
Ashley Warlick is the author of The Arrangement (Viking, February) and the buyer at M. Judson, Booksellers & Storytellers in Greenville, S.C.
A version of this article appeared in the 04/04/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Selling a Book—but This Time It’s Your Book!
The post A Bookseller Contemplates Selling Her Own Book appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Nonfiction scene-building secrets from the pros
What do most readers think the crucial difference is between creative nonfiction and regular nonfiction? The former is exciting and the latter is…yawn…regular. Like the stuff they make you read on an SAT exam.
Creative nonfiction, however, is terrifically interesting. It crackles on the page thanks to having many of the best elements of fiction writing built right into it. Author Lee Gutkind claims that the form is like jazz, meaning it has “a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself.” Teachers and writers of creative nonfiction agree that powerful scenes – especially opening scenes – are often what make readers sit up, take notice, and keep on reading.
If that’s the goal for your own creative nonfiction, read on and see what these pros do to send their readers hustling back for more.
Dinty W. Moore, a well-published author and director of Ohio University’s B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in creative writing programs, knows that creative nonfiction scenes are anything but a mere matter of listing facts or recreating scenes. “Our essays are richest and most powerful when the author leads the reader on a journey of discovery, one where the questions are every bit as important as the answers,” he says. “Why are you writing this? What intrigues or confounds you? What can you never understand?” He echoes this impulse in his book Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide to Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, writing that “Privacy is for your diary. Essays are for readers.”
Some writers get that point but still miss the boat. Why? They don’t embrace the power and potential of scenes. Moore explains that “too often, student writers either give us static scenes, as if they were describing a still photograph of their grandmother’s kitchen rather than the active, busy, confusing family interactions that really exist, or they limit themselves to just the seen and heard and forget the sensory details of texture, taste, and smell. In real life, there are usually six things happening at once.”
Ringling College of Art + Design teacher and writing coach Wendy Lyons Sunshine offers three tips on writing knockout scenes, using her own writing to illustrate each point.
Use dialogue – even if it’s not between people directly. This opening from her essay on onearth.org quotes a letter she received. “My internal thoughts become a response, as if I’m in dialogue with the letter,” she says.
“Dear Landowner,” the letter began. “As you may be aware, it is not necessary to have a large amount of acreage to profit from a gas unit…”
Oh no, I thought. The Barnett Shale has finally tracked me down.
Emphasize contrasts. Sunshine’s investigative news story for Fort Worth Weekly, “Mud Wrestling,” opens with a gorgeous natural setting that’s at odds with the main character’s behavior. “He’s pointing out ugliness underneath the water. We feel friction between the landscape’s beauty and the odor of decay,” she explains.
On a hot and glorious blue afternoon just west of Fort Worth, Tony Goodwin, 70, jabs a shovel into the moist bank of the Brazos River behind his home and dislodges a slick brown wedge of mud. The bottom layer resembles asphalt. “That’s decaying organic matter,” says Goodwin about the black goo underneath. “It stinks.”
Be specific with details. In this opening for her D CEO cover story, she sets the scene and reveals a distinctive quirk of a highly competitive executive.
Looking like a sun-drenched golfer weary from a morning on the links, Richard Allen folds his tall frame into a conference room chair on the 41st floor of a building off Dallas’ Ross Avenue. Despite a ruddy complexion and wide shoulders, the CEO of the California-based Allen Group says he’s never been particularly athletic and, as if to prove it, promptly fumbles with the remote control for a promotional DVD.
Kelly Caldwell, Dean of Faculty at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, adds that scenes work best “when they blend the familiar, the recognizable, and the strange: the idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies, oddball tendencies of being human.” She cites an example from the book The Dragon Behind the Glass by another Gotham teacher, Emily Voigt, where the author does a ride-along with Lieutenant John Fitzpatrick, a New York environmental police officer who is “in many ways a made-for-TV cop. Tall and muscular, crew cut, pounding on doors at 6 a.m.,” says Caldwell. “Only instead of hauling people out of their homes in handcuffs, he hauls out their illicit pet alligators, Nile monitor lizards, and African Diana monkeys.”
Just look at this excerpt from Voigt’s book and you’ll see what Caldwell means.
Fitzpatrick had spent two months studying birds in the jungles of Venezuela where he lost 30 pounds, grew a “full Grizzly Adams beard” and got all sorts of weird skin infections before realizing he was really a city person. He still loved tropical animals – from afar. His only pet was a pint-sized Maltese with a name he refused to disclose.
“Like Snowball?” I asked.
“Something along those lines,” he said.
“Flufferbutter?”
“You get the picture.”
But don’t just take the words of these experts – go out and read the best creative nonfiction you can find. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.
I’ll wager dollars to donuts that the ones you like the most have well-wrought, imagistic scenes that in many ways read like a first-rate novel. Sure, these stories are rooted in true happenings, but that’s not the point. What matters to readers is that they can’t wait to find out what happens next.
By any measure, that’s successful writing.
Ryan G. Van Cleave is the author of 20 books, and he runs the Ringling College of Art + Design creative writing program.
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Lion Forge Heads to ALA with a New Line of Kids’ Graphic Novels
Originally launched in 2012 as a digital-first comics publisher with a limited line of adult and children’s titles, Lion Forge Comics is heading for ALA midwinter meeting in Atlanta this week with new staff and an expanded list of standalone graphic novels and monthly comics.
Last summer Lion Forge added staff—among them Rich Johnson, v-p sales, marketing and business development and senior editor Joseph Illidge—as it ramped up its operations to become a full-service publishing operation offering a line of graphic novels for adults and children. This past fall at New York Comic Con, Lion Forge launched CubHouse, a new line of comics targeting pre-K through 12, which will be a part of its established kids’ imprint Roar Comics, which will now focus on comics for teens and young adults.
The house also hired book trade veteran Andrea Colvin, named senior editor, to head the house’s expanded children’s imprint. Colvin, formerly v-p of content in Andrews McMeel Universal’s book division, has also worked as director of publishing operations at Open Road Integrated Media, and was executive managing editor at Abrams.
Colvin will oversee the newly expanded kids imprints of Roar Comics and CubHouse and she spoke with PW about the graphic novel market, Lion Forge’s newly expanded children’s imprint and the company’s plans for ALA.
Do you see a trend or trends in the growing marketplace for graphic novels aimed at children and young adults?
There are a couple of trends. One is the overall acceptance, and in many cases championing, of graphic novels and comics in classrooms and school libraries. Librarians have certainly led this charge, but classroom educators have really come around in the past five or so years to the benefit of comics for increasing literacy as well as aiding the understanding of complex topics.
Another great trend is the increase in the number of comics and graphic novels that tackle those complex topics, from science and history to social issues (Abrams/Amulet’s Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales is a great examples). Also, authentic personal histories that kids can identify with (Svetlana Chemakova’s Awkward from Yen Press is an example). The next step for Lion Forge is to create comics and graphic novels like these that come from diverse perspectives and feature diverse characters.
What will you and Lion Forge do at the ALA meeting?
Lion Forge has a number of exciting announcements we’ll be making at ALA, but the main goal of the show for us is to connect with librarians. We recognize that librarians are really the boots on the ground when it comes to what kids want to read, what kids should be reading, and where the holes in the market are currently. I cannot overstate the importance of librarians for actually putting books in the hands of kids.
How many titles can we expect to come from Roar and From CubHouse?
2017 and 2018 are going to be really formative years for us. For 2017 we’re expecting to have 15 to 20 titles/properties in each line—this includes, for CubHouse, picture books, graphic novels, and comics series, and for Roar both graphic novels and series. I imagine we’ll expand that in 2018 up to about 30 titles per line. We like to stay busy! But we’re finding so much great content from great creators that we are really excited to bring to market.
Beyond the age level, what is likely to be the difference between the two Lion Forge kids lines.
Well, age level is a pretty big distinction, in how it affects content tone. Our CubHouse content will be more fun, and infused with a lot more humor, in general, than the Roar content, which is likely often to have a stronger, and sometimes darker, emotional core (though certainly not devoid of humor!). Both lines will publish nonfiction—both memoir and topics of interest to the educational market—and both will publish ongoing monthly comics series as well as original graphic novels and graphic novel series. I’m particularly excited about our forthcoming picture book line under the CubHouse imprint. It’s still in the development stages, but I think there is a great opportunity for comics-inspired picture books and picture books by comics creators.
You have an extensive background in the book trade but you also worked with graphic novels at Andrews McMeel’s AMP! kids’graphic novel imprint. Are there any meaningful differences or adjustments to be made when working for a comics publishing house versus a trade book publisher?
There are two big differences I noticed right away. The first is that publishing comics on a monthly schedule is a LOT different from thinking of books as belonging to one of two “lists” a year! Deadlines are a lot tighter! Rather than the often solitary work of months or even years that goes into longer-form comics and graphic novels, monthly comics generally have a whole team of creatives working on them—writers, artists, colorists, letterers, designers. Quickly coordinating all of that work is a really different experience for me. Luckily I have a talented assistant editor, Hazel Newlevant—a graphic novelist herself—who has led me through the learning process.
The other big difference, and it’s possible that this is unique to Lion Forge, is the appetite for creative risk. Trade book publishers, in my experience, can often be risk averse (I know this isn’t true across the board). What that often means is that it’s difficult to sign up untested creators, those who may have had projects that didn’t sell particularly well, or those without significant “platforms.” At Lion Forge, we’re looking for exciting—and diverse—talent, plain and simple.
How will Roar/CubHouse work with the Magnetic Collection and can you describe its publishing program?
The Magnetic Collection is created and curated by Mike Kennedy, who founded Magnetic Press, which Lion Forge acquired around the time of last year’s New York Comic Con. Mike and Magnetic made a name publishing really lush graphic novels, higher-end comics, and comics art books. Mike, along with our editorial director, Mark Smylie, has deep connections in the European comics publishing world and are using those to bring some really gorgeous books to Lion Forge. The books aimed at teen, YA, or younger audiences, will be published as part of the Roar or CubHouse imprints. My current favorites on the Magnetic Collection for Roar list are Tony Sandoval’s Doomboy and Rendez-Vous in Phoenix (the latter an account of the creator’s real-life journey to the US as an undocumented Mexican immigrant).
What are some of the projects we can expect to see from the Roar/CubHouse imprint?
All sorts of great things! Here are two that we’ve not yet formally announced—so you’re the first to know!
—Taproot by Keezy Young is an original graphic novel that’s both a ghost story and queer love story featuring Blue, who is dead, and also in love with his best friend, Hamal, who can see ghosts.
—Wrapped Up is an ongoing series in our CubHouse line that is written by Dave Scheidt and drawn by Scoot McMahon. It’s the story of Milo, your average twelve year old boy, whose parents happen to be mummies, his friend a wizard and his babysitters are witches! He likes to hangout with cool teen vampires, typical kids stuff. We will be making many, many more announcements in the weeks and months to come.
Comics publishers often release their kids’ comics under the general “All Ages” category which can be a problem in the book trade, where retailers expect a book to have a specific age level. Will Roar/CubHouse use the “All Ages” category to describe its books?
We will not. Luckily we’ve got Rich Johnson running our sales strategy, and he’s got extensive experience in the trade book market as well as with comics publishers. He knows All Ages is a problem for the book trade, and, frankly, a problem for book buyers as well, particularly the so-called “gatekeepers”—the parents, teachers, and librarians who are most often the actual purchasers of kids titles.
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Poetry Foundation: Poetry Spotlight | WritersDigest.com
Last week, we took a look at the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in Dayton, Ohio. This week, let’s travel to Chicago to examine the Poetry Foundation.
By the way, I appreciate the poetry spotlight ideas people have sent my way. Keep them coming at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with the subject line: Poetry Spotlight Idea.
*****
The 2017 Poet’s Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer, includes hundreds of poetry markets, including listings for poetry publications, publishers, contests, and more! With names, contact information, and submission tips, poets can find the right markets for their poetry and achieve more publication success than ever before.
In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
*****
Poetry, February 2015
Per its website, the Poetry Foundation is a non-profit organization “committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.” It runs the Harriet blog and publishes Poetry magazine, which I’ve covered previously on this blog.
While Poetry was established by Harriet Monroe in 1912, the Poetry Foundation was formed in 2003 with $200 million gifted by philanthropist Ruth Lilly. Before that, Poetry was published by the Modern Poetry Association.
But there’s a lot more to the Poetry Foundation than a magazine. For instance, the Foundation hosts poetry events, shares a wealth of poetry information on their website, give awards to poets, offers a library dedicated to poetry (with a collection of 30,000 volumes), and many other poetry-related activities.
For poetry lovers in the Chicago area, the Poetry Foundation is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Address: 61 W. Superior St., Chicago IL 60654.
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
*****
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What’s Happening in America? Susan Sontag Sought to Find Out in 1966
As we confront the inauguration of a bawdy President, indecorous, undignified and illiberal, many among us—American liberals in particular—have been tempted to ask: “What’s happening in America?” Susan Sontag, whose political prescience has been duly noted, asked and answered this same question 50 years ago. And her answers, laden with the intellectual acuity of all her work, offer some insight into our own sour present.
“What’s Happening in America?” began as a questionnaire distributed, per the editorial custom of the Partisan Review, among a number of the notable intellectuals of the time. These included many men and, other than Sontag, a single woman: Diana Trilling. “There is a good deal of anxiety about American life. In fact there is reason to fear that America may be entering moral and political crisis,” wrote the editors at the top of the document. The questions posed included, among others, “Does it matter who is in the White House?” and “Is white America committed to granting equality to the American Negro?” Responses were then published in the Partisan Review’s Winter 1967 issue. Sontag’s take begins with a repetition of the editors dire characterization of the present, presenting readers today a precedent for the apocalyptic flavor of our political moment. If the conscience of the nation seems moribund to our 2017 sensibilities, “What’s Happening in America?” reveals it to have been flailing for at least five decades. When Sontag submitted her response, the United States was in the midst of the Vietnam War; prettily titled operations with names like “Cedar Falls” were dropping bombs and killing thousands. Lyndon Johnson was President and Ronald Reagan Governor of California. The country was riven; the chasm between intellectuals and voters, liberals and conservatives, seemed then, like now, wider than ever.
Sontag’s characterization of 1966—she wrote the essay many months before it was published—is important for another reason, as calls for resistance to the new administration proliferate. She was adept, as revealed in her early opposition to the Vietnam War (and her bold trip to Hanoi even as it was underway), at carving out a position of dissent and non-complicity against even the most intractable milieu. It is that signature Sontag skill in which many of us need instruction today, and one which she supplies in the essay, underscoring at the outset that “everything one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the awareness of American power, of America as the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man’s biological as well as historical future in its King Kong paws.”
This is an important exhortation, one whose application to the recent past and the recently arrived present would reveal that the imperium has persisted, differing in flavor but not ultimately in form. The outgoing Obama Administration, lauded now in part for its contrast against the garish and gaudy replacement, was sly in its use of America’s “King Kong paws,” raids and bombings and secret wars all an acknowledged part of its arsenal. Under Trump, King Kong promises to be ever more wild and unfettered, building walls, crushing and trampling with relish; in Sontag’s words “naked violence breaking through, throwing everything into question.”
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If Sontag were alive, she may have noted that neither presidential candidate truly considered the nature of American power in the 2016 election. A less hawkish America was not a feature of Hillary Clinton’s political vision. This is a thorny fact to resurrect now, posited against the horror of a Trump presidency, but it remains a crucial one. In “The Third World of Women,” published in the Partisan Review six years after “What’s Happening in America?,” Sontag isolates as one of the failures of the women’s movement its inability to argue for a change in the nature of power itself. This would require not simply the transfer of a power subsistent on the structures of patriarchy to a female leader, but rather a complete dismantling of that system, so that its very character was changed. It is perhaps just this inability to re-conceptualize power itself that bears some relationship to the almost-but-never-quite nature of American women’s quest to get into the White House.
Today, President Elect Trump will be sworn in as the President of the United States and his cabinet, made up of the whitest and richest of America, will begin to run the country. And yet, tomorrow, thousands of women will march and protest in Washington D.C. to express their opposition to his flamboyant misogyny, his xenophobia, and his ascendance to the country’s leadership. Sontag famously said in an interview to the Paris Review that “feminist” was “one of the few labels [she was] content with.” She went on to ask, “Is it a noun? I doubt it.” These women marching on Washington inauguration weekend are doing feminism, insisting on it as a verb and not a noun—not dormant, nor a tame description to affix to this or that. Their commitment to its active meaning is likely to be tested in the days to come as the promises of Trump’s cohort of cronies seek to abridge reproductive choice, marriage equality, to cut funding for programs that have provided assistance to domestic violence shelters, women’s health initiatives, and many others. Each of these fights, and others not yet enumerated, will require continuing energy, continuing vigilance, continuing insistence on feminism as a verb.
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In “What’s Happening in America?” Sontag also notes three historical facts that required confrontation before any analytical grasp of the “moral and political crisis” of 1966 was possible: that America was founded on genocide and on the “unquestioned right of white Europeans to exterminate” the indigenous population, that it had the most brutal system of slavery that did not “in a single respect recognize slaves as persons,” and, finally, that it was essentially peopled by a European underclass who were not, in their native Europe, cultural producers. As a result, she argues, after America was “won,” it was “filled up with new generations of the poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have at the beginning of the industrial era. And the country looks it.”
Condescending as it may be, Sontag’s assertion continues to resonate. Even before Trump was elected, comedian John Mulaney, appearing on the Seth Myers Show, joked that “Donald Trump is not a rich man, Donald Trump is like what a hobo imagines a rich man to be,” complete with “fine golden hair,” “tall buildings with [his] name on it” and a “TV show where [he fires] Gene Simmons with [his] children.” Mulaney was riffing, but in the months since others have picked up the track, pointing to the garish nature of Trump’s gold-laden rooms and conspicuous consumption as the core of his appeal to those who have little or nothing. Viewed in light of Sontag’s observations about the constitutive realities of America, Trump’s ascendance looks less like an aberration. It is instead the expected trajectory of a historical reality wherein Sontag’s three unacknowledged facts continue to determine the national mythos. Paths, after all, cannot be changed without a reckoning.
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It is unsurprising that the tumult of the present, our collective chagrin at what is to come, has provoked a turning back—a re-reading of those who have come before, catalyzed by the belief that this perusal of intellectual history, of catastrophe’s endured, can provide some faint blueprint for the formulation of an ethical and active dissent. Sontag was searching too in “What is Happening in America?” considering one and then another avenue for hope. But hope was for her in 1966, as it is for us in 2017, elusive. Sontag located it in the young people of her time, whom she believed “understand that the whole structure of modern American man needs re-hauling” and that if “America is the culmination of white Western civilization” then “there must be something terribly wrong with white Western civilization.”
In this last prognostication, seeking hope in a burgeoning, youth-led re-thinking of America among the generation “not drawn to the stale truths of their elders,” Sontag may have been wrong. The young of 1966 are the old and older of now, but their vision—that brave re-configuration promised by the sexual revolution and by a turn to eastern mysticism and non-western forms of knowledge—never came to fruition. They may have, in the heady moments of youth, rejected the “stale truths of their elders,” but ultimately the same stale truths have been resurrected again: a disregard for racial equality, an insidious belief in the supremacy of whiteness, a disdain for foreign others, and a persistent faith in violence loom over many American baby boomers.
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In the same Art of Ficiton interview in which she accepted the “feminist” label, Sontag also confessed that she sometimes began essays with the first lines, but others with the last. In “What’s Happening in America?” it is the next to last line that rings out most clearly, suggesting that it was perhaps Sontag’s first, generative thought. “This is a doomed country, it seems to me,” she writes. “I only pray that when America founders it doesn’t drag the rest of the planet down too.” Many Americans will be murmuring a similar prayer today.
Were she alive, January 16, 2017 would have been Sontag’s 84th birthday, but in its proximity to political catastrophe, it would not likely have been a very happy one.
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January 20, 2017
Dear Publishers: Latinos Read Books, Too
By Nelson A. Denis
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Latinos do not exist in our national literature. In the cacophony of U.S. culture, 55 million Latinos are struggling to hear their own voices and stories, but they can’t. In libraries and bookstores and classrooms, on television and film, the Latino stereotypes abound—but Latino voices are absent.
There is a structural reason for this: publishers suffer from the delusion that Latinos don’t read and—ipso facto, reductio ad absurdum—they neglect to publish Latino authors, which ends up proving their point.
Since publishing is a business, some facts may help their profits. At 55 million and growing, there are more Latinos in the U.S. than there are senior citizens, and their annual buying power is now over $1.5 trillion. This buying power has already impacted the theatrical box office: in both 2014 and 2015, the Theatrical Market Reports of the Motion Picture Association of America showed that Latinos are buying twice as many movie tickets as African-Americans.
Until its chain folded in 2011, Borders operated 642 bookstores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Of all these outlets, the Borders store in Puerto Rico sold the most books and was the most profitable by far, with annual sales of $17 million. All by itself, that Borders store in San Juan proved that Latinos read.
And how did the publishing industry respond? When the Borders chain closed due to poor sales in other outlets, the store in San Juan closed, as well—and no one thought to fill the vacuum. That’s $17 million in annual book sales, gone.
Selling the Wrong Product
Currently, the Big Five publishers believe they service the U.S. Latino market with mostly foreign literature in translation (Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Javier Sierra, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, et al.). These imports with prepackaged P&L numbers produce an easier sale at weekly marketing meetings in publishing houses, and often lackluster sales in bookstores.
The lost opportunity is enormous. In both Puerto Rico and the U.S., Latinos are a hugely underserved market. They are hungry for stories, starving for role models. But the publishers carpet bomb them with foreign settings, themes, and characters—then they wonder why the Latino market is soft and conclude that Latinos don’t read.
Bias, Laziness, Ignorance, Fear—and New York Times Bestseller Lists
A confluence of factors sustains this marketing myopia. The Big Five, like the larger media culture, are not representative of the U.S. but of the limited tastes of the elite of Manhattan and certain areas of Brooklyn. These cultural gatekeepers—publishers, editors, agents—are simply unfamiliar with Latinos. A bias seeps into their decision making, based again on the unwarranted assumption that Latinos don’t read. In an industry teeming with layoffs and mergers (e.g., Penguin and Random House), many editors are one or two decisions away from a pink slip. They thus avoid decisions, while trying to appear decisive.
Only after Junot Díaz’s book Drown was serialized in the New Yorker in 1996 did Riverhead publish it. When Simon & Schuster launched Atria Books to identify and develop Latino voices and literature, it rapidly devolved into celebrity memoirs, foreign translations, and Latino cookbooks.
The publication of my own book, War Against All Puerto Ricans, uncovered another obstacle. It was the bestselling book in Puerto Rico in 2015–2016, outselling Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and The Girl on the Train. Based on the sales figures from Puerto Rico alone, the book would have been a New York Times bestseller—but the Times does not include sales figures from Puerto Rico in the computation of its bestseller lists!
The Apartheid Will End When the Profits Roll In
A tectonic shift—a tipping point—will inexorably occur. There are too many Puerto Ricans, too many U.S. Latinos, with our own heritage and experience and stories. Díaz is the merest tip of that iceberg. Sooner or later, one gatekeeper will realize this and make a fortune, and all the others will stampede to be second. There is an urgency to this process.
Our national fabric is dangerously thin—particularly with respect to our Latino community—in the brave new world of Donald Trump. If there was ever a time for our gatekeepers to step forward, include that community, and strengthen our national fabric, that time is now.
Nelson A. Denis was a New York State assemblyman and the editorial director of El Diario. He is the author of War Against All Puerto Ricans (Nation, 2015).
A version of this article appeared in the 01/23/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Invisible Latinos
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GIVEAWAY: Win All About Them
There’s a lot of talk about branding when we talk about modern writing careers. Once upon a time, a wordsmith might survive on books alone, but today’s writers are expected to be authorpreneurs – just as attuned to the marketing world as they are to the page. If you’re stuck trying to hone your brand, Bruce Turkel’s All About Them: Grow Your Business by Focusing on Others might be of interest.
The book looks at why successful brands succeed, and how those looking to boost their own personal brands can best see their business grow. Forbes named it one of their top 10 business books of 2016, with contributor Shep Hykin calling it “one of the most entertaining business books I’ve read in a long time.”
Fill out the form below to enter our giveaway. Readers have until 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 26th to win.
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10 Great Westerns You’ve Never Read
Andrew Hilleman's thrilling western, World, Chase Me Down, re- imagines the life of a turn-of-the-20th-century kidnapper who committed the first “crime of the century.” Hilleman picks 10 great western novels you've probably never read.
In 1903, not long before her death, Calamity Jane famously said “Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route.”
I often feel the same when it comes to book recommendations: I like to discover them on my own and am strangely guarded when asked about what I’ve enjoyed lately. There’s nothing like wandering aimlessly through a bookstore, picking up a copy of a novel you’ve never heard of, falling in love on the first page, and sprinting up to the counter while turning to page two. Whenever I’m recommended a novel by a friend, it feels a little bit like a hand-me-down sweater. Conversely, whenever someone asks me what I’ve been reading, I feel like I’m trying to sell a beige Buick Skylark in a strip mall car lot.
I really need to get over such silliness. If you’re reading this list, you’re most likely a Western fan already and familiar with classics like Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove, and True Grit. Not to discount those titles—they’re well known for a reason. But there are also a bevy of other outstanding works of Western fiction that deserve a place on your shelf.
So here I am getting over my strange peccadillo. Or, at least, half of it. I offer a list of my favorite Western novels that are off the beaten track. Some of them are by authors you might know, but fly under the radar even to their fans. Some were once wildly popular but have faded from memory. Others just plain never got the recognition they deserve. Regardless of the reason, each of these works is a masterpiece well worth your time.
Oh, and Calamity Jane makes an appearance in number 6.
10. The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Once considered a classic, this Western epic deserves to be on the mantle with the best of Larry McMurtry. In my humble opinion, it beats Lonesome Dove all to hell. It’s Guthrie’s debut about three frontiersmen traveling west as fur trappers in the 1830s. These cowboys aren’t your stereotypical gunslingers—they’re hard-working roughnecks of the truest sort and young Boone Caudill reminds me of Robert Redford’s mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson. The writing is so vivid and well-researched it often leaves me panting. While Guthrie won the Pulitzer for his follow-up, The Way West, his first offering is a monument and all-time great Western.
9. Welcome to Hard Times by E. L. Doctorow
Another debut by a literary heavyweight. Many have at least heard of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate. But, even among those folks, very few would think the man got his start with cowboys. The only reason this one isn’t ranked higher on my list is that it relies on boilerplate formula too often. The “Bad Man from Bodie” is a formulaic creation as far as outlaws go, but the prose with which Doctorow constructs him and his dark humor keep the character and the story fresh despite its familiar conventions. Read the first two pages and you’ll see the sure-fire signs of how Doctorow became a master stylist.
8. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
Wait, you say. I know this novel! This isn’t off-the-radar! Maybe so. It’s by far the most contemporary offering on this list, having been published in 2011 to wide acclaim, which may be the reason it rings a bell. But how many people have actually read this novel? I’ve gone through it four times, myself. That’s not bragging—it’s just that damned good. The story is so spectacular, the humor so amazingly coarse, the character development so rich, that anything short of multiple months atop the bestseller list is a crime. That might change once the movie is released in a couple years.
7. The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The masterstroke of this novel is that it’s only getting started where most Western novels end: with a climatic moment of violence as three men are lynched outside of a small Nevada town. What happens after is the heart of the story: an exploration of mob rule that still echoes harshly for us even today. Especially today. The opening line is one of the best I’ve ever read. Not to mention Art Croft is one of the most overlooked narrators in all of literature. His first-person voice is pitch perfect.
6. Deadwood by Pete Dexter
Forget the HBO show of the same name. No, really, forget it. I’ve tried to despite loving it, mainly because of the unfinished ending after it was cancelled following season three. This novel takes place in the same famous South Dakota town and features many of the same historical players including Wild Bill, Charlie Utter, and my personal favorite Calamity Jane. But that’s where the similarities stop. Dexter’s novel was published in 1986, so it’s got dibs anyway. Plus, it’s just a lot damn better and has an actual ending to boot! It’s also as bizarre as a Western novel gets. And that’s a good thing.
5. The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout
While slim and sparse, this novel is anything but threadbare while evoking the final days of an old gunslinger who’s hanging onto life by its last thread. John Brooks is an aging assassin whose days are running short after he’s diagnosed with cancer. All he wants is to die in peace, but once word spreads around town that the famous man is near death, a plethora of fame-seekers come to see him on the way out the door. Some just want to shake his hand once, others want to beat the cancer to the punch. Side note: John Wayne’s last starring role as Brooks might be his very best.
4. The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey
Dusty trails full of tumbleweeds—meet the superhighways full of cars. Goodbye, chestnut mare. Hello, red Cadillac. The Old West is disappearing to modern society in this novel of friendship that turns from jailbreak to manhunt in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jack Burns fights against the coming future despite knowing the score. The prose reads like early Cormac McCarthy. The dialogue makes me drool. If you like this one, seek out the even lesser-known film adaptation Lonely Are the Brave.
3. Bad Dirt by Annie Proulx
If you aren’t already aware of Proulx’s first collection of Wyoming stories, Close Range, then start there. But this second assembly is just as sharp and painful and brilliantly drawn. While there aren’t as many singular hits as there are in Close Range, these stories together are ultimately superior by the sheer fact that there isn’t a dud among them. If Brokeback Mountain emptied you of nearly all breath, "The Trickle Down Effect" in this collection will finish the job.
2. Desperadoes by Ron Hansen
Most will recognize Hansen for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That’s fine by me, because that novel is a classic. But to have enjoyed that novel and not have read Desperadoes is a serious misstep. The language in Hansen’s portrait of an aging Emmett Dalton is astounding. His prose rivals Nabokov in this tour de force. But what I love most about this novel is that in a genre where conscious reflection is so often absent in favor of empty gun play, Hansen delivers in spades. The most powerful scenes are often the quietest ones. Poignant and haunting, this story rises above genre to the very top of our literature.
1. Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
It’s nearly impossible to have a top-10 Western list of any kind without including the ultimate master of the genre. While I gave Mr. McMurtry a not-so-slight jab in my comparative praise of The Big Sky to his epic Lonesome Dove, the man has no parallel when it comes to full-blooded Western genius. What else can be said of this titan that hasn’t already? Certainly nothing from the likes of me. But I will say this: there’s something about the freshness and urgency of a debut novel that can’t be replicated by what follows no matter how talented the author. This is true of McMurtry as well. I was spellbound by his prose. No, really—it put me in a trance and I awoke sixty pages later wondering what the hell just happened to me. It doesn’t hurt that Paul Newman knocked the role of Hud into the stratosphere. Every line is poetry down and dirty in the mud, right where it belongs.
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When Can You Call Yourself a “Real” Writer?
BY JESSICA ALLEN
When can you call yourself a “real” writer? A fellow scribe shares how a series of ordinary encounters transformed her point of view.
When you grow up revering books, as I did, you grow up revering writers. I remember the first author I ever met: Patricia MacLachlan, who spoke at my junior high school shortly after winning the Newbery Medal for Sarah, Plain and Tall. Even now, decades later, I picture her as having a halo. In reality, she was probably sitting with her back to a window. No matter. In my mind, she glowed. Still does.
Writers were other, to borrow a phrase from graduate school. They were as magical as unicorns, as unusual as $2 bills, as impressive—and imposing—as Niagara Falls. I knew they existed, that they were dreaming up the books I consumed and cherished, but I couldn’t fathom that we lived in the same world, or that I could join their ranks.
I stared at author photos and wondered what it took to get one. I went to readings and offered my hardcover for signing, careful to direct the writer in question toward the non-sweaty part of the book. Even as I began to write and get published, I hesitated to call myself a writer. There always seemed to be yet another goal to achieve before I could do so.
Real writers wrote novels; I wrote reviews of novels. Real writers published work in magazines you held in your hand; I published pieces online. Real writers made a living as a writer; I had a day job. Whatever I did, it was never enough, in my eyes. I had the arrogance to think that readers would care about what I had to say—the audacity to put fingers to keyboard in the first place—but not enough to say “I’m a writer.” That’s what some might call irony.
Everyone has bouts of impostor syndrome. But in a field that demands attention to meaning and nuance, using the word “writer” can be especially fraught—particularly for those of us who toil away without a bestseller or a byline or an agent. Of all the words I’ve written, “writer” has given me the most trouble.
And then one day I walked by Daniel Mendelsohn carrying his dry-cleaning. Another time I saw Helen Phillips waiting to cross the street. I’ve overheard both Tony Kushner and A.O. Scott talking on the phone. Michael Musto and Emily Gould have lapped me on bikes. Rivka Galchen once sat behind me at the movies (I’m short, so it was OK).
As the years have gone by, I’ve seen Colson Whitehead and Francine Prose corralling kids, Gary Shteyngart walking his dog, Adam Gopnik at the Museum of Modern Art, Nora Ephron eating pizza with Nicholas Pileggi. I’m ashamed to admit how badly I freaked out Jonathan Franzen by stalking him stalking birds in Central Park.
The longer I live in New York, the more writers I bump into. The more I bump into, the more I see that they’re people too. They go to the movies, they pick up dry cleaning, they have dinner with their spouses. Just like I do. They’re famous, of course, but they’re famous for doing the hard, hard work of messing with words. Just like I do.
Who knows how many writers I’ve stood behind at the grocery store or sat next to on the subway? Who knows how many writers you have encountered, wherever you are? Living in New York taught me that you don’t need to live in New York to be a writer. You need only to write.
Recently, I was talking with my toddler’s pediatrician, as new parents do, about bowel movements: “It was kind of like freshly mown grass.”
She paused. “I’ve never heard that before. You must be a writer.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Jessica Allen (jessallenica.com) writes about food, culture, travel and New York, where she lives with her husband and son. This article originally appeared in the May/June 2016 Writer’s Digest.
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