Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

By Nicky Trup


Monday, 30 August 2010


After more than two decades in production, the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary may never make it to print, its publisher has said. Oxford University Press has blamed the rise in popularity of electronic publications and reference websites for a decline in demand for printed dictionaries.


Nigel Portwood, OUP's chief executive, suggested that the next edition of the OED would probably be available online only. "The print dictionary market is just disappearing; it is falling away by tens of per cent a year," he said. "Print is still important round here but, wherever possible, if there is an opportunity, we are moving out of it."

Currently, 15 per cent of the publishing house's business comes from digital revenues, with sales of e-books up 40 per cent compared to last year. Mr Portwood said the OED was one of the "long-term research projects we fund, which will never cover their costs but are something that we choose to do."

A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition since 1989, with no confirmed completion date in sight. The book is only 28 per cent finished, and publication could be as far away as 10 years from now. New or revised entries, however, are published every three months on the official OED website, with the next set of updates due in September.

The first edition of the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1928, and the second edition in 1989. OUP publishes 500 dictionaries, thesauruses, and language reference titles in over 40 languages.

Despite its chief executive's scepticism, the publisher has not entirely ruled out the possibility of a third print edition of the OED. A final decision on the format will be taken when it is ready for publication, likely more than a decade from now.


(another victim of technology, add to maps, newspapers, magazines, travel guides, the category of reference books, that's what the interwebs are for

ah but do we lose the pleasures of randomly leafing through the dictionary and chancing upon a new word?)

The latest literary dust-up in the United States concerns the outsize critical admiration of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom, the follow-up to his 2001 National Book Award winner The Corrections. Freedom secured two worshipful reviews from the New York Times in one week, the Book Review's lengthy cover essay drooling with such jaw-dropped awe that it was hard to read for the saliva stains. Franzen himself appears on the cover of Time, and Freedom sits in President Obama's stack of holiday reading.

Fellow novelist Jodi Picoult ignited online fireworks last week by claiming that female writers never attract the same reverence as "white male literary darlings" like Franzen. Naturally Picoult risks the appearance of plain old envy. Though a skilful craftsman, Picoult may also lack the literary standing to make such a charge. Myself, I've yet to read Freedom, embargoed until this Wednesday, but it does sound like an excellent book, one I'm looking forward to.

Nevertheless, Picoult has a point. A female novelist would never enjoy a Franzen-scale frenzy of adulation in America, which maintains two distinct tiers in fiction. The heavy hitters – cultural icons who often produce great doorstop novels that no one ever argues are under-edited – are exclusively male. Rising literati like Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen efficiently assume the spots left unoccupied by John Updike and Norman Mailer, like a rigged game of musical chairs. Then there's everybody else – including a raft of female writers who keep the publishing industry afloat by selling to its primary consumers: women.

Elaine Showalter did a bang-up job in the Guardian Review last spring explaining why American women are never credited with writing the Great American Novel while identifying female writers who deserve more acclaim. So in preference to singing yet more praises of the gifted Annie Proulx, I'll share an inside glimpse of how publishers are complicit in ghettoising not only women writers but women readers into this implicitly lesser cultural tier.

With merciful exceptions, my publishers constantly send prospective covers for my books that play to what "women readers" supposedly want. Take the American reissue of my fourth novel Game Control – a wicked, nasty novel about a plot to kill two billion people overnight. The main character is a man, the focal subject demography. Yet what cover do I first get sent? A winsome young lass in a floppy hat, gazing soulfully to the horizon in a windblown field – soft focus, in pastels. Dismayed, I emailed back: "Did your designers read any of this book?" When I proposed a cover photo by Peter Beard of sagging elephant carcasses – perfectly apt – the sales department was horrified. Women would be repelled by dead animals. We settled on live elephants, but it was pulling teeth to get girls off that paperback.

Or take the amicable difference of opinion I am having with my German publisher, since apparently this problem is also European. My latest novel, So Much for That, is told from two male points of view. Its subject matter – illness, mortality, and the fiscal depredations of American healthcare – is unisex, its tone furious. Yet what's on the cover? A woman, looking stricken. Male readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a book with that cover on the Strassenbahn.

The titling of that novel also came up against stereotypes of my ostensibly all-female audience. The US sales department vetoed the original title, Time is Money, for "sounding like nonfiction", though fiction appropriating and subverting nonfiction titles is commonplace (nobody mistook Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs for an international policy journal). It took me a while to discern the real problem: Time is Money was too direct, too aggressive, too in your face; it would frighten the girls away. This suspicion was confirmed when I suggested the Germans, with no equivalent of "so much for that", simply use my original title. Uh-uh. Zeit ist Geld is "too male and harsh". I admired my publisher's candour, if not his neutral substitute: The Better Part of Life.

Publishing's notion of what "women want" is dated and condescending. In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.

Granted, the marketing logic seems unassailable: in the US, Britain and Germany, 80% of fiction readers are women. (Which mysteriously makes women look bad: those layabout ladies have nothing better to do than loll around and read. Yet if 80% of fiction readers were men, we'd assume that men are still far more cultured and better informed, while women squander their free time on mopping the floor.) Why appeal to the meagre male 20%?

Simple: smart female authors who twig that their careers depend on writing solely for their own gender will instinctively narrow their subject matter. Meanwhile, gauzy covers with shy titles signal that the literary establishment needn't take this work seriously. Little wonder, then, that the language of extravagant regard in that New York Times Book Review write-up of Jonathan Franzen – "Like all great novels," Freedom "illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence" – is rarely lavished on female novelists. Little wonder that admiration of Franzen's focus on "family as microcosm or micro-history" would invert to disdain should a woman choose the same subject: look, just another bint stuck in her tiny domestic world.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss. By stereotyping my work's audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfr...

warning: if you dont like strong language or are otherwise lacking a sense of humor dont bother

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08...

A few years ago, a woman I hardly know and whose name I’ve now forgotten invited me to become her friend on Goodreads, a social-networking site on which users log the books they’re reading (or have read, or intend to read), and in some cases write casual reviews of these books and rate them on a scale of one to five stars. I thanked the woman but told her I didn’t participate in social-networking websites. Because, I didn’t elaborate, I found them more estranging than connecting, or suspected I would, and because I didn’t want to turn myself into some kind of product (not true: in my huffing, protracted climb from anonymity to obscurity, I’ve attempted quite a lot of that), and because I was very tired, and finally because I couldn’t afford another distraction from my writing or from checking my email forty times a day. I’ve since softened my position on all this and now have an impressive though not obscene number of friends on Facebook. Sometimes these nominal friendships bring into depressing relief my paucity of substantive friendships, but on the whole I’d say I’m slightly less lonely and no less productive (which is to say: not terribly productive) than I was before I joined Facebook. But this essay, if that’s what it is, isn’t about Facebook (boring), it’s about Goodreads (sort of)...



http://www.themillions.com/2010/08/ba...

Jack wrote:
This seems like the kind of place where folks add cinnamon and whipped cream to their coffee. I resign. Best to each and every one of you.

perhaps you fellas mean Jack?

http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu...

NEVER 'lend' a book - only give

someone wise once said that

maybe it was me

probably not though

a few quick hits

1)as long as books are sold as physical objects in actual stores you probably will continue to need publishers - a publisher's primary function is to put books on shelves - if this reality changes then publishing houses will have to change function or go away

2)the consolidation of publishing houses has pretty much lead to a focus on big win block busters and this isnt working too hot as it leads to more money going to fewer authors trying to meet expectations that are too high

sort of in response to this what we are seeing in the last couple of years is the return of small independantly minded (and owned) publishers who focus on just a handful of books and work on smaller more manageable scales utilizing both the new technology and social networking options AND the older traditional independant bookstore word of mouth approach - these publishers give more attention to their smaller lists, have lower more manageable expectations of performance and are therefore more supportive of and patient with their select stable of authors

Cat's Cradle and SH5 are the only ones I could recount with any degree of detail - I kind of remember the ending of Galapagos with the whole de-evolution into seal like beings deal

for some reason that description makes me think of Leon (The Professional)

Amazon is running scared from the I-Pad - at the same time there is a story about the sony e-reader (finally wi-fi enabled) topping sales of 3 million units...

also interesting is what went on with Wylie this week

who doesnt want to see this movie?

Adrian wrote: "That movie may feature Russ Tamblyn, but he's no Lee Majors. And there aren't any realistic scenes of Vikings fighting native Americans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7kf-n..."

that may well be the best trailer I've ever seen - netflix que is gonna get all kinds of shuffled now!

welcome Tom!

people are made from living things too you know...

I'd say there are certain books or certain kinds of books that are easily translated while others are all but impossible - imagine the kind of mess someone might make of Ulysses or even worse, Finnegan's Wake

Jimmy wrote: "Something is ALWAYS lost in translation. It is inevitable. But just because something is lost between the two languages does NOT mean that the books in the new language are no longer valid, and t..."

Im not sure what it means for a book to be valid or not - but I would suggest that what of the actual writing (as opposed to message, themes, story etc) you cherish in a translated work comes more from the skill of the translator from that of the original author

By Anna Quindlen

From the new book "Scout, Atticus, and Boo," edited by Mary McDonagh Murphy (HarperCollins, 2010)


I took "To Kill a Mockingbird" out of the library at Holy Child Academy, where I went to school through eighth grade. But I can't exactly remember what year it was or how old I was.

I totally remember the experience. It's just all these people In this town, and you are visiting and you stay, and then at the end, you can't believe that you have to leave, and then sooner or later, you go back again and revisit them all over again. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is probably in the top three of books like that, where you utterly live in the book, and walk around in the book, and know everyone down to the ground in the book, and then leave, and then inevitably come back. I can't imagine anyone I like reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" and then not rereading it.

I've realized over the years that I have a completely different orientation toward the book than most people do, because at some essential level early on, and even as I got older, I don't really give a rip about Atticus. I mean, he is fine and he is a terrific dad and he does a wonderful thing, and so on and so forth.

But for me, this book is all about Scout. And I don't really care about anybody else in the book that much, except to the extent that they are nice to Scout and make life easier for Scout. I love Calpurnia because of Scout. I really like Jem and feel like I know him because of Scout. I'm totally perplexed by and sort of furious at Atticus when he has their aunt move in, who is just a heinous creature and is clearly there to get Scout to wear a skirt and wash her face, because I so don't want her to do anything like that. I think one of the reasons I became so obsessed with Harper Lee, when I was older and knew more about her biography, is because everything that she did convinced me that she was just a grown-up Scout who hadn't gone over to the dark side of being a girlie girl.

I looked over the book again about three months ago. It's still always about Scout to me because there really aren't that many of those girls. There were hardly any of those girls in our real life, and there aren't that many of them in books. So you store them up as a hedge against the attempts of the world to make you into something else...."


more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07...

and ps - dont we talk about novels here all the time? what are we if not the american public? chopped liver? everyone I know talks about the novels they read - I cant get them to shut up about it and I wish I could

did Lee Siegel think that he was saying something that hasnt been announced time and again over the last 60 years? or did he think that stealing David Shields patter about non-fiction made him clever (there is a certain poetic justice to stealing Shields patter I guess) - Lee get an original thought