literature

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2
Sep 09

Literary Fiction Sucks Up To Genre Like A Hot Girl At Comic-Con

Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time and the author of “The Magicians”, a novel. In this great piece in the WSJ, he writes about the “plot against plot”–the abandonment of story in 20th century literary fiction–and the new trend in fiction to embrace story again.

I’m a huge lover of modern and postmodern fiction. But I do think we as novelists owe as much to our readers as we do to art. The current pendulum swing back towards hybridizing literary fiction with genre fiction to make the former readable is good for writers and good for readers. It only makes what we write that much more relevant, because what use is the most artfully written novel if it interests no one? Novelists have a lot to learn from the challenge of being entertaining.

n.b.: I had jumped on the bandwagon without even realizing it–my new novel is literary fiction inspired by graphic novels. ‘Cause I’m trendy like that I guess.

The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They’re forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in “Inherent Vice” he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

via Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work – WSJ.com.

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22
Jul 09

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi | Poets & Writers

Legendary Publisher and Editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG) Jonathan Galassi answers some questions for Poets & Writers. His life is like a history of publishing of the last quarter of a century:

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn when you were a younger editor?

One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don’t get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don’t get the right reviews, or if books aren’t in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl’s biography of Frank O’Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don’t know if that’s a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.

via Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi | Poets & Writers.

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22
Jul 09

Glimmer Train Conductor

Susan Burmeister-Brown–editor of top literary journal Glimmer Train–answers some questions about her process for selecting stories:

EWR: Glimmer Train has been very successful at choosing high quality fiction. Can you speak to the process a story goes through in order to appear in your magazine?


Susan: If the story comes to us using our online submission system (which is the case for 98% of what comes in), I am the first reader. I read the first page of the story online. If I want to turn the page, I mark that piece for “full read”. I do my full reads in a separate session, since the process of screening work is very different from full reading. I print the stories out at this stage, since I still find it easier to lose myself in pages rather than on the screen. If I love the story, I sit on it for a few days. I see how it stays with me, and I reread it. If I still love it, I give it to my sister. She’s a slower and more thorough reader. She’s the one who can identify any weak spots, suggest possible edits, etc. She reads it, sits on it a couple of days. If it’s staying with her, then she reads it again, circling strong passages as she goes along. It’s her way of sinking into a piece. Finally the two of us sit with the stack that has endured, and we talk about each story. We can only print 40 stories a year, so we have to keep our bar extremely high. It basically comes down to our selecting the stories that we can’t stand the thought of not publishing.


If the story comes to us on paper through the mail, the story will first be read by our story screener who’s been with us for over eight years now. She’ll give me her top quarter. Those get my full read.



EWR: What advice would you give to new or young writers trying to build a career in writing?


Susan: I have two pieces of advice:


-Regularly read good writing.


-Unplug yourself from the hurly-burly of life on a regular basis so your subconscious has time to make some good compost. If you have too much going on all the time, or you’re always emailing or texting or talking on the cell phone, always have a browser open on your screen seeing what’s going on out there in the world, or the radio on in the car – well, these are not conditions in which productive mulling can take place. Writing does not just occur when you’re at the keyboard or with pen in hand. It brews in the mind.

via Interview with Susan Burmeister-Brown.

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17
Jul 09

Pulling Back the Curtain on New York Times Book Reviews : Selling Books

Most people who write books have two dreams: to go on Oprah and to get reviewed (favorably, ‘course!) by The New York Times Book Review. Following is an expose on how that happens. (N.B. It don’t look good for first-novelists. It never does.)

The process of deciding what gets reviewed and what doesn’t is quite demanding work. “It begins with the clerk who goes through the pile of 750 to 1000 advance manuscripts that the office receives each week,” says Gewen. However, don’t expect your self-help book, reference guide or travel manual to get any attention in the initial review by the clerk. Those books are “tossed.”

Then, the rest of the manuscripts are taken to Tanenhaus’s office where the senior editor and deputy editor divide them up and get rid of more.

This leaves the six preview editors with about 25 books to look through. Keep in mind this winnowing process has just cut upwards of 750 or more books! Gewen said he spends at least a half hour on each book and chooses four or five, then rejects the others. Reasons most often cited for exclusion, “too narrow for us” or “workmanlike.”

In an interview with Tanenhaus by Michael Orbach of “Knight News, ”If a writer is not bringing something new to the conversation or is not very well-established with a following, long-awaited book, or has really superb narrative or analytical skills, there’s a good chance the book won’t get reviewed.”

In another article that tries to depict the workings of The New York Times Book Review, “The Book Review: Who Critiques Whom- and Why?” by Times Editor Byron Calame, Tanenhaus continued to say that books often get rejected because they “lack originality” or are “packaged assemblages of smaller pieces.”

And for those of you authors who want your first novels to be reviewed, Tanenhaus said, “It has to be strikingly good.”

via Pulling Back the Curtain on New York Times Book Reviews : Selling Books.

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fiction / future / literature / sci fi — No Comments
28
Jun 09

10 Sci Fi Books That Launched Their Own Genres

Great article here about 10 sci fi books that launched their own genres:

http://io9.com/5302367/science-fiction-books-that-launched-their-own-genres?skyline=true&s=i

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