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30
Jul 09

Imperial Prose: The Book Bench : The New Yorker

This is simply magnificent:

In this week’s New York magazine, Sam Anderson opens his review of William T. Vollmann’s latest novel, “Imperial,” rather hilariously:

“Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.”

via Imperial Prose: The Book Bench : The New Yorker.

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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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14
Jul 09

The Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 2

Gay Talese interviewed in The Paris Review. He writes all his notes and outlines on the cardboard shirt boards that come from dry cleaners.

INTERVIEWER

Your piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is often singled out as the classic work of New Journalism. How did that assignment come about?

TALESE

Harold Hayes, my editor at Esquire, said, I have your next piece: Sinatra. I told him I didn’t want to do it. Sinatra had been done to death. I mean, Christ, another piece on Sinatra? But Hayes is a strong person with a polite manner who got his way. So I go to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles and I call Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. He says Frank’s not feeling well. He has a cold. Mahoney is also not happy about other things. He’s unhappy about this rumor that Sinatra is friends with organized crime figures. Mahoney says, We may want you to sign an agreement saying we can see the piece first. I say, I can’t do that. He says, Then we might not have a deal. At the end of the week, I’m still in the hotel room, and Mahoney calls to ask me what I’m doing. I say, I’m waiting for you to call me. How’s Frank feeling? Well, he’s not very good. I say, He still has a cold? He says, Yes, he still has a cold. He brings up the agreement issue again, and again I say that’s a problem. He says, I understand you’ve been seeing people. Yes, I’ve been seeing people. You’ve been seeing some of Frank’s friends? I say, I don’t know if they’re Frank’s friends, but I’ve been seeing people. He asks me, How long are you going to be doing this? I don’t know, I say, and then he hangs up.

That night I’m sitting at a bar around ten o’clock, watching people, and sure enough I notice Frank Sinatra sitting down the corner of the bar with two blondes. Sinatra goes to play pool and I witness a scene between Sinatra and a guy named Harlan Ellison, and I write it down on a shirt board. But I don’t get it all, so I go up to Ellison and ask him if I can talk to him the next day. He gives me his phone number and address. When we speak in person I ask him not just what everyone said, but what he was thinking. I always ask people what was on their mind. Were you surprised by Sinatra? Had you met him before? Did you think he was going to hit you, or did you want to pop him? Then someone I knew had a secretary who had gone to school with Sinatra’s daughter Nancy. She told me this great story about how she went to this party at the Sinatras’ house. At the party she accidentally knocks off from the mantle an alabaster bird. And little Nancy says, Oh no, that’s my mother’s favorite. Then Frank Sinatra knocks the other one off.

via The Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 2.

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