BookFox

Review of "The Late Age of Print" by Ted Striphas

Ted Striphas will challenge every entrenched notion you have about the publishing industry.

You think Big-box retailers like Borders and B&N have put independents out of business?

Striphas argues that other factors often contributed to the indie's close, that the big-box retailers rectify the social/financial inequalities present around indie's, and that big-boxers have a history and a sense of place, too.

Think the problem of books is on the consumer side, that people aren't reading?

Nope. Striphas argues it's on the supply side, with how books are printed and distributed, the inequality of supply/demand (books are "ubiquitous and mundane"), and how books have been commodified since the 1930's "bookshelf in every house" campaign.

You think the emergence of e-readers creates a new problem for the book industry?

Well, back in the 1930s, publishers fought tooth-and-nail against consumers exchanging books with each other, even holding a contest to create a derogatory name for book-sharers (the winner? Book Sneak).

You think e-piracy will be a problem for booksellers like it is for the movie industry?

If you do, it's rather ironic, given that in the late 1800s, America didn't respect international copyright, and thus pirated European books and sold them at a heavily discounted price here in the States.

I could go on, because there's a wealth of data, narrative, and ideas here, vaulting this slim volume into the heavyweight class of tome. Striphas discards canards about the publishing industry and creates his own narrative, which makes "Late Age" fascinating to read, even if I remain skeptical at some points. I remain skeptical that big-box retailers ever capture a place or maintain a history in the same way an indie bookstore does, simply on the basis of my many interactions with indie's and big-boxers.

And I'm not sure that big-boxers challenge social inequalities. If you want to talk about access to books, there's always the (free!) library, which levels the playing field.

Some of the material here is just helpful information, and doesn't steer the industry toward its next step. For instance, the third chapter exposing the King-Kong-like ascendancy of Amazon.com using draconian efficiency protocols on their employees is interesting from an employee-abuse perspective, but leaves you wringing your hands asking what's next.

Also, the fourth and fifth chapters detailing the aesthetics of Oprah's Book Club and Harry Potter's copyright-protection wranglings around the globe both are intriguing narratives about our current cultural moment, but are more observational than argumentative.

I should warn you that the book's a bit academic. Striphas teaches American Studies and Cultural Studies at Indiana University and he quotes Heidegger and Marx within the first few pages. He also has an annoying habit of telling you what he's going to write about rather than just writing it (as well as summarizing everything at the end). These are academic protocols, I realize, but you have to expect your readers to be smart enough to get it the first round.

There are also some patchy spots with language that's been infected by theory: "In 1891, the accession of the United States to international copyright didn't represent a Copernican revolution in its stance toward protecting foreign works inasmuch as it expressed the declining marginal utility of the discourse of civic republicanism relative to the development and consolidation of industrial capitalism."

But if you can overlook the occasional academicism, I highly recommend this book. It'll have you chewing over the book industry for a good spell.

Short Story Censorship

In a high school English class unit called Love/Gender/Family Unit, Kathleen Reilly taught short stories by David Sedaris, Laura Lippman, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway. But not anymore. She recently resigned, after parents demanded she remove the stories from the curriculum.

Parent Sue Ann Johnson was one of the more vocal objectors to the stories, arguing kids are being harmed:

“There is an agenda, people. Wake up,” she said. “We are desensitizing our children to violence. We’re desensitizing them to sex. We’re desensitizing them to drugs. We’re talking about the hearts and minds of the future of America.”

I can only wag my index finger of shame. This is a simple error, to suppose that exposing someone to violence/sex/drugs is the same as desensitization. Certainly desensitization is something to avoid, but would anyone say that visiting the slums in Kenya risks desensitizing students to poverty? The exposure would probably lead them to become more sensitive, perhaps even to act in positive ways on their sensitivities.

I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's defense of Fight Club, how he argued that portraying violence in all its real, mucky messiness was the best antidote for the glorified fakery in movies that leads to desensitization.

Literature is the best possible place to expose students to such things. You can't help but think that most acts of censorship are a failure to read properly; in other words, a form of illiteracy. It's a failure to read literature as it's meant to be read -- not as a nonfiction book advocating a particular lifestyle, but an interaction and exploration of life itself.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has also picked up the story. There's a you-go-get-'em editorial in the local newspaper, too, from a recent graduate arguing that his alma mater should keep the short stories in the curriculum. It's cute because it's so winsome.

Perhaps we need some kind of Short Story Superhero that can defend against these censorship mafias. With a suit and a spiffy motto, nothing could withstand Short Story Man! He could leap tall parents in a single bound. He could cast protective webs around the banned books.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize

The shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story prize is out, and they did much better at creating a shortlist than last year, when the Jhumpa Lahiri coup took down the prize.

• An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)
• Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
• Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia)
• Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy (United States)
• The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip O Ceallaigh (Ireland)
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (United States)

Nice international selection, and love to see my boy Tower representing. Winner of the 35,000 Euro prize will be announced Sept. 20.

The E-Book Revolution Approaches

Brilliant and lengthy article at Fast Company on the changing landscape of books, publishers and e-books.

The book industry is especially vulnerable because it is a "hits" business, with a small number of breakaway titles (Harry Potter, The Tipping Point, Twilight) subsidizing all the rest. Take away publishers' best-sellers and you're left with stacks of money-losing operations. But authors such as Dan Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer, and J.K. Rowling would all thrive in a system that let them skip advances in exchange for higher royalty rates. Instead of a star author getting the standard 15% on a hardcover, for example, Amazon could simply skim a 20% distribution fee, and the author gets the rest. In this model, "the whole thing is structured so that you, as the provider of intellectual property, get the lion's share of the revenue after costs, not the publishers," Maneker says. If e-books take off, Amazon could cherry-pick the biggest-selling authors, and publishers would suddenly find themselves cut off from their most bankable sources of revenue.

Review: "Fugue State" Brian Evenson

The stories in "Fugue State" will haunt you. Brian Evenson has a remarkable ability to come up with creepy tales that won't be extracted from your head. For example, take "Invisible Box." Imagine a girl sleeping with a mime, a mime that's still dressed up with the gloves and the face paint. During the completely silent sex, the mime draws a box around the two of them, and for days afterwards, the girl can't shake the feeling that the box still traps her.

Try sleeping on that one.

If the stories were odd in certain genres or patterns, they would be easier to shake, but these are wholly original creations that frighten in unexpected ways. In "Younger," there's this horror of a father leaving his two young girls alone with the strict instruction not to answer the door if anyone comes. The way that the unknown knocker knocks traumatizes the younger sister for the rest of her life. There's nothing intrinsically scary about the storyline itself -- it sounds pretty prosaic. But Evenson invests the story with such tension it might as well be vampires and zombies at the door.

The graphic story in this collection, "Dread," lives up to its name. Illustrated in stark black and white panels, the main character has a schizophrenic struggle after being haunted by a phrase in a unmemorable book: "He no longer resembled me." The graphic novelist Zak Sally, who drew wonderfully for this story, also created a header for each of the other eighteen stories, but these are too small and too infrequent. A full page graphic for at least some of the stories would be an improvement.

Not all the stories are frightening. If you want a satire of the publishing industry, "Ninety Over Ninety" is hilarious. It's a spoofed version of "Entourage" for the publishing world. Kossweiller, a hard-working editor at the Entwinkle House, publishes works of literature that don't sell, and then is routinely hammered and abused by his commercial-fiction-seeking boss, "Cinchy," who is deathly afraid of dolls. (Entwinkle = Entrekin? You make the call).

The title refers to esoteric tortures "Cinchy" uses to abuse editors who displease him, like making an editor get ninety contracts in ninety days, and then once he got them, ripping them all up in front of him.

Overall, Fugue State is highly readable and highly entertaining (if you don't mind being freaked out for a week or so). Evenson plays with notions of self and authorhood, while never giving up the emotional core of fear. If I had some kind of star system or a BookFox "Read This!" award, Evenson would get high marks.

Review of Damion Searls "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going"

In the fourth story of this collection, "A Guide to San Francisco," the narrator says, "I have to admit I have never been as moved by the realists or the world-creating fabulists as I am by the pattern-makers." If you agree with that aesthetic preference, you should read Damion Searls' "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going."

The book is slim enough to be a fiction chapbook, with five first-person stories about writers, and relies on complex patterns and beautiful prose to carry the pieces. Rather than a casual series of events, a slow accumulation of acutely rendered details moves the stories forward.

Lovers of literature should lap up the frequent references to literary titans like Hawthorne, Nabakov, Gide, Orwell, and Fitzgerald. There's also a good bit of Borges in some of the stories, with literary criticism about stories that don't exist, and meta stories commenting upon themselves, and fiction not only mirroring reality but creating it.

Here are a few treasures that I enjoyed mining:

• "The trees drip with green: the air is too saturated to hold more color."
• "[The angels] loom, like the buried first memory of a parent."
• "Her high, thin gaze would sweep down from above her crucifix necklace or pearls like a frigid Arctic wind to cool anyone's faintest interest in mentioning [sexuality] around her."

"The Cubicles" chronicles the career struggles of a technical writer, and the deflation of expectations and dreams: "I no longer aspired to see my name blazoned on title pages, meanwhile achieving such fame nevertheless: my name on the credits pages of dozens of books, read by thousands, books explaining how to use a certain database or manage client ROI in a B2B e-business footprint or design a Customer Call Center (CCC)." The third story, Goldenchain, shows the rattling gasp of an expiring marriage during a trip to Puget Sound. All five of the stories bear of the mark of careful, deliberate thought about character and language, and give fruits to those intrigued enough to return for a second (and third) reading.

If nothing I've said has convinced you one way or another, take another look at the cover. It's a stenciled car driving into a kaleidoscopic square. Yeah, reading this book can kind of feel like that.

Cao Naiqian: There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night

Before I get to a micro review of the collection itself, I have to admit that I'm impressed by Naiqian's bio. Growing up in a rural section of China, he didn't start writing until 37, as a result of a bet with a friend. He still has his day job as a detective (!) for the government. He actually lived before starting to write, by working in a mine and in a factory and with music and as a farmer.

With a bio like that, you can't help but be interested in the fiction.

"There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night" describes the hardscrabble life of peasants in a rural cave-dwelling town in China. Each of these thirty stories is short -- think flash fiction, or short shorts -- but accomplishes much with a Carveresque-style minimalism. Desperate lives generate stories about simple elements like food and sex, which reoccur frequently: growing food, cooking food, destroying food, and adultery, bestiality, incest. The reappearing characters, with names like Dog, Grunt, Zits We and Widow San, don't want modernization or political progress or the afterlife, they want little more than pride and honor; full bellies and sated sexualities.

Stylistically, Naiqian has this habit of repeating an exact phrase twice: "It grew darker and darker. It grew darker and darker." Also, in dialogue, he gives attribution for every single line, so sometimes you read "Heinu said" four times in a row without any other characters speaking. By piling on the words the particular information grows in significance. It's reminiscent of the way Hebrew poetry in the Psalms moves elliptically around a subject by describing it in at least two and sometimes four different ways. But since Naiqian doesn't vary the expression at all, it lacks the kind of aesthetic variation of Hebrew poetry. Instead, it captures the bare-bones existence of his characters -- even the words to describe them, and their words themselves, are limited, spare, and can only repeat identical lines for emphasis, rather than by any kind of linguistic flourishes.

The details of this collection, especially about animals, come straight from the source. There's true-experience tidbits about flies, such as the fact that fly droppings on food can't immediately be seen, but turn black after a period of time, and also that a fly can still buzz around even after it's been decapitated.

There's also a spot-on description of a lesbian hen, and the way Naiqian describes her mating ritual in this excerpt is precise, especially the last line (I raised chickens, so yes, I know):

"Whenever the village hens saw Fluff Ball coming, they would stop what they were doing and hunker down, lift their tails exposing their red rumps, and allow Fluff Ball to mount them. Fluff Ball would strut, its chest thrust forward, over to the most attractive hen. It would spread its right wing like a fan and circle the hen. Round and round it would go before leaping on the hen's back to do it. To maintain its balance, it would grasp the feathers on the hen's neck in its beak."

The translator, John Balcom, who also wrote an introduction, mentioned that the dialogue is particularly difficult to translate, since Naiqian uses heavy dialect. How it comes out in English is full of curses. There's plenty of "fuck your mother to death" and "fuck your ancestors." For example, this exchange in the first story, "The In-Law":

Blackie said, "That fucking In-law is here for you."
The woman said, "Don't let him in. Wait till I put on my pants."
Blackie said, "Shit, what difference does it make?"
Blushing, the woman said, "Why don't you just tell him I'm sick? It is that time of the month, anyway."
"How can I do that?" asked Blackie. "We Chinese always keep our word."
Blackie went out to meet the In-Law.

A lot of cultural nuances are probably lost in translation, but the issue of class comes across loud and clear. The stronger pieces in this collection are the ones that don't rely excessively upon dialogue, like "Widow San" and "Heinu and Her Andi." Coincidentally, they're also the slightly longer ones.

If you'd like to explore rural Chinese culture, this book will give you a look that is almost too close for comfort.

John Freeman on Literary Journals

Here's John Freeman brilliant description of the role of literary journals:

Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Narrative Has Competition! (Hello, Electric Literature)

Narrative has become the current gold standard for online literary magazines, wading in the fray and dominating the competition in a relatively short time.

Well, watch out. Electric Literature just launched, and it looks like a doozy.

True to the name, EL is distributing electronically, through a host of formats: e-book, Kindle, and iPhone, plus print-on-demand. It seems a smart new path for literary journal distribution. Plus, EL actually provides a business model that might work, as stories are sold for .99, a much better distribution model than wrangling a few copies into independent bookstores, many copies of which are unsold and scrapped.

Might I mention the lineup is as strong as that first issue of Black Clock that took the literary world by storm?

• Michael Cunningham
• Jim Shepard
• T Cooper
• Lydia Millet
• Diana Wagman

As far as money, they say this on their submission page (a backhanded jab at Narrative?):

We pay writers, they don't pay us. We are proud to support writers who entrust us with their work.

They also pay at a Subtropics rate ($1000 smackers a story). But it's pretty hilarious that a journal with "Electric" in their name doesn't accept electronic submissions. [CORRECTION: Though initially confused by the set-up of the submissions page, I have now verified that they do accept electronic submissions.]

Plus, if all that isn't enough, they have pictures of hot girls doing weird things on their website (But not as explicit as Fence, though).

How Do Parks Resemble Short Stories?

At the Guardian, they review the new anthology "Ox-Tales," structured around the four elements, and "Park Stories," a set of eight specially commissioned short stories all corresponding to a major British park.

Explaining the rationale behind the parks, editor Rowan Routh said: "There's a kinship between parks and short fiction - both are confined things."

I could go farther -- short stories are manageable enough to be read in parks. They are the perfect park-lit.

Oh, and the article continues the trend of speculating that short stories are experiencing a revival. Yet at the same time, the article starts by explaining how short story writers used to make a living at writing short stories, and now for "Ox-Tales," they're donating the stories. Hmmm. Not exactly revival-ish. (But it is for charity!)

But one thing Britain's got right. They are sponsoring the short story form. The USA could pick up some tips.

(Fake) Writers on Twitter

I've been amused by the fake twitter accounts (twitterjackings) that I've come across recently. Of course there are famous rip-offs. No, that's not really Steve Jobs, sorry. And Condoleezza Rice isn't tweeting, "LOL! G.W. likes fruitcake."

But the ones I've been encountering have been in the literary realm. Billy Collins started following me, and offering abbreviated poetry. Of course Billy Collins is alive, so at least the joke isn't exposed -- it actually could be Collins. But then there's all the dead authors.

Enter Jorge Luis Borges. Twice, actually, because he also has a spanish account. Why would someone want to follow him? Perhaps just for the surrealism, the humor, the anachronism (and ana-technological, if I can coin that) of following a dead author. Perhaps for the humor: "Gauchos fighting outside again. Sigh. Can't sleep." For the inside jokes to Borges' blindness. Sometimes channeling the author is a kick to read, like a smashup of various literary/biographical references.

There are three accounts for Ernest Hemingway. More than fifteen William Shakespeare impersonators. Two for Mark Twain.

Herman Melville only has one account, but its name is a doozy: "NothingButDick." To be fair, it stays true to the name, only publishing 140 character excerpts from Moby Dick. Flannery O'Connor, true to form, has a wicked sense of humor: "'The lame shall enter first.' This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches." O'Connor responds to pop culture by mentioned her appearance on the television show LOST, and even responds to other twitter accounts.

I love all the different approaches: famous quotes, excerpts from their writing, biographical details, or a mix of these and more. But might I suggest that even the more prosaic accounts could be a healthy dose of info for a high school student. And at their best, some accounts are highly entertaining for those familiar with an author.

Of course, if you're sick with the fake and actually want the genuine article, check out this list of the Top 100 authors on Twitter, including Chuck Palahniuk and Paulo Coelho.

Or you can acknowledge, in a very Jean Baudrillard way, that even the real people on twitter are fake.

John Freeman at Granta

John Freeman's been popping up with some regularity, mostly in reference to being named Granta's new editor after Alex Clark resigned. Since the average appointment of Granta's editors seems to be something in the range of about 2 days (okay, bit of hyperbole, there -- or if you're into tropes, actually a litote -- they stay for 7-8 months), I hope Freeman hangs in a while longer. When I met him at the LA Festival of Books, back when he was merely in the lowly position of American-branch editor of Granta, he was a genuinely nice guy.

In the National Post interview, he talked about his technologically savvy vision of the future of the magazine:

“The job of an editor is very different now than it was when reading and publishing and print-based entertainment was at the centre of cultural life,” he says. “You have to work the angles: we have a Facebook page. We have a Twitter channel with 2200 followers. We’re doing video interviews with the writers who have pieces [in the magazine].” And although he's a passionate defender of the printed book, Freeman says he is meeting with Amazon representatives about making Granta available on the Kindle e-reader: “In the next 30 years, we have to become more digital and more international. That’s the way reading’s going.”

Also, in regards to a future issue of Granta being Canadian themed, he points out that Canada has the only non-patriarchal literary society:

“There’s so many interesting writers in Canada. It would not be very difficult to put together. It would be a snap. It my mind it's the only matriarchal literary society,” says Freeman, with a nod to Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood."