BookFox

Spoiled Salinger

Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog "More Intelligent Life," where in a post titled "Salinger's Spoiled Children" Bradley Freedman describes a friend's pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend's impulse:

But instead of accepting Salinger’s published works as gifts, they sought his unpublished writings as their due, like ungrateful children. Surely art is not an obligation. It must always be a choice.

I don't think their expectations are that far off the mark. And characterizing them as "ungrateful children" surely goes too far. 

I think his friends believed, as I do, that art kept only for oneself is selfish. As human beings, we don't exist in a vacuum, we exist in communities and societies that rightfully demand dues. It's not an option to give those dues, it's a duty. 

Obligation to society comes in many forms. The most obvious one would be voting, at least in a democracy. Or caring for your children, or participating in the safety of your neighborhood. And for an artist, you need not only to write, but to share that writing. To do otherwise, such as hoarding manuscripts for five decades, is to be derelict in the artist's duty.

Unfortunately, in American (Western?) society, "choice" has been elevated to the highest moral platform. As long as you have options, as long as your will or agency is primary, then that is above all the moral good. This is not only self-centered, it's plain wrong. So when Freedman says that "[Art] must always be a choice," he is essentially saying that the choice belonged to Salinger, that he had the right to choose or not to choose. But even as high as we've enthroned the Individual in Western thought, this is a false choice. We do not get the right to choose whether or not we contribute to society. We just have an obligation to contribute.

It must be said: Salinger failed in his responsibility to society. He most certainly did not have the "right" to withhold his writings from his devoted fans and from a free society that enable him to publish in the first place. Because of his solipsistic attitude, Salinger is the spoiled one, not those of us who requested more work from a master of fiction.

Requiem for Equator Books

Equator Books is shutting their doors after nearly six years here in Los Angeles. The knowledge that independent bookstores seem to be shutting down with metronomic frequency does not reduce the sorrow of the occasion.

Since Equator specialized in collectible books, it was a virtual shrine to the book-as-object. I remember browsing through in awe of the gorgeous first editions, archivally wrapped, the hardbacks crisp, the deckled edges beautifully uneven. Yes, sorry -- that is drool.

Equator was also one of the few independent bookstores that offered enough open space to throw a party. (Much as I love you, Book Soup, the L-shaped reading area and narrow aisles are not the best conduits for fraternizing). I remember a soiree after the LA Festival of Books where literary luminaries of all stripes drank, gossiped, and fawned over esoteric volumes.

So before the doors are shut and locked (on Sunday! so soon!), you might want to pop in and grab a volume or two, and say goodbye to this literary sanctuary. 

Amazon's Strongarming of Macmillan Day 8

The Guardian has an excellent article rounding up all the sites, authors, and publishing groups boycotting Amazon in one form or another. Some remove all links to Amazon; others encourage readers to buy books from elsewhere.

It's this last tactic, encouraged by John Scalzi, which I think will be the most helpful. Instead of limiting actions (boycott), be active in a new direction (buy a Macmillan book from somewhere other than Amazon).

That helps authors, rather than just hurting Amazon.

So here's a few other places to shop for books online:

The Checklist Manifesto (Barnes and Noble)

Wolf Hall (Powell's Books)

Night (Indiebound)

Or go over to Books-A-Million, which as of 9:30 on Friday morning, is sporting all Macmillan titles on its front page -- not only a savvy business move, but also a slap in the face to Amazon.

Amazon's Extortion of Macmillan Day 6

It's 10:00 p.m. here in Los Angeles, on the sixth day of the Amazonian extortion against Macmillan. Counting the days is starting to seem like some kind of foreign hostage crisis where the newscasters count out the length of imprisonment.

As many people have pointed out, Amazon doesn't have the slightest clue of the definition of "monopoly." But they also don't know what the word "capitulate" means.

Capitulation does not mean pay some sharply worded criticism to your opponent and then refuse to reinstate their books.

Capitulation also does not mean refusing to reinstate books as a kind of bargaining chip.

Might I add that it's a bit petty to try to hurt a publishing company as much as possible while paying lip service to the notion of reconciliation?

You want to stop allowing publishers to sell books on your site? Fine, then I won't link to you. I'm taking down all my sidebar links to Amazon until they stop this thuggish behavior. If this isn't another Amazonfail, I don't know what is. Let me count the ways.

Ted Genoways Screed in Mother Jones

Ted Genoways, editor of VQR, wrote an impassioned call for action in Mother Jones. Essentially, he laments the decline of the literary journal and the explosion of creative writing programs and writers who don't read.

About those writers who don't read:

"Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves."

The flaw in this thinking is that writers are either reading literary journals or not reading at all. "Newly produced literature" is a malleable term. As a writer, I read "newly produced" collections every year -- a lot of them (20, 30). But I read few journals because I need more of a winnowing process. 

There's a winnowing process -- from unpublished manuscripts to literary journals, and from literary journals to Pushcart/BASS/Collections. I've read the unpublished manuscripts in slush piles, and I've read literary journals, and I tend to prefer collections (even more than Pushcart and BASS). 

Why? Because for one, many stories in literary journals don't make it to collections. That winnowing process allows me to access a better bank of literature. Two, I like reading numerous stories by a single author, because the stories connect more than many journals.

And three, because pragmatically, I have far too much to read (no, really -- it's impossible to keep up). Everyone has far too much to read. Not only because we're bombarded with all sorts of flashy doohickeys like Twitter and DVR and Netflix and computer games and video games, but because the sheer amount of fiction produced each year is overwhelming.

In other words, while Genoways notes quite correctly the proliferation of creative writing programs and writers, he fails to take into account the impact of the proliferation of words. We're drowning. And we cope with that drowning by moving up the ladder: by choosing to read books, which offer a further winnowing process than literary journals.

I'm not saying that I don't like or read literary journals -- I do. I'm just trying to trampoline off Genoways argument to show how and why things are the way they are. And I'm not saying it's right, just that this has been the pragmatic route many have slipped into.

I don't know the solution. But as the era of e-books dawns, I suspect that ten years from now, Genoways and other literary editors will be looking back on the '00s as the good old days. Because if you can't get anyone to subscribe or read journals now, just wait until there's an infinite amount of stories, novels and nonfiction available for free on e-readers. 

Book Piracy

Over at The Millions, there's some great journalism going on -- an interview with a book pirate called "The Real Caterpillar." One of the most interesting sections is at the end:

Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.

It's an excellent point -- will the publishing industry die off in a manner similar to the recording industry? And since the publishing industry has largely given up its role of editing (shuttled to agents) and promotion (forced upon the writer), wouldn't it make more sense to take the Radiohead-Rainbows approach and have the author put up a $3 donation button on the site? 

It'd be roughly three times the money for the author, who gets a pittance of about $1 per book sold, and cheap enough for pirates to buy rather than do all the work of digital scanning.

The Story Prize Finalists

Three books have been nominated by The Story Prize:

• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Drift by Victoria Patterson
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Well, I guessed the winner last year, so I'll take another stab for 2010. It seems the two frontrunners would be Mueenuddin and Tower, both of whom I've read, but it's a nice nod to nominate Patterson as well -- I'd heard good things about Drift. It also fits into the normal pattern of nomination for The Story Prize -- two favored collections and a worthy up and comer. 

It's a good move because prizes are, at the bottom of things, a way of gaining recognition and cachet, and so prize nominations should be generous and diversified (I think The Story Prize does a much better job of this than the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, which has a free-for-all "longlist" and once skipped the shortlist).

In Other Rooms was a National Book Award Finalist, but Everything Ravaged was a New York Times Editor's Choice. I might pick Everything Ravaged, but I think the judges might pick In Other Rooms. Either one would be worthy. 

The judges are "writer A.M. Homes, journalist/blogger Carolyn Kellogg, and librarian Bill Kelly."

Winner announced on March 3rd!

The Predictive Power of Book Reviews

I’ve become disenchanted with book reviews. At one point in my life, I think I relied upon them more. Maybe I trusted the taste and judgment of the seasoned reviewers. Now, I feel a bad review has no predictive power as to whether or not I’ll like a book. A good review actually has more weight, especially if I see a cluster of good reviews. But a bad review is a coin-flip -- I might like the book, I might not. The review often tells me little. 

I had already read “A Better Angel” by Chris Adrian by the time the Los Angeles Times review came out slamming it. All of the reviewer’s problems were not only highly idiosyncratic, but simply wrongheaded. She missed the spirit and the sense of the collection. 

Or when James Wood reviewed “Atmospheric Disturbances” in the New Yorker, I listened to his complaints about the book’s postmodern elements, recognized them for his trademark taste, and his argument backfired – instead of avoiding the book, I knew I’d love it (it ended up being one of my favorite novels of 2009.

Lastly, after Michiko Kakutani's evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City” in the New York Times, I decided to read the novel anyway. I enjoyed it a great deal. It perfectly captures the emotional state of New Yorkers after 9/11 (yes, I was there), and does so in oblique and intriguing ways (the tiger, the fog, and even the coping mechanism of pot-smoking). 

I don’t think these are isolated cases or exceptions. Rather, I think they tell me about the effect book reviews have upon me, and perhaps upon others. I think this also might tell us a bit more about the power struggle going on between internet-enabled forms of word-of-mouth (any type of ranking system on Goodreads, LibraryThing, BookSwim, message boards, bloggers, tweeters, etc.) and formal book reviews. They have an inverse relationship, it seems—as word-of-mouth finds more avenues of dissemination, book reviews tank in relevance and power. 

From a professional standpoint, tanking book reviews seem a catastrophe. I say “seem” but I really do consider it a catastrophe—book reviewers are the front line of literature, and perform a vital role, even if they do sometimes turn into the Maginot Line as literature they denounced blitzkriegs past them into the sacred halls of the canon. 

But from the pragmatic standpoint of a reader, is this really a catastrophe? But that I mean: what has more predictive power: a review, or even a group of reviews, or a poll of readers, even readers similar to me (like Netflix’s “Viewers Like You”). I keep discovering that a poll of readers like me is equally efficacious to a group of reviews at telling me whether or not I will like a book. The opposite is equally true: a poll of readers unlike me is just as unhelpful as a reviewer with different tastes in telling me whether or not I’ll like a book. 

I do know that book reviews should have more importance than merely telling me whether or not I should read a book. They also perform the critical role of judging books. But to survive in this new media landscape, book reviews need to do what only they can do: describe the book well, connect the book to current books, the canon, trends, and make insightful interpretations that many readers might have otherwise have missed. 

Their primary role is not to color it by way of their idiosyncratic reaction, because there are millions of other readers out there who can perform that same role. The role of informing the reader whether or not they should read the book has been (mostly) usurped (publishers often note this diminished role by arguing that book reviews have little effect on sales). In short: more critical interpretation, less personal opinion. 

If a reviewer hates the book, then tell me so. That’s fine. But a lot of the time, I just won’t believe you.

Short Story Collections in 2010

Happy 2010, everyone. And get ready for a new spate of short fiction. We got some doozies forthcoming.

Here are ten upcoming short story collections I'm looking forward to this year.

 Sam Shepard, Day out of Days (January) 

 Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (January) Stories linked by the motif of love.

 T.C. Boyle, Wild Child (January) Boyle's one of our best. A master of the short story.

Richard Bausch, Something is Out There (February) Love the cover art.

Thomas Lynch, Apparition & Late Fictions (February) Haven't read my review copy yet. Publisher's Weekly panned it, but Kirkus praised it. Only five stories, but looking forward to the novella.

Brad Watson, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (March) 

Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (March) Been looking for more fiction from Yanique ever since I read the title story, which won the Boston Review 2005 prize.

Ron Rash, Burning Bright (March) Burning Bright review from I Read A Short Story Today. Title story first published in Ecotone, which has developed quite a nice reputation in its brief but distinguished life.

Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (March)

 Aryn Kyle, Boys and Girls Like You and Me (April) Contrary to the title, this one's all about women and girls.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. BookFox will be taking a break for a few weeks.

Looking back over this year in reading, I discovered I read about 60 books -- half short story collections and half novels, with a couple of nonfiction books thrown in. This is right about average for my reading compared to the last few years.

I always think I'll end up reading more, but the internet distracts me. Still, sixty books plus the seven magazines I read regularly, plus all my internet reading, plus grading, plus the books I don't end up finishing -- that's a pretty a large amount of prose that my eyes digest.

Every New Year's my wife and I create strategies and goals for the next years, and though I'm tempted to increase the number of books I read, I think I'll keep it the same -- 60. Because recently, even though I'm a speed reader and can blaze through a decently sized novel in a few hours, I've been training myself to read much, much slower. I like reading slowly. I learn more. I admire the ground-level work that the author performed, rather than focusing more on the global perspective of plot and character.

In the next year, I also look forward (with trepidation) to all the revolutionary changes coming over the industry. Still, I'm curious to see how it all washes up. This is a Gutenberg-sized revolution, and here we're at the cusp of it.

I hope everyone's celebrations go well.

Best Short Story Collections of the Decade

So here are my picks for best short story collections of the decade. If you want another take, check out the A.V. Club's choices -- we got a few in common, but a whole lot of differences.

If you think I missed one, you're wrong. Probably. But if you insist on the point, leave a comment. We'll hash out a few reader's favorites that seem to have been overlooked in this great decade of short story resurgence.

Pastoralia, by George Saunders (2000)

 After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami (2002)

 Things you Should Know by A.M. Holmes (2003)

 Runaway, by Alice Munro (2004)

 All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones (2006)

 Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg (2006)

 The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio (2007)

 Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolano (2007)

 Dangerous Laughter, by Steven Millhauser (2008)

 Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008)

Best Short Story Collection 2009 -- Guest Post by Larry Dark

 "The Size of the World" by Joan Silber (Norton) 

In 2004, Joan Silber published a book of stories, "Ideas of Heaven," that introduced a new way of structuring a collection. A character or other element in one story, would take center stage in the next, with the last story connecting back to the first, completing the ring. 

With last year’s collection "The Size of the World," Silber returned to this form in stories that ranged from Vietnam to Mexico, Florida, Thailand, and Sicily. Silber’s generous stories often encompass the sweep of a lifetime and engage ideas such as love, faith, and fate with a truly global perspective. And the search for the connections between and among stories becomes an engaging puzzle. Her first ring of stories was a National Book Awards and Story Prize finalist. "The Size of the World" is just as good. 

Larry Dark runs The Story Prize.

Ed. Note: Even though it's billed as a novel, "The Size of the World" is really a series of interlocking stories. And yes, it's 2008, not 2009, but that's only a year off, and really, you probably haven't read it yet.