"I hate my job," she began, "and I go to work every day and I can't bear it, and it's just . . ." she pointed down at the piece of paper on her desk. "This is what I want to do. And I feel like I look at all of these writers and painters that we read and talk about and they're famous and they have piles of money and sure, it's possible for them . . . but can someone like me really be a writer?"
Links of the week December 16 2019 (51)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
16 December 2019
In fact, the very act of enrolling in this introductory class was her attempt to quell that voice that had so long said she couldn't do it. But then, within that classroom, spending 75 minutes twice a week parsing the styles and techniques of the people who had succeeded at doing what she had only just convinced herself might be possible, or at least worth a shot, she was starting to reckon with that same feeling that the world of art, and a life in service of it, was not for people like her.
You know them as bodice rippers. The kind of books where a damsel in distress waits around for a hero to come rescue her and then they live happily ever after. But during the last 10 or so years, that perception has started to shift, thanks to the nuanced, fiercely feminist, and yes, sexy stories that have emerged.
"Often people hear romance novel and have a very specific picture in their minds: maybe a historical novel, perhaps with a specific cover model, and lots of fuchsia and teal and flowing hair," says Sarah Wendell, founder of the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms. "They may also think of recent blockbuster erotic novels, or variations of the same. And much as there are more space movies than Star Wars, there are so many different, wonderful novels that could be classified as romance fiction."
The stereotypical picture Wendell is describing is, in fact, a bodice ripper: the first contemporary iteration of romance novels that were published in the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. After Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower was published in 1972-the problematic love story between the innocent Heather Simmons and lusty adventurer Captain Brandon Birmingham-a new generation of sexually explicit, pulp-y romances exploded onto the market. And while bodice rippers birthed our modern era of romance novels, over time these stories have evolved beyond their '70s origins. As with any other form of entertainment, they've caught up with the times.
Today's post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page-the first page-of a work-in-progress.
When I met with my mentor in his Greenwich Village duplex, we'd sit side by side at his dining room table walled in by hundreds of books. Armed with his trusty Mont Blanc, Don Newlove slashed through my sentences, slathering them with ink, making me read my version first, then his, and tell him why his was better!
For about eight months we did this, until I bridled at my mentor's "improvements." By then it hardly mattered, since I'd learned most of what Don had to teach me, which boiled down to this: Never let a dead, droopy, or sawdusty sentence-a sentence not worth reading once, let alone twice-stand. In those eighteen months, thanks to Don I became the next best thing to a poet: a stylist.
As the deadline looms, we ask former winner Jane Davis what success in our awards for self-publishing meant to them
With only just over two weeks to go for authors who have self-published an adult fiction or children's book in 2019 to submit their work for the next Selfies Awards, we contacted the 2019 winner, Jane Davis, whose exceptional novel Smash all the Windows recounts the emotional fall out after a miscarriage of justice is corrected.
"I am a great advocate of entering competitions", said Davis. "Ten years ago, a competition win enabled me to give up full-time work to dedicate more time to writing, and prize money has paid for all of my self-publishing endeavours to date. My books may not be huge sellers compared with genre fiction, but the pressure of not having to worry about making individual books 'pay for themselves' means that I can focus on quality and produce a legacy of work that I am proud of.
Part of what makes VanderMeer's weirdness so striking is his ability to create believably strange natural worlds from a place of granular fascination. He's often credited this to his time living in tropical locales, especially Florida. VanderMeer has described images in Annihilation inspired by the state as "ecstatically beautiful," though others may find them startling. His outlook is one that's familiar to me. Growing up in South Florida, I remember seeing the state's overwhelming abundance of swarming, growing, dying, consuming creatures as quotidian: gators and buzzards threatening to snatch small dogs, all the leathery flattened toads in the road with their innards artfully askew.
VanderMeer has always cared about bringing an understanding of animal behavior and biology to his work while knowing his limitations. If it's impossible to fully understand how another human thinks, it's even harder to extrapolate how an animal's mind works. The animals in Dead Astronauts, though, have all been messed with by humans, and adapted into something that more resembles human consciousness. "That gives me the kind of narrow pathway to still try to do something that goes beyond the human, but has a certain amount of plausibility to it," VanderMeer said.
Even the greenest of graduate students have heard "publish or perish," but rarely are they instructed on exactly how to accomplish that or even where to start. The world of publishing can feel intimidating to those who've already pumped out a few books, let alone the uninitiated.
To find your way into this world, you must gain access to the gatekeepers - that is, get your idea in front of book editors. How you do that depends on whether you are approaching an academic press or a commercial "trade" publisher. I'll focus here on university and other scholarly presses because that is the most common path to publication for Ph.D.s.
While first contact with a trade-press editor comes via an agent, academic publishers are a whole lot more democratic. Anyone with a book idea can pitch to a scholarly press editor and get a fair hearing. But, as with anything, if you hope to convince a book editor, you have to make it easy for them to say yes.
Galley Beggar Press, the tiny literary publisher behind acclaimed novels including the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport and women's prize for fiction winner A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, has been forced to make a public appeal for support after the Book People's fall into administration left it with a £40,000 hole in its finances.
Galley Beggar's co-director Eloise Millar turned to crowdfunding on Wednesday to ask for urgent help from readers as it faces "the biggest crisis in its seven-year history". The publisher entered into a partnership with the discount retailer earlier this year when Lucy Ellmann's novel was shortlisted for the Booker. Galley Beggar produced 8,000 special editions of the novel, costing it around £40,000.
Less than an hour after the fundraiser launched, Galley Beggar had raised more than the £15,000 it initially asked for. It subsequently raised the goal to £40,000 with funds quickly exceeding £30,000. Fellow publishers, authors and booksellers are rallying behind the Norwich-based publisher, with donors including the National Centre for Writing and Arts Council England's literature director Sarah Crown.
In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd. It was seeking an English-language translator for a trippy science-fiction novel titled "The Three-Body Problem." Liu - an American computer programmer turned corporate lawyer turned science-fiction writer - was a natural choice: fluent in Mandarin, familiar with Chinese sci-fi tropes and culture and a rising star in the genre. Liu had only translated short fiction at the time, though, and capturing the novel in all its complexity seemed daunting.
The success of "The Three-Body Problem" not only turned Liu Cixin into a global literary star; it opened the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction. This, in turn, has made Ken Liu a critical conduit for Chinese writers seeking Western audiences, a literary brand as sought-after as the best-selling authors he translates. (Among Chinese sci-fi authors and fans, he is often referred to affectionately as Xiao Liu, Little Liu, to distinguish him from Liu Cixin, who is known as Da Liu, Big Liu.) Liu's translations have reshaped the global science-fiction landscape, which has long been dominated by American and British authors. Over the past decade, he has translated five novels and more than 50 works of short fiction by dozens of Chinese authors, many of whom he has discovered and championed himself.
The richest literary prize in India - the JCB Prize for Literature, which confers ₹25 lakh on a writer of fiction, in English or translation-has already been announced. But there is still much to look forward to in the country's literary prize calendar, with the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature to be declared in Nepal on 16 December, followed by the Crossword Book Award in January. This is also a good time to look back on the year gone by and take stock of some of the bizarre twists and turns prize cultures have taken, globally, of 2019.
The most notorious example of misappropriation of such power this year is in the co-awarding of the Booker Prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. By brazenly flouting the rules of the prize, which stipulates that the jury pick only one winner, the judges unleashed a torrent of criticism. The move was deemed especially preposterous because one of the jury members defended the choice of awarding Atwood by praising her stunning body of work, in direct contravention of the rules. The Booker Prize is conferred on a writer on the basis of one book of singular merit, not on a lifetime's achievements. While the prize committee denied any such motivation, the damage had been done, and irreversibly so.