Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating commerce. They viewed the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor as a victory for liberty and a blow against the British East India Company's trade monopoly.
Links of the week August 17 2020 (34)
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:
24 August 2020
As a result, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other platforms were free to develop business models that treated every seller and buyer - every citizen - differently. These corporations exploited this license to the fullest, and have used their power to reorganize entire realms of human activity. Amazon, Google, and Facebook match individuals to specific shoes and clothes, specific restaurants and hotels, specific movies and music, specific jobs and schools, specific drugs and hospitals, specific sexual partners, and even specific books, articles, speakers, and sources of news.
These companies are the most powerful middlemen in history. Each guards the gate to innumerable sources of essential information, services, and products. Yet thus far no governmental entity in the United States has signaled any intention of limiting the license these corporations enjoy to serve only the customers they choose to, at whatever price they decide.
When U.K. bookseller James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble a year ago, after a sale that landed it in private hands, he faced the formidable challenge of rescuing the chain from troubles largely of its own making, in the shadow of Amazon's prowess in the segment.
At the time of the sale, annual revenue at Barnes & Noble hadn't grown for seven years, declining, in fact, by some $700 million since 2015. As Amazon powered on as a top bookseller, Barnes & Noble cycled through a series of CEOs and strategies.
The temporary closure of nonessential businesses during the pandemic has panicked many a retailer, but Daunt's team has seized it as an opportunity to overhaul stores. He describes a process of tearing up the old playbook, from how books are categorized to where and how shelves are placed. Years of siloed book-buying and corporate-level planning meant some that should have been shelved together were scattered in various sections, making for an awkward flow - manga stuck behind history, for example. Above all, Daunt wants to create spaces where people can linger and discover, maybe for hours.
As the weather turns and the days shorten, as trees bend low with fruit and blackberries darken the hedges, bookshops are bracing for a bumper crop of their own. September and October are always rich, but this year is exceptional: nearly 600 books will reportedly be published in the UK on 3 September alone.
About 55% of these books are academic and professional, and will not enter a bookshop at all. But 20% more trade books will be published than on the same date last year - a rise replicated on nearly every weekend of the autumn, while Super Thursday the following month is predicted to see a 50% increase.
Partly this is because of lockdown, when most publishers moved spring books into the autumn lists or next year. But it is also because, in direct defiance of gloomy predictions about the death of the book, numbers have been rising by 5% every year of the last decade, not counting the explosion in self-published works. Sales have kept pace: last year was the strongest in the history of publishing. And 2020, against all odds, seems already to have beaten it - sales of hardbacks are, so far, 23% greater than last year's. The sense of relief is palpable.
If it hadn't been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I'm not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. But there was something else: she answers questions about herself not in sentences or paragraphs but in pages, and sometimes even chapters, as if she's been keeping the whole story of her life in her head, just waiting for someone to ask about it.
That voice matches an official photograph from her earlier days, when she was a star editor of romance novels at Dell, then a division of Doubleday, in New York. She was uncontestably beautiful, with a broad, toothy smile and a sly intelligence behind her eyes, a spray of freckles over her cheeks, and an Afro that, befitting the publishing world, was neither too corporately short nor too aggressively political. She is propped up on one elbow and leaning in toward the camera. She looks game for anything.
Romance writing has always been easy to laugh at, at least for the uninformed. You might imagine that these stories mostly involve a castle on the Scottish Highlands, inhabited by a restless warrior wearing nothing under his kilt. Or maybe you picture the broad and bare-chested phenom Fabio, taking time out from piloting his Viking ship on the high seas to attend to a buxom and bound captive down below.
But if this is your vision of the romance-writing world, you might have missed its evolution into a billion-dollar-a-year business. In 2016 romance made up 23 percent of the overall U.S. fiction market, and the net worth of some of its writers exceeds that of John Grisham (see Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel). According to Christine Larson, a romance expert and journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, 45 percent of the romance writers she surveyed made enough to support themselves without a day job-"that is shocking for any group of writers," she said-and thanks mainly to their embrace of digital publishing, 17 percent make more than $100,000 a year. Not Mark Zuckerberg money, but far more than the $45,000 median income of American working women.
The popularity of Nordic noir may seem to be fading after its heyday of the early-2010s but Norway's biggest-selling author would beg to differ. Public tax information revealed that Jo Nesbø's two companies took in more than NOK 58 million ($6.5 million) in 2019, of which NOK 45.5 million ($5.1 million) was classed as book royalties.
Most critics link the development of modern Scandinavian crime fiction to the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who together wrote ten novels about the police investigator Martin Beck in the 1960s and 1970s. They introduced a strong sense of place and thick layer of social criticism into the story, characteristics that have gone on to define the genre.
Nesbø's work been praised for expanding the crime genre with psychological insight and a globalized outlook. While critics point to his alcoholic, anti-hero police investigator as a tired trope, Nesbø was one of the writers responsible for popularizing the trope in the first place.
Of all of the forms of fiction, "flash fiction," which is typically defined as being a story less than 1,000 words, is the only one described with a metaphor. As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife about what to call these short stories of under 1,000 words. He'd been calling them "blasters," but that moniker didn't ring with any poetic allure. Right at that moment, a bolt of lightning struck, and the dark night lit up with a flash. "Call them flash," his wife said. And the name of a genre was born.
The irony is that flash, despite being the smallest of fictional forms, breeds sub-genres and an ever-flowing list of new names. Flash stories are often called miniatures, short shorts, or postcard stories. There is the drabble (stories that are exactly 100 words), micro-fiction (stories under 400 words), and hint fiction (stories under 25 words).
My dog has a carbon footprint. She loves food for one thing, especially meat, and sometimes I keep the heat turned up a few degrees for her when I leave the house. In a strictly economic sense, her productivity (the ratio between output and input volume) is zero. She has no measureable output-she doesn't work, which is ironic because she's classified as a "working dog," bred to herd cattle. She is not a service animal, insofar as she doesn't wear a vest and no one has ever filed any paperwork, but she does have a job, and that job is complex and important, and therefore worthy of consideration.
Dogs cannot be characterized by dialogue or thoughts (anthropomorphized interiority, maybe), so why is literature so obsessed with them? Dogs change humans. Dogs reveal human wants and vulnerability. Dogs, ultimately, make humans more human. So, if my dog%u2019s primary job is to make me more human, then she is productive, very productive, even measurably productive in an economic sense.
The 1970s detective would not be an American pacifist ready to burn his draft card down on Main Street, nor would he be a Lieutenant Calley, murdering civilians and singing his own battle hymn. Detectives of this era attempted at once to recreate and to atone for a manliness of the past in order to situate themselves in the strange new present. [Robert B.] Parker's introduction of Spenser became the main event in 1970s hard-boiled literature.
Spenser has a sardonic nostalgia, but rather than being a self-aggrandizing or bitter has-been, he thrives in the cultural weeds of the early 1970s. He is kind to others, ready to protect the weak, and is indestructible. Spenser is also clever and poetic, fond of quoting Wallace Stevens. He is even a gourmet cook, though he notes that if he were a woman, no one would call him a gourmet; they would just call him a housewife. One critic remarked that Parker had essentially created a hard-boiled superhero, noting Spenser's bulletproof build and moral toughness. But despite some improbably impressive fighting skills, he also deals with the human concerns of how to be a responsible individual, a male adult, and an instrument of justice in a time of widespread disillusion.
I didn't have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do as a young person at all. I knew I needed a job, and I wanted to do something that didn't bum me out.
I was the first person of color to be the director of the National Book Foundation. It's been an extraordinary experience, and I hope it remains so until the bitter end when I leave in December. Publishing and books can feel exclusive. It can be a really difficult community to be a part of. People are really proud of what it means to make a book and to live in the world of books. It's a relationship business. I wanted it to feel like a party for everyone. I didn't want people to feel they weren't the right color or age for the party, or that they didn't live in the right place to be invited. I wanted to make this be something that all people can enjoy.
Publishing is going through a reckoning right now. Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ does a report on demographics, and it's very, very clear that you don't have a lot of people of color sitting at the table. One of the big conversations our industry is having is: What do you do with data that tells us we're not diverse enough for the year 2020? We make the culture - we make books. If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.
17 August 2020
I have a philosophy that I apply to writing crime fiction-a way that I think about what makes readers read, and also a way that I justify creating scenes that depict, for example, a vivid murder, a harrowing sexual assault, or a gut-wrenching child abduction.
I don't claim my thinking is unique or exceptional. I don't always adhere to it. It possibly derives self-consciously from the way I stumbled out of literature (short stories, the Fiction shelf) and into crime writing. My philosophy is a bit presumptuous, too, and I plan to end this piece by asking your forgiveness.
But here it is. I believe that crime fiction is at its most meaningful (compelling, relevant, lasting) when the reader is complicit in the crime.
What I mean is this: in a story, when crime is not evil's cause but its effect, when the transgression is not singular but collective, when the sin is a festering infection countenanced by the culture at large, such that the criminality itself is the inevitable skin boil - and in real life, we look away, repulsed - this is when the reader is complicit, and in complicity the reader is most engaged.
Writers who find themselves mired in procrastination would do well to take a page from Marcel Proust's most famous book. Specifically, a page from In Search of Lost Time in manuscript form. Nothing more powerfully illustrates the truth of that creative-writing-class maxim, ‘writing is rewriting', than the liberally crossed-out, lavishly annotated, occasionally doodled-upon notebooks in which Proust composed his seminal, seven-volume text.
While their faded ink and age-dappled paper evoke physical fragility, what they showcase is a robust, almost aggressive determination. This is the heavy lifting of literary endeavour made manifest; there is no preciousness here, nothing is sacred. However much Proust doubted himself - and he doubted his chosen art form, too - he pressed on with a monumental task that would occupy him for the rest of his life. As for that iconic morsel of memory-laden cake, the madeleine, it started out as a slice of toast and a cup of tea.
Dave Robicheaux is an amalgamation of swashbuckling detective, political activist, and Catholic theologian. A literary emblem of Raymond Chandler's theory that the crime investigator is modernity's substitute for the medieval knight, the protagonist of most of James Lee Burke's novels is a flawed and complex hero whose struggles against the mafia, serial killers, child predators, and bigots and bullies of fascistic ideologies magnify into stories with implications so large that they feel borderline cosmic.
"The most important battles happen in places no one cares about," Robicheaux is fond of declaring. The sociopolitical and spiritual significance of the seemingly provincial is a view that the character shares with his creator. Burke was born in Houston, and raised on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. He earned his Bachelor's Degree at the University of Louisiana, and a Master's in English at the University of Missouri. Before writing multiple bestselling mysteries, and earning the rare distinction of two-time Edgar award winner and Guggenheim fellow, Burke worked as a truck driver, social worker, land surveyor, and college professor.
For this installment in a series of interviews with contemporary poets, Peter Mishler corresponded with Will Harris. Will Harris is a writer and editor from London. His poems and essays have been published in the TLS, Granta, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books. He received a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019 and co-edited the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan. His debut poetry collection RENDANG (UK: Granta; US: Wesleyan University Press) is a Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020.
Will Harris: The idea of "a life in poetry" scares me a little. It makes poetry sound like an institution or a nation state-somewhere you can be kicked out of, that you need the right credentials for. I sometimes have this feeling of being outside of poetry-outside of myself, too-trying to break in. I can only suspend the fear for long enough to write if I tell myself that poetry, like love, is something you do. It's not a divine state. Not a gift. It exists while you're doing it.
At least ten times a day I ask myself, "What the f*ck is wrong with people?"
I suspect I'm not alone in this; we live in particularly trying times and people prove their idiocy or ugliness on the daily.
But even before our current challenges, I've spent my life perpetually flummoxed and intrigued by a broad array of actions taken by my fellow humans, ranging from the erosion of common courtesy to the commission of heinous crimes. I want to understand the psychology of the guy who abandons his shopping cart in the middle of a parking space and I also want to crack the psyche of the family man who slaughters his entire family.
Writing is how I process the world. Through absorbing what's around me and then turning my writer's lens on what I've observed, I explore my fears, anxieties, and confusion as well as promote my hopes, visions and desires for the world I'd like to see. Through digging deep to create complex, relatable, and empathetic characters, I help myself make sense of behavior that otherwise leaves me back where I began this article, shaking my head and demanding: "what the f*ck is wrong with people?"
Three of publishing's most important organizations have teamed up to write a letter to the chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee investigating the market power of Big Tech to press their case that, over the last several years, Amazon's growing dominance over book publishing and bookselling has fundamentally altered the competitive framework of the industry. If Amazon's power is left unchecked, the letter continues, competition within publishing could diminish even more.
Amazon's power is far reaching, the letter states, including using predatory pricing and its market dominance "to engage in systematic below-cost pricing of books to squash competition in the book selling industry as a whole." As for the entire publishing industry, the letter states, "we believe that Amazon acts anti-competitively in multiple ways, dictating the economic terms of its relationships with suppliers so that publishers, their authors, and the booksellers who sell on Amazon pay more each year for Amazon's distribution and advertising services but receive less each year in return."
The Black Writers' Guild has said it is "pleased" with the progress made since the publication of its open letter in June, which called on major publishing houses to address the racial inequalities in their organisations.
The Guild is roughly halfway through a series of virtual meetings with publishers and on track to complete them by mid-September. "Robust discussions" have been had, the Guild said, including honest feedback where it believes well-intentioned schemes already underway "may prove futile". It is understood major houses including Penguin Random House, Hachette UK and HarperCollins are among those the Guild has held discussions with, in addition to some independent presses.
On the heels of the Guild's open letter in mid-June, signed by more than 100 writers, leading houses - including Hachette UK, Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing, Bonnier Books UK, Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books and S&S UK - all conceded the pace of change was too slow and the industry had work to do. The Guild's letter was specific in its requests, asking publishers for transparency through audits to provide data on the submission-to-acquisition ratio of black authors and the median and mode averages of the advances of black authors, as well as to "immediately" address where core leadership boards lack black members and the "worrying absence" of black publishing staff in key positions in sales, marketing and publicity departments.
In 1973, Graham Greene wrote an introduction to a bookselling friend's memoir. As Greene was one of the most respected writers of his day, this was no small gesture, but the author was also a committed bibliophile. The book dealer and biographer John Baxter's memoir A Pound of Paper contains treasurable glimpses of Greene deliberately signing obscure copies of his works in far-off locations, in the certain knowledge that these items would become hugely sought-after rarities, and he remains one of the few serious literary figures who also understood the glamour and romance of the bookselling trade. In his introduction, he openly acknowledged this, writing ‘Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.'
If Greene was alive today, he would look at his beloved second-hand and antiquarian bookshops with an air of sorrow, leavened with a touch of bewilderment. The recent news that one of Charing Cross's most famous booksellers, Francis Edwards, was to close after 150 years, maintaining only a presence in Hay-on-Wye, was greeted without the anguish that it might have been otherwise. After all, covid closures are ten a penny these days, and in the era of Amazon and Abebooks, maintaining an expensive shop in central London without regular footfall might seem a folly.
Until quite recently, I hadn't finished a book since the end of January. In that sense, I'm not so unusual-a 2018 study from the Pew Research Group revealed 24 percent of Americans hadn't read an entire book, or even a portion of one, in the 12 months prior-but this is very unusual for me, a person who touts nine years of completed reading challenges on his Goodreads profile (with an average annual goal of 75 books).
The reasons that 24% of people don't read are varied, murky and, in some cases, troubling (electronic distraction is one thing, the link between poverty and literacy is another thing entirely). But my own reasons for abandoning my most recent read on page 140 are abundantly clear and can generally be grouped under "coronavirus pandemic, the": I no longer have a commute, and it turns out I do my best reading on the subway. Forget reading on lunch breaks; now I eat with my kids. Evenings? That's doom-scrolling time! Even as book sales are booming and less-distracted readers are eagerly plowing through their to-read lists, I've been unable to concentrate on anything longer than the latest harrowing essay in The Atlantic.
Middlemarch is to be published for the first time in almost 150 years under George Eliot's real name, Mary Ann Evans, alongside 24 other historic works by women whose writing has only ever previously been in print under their male pseudonyms.
Now the work voted the greatest British novel of all time is finally coming out as Evans's, as part of the Reclaim Her Name campaign from the Women's prize for fiction and prize sponsor Baileys, to mark the 25th anniversary of the award.
Women's prize sponsor Baileys has apologised for putting an illustration of the wrong black abolitionist on the cover of a book in a series republishing female authors who wrote under male pseudonyms - a project that has received mixed reactions since it launched earlier this week.
The Reclaim Her Name campaign, announced on Wednesday, sees 25 titles being republished as free ebooks to celebrate 25 years of the Women's prize for fiction, with print editions donated to selected libraries around the UK. More than 3,000 pseudonymous writers were considered by a team of researchers commissioned by Baileys. Selected authors included Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, and Fatemeh Farahani, who published poems in 19th-century Iran as Shahein Farahani.
The Women's Prize for Fiction recently debuted an upcoming project which will mark the 25th anniversary of the prize: an initiative called "Reclaim Her Name" (#ReclaimHerName) which republishes famous works by twenty-five female authors who published under male nom-de-plumes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including George Eliot, George Sand, Vernon Lee, and Arnold Petri. The thing is, the initiative is republishing these books using the authors' given, female names, rather than their male pseudonyms. Many have applauded this initiative. No. Stop applauding. Stop applauding now.
Produced in collaboration with the Woman's Prize's longtime sponsor Bailey's Irish Cream, the initiative presents itself as redeeming an unsavory aspect of history, paying service and giving credit to women whose "true" selves were erased from publishing history. The thing is, the eager but lumbering feminism behind this initiative ignores that all of these women chose to publish under male pseudonyms. This initiative's insistence on using their female names blatantly ignores their own decisions about how to present their works, and in some instances, perhaps even how to present themselves.