The pandemic virus, 2019-nCoV (better known as the coronavirus virus) is already having an impact on the global publishing business. While the majority of Chinese companies are closed for several weeks during the long Chinese lunar new year celebrations, many will remain closed for much longer as a consequence of the outbreak. At present, there is a compulsory closure for all factories, banks, and offices until February 10.
Links of the week February 3 2020 (06)
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:
10 February 2020
Publishers are doing their part to help China cope with the pandemic. Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature, have removed their paywalls to recent studies related to the new coronavirus; Pearson is offering free online learning resources for home-bound school children. In China, more than 75 Chinese publishers are offering free online courses, e-books and audiobooks for the public during the period when people are forced to stay at home.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman," wrote Virginia Woolf. Today, Anonymous is probably an outraged employee in a public service: a member of the legal profession blowing the whistle on the system, or a medic who has seen one too many patients expiring on a trolley. This month the tally of the unknown author swells again, with the publication of Can You Hear Me?, a paramedic's memoir published under the pseudonym Jake Jones.
For readers, the anonymous author holds a simple and compelling promise. Here is someone who - by concealing their identity - can reveal the complete and shocking truth. Many anonymous authors say this is precisely why they've chosen to remain hidden. The Secret Barrister, whose anonymous exposé of the criminal justice system was published in 2018, explains from behind the barrier of email: "Anonymity means I can criticise institutions, organisations and players in the justice system without feeling that I have to modify my commentary with a nervous eye on my real-life practice."
I was going through my notebooks the other day when I came across a piece of paper; a torn scrap on which I'd written hurriedly a name and the plot number of a grave. Writing a family story is a question of finding where the bodies are buried and this, in very real terms, had been the first clue. The original had fluttered from a file my father had been holding, it had landed in my hand as we'd stood together in his studio, I had copied it down on a scrap of paper and taken it home, it had marked a beginning and an end. Find my grave-a message from an uncle long gone whom I'd never met, yet his demand had arisen, up from the depths of who knows where, and had circled round and round my head. It had made me go that day to see my father and ask what had happened to his brother.
Sitting here with my novel beside me on the desk, it still amazes me that the story could be condensed into a book. It was so complicated. It covered so much ground. Likewise, the genre that I settled on-a fictionalized account of a true story, sometimes called auto-fiction or the non-fiction novel-is also a wonder to me in that I was naïve enough when I set out to not know what kind of book I was writing. When a writer is given a story it is exactly that, a gift, to do with what we will. I could have made it into anything; a memoir, a biography, I could have used the true story as a jumping-off point, freeing my hand to play fast and loose with the plot. I could have changed all the names and been opaque as to how true or false it was, protecting my family from attention by keeping the veil drawn. I could have shut it in a drawer and refused to write it; I could have left it buried. But I didn't do any of those things.
There are so many moving parts an author needs to pay attention to when writing fiction-POV, character development, narrative structure, happy-hour specials-that it's easy to miss the small stuff, the things that we think we instinctively understand and already do very well.
How dialogue is set off from the rest of the narrative is one of those little things that makes a big difference in how your story reads and what the reader understands about you, including:
Are you a Serious Author, an author of genre fiction, or a clueless dilettante?
One way to look at it is to consider any movement away from the exclusive use of said or asked a step away from the very "best" writing, from the kind of writing intended to be considered "literary." If you spend any small amount of time examining blogs or books on writing, you will find that this is a very common directive: use said, asked, and nothing else.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the most common works in conjunction with that other famous maxim: show, don't tell. If you use the word ranted to describe the speech act of one of your characters, you're telling your readers how to understand what is happening rather than illustrating through action and dialogue.
About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. She was shocked by what she found.
"I thought it was going to be a happy progress report," she said in an interview. "Instead it was a bad news day."
Books written by women were less likely to be reviewed or win the most prominent book awards, Swan said. Some of those numbers have shifted in recent years. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a group that tracks the gender imbalance in major publications, reported gains for female writers at several of them in 2018, and writers such as Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Susan Choi and Sarah M. Broom took home several of the highest-profile book awards last year.
But Swan teamed up with a friend who works in book publishing, Janice Zawerbny, in an effort to continue to level the playing field. The result is a new annual prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which starting in 2022 will award 150,000 Canadian dollars, about $113,000, for a work of fiction published in the previous year by a woman or nonbinary person. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It is a sum that dwarfs the prize money for literary awards such as the Booker Prize (50,000 pounds, roughly $65,000), the Pulitzer Prize for fiction ($15,000) and the National Book Award ($10,000). The Nobel Prize for literature is one exception, with laureates receiving nearly $1 million.
Mary Higgins Clark, who published her first mystery in 1975 and went on to be known as the Queen of Suspense, died January 31 of natural causes at her home in Naples, Fla. She was 92.
During her long writing career, Clark wrote 38 suspense novels, four collections of short stories, a historical novel, a memoir, and two children's books. With her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, she coauthored five more suspense novels, and cowrote the Under Suspicion series, comprising The Cinderella Murder, All Dressed in White, The Sleeping Beauty Killer, Every Breath You Take, and You Don't Own Me with bestselling author Alafair Burke. Among her best-known works were her 1975 novel Where Are the Children?-not her debut, but her first successful novel-and 2005's No Place Like Home.
All Clark's books were published by Simon & Schuster, and the company said that more than 100 million copies of her books are in print in the U.S. Most of her books also became international bestsellers as well. In a memo to employees announcing Clark's death, S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy called her "the First Lady of Simon & Schuster" and a natural born storyteller.
Women's Prize for Fiction to mark 25th anniversary with 'Winner of Winners' contest | The Bookseller
The Women's Prize for Fiction is marking its 25th anniversary with a campaign encouraging people to read all the previous award-holders before a "Winner of Winners prize" is chosen through a public vote.
A campaign called #ReadingWomen will challenge readers to plough through the 25 previous books, written by authors including Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith.
The campaign will spotlight each winner in chronological order on its website and social channels, one every 10 days, starting on 17th February with the prize%u2019s first winner, A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore (Penguin). Readers will be able to access accompanying resources for each book including new reading guides, extract widgets provided by Nielsen and exclusive author content. It culminates in the autumn, when the "Winner of Winners" from across the past 25 years will be chosen in a public vote.
Find this on the Women's Prize for Fiction website on 17 February
As a Latina author of political romantic suspense, I have been fascinated by the unfolding controversy around the novel American Dirt, the story of a mother and son who flee to the US, escaping Mexican drug cartel violence. The book has come under fire because the author-who is neither Mexican nor an immigrant-received a seven-figure deal for a story that has been called "immigrant trauma porn." There has been a proliferation of essays about race and representation, as well as the lack of racial equity in the publishing industry. There are also wide implications for this book in the ongoing feud between literary and genre fiction.
The history of the literary vs. genre divide is centuries old. The modern American divide dates back to the early 1900s when many of the publishing houses were founded by children of the captains of industry who made their fortunes during the industrial revolution. These wealthy heirs wanted to build lives of social relevance although they didn't have to work for a living. This particular group decided to become patrons of the arts and to fund presses. The writers they selected would be writing great works of art and meaning, and the wealthy heirs would get to pal around with them. Like so many institutions founded by the wealthy, explicit conversations about money were considered impolite.
Sometimes, allies can be more harmful than enemies. American Dirt, a novel about a mother and son fleeing a drugs cartel in Mexico, has the literary world clutching its pearls. The problem? Does the writer, Jeanine Cummins (whose grandmother is Puerto Rican but who has identified as white) have the right (or the ability) to portray an authentic Mexican story? The background of the author, something that should have been an irrelevant matter, became the focal point of reviews.
In the New York Times, a white reviewer agonised over whether it was her place to review such a book at all. "I could never speak to the accuracy of the book's representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants; I have never been Mexican or a migrant," Lauren Groff wrote. To her horror, she discovers that the writer herself is not Mexican nor a migrant.
This well-meaning nonsense got us, the readers, nowhere. The question that a review answers is simply, is the book any good? If it were a work of nonfiction, all these questions about identity, access and the problematic "white gaze" as Groff called it, become more relevant. But American Dirt is a novel, and a thriller at that, so the angst over the accuracy of its portrayal, rather than whether the world feels authentic, seems misplaced and forced.
Ask someone who works in publishing what they think of American Dirt and they might tell you they're not the best person to speak to the situation. Or that they haven't read the novel. They might directly reference their privilege, then suggest you ask one of the handful of Latinx people who edit or sell books.
This was the reaction from myriad publishing professionals when questions were put to them about the latest controversy that has engulfed their business.
Privately, many in publishing have seized on the vitriol that has been directed at Cummins and, to a lesser extent, Flatiron as the disconcerting takeaway of the affair. They've witheringly referenced the "mob mentality" of the online attacks and said that, sadly, this is what stands for public discourse in our "cancel culture."
Other insiders said they believe the controversy raises important issues about the problematic reality that, in publishing, the decision makers are overwhelmingly white.