There comes a moment in every long-running series character's journey to step out of time to join the pantheon of the greats and live forever. So why has author Lee Child denied Jack Reacher-the current King of Crime Fiction - immortality?
Links of the week July 5 2021 (27)
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:
12 July 2021
Like everyone else in the free world, I'm a fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. Reacher is a modern-day Conan, roaming the land without attachment or possessions, stumbling into trouble then moving on the second he's crushed it into dust. Child injects just enough hard-boiled metaphor into his lean, mean prose to keep us aware that while the author has chops, he's sparing with the hatchet.
Before the Jack Reacher series became the juggernaut we know today, Child made the decision to age Reacher in real time. Which leads to one of the unintentional problems caused by lasting success: Jack Reacher is on his way to becoming a senior citizen.
Jonathan Crane on capturing a varied and fragmented society in fiction
My novel We Need To Talk is in many ways a consequence of the life I lived through my thirties. For a decade I moved around from town to town, itinerant and rootless. I lived in countless house-shares, in backpackers' hostels; I worked more bad jobs than I care to remember, in pubs, clubs, warehouses, offices, gardens. I was seeing life, and society, from different angles, meeting people who confounded my expectations, who found their own ways of negotiating life, and who carried on through difficult times.
That phase was the inspiration for much of the book. It opened my eyes to the different realities people experience, and this guided me as I populated the novel's fictional town of Sudleigh with characters from across the class spectrum. Then, as I began binding together the stories to form the novel, I played with intersections and disconnections between those characters, exploring community and individualism within the container of the town. The stories worked together to build a portrait of contemporary, small-town England, acknowledging the dual forces of cohesion and atomisation at play within society.
RL Stine may be one of the most successful authors of our era, but, being a modest and amusing fellow, he'd much rather talk about other writers.
"I've actually done entire interviews about the author Sebastian Barry, " says the Goosebumps creator. "He's a really good friend of ours in Wicklow. I think he's the best prose stylist on Earth. I really do. We should just talk about him."
No one, however, thought to write such spooks and frights into a children's book; no one, that is, until RL Stine.
"I was always surprised there weren't more protests," says Stine. "I expected there would be a lot more trouble. Especially from conservative areas. The thing is that we had so much support from librarians and teachers. And that really helped a lot. Now, we've been around so long, people just don't even think about it."
Stine is best known as the author of Goosebumps, the children's horror-book franchise that, since it debuted in the early 1990s, has spawned TV series, video games, plastic masks, its own land in a Disney theme park, and a West End theatre show.
Everything from poetry, short stories, essays and more esoteric forms of writing can now find a home in what has become a welcome and flourishing scene
None of us foresaw how long lockdown would last or what the outcome would be. One unexpected result has been an increase in the number of people who have used the time to tap into their creativity and get writing. And to cater for the increase in output, there has been a surge in new literary journals and online publications.
Tolka, Beir Bua, Strukturiss, Riverbed Review and Sonder are just some of the new titles being created to publish, in a variety of forms, writers' experiences.
"The pandemic has given people permission to be creative and do something for themselves, writing about our own impressions. There has been so much experience of isolation and anxiety in lockdown, putting pen to paper helps to make sense of things, if only to express how we feel," says Claire Hennessy of Banshee Lit, who along with writers Laura Jane Cassidy and Eimear Ryan, produce "a selection box" of mainly women's writing.
Christine Smallwood's recent novel The Life of the Mind - a bleak, funny tour of academia's outer fringe - offers a lament for the state of email. Dorothy, the book's grad-student heroine, "used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links." Emails had been the way Dorothy and her friends "crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives," Smallwood writes. "That way of life, alas, had ended." Now the emails they exchange are perfunctory, businesslike, "and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media."
Would it be a consolation to Dorothy to know that long emails aren't quite dead? I now get emails that are longer than ever, in fact. They strain against the confines of Gmail, these emails; they demand to be opened in new tabs. The videos and links are still there, and often ideas, too. In no sense, however, are these emails "just for me." These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.
Despite the fact that she wrote 33 novels and 56 stories about him, Agatha Christie wasn't overly fond of her iconic detective, Hercule Poirot. The author described the character as a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep," and resented that his popularity meant that her publishers were reluctant to let her experiment with new, Poirot-free ideas.
After writing 14 books about Poirot, Christie created a new character: Ariadne Oliver, "a mystery novelist who despises her most famous creation." In one of her appearances, Oliver says that if she ever encountered her fictional creation in real life, she'd "do a better murder than any I've ever invented."
Now more than ever, novelists are facing up to the unthinkable: the climate crisis. Claire Armitstead talks to Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh and more about the new cli-fi
In September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire, tweeted a photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon course as wildfires raged in the background. "In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot," he wrote of the picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who spotted the photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane. Everything about this story - the image, the circumstances - seems stranger than fiction.
The 2021 trade campaign to mark National Poetry Day (NPD) on 7th October is spotlighting 43 new poetry books from 26 different publishers, in a year that sees more recommendations from indie presses than ever before.
This year also marks the youngest ever poet featured in the recommended reading lists. Nadim, aged four, author of Take Off Your Brave: Poems Just for You (Walker Books), is featured alongside Yapping Away by NPD ambassador Joshua Seigal (Bloomsbury Education) and Sofia the Dreamer and her Magical Afro by Jessica Wilson (Tallawah Publishing). The full list of recommended titles can be viewed online.
‘Changing the world is hard and the highest ideals may have unintended consequences,' writes Richard Charkin in his column of queries on issues in the publishing industry's self-examination.
The reality of today is the realization of racial inequality, class division, intolerance of sexual choices, gender discrimination covert and overt, and populist nationalism threatening or even causing actual war. Add to the mix the impact and consequences of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and it really does not feel like the age of Aquarius or even the relative prosperity and stability of the past 50 years. Many publishers around the world are doing their best to respond to these challenges. Audits of gender, race, and sexuality of employees and authorship are undertaken, published, and followed up.
You probably won't have heard about sensitivity readers, but across the pond they are already an essential part of fiction.
Sensitivity readers are freelance copy editors who publishers pay to cancel-proof their new books. They read books that feature identities or experiences that are outside of the lived experience of the author. They then critique the writing through the prism of what they claim to be their own authoritative life experience to guide the author toward more authentic representation. For example, the white author Jodi Picoult used a sensitivity reader for her novel about a black nurse who cares for the children of white supremacists.
For critics, these individuals are the latest stage of the culture wars: woke-ifying new books before readers even have the chance to read them. For publishers they offer a seductively cheap way of reducing the risk of a book or its author being cancelled and the ensuing reputational and profit damage to the firm. To become a sensitivity reader you have to advertise your suffering - create and market a CV of otherness, of emotional pain, trauma, credentialising your oppression to enter a victim-for-hire system.
James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, discusses Covid-19 closures, paying staff the living wage and saving Europe's largest bookstore.
At a midweek lunchtime in late June, a woman browsed the travel-writing shelves at Waterstones Piccadilly in central London. The shop, which claims to be Europe's largest bookstore, was otherwise quiet. James Daunt, Waterstones' managing director, gestured to the woman from the shop's café, where he was sipping a coffee opposite me. "We all know she is picking out a book that she can get from Amazon and it would save her a quid, or whatever it is," he said. "But as it pops through her letter box she will get only a fraction of the enjoyment that she would if she buys it here."
The curation of an inspiring browsing space is paramount to his business strategy. "A lot of it is visual - the attractiveness of books - and then it's how do you get the right titles, the right juxtaposition? How do you tease people? How do you amuse people? How do you get people into your shop, and how do you keep them there?" He nodded towards the woman again. "And in half an hour's time she'll probably still be there. Now, if we've done it well, she'll also walk out with something. Most importantly, she will have had a really nice time."
In the first half of 2020, unit sales of print books surprised many in the industry by posting a 2.9% increase over the same period in 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, overcoming a slump in sales in early spring following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Print sales finished 2020 up 8.2% over 2019, and that strong performance continued into 2021, with units jumping 18.5% in the first six months over the comparable period in 2020. With the exception of the juvenile nonfiction category, all the major publishing categories had double-digit sales increases in the first half of the year. Backlist had the strongest gains, up 21.4%, but frontlist sales were also solid, rising 12.4%.
The increase in the first half of 2021 was led by the adult fiction category, where units rose 30.7%. The top seller in the category was Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, which sold more than 558,000 copies since its release in early February (see "2021 Bestselling Print Books [So Far]," p. 6). The other top sellers in adult fiction were a mix of new releases and backlist titles. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens took two spots on the category bestseller list: the trade paperback edition sold more than 294,000 copies following its publication at the end of March, while the hardcover edition was #20, selling nearly 151,000 copies.
Online bookseller Bookshop.org is on track this month to surpass $15 million returned to independent bookstores since the company began in 2019. That figure is in addition to the $250,000 it donated to Binc's "Survive to Thrive" campaign. "It is a milestone we are anticipating surpassing by the end of July," Andy Hunter, CEO of Bookshop.org, said.
Sales have reached $29 million this year, including tax and shipping, and are up 17% for the first half of 2021 compared with 2020. That increase comes despite an expected decline in sales compared to a year ago since April, when most bookstores around the country began to reopen form normal business. In the April-June period, sales were down 20% from the comparable time in 2020, less than the 30% drop that Hunter had been expecting. %u201CLast year, June was very busy for us, particularly with the huge sales of antiracist books with the Black Lives Matter protests happening around the country. This year is more like a normal June.%u201D
This paperback was originally scheduled for May 2020. I look back through my emails from the previous February and see discussions about the cover and worries about whether we are in time to make small corrections before going to print. In retrospect, it seems a time of innocence, of happy, purblind naivety.
Future historians will no doubt chart the gradual way in which we began to understand the impact Covid-19 might have on all our lives. Everyone will have their own perspective, but for much of the UK book trade the cancellation of the London Book Fair on 4 March 2020 was the real wake-up call. By the end of the following week, almost all of Faber's staff were working from home. On 16 March, Amazon announced that it would not be accepting non-essential items, including books, into its warehouses. Full lockdown a week later closed the last high street bookshops. The routes to market had dried up.
Those of us seeking comfort could look to the last great national crisis: publishing had survived the Blitz, even flourished, as the blackout encouraged reading. In the 21st century, however, books have to compete for leisure time with so many other pastimes - of which watching television is only the most obvious - and even the War did not close Britain's bookshops. I rather think the last time that happened was in the 1926 General Strike, right at the beginning of the story this book tells. Years later, my grandfather was still blaming that two-week stoppage for the failure of his one foray into writing fiction, Elnovia. Publishers, including Faber, took the only sensible course and postponed many new publications. How could readers find debut authors, for example, in a world without bookshops and festivals? Yet new books are responsible for a huge percentage of book sales. Their cancellation left a gap that would be difficult to fill. April was the tensest month.
People of Color in Publishing and Latinx in Publishing collaborated on an online survey in summer and fall 2018, reaching out to current and former BIPOC industry members about the extent to which they've experienced racism on the job. The results of the survey are now being released in a report, "Workplace Racism Survey," that documents the ways racism manifests itself at publishing houses. (Organizers delayed the release of the findings because of the pandemic and the uncertainty it created about the future of the industry.)
f those who responded, 72.9% reported experiencing microaggressions%u2014brief, commonplace encounters that communicate racial prejudice or cultural diminishment. And the survey chronicles numerous instances in which junior and midlevel BIPOC professionals encountered half-hearted or poorly managed efforts at diversity where they work. Of the people of color who responded, 86% cited unfair or extra workloads placed on them in order to educate their colleagues about racism, while 47.4% said they had been asked to act as ad hoc sensitivity readers without compensation.
In recent years, the conservative imprints at the major New York publishing houses have been put under a microscope. Simon & Schuster canceled its contracts with Milo Yiannopoulos and Josh Hawley in response to public outcry and in-house protests (while refusing to comply with similar demands regarding Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pence).* Kate Hartson, former editorial director of the Center Street imprint at the Hachette Book Group, maintains that she was fired earlier this year for her pro-Trump politics. Last month, Hartson and Louise Burke, former publisher of Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint, announced the launch of All Seasons Press, a new independent conservative press like Regnery, the publisher that picked up Hawley's book. Could these developments mark the migration of conservative book publishing from the mainstream houses to smaller companies? And what might be the unintended consequences of such a shift?
To find out how this potential change looks from inside the industry, I called Eric Nelson, the vice president and executive editor of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins dedicated to publishing books by political conservatives. He joined Broadside the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, after working for the conservative and business imprints at Penguin Random House.