When author and illustrator Ariella Elovic drafted her book proposal for Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir, she never considered that the graphic memoir about body acceptance might one day become a television series. Growing up, her biggest insecurities were her visibly hairy arms, sideburns, unibrow, and upper lip hair; as a young adult, she created an illustrated alter-ego to help her process all of the ways her body was changing.
Links of the week November 15 2021 (46)
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:
15 November 2021
After the book was finished, Simonoff's coagent at United Talent Agency (UTA)-one of the four major Hollywood talent agencies-presented Cheeky at a general meeting where talent agents brainstorm creative partnerships between their clients. Throughout the summer of 2020, Elovic, 30, took the resulting one-on-one phone calls with actors, directors, and showrunners looking for a partner with whom she clicked creatively. She hit it off with an established comedian. "It basically felt like what we would create together would be a really strong combination of our two brains," Elovic says. Though the partnership has yet to be announced, the pair are working with a production company on a "mini-pilot" to pitch to streaming services. A few weeks ago, the author quit her day job as a project manager at Paperless Post. It's a big commitment, she says, but "I figured at some point, I [would] have to quit my job to help prep material. I'm going to want to give it my all."
The first lesson I learned about writing was to check for errors and then check again. And I keep learning the same lesson over and over. I'm not the first or the worst mistake-maker. Writers have been making errors forever. Google the topic "mistakes in books" or "authors' mistakes" and prepare to be overwhelmed. These mistakes take many forms, and some have become famous. In the "Wicked Bible" of 1631, the 7th Commandment reads, "Thou shalt commit adultery." In Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the shipwreck survivor Crusoe is on the island watching his ship sink. He takes off his clothes and swims back out to the ship to salvage supplies, which he brings back to shore in the pockets he no longer has.
Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy has two lovers "like two small chips being tossed on a rough but friendly sea." Did he intend them to be ships? Nobody knows, but we suspect. Simple typos can easily survive a writer's scrutiny, especially if the letters still form actual words. In The Good Earth Pearl Buck describes a group of huts clinging to a wall "like flees to a dog's back." A contemporary error that I just learned about is a thought by Cersei in the fifth book of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire: "‘I am beautiful,' she reminded himself."
There is a story that Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's father, believed his writings were informed by the Holy Spirit. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson supposedly asked, "Cannot the Holy Spirit, then, spell?" Spelling and punctuation slip-ups are painful, but substantive errors are worse. About two thirds of the way through my book The Old Man, two characters escape pursuers by taking a train up the west coast to Canada. They take a bus from the border to Vancouver and then a cab to Victoria, where they check into the Empress Hotel. I once went from Vancouver to Victoria and stayed at the Empress. What could I possibly get wrong? I had forgotten that Victoria is on an island reached by a two-hour ferry trip with a forty-minute drive on either end of it. People noticed.
Within the first twenty-four hours after publication, I received the first ten emails pointing out my mistake. I still don't know how all of those people read two thirds of the book and discovered my shame so quickly. But that didn't mean the emails stopped. A year later the emails still hadn't stopped. Two years. Three.
When Penguin Random House announced in July that it would be publishing a memoir by Prince Harry, there was one name that was, conspicuously and appropriately, left off the press release. The man channeling the Duke of Sussex's voice for the book, J.R. Moehringer, was nowhere to be found among the details the publisher released. But those in the industry know that Moehringer, one of the highest-profile ghostwriters working, will be an essential component in the royal's book-even if his name never appears on the final product.
Ghostwriting, or "collaborating" as it's now called, is nothing new. For as long as celebrities have been writing books, others have quietly helped them do it. It's highly specialized work that requires a blend of skills; industry sources say the best collaborators are equal parts editor, reporter, writer, mimic, and shrink. And in today's industry, where publishers are more and more reliant on nonfiction projects by authors with significant platforms, good collaborators are in higher demand than ever. It's also the kind of work, very handsomely paid at the high end, which is appealing to a growing population: writers, journalists, and editors.
When writing about real people in historical fiction, what might the consequences be of taking certain artistic liberties? Author Robert Lloyd discusses the ethics of literary revivification.
I've written a book, and very luckily for me, it's about to be published. The Bloodless Boy is set in Restoration London in a snowy January 1678. It includes various "real" characters. People from history. People who had emotions, intellects, needs, desires, and who acted in the world, leaving consequences behind them. Yet I've taken the liberty to place them within a fictional story, with events occurring that didn't happen. I also have historical figures interacting with characters who are wholly made-up.
Historical fiction, it's generally called, and there are plenty of examples about. As such, the book sits somewhere on the spectrum between "history" and "fiction"-as if either can ever be free of the other.
"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it," Graham Greene, WWII spy and author, wrote in The Quiet American, though he also surprisingly penned a series of delightful children's books The Little Train (1946); The Little Fire Engine (1950); The Little Horse Bus (1952); and The Little Steamroller (1953), all featuring anthropomorphic heroes. The books were a collaboration with his mistress, Dorothy Glover, a theater costume designer and the landlady of his London writing studio; a single name, Dorothy Craigie, appeared on the books, presumably a pseudonym for Glover who illustrated them.
That so many former spies became novelists is not surprising. To resort to an easy aphorism, both professions tell lies to tell truths. However, that children%u2019s literature has also attracted its fair share of intelligence practitioners is more than a little unexpected. Espionage, among the most pragmatic of professions, is not known for its whimsy. If truth be told, espionage credibly ranks among the least whimsical of professions
Art has long been claimed as a final frontier for automation-a field seen as so ineluctably human that AI may never master it. But as robots paint self-portraits, machines overtake industries, and natural language processors write New York Times columns, this long-held belief could be on the way out.
Computational literature or electronic literature-that is, literature that makes integral use of or is generated by digital technology-is hardly new. Alison Knowles used the programming language FORTRAN to write poems in 1967 and a novel allegedly written by a computer was printed as early as 1983. Universities have had digital language arts departments since at least the 90s. One could even consider the mathematics-inflected experiments of Oulipo as a precursor to computational literature, and they're experiments that computers have made more straightforward. Today, indie publishers offer remote residencies in automated writing and organizations like the Electronic Literature Organization and the Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana hold events across the world. NaNoGenMo-National Novel Generation Month-just concluded its sixth year this April.
The Department of Justice's attempt to halt Penguin Random House's acquisition of Simon & Schuster finds support within an industry already burned by bad trends. "Obviously every agent is thrilled that the wheels might be grinding to a halt on this," one insider says.
The news this week that the Biden administration is headed to court to stop Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon & Schuster added a new ripple of drama to the already feverish climate of media M&A. Biden's Department of Justice, which is taking a more aggressive approach to corporate consolidation, says that the proposed $2.18 billion merger would give Penguin Random House, the world's largest publisher, "unprecedented control" over the book-publishing industry, and that it would result in "lower advances for authors and ultimately fewer books and less variety for consumers." PRH and S&S argue that the merger would not reduce "the number of books acquired" or the "amounts paid for those acquisitions," and that the two publishing houses, both members of the so-called "Big Five," would still be permitted to bid against each other in auctions "up to an advance level well in excess of $1 million." PRH has its boxing gloves on: The company has retained Daniel Petrocelli, the same man who litigated AT&T and Time Warner's successful battle with the Trump administration in 2018. (Pass the popcorn.)
I was flying from the Bay Area down to Orange County recently, thinking about my first book and its publication date just a few weeks away. Was there anything we'd failed to do? Was our social media effort gaining any traction? What should I say at my upcoming events at Rizzoli in New York City and Book Passage in San Francisco?
And then I looked out the window as we passed over the Los Angeles harbor. Ships, as far as I could see, were anchored for mile after mile. I wondered if my books, coming from Hong Kong, were on one of them, or backed up somewhere across the Pacific Ocean. I suddenly had a very bad feeling.
From the time I began working on my book-an attempt to surface my guiding principles that had shaped my work in architecture-my publishing guru, Gerald Sindell, had been preaching the meaning of "pub date." It took me a long time to fully understand the significance of that date, but it had begun to sink in, and I had become a believer. Not only a believer-over time I organized my life around pub date. It had become my true north, my lodestar.
Pub date is not just the date a book happens to be available in stores. It can become, in a life that may only comprise one book, the single moment in which what one has to say has the potential to be news-to get attention, to enter into the public discourse. My book turned out to be a bit of a memoir, but much more so a polemic, a plea to architects and the communities that work with them to understand that architecture is not just about pretty buildings, but that architecture, done right, shapes lives.
The proportion of children's books featuring a minority ethnic character has almost quadrupled in the last four years, according to a new survey - but researchers say "we are not yet at the point where children of colour have the same experience of literature as their white peers".
The annual Reflecting Realities Survey from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), which monitors the diversity of the UK's children's books, launched in 2018, when it found that just 4% of the children's books published the previous year featured a black or minority ethnic character - and just 1% had a minority ethnic main character. Described as "stark and shocking" at the time, the proportions have increased in each year since, to 7% in 2018 and 10% in 2019, and - with 5,875 children's picture books, fiction and non-fiction titles published in the UK in 2020 - to 15% in 2020, with 8% of titles featuring a minority ethnic main character.
An illustration of a father and son in the mountains, from Pete Oswald's Hike
The report praised Hike by Pete Oswald, the story of a father and child on a day out. Illustration: Pete Oswald/Walker BooksAccording to the latest official data, 33.9% of children of primary school age in England are from an ethnic minority background.
The China Shanghai International Children's Book Fair (CCBF), originally scheduled to start on November 19, has been postponed to next year and is scheduled to run from March 20 to 22. This is the latest development from China's strict zero-Covid policy even though the average number of new cases in the past few days was well below 100.
Children's books remain the brightest spot in the Chinese publishing industry, accounting for 27.7% of its overall book retail market in the first half of 2021. In recent months, popular science has overtaken fiction as the #1 category in this segment. Titles from the U.S., U.K., Japan, and France dominate the translated children's list, with recent bestsellers such as Bodo Schafer's A Dog Called Money, Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, Pascale Hedelin's The Human Body, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window, and Anthony Browne's My Dad and My Mum.
Paratext fascinates me to no end. I love looking and thinking about all of the pieces that comprise a book which aren't the actual narrative itself: the book's colophon, the book's description and flap copy, the author's biography, and the copyright page hold so much information about the book and its context that overlooking them feels wrong. I believe in reading a book's introduction, as well as any foreword or afterword, and I can't get enough of a book dedication or acknowledgements.
Before falling into the world of books, first as a librarian, then as a writer and editor, I didn%u2019t think too much about the pieces of a book or how it came together. I mostly perused acknowledgments to see if there were any familiar names or, when I began to understand what it was I loved in a book, to discover if books I really enjoyed were edited or agented by the same people. There%u2019s a lot of reader service in finding common themes an editor likes in their books, for example, or seeing the types of books an agent represents.
But then, I published a book and I realized the true value in all of these elements of a book, both as a writer and as a reader.
"The soft-boiled genre is embedded firmly between the cozy and the hard-boiled, like middle-aged and elder women ensconced between siren and senior."
The soft-boiled mystery is real, relevant, and required. I hereby proclaim this as fact on behalf of all the vibrant females over 50 like me, who want to read books starring lead characters like us. In crime fiction, the soft-boiled genre is embedded firmly between the cozy and the hard-boiled, like middle-aged and elder women ensconced between siren and senior.
Tributes have been paid to bestselling novelist and "icon" Wilbur Smith after he died unexpectedly at his Cape Town home, aged 88.
Smith passed away on the afternoon of 13th November with his wife Niso by his side "after a morning of reading and writing", Wilbur Smith Books announced.
The author was a global bestseller whose novels have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide in over 30 languages, according to his publisher. He wrote 49 novels in all, including his hugely popular series following the Courtney family's adventures across three centuries in South Africa. Smith's first novel When the Lion Feeds was published in 1964, the first in scores of bestselling novels. More than 50 years after his debut, he signed an eight-figure deal with Bonnier Zaffre in 2017, described by then Bonnier Publishing group chief executive Richard Johnson as "one of the biggest in publishing history". He signed a further 10-book deal with the publisher in December 2020.
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." (Mark Twain)
I call this Red-Lining Reality, because these are things editors put a red line through; readers won%u2019t find them believable. My family travelled to Italy a few years back. We were going anyway, but this conveniently provided me with information for the story I had in mind for my fourth book, Cecilian Vespers, about the murder of a renowned theologian. Some of the clues related to the lives of long-dead saints, including Saint Philomena. I'd never heard of her till I began my research.
An examination of the Jewish origins of the "Mensch of Steel", a look at the "romance" of mathematical curves and a volume that seeks to rectify the shocking lack of research into the health benefits of camel milk are among the six books that will vie to become the 2021 recipient of The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.
For the first time in the Diagram's 43-year history, all six shortlisted titles come from university presses or academia. They include Curves for the Mathematically Curious, which looks at the "elegant and often surprising mathematics" involved in mathematical curves; Handbook of Research on Health and Environmental Benefits of Camel Products, which promises cutting edge data on the "ship of the desert"; and Hats: A Very Unnatural History, which lifts the lid on the use of birds and other mammals in the making of headwear.
Also competing for the 2021 gong are Is Superman Circumcised?, a look at the Jewish influences of the DC superhero; The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Fabergé, a 400-year history of Russian material culture; and Miss, I Don't Give a Shit: Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools, a guide which aims to help teachers get through a lesson "without a desk flying at you"
It doesn't sound like a Pulitzer winner, but "U.S. v. Bertelsmann SE, 21-cv-02886" is a cracking read in the niche genre of antitrust litigation. This is the U.S. Department of Justice's surprise lawsuit against Penguin Random House's $2.2 billion agreement to buy rival publisher Simon & Schuster almost a year ago.
For entertainment value, you get a handful of embarrassing private messages written by executives in both firms such as: "I would not want to be a big author at Simon & Schuster now." The political context - a more robust U.S. approach to dealmaking - adds spice too. But the substance is what counts, and that's where there are concerns for authors and readers.
The acquisition would consolidate the so-called Big Five book publishers down to four and extend PRH's lead as the world's largest. As the DOJ argues, the number of houses with the financial muscle to buy blockbuster manuscripts would shrink even further.