Indeed, positive and negative reviews mean a great deal to publishers and to writers. Most paperback books feature blurbs not from respected writers but from respected periodicals, and often one will see a quotation from a “premier” publication—the Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker, among others—on the cover in an effort to raise sales and make the book more appealing. And on the inside of paperbacks, especially for acclaimed or famous books, there will be even more pages of quotation that rave about the book’s brilliance and the author’s skill.
Does this actually work? As with so many things in publishing and literature, it’s hard to say if readers are swayed by a quotation from a paper, a review, or a writer they might not know very much about. But it certainly can’t hurt, and it doesn’t take much effort. In the end, it’s just another way to try and stack the deck to make some money.
“via”:http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/
A bump on the doormat announces the arrival of the morning mail. Our cat Scotty runs up the hall and stares at the door expectantly, knowing my opening it will allow him a brief escape into the alien world of the winding staircase, and a glimpse, down six flights, of a Paris in which he, rooftop-born and bred, has never set paw.
Being raised in an Australian country town caused me to allocate exaggerated importance to mail. It meant the outside world still knew of my existence. “And none will hear the postman’s knock/Without a quickening of the heart,” wrote Auden in his commentary for the film NIGHT MAIL, “for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?” And a bump was doubly exciting, since it always meant books.
Today it’s SHAMBLEAU AND OTHERS, a collection of science fiction stories by Catherine Moore, published by Gnome in 1953 – just about the time the sf bug first wriggled into my blood. This nice copy of the first edition was snatched from the flood that pours hourly through eBay. On the dustwrapper, sharp as on publication day, three impossibly sleek rockets lance up from a rocky landscape against a black sky and a looming, cratered moon. A fifties idea of space travel, as quaint as that year’s finned, chromed Cadillac Eldorado.
I dip into the first story, BLACK GOD’S KISS.
Joiry’s lady glared back at him from between her captors, wild red hair tousled, wild lion-yellow eyes ablaze… “Come to me, pretty one,” he commanded. “I wager your lips are sweeter than your words…”
Well, it read like frozen music at fourteen. But space opera, like the pulp paper of the magazines that printed it, turns yellow and crumbling almost before the ink’s dry.
I shelve the book between Anne McCaffrey’s DECISION AT DOONA ( inscribed “To John, for courage above and beyond the call of a writer’s function…” – “courage” being smuggling forbidden birth control pills into Catholic Ireland for her daughter), and Michael Moorcock’s THE FINAL PROGRAMME.
Mike spent last summer in Paris, recuperating from a foot operation that forced him to spend all his time in a wheelchair with one leg raised to the horizontal. A friend and I trundled him up Boulevard Raspail to Montparnasse one day for lunch at La Coupole. Struggling to manoeuvre chair and foot through the vestibule was like a modern-day re-staging of Charlie Chaplin’s THE RINK, where Eric Campbell, as burly and bearded as Mike, keeps getting his gouty foot jammed in the revolving door.
The day SHAMBLEAU arrives also bring an email from Australia. Lee Harding, an old friend from my days as a not-very-good science fiction writer, announces that John Clute, editor of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION, the standard reference, has flown in from London for a summit with co-editor Peter Nicholls, once the ranking fire-eater of sf scholarship, now in poor health.
Never one, however, to miss the opportunity for a party, Peter threw one for the sf community, at which discussion centered on whether the new edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, too huge now for a single volume, should be available only on line, and on the state of science fiction, which many feel has expired as a literary form. “Like myself,” writes Lee, “Clute feels that sf has ‘done its job’, with only vestigal traces visible amidst the godawful fantasies now clogging the bookshops, and he’d like to see the ENCYCLOPEDIA as an historical record of the Golden Age…”
I’m with him. Of the thousands of books in my collection, ranging from Wells’ THE INVISIBLE MAN and FIRST MEN IN THE MOON through John Wyndham’s DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, Asimov’s THE NAKED SUN, Clarke’s 2001 and Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451, few date from later than the mid-sixties. They’re reminders of a time when we thought science was the solution to society’s ills rather than a contribution to them. Lincoln Steffens, returning from new-born Soviet Russia in 1919, proclaimed “I have seen the future, and it works!” Apparently not, it now seems.
From emails, I jump to eBay, checking what my overnight searches have turned up. A first edition of Robert A. Heinlein’s THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH? Sounds good. Terrible tripe, of course. In the title story, a blind space poet, tending an atomic rocket gone bad, reels off stanzas of verse so leaden that no radiation could possibly have penetrated it. But the dustwrapper looks great, and I post a bid. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past – or rather to a future that never happened, and now never will.
We have the good fortune of publishing the non-fiction work of William T. Vollmann. I just read his new book, which should be out next February, and it has some incredible moments. There’s nobody really like him. Anyway, here is an interview with him that appeared in the S.F. Bay Guardian recently.
When I write my books, I don’t care about the marketplace. My father always used to say the reason academics fight so much is because the stakes are so small. When your book is published, the stakes are so low. Whatever they pay you is not enough. Therefore, why should you compromise? In the meantime, we’re all prostitutes. Most of the prostitutes I know keep one little private thing. Some prostitutes won’t kiss. Some of them save the anus for the person they love. Or they might refuse to say “I love you” except to the person they love. Whatever it is, they keep one tiny little broken shard of their integrity. I don’t want to use the word integrity because it sounds as if they’re doing something bad. They aren’t. They’re just living on the capital they have, which is themselves.
My own way of being a prostitute is that I let magazines damage my work in any way they care to. My strategy is this: Except in cases of severe financial need, I only accept a story that really interests me. I am sure I can write it in a way that will please me, and I can keep it in a book. Then I make money, get my expenses paid, and do it my way. I put my heart into it, and then send it to a magazine. It gets butchered, and I tell them it was excellent. They did a great job. Then they tell me how easy I am to work with. And I cash the check. Then when my book is finished, I’ll cut my royalties in half or whatever is necessary, but you better not even change a comma without consulting me. In fact, the book I’m working on now has spurious commas, and I made them remove them. So that’s my own particular way of selling out. It’s practical. I can’t say it’s noble. On the other hand, it probably doesn’t do any harm.
“via”:http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/
My handwriting is, for the most part, only intelligible to me. I wonder if this is because handwriting is now really only meant for the consumption of the writer (as reminders, diary entries, etc), whereas in the past it was used for interpersonal communication (letters, notes, etc.). Whatever the case, it’s certainly not art anymore.
In the introduction to the book masters of calligraphy, originally published in 1923 in german under the title meister der schreibkunst aus drei jahrhunderten, there is the following: “today the charms of a thriving calligraphy, expression and beauty, are in danger of perishing. handwriting in everyday life is disappearing or becoming superficial or coarse. with it yet another branch of honorable human artistic endeavor is dying out.” that was initially written in 23 and with each successive printing, in 36 and again in 81, the sentiment became more true. by now i think it’s safe to say the art of handwriting, as it was once understood, is no longer dying but really and truly dead.
Doctorow’s THE MARCH won. Among the finalists was a great book published by Amistad called I GOT SOMEBODY IN STAUNTON. One of the judges called Lewis’s work “muscular”.
An article about all of the above found here.
In other news, I’m still crushed about Johnny Weir.
Our own “JW” is quoted in this article about Harper Perennial favorite Jay Ryan. Jay has been gracious enough to create two covers for us — Michael Chabon’s THE FINAL SOLUTION and the cover for a wonderful debut novel by Bryan Charles called GRAB ON TO ME TIGHTLY AS IF I KNEW THE WAY.
Read the article here, and here is a link to some of Jay Ryan’s other printmaking work. You can even buy some posters.
Tom Bissell writes great essays, and here is one, adapted from a lecture. It touches on the James Frey saga to freshen its relevance to the Oprah crowd, but it’s larger than that.
(Via Maud Newton)
Imagine, at the end of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, that Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod kill the white whale instead of the other way around. That Ishmael is not alone in his escape. Steven Olsen-Smith, an associate professor of English at Boise State University, has reconstructed textual evidence that strongly suggests that Melville, whose 1851 novel stands as one of the great achievements of American literature and an enduring study of doomed monomania, entertained just such a scenario.
“via”:http://www.aldaily.com/
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