Tag Archives: Books & Authors

I’m pretty sure it’s an overdone fake, but man is that former stripper clever, sassy, and knowledgeable about music.

This year Zadie Smith and the other judges of the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition decided not to honor any writer with the prize. They didn’t consider any submissions good enough to win. I thought that was pretty awesome, even though the whole thing reeks of a publicity stunt. The judges wanted to make a statement about not rewarding mediocrity and about upholding high literary standards. Zadie Smith writes:

Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack of truly challenging and original writing, and the small selection of pseudo-literary fictio-tainment that dominates our chain bookstores. We created this prize to support unpublished writers, and, with our five grand, we put our money where our mouths are. We have tried to advertise widely across this great internet of ours and to make the conditions of entry as democratic and open as we could manage. There is no entry fee, there are no criteria of age, race, gender or nation. The stories are handed over to the judges stripped of the names of the writers as well as any personal detail concerning them (if only The Booker worked like that!) Our sole criterion is quality. We simply wanted to see some really great stories. And we received a whole bunch of stories. We dutifully read through hundreds of them. But in the end – we have to be honest – we could not find the greatness we’d hoped for. It’s for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year. . . .

. . . .For let us be honest again: it is sometimes too easy, and too tempting, to blame everything that we hate in contemporary writing on the bookstores, on the corporate publishers, on incompetent editors and corrupt PR departments – and God knows, they all have their part to play. But we also have our part to play. We also have to work out how to write better and read better. We have to really scour this internet to find the writing we love, and then we have to be able to recognize its quality. We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

The more I think about the Willesden Herald’s decision, the more self-important it seems. We’re not talking about the Nobel Peace Prize here. We’re not even talking about the Pulitzer or the Booker. We’re talking about a short story contest that might make some unpublished writer’s career. I mean every month the lesser literary magazines probably contend with a dearth of good writing, but they still put out an issue. Did it occur to Zadie and the judges that perhaps the better writers were submitting to the bigger, more prestigious contests? But now they have branded themselves as an exclusive club that all the most ambitious writers must try to enter.

Maybe it’s a good sign that every literary magazine doesn’t receive outstanding submissions to every writing contest. This shows that no matter how many amateur writing classes and writing programs and writing blogs proliferate in our wordy world, it still holds true that not everyone can do it well. Even though more and more people are writing books, literary greatness is still rare.

Artistic integrity is an easy banner to wave, but if you’re going to make a commercial living through publishing and prizing literature, you can’t expect every weekly/monthly/yearly crop of writers to be a great one. Sometimes the crop will just be mediocre. But there should still be a winner. When I throw a hotdog eating contest and only three people show up to compete and they’re all anorexic, I still award a prize. The winner might have only eaten half a hot dog, but the other competitors just sniffed the bun.

The Atlantic Magazine has recently archived over a decade of its complete issues online. Some of the incomplete content goes back 150 years. My recent reads:

Index of Literary Interviews, with Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Franzen, Andrea Barrett, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, and many more

Where Great Writers Are Made: Assessing America’s Top Graduate Writing Programs by Edward J. Delaney (UVA professor Christopher Tilghman is heavily quoted.)

The Angriest Man in Television by Mark Bowden (article about David Simon, the creator of HBO Baltimore drama The Wire)

Recent Fiction 

Classic Book Reviews from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Les Miserables, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Lolita, and more)

The Atlantic has also compiled “highlights” with featured content like Twenty from the Twentieth Century (with Einstein, Picasso, and MLK Jr.), and Flashbacks.

Happy reading.

I have the day off and it’s snowing, so I spent the morning on the couch reading Dominick Dunne’s A Season in Purgatory, a book that definitely lives up to its reputation as a page-turner. The story seemed increasingly familiar as I read: Connecticut, Catholicism, cover-ups, panties. I Googled the book and duh – it’s based on the murder of Martha Moxley.

A Season in Purgatory reminded me of a literary issue I’ve been meaning to address in my blog for a while. Now that I am famous and at the pinnacle of my writing career, I think the time has come.

What’s up with all the novels narrated by “writers”? It seems like every other book I read is narrated by a fictional author – an impassive observer who loiters in the background of the story and then later writes it down. In the first half of Season, for instance, the narrator lurks woodenly around the members of a charismatic Irish Catholic family (the real protagonists of the book) and absorbs their secrets. The narrator later becomes a famous author, as do most of these fictional authors who live out the real author’s bestselling fantasies.

But there’s an obvious flaw in this narrative construction. Writers are so BORING. They don’t DO anything. They’re constantly taking NOTES. They never get LAID. They’re more interested in writing about life than in living it. Which is all well and good in reality – we can sometimes even dupe people into thinking we’re interesting – but I’m so sick of writers infiltrating the fictional world. Can writers really not remove themselves far enough from their own heads to give their main characters a profession that is not writing? As a reader, it’s easy to hear the narrative voice as an autobiographical voice, and then you are distanced from the fictional dream. Also, you are annoyed.

Don’t get me wrong – in a great story, I quickly get over my annoyance with this literary device. I love Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels and even the narrator in A Season in Purgatory redeems himself in the second half of the book (i.e. he stops writing). But I’m still frustrated by the lack of creativity in these ubiquitous plots chronicled by fictional authors.

I know we all want to think that writing is an inherently interesting profession. There have been writers who have lived epic, soap operatic lives. But most writing takes place in isolation, in acute observation, in painful self-awareness. . .in abstraction, not in story. Hot dog vendors are way more interesting than writers. Ask John Kennedy Toole.

Why can’t more writers write writers out of their writing?

[Full disclosure: both the narrators in my unpublished novel are writers. But one is a really bad writer and the other one writes diet books.]

P.S. Sorry for geeking out yesterday about my C-Ville press. When the BBF came home from Court Square, he congratulated me and said, “The important thing is to act cool and nonchalant about the positive press. Whatever you do, don’t blog about it.” I was like, “Too late.”

I just read a memoir that the mass of my Charlottesville friends (and my little sister) have been raving about for months–Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield. Rob used to live in Charlottesville with his wife Renee [Rob, did you eventually get annoyed at all the accented e‘s you had to insert into Renee’s name when you wrote this book? By the end, were you cursing her parents for giving her a name that consumes extra typing time on an American keyboard? I ask because I don’t know how to insert one accented e into Renee’s name, and you had to insert about a thousand. Then again, if my BBF was from South Africa and had a Xhosa click in his name, I’d probably find a way to incorporate it into our love story.] [Maybe I should save these burning questions for your book signing on Tuesday.] [January 22nd, 5:30 pm at New Dominion Bookstore].

You might guess from the title that Love Is a Mix Tape abounds in pop culture references. Rob drops names of songs and their authors, B movies and their stars, fanzines and their Corner Parking Lot writers, chain restaurants and their steaks. I expected this proliferation of names to annoy me, but it didn’t. In the context of the book, the names fit. The pop culture references were always the common ground between Rob and his wife, what brought them together when he was a Boston Irish boy and she an Appalachian girl, and it makes sense that he should use them to draw in the reader as well. And we all miss the 90s.

This book is sad, and it’s populated throughout by people who were sad: Kurt Cobain, Jackie Kennedy, Virginia Woolf, Rob. And sometimes by sad pop music (I know I’m not the only girl who has cried to Cruel Summer by Bananarama). And even the Brooklyn kitchen cabinet stocked full of dance party mix tapes is sad, because many of the songs were selected by Renee, whom Rob loved and still loves, even though she’s gone. Rob gives great depth and substance not only to his rock and roll marriage, but also to every relationship that is informed by pop, that thrives on pop. Love is greater than we are; so great that we need to harness great songs and great poems and occasionally even Applebee’s and Hall & Oates to tell its story.

The New York Times online featured an article this morning entitled “Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work into Real Book Sales.” Many authors have either gotten their start or have intentionally marketed their book ideas on the web. Literary agents or publishers then determine that page views will translate directly into sales and they give the web authors six-figure book deals. Usually they’re wrong (I don’t remember Jessica Cutler’s novel The Washingtonienne doing so well), but every once in a while they’re right (e.g. My Secret based on postsecret.blogspot.com and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell based on tuckermax.com had decent sales).

But not only blogs, cartoons, and online fiction can turn into books.

Hyperion recently made a leap of faith when it reportedly paid $6.7 million to acquire the rights to “Last Lecture,” a book to be based on a talk given at Carnegie Mellon University by Randy Pausch, a 47-year-old computer-science professor who has terminal pancreatic cancer. Videos of the lecture — or parts of it — on YouTube and elsewhere on the Web have been viewed more than 6 million times.

This reminds me of Disney making a billion dollar movie dynasty out of its Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park ride. A YouTube video that gives you the warm-fuzzies or a rollercoaster that makes you throw up can be a crossover hit when deal-makers have a vision.

Whoa, I just watched the Last Lecture YouTube video for the first time. Randy Pausch actually achieved one of his childhood dreams of designing a Disney ride. Disney evidently has its finger on the pulse of innovative business practices. Next they will probably launch a popular line of pancreatic cancer hot dogs. I’m going to make myself cry. This is sad stuff.

The point is, you never know what the world at large will gravitate to, and eventually something brilliant that you post online could make you a million dollars. And that is the meaning of life, after all. One million dollars.