Author: Mark Athitakis

English Into Arabic

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Ha Jin, Junot Diaz, Marilynne Robinson

Last fall I made a brief mention of Kalima, an effort by the United Arab Emirates to translate books from English into Arabic. At the time, the organization was working in conjunction with the National Book Festival to scout for suggestions of great American literature to include in its series. On the evidence of a recent press release, they made some pretty impressive choices. Below are Kalima’s picks:

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
Ha Jin, Waiting
Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Not all Americans, you’ll notice—the release mentions seven authors total from the U.S. were included. A little googling reveals that Publishers Lunch has reported a few more recent rights purchases by Kalima, including Junot Diaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Robinson’s Housekeeping

Mark Twain’s Holy Writ

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain

In 1905 Mark Twain wrote “The War-Prayer,” a brief short story with a straightforward pacifist message. Its criticism of jingoism—and the use of religion as a blunt instrument to support it—wouldn’t seem to be so terribly provocative that it couldn’t find a publisher, and by that point Twain’s reputation was so firmly established that it’s hard to imagine he couldn’t get anything he wrote to see the light of day. But Twain wrote it at a very jingoistic time, in the midst of the Philippine-American War (Stephen Kinzer‘s Overthrow provides a great backgrounder on how propagandistic that little-discussed era was); Harper’s Bazaar passed on the story, saying it was unfit for a woman’s magazine, and contractual issues prevented Twain from shopping it far elsewhere. “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time,” Twain wrote to a friend. “None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.”

Twain was right about the piece remaining unpublished in his lifetime. (Probably right about the dead and the truth, too.) The piece wasn’t published until 1923. It’s enjoyed a second life since then, especially among antiwar protesters, and in 2006 its reputation was solid enough that Mark Twain Studies, a Japan-based journal dedicated to the author, devoted a whopping 26 articles on the story, along with republications of the story’s original manuscript (PDF) and typescript (PDF). A new academic journal based at Stanford University, Journal of Transnational American Studies, has now seen fit to republish the whole shebang; I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing, but just bouncing around it’s clear that there’s a wealth of great material inside. John J. Han discusses how the piece was repurposed (PDF) for a Babylon 5 episode; Michael J. Kiskis connects the story to Twain’s other antiwar writing, and to post-9/11 attitudes (PDF); and Twain biographer Ron Powers borrows some words from William Dean Howells to locate (PDF) just what it was about the story that made it so uniquely Twain, and what it is about America that makes the story’s message so easy to ignore:

“The War-Prayer” fully illustrates William Dean Howells’s shrewd analysis of what made Mark Twain’s diction transformative, even transcendent of its “period”: its “bottom of fury,” its “indignant sense of right and wrong,” “its “ardent hate of meanness and injustice.” These worthy passions propelled by “his single-minded use of words, which. . . express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them. . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it.” Or focus-groups, or marketing, or Rove.

This Book Could Be Your Life

by Mark Athitakis, posted in N. Frank Daniels, Stewart O'Nan

Does Eric R. Danton‘s Hartford Courant story last week about DIY publishing address an important shift in the book trade, or is it thick with bad parallels and faulty logic? The story argues that self-publishing, long stigmatized by readers, reviewers, and publishers, is enjoying a rehabilitation of reputation—which is as it should be, because, after all, didn’t we think that DIY was a cool thing in music?

Well, we did, and perhaps we still do, but it wasn’t because we were happy to have an indie-rock culture that was free of gatekeepers, as the story suggests; we just wanted a more diverse assortment of gatekeepers from which to choose. Danton cites a handful of labels that serve as useful models for his thesis of operating outside the corporate system, like Sub Pop, Homestead, SST, Touch and Go, and Dischord. All great labels, but ones that were also very reflective of the personalities of their owners. You got behind SST because its owner was in a great band and signed lots of great bands, which made you slightly more patient about the crappy bands he occasionally signed.

Did we escape the age of gatekeepers with the arrival of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which became an indie-rock phenomenon in 2005 on the back of its unsigned debut album? The Courant story would have it that way: They’re the central musical example in it. But CYHSY doesn’t exemplify how a band can become a (modest) success story without gatekeepers—it exemplifies how the gatekeeper has changed, and no longer needs to be a standard-issue record label.

This is where Danton’s story starts to fail me. His equation of DIY music with DIY publishing fails to acknowledge the culture of discussion, argument, documentation—and, yes, gatekeeping and tastemaking—that’s still installed in DIY music, and doesn’t provide a convincing parallel for DIY publishing. Who’s replaced POD-dy Mouth? Where’s the culture of readers engaged with POD novels in the same way as Pitchfork? Or even the collaborative group of, say, young fantasy writers who’ve built a small cult around themselves by branding the novels they self-publish? Instead, the story’s chief example is Joel Fried, who’s sold a thousand or so copies of his book of essays, Bursts, through BookSurge. How this proves that self-publishing has obliterated its amateur-hour stigma escapes me. If anything, Stewart O’Nan comes off as the most convincing voice in the article, arguing for the old-fashioned publisher: He tells the Courant, “I want to get my book between covers and onto the shelves of as many good bookstores and good libraries as I can, hoping that in time maybe that will translate into it being on the shelves of lots of good readers, and I find the big houses give you the best shot at that.”

I’m not rejecting the value of self-publishing out of hand, and if there are good answers to those questions I asked in the previous paragraph, I’d like to hear them. But it’s inarguable that Danton needed better sources. One possibility would’ve been N. Frank Daniels, whose debut novel, Futureproof, was published in January by Harper Perennial after enjoying some acclaim as a self-published book. The novel itself didn’t do much for me—it’s an overlong accounting of a young man’s descent into heroin addiction, and its plainspoken tone would’ve been more appealing if its plot did anything but move in a ponderous, and-then-this-happened fashion. But it has its fans, and Daniels’ piece in the back of the book, about how he got those fans, is great reading. Feeling he had a worthy book but knowing he didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of going the O’Nan route, he developed a plan:

I would personally market the book to as many people as I possibly could via the Internet and its many avenues for self-promotion. I petitioned people, using primarily MySpace and Amazon, asking them to read the first fifty pages of the book and respond positively or negatively to what they’d read.

Only then did he go through the process of self-publishing the book, which led to a rave from POD-dy Mouth, which led to an Entertainment Weekly piece on the POD-dy Mouth rave, which led to more touring on Daniels’ part, which led to Harper Perennial knocking on his door.

What I like about Daniels’ process is that he gauged interest in his work before self-publishing it, instead of self-publishing his work first, then gauging interest in it; he made an effort to build a small but engaged audience that genuinely hoped for more from him in the future. That’s not unlike every smart band that realizes that nobody wants to own its music until they’ve had a chance to hear it a few times, which means a lot of time spent playing a lot of shows and building a fan base organically. Back in the olden days of Homestead, SST, and Sub Pop, you earned your right to take up space on the merch table, and it’s still a valid approach even if the merch table is now online and enormously long; it proves you’ve respected your audience enough to work on what you’re doing before putting a price tag on it, or even making it available for free. If indie rock is any sort of a model for DIY publishing, it’s not merely in self-publishing—it’s in smart self-publishing strategies that think of the audience before the book.

Links: Scribble Scrabble

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Colson Whitehead, Nelson Algren, Sherman Alexie, Sue Miller

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities, the blog of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, is full of all manner of interesting literary arcana, from lesbian pulp novels to old Raymond Pettibon drawings. The Hartford Courant catches up with the blog’s minders, with a particular eye toward its collection of writer’s notebooks.

Henry Kisor, mystery author and former books editor at the Chicago Sun-Times (where he gave my so-called critical career a boost a few years back), is going through his old files and digging up some fun stuff, including letters from Art Buchwald, and a vicious missive from G.P. Putnam’s Sons editor William Targ calling Nelson Algren an “inhuman turd.”

Esquire deems Colson Whitehead‘s John Henry Days a candidate for great American novel of the new century. Which is….interesting…considering the magazine didn’t think much of it when it came out.

Sherman Alexie has a whole bunch of works in the pipeline. He tells the Northern Arizona University Lumberjack: “I’ve got a new book of poems coming out shortly called Face. This fall, I have a book of short stories coming out called War Dances. Next spring is the release of the sequel to my young adult novel. The sequel’s called The Magic and Tragic Year of my Broken Thumb. And I have a novel coming out fall of 2010 called Fire with Fire. And then I have another young adult novel coming out the Spring after that called Radioactive Love Song, and then I have another novel coming out the fall after that called Thunder and Lightning.”

I’m still thinking about novels about motherhood, a subject that D.G. Myers raised recently. Seems to me that Sue Miller‘s The Senator’s Wife, and a few other Miller novels besides, should enter the discussion.

But this novel? Not so much.

It Takes Two

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Johnson, Raymond Carver

Writing in the Rumpus, Adam Johnson proposes that more fiction writers start including collaboration in the their toolkit. Working together forces an individual writer to set aside his or her ego, allowing the “team” to better concentrate on the business of characterization, setting, and so forth:

I wish I would’ve been asked to collaborate on just one story for a workshop back in my MFA program. I would have hated it, of course, because it would’ve meant that I’d have to question all my instincts, that I’d have to get off the crutch of my limited skills, and that I’d have to write a true character for once, a fictitious person that wasn’t a guised version of myself. I would have had to ask, out loud, questions like: What is this story about, what is this scene trying to show, and what’s at the heart of this character? And I’d have had to listen to another writer answer. For once it would have been about writing and not “being a writer.”

And about those MFA programs: Yes, Johnson notes, they have a collaborative element to them, and yes, he supports them. That, in spite of his acknowledgment that MFA programs have a way of making for carefully machined prose. (This is a criticism I leveled at Johnson’s debut collection, Emporium, some years back, though clearly my complaint could have used some more thought and evidence. Blurbs aren’t fair game in criticism, kids.) After all, you have to learn to walk before you can run, and getting down the basics allows for more dazzling acrobatics down the line. “I believe the proliferation of MFA programs is a good thing—more hounds to the hunt,” Johnson writes. “And what’s wrong with learning the skills of writing first, so that when an important story comes along, it has a game author?”

I’d be more willing to get behind Johnson’s defense of collaboration if I could think of more evidence of them—or at least more evidence of cases where it went smoothly. I think if Raymond Carver‘s much-documented contretemps with his editor, Gordon Lish. Carver’s stories, to my mind, were improved by Lish’s heavy hand, but nobody would think of that as a healthy collaborative environment to seek out. Johnson cites an unpublished collaboration with his wife as evidence that the system can work well. Are there others that are available on the shelves?

Mr. Poe Regrets

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edgar Allan Poe

This Saturday marks the opening of “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” a exhibit at the University of Virginia designed to commemorate the author’s 200th birthday. Among the artifacts featured is a recently discovered 1842 letter from Poe to his publishers, apologizing for being drunk that last time they hung out together, hitting them up for a chance to be published, and generally behaving like a magazine intern. The News Leader (Staunton, Va.) explains:

In the letter, written in July 1842, Poe apologizes to publishers J. and H.G. Langley for his drunken behavior. He encloses an article he hopes the publishers will buy, as he is “desperately pushed for money.” He also blames a friend, poet and lawyer William Ross Wallace, for making him drink too many “juleps” and tries to make amends for the unfortunate result: “Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me – but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”

The Langleys rejected the piece. Insofar as Wikipedia is trustworthy on the matter, 1842 was a rough year for Poe: That year his wife, Virginia, suffered a bout of tuberculosis that drove him to begin drinking heavily. The exhibit runs through Aug. 1 first at the University of Virginia Library’s Harrison Institute, after which it will move to the University of Texas’ Ransom Center, which helped assemble the exhibit.

Won’t Somebody Please, Please Think of the Children?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson

D.G. Myers, who for my money runs one of the best new(ish) litblogs going, recently spent a little time with the question of whether American literature has something of a family problem—he argues that there’s a lack of fiction that addresses parenthood, especially motherhood. The problem, he suggests, may lie with the backgrounds of writers themselves, and to give something of a scientific imprimatur to his musings, he looks at the the authors featured in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1914-1945) and discovers: “Forty-nine children born of thirty-seven writers—a child-to-writer ratio of 1.32, the fertility rate of a former Soviet Bloc country.”

One problem—heck, let’s call it sample bias—is immediately apparent. By drawing the line at 1945, Myers is neglecting writers who came into prominence after World War II, and might presumably have been having children during the largest burst of fertility in the country—the Baby Boom. John Updike had four children. John Cheever had three. Raymond Carver had two. Michael Chabon has four kids. Female authors? Louise Erdrich: three children by marriage, three by adoption. Marilynne Robinson had two children. Maxine Hong Kingston has one child, as does Alice Walker—though, famously in that case, mom and daughter don’t get along.

Of course, it’s best not to obsess too much over this: I’m being just as selective as Myers is, and there are plenty of childless authors in the postwar era (DeLillo, Roth, Cisneros, Welty, etc). And it wouldn’t change his central concern about “how very little of ordinary life—family life—gets into American writing.” There are plenty of families in American literature, he figures—they’re just a lot like the Snopes clan, or the Portnoy family.

Tolstoy’s riff on happy families comes in handy here—it may simply be that normal family life doesn’t make for interesting fiction, in the same way that the workplace rarely does. Though I’m happy that my family life in no way resembles, say, Russell Banks‘ Affliction, that doesn’t make me any less grateful for the book. Ordinary family life makes it into plenty of novels and stories, though that ordinariness can make critics skittish—the chief (and I think wrongheaded) complaint about Ha Jin‘s A Free Life was that it didn’t do much but cover relatively mundane domestic matters. The real trick is to cover those mundane bits of family life in a way that has depth and intelligence; the young mother in Kent Haruf’s Plainsong comes to mind, as does the aging father in Robinson’s Gilead. Whether or not this country has a “low-fertility-rate literature”, as Myers writes, the fact is it hasn’t neglected stories about families—it’s just that the wisest writers seem to know how sizable a task it is to write about them honestly and well.

Taxed Time

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace

Many of the details in D.T. Max‘s New Yorker story about David Foster Wallace are sad and familiar, especially for anybody who’s read David Lipsky‘s equally thorough piece in Rolling Stone last October. But Max’s article does bring news of a manuscript that Wallace had been working on for years before his suicide, “The Pale King,” an exploration of the nature of boredom, set in an IRS office. (The Wallace fan site The Howling Fantods is gathering up materials related to the unfinished work, which Little, Brown plans to publish next year.)

Though Max’s version of events doesn’t differ notably from Lipsky’s, it wouldn’t be fair to the New Yorker piece to simply scan it for tidbits about “The Pale King.” Lipsky did an excellent job of tracking Wallace’s emotional despair, while Max does an excellent job of tracking Wallace’s rhetorical despair—his obsession with finding a way to make his fiction work as a powerful moral force. To that end, he spent his final years trying to strip away the barnacles of irony and metafictional trickery from his work, writing more nonfiction and clearing pomo gunk from “The Pale King.” As Max describes it, he wasn’t wholly successful on that front. Wallace wrote a smirking introduction to the book that poked holes at those acrobatics, but at the same time engaged in them:

[Wallace writes in the introduction,] “The very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” He also writes, “I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too—at least now that I’m over 30 I do.” And yet there he was, writing about “David Wallace” in long, recursive sentences with footnotes.

It will be interesting to see how the final product looks after his editors are done with it. Will it echo the sprawl of the hundreds of thousands of words Wallace applied to the novel, or will it be reshaped into the more straightforward narrative he hoped it would be? Which version would do right by Wallace’s vision?

Links: Malaise Speech

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bill Holm, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Robert Coover, Russell Banks, Tao Lin, Wells Tower

Today is John Steinbeck‘s birthday. In his honor, the National Steinbeck Center is hosting events through the weekend; in related news, the entire country is hosting a massive Great Depression for the next five years or so.

Perhaps a commemorative Mark Twain coin would help?

Minnesota author Bill Holm, called the “polar bear of American literature,” has died. He was 65.

Those Robert Coover appearances at the University of Pennsylvania I mentioned earlier this week are now available online on video and MP3.

Russell Banks says Martin Scorsese‘s film adaptation of his novel The Darling is still moving along.

A healthy selection of works by Wells Tower, including an excerpt from his new collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, are online.

The viability of Tao Lin‘s plan to finance his writing by selling shares in his next novel is being disputed in the comments of yesterday’s post. Bright minds who understand finance and publishing better than I do are encouraged to weigh in. (Update: I got played on this. Maybe. Probably. Anyhow, lesson learned.)

Last call: Tomorrow I’ll be at an all-day seminar on fiction writing at George Mason University, put together by American Independent Writers. If you’ll be there, please say hi.

Screwing the System With Tao Lin and Binky Urban

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Tao Lin

In preparation for a panel on fiction writing/blogging/the death of the publishing industry/the death of newspaper book reviews that I’m participating in this Saturday, I’m trying to gather as many different perspectives on the current state of the publishing industry as I can. It’s not my bailiwick, but Twitter has been great at pointing me in a few interesting directions (@sarahw, @RonHogan, and @R_Nash being just three of many especially helpful people there worth following). Everybody agrees that the current situation is destructive, but it’s interesting to see the optimism of younger writers with little to lose set against the handwringing of the old guard that’s losing plenty.

In an interview with the Urban Elitist, Tao Lin discusses how he’s successfully financed his forthcoming novel by selling six $2,000 shares in it. Lin is somewhat infamous for his hustling for attention; I haven’t read a word of his fiction, so I have no clue if it’s worth that kind of investment. But going the Tao Lin route, however attention grabbing, still means lots of mac and cheese, at least for a while:

I have had part-time jobs almost continuously since college (I am 25), I think, except for maybe one year when I shoplifted batteries and Moleskine journals to sell on eBay. I stopped working at my last part-time job last August when I sold 60% of the royalties to my next novel, RICHARD YATES (Melville House, 2010), for $12,000. Since then my money (other than the $12,000) has come from selling pre-orders and lifetime subscriptions to books that a press I started called Muumuu House is publishing; Christmas and Chinese New Year’s money from my parents and brother; and selling drawings, drafts of things, and various “piles of shit” from my room on eBay.

Still, he’s hopeful: “I feel that within 2-4 years I will have steady cash flow from royalties from my books, foreign sales of my books, foreign royalties from my books, and other writing-related things,” he writes. Keeping authors going until steady cash flow arrives is also much on the mind of agent Amanda “Binky” Urban, who works with a host of A-list fiction writers. In an interview with Haaretz, Urban—who was in Israel as one of her clients, Haruki Murakami, picked up the Jerusalem Prize—argues that agents like herself, along with major houses, played critical roles in bringing Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford to wider audiences. Her biggest fear in the midst of the reshaping of the publishing industry is that younger fiction writers no longer get the time to find a foothold:

“So fewer books will be published, and those whom we call midlist writers will no longer get published. The major writers will keep publishing, debut books will always be published, and the ones in the middle will have a problem…. The question is really how you keep authors alive until they break through and garner a large readership. That’s what I stay awake at night and worry about.”

It’s a legitimate concern, especially if a writer doesn’t have the temperament to perform all the duties that a publishing house traditionally has—it’s certainly hard to see the reclusive Cormac McCarthy starting out by going the Tao Lin route. The risk, perhaps, is that the fiction writers who survive this transformation are the ones who do the best job at self-promotion. Even McCarthy now has to give in a little, as he did by appearing on Oprah. Urban explains:

“I told him that before he says no, an Oprah Book Club pick means sales of between 750,000 and 1.2 million copies.” There was a long pause, and McCarthy replied that he knows he owes a lot of people, and maybe he should consider it. She asked him whom he owed, and he replied that he owed her and his publisher (Knopf). “I said, well don’t do that for us, and he said no, I think I should.”