The best fiction author of all time is Paul Stewart with his wonderful illustrator Chris Riddel.......The Edge Chronicles is probably the best series ever to have been created.....so much morso than that stupid, perposterus series "Harry Potter." In my opinion, The Edge Chronocles could and would be a much better film series than Harry Potter and it would probably rival Lord Of The Rings. But yes, Paul Stewart...I congratulate you and your magnificent imagination.

Children of the corn
Jessa Crispin wonders what happened to all the adults in literature.

Boredom during a Chicago winter can lead to all sorts of odd behavior, like rearranging furniture for hours on end, as if the right feng shui will make the sun burst through the clouds. I finally settled on moving the bookcase of unread books into the bedroom to give myself reason to get out of bed in the cold, cold morning; then I started going through the books as I removed them from the shelves. There was The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Ali Smith's The Accidental. Galt Niederhoffer's A Taxonomy of Barnacles. Dara Horn's The World to Come. Evan Kuhlman's Wolf Boy. Amanda Boyden's Pretty Little Dirty. David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. They all had one obvious thing in common: the adolescent protagonist.

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A Criminal and Addict? Or a Fraud?
The Smoking Gun investigates James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. Threats of lawsuits follow.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."

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Michiko loves Nick

I normally don't link to reviews, but Laird seemed like a nice guy in the minute I met him and IFOA and this particular review contains a line I will print out for my wall of fame: "his prose has none of the self-consciousness or preciousness sometimes displayed by poets-turned-novelists." Ah. Endorphins. Niiiiiice.


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Fiction News:

Bad year for books says Philip Marchand.

Meeting JT Leroy.

Da Vinci Code blamed for crowds at the Louvre. Here I thought it was all the art.


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Did Don DeLillo predict the Buncefield explosions?
The Guardian considers the eerie similarity between the recent explosions in England and DeLillo's White Noise.

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I'm not seeing any fiction crash. The current year is loaded with quality and Canadian fiction in my little corner (Waterloo) is doing just fine, thanks. Perhaps the Chain is selling more yoga mats and fewer books

English language fiction sales get hit with the ugly stick

Welcome to my world, you pampered novelists. Ladies and gentlemen, I would definitely say it's time to panic. Please prepare to run amok in an orgy of grief and, in turn, violence. Apparently we can blame the trend on either Dan Brown, Harry Potter or Osama Bin Laden. That's just spooky, because those are the exact same three suspects for who left the empty toilet paper roll in the bathroom at our house this weekend past...! Coincidence?


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smartest writer _ever_.

In Defence of Bret Easton Ellis
The London Review of Books wonders if he's a smarter writer than most people think.

It is perhaps not surprising, given Ellis’s obsession with the fables and foibles of inattention, that he should demand a great deal of attention from his readers. And at the same time he makes it easy for them not to notice things: the gags, the sex, the glamour, the horror that Ellis does so well, all seduce us into not looking too long, into not seeing just how artful he is. Right from the beginning of Lunar Park we have to keep our wits about us. The first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied there.’ The only problem with this sentence is that it’s only half of the sentence in the play. Ellis – obsessed as he is with the way everything becomes an excerpt, the way the context is taken out of everything – has extracted part of the speech in Act 1 Scene 5 that follows Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father.

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Edited by author 11-26-2005 05:54 PM
I'm with Paul on the last line of Grendel.

Although it's tied for me with the last line of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber (the first series):

"Good-bye and hello, as always."

Peter

Now now. Let's stay on topic.

My vote for a great last line (and I think Peter will have my back on this one) is that of Grendel by John Gardner. Here's the line:

"Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. "So may you all."

They could be. Did all the pretentious dorks from McSweeney's headquarters somehow end up on the Pulitzer jury?

Heh, I was waiting for some jab. Guess the Pulitzer commitee, etc, etc, etc are just a bunch of chumps, uh?

It's just the words that come before that that suck.

Always love Eggers' A.H.W.O.S.G.'s "...finally, finally, finally."

Edited by author 11-24-2005 04:52 PM
Famous last words
What's your favourite ending to a book?

One of the favourite games of literary people is that of best first lines. Everyone enjoys reciting them; the bizarre (Earthly Powers), the haunting (Rebecca), the august (Anna Karenina), the casual (Howards End) or the strangely anonymous (Jane Eyre). First lines are great fun. But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.

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Edited by author 11-24-2005 01:45 PM
NYT 100 notable books

Now here's a list.

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Edited by author 11-23-2005 05:00 PM
Interiority
Suggests to me
A colonoscopy!

Don't get too worked up over a metaphorical generalization. It makes as much sense as saying "interiority." I won't explain what I mean by it, but rest assured it would never appear in a critical essay, but perhaps "interiority" would.

Edited by author 11-23-2005 02:07 PM
"Novels by males sweat too much." Sheesh. Now if a man said something like "poems by females lactate too much," there wouldn't be enough left of him to feed to the bluebottles. So what makes this a reasonable generalization, Frayed?

Who reads fiction?I do,and lots of it. Not surprising that more women read novels than men: perhaps it has something to do with "interiority". God, there I said it.I picked that gem up in a piece of criticism, which I almost never read, and you now understand why. Curious fact,though, when one considers that until recently the world's major literary critics were male. Novels by males sweat too much, with the exception of Sebald and one or two others.

Using the same muscles

A chat with the fiction editor at the New Yorker.

It really messes with you when you’re trying to do your own writing.

I don’t do my own writing.

You don’t?

No.

Not at all?

No. I don’t think there’s any way—for me, anyway—to do both.

How come?

Because it uses the same muscles. And you spend your day in a hypercritical editorial mode where you’re looking at every sentence to see what’s wrong with it. And then if you try to write one there’s a lot of things wrong with it. And you never get past it. It’s pretty tough to do both. Some people do it. And there are a lot of journalist-editors. Not a whole lot of fiction writers-fiction editors.


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Marcus vs Franzen

People are confused by Ben Marcus's Harper's attack on J-Franz . Confusion causes delay. I should know. I've been sitting stone still for about twenty minutes wondering where my coffee is on my desk. I really can't find it. I set it down next to some papers and I think the edits from Lane's article drank it and ate the paper cup.


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Inferiority complex

Why are some genres considered inferior to others? Let's face it, it's because ugly people read them.

What is it, when Man Booker juries meet, that makes genres "inferior", asked Baroness James? Why is crime writing, with its "very conscious structure" and ability to raise "big moral issues" outside the box of introversion, such a poor relation of "literary fiction", asked Rankin?

Okay, not ugly people - poor people. Poor and ugly. Too poor to get an education, too ugly to go to the right salons where people are reading the right Oprah books and the occasional Booker winner.


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Who will write about the poor?
Moorish Girl wonders what happened to the voices of the disadvantaged in contemporary lit.

Poverty has receded from the list of popular themes of the American novel. No longer do we have a John Steinbeck, a Richard Wright, a Theodore Dreiser, or a Zora Neale Hurston writing about the working poor. Who today would write that "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage"? It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the last decade, American fiction has been fixated on the middle and upper classes.

Luckily, that'll change now that the middle class is becoming extinct.

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In defence of fiction

Experimental fiction, that is... (Only an excerpt of a longer Harper's essay. Thanks to the publicists who hit me with the old bait and switch. You're on The List.)


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Immortalize your doom here
Damn, I should have bid on David Brin's offering. I would have paid at least $5,000 for the rights to Moon Base Darbyshire. Or maybe Ebola: The Darbyshire mutation.

The most unusual offering was probably from science-fiction author David Brin: "How about something original? Let the bidder choose between: The name of a rogue moon on a collision course with a doomed planet, an exotic and gruesome disease of unknown origin, or an entire species of wise, ancient extraterrestrials." The winning bid: $2,250.

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I wonder why Paul Watkins's books are not more widely read. His approach has a romanic poignancy similar to that of Erich Maria Remarque.

Paperback writer hides from own book behind own name

In a clever marketing move, Picador has opted to disassociate the paperback release of Tom Wolfe's widely-panned I Am Charlotte Simmons from the negative reviews themselves by decling to print the offending (and ridiculous) title on the cover of the mass market edition. Hell, remove Wolfe's name as well and I bet your sales would be even better.


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Um, Kathryn, are you being ironic? Does McEwan, apart from his formidable lit skills, not come across in photos and in the flesh like an anglo Norman Bates? So perhaps the book-accepting women were merely hoping to avoid a terrifying interruption to subsequent showers? Just a theory.

Edited by author 09-20-2005 10:15 AM
I'd transgress with this man

Ian McEwan. Oh god, I'm weak in the knees just saying his name. Ian McEwan (I'll try again) handed (Girls? With his own immacualte hands) free books in his local park. On the green green grass. His hand brushed...; oh my! Is it any surprise that it was mostly women who took his gifts?

As in the 18th century, so in the 21st. Cognitive psychologists with their innatist views tell us that women work with a finer mesh of emotional understanding than men. The novel - by that view the most feminine of forms - answers to their biologically ordained skills. From other rooms in the teeming mansion of the social sciences, there are others who insist that it is all down to conditioning. But perhaps the causes are less interesting than the facts themselves. Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

He's forgotten all the other complex sociology at work in his gifting, though, hasn't he? How adorably guileless.

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In defence of fiction
Jay McInerney on the relevance of the novel. But who will defend McInerney?

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published. Twenty years ago, it was common knowledge in American publishing circles that the novel was over. Even as he complimented me on my first novel, which he had just purchased for publication, Jason Epstein, then vice-president of Random House, told me over a lavish lunch that the novel had probably outlived its audience and that people my own age didn't seem to be interested in literary fiction. He was trying to prepare me for the obscurity that was my probable fate.

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Edited by author 09-16-2005 11:13 AM
hi everyone, i have a question about literary agents for emerging fiction writers (EFW)... are they a good idea? how do EFWs know whom to approach? any and all info would be appreciated. i know a lot of you out there publish fiction... and once were EFWs

McCrum vs the New York Times

Is the novel really dead? Or should I say, Dead Again? (God, I loved that movie, right up until the last few seconds. It was a British movie with an American death bed. A giant scissors sculpture? Krikey.)


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She's so heavy

Hunger's Brides hits the US and, at 1,360 pages, people are amazed by its size. No flash photography, please. You'll enrage the beast.


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Latitudes of Disappointment

This year's great American novel hasn't shown itself. Um, there's supposed to be one per year? When were those quotas put into effect? And has anyone informed Wubblewoo? Maybe he should invade Manhattan to protect America's stake in the literary fiction market. Wait, don't give him any ideas.


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Want to be in a book but your loved one keeps forgetting to even write you into the acknowledgements page?
Now you can buy your way in with this charity auction by the likes of Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem. I've already put top bid in for Lemony Snicket. So back off.

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Best year for fiction?

A former Booker judge, as part of the press buildup to the award, announces that this year past was the best for Brit-fiction (Brittion?) since the award launched.


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When novelists attack
The TV world is all abuzz with discussions of Over There, a new drama about the Iraq war that depicts the conflict as it happens. It aspires to be sort of a docudrama that avoids politics. Uhh.... Meanwhile, novelists skip the big events themselves and instead focus on the impact of terrorism and the wars on society. I suppose I should make some comment about the mediums, but what would be the point?

Written after 9/11 but before 7/7 meant a thing, Ian McEwan's novel "Saturday" creates a hero who looks out his window, sees London "waiting for its bomb," and worriedly thinks "rush hour will be a convenient time." Today this fiction may seem as prophetic as Chris Cleave's "Incendiary," published in Britain on 7/7 itself, in which suicide bombers kill hundreds of Londoners in a soccer stadium. But both authors agree that their plots are based on sheer common sense and the awful fulfillment of our fears.

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Billy the Kid in literature
Today in Literature has an interesting roundup of Billy's appearances in fiction. Who knew the Kid was such a romantic?

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no man, always read...always. Expand the mind. Love Irving, I'll let you know Kelly.

Only connect, Kelly, only connect...

Edited by author 07-10-2005 10:18 AM
JOHN IRVING: UNTIL I FIND YOU. HI everyone- Has anyone read the new John Irving, Until I Find You? It's a big one - 800+ pages. I'd like any feedback. Thanks. Remember, when politics, and the world is getting you down, READ and CONNECT with each other. Ciao!

"when we die we've had a life 2,000 years long"
Umberto Eco believes we live two lives: our short, limited biological life and our long, rich cultural life. See also his thoughts on how the Web could be God.

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The saviours of Iranian fiction

Women novelists. Hm. And here I thought it was the election officials.


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These novellas look great... Can you get them without special ordering them, I wonder?

Novella-rama

I know I've mentioned it before, but if you haven't checked out Melville House's line of novella reprints, you should. I've been getting them as they come out and they're lovely, well-made, and cheap. Further, they make a nice uniform library for your shelf (ie, they look great). Go check them out.


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i read a book many years ago and now i can't remember the name. it was about a boy who had a magic whistle and a toy horse that had no ears. i don't think it had eyelid either. when he either blew the whistle or petted the horse something magic happened but i don't remember what. does anyone remember the name of this book? pleas email me at cld456@hotmail.com if you do. thanks

Edited by author 06-23-2005 09:57 AM
Born in 1985?

How dare anyone? Oyeyemi stands up for integrity.

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Awards update

Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian wins the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.


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Bookslut has cats??

Successful litblogger Jessa Crispin now has a column at The Bookstandard. This first one is on "niche fiction" (which Americans pronounce "nitch"). After I post this, I will send her an email with the header, "Don't you have enough to do?" in which I give her a verbal dressing down for taking on more work.


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"I was writing ads for Sears truck tires when a friend gave me a copy of V"
Big-shot writers such as DeLillo and Saunders reflect on Thomas Pynchon. See also the review of Cormac McCarthy's new one.

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Ready-made Rebellion
Harper's has posted its essay on "transgressive fiction" featuring Neil LaBute, A.M. Homes, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Cooper. Most provocative. (From the Rake)

One of contemporary fiction's most frustrating tropes, however, holds that even the most shocking transgression is made psychologically credible when a character carries it out not for exotic or obscure reasons but for no reason whatsoever. The technique itself is less startling than its rate of critical success, for the credibility of such inventions depends on accepting the proposition that they are not inventions at all but something more profound, more authentic, than mere art.

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The Calvino Effect
Metafilter assembles the most complete list I've ever seen of things inspired by Italo Calvino's works -- including the Invisible Cities hotel. Warning: You may lose a day or two checking out all the links.

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Where's the novel headed?

Into the head. Moby's guest columnist looks at the future of the novel.


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In the name of art

Hell, why do we need to justify this in the name of art?* Putting novelists in boxes is always a good idea. Just make sure to punch holes in the lid, or not, as your plans may be.

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in "Novel: A Living Installation" at the Flux Factory, an artists' collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No need to go to Queens (Ech. Queens. Home of "The Boulevard of Death"...) Just go by the second cup and leer at us suckers on our lunch break.


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White Noise on White Noise
This could have been a great project if the links were randomly generated too. As it is, it's still kind of interesting. I'd like to see this done with more works.

White Noise on White Noise is a collection of 36 randomly selected fragments of text from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise.

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I will never ever stop reading Don Quixote.

Does Don Quixote still matter?
And what happened to the novel?

That our own era mostly knows Quixote through a sentimental pop-culture digest of the story, in which the knight tilts at windmills and dreams the impossible dream, doesn't negate the fact that we can relate to a 400-year-old character. We'll even sing along with the Man of la Mancha, or at least hum the show tunes.

Joining the knight and his guide in their Broadway musical adventure may be the only journey most readers will be able to manage. The novel, it is true, is long and digressive. The writing is also ornate and tirelessly playful. But the more serious problem with Don Quixote is that it fails many of the critical and consumer tests of our literary culture, a culture in the grips of a narrow, bland definition of what constitutes a good book.

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I am so going to eat read this

And I say that in the tone of voice I used as I sat for a moment before my plate of saffron rice, butter chicken and sag paneer tonight. Yum.

In the same vein, Ishiguro’s new book, Never Let Me Go, is narrated by Kathy H., a young woman looking back on her life at an idyllic English prep school called Hailsham. Set in the recent past, it is equal parts elegy, detective story and, in some respects, dystopic teen novel. Slowly, we learn that the special, almost elitist upbringing shared by Kathy and her two closest friends — two other points in a love triangle — was perhaps a simulacrum of life. (Warning: it is difficult to discuss this book in any depth without revealing a half-cloaked plot secret, so if you fear spoilers, don’t read on.) Kathy and her parentless peers are “donors ” (Ishiguro’s word) or “clones” (anyone else’s). Bred to save the rest of us by handing over their organs and dying young, they are an abstract debate made flesh.


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How many men read fiction?
More than you may think. So stop putting pretty covers on books, damn it!

Even the books that might appeal to men aren't marketed to them. Miriam Toews's Governor General's Award-winning A Complicated Kindness is about a 16-year-old female protagonist, but it's funny and includes enough sex, drugs and rebellious teenage angst that the men I know who've read it, loved it. But those men had to get past the less-than-manly title and a cover that features pink and orange trim. "A lot of guys think, and I do blame the publishing industry for this," says Smith, "that if they read fiction it's going to be like having that long conversation with your girlfriend that she always wants to have about the relationship and where it's going."

Those conversations are much easier to handle with the aid of audiobooks and a small headphone hidden in your ear. Just remember to say "I'm sorry" and "If it's that important to you I'll work on it" every few minutes.

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Edited by author 04-05-2005 09:48 AM
Is a rose a rose a rose?

And does it smell as sweet? My next book will be about an author writing about a character in another novel writng a novel. It's a shoe-in for the prizes, naturally.

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Want to know what happens

After The Graduate? Go off the author.


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"What good is a dead narrator?"
On postmortal fiction.

Really, the question of why so many dead are turning up in fiction could be answered more easily if being dead offered a new tonal range or somehow made it new, but the voices of the new literary dead sound chilly but normal ... Current literary practice tends to substitute for any attempt to render the uncanniness of death a chummy, ironic ordinariness, the central irony being the fact that though the voice is dead it sounds okay.

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What makes me cringe is people using expressions the actual meaning of which they ignore. By "per say," Dr., I assume you intend "per se," the Latin phrase meaning "as such", since "per say" is perfectly meaningless? I love to see writers put something of their soul (as unhip as that word might be) on the line, but first they must be perspicuous: before the bleeding, the forging of the blade.

Edited by author 03-24-2005 07:37 PM
If the statement was a ploy, it brought attention to the editors but, ultimately, failed to interest anyone in the anthology's actual content. Nobody's even mentioned the foreword’s next sentence (which lauds the female contributors to their anthology). Stuff like this just makes the whole industry look dumber than usual. I know that book sales are flat, but this isn't the way to engage the public with the writing, nor will it get anyone talking about writing that "takes risks", per say. (And even that wording -- with its gamble-something-of-your-soul earnestness -- kind of makes me cringe).

It all feels a bit old boys club to me. About ten years ago Bill Bryson pulled the same bone-headed arguement out in a Granta Best of Young British Writers. Clearly little has changed on the other side of the pond.

Keep it safe, eh. Everything in its proper place.

K

"And, good on them (or is that God bless 'em) for discussing literary style!"

That is a discussion of literary style!? A no-brow one perhaps. It comes across as nothing more than desperate attention seeking and, like any that-time-of-the-month little zit, it should simply be ignored.

Some of the angered responses to Litt and Smith, as posted at the Guardian, are--to put it simply--over the top. Relax! Neither Litt nor Smith has set back the women's movement or so-called domestic writing-- they have not diminished the value of Tolstoy or Woolf or Checkov as writers. If you read the intro quote closely, note that they are only referring to "the submissions" they received, nothing else. As editors, they can only responsd to "the submissions" they receive; anything else would be irresponsible. There's nothing anti-intellectual or neo-conservative about it. And, good on them (or is that God bless 'em) for discussing literary style!

You heard it there first: women authors suck

This is sure to win friends and influence people. Especially in this anti-intellectual, neo-conservative, keep-mamas-in-the-home-like-god-says day-and-age (that's a lot of dashes!).

In the introduction to 13, a collection of poetry, short stories and extracts from novels, published by Picador, the authors Toby Litt and Ali Smith make a sweeping condemnation of the subject matter, writing style and preoccupations of female writers. Litt, the author of several books including Corpsing and deadkidsongs, and Smith, the Scottish writer who has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, sifted through numerous submissions from women writers. Few impressed them.

In the introduction to the collection the authors write: "On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell."

Um, I believe the pharmaceutical designation for that drug is "patriarchal hegemony". (Some responses.)


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The Gorge
Oh yeah, here's that Umberto Eco story that everyone's arguing about.

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9/11 fiction

Read all about it.* Again.



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Who's your favourite character?
The Independent polls authors to find the characters that give the greatest reading pleasure. Some fun stuff here.

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Page 1 of White Noise, annotated
A blow-by-blow account of the first page of DeLillo's classic novel.

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Never hoid of the guy

Now I must have. Gore Vidal on James Purdy.*

''Gay'' literature, particularly by writers still alive, is a large cemetery where unalike writers, except for their supposed sexual desires, are thrown together in a lot well off the beaten track of family values. James Purdy, who should one day be placed alongside William Faulkner in the somber Gothic corner of the cemetery of American literature, instead is being routed to lie alongside non-relatives.

Wait a minute... Did the NYT just sell me a book?



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Writing the snob

The snob in recent literature... I think. I'm actually not sure what the purpose of this article is, as it contains very little text that isn't description of one of the several books mentioned (but that seems to be the way the NYT is going, doesn't it... all the same books mentioned all the time.)



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Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that The Da Vinci Code is pure fiction... That's right! A "Novel", as it were...

Hmm. How do Christians know anything about conducting trials...? Oh, yes: the killing and burning. Riiiight.



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So, what do you do?
The question every author asks his characters before putting them in sexually embarassing situations and killing them.

This might surprise no one, but novelists are rarely interested in work. Almost the hardest part of planning a novel is choosing a job for the hero. What can one do, but repeat the same idiot questions as a school careers adviser: what do you think you should be? A carpenter, a soldier, a hairdresser? And you get no answer, because fictional characters don't speak; especially not unwritten fictional characters who don't even have jobs.

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The radiation leak that is Ayn Rand

A look back at 100 years of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.



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First time author gets near million dollar advance

Illness spurs author to get cracking. Bidding war erupts. Author walks away with £500k.... You know, same old story. Well, the same in that it wasn't you. (From Moby)



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Thomas Flanagan

Retrospective in the LAT.*



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I was trying to make a pun at first, but gave up. Glad to know I wasn't the only one with a mind in the pop culture gutter.

G

Am I the only one who thought the headline was about John Oates at first?

The Oates Effect

Screw writer's block. I can't stop this crazy hand* from scrawling!

The "fast" novel tends to take shape when a writer is young and in possession of stamina and an uninterrupted sequence of thoughts and big ideas. These books bristle with the writer's excitement. I first experienced this myself in 1981 when I was in college and writing my first novel, Sleepwalking. I applied the same all-nighter skills that I'd used to fashion term papers. Whenever I stopped to eat, I needed only ramen noodles and peanut M&Ms to keep me going. Sleep wasn't particularly necessary, except every once in a while, and if dark circles were scalloped beneath my eyes, I was convinced they only gave me a sensitive, Goethian, Sorrows of Young Werther quality.



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And so it begins...

Many lit-bloggers are also writers. Some have already published books, like Pete and I, and some are gearing up to. One, the extremely articulate and pleasant Laila Lalami of Moorish Girl, just signed a two book deal with Algonquin. I suspect you'll see more from the cabal of A-list bloggers in the next few years. Unless, that is, they end up like me, dividing time between child and smart-arsed remarks.



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Pardon me, do you have a razor blade I might borrow?

Actually, I really want to read this book now.

Now a second-year undergraduate reading social and political sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Oyeyemi wrote the novel in seven giddy months while studying for her A-levels in a south London comprehensive. She sent the first 20 pages to agent Robin Wade who phoned her the next day, and in a tale fast becoming urban myth, Oyeyemi signed a two-book deal with Bloomsbury for a reported £400,000 (the figure is exaggerated, insists the publisher) on the day of her A-level results.

If the book's good as well as lucrative, then I will be forced to commit suicide. (Lucky for me I can find fault with anything...)



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What's the defining characteristic of Southern literature?
Apparently, it's dead mules.

The novel Blood Meridian (1985) establishes Cormac McCarthy as unchallenged king of literary mule carnage. No fewer than fifty-nine specific mules die in the book, plus dozens more that are alluded to in groups and bunches. Mules are shot, roasted, drowned, knifed, and slain by thirst; but the largest number, fifty out of a conducta of 122 mules carrying quicksilver for mining, plummet from a single cliff during an ambush, performing an almost choreographic display of motion and color

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No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy has a new novel on the way. And a movie, it seems.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and over two million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches along and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

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Art of the novella

I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but Melville House (run by DLJ of Moby fame) has started a series of novella reprints that quite exciting. They sent us some and I was floored by some of the titles I'd never read. Why? Because no one publishes novellas anymore! So go browse and maybe buy a few. They're really quite attractive, in an FF kind-of-way. (The Edith Wharton is divine.)

Edited by author 12-14-2004 11:06 PM
Ya ya, even my cat thinks /m97 is a way too look-at-me post. Forgive me. It's the chocolate talking.

Edited to note that it would take much plotting, great character, and an exorcism-like setting to extract all the poetic hoo-hah from my would-be novel...

Ah, good to hear. Thanks to a tip from some wise guy, I ordered Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the other day. And I also contributed to a ninja's royalty cheque, so hey, Merry Christmas.

Here, here. Fucking poets. But seriously, I'm reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell right now and I can say without doubt that it's beautiful writing would mean dick all were it not for the elements of plot, character, setting. Old fashioned sounding words now, eh?

G

P.S. I'm so addicted to the book I've been neglecting other duties. You'd be surprised how much yelling you can read through.

Edited by author 12-14-2004 09:40 PM
Reminds me sorta of what BR Myers was talking about in "A Reader's Manifesto", though for him a lack of plot was more of a symptom of bad fiction than the main cause. Still, I'd agree that more plotting and less poetic hoo-hah would improve modern fiction in general.

Novelists can't tell stories anymore

Well, finally someone's said it.*

Most people blame themselves for being unable to finish modern "literary" novels. I have another theory: it's not us, it's the books.

Somewhere in the course of postwar fiction, most highbrow novelists have forgotten how to tell a great story. They can sustain a theme, they can do symbolism, they can allude to history and Hamlet ... but they can't propel us to the end of their books.

The problem: too few rattling good yarns.

Personally, I blame education for it. If we were all dullards we wouldn't need literary novels or novelists and could just be spoon fed semi-literate pap. Think of how little political turmoil there'd be then! Nirvana! Gosh, how I wish I could just open up and say aw for the flaccid, anti-intellectual phalli of embossed cover set. Life would be so much simpler, if kind of choky. (For the record, I don't know any novelists who sit down to write with a "theme" in mind, though I imagine a few edit back to it after the first draft is out. Speaking of which, someone should take the letters T, H, E, am M, out of this chick's Alphabits.)



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Is Michael Crichton too smart for his own good?

Hahahaha! Why no, you silly goose!! He just thinks he is...

Crichton is like a college professor who insists on lecturing 10 minutes after the class period ends, when his students are edging toward the door. In State of Fear, the narrative stops cold for climate charts that are printed on the page ("Goteborg, Sweden: 1951-2004"). When one of Crichton's heroic skeptics makes a controversial statement about global warming, Crichton tags it with a footnote—look it up for yourself, liberal critic! The novel ends with 20 pages of bibliographical references and the author's 25-point "message" about global warming. It's a bulwark for what Crichton thinks will be a backlash from the newspapers, the same sour reaction that greeted Rising Sun and Disclosure. But first, doesn't somebody actually have to finish reading State of Fear?



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Europe's lost stories
Julian Evans muses on the history of the novel in Europe, and the gap between BritLit and the Contintent:

If the novel is a European form, it is more accurately a western European form, and only later central and eastern European (and Russian). It came to central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and central European novelists impinged only slowly on western consciousness. Neither Kafka (d. 1924) nor Musil (d. 1942) was widely recognized as a writer of European rank until after 1945. The collected works of Joseph Roth (d. 1939), the great elegist of the tottering circus of Austria-Hungary, were not published in German until 1956. (In Britain, we began to read Roth only in the mid-1980s.) Kundera, first translated into English in 1970 with The Joke, was the exception, and his rapid ascendancy became the key to British readers' entry into the aesthetic identity of central Europe -- a unity of small nations cyclically kidnapped by "protective powers" and other tyrannies.

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brave new world was a distopia? man. everything is upside down now. but they all had all that access to soma?

Trust the computer! The computer is your friend!
What's your favourite literary dystopia?

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The CSM blisses on Chabon

Some good press for an underacknowledged writer. Just what we like to see.

Creative inspiration is a myth, he says, and he frets over what might lurk beneath the lavish reviews and jacket blurbs. "There's always a voice in my head saying, 'Oh, what do they know? They don't know the real you, the total reject.' You're alone in your office with your computer and the praise doesn't help you."

Try doing it without the lavish reviews and praise, Michael...



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"I suspect most readers yearn for a more mutual relationship."
And therein lies a tale. Because someone is dragging someone else (occasionally protesting) at present, we do not have a relationship? Dunno about that, I think all writing benefits from a bit of a tug and a stretch sometimes.
No minor stories, only minor writers? again read the book reviews of D.H.Lawrence ( Selected prose/writings/criticism - I forget the precise title)if you want some sense of the great ocean from which major works must appear - it is possible they are impossible without the minor writers so cursorily dismissed here. What are you proposing here, rationing off the good stories like they do in Hollywood?
I will look for those vanished middle class novels by the way. This is a good and thoughtful article, thank you.

In commemoration of such a great post I'm going to go buy my first copy of Maisonneuve.

The seven basic plots
Prospect Magazine reviews Christopher Booker's thoughts on the nature of narrative. Interesting read, especially the opening piece of advice.

It may seem odd to propose F Scott Fitzgerald as the most modern of storytellers, but consider how his portrait of Anson Hunter, the protagonist of The Rich Boy, opens with the narrator's reflections on his own technique: "Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing."

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Russian writers do it in public

Blogging your way to the last chapter. A Russian novelist has taken a poll asking his readers what they'd like in his next book, which he will publish as it comes on his blog.

The author has been using the blog for more than a year to respond to questions and comments about his books, taking the username Doctor Livesey, a character from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island."

"I had a think about what the point of [LiveJournal] is for a writer," he wrote. "To argue with literary opponents? That's more fun to do on forums. To hear readers' opinions? Partly yes, but not every day. To read other people's blogs? Wonderful, but then why write your own? And this is what I decided: A writer needs a blog to write books."

That's funny, 'cause this blog is what ensures I DON'T write books. (40,000 characters a week? What's he writing, Gravity's Rainbow?)



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This is like the time I read that article about women no longer needing sperm to procreate...

Is there an emoticon to denote the sound of a bugle playing Taps?

Occasionally you hear of a Luddite novelist who shuns computers, but the truth is that most of us would be lost without them. If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine, then, the blow to my scribbler's vanity when I discovered a while back that computers might get along just fine without writers.

This is not science fiction.* With little fanfare and (so far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out - even those not in master of fine arts programs. Consider the beginning of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal:

"Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving."

That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.

There's that word... Pregnant. And all without me. First some invents that computer "Christian Bök" to write poetry, and now this... Sheesh.



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The literary end...

Why can't our papers publish stuff like this?

Even before his illness, Kafka wondered whether producing fragments might be the only way he could be true to his incomplete view of the world. He had sad fantasies of being sliced up like roast meat, or of being a log and having thin shavings drawn off him, while the last story he wrote was about a singing mouse, in which he finally asked the question that had haunted his career: "Is it her singing that charms us, or isn't it rather the solemn stillness that surrounds the feeble little voice?"

A similar question might be asked of any writer, because writing is always partial: it involves the choice of some words rather than others, and choice requires rejection. As Henry James observed, "Stopping, that's art": the writer must know what to shut out, when to shut up.

(From GoodReports)



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Fiction online

TDR takes a look at the impact of online sites hosting fiction.



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Actually in the G&M interview this weekend, he confided that he wore a navy blazer while eavesdropping on today's youth...

Though really, a 73 year old in a navy blazer wouldn't be much less conspicuous than a 73 year old in a white suit in a frat house / co-ed dorm.

Civvies, yes, but unfortunately he still couldn't resist an all-white getup, and was spotted immediately.

Tom Wolfe: the Jane Goodall of the Fraternal Campus Chimp

Apparently Tom Wolfe actually donned civvies to research his latest.

What is important to him and, he believes, to his fiction, is that he witnessed it first before he wrote about it. Famously, after the publication of "Bonfire," he issued a challenge to writers to once again root the American novel in the social realism of Dreiser, Steinbeck and Dos Passos by going "out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours to reclaim it as literary property."



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