Books I shouldn't want to publish...

... but that I wish I had. Any writer who can use the phrase "boughten woman" is okay by me.


















More lurid pulp fiction covers at the sadly defunct Cover Art Gallery.

The author's slice of the pie

Jonathan Heawood has an interesting perspective on publishing:

While readers have an interest in seeing a wide range of high-quality writing for all tastes, and authors have an interest in a marketplace which can generate income from their idiosyncracies, the print market itself is geared towards promoting ever smaller numbers of increasingly conventional titles. Whether readers get their content in black ink on a white page, blue text on a grey screen or white chalk on a black board is irrelevant. As Clare Alexander pointed out, authors aren't in the paper business, they're in the communication business....
...If conventional publishers, agents and retailers want to find an answer to this question, they are going to have to stop defending the status quo. The present dispensation is a historical accident. These particular middlemen arrived on the scene over the last few hundred years, whenever the industry became richer, at the same time that new copyright controls were imposed as each new player - agent, publisher, retailer - sought to defend their slice of the pie. The pie has grown, but so have the number of slices. The only player with a diminishing slice is the author.

Raj Redux

William Dalrymple in the NYRB:

Two new books on the British in India, both of them sophisticated works by established scholars, demonstrate how polarized the debate has now become. For Nicholas Dirks, who concentrates on the India of the East India Company, the British Empire is a terrible blot on world history comparable to slavery and fascism; to be neutral or even balanced on the issue is to tolerate the intolerable, and even to become complicit in oppressive violence and tyranny. For David Gilmour, however, working on the later period of the high Raj, the Victorian administrators of the Indian Civil Service could certainly be eccentric and fallible, but far from being oppressive exploiters they in fact "represented the British Empire at its best and most altruistic." It is difficult to imagine two books, on similar subjects, which have less common ground.

The Man Booker... international?

Stuart Kelly grumbles about the 2007 Man Booker International Prize shortlist:

So I was eager to see the 2007 shortlist. When I did, bemused boredom swiftly turned to gnawing irritation. For the record, the novelists contending this year are Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michel Tournier. One thing is immediately conspicuous. You've probably heard of most of them.
There are only four non-English speaking authors. There is nobody from China, Japan, Russia, South America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent or the Arabic world. Moreover, every author on the list who is eligible for the usual Man Booker has either won, or been shortlisted, for that award. "Diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques", as the press release trumpets? Hardly.

In The Guardian, James English asks:

Surely it is a bad thing to have all these new prizes sprouting like weeds even while the established ones are themselves dividing and reproducing, generating offshoots and offspring that have us speaking of "baby Bookers" or of the Man Booker "family" of awards? Surely all this must be a symptom of literary soil rendered artistically arid by decades of global free-marketism and a superheating multinational machinery of hype?

Disappointingly, having asked the question, he answers "Nay".

Literary readings and other merde

Mik Awake questions the 21st century hustle known as the literary reading:

In its producer-consumer format, in its faux-democratic approach to literary discussion, in which readers are encouraged to disagree only on which passage of a book was their favorite (Merde!), the literary reading is a perfect example of market culture’s damaging influence (Merde!) on our experience of art and perhaps, for many former or current students, an all-too-familiar echo of the teacher-student format (Merde! Merde! Merde!). In a situation where the Author equals producer, and reader equals consumer, disfavor can be seen as costly. But, without drunk French prodigies yelling out swear words, how do most people gauge public disfavor at a literary reading? The answer: silence.

How to sell your book

Easy. Recruit your fridge and stovetop as marketing personnel.

(From MaudNewton): Miranda July uses the top of her fridge as a dry-erase board to promote her book, No One Here Belongs More Than You. I'm buying it. In yellow.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr, 1922-2007: Last line of book

New York Times; SFGate; The Guardian; Globe and Mail.


From Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

From Breakfast of Champions:





Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"








From Player Piano:
''You think I'm insane?'' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

''You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.''

''Barely-- barely.''

''A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.''

Finnerty shook his head. ''He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.'' He nodded, ''Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first.''

Stealing books is right/ wrong?

John Lanchester does a great piece on Google and copyright--yes, there is something new to say, and he says it:

So: 20% of all books are out of copyright, and Google can have them with everyone's blessing; 10% are in print, and the lines of argument are fairly clear. The other 70% of books are either in copyright but out of print or in a status about which nobody is certain - "orphan works", as they are known. (Nobody even knows how many books there are. The best guess seems to be about 32m.) It is over these titles that the big argument between Google and the publishers is taking place. Google wants them to be available online, together with links and places to buy the books. It seems to me this would mean that, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book - and this makes some publishers and writers nervous.
The crucial issue is one of trust. Everyone in the book world can see what has happened to music and is happening to film, and it worries them; the prospect of free digital copies of books is not automatically joyful. Ovenden says "I can't see how they'll sell more books by not being in Google" - which has a certain force. There is something horrifying about the idea that 70% of all the books ever published are in the limbo of being out of print. Anything that gives those works a new life and new readers, even if only a few a year, has to be welcome.

And The Splintered Mind discovers that ethicists steal more books than anyone else.

No more Aurelio Zen

Michael Dibdin died in Seattle this week at the age of 60--The Telegraph has an intelligent tribute:

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

For Shakti

I met Shakti at a boring Delhi party over two years ago; she and Jeet had just moved back to Delhi from New York, and Shakti was doing what she did best--making friends. We chatted for a bit; she told me I needed sexier shoes (I still do, Shakti, you had the jump on me on that one), slipped a friendly hand into mine and asked when she could come over and meet my cats.

Over the next few months, Jeet and Shakti became part of our lives as though they'd always been there. Shakti joined Random House as an editor, and when we discussed books, I was struck by her openness to new ideas, her enthusiasm about authors. Samit Basu did a reading shortly after that; it coincided with his birthday. I was supposed to be in conversation with Samit; Shakti came up to me before the discussion started and told me she would put her hand up right at the end to ask a very special question, so could I make sure she was the last speaker? I said, of course.

Her question was simple. Would we all sing happy birthday to Samit, and cut the birthday cake she had thoughtfully smuggled in? We did; it's the only book launch I can remember that ended with the audience bellowing "Happy Birthday to You" at the author. It was a typical Shakti moment.

People gravitated to Shakti because she made us believe that anything was possible. She was curious about photography; she started to take her own pictures, and was planning to make a "wall of memories", a record of their first years in Delhi. At Jeet's poetry readings, Shakti was the one handling the digital video camera; she had an instinct for when to zoom in on Jeet's face, when to capture the audience's reactions.

She shifted from Random House to start up Bracket Books, and she sparked with ideas for her brand-new imprint. She had also started writing herself, and she had an astonishing voice, a very distinctive style. One of my friends calls it "handwriting", this business of a writer's signature, and says that it can't be taught--either you have your own "handwriting" or you don't. Shakti did.

At a Caferati evening where she, Jeet and I had been invited to discuss writing with Caferati's members, Shakti spoke with honesty about the challenges facing new authors, about the need for publishers to create what she called "welcoming spaces" for writers who were starting to find their own voices. She wanted to be one of those publishers; she wanted Bracket to reflect her own credo of openness and encouragement.

Jeet and Shakti had one of the most open houses in a city that takes hospitality seriously. Shakti was always at the heart of those evenings, the one who encouraged us to try to use a hula hoop, to do zany writing experiments, to read serious poetry in a seriously unserious manner. She believed in the importance of silliness, and in her company, I found myself letting go, letting my hair down, relaxing into the moment.

It seems so wrong that someone as vibrant as Shakti should be gone. It seems obscene to be writing what amounts to an obituary for someone who was so alive. But maybe it's one way to hold on to all the things that Shakti meant to us. In just two years, she brought so much joy into our lives; I believe she would have been an amazing writer, a kind and wise publisher. My thoughts are with Jeet, with their families.

Shakti Bhatt

This is hard to write, but for all those who knew and loved her: Shakti Bhatt, writer, editor of the newly-established Bracket Books, and friend to more people than can be counted, died of a sudden and brief illness late on Saturday night.

She and her husband, the poet Jeet Thayil, moved back to Delhi from New York two years ago, and made a new life here by throwing open the doors of their home to all of us. Shakti was well-loved, and will be missed more than I can put into words right now. Our thoughts are with Jeet.

One of Shakti's friends sent me this poem, by Vikram Seth; I hope he won't mind if I put it up here today.


All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above--

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights, or for one,
And some for all their years.