An Interesting Notion About Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the condition of being in doubt, or being in possession of imperfect information. Which fork in the road leads to one's destination?

I'm speaking metaphorically because in the age of smart phones, one can generally easily determine the correct geographic route.

Many of us experience from time to time, if not perpetually, an uncertainty about life -- if not its fundamental meaning at least how we should go about living, or what exactly we should do to accomplish something.

This can be very frustrating for some, but perhaps actually rewarding for others.

"I think people give a lot of spiritual credence to uncertainty, to not knowing," contemporary author Maggie Nelson said in an interview with The Creative Independent. "That's exactly how it should be, but it doesn't mean that not knowing is easy," she went on  to say.

Identity Politics Viewed As A Threat To Fiction

During the recent presidential election, America arguably shifted significantly from policy-based political affiliations to affiliations based on cultural and racial identities.

Most notably working class whites living in the so-called Rust Belt states switched in significant numbers from the Democratic candidate for president to a man running as a Republican even though he had attacked the GOP establishment as aggressively as he was attacking the Democrats.

Why Writers Hesitate to Criticize Publishers

The publishing industry is obsessed with money and celebrity yet writers hesitate to criticize it because in the current environment, their prospects of earning a living are so poor.

That's the view of Jessa Crispin, who I also wrote about in my previous post.  Crispin has been in the news during the past year because she shut down her pioneering literary blog "Bookslut" after 14 years.

How Internet Advertizing Impacts What Gets Written About

In an interview last May, Jessa Crispin told "Vulture" why she was closing down her literary blog "Bookslut" after 14 years.

One of the reasons she cited has to do with the changing nature of on-line advertising.

The Rise of Hitler and the Current U.S. Election

While this blog is in principle concerned with literary fiction, I am going to stray from that topic for the moment as a result of having recently read a review of a new biography in the Oct. 16, 2016, New York Times weekly Book Review section.

The work, by Volker Ullrich, is entitled "Hitler" and subtitled "Ascent 1889-1939." It focuses on Hitler the individual, a man of remarkably few accomplishments until he emerged out of Germany's post WWI economic and political chaos in a position of leadership, which he quickly consolidated, turning a democracy into a dictatorship.

Comments From Readers on "Manhattan Morning"

As regular readers presumably know, one of the purposes of this blog is to promote my novella "Manhattan Morning" -- sort of a soft-sell approach, one might say.

While a number of people have now been kind enough to read it and give me their thoughts, commercial demand has been minimal. Not that I particularly care from a monetary point of view, but authors do enjoy having readers.

One of the reasons the book hasn't done well in the marketplace is an absence of "blurbs" -- short descriptions of  the book that sing its praises in a pithy and often over-blown fashion, generally attributed to persons or institutions considered to be qualified option leaders.

Without such endorsements, people appear reluctant to invest in much of anything and one of the down-sides of self publishing is where does one get such blurbs?  If you doubt their importance, you might want to take a look at an earlier post of mine on this topic -- "Does Anything Pack More Clout in Publishing Than a Blurb?"

So ... in the absence of blurbs, I offer as endorsements the following three comments from readers, identified by their initials only (to protect the innocent!):

First

"The book is charming, gracefully written, and wise in its own modest and winsome way. I read it in one enjoyable sitting and immediately told my wife that she must read it soon. 

"I know that area in NYC, in and around 5th and 54th, for once upon a time I was a member of the University Club (best thing about it is its upstairs library, which almost no one uses). So I followed your steps down to St. Patrick's with all the stores and all the voices along the way.

"The middle story is told with generosity of spirit towards all participants and never gets near either the sensational or the exploitative. You do this well (and I must assume that at least some part of it is based on events you know well). I was wholly absorbed in the chronology. And the mother-in-law is something to behold!

"The last story is touching in its simple human beauty. You made me present and I enjoyed the company." W.C.

Second

"It is a haunting work of fascinating contrasts, elusive, bittersweet nostalgia in a mosaic-precise setting. You aren’t easy on the reader left wondering about Dan and Helen, Dan and Marcy – their relationships – never mind Gloria – and so your quirky ending is as surprising as it is charming." P.L 

Third

"I enjoyed your thoughtful walking tour of Manhattan, along streets I often traversed, thinking thoughts not unlike those of your hero."  B.M 

"Manhattan Morning" a three-chapter novella, is available in paperback format here and in e-reader format for the Amazon Kindle here, or for other types of readers here.

If for some reason you can't, or don't want to purchase it, but still want to read it, send me an email at queries.fwm@comcast.net and I will send you a copy -- until stocks run out!

The Literary Genre of Fiction Set In New York City

If my novella "Manhattan Morning" fits into a literary genre, it is probably that of fiction set in New York City.

I mention that because "The Shortlist" feature of last Sunday's New York Times book review section was entitled "New York Novels." Therein, author Helen Ellis took a look at five different stories set in The Big Apple.

Before continuing, I should mention that in an earlier post, I reviewed Ellis' short story "Dead Doormen," which -- no surprise -- is also set in Manhattan. The story is part of a book of her stories entitled "American Housewife."

The books Ellis reviews are stories about sexism on Wall Street; the notion that New York is a place where anyone can come to make it big; it's tough to survive in the city, especially with student debt; New York is where people go to make art, and if you do make art there, can you also be a mom?

To be fair, the books are about a lot more than just that and those interested can read Ellis' commentary by clicking on the phrase "New York Novels" in my second paragraph, above.

In contrast, "Manhattan Morning" is about none of those things. Rather, my protagonist is merely passing through Manhattan and, with nothing in particular to do for much of one day, he takes a walk from the Warwick Hotel to Grand Central Terminal, looking at and listening to what that part of the city has to offer. Many things come to his mind as a result of the stimuli, most significantly his relationships with several women.

But he also thinks about art in the context of how it connects and interacts with society: the aesthetics of utopia; as an expression of emptions; to enhance commerce with grandeur, and as an expression of love for one's family.

At the end, a surprise encounter with yet another woman, leaves the protagonist, Dan Morrison, contemplating his future with new eyes and re-examining his values.

"The Humans:" Life is a Downer For The 99%

The New York Times recently ran a lengthy obituary of John Bradshaw, who achieved considerable renown as a self-help evangelist.

 

I mention this because Bradshaw, who initially experienced severe alcoholism after a troubled childhood, has been credited with bringing the term "dysfunctional family" into common use during his subsequent, very successful career.

Now, it seems we can't get away from it. Among other things, it has become a staple of a great deal of contemporary fiction and, of course, live theater where the emotions ordinary people may feel, but have difficulty expressing without disastrous consequences, are given free rein on stage.

One of the latest examples of this is a current Broadway play called "The Humans," by Stephen Karam.

In a Times review earlier this year, Christopher Isherwood called the play, about a family gathering for a somewhat makeshift Thanksgiving dinner in a distressing New York apartment, superlative.

"Written with a fresh-feeling blend of documentary like naturalism and theatrical daring, and directed with consummate skill by Joe Mantello, Mr. Karam’s comedy-drama depicts the way we live now with a precision and compassion unmatched by any play I’ve seen in recent years. By “we” I mean us non-one-percenters, most of whom are peering around anxiously at the uncertain future and the unsteady world, even as we fight through each day trying to keep optimism afloat in our hearts."

The play is, indeed, well acted and the set is all-too convincing -- to the point where one feels as if one is in the apartment with the family. And at times, it is very funny. But the jokes are for the most part transgressive in nature -- at the expense of people in difficult circumstances of one sort or another. One laughs at the punch lines and then doesn't feel particularly good about having done so.

While the family is depicted as treasuring strong bonds, as time goes by and one character after another is revealed to be troubled, compromised or having come up short in one way or another, those bonds seem increasingly superficial. The only character not in danger of heading into a downward spiral is the live-in boyfriend of the family's younger daughter -- but only because he will soon come into a trust fund rather than from his own efforts. He has little to offer other than the food.

If Mr, Isherwood is correct in saying that the play accurately depicts "the way we live," that myriad of life-is-a-downer New Yorker short stories that  I have complained about may not be so far off the mark. I also have a related post on what is missing in contemporary fiction.

How does it all end?  Well, without giving anything away, as the emotional intensity steadily increases -- in "The Humans" as in other plays in the same genre -- one begins to wonder how the playwright is going to bring things in for a landing.  Not easily and not always in a satisfactory fashion in my theater-going experience.

Messages of Arthur Miller's Play "The Crucible"

When Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill) was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he sometimes recited the following apothegm as illustrative of the political difficulties of finding new sources of federal revenue.

"Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree."

In that instance of wishful thinking, outsiders could somehow be the solution to our problems. But it is usually the reverse: outsiders, or external forces, are somehow to blame.

At the moment, for instance, some see immigrants as main reason the American Dream seems increasingly out of reach. That's despite considerable evidence that immigrants have been responsible for far more of America's accomplishments than for the country's failures.

I mention this because I just saw a revival of Arthur Miller's most-performed pay, "The Crucible" on Broadway staring, among others, Saoise Ronan of "Brooklyn" fame.

Miller wrote the play, about the 1692-93 Salem witch trials, in 1953 as an allegory of McCarthyism, an anti-communist witch hunt then in full flood. Intellectuals, particularly in the performing arts, were a prominent target and, indeed, Miller himself was eventually called up before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). While he told the panel about his own former leftist activities, he refused to name others who had been involved and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a conviction that was overturned a couple of years later.

Broadway and ballet choreographer Jerome Robbins ("West Side Story"), called before HUAC in 1950, had likewise initially refused to name names -- for three years in fact -- but when his homosexuality appeared at risk of public disclosure, he reversed course and named several persons -- a playwright, a filmmaker, a dance critic and others. As a result, he wasn't blacklisted and his career continued unfettered.

(The New York City Ballet is currently performing an "All Robbins" program that includes the shorter ballet version of "West Side Story").

I mention these incidents for a couple of reasons.

First, one of the themes of "The Crucible" is that in witch-hunt ridden Massachusetts, it was often necessary to publically condemn the alleged wrongdoings of others to protect one's own standing in society. Even when one believes such demands are wrong, they can be difficult to resist when one is personally compromised.

Thus Robbins felt forced to cave in because his behavior was at odds with prevailing attitudes toward homosexuality. And in Miller's play, the chief protagonist, a farmer named John Proctor, faces problems resisting demands he believes to be wrong because he has had an affair with his family's young female servant, Abigail Williams (played by Ms. Ronan in the current Broadway production).

Second, demands that people name names in order to save themselves are still very much with us: to wit, the CIA's waterboarding of war-against-terrorism prisoners.

In both cases, there are strong incentives to say things that are untrue.

While convoluted to the point of being somewhat confusing at times, Miller's play still has a relevant message to deliver.

(By the way, if you haven't seem the film "Brooklyn," or better yet, read the book, I highly recommend both of them.)

How Much Of Your Manuscript Will A Publisher Read?

That's an interesting question, and I suspect there are as many answers as there are publishers.

But since I've just written a post on Elena Ferrante, a contemporary literary sensation, how about her publisher? How many pages of your manuscript would Michael Reynolds, the chief editor of Europa Editions, read?

Thanks to Literary Hub, we know the answer: 30 pages.  But his mind may actually have been made up much earlier.

What follows is the key interchange in an interview of Reynolds by Francesca Pellas:

FP: How do you select manuscripts here at Europa? How much do you read before making a decision?

MR: I read everything that comes in, but I don’t read the pitch first, nor the cover letter. I start with the manuscript. I look at the email just to make sure it’s not something that we don’t publish, and then go straight to the manuscript. I read 30 pages and decide whether it’s worth continuing or not. Sometimes I know from the second line that it’s not going to work for us, but I always, always, give these manuscripts the benefit of the doubt and read those 30 pages. I’ve never changed my mind, but I feel that’s the least I can do out of respect for someone who spent so much time writing something.

The bottom line: make sure you get the second line right!

Ferrante Uses Familiar Devices to Hook Readers

Elena Ferrante is an author who has been getting a lot of positive press lately and not without reason. She's an incisive, but charming writer with a good story to tell.

I just finished "My Brilliant Friend," the first book in her Neapolitan Novel series, and while I greatly enjoyed it -- even though it was difficult to keep track of who was who from time to time -- I couldn't help but be struck by her use of a couple of very basic devices to first suck readers in and then to get them to purchase the next book.

Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?

This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.

"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"

So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.

The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.

If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.

Why Are Books Perceived as "Literature" Unpopular?

In a recent post that can be found here, I mentioned that writing a book that can only be labeled as "literature" (as opposed to thriller,  detective story, romance novel or some other popular genre) is a kiss of death in the current milieu.

I mention that because in a letter to the editor published in the May 6, 2016 NYT  book review section, William F Wallace, of Brandon, Miss., concludes his missive as follows: "so readers don't buy too many books they suspect are 'literature.' Have you noticed that?"

Well, I'm sure The Times, along with the publishing industry has, indeed, noticed that.

Which begs the question "why don't people want to read such books?"

Mental Health Topics and YA Literature

"At a time when young adult literature is actively picking away at the stigma of mental illness, Whaley carves off a healthy chunk with style, sensitivity and humor," says Neal Shusterman, reviewing a book called "Highly Illogical Behavior," in The New York Times.

As regular readers know, young adult, or YA, literature is one of my favorite topics because it appears to be the one genre of fiction experiencing significant growth.

Aspects of a NYT Article on Book Clubs For Men Only

The New York Times  has an article about book clubs for men only, which you can read in full by clicking on the hyperlink under those words.

I'm not going to address the ins and outs of that notion, which seems reasonable enough, but rather quickly mention two topics contained within the article because they relate to earlier posts on this blog.

The first club mentioned in the article is located in Marin, California, and it has what was described as a cardinal rule:  no books by women about women. While the members of the club were apparently thinking mostly of "chic lit" as something they aren't interested in reading, when it comes to popular fiction in general, they don't have too much to worry about. See my earlier post entitled "Male Characters Dominate Fiction."

Replying to E-Mail Like Something Out of a Romance Novel

Google has for some time had an app called "Smart Reply" that can generate responses to your email for you if you find that task too tedious. But the responses, composed by Google's artificial intelligence (AI) engine, have apparently been on the tedious side, themselves.  Too factual, not particularly conversational.

That's apparently about to change according to an article published by BuzzFeed.

More on Secular Epiphanies, and the American Sublime

A short while back. I wrote a post about encountering a poet sitting at his typewriter at a local farmers market who would write a poem, on the spot, on any topic one might propose. I proposed "epiphany, in the non-religious sense," made a modest contribution to his well being and was asked to return in 15 minutes. You can see the result and read more about that here.

When I subsequently searched for his website, I discovered that poetry-on-demand is readily available and apparently has been for some time.

One particular writer, Jacqueline Suskin, caught my eye and I asked her for a poem on the same topic to see how her notion of the concept might differ from that of the first poet, William Curtis. To be fair, she had more time to think it over and received a somewhat larger contribution to her well being, but an affordable one nonetheless.

No Prize For Literature

If you are thinking about self-publishing a work of fiction and troll the Internet to find out how best to do so, you are, at some point, likely to be advised NOT to identify your work as "literature." It's a kiss of death in the marketplace and, indeed, in the prevailing social climate.

The only exception may be college campuses, but even there, literature is mostly required reading for certain majors. And, yes, there are some book groups here and there that still read such works.

How Lucky was Harper Lee, Revisited

Late last year, after reading "Go Set a Watchman," I wrote a post entitled "How Lucky was Harper Lee?"

My point was that when "Watchman," essentially the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird," was published last year amid considerable controversy, it was met with a hail of criticism as to how terrible it was. But when Tay Hohoff read it in 1957 at the publishing house J.B. Lippincott, she took a different view and helped Lee transform it into what turned out to be a Pulitzer Prize winning American classic.

The Life of a "Rock Star" YA Fantasy Fiction Author

I've written previously about YA, or Young Adult, fiction because it is about the only genre currently showing good growth in terms of sales. You can find my earlier posts by clicking on  "young adult fiction" in the list of labels on the right, or at the bottom of this post.

Over the weekend, The New York Times  led its "Sunday Styles" section with a lengthy feature on Cassandra Clare, one of the most successful YA authors. According to the article, she's "an alternative world builder" who sets her supernatural plots in urban settings.

The Limitless Maintained in Experience of Momentary Light

The title of this post is the last stanza of a short poem on the topic of "Epiphany" by William Curtis.

The word, in its most primary sense, refers to a sudden manifestation of the divine. In that context, the most famous epiphany is perhaps that of St. Paul (then known as Saul) when, on the road to Damascus, he saw the figure of the risen Jesus and became a convert to Christianity.

But as we now know it, an epiphany can be a sudden insight into almost anything. It doesn't have to be religious in nature.

A Device for Differentiating Characters in Fiction

In a recent post, I briefly discussed the idea that voice can, and possibly will, determine the persona and behavior of a character in fiction. There are other options as well.

Lara Vapnyar makes use of an interesting device for differentiating her characters in "Waiting for the Miracle." Although part of a novel she is working on, the piece was published as a short story in The New Yorker and can easily stand on its own.

White Male Culture: Dominant, But Soon To Be Exotic

When long-time New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton recently died, The New York Times obituary quoted Hamilton's friend, Lewis H. Lapham, as saying the following:

“You were never in doubt about who the cartoonist was. He had a particular beat, as it were — the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges.”

Stories Determined by Voice

I recently attended a seminar on writing during which the instructor, a novelist and short story writer, talked about wrestling with a particular character’s voice because voice would ultimately determine the feel of the story she was attempting to write. 

This brought to mind a recent New Yorker author interview in which  George Saunders said that when he sat down to write the story entitled "Mother's Day," he at first envisioned a rather elegant woman as the main character, but when he gave her a voice, she came out grouchy “so the story took a swerve there.”

There's Something Missing In Contemporary Fiction

Back in January, I wrote a post contending that much of the contemporary fiction one reads in The New Yorker -- and probably elsewhere as well -- presents life as a downer.

I mention this now because the April 12, 2016, New York Times "Bookends" column posed the question: "Which Subjects are Underrepresented in Contemporary Fiction?"

An Election Season Read, or Re-Read as the Case May Be

Today's issue of The New York Times has an article noting that Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, "All the King's Men," is still a great read 70 years after it was first published.

"I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries," said Dwight Garner, author of the piece. "It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election."

Rape In Life and in the World of YA Fiction

I've written about Young Adult (YA) fiction previously, in large part because it is reportedly about the only literary genre experiencing significant growth in sales. As such, it has attracted a lot of attention and various established authors who previously ignored this segment of the market have started to write for it.

These are not children's stories. No topics are off limits and perhaps partially as a result of that, lots of adults are said to be readers of these books, too.

An Imaginative Plot Twist or "Cheating?"

Ok, I used that word "cheating" mainly to get your attention. There is no such thing as cheating in fiction, right? Anything goes. But then again ...

Writers often have trouble with plots. They develop a scenario and then, for one reason or another, can't figure out how to resolve it -- how to bring matters to a conclusion, or in the case of many short stories, to a satisfactory finish since conclusions aren't all that common.

"High-Minded Sex:" An Interesting Tournament Outcome

Literary Hub, an online aggregator, today announced the winner of it's single-elimination tournament aimed at selecting the best example of "literary sex writing" from an initial round of 16 samples taken from four different historical eras.

A passage from James Baldwin's novel "Giovanni's Room" took the blue ribbon after all eight judges weighed in on final round, Lit Hub said, adding that the decision to select Baldwin over Jeanette Winterson was "almost unanimous."

"High-Minded Sex:" A Curious Outcome With Sea Anemones

Literary Hub published the results of the semi-final round of its single-elimination "Tournament of Literary Sex Writing" today and the outcome was curious in more ways than one.

First, the contests' finalists, former American author James Baldwin and contemporary English writer Jeannette Winterson, were both describing same-sex encounters in the passages from their writings that were selected for the competition. Oh well, conventional sex between men and women is so very yesterday. Either a gay black male or a lesbian will be the overall winner. The Lit Hub judges can congratulate themselves on being about as politically correct as it gets these days.

Saving Chic Lit Through Experimental Fiction

I have recently been reading "All the Single Ladies," a non-fiction work by Rebecca Traister that, among many other things, celebrates cities as the best place for an apparently growing number of unmarried women to live.

"Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual  transactional services, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love," Traister says.

"High-Minded Sex:" The Erotic Eight to the Fornicating Four?

Today, Literary Hub announced the outcome of the second round of it's single-elimination competition for best depiction of sex in literature.  The starting point was what the service identified as the "erotic eight," which I assume means the outcome will be identified as something along the lines of "the fornicating four" -- as opposed to the more conventional "final four."

Today being April Fool's day, it is hard to know whether the decisions of the distinguished judges should be taken seriously, but having written up the first elimination round, I'll play along with the game. As was the case yesterday, the actual passages of "literary sex writing" will not be reproduced on this blog. But links will be supplied for the convenience of readers who can't resist seeing what the fuss is all about.

"High-Minded Sex:" First Round Victors

In yesterday's post, I wrote about a March Madness-style tournament on "literary sex writing" -- you know, the presumably high-minded method of addressing this evergreen topic. In other words, we're talking about art as opposed to pornography. But as the years pass, that distinction appears to get increasingly blurry.

As advertised, winners from the initial round-of-sixteen were announced today with the following results (this being a family-friendly blog possibly read by scores of children, the actual passages will not be reproduced here, but links will be provided):

"High-Minded Sex," and the Winner Is ...

If one is an author in the current reading environment, one is told that to label something "literature" is to bestow upon it a kiss of death.

So if the word "sex" is associated with the word "literary," will that turn off otherwise interested readers in droves?

Literary Hub, an on-line aggregator of news and features about writing, could be about to find out. The service has just announced a single-elimination style tournament for "literary sex writing."  Such prose evidently stands in sharp contrast to ordinary old sex writing and as such, may be considered a high-minded, as opposed to prurient, activity.

A Familiar Device and a Trope: "For the Best?" You Decide

Ann Beattie's story "For the Best" in the March 14, 2016 New Yorker opens with a familiar device: there will be a meeting of possible consequence later in the story and, of course, we are immediately curious as to what's going to happen even though we know little more about anything at this point. It's a part of human nature that writers regularly prey upon and most of the time, we're hooked.

Gerald, a well-off elderly Manhattanite is, as usual, invited to a friend's annual Christmas party, but this time a "heads-up" email sent just before the invite arrives tells him his former wife, who he hasn't seen in 31 years, has been invited as well. Just to make sure readers understand the portent of this development, we are told the email contains not just one but two exclamation points.

Fiction and Non-fiction Indistinct in Some Cultures

Think about a two lane road. In the U.S., if there is a dotted line down the middle, cars coming in either direction can cross over the line to pass a slower vehicle, assuming the coast is clear.

Now think about the same road on more difficult terrain.  There are two lines in the middle, one solid and the other dotted. If the solid lane is on your side, you can't cross it. But if you are driving on the side with the dotted line, you can.

Connecting the Dots ... and James Patterson's BookShots

With this post I am going to tie together some earlier topics and point out how they apply to James Patterson's new venture, called BookShots.

In a couple of  earlier posts, which interested readers can find here  and here, I discussed the phenomenon of declining attention spans in the digital and social media age. And then, in a more recent post that can be found here, I reported on a recent study that found, among other things, that a surprising number of people never finish the novels they purchase and, in many cases, don't read much of them.

Male Characters Dominate Fiction, A Recent Study Finds

Fiction, it appears, may be yet another area where women aren't treated equally to men.

I recently wrote about a recent study that, by means of computer analysis, compared 200 novels written by graduates of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs to an equal number of those written by authors without MFAs. You can find that post here. The point of that posting was to take another look at whether getting the time and cost of getting a graduate degree in creative writing is worth it or not.

But the study also came up with another interesting finding: that authors write more about men than about women, perhaps because publishers find such books sell better.

Listicles and the Addictive Nature of Lists

Jonathon Sturgeon, in an article about how and why people chat about books online, mentions in derisive terms a listicle he received not too long ago.

"The day after the last Paris attacks, after viewing streams of dejection online, I received an email from BuzzFeed, a listicle featuring 31 books that promised to restore my faith in humanity."

Not Just All About Me, But All About My Angst

The New York Times just carried a lengthy obituary on Anita Brookner, an English writer who, early in her late-in-life writing career, won the Booker (now Mann Booker) Prize for fiction.

Reading this brought to mind an Elle magazine article about contemporary Twitter maven, poet and soon-to-be novelist Melissa Broder. The article came to my attention thanks to "Literary Hub," an on-line font of all things having to do with writing.

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.

How Much Of A Book Do You Actually Read?

In the age of Big Data, publishers increasingly want to know just how much of a book purchasers actually read, or so says a story in the March 15 New York Times.

Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of e-books apparently already have a lot of such data when it comes to people reading books in electronic form, but that is roughly only about 25% of the market and readership of e-books is, at best, leveling off at present, various reports have suggested. Readership data for books on paper is another matter.

To fill the gap, The Times reported, a London-based firm named Jellybooks has a device readers can use, in exchange for free books, to track their reading activity and transmit that data to the company, which then provides it to participating publishing companies, presumably for a fee.

A Memorable Way of Putting Something

"His beauty had startled her, until she'd met both parents -- Vietnamese mother, Polish father -- and then he'd seemed like the solution to something."

That sentence jumped out and stuck with me as I was reading "Buttony," a story in the March 7, 2016 New Yorker  by Fiona McFarlane. It's about the dangers of an addiction to beauty and it reads like a fable even though the characters are humans as opposed to animals.

Edvard Munch: Storytelling in Art

One artist I have long admired is the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch and, as such, he figures in the first chapter of my novella, "Manhattan Morning."  Indeed, that chapter is entitled "A Particular Girl in the Frieze of Life" -- a reference to a series of paintings Munch made that are rich in psychology.

"The key to Munch's originality is storytelling with a potent pictorial rhetoric of rhythmic line and smoldering color," Peter Schjeldahl said in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. He was reviewing an exhibition of Munch works of art that recently opened at the Neue Galerie on Manhattan's Upper East Side, not far from the Metropolitian Museum.

Does Anything Pack More Clout in Publishing Than a Blurb?

"Powerful ... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

"Unflinching, gorgeously written."  -- San Francisco Chronicle.

Those are known as blurbs, or "short descriptions of a book, movie, or other product written for promotional purposes and appearing on the cover of a book or in an advertisement."

When it comes not just to attracting purchasers, but also to getting a book through the conventional publishing mill, nothing is more important than blurbs, it seems.

Is Some Fiction Written in Code?

Have you ever wondered what the author of a novel is really writing about?

In an article in the The New York Times entitled "Song of Inexperience," Vivian Gornick depicts E.M. Forster as writing with "a pen forever dipped in code."

It's a provocative notion.

Sex Sells, and Sells and Sells and Sells

The Sunday Business section of the New York Times recently carried a lengthy article on Meredith Wild, a woman who, after becoming a very successful independent author of romance novels, started her own publishing imprint called “Waterhouse Press.”

“I wanted something that sounded like it was a real imprint, because nobody takes you seriously as an independent author,” the Times quoted Ms Wild as saying.

After first publishing her own books, Ms Wild began acquiring and releasing the works of other self-published romance writers under the Waterhouse name, becoming what the Times termed “a kind of value investor in erotic prose, pinpointing under-valued writers and backing their brands.”

Imagining Ourselves Into Other People's Experiences

Quote of the day: "In fiction, we imagine ourselves into other people’s experiences."

That comes at very end of an interview of Sunil Yapa, author of "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist," a recent novel about the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and riots in Seattle. He was interviewed by Bethanne Patrick.

The quote is interesting and perceptive because it helps explain why people like or dislike certain novels. If one doesn't find a character with whom one wishes to identify for one reason or another, books are often not that interesting.

That can be true no matter how well characters are "developed."

The Immediately Shocking, The Immediately Charming

"Does anything less than the immediately shocking or charming get attention?" asks Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review in a recent New York Times "Critic's Take" column.

Not if one spends much time on Facebook or some other form of electronic social media. Topics hurtle past and those who post them have learned they had better not require much thought on the part of viewers. What's up front has to be sufficient to generate a "like" or perhaps a three-word comment. Few viewers will bother to read any further.

The Independent Lives of Fictional Characters

I think it is natural that when people read a book, they wonder to what extent writers have cast themselves, family members, friends or acquaintances as characters, perhaps with an agenda in mind.

Some friends who have read my novella, "Manhattan Morning", have expressed surprise to discover that neither I nor anyone else they know appears therein. The main characters -- Dan, Marcy, Gloria and Rev. Saddleford -- are inventions I set in motion and who then, to at least some degree, took on lives of their own during the writing process.

Dead Doormen, Caricature and Helen Ellis

One way to illuminate the truth of something is to enlarge its most pertinent features out of proportion. We are all familiar with caricature in art, often with respect to political figures or celebrities. For example, Richard Nixon was rarely caricatured without having considerable emphasis placed on his trademark five o'clock shadow, suggesting an ever-present dark side to his character and a certain degree of shiftiness.

All too true.

Caricature is also a form of literature and when deployed, an author exaggerates or over-simplifies certain aspects of a character or a situation to entertain readers or to make a point. If the point is to ridicule the subject, the technique is akin to satire.

Death of a Shapeshifter: David Bowie

David Bowie, identified first and foremost in his New York Times obituary as "infinitely changeable" died on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016. He was 69 years old.

"In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits," the newspaper said. It called him "a constantly morphing persona" and "a person of relentless reinvention."

Why mention this is a bog about fiction?

New Yorker Fiction: Life is a Downer

If one reads fiction in The New Yorker regularly, as I have over the past couple of years, it is hard to escape coming to the conclusion that life is fundamentally a downer and often disgustingly so.

One of the latest such depictions is "The Beach Boy" from the magazine's Jan. 4, 2016, edition in which a Manhattan dermatologist who initially appears to be leading a reasonably satisfactory, comfortable middle class married life falls to pieces and ends up drunk on a tropical beach, attempting unsuccessfully to get the attention of a male prostitute he thinks could tell him something, surely degrading, about his former wife.

His former wife? Oh, I almost forgot. In an extremely well-wrought and imaginative plot twist, she dropped dead. Just like that.  This development was required it appears, to expose John, the dermatologist, as the pathetic creature he really had been all along.

George Orwell: Frighteningly Prescient With More To Come

A May 2015 post entitled "Fiction of the Future" was the first in which I discussed the idea that one purpose of literature is to look ahead and try to imagine what might come of us, unconstrained by prevailing limits of scientific or other relevant knowledge. Therein, I cited George Orwell's 1940 novel "Nighteen Eighty-Four" as probably the most famous title within this genre.

Thanks to a service called "LitHub Daily," I just read a thoroughly researched, exceptionally chilling article by Stephen Rohde that shows how very prescient Orwell was.  Entitled "Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this rather lengthy piece is highly recommended.

There is little more to say about the subject now, but I suspect I will return to the topic in the future.
 

A Story of Manners That Calls To Mind Graphic Novels

I'm going to stay with the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker for the moment and talk about Tim Parks' concise short story called "Bedtimes," which I like for two reasons: first it is essentially a story of manners -- that once popular genre that few writers seem to view as a suitable subject for contemporary fiction.

Novels of manners -- Jane Austin, of course, immediately comes to mind -- concern how people behave toward each other in conventional social situations, or, to put it another way, in ordinary life.

Second, I like this story because it is written in prose so straight forward it reads like an ever-so trendy graphic novel. All that is missing is the pictures, but the nature of the story is such that one can easily imagine them.

"There is a willful simplicity and a mechanical, monosyllabic repetition to the prose. Almost as if it were written for children, in places, as if everything were terribly simple and clear, when in reality none of the important or complicated things are being said," Parks explained in an author interview.

What important or complicated things? A marriage has stagnated, but perhaps not terminally, and neither spouse wants to take the issue on. Among other things, there are children in the picture.

To say more would give it away. It's only two pages. Read it and see what resonates.

Will Advanced Robots Recreate Us As Works of Art?

As I have previously noted, one of the purposes of fiction is to look into the future and try to imagine what the world might be like if, say, terrorism reigns supreme or climate change overwhelms us.

Then there is the much-discussed topic of artificial intelligence and whether it might get out of control. The Washington Post carried an op-ed piece on that topic last month and I've written about it in earlier blog posts that readers can find here and here.

All of which brings me to a short poem in the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky entitled "The Robots."

In it, Pinsky, imagines a world in which exceptionally advanced robots ("Their judgement in its pure accuracy will resemble grace ...")  reign supreme. Man is gone, but the robots can comprehend the nature of humans through the dust that remains of them "and recreate the best and the worst of us, as though in art."

It's an arresting image. Picture yourself framed and hanging in a museum for the edification of a bunch of robots which "when they choose to take material form they will resemble dragonflies, not machines."

A Paperless Society? Not When Bill Gates Reads Books

I took a break from blogging during most of the month of December, passing up many interesting topics in the process, but instead, got a number of other things done. So I'm starting the New Year with more of a clean slate than usual.

Here's a very brief item to get back into harness.

The New York Times has a story today (Jan. 2, 2016) about Microsoft founder Bill Gates reviewing books on his blog Gates Notes.  No surprise, as a celebrity, when he recommends a book, a bounce in sales follows.

What would we, a nation of sheep, do without celebrities? How in the would would we know what to  eat, what to drink, what to wear and (think Oprah) what to read?

What struck me about the article was not what Gates has been reading -- non-fiction for the most part, it appears -- but how he reads. According to The Times, not in an electronic format.

"Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while vacationing with family," the newspaper reported.

One advantage of paper is that one can scribble in the margins.

"He (Gates) rarely posts negative reviews of books, explaining that he sees no need to waste anyone’s time telling them why they shouldn’t bother reading something. He doesn’t spare himself, though. 'I have a habit, which I don’t recommend, of finishing essentially every book I start,' he said. 'And if I disagree with a book I spend lots of time writing notes in the margins. Perversely, this means that the more I dislike a book, the longer I spend reading it.'" the article said.

I like to scribble notes in the margins of books that I read, too, but generally not to argue with the authors. It's a way to more easily get back to material I like or think is interesting or important.

Fortunately, Gates isn't the only one who finds books in print more satisfying that a stream of text on some electronic device. We are fortunate to have a bookstore a block and a half away and it is doing exceptionally well -- right under the nose of Amazon, which, by the way, recently opened its own bricks-and-mortar store selling books in print at our local high-end shopping mall.