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.