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.”