Along Publishers Row
By Campbell Geeslin
Novelist Philip Roth, in The Guardian of London, predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading novels will be akin to the numbers now reading Latin poetry. Novels will be a curiosity, certainly not a profit center.
That observation is from an essay by Susan Dominus in The New York Times. She said, This is painful gospel for anyone who reads Philip Roth, or other great writers, the way other people read religious texts—to make sense of the world, to be humbled or inspired by the power of language.
In her essay, Dominus insisted that even without novels “people will keep making literary culture, just not at the same scale, or in the same hallways, or for a living.”
DRAMA: The Lincoln Center Theater opened the fall season with “What Once We Felt,” a new drama by Ann Marie Healy. It’s “about a novelist of the future whose book becomes the last to be printed on paper.”
The New York Times asked, “Grim parable? Macabre comedy? Naturalist drama? Given that subject matter, it could be any of the above, or a little of all three.” Let’s hope it’s an impossible fantasy.
TOO MUCH? Thomas Mallon’s new book is Yours Ever: People and Their Letters. In an interview in PW, Mallon said, “To me, the idea of e-books as the most popular format bothers me less than the possibility of a publishing world in which the editorial apparatus has collapsed. As the world of self-publishing proliferates, I just worry about so much stuff being out there that people don’t know how to find what’s good. That, I think, is the big challenge, more than the shifting technology itself. I suppose that immediately provokes charges of elitism from people. Well, so be it. I don’t want to live in a world where everything receives the same imprimatur as everything else. I don’t want to live in a world without editors.”
NOTED: The following quote is from Chamfort’s Maximes et Pensees, published in 1805: “Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before.”
THE HARD PART: Ron Hansen’s latest novel is Exiles. He is an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church. His novels, Atticus and Mariette in Ecstasy, were bestsellers.
He told The Writer that “the hardest part of fiction writing, for me, is introducing characters.”
He said he learned how it should be done from William H. Gass. “While other writers may have been content to describe Marcel Proust as sickly, here is Gass: ‘At his birth, not everyone expected Marcel Proust to live, and, indeed, with what was to be characteristic perverseness, the little fellow grew as sturdily as if weakness were the purpose of the plant.’ A lot of work gets done in that one wry, economical sentence.”
ON DISPLAY: Four quilts inspired by children’s books are on exhibit at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., from January 15 to April 5. The quilts were made by Muriel Feldshuh of Brooklyn.
Feldshuh wrote the Guild: “There are 126 illustrators and authors who contributed to my project. Several of the authors who contributed quotations are Newbery Award winners. Many of the illustrators are Caldecott award winners. It has been a fun project for me.”
Among those who provided illustrations or quotations and were listed by the quilt maker are Kevin Hawkes, Wendell Minor, Petra Mathers, Jane Yolen, Chris Raschka and Kate DiCamillo.
Last fall, two of the quilts were shown at the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature in Abilene, Texas.
ALL MALE: In its November 2 issue, PW compiled a list of the year’s 10 best fiction and nonfiction books. The Guardian reported that there were no books by female writers on the list, and the ranking was drawing protests. Cate Marvin, a founder of Women in Letters and Literary Arts, was quoted: “The absence made me nearly speechless.”
Louisa Ermelino of PW commented: “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Then she added, “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”
SO THERE: In Oscar Wilde’s preface to his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the author wrote: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
RERUN: Old prose can turn up in surprising places. Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard are singer-songwriters who produced an album entitled One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music From Kerouac’s Big Sur. Some of the songs on the album grew out of a documentary film with a similar title. The lyrics came from Jack Kerouac’s writing, set to music.
NUMBER ONE: During one week in October, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid was the best-selling book in the U.S. PW reported that it sold more than Dan Brown or any other author. Kinney’s fourth in the series, Dog Days, had a four million copy first printing. More than 21 million Wimpy Kid books are in print.
UNAFRAID: A Newsweek reporter told Maurice Sendak that some parents complained that the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are was too frightening for small children. The movie is rated PG. Sendak, who is one of the film’s producers, said that he would “not tolerate” parental concerns about the movie being too scary. He said, “I would tell them to go to hell.”
How about just sending them to an island peopled by monsters?
