Six Great Books

Meg Wolitzer's "The Second Shelf" Strikes a Nerve

If you haven't read author Meg Wolitzer's provocative essay on the different rules for men and women in the world of literary fiction, you must read this. Her April 1, 2012 essay, The Second Shelf, for the New York Times Book Review told known and rarely acknowledged truths about the publishing industry. Basically that "isms," (racism, sexism, chauvinism and I would add ageism) are alive and well in traditional publishing. The"isms" result in first rate fiction by women being marketed as second rate "Women's Fiction," aka something a man would never read. Seems when men like Jonathan Frazen, Jeffrey Eugenides and Chad Harbach for example, write about the same subjects as female writers - marriage, family, relationships - they just write great fiction. I suppose that's because testosterone instead of estrogen was involved in the writing of the book. What else could possibly explain the disparity?

The Times is still printing letters to the editor on Wolitzer's essay, the links are below - read, learn, comment.

Thanks Meg.

The Second Shelf

The Second Shelf - Readers Respond

The Second Shelf - More Readers Respond

Twitter Teacher's Pets?

What does Twitter have to teach us?  Brevity, at the very least.  Keeping tweets under 140 characters forces us to choose our words carefully. 

Some high school English teachers believe that incorporating Twitter into homework assignments will make students better writers.  However, as this article in the Washington Post points out, asking students to tweet about Hemingway or The Canterbury Tales may make them more vulnerable to online predators, including their teachers.  Virginia is calling for regulations regarding instructional use of social media, and some states have already banned Facebook and other digital tools beyond school control.

Will keeping Twitter out of schools protect young people?  Twitter is a new technology, but relationships between students and teachers are hardly a new problem.  Central to the plot of my novel, Blind Girl's Bluff, is an illicit liaison between an art teacher and a blind boarding school student in 1985, when computers were virtually absent from secondary school curricula.  What makes my protagonist Lucy vulnerable is not the art that brings her to Monsieur Touchefeu's bed, but the trauma of having lost her father and the naivete of her perception that she is a grownup at age fifteen. 

Blaming art or technology when bad things happen between teachers and students is far too simplistic.  That's the kind of blame we could tweet in 140 characters or less, and that's why we still need novels and other traditional storytelling vehicles to capture the emotional complexities Twitter cannot.  My hope is that teachers using Twitter to enhance their students' engagement act purely out of good intentions.  In other words, I hope they are not slimeballs like Monsieur Touchefeu. 

And for those of you who would like to meet my slimeball, here is a link to an excerpt from the first chapter of my novel (this comes immediately after the prologue, which appears on the "About Kelly" page of this site).

Would You Date My Novel?

In an ADHD world of speed-dating, Facebooking and Tweeting, how much time do people spend reading novels?  Or shopping for novels, for that matter?  From the looks of the crumbling book publishing industry, I’d say, not much.  It seems people are increasingly selective about what they’ll pay to read. 

If you’re like me, you mosey around the book store scanning “first pages” until you find an interesting enough book to purchase.  Amazon.com shoppers do the same.  The first couple pages and the table of contents—that’s about all you get for free.  Kind of like a first date, at some point you’ve gotta decide.  Yay or nay?

            After being inspired by a fellow sixgreatbooks.com writer, I decided to submit the first page of my novel to a site called Flogging the Quill: floggingthequill.com.  Here, book writers like me submit the first page of their manuscript for public critique.  Obviously, there’s no true predictor for book success; but if nothing else, this site gives writers insight into the minds of potential book buyers.  In five weeks, my book’s first page will be up for critique.  I'll remind you to check back and see what people say.  In the meanwhile, here’s a sneak preview.  I’m curious:  If you were speed-dating, would you go on a second date with my first page?  Yay or nay?  

~

My only chance at redemption began the night I destroyed my best friend’s life—a night so charged with drugs and alcohol and unchartered emotional depths that I still struggle to remember it and to forget it.  Had it not been for that night, I would never have entered the labyrinth that eventually led me to my biological mother—a woman I hadn’t seen since birth.  My only wish is that we’d both been alive the day, many years later, we finally reunited.  But I’ve come to learn that some things aren’t supposed to happen on this side, so they happen on the other side.  At least that’s how it was with my mother and me.

            Sometimes, when you’re on the brink of something big, life nudges you.  Other times, it shoves you.  Valentine’s Day, freshman year, life gave me my first major shove.  I was sitting on the floor of my dorm with my best friend Paul.  It was three a.m.  My eyes were closed, and I massaged my nose to loosen the cocaine caked inside.  It oozed down my throat, leaving an iron taste like blood.  As I sat there numb, a soft orange color started pulsing in my mind.  I opened my eyes to a room full of light.  Then darkness.  Then light again.  I stood up, but fell over.  It was in this alternating world of light and darkness I had my last flicker of anything near a halfway normal life.

~      

Will eBooks Kill the Publishing Czars?

To make things even more confusing for us novices trying to break into the publishing world, now there is the iPad that is speculated to revolutionize the publishing industry with its iBooks application. Publishers Weekly reported, “In the iBookstore there are currently five publishers with titles available—Penguin, Harper, S&S, Macmillan and Hachette,” and points out that Random House is excluded from this list of publishers.  

 

Also this past weekend, drama ensued when Amazon removed MacMillan titles available on Kindle and Amazon.com due to a pricing war only to put the titles back on the popular website in a concession to MacMillan. All this news (see below links) leaves this future published author dizzy and feeling uneasy about the eBook war that is about to take place. Was Amazon exacting retribution on MacMillan for teaming up with Apple? Who knows, but it looks like it to me. And what does this mean for authors in the market for a book publisher?

 

As a child of the 80s this reminded me of how MTV permanently changed how we listened to music. To me this iPad hysteria echoes those times. Video certainly killed the radio star just as eBooks may make paper pages a thing of the past. As we have seen already technology advances like the iPod have been game changers in how we access entertainment content.

 

I’ll certainly be wary about signing a contract with publishers if they are not able to make content widely available for iPad, Nook and Kindle users. This also makes me wonder if publishing myself would be worthwhile. Why deal with a publisher that will jack up the price on an electronic version of a book.

 

Whatever shape the publishing world takes, we will be watching closely as we forge ahead to get published.

 

Amazon to Macmillan: You Win (for Now)—1/31/10, Sunday

 

Macmillan CEO Confirms Dispute With Amazon Over eBooks— 1/31/10, Sunday

 

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community

From: John Sargent—1/30/10, Saturday

 

Apple vs. Amazon: The Great Ebook War Has Already Begun—1/30/10, Saturday

 

Publishers embrace iPad, but revolution unlikely—Thursday, 1/28/10