Writer’s block?

GARRISON KEILLOR, an author and host of ”A Prairie Home Companion“, a radio programme, has some humble and awkwardly soothing words for the hair-tearing writers of the world:

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? And the readers you most want (youth) are fixated on screens, not on paper. This is so depressing you want to tie a rock to your ankle and jump in the Mississippi, and if you remembered how to tie the knots that could hold a rock you might, but a long walk can bring you around.

Maybe a little simplistic, and perhaps a touch condescending. But not bad advice. It is spring, after all.

Then We Came to the…sales conundrum

IN LIGHT of all our whinging about the declining space dedicated to books coverage in American newspapers, it is amusing to read this article about the publishing market. David Blum poses some interesting questions about what motivates readers to buy a book. Often (*gulp*) the whims of critics don’t factor in.

“Then We Came to the End,” first-time author Joshua Ferris’s satirical narrative of office life in a Chicago advertising agency, got the sort of universal acclaim from book critics that novelists dream of, and almost never happens….So why did “Then We Came to the End” not become a New York Times bestseller?…   

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? …shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

It is odd when an expensive marketing strategy (Mr Ferris’s book even has its own website) and critical acclaim don’t generate impressive sales figures. And if a book fails to win momentum early on, things only get worse. Authors are left writing long lists of all the people they can send signed copies of remaindered books to.

Can we all just get along?

Adam LeBor is that rarest of creatures: a journalist who can write about the Israel-Palestine conflict with openness, interest, eloquence, wit and genuine compassion for ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. His newest book, City of Oranges, examines the conflict through the eyes, words and lives of six families in Jaffa, the ancient Ottoman port around which Tel Aviv was built. Based in Budapest, he writes for several publications, including The Times and The Economist; we spoke with him earlier this week, on the occasion of City of Oranges’s American publication.

Play or Download: Adam LeBor on the prospects for Arab-Israeli coexistence (9:42 | 3.9 MB MP3)

There can be a human connection. Despite everything, there can be a human connection. And that’s one of the things I hope the book can achieve…In the long term, Israel is not going away, and neither are the Palestinians, and they’re going to have to come to some kind of agreement.

Growl

What is it with books about animals? Why has a memoir about man’s relationship with his kooky, misbehaving dog become a best-seller, with over 3.2m copies in print? And soon there will be a book about a kooky cat who lives in a library, which just sold for about $1.25m to Grand Central Publishing. It hasn’t been written yet, incidentally. 

Slumming it

In an amusing essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Joe Queenan writes in praise of very bad books. It is “one of life’s unalloyed pleasures”, he writes, to read ”an uncompromisingly stupid novel in a world filled with stupid novels that do make compromises.”

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t.

Better a giggle than a Gogol

“WHY is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?”Julian Gough has some fighting words about the state of the novel in a compelling but unwieldy essay in Prospect magazine. The problem, it seems, is that novelists are afraid of being funny. Western culture overvalues the tragic and undervalues the comic. According to Mr Gough, it’s time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh:

Possess all the great art ever made*

THE latest and greatest contribution to the popular economics paperback bookshelf comes in August from Tyler Cowen, ace blogger, academic, and all-round good egg. It is called “Discover Your Inner Economist” (Dutton,  August 2007), and it may well be the best book ever written by anybody on any subject.

Here is Mr Cowen explaining how the art market works:

 1   Landscapes can triple in value when there are horses or figures in the foreground. Evidence of industry usually lowers a picture’s value.

2    A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit. Roses stand at the top of the flower hierarchy. Chrysanthemums amd lupines (seen as working class) stand at the bottom.

3    There is a price hierarchy for animals. Purebred dogs help a picture more than mongrels do. Spaniels are worth more than collies. Racehorses are worth more than carthorses. When it comes to game birds the following rule of thumb holds: the more expensive it is to shoot the bird, the more the bird addas to the value of the painting. A grouse is worth more than a mallard, and the painter should show the animal from the front, not the back.

4    Water adds value to a picture, but only if it is calm. Shipwrecks are a no-no.

5    Round and oval works are extremely unpopular with buyers.

6    An 18th-century Francois Boucher nude sketch of a woman can be worth ten times more than a comparable sketch of a man.

The moral?

The Me Factor is at work. For that reason, don’t expect a large market in paintings of plane crashes.

* This is the title of one of Tyler Cowen’s chapters. I stole it, thinking it had a high read-me quotient. His other chapter titles include: “How to control the world: the basics”, and “Look good at home, on a date, or while being tortured”.

Blogging books

THE New York Times has decided to beat the drum today about the dwindling column space dedicated to book reviews (something we’ve been lamenting ourselves). The issue is really money, not culture (and its much-heralded decline). Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, and literary musings are like love-handles in the fat-trimming world of publishing.

The Times article, which quotes literary authors, book-review editors and bloggers, highlights all sorts of interesting questions about the future of books coverage:

To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books. In recent years, dozens of sites, including Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/), maudnewton .com, Beatrice.com and the Syntax of Things (syntaxofthings.typepad.com), have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.

This rise in literary blogging is surely a good thing. “I think the more people that write about books the better”, said an enlightened Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review (a mercifully stubborn hold-out against the pull of the bottom line).

Still, a move away from print is a pity.

“Moby Dick”, without all those fishy bits

HAVE you always wanted to read “Anna Karenina”, if only there weren’t so many pages about agriculture? Orion Books hears your plea:

The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads “in half the time”, will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.

Whither the book review? Part II

ART Winslow at Huffington Post offers more wistful words about the demise of the book review. “How did we arrive at what seems to be a cultural sinkhole?”

In the new book burning we don’t burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.

What about the vast expanse of space online?