Goodnight, Sweet Print

By Ted Heller

THE YEAR IS 2001 and I am on the subway. It is the Number 1 train, going uptown, and I am heading to a reading of Slab Rat, my first published novel. (It’s my first ever reading, too, and I’m nervous.) It’s four in the afternoon and the car I’m on is not crowded. I see, directly across from me, a gorgeous, olive-skinned brunette sitting and reading a book.  She’s not tall enough to be a model and not quite emaciated enough, but she is on the flawless side (her nose is a bit long, but who cares?). I swallow and tell myself not to stare and I follow through on it: I do not stare, for that would just be wrong. But then, while nobly avoiding eye contact, I see what book she is reading. It’s Slab Rat! Oh my God! She’s reading my book and, I can tell, she’s enjoying it, too. Perhaps she’s also on her way to the reading?

This opportunity, I quickly realize, is highly unlikely to ever occur again. I may never get another book published, and if I do ever get another book published I may not ever again see someone else reading it, and if I do ever get a book published and see someone else reading it, the person most likely will most likely not be, as this woman is, a dead ringer for Monica Vitti circa The Red Desert. Should I do something? Do I bust some sort of move? “You have to do something,” I hear a strange, anxious voice telling me. It’s my voice . . . and it’s saying: “This is one of the three reasons you became a writer in the first place, fool!” (The other two reasons being: 1) to write books that don’t sell well, and 2) because I can’t do anything else.) So, after the subway comes to a sudden stop between stations, I stand up and approach her and tell her that I am the author of the book that is currently reducing her to hysterics. She looks up at me, looks at the photo on the book jacket, and tears of delight quickly well in her eyes. She begins to melt.

The above scene did not happen. Of course it didn’t.

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Stop Saying That Men Don’t Read Women

It holds woman writers back, and it’s just not true.

By Ester Bloom

It has become a truism that “men don’t read women.” The assertion is taken as self-evident by feminist publications like Salon (“while women read books written by men, men do not tend to reciprocate”) and shown anecdotally by blogs. It is also perpetuated by male bastions like Esquire, which recently released a list “of the greatest works of literature ever published” featuring one (1) book by a woman out of a total of 75. (Dudes like stuff that is “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another,” helpfully explains Esquire’s editor-in-chief, who introduced Fiction for Men e-books to widespread scorn last year.)

To be sure, the inequalities of the literary world are as plain as the nose on Jonathan Franzen’s face, and many writers and readers alike remain outraged about this unbalanced state of affairs. The Women In Literary Arts numbers for 2012 (compiled annually by VIDA) have barely budged from 2010 and 2011—men still dominate the major outlets as tastemakers, reviewers, and authors whose works are deemed worthy of review. The Nation recently published a cri de coeur by novelist Deborah Copaken Kagan lamenting “centuries of literary sexism, exclusion, cultural bias, invisibility. There’s a reason J. K. Rowling’s publishers demanded that she use initials instead of “Joanne”: It’s the same reason Mary Anne Evans used the pen name George Eliot.” And a recent Salon interview with Meg Wolitzer addressing these frustrations is titled “Men won’t read books about women.”

The truth is more complicated. Of course men read books about women and have for centuries—what are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina if not classic books about women? Those canonical examples are merely a couple of the ones explicitly named for their central character. Nobody picking up those lauded works of fiction could claim to have been misled by the title to think they were reading about Hitler’s Germany, or fishing, or fishing in Hitler’s Germany, or whatever else men are solely supposed to want to read about.

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The Most Dysfunctional Families in Literature

By Jami Attenberg

Neuroses run rampant across three generations of the Middlestein family in Jami Attenberg’s sublime new novel, The Middlesteins. Who better to recommend great books about profoundly imperfect families?

In literature, as in life, every family is pretty much dysfunctional in one way or another. So what makes one dysfunctional literary family more memorable than the next? Personally, I prefer a little wit with my disaster, not to mention a little soul; it makes the pain go down easier. But every once in a while I like my families extra wicked and dark. I guess it makes me feel like I’m not that terrible after all.

By the way, these aren’t in order of my favorites, because it is impossible for me to pick a favorite! I love all these troubled souls — siblings and parents, husbands and wives alike — equally.

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Good sex in literature: why is it so hard to find?

Julian Barnes claims that British novelists feel obligated to write love scenes and so make a hash of it, replacing euphemisms with cliches. So what is so tricky about literary sex?

Was it good for you? Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981).

By Stuart Jeffries

Who wrote this? “He lifted her on to his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation.”

Here’s a clue: they came second in salon.com’s 2011 Good Sex awards. Guessed yet? Here’s how the scene ended. “He began to cry into Lalitha’s hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand.” The answer? Jonathan Franzen, in Freedom.

If Franzen does write well about sex, he does so in part because he allows in humour (that overpopulation gag; and the idea that a really good orgasm might be saluted by a horn section) without letting it overwhelm the scene or destroy its pathos. He also recognises the personality-transcending nature of sex – at least if, and I don’t want to be prescriptive, you’re doing it right. And it is this very universality or impersonality of sex that creates a problem for those novelists who write about it: in a steamy paragraph of universalisable fatuity, you risk destroying the characters you have spent the preceding pages creating.

Julian Barnes, writing in this week’s Radio Times, identifies a specifically British problem about sex in literature.

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The 10 Most Notorious Parts of Famous Books

By Gabe Habash

A little controversy goes a long way in the book world, where tweets from prestigious publishers resembling Kanye West lyrics cause people to flip out. In the case of the books below, notoriety and controversy have added an extra facet to their reputations, propelling discussion and (in some instances) fierce debate that involved censorship. Here are our picks for the most infamous passages of famous books. Some spoilers follow.

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Books I Love: Ken Jennings

By Ken Jennings

Books I Love is a series where writers talk about the books that inspired them, the books they keep coming back to, and the books they’ll always remember.

More than anything—war, raisins, people who say “supposably”—I hate writing “favorite books” lists. My new book, Because I Said So!, is about the scientific debunking of deathless parental clichés (don’t swim after you eat, swallowed gum sits in your colon for seven years, etc.), and so I sneakily asked Publishers Weekly if I could limit this list to books about parents and kids. How hard could that be? I thought. In children’s books, the parents are always dead. And in classic novels, the iconic parents are all impossibly saintly creations like Atticus Finch and Marmee March that no one really likes much. (Also, they have terrible names like “Atticus” and “Marmee.”) But even that didn’t narrow my list down enough: I found I still had no room for so many favorites: for Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (about a grandmother, not a mother, but still), for any of Jonathan Franzen’s moms or Richard Russo’s dads. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to all of you.

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The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors

  By Maria Popova

Why Tolstoy is 11.6% better than Shakespeare.

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates— “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:

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Has Martin Amis captured the state of the British nation?

The way we live now: Martin Amis’s book title suggests a nation gone badly wrong Photo: Christopher Pledger

Martin Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo, aims to capture the dirty glamour of celebrity-obsessed Britain. But is it possible to sum up a country in a work of fiction?

By Sameer Rahim

There’s a big clue in the subtitle of Martin Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England. Not only has the 62-year-old writer created a portrait of a person – the “brutally generic” Lionel, a Wayne Rooney lookalike who has emerged from the primordial ooze of the London borough of Diston – but also of a nation gone badly wrong. Amis’s “State of England” implies England is in a bit of a state.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, Amis rowed back from the claims on his front cover. Lionel Asbo is “not a where‑we‑are novel”, he insisted. “It’s more about the atmosphere of the time.”

It’s hard not to be taken in, though, by what he described as the world of “surfaces, trivialities and vulgarities” that surrounds us. Or, at least, it has been difficult for Martin Amis (now living in New York) to resist the dirty glamour of celebrity‑obsessed Britain.

But is the idea of a novel that sums us all up misconceived? Ezra Pound famously described literature as “news that stays news”. You should be able to read a novel long after the events it describes have become dated, otherwise your work will be as ephemeral as the latest cultural fad.

Possibly because they come from such a large and disparate country, many American writers have tried to create nation-defining fiction. I hesitate to draw on the cliché of the “Great American Novel”, but it is undeniable that writers as different as Saul Bellow, Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen have produced panoramas of American society that intervene in larger arguments about the future of the country, rather than simply observing from a safe distance.

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Read It and Whine! Writers Don’t Need Prizes, They Need Ideas

Photo by Ricardo Barros

The publishing industry’s pursuit of prizes has led to an epidemic of novelistic navel-gazing.

By Chris Lehmann

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

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The 10 Grumpiest Living Writers

Harlan Ellison

By Emily Temple

This week saw the release of Farther Away, Jonathan Franzen’s newest collection of essays and speeches, covering the last five years of his non-fiction output. Well, in those last five years, he has become increasingly grumpy, griping about things like Twitter and ebooks, and building a reputation as an unrepentantly prickly author with a constant bone to pick. To celebrate the release of another book filled with Franzen’s complaints, we’ve put together a list of the ten grumpiest, crankiest and most cantankerous authors still living today.

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