Debut Novels by Writers Over 40

By Randy Susan Meyers

I tried to resist writing this—especially after my plea against categorizing authors.  Plus, so many of us hide our age in this world of never-get-old, unearthing this information, even in our Googlized world, was difficult.

But, recently, along with the plethora of lists of writers under 40, I was faced with the declaration that, as headlined in a Guardian UK article about writers, ‘Let’s Face It, After 40 You’re Past It.”

Then I read Sam Tanenhaus opine in the New York Times that there was “an essential truth about fiction writers: They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young. “There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising,’ when in fact they’re peaking.”

Thus, in the interest not of division, but of keeping up the flagging spirits of those who don’t want to be pushed out on the ice floe until after publishing all those words jangling in their head, I present 40 0ver 40:

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At Random House, Employees Will Enjoy 5,000 Shades of Green

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Random House had its corporate Christmas party on Wednesday night in New York, and word is that Santa likes bondage. A lot.

Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Random House, promised employees — from top editors to warehouse workers — a $5,000 bonus to celebrate a profitable year. The cheering went on for minutes, according to people in attendance.

Call it 5,000 shades of green.

This year, Random House had the good fortune to publish E. L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” about an inexperienced college student who falls in love with an older man with a taste for trying her up and whipping her, among other delights. The book has topped the New York Times paperback best-seller list for 37 weeks and counting. The sequels “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed” have been in the top five for a similar amount of time.

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Greenlight Bookstore Offers First Edition Club

Greenlight Bookstore is making it easier for bookworms to get the tomes the treasure.

By MATHILDE HAMEL

To celebrate its third year in Fort Greene, Greenlight Bookstore has launched a new program. It’s a one-of-a-kind First Editions Club that focuses on the importance of physical books and their value as collectibles.

“We are so astonished that nobody had done this in New York City,” said Emily Russo Murtagh, 32, Greenlight’s First Editions Club manager.

The unusual idea comes from Mrs. Russo Murtagh, who said she got it when she was working at the Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley, MA.

“Independent bookstores are always struggling to find ways to keep up or rather compete against the big box stores like Amazon,” she said. “It is a way for them to showcase their expertise in selecting those new books that could be potentially valuable.”

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Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

By Maria Popova

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments. After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman:

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Putting Words in Halle Berry’s Mouth

Illustration by Holly Wales

By DAVID MITCHELL

“So how does it feel?” is the question you hear when your book completes the long ascent from production purgatory to movieplex. Well, first there’s a primal kick: actors speak dialogue you wrote years ago, and all those nonexistent people are now real. They find flashes of humor or menace you never spotted, and soon all memory of how you imagined the character before the actor muscled in is gone.

For a playwright or screenwriter, this is a normal day at the office, but the first read-through of the “Cloud Atlas” script will stay with me forever. With three or four actors unable to attend, the film’s directors — Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski, who also wrote the screenplay — divvied up the spare roles. It seemed rude not to volunteer. I hadn’t been in a group-reading situation since my high-school English class, but instead of my 17-year-old classmates slogging through “A Passage to India,” here were Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent delivering lines that sounded uncannily familiar. The whole experience felt rather like finding Gandhi playing Connect 4 with your plumber in the cupboard under the stairs — it wasn’t so much the individual elements of the scene that were surreal but their juxtaposition.

Yet it soon sinks in that you’ve morphed from being the Creator to the guy who happened to write the original novel. How this makes you feel depends, I guess, on how you feel about the adaptation itself. I’ve never experienced much anxiety in this quarter. I met the three directors in 2008, and their plan to foreground the novel’s “transmigrating souls” motif by having actors perform multiple roles (each role being a sort of way station on that soul’s karmic journey) struck me as ingenious.

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Can self-publishing buy respect?

(Credit: iStockphoto/stokato)

Authors can now buy themselves rave reviews. Now that’s lazy — and counter to the true indie spirit

By Erin Keane

There was much pearl clutching after the Internet aired abecedarian mystery novelist Sue (“A Is for Alibi”) Grafton’s thoughts on self-publishing. Short version: She thinks it’s for lazies. Who you calling lazy? The digital swarm opined and I agreed, to some extent, with the outraged chorus. Who wouldn’t want to be on the side of the self-publishers, those scrappy DIY-ers who, like their punk forefathers and -mothers, step outside of a system that can’t or won’t serve them? Get in the van!

Then the New York Times examined a now-shuttered book review-for-hire service aimed at self-publishers, run by an Oklahoma businessman who realized that a large pool of underemployed writers willing to work for peanuts plus an equally large pool of unknown authors desperate to stand out equals profit. If only he had figured out a way to exploit the hopes of the adjunct professoriate, he could have hit the cynicism trifecta. Authors who wanted to artificially inflate their book’s popularity could buy satisfied reader reviews, circumventing the tedious business of building relationships with readers, librarians and booksellers like those squares in traditional publishing insist you must.

The service itself isn’t all that shocking. It’s not like you can’t purchase reviews from legit outlets like ForeWord and Kirkus, although they do sell review services aimed at self-publishers. Their packages are a bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for. One decent, well-reasoned Kirkus review by an experienced book reviewer, even in its “Indie” ghetto, could be worth 20 breathless shills on Amazon, where product reviews have become a kind of meme-based performance art.

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John Jeremiah Sullivan: ‘Genre snobbery conceals a deeper stupidity’

John Jeremiah Sullivan at the Edinburgh International Book festival. Photograph: Malcolm McCurrach/Universal News and Sport (Europe)

The US essayist lauded as ‘among the best young non-fiction writers in English’ talks about avoiding cynicism, hanging out with the Tea Party and why fiction isn’t necessarily better.

By Sarfraz Manzoor

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s new book Pulphead – a collection of non-fiction essays and reportage – has arrived in this country on a wave on rhapsodic reviews. When I meet the 37-year-old, touted as “among the best young non-fiction writers in English” by the New York Times, shortly before his session at the Edinburgh International Book festival, I remind him of a remark he made to an earlier interviewer: “Thinking you’re a genius is death.” How, now, is he dealing with reviews hailing him as something akin to a genius? “I sense the danger of it and I don’t take it seriously,” he says cautiously, weighing each word carefully before releasing it. “A book takes time to live in the world before you can say anything meaningful about its longevity or its impact on culture. In order for me to be intimidated (by the reviews) I would have to take it seriously and you can’t take it seriously so soon after a book is published.”

Pulphead is a collection of magazine features largely written for American GQ and the New York Times Magazine, in which Sullivan explores contemporary America through the prism of music, history and popular culture. There are encounters with the Tea Party and Christian rockers, meditations on Axl Rose and Michael Jackson and reportage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and a US reality show. Amid the pop culture are other pieces on his brother’s near-death, caves, animals and evolution. The essays are deeply researched, beautifully written and intricately shaped; like musical compositions they have different movements, riffs and shifts in key and pitch.

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10 LGBTQ Young Adult Novels To Make It Better

By Malinda Lo

Earlier this year, an article in the New York Times described recent neuroscience research that showed that reading enables us to better understand and empathize with other people. Dr. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, told the New York Times: “Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

Of course, any dedicated reader (or writer) could have told you the same without the research, but it’s lovely to have the facts to back up our instincts.

The ability of the printed page (or the ereader) to act as a doorway into another world, where I can vicariously experience someone else’s life — safely, freely — has always been the reason that reading is one of my favorite activities. For teens (or anyone, really) who is living in a real world where they’re unable to be themselves, or where they’re struggling to figure out who that self is at all, reading can be a wonderful way to imagine different possibilities. That’s why books can be so important to teens coming to terms with their sexual orientations, particularly if they’re not in environments that are supportive to them.

 

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Pulitzer Fiction Snub Has Book Publishers Fuming

By JULIE BOSMAN

Just when the publishing industry thought things couldn’t get any worse.

Days after the Department of Justice made the blockbuster announcement that it was suing five of the biggest book publishers in the business, the Pulitzer Prize board dropped its own bombshell on Monday: for the first time in 35 years, there would be no Pulitzer winner for fiction.

Publishers, authors and booksellers howled in outrage, attacking the Pulitzer board on Twitter and on blogs (“how can this be?” was the Tweet from the Boulder Bookstore). Winning the Pulitzer for fiction offers an unparalleled boon in prestige and sales, a rare splashy opportunity to bring a novel in front of the public and to permanently change the course of a writer’s career. Not to choose a winner, the industry raged, was an insult.

It was the 11th time in the prize’s history that a winner in fiction was not chosen, said Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, but the first time since 1977. That year, the jury recommended “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean but the board declined to give the award.

Usually, a winner is selected in a two-step process. A three-member fiction jury reviews hundreds of books (341, in this case), comes up with three finalists and sends those finalists to the Pulitzer board.

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A Radical Female Hero From Dystopia

  By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS

KATNISS EVERDEEN, the 16-year-old “Hunger Games” warrior who has torn through the box office, is one of the most radical female characters to appear in American movies. The film’s stunning success can partly be explained by the print sales of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of young-adult novels, which jumped to more than 36.5 million in March from 16 million in November, suggesting that the anticipation for the film was feeding demand for the books. At the same time there’s more to Katniss fever than page-screen synergy. Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the chief film critics of The New York Times, examine this complex, at times contradictory character.

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