Amy Tan picks apart the Cliffs Notes of The Joy Luck Club and discusses labels applied to her work, according to this Tallahasse Democrat article. She apparently also brings her pet Yorkies (in “black, purse-sized bags”) to public events.
Some writers are committed to publishing their work no matter what. How committed? How does $15,000 sound?
Looks like Dan Wickett is a recidivist. Last month, he hosted an e-panel with the editors of several prominent literary journals. He does it again this month. His guests are David Lynn of The Kenyon Review, Gina Frangello of Other Voices, Jason Sanford of storySouth, Martin Lammon of Arts & Letters, Don Lee of Ploughshares, Esther Lee of Indiana Review, Barry Silesky of Another Chicago Magazine and Aaron Burch of Hobart.
Several readers wrote in to Moorishgirl in response to this post, about whether authors should get royalties from used book sales. Chris Beha wondered why some people are shocked by the idea of charging royalties on used books.
Why is it selfish for authors to want to get paid for such a labor intensive project? And why do the used booksellers who turn these books around with enormous profit margins get off the hook? If I come to The Strand in NYC with a box full of two hundred used books, they might pay me twenty dollars for the lot. They’ll mark each one up to four or five bucks, knowing full well that most will just sit on their shelves forever. These places have essentially no overhead costs whatsoever–they have to pay rent on the space and they have to pay their surly employees. 95% of dollars spent in the Strand go to the Strand. We take this part of the used book trade for granted. Now, if they had to pay the publisher some small amount for each book they sold, why couldn’t that money would come largely out of their profits, not out of the consumers pocket?Maybe books should be given away for free, but they’re not. Given the fact that readers are going to pay money for books, why not try to insure that more of that money goes to the people who wrote the books, rather than to middlemen?
A few people put the blame of authors’ losses on online retailers, which make it exceedingly easy to buy a used copy of a book that has just barely come out. George at Bookninja, for example, explained his reasons for continuing to link to Amazon thusly:
I have to jump in here and say that the reason we continue to link to Amazon (even though their American arm donated primarily to the Bush campaign during the election) while most of the other lit bloggers have moved to Powell’s, is because, as I understand it, Powell’s will sell you the cheapest copy of a book by default. This means if there’s a used copy of your book sitting beside a new copy online, the used copy gets sold first, and you, the author, get what the French call “Jacques Squatte”.
I am one of those who’ve made the switch a while back, and so I was curious to hear what Powell’s would have to say about this. I posed the question to David Weich, Director of Marketing and Development at Powell’s. Here is his response:
Depending on the type of link a partner uses or the search terms a customer keys into our site, we may display a sale-priced or used copy first. As a rule, we want to show the customer the best deal; our display depends on available inventory. But we would never sell a used copy in place of a new one if the customer wants a new book. We don’t hide new books and we certainly don’t substitute used copies for new; we give customers a choice, just like in our stores.That said, it’s kind of a funny argument to make that Amazon represents authors more respectfully than Powell’s. I won’t get into the dozens of surreptitious and self-serving ways that Amazon blackmails publishers into even displaying an author’s titles (it’s the only bookseller that proudly promotes its pay for placement system, and that system doesn’t just affect the Home page – every inch of the Amazon web site has been bought). But to stick to the subject of new versus used: consider the scope of Amazon’s Marketplace section, where used sellers worldwide post their inventories, and which allows Amazon to offer used copies of virtually every book in print right alongside new ones.
Blink
Powells.com — new for $18.16; out of stock used
Amazon — new for $15.57; 51 used copies starting at $13.73.Max Tivoli:
Powells.com — $9.80 new; out of stock used
Amazon — $10.50 new; 57 used copies starting at $7.76I could go on, but I’ll spare you. Keep in mind, however, that Marketplace is by far Amazon’s fastest-growing segment and to date the only part of their book division that has registered profits.
So, do you agree? Disagree? Send reactions to llalami AT yahoo DOT com.
Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land continues to draw raves:
I’m sorry if I’m the last dork to show up at the party and I’m telling you things you already know. I don’t know Sam Lipsyte at all. I don’t know anybody who knows Sam Lipsyte at all. But on a recent Sunday morning I picked up his novel Home Land, and then I spent the next 12 hours reading it. It’s funny and sad and cruel and awful. It makes David Sedaris seem a little lightweight. It makes David Foster Wallace seem a little out of touch. It makes Rick Moody seem, well, unnecessarily Moody. It makes one laugh out loud while pondering the ways in which all lives, invariably, go wrong.
Read the rest of Benjamin Alsup’s review, which appears in Esquire.
I’m starting a new feature this week, to run on Thursdays, in which I give out some free goodies to the first person who emails and provides a mailing address. I thought I would start with Calamity and Other Stories, a lovely new collection of short stories by Daphne Kalotay.
Update: The winner is David from Washington, DC. Congrats!
Today is my birthday. I don’t usually look forward to the celebration, since it’s so often associated in my mind with a particular number that moves inexorably up. But this year I find myself very much at peace with myself, enjoying my thirties, and discovering new things every day. I suppose this has more than a little to do with the upcoming publication of my collection–it’s been such a dream of mine, for a very long time, and to finally be able to see it come together has been very rewarding, but I also like to think that I’ve finally learned to just relax and enjoy life. I’m thinking of buying myself something special from Powell’s, spending some time with my Mom, and maybe going to Le Bouchon with Alex tonight.
Salman Rushdie is reportedly upset about having been misquoted by Patrick French in his review of the widely lauded Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. (I haven’t yet bought the book, but plan to this weekend.) The review quoted an old essay by Rushdie, in which he described Rajashtan as “colourful” as proof that the writer was out of touch with reality, and using an “insider-outsider” perspective.
Rushdie went on: “As a look at my essay A Dream of Glorious Return, published in Step Across This Line, will quickly show, I was talking somewhat satirically about the tourist-Rajasthan that was presented to Bill Clinton on his visit to India (“People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances and ride on colourful elephants and these are things a President should know”) while the non-colourful realities of the drought and so on were not drawn to his attention.”Rushdie added: “It is quite improper to quote my essay selectively so that he can praise my friend Mehta by making me look foolish.”
On a lighter note (or darker, depending on your perspective), Rushdie threatened to take a baseball bat to a reporter who’s written mean things about his wife, Padma Lakshmi.
First link via Kitabkhana.
Second link via TEV.
Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante has passed on.
His effervescent novel Tres Tristes Tigres, published in English as Three Trapped Tigers, captured the rum-soaked, salacious Havana of the late 1950s and became a classic of Cuban literature. As most of his writings, the novel bubbled with the witty Cuban speak of the streets and a cast of eccentric characters.Although he wrote ”in Cuban” instead of the high-brow Spanish of many of his contemporaries, he earned high-brow praise, winning in 1997 Spain’s Cervantes prize, the most prestigious in Spanish literature.
He was also an outspoken critic of the Communist regime in Cuba.
Judy Budnitz’s new story collection Nice Big American Baby is reviewed in the SF Chronicle and on NPR. You can read “Miracle,” one of the stories from the collection, over at the New Yorker site.
