Category: literary life

The finalists in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books are The Plot Against America, and Cloud Atlas. Visit the site if you’d like to see who won.

Readers continue to respond to this post, and its follow-up, about whether authors should get royalties on used books. Colleen Mondor, Children’s Book Review Editor at Eclectica, and who worked in a used bookstore in Alaska for two years, weighs in on the logistical problems raised by a subsequent-royalties system of the kind that A.S. Byatt wants:

In the larger stores (Powells, Strand, etc.) [employees] inventory by title, regardless of new or used, but in most used stores the used books are all lumped together by the “Used” category….we had no idea what we had by title as far as the inventory system was concerned. So in order to compensate authors we would have to inventory every used book by title as they came in, keeping in mind that a large number of them do not have ISBN codes, and then what? Notify publishers that we have the book? Or do we notify them only after we sell the book? When purchasing new books, it is all done up front, when the store buys the book from the wholesaler (like Ingram). But how would this used process work? As I check out the new and used bookstores in my town now, I see various displays of books from 100 years old to six months ago…and some are sold by hand receipt that merely states “books” under the description. How do you keep track of that by title? And who keeps this whole mess honest? (…)

Quite simply, the system does not exist for most stores to accommodate the sort of tracking that some authors (Byatt) seem to want. And that is how it is in the used world. Do you think Ford gets a cut from used trucks sold at the local street corner car lot? Do fashion designers get money from thrift store sales or record companies from the used record stores? It doesn’t happen because it would be insane to try and do. I’m not even going to start on how chaotic the pricing standards would be. A book that sells in Florida for $10 might get only $1 in AK…same condition, but the subject matter demands a higher price in one locale as opposed to another. Would authors be happy with such haphazard pricing?

Powell’s David Weich is similarly skeptical of subsequent-royalty schemes.

New books get sold, not leased. The implicit contract of such an exchange transfers ownership to the buyer; whether it’s a book or a painting or a couch or a dog or a rock that has been sold, the purchaser now *owns* it. At that point, the artist or toy maker or craftsman has ceded control over the product. I don’t buy into the idea that a writer’s product is any different, or more valuable, than that of any craftsperson. It strikes me as self-righteous and belittling of others’ work.

If a publisher were to resell a book’s content — the issue has come up in various forms over digital republication rights –then the writer may very well have a legitimate claim to additional compensation. However, if a writer were due compensation every time his/her book is resold, the value of the item would immediately decrease; in effect, the original bookstore customer is paying for a different product: a product with no resale rights. And this arrangement isn’t particular to the book industry; it’s the basis of our economy. Should the maker of my desk lamp get a cut when I resell it at a yard sale?

Comparisons between books and other products also form the basis of reader Ken Bronson’s response:

I first heard this argument that content originators should get compensation for sales on used items when Garth Brooks made the case that musicians and songwriters should get money for used CD’s. I don’t get how a book or a cd or a movie is different from a car or a toaster. I can sell my car and Chrysler won’t get a kickback. I never really researched why artists think they are selling something different than toasters. Sorry but no one has ever explained it in a way that makes sense to me.

Since books have been compared here with used trucks, CDs, desk lamps, and toasters, I feel compelled to point out a couple of things. There is a difference between books as art objects and books as products.

When taken as art objects, books don’t have a monetary value and cannot be quantified in the same way. Books are not written according to a specific set of independently verifiable features. Our reactions to them are entirely subjective–we may love them or hate them. They can make us laugh or cry; they can reshape our views of life or leave us thoroughly untouched; they can make us happy or so angry that we issue fatwas over their authors.

However, when a book is sold to a publisher, when it has an ISBN, a nice cover by Chip Kidd, a fancy author photo by Marion Ettlinger, and a price tag, it becomes a product, indistiguishable from other products on store shelves. The expectation that it should be treated any differently strikes me as a little absurd.

The Observer catches up with six authors, about the moment they’ve been waiting for (some for longer than others) the publication of their first novel. Here’s a sample, from writer Carole Cadwalladr.

[N]obody asks to have a novelist in the family. In particular, nobody asks to have a novelist who writes about dysfunctional families in the family. (And I won’t even begin to describe what it’s like having your dad read your novel – your dad who, according to family legend, or at least my mother, last read a novel in 1962 and therefore doesn’t understand the concept of made-up things being printed in books.)

But they’ve been champs. (My dad’s verdict? ‘Very enjoyable. I mean I don’t think it’s going to win the Booker … ‘) and they’ve defended my decision to have written it.

Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist, his biography of the elusive Lev Nussimbaum, the man who may or may not have been cult author Kurban Said, is reviewed in the New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. (The paper also posts the book’s first chapter on its site, along with a picture of the very photogenic author.) Wheatcroft recaps the major points of Nussumbaum’s fascinating life, finds a couple of factual errors in Reiss’s work, but otherwise gives the book a positive review, concluding,

Whether this astounding and bitter story has any moral I am not sure, but it defies the old phrase “stranger than fiction.” It’s just as well that Reiss didn’t write his “Quest for Kurban” as a novel. Who would have believed a word of it?

What I find rather interesting myself is that Reiss’s central thesis (that Lev Nussimbaum was Kurban Said) isn’t presented as just that–a hypothesis. Amardeep Singh points out that in the Anchor Books version of Ali and Nino, there is an afterword that points to another possible author: Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels.

It was impossible for decades to identify the author behind the pseudonym, but it now seems clear that “Kurban Said” is a pseudonym for two different people– a woman, the baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, and a man Lev Nussimbaum. . . . Lev Nussimbaum–who possibly had the original idea for the novel–was Jewish, born in Baku [in Azerbaijan] in 1905. Nussimbaum’s father took Lev and perhaps a German governess to Berlin during the tumult of the Russian Revolution. Nussimbaum completed his studies there, became a journalist and later wrote books about Mohammed, Nikolas II, Lenin, Reza Shah Pahlevi and regional geo-political issues. These books were published in London and New York under the name Essad Bey, the name he had taken in his youth when he converted to Islam. After Hitler seized power, Nussimbaum fled Berlin for still-independent Austria where an intense friendship with Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, her family, and her circle, developed. Ali and Nino is almost certainly result of this relationship. Which sections of the novel are the work of which author remains an unsolved mystery.

This is the stuff that legends are made of, and I’m sure speculation about who the real Kurban Said is won’t stop anytime soon.

In other news and coverage about The Orientalist, Nextbook contributor Boris Fishman interviews Tom Reiss about the book.

The gender-blurring wunderkind JT LeRoy’s new work of fiction, ”Harold’s End,” is billed as a novella but in fact barely weighs in as a short story. There may be almost 100 pages here, but they are small in size and somewhat airy. This book has been padded unabashedly: there’s an introduction by Dave Eggers, who first published an early version of the text in McSweeney’s; an afterword by Michael Ray, LeRoy’s editor; a dozen watercolors by the Australian artist Cherry Hood; and nearly four full pages of acknowledgments (Billy Corgan, Gus Van Sant, Tatum O’Neal, Lou Reed and sundry others are gushingly thanked). It’s no exaggeration to say it takes more time to read through the press packet than the actual story — a modest, sometimes affecting tale of a boy, his pet and scatological perversion.
LeRoy’s brief career has generated the kind of magazine-feature publicity usually reserved for movie stars.

Good thing the NY Times does its part.

I’m a fan of Ellen Gilchrist’s work (In the Land of Dreamy Dreams is one of my favorite collections) but somehow I missed that she has a new book out about craft, The Writing Life, due to come out in March. The Mississippi Press devotes a page to Gilchrist, her work, and a reading she gave at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women.

A portion of the book is dedicated to the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments.

In the essay, “Writing What you Know,” Gilchrist tells of a talented young writer who wrote a marvelous story about bullies on the back of a school bus. She had to drop out of the writing course for the birth of her third son. Gilchrist ran into her at the Fayetteville Athletic Club.

Reading from the book, Gilchrist said, “I’d like to get back to school but as you can see it isn’t going to happen soon,’ she told me. You’re collecting material,’ I told her. Besides, this is the real creation. Everything else is a shadow.’ I hope so,’ she answered and disappeared to the swimming pool.”