Category: literary life

Yet another article on chick-lit, this one from the Utne Reader, summarizing the recent discussions of the place of chick-lit within other commercial fiction and the amalgamation of different books under the general banner of chick-lit.

So is the critical uproar over chick lit over the top? Could be. After all, who says that trashy beach reads can’t coexist with smart postfeminist books? (One of the points of third-wave, “lipstick” feminism, is exactly that — that women don’t have to be one kind of human being, with one kind of pleasure, all the time.) Even within so-called chick lit, there is variety in quality and subject matter (witness new branches like “mommy lit” and “Latina lit”), and it is hard to make generalizations — another lesson of modern feminism.

Read the full article here. Thanks to K. for the link.

When Nanny Diaries authors’ latest effort was rejected by their publisher, staff writers everywhere had a field day (see here, for example.) In the blogosphere, too, the Nannies had few friends. Unfortunately, it turns out the Nannies’ comeupance might have to wait.

Nanny Diaries co-authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s CITIZEN GIRL, originally under contract to Random House before the house rejected it, about “the employment odyssey of an ambitious woman confronting what it is to be young and female in the New Economy,” to Brenda Copeland at Atria, for publication in fall 2004, in what others say is a very good deal, by Suzanne Gluck at William Morris (NA).

Reader Jonathan Wright writes in to take issue with the 3% figure from the Los Angeles Times article quoted in this entry. Wright says that the figure is “based on the number of authorised translations into Arabic i.e. where the author and publisher approve the translation and receive some royalties. But a casual glance at the bookstalls of Cairo would show they are stacked with unauthorised translations of English books. Every significant work on Middle East current affairs is rapidly translated into Arabic in pirate copies and they appear to sell well, judging by the stacks I see in the streets, including the usual suspects (Bernard Lewis, Tom Friedman etc). I couldn’t hazard a guess at the proportion but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least 20 percent (should one include cookbooks, for example?). This doesn’t mean that Arabs read as much as they should (far from it), but if they read more, perhaps it would be better for them to read more works written by Arabs. The three percent myth, of course, fits well with the neo-conservative campaign to portray Arabs as benighted isolationists, deprived by authoritarian governments of the right to read what others are writing. This is mostly nonsense.” My own issues with the UN report from which that 3% figure was taken can be found in a previous post.

Check out Nextbook, a digest of literary and cultural news relating to Jewish interests. There’s a very interesting discussion about Passion plays and their recent Hollywoodization.

The Los Angeles Times has a good article about America’s growing insularity in the arts at a time of increasing globalization in other fields. The article talks about the problems in selling foreign films (people have to know a bit of history to enjoy Goodbye Lenin!) and the performing arts (specifically the difficulty for even the most renowned musicians to obtains visas to come here.) As for books, the paucity of translations is again duly noted:

Of the literary books published in the U.S., fewer than 3% are translations a proportion no better than in the Arab world. Leading lights, most recently Northwestern University Press, have cut back substantially; even Nobel Prize winners such as Jose Saramago and Imre Kertesz remain obscure here.

Color me surprised: America is as insular as the Arab world. In fact, it may be working hard to remain that way: The government even wants to prosecute editors of books from the Axis. (Thanks to Maud for the link.)

British author Carole Matthews has accepted money from the Ford company to promote its cars in her books. Ms. Matthews doesn’t consider herself a sell-out because, she says,

Wherever my heroine is driving a car, it will now be a Ford Fiesta,” she told the BBC’s World Business Report. “That’s the only thing they’ve asked me to do, they’ve placed no other constraints on my writing at all.”

And I suppose we’re free to not consider her novels literature.