paris review succession
The Paris Review has started looking for a new editor.
“It’s going to be impossible to replace Plimpton,” said a friend of the editor who asked not to be identified. “The magazine just so reflected him
The Paris Review has started looking for a new editor.
“It’s going to be impossible to replace Plimpton,” said a friend of the editor who asked not to be identified. “The magazine just so reflected him
The shorlist for the Governor-General’s Award has been announced, and beside the expected vets (Margaret Atwood for Oryx and Crake) and some quirky choices (Elizabeth Hay’s Garbo Laughs, Douglas Glover’s Elle, and Jean McNeil’s Private View), the surprise nominee is Edeet Ravel, an Israeli-Canadian writer whose first published novel Ten Thousand Lovers is “a tale of love and terrorism set in Israel in the 1970s.” Ravel is described as a woman who spends a portion of her time each year thinking of practical ways to promote peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
We’ve heard this complaint before: Readers in charge of the slush pile bitch and whine about the manuscripts they are forced to “read.” Grant Stewart was one of them:
Just to be clear, there’s never anything publishable in a slush pile. My job was just to make absolutely sure, then send the lousy stuff back whence it came. My only regret was I wasn’t allowed to enclose my own advice with the standard polite rejection. My ‘compliments’ slip would have read something like this: Dear Wannabe Novelist. Tips for your next submission (God help us). First, look at the covering letter you will send out with your opus. If it contains the sentence ‘This is my life’s work, it took me eight weeks!’, get out of my sight.
Except he came across DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (the Booker winner.) He writes about what it’s like for a struggling author to discover someone else’s gem of a book in the slush pile:
My second novel, The Octopus Hunter, was published, and sold as badly as my first. Then, to cap it all, even the slush betrayed me. They called him Pierre. I thrust the 30 sample pages in Clare’s face. “Read this now! It’s a masterpiece!! From the SLUSH PILE!!!” Clare loved it. Faber & Faber loved it and paid a small fortune to publish it.
Link via Moby.
John Mullan writes about the history of book covers, what they communicate, and how they are designed.
A revolution in publishing, especially of fiction, was heralded by the launching of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. Penguin expanded the market by producing cheap (though usually high-minded) books and relied on a distinctiveness of design to establish its series’ identity. The first 10 titles sold at sixpence at a time when the cheapest hardbacks cost five times more. The products were simply colour coded: orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime. By today’s standards, the early covers were positively austere. Only slowly were a few cautious engravings introduced to illustrate the covers, though Penguin’s American subsidiary was much less restrained. In America, even highbrow paperbacks were designed to be sold in drugstores and airport bookstalls.
If you’re a designer, you might like to check out the Guardian’s book cover competition. They’re looking for new book covers for The Sheltering Sky, The Master and Margarita, The Go-Between, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s daughter is selling six of his manuscripts at Christie’s this week, and the lot includes a novel that draws on one of Conan Doyle’s marriage and a memoir about the Boer war.
The Washington Post has a transcript of a chat with a candid Charles Baxter:
When I first wrote “Saul and Patsy Are Getting Comfortable in Michigan” in 1983 I ended the story with an automobile accident. (It was an amateurish way to end a story–you can’t end a short story with an accident because it never looks accidental; it looks arranged by the writer.) A month or so after the story appeared, a large woman at a Detroit literary soir?e came up to me, grabbed my lapel, and started shaking me. “You have your nerve,” she said, “killing off that nice couple like that.” I said, “They’re not dead!” I suppose she had intimidated me and caused me to see the error of my ways.
Here’s an excerpt from Diane Middlebrook’s book on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Portrait of a Marriage.
The Guardian has an interview with Booker winner DBC Pierre.