That’s Me in the Spotlight…

Next month, I’ll be appearing at Fall for the Book and James River Writers to speak about bookblogging on panels with Happy Booker, Reb Livingston, and Caroline Kettlewell. The Richmond Times-Dispatch generates a little advance buzz for the James River Writers festival by emailing me some questions, including one that allowed me to muse about the impact of blogs on newspaper book reviewing:

“Before blogs, if you hated your local paper’s book section, you might write the editor a letter, where your complaint was probably seen by one person, maybe two, and then disposed of. Now, the complaints—and the praise—are out there for the entire world to see. Every book review editor can, if they want to, find out what readers think not just of their performance, but that of every other major review department. How seriously they take that, though, remains to be seen.”

29 August 2005 | events |

NYT Contradicts the “No New Stars” Buzz

Remember that AP story two weeks ago on the current dearth of literary fiction, in particular the lack of “dazzling debuts” from new writers? At the time, I pointed out that this didn’t seem to match the eagerness with which Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep was received earlier this year. Now here’s another counterexample: the New York Times Book Review just gave front-page placement to Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, “which manages to make the whole flailing, postadolescent, prelife crisis feel fresh and funny again,” says Jay McInerney, “even as it sometimes resembles nothing so much as a self-conscious, postmodern homage/parody of the genre.” I heard Kunkel read a scene from the novel late last year, and of course it’s hard to judge with such a limited perspective, but it sounded pretty decent to me.

Hmm…both of these counterexamples are from Random House–which is conspicuous in its absence from the array of New York publishing insiders quoted in that AP story. Something to think about? Maybe. (Not that it means they weren’t interviewed or approached, of course. As a working journalist, I know you don’t always hear back from everybody in a timely fashion, and you can only cram so much into a story before your editors start to make throat-clearing noises.)

And here’s something else: there’s a literary world outside New York City. That principle’s underscored in the first of what promises to be a series of “from the publisher” dispatches at the website for Unbridled Books, which has quickly established itself as an independent publisher worth any literati’s attention. (Not that I’m a completely objective observer, as you’ve seen its authors here on numerous occasions.)

29 August 2005 | uncategorized |