Category: publishing

Book Bloggers Aren’t Killing Lit Crit, They’re Saving It

“What blogs can give readers is a sense of trust that, in professional circles, only the biggest lit-crit names – such as James Wood or Michiko Kakutani – can attain: a ‘criticism with personality’. They are expressing opinions about books in particular, and literature in general, based on a particular life of reading, written in a critical but non-technical language. What they can also give, crucially, is attention to books other than the newly published.”

Jeffrey Eugenides On Writing The First Sentence Of A Novel

“[What] I’m searching for with the first sentence is the entire book. … And the process is not always the same, but finally there is a sentence that seems to suggest the entire narrative and the tone and the narrative strategy and everything all in one. … Whenever someone compliments me on the first page of Middlesex, I say, ‘Thanks, it took me two years to write’.”

Is Protest Fiction Spent? (Nope)

“Novelists have often thought of novels as vehicles not merely for raising questions but for staking out positions and demonstrating the awfulness of a political regime or ideology.” (James Baldwin called it “protest” fiction – “novels of Negro oppression”.) “Does anyone today write protest fiction, novels designed to mobilize sentiment and influence events? Do they find a ready and enthusiastic audience? The answer, in both cases, is most definitely, and of course.”

What The Closing Of A Lit Magazine Says About How We Trade Information

“Here’s what I learned through the closure of the Word. The speed with which this item of news spread and became a news event in which people could happily participate and the “disintermediation”, to use a jargon word, of the traditional news outlets was a live demonstration of the same forces which mean you can’t publish magazines, or indeed anything, the way you once did.”