MANIC MONDAY

* The complete schedule of panels for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has been released.

* The renowned editor Aaron Asher, who worked with the likes of Milan Kundera and Philip Roth, has died.

* The little bit that we've recently learned about oddities in Australian copyright law actually alows us to make some sense (though not too much) of this article in the Age about Brit/Aussie publication struggles.

The trouble is that British publishers have almost always insisted, when they acquire domestic rights, that so-called "Commonwealth" rights — that part of the globe that used to be coloured red — be included. They have even tended to refuse to consider buying rights in books that originate in Australia.

* Huntsville, Alabama has taken on The Maltese Falcon as its next Big Read selection.  Elsewhere, Tulsa Metro Reads chooses The Great Gatsby.

* The state of Irish literary fiction is thriving, according to Alison Walsh's essay in The Independent.

The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008 emphatically gives the lie to this notion. The "senior" award in the Irish Book Awards, the shortlist features four outstanding novels, which demonstrate that our literary culture is thriving: Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls, his hugely ambitious novel charting the progress of our ancestors in America just after the Civil War; Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang, a gripping literary thriller set in St Petersburg; Anne Enright's Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, a tour-de-force of literary quality and a searing portrait of family life in all its glory; and Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, about which Tim Rutten in the LA Times urged: "Go directly home. If you live with others, send them away. Pour yourself a quiet drink and settle into your best chair for an authentic dose of Irish angst and wit, wondrous writing and about as undiluted an evening's pleasure as reading can provide."

* One of literary journalism's evergreens: Another profile of Paris's Shakespeare & Co.

* No jacket required: A.L. Kennedy profiled at length in Scotland on Sunday.

* Though we hope Mrs. TEV would beg to differ, literary wives, it appears, routinely get the short end of the stick.

What is interesting rather than merely depressing about all of this is why the women stay. Literature is littered with miserable writers’ wives and a few of their corpses: see Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, all of whom had mental health issues that their husbands may or may not have tried their hardest to alleviate.

And there’s no shortage of literary unions where the wife’s own talents were subsumed to the husband’s (alleged) greatness, until divorce came along to rectify the balance: see Martha Gellhorn, who was married to Ernest Hemingway, or Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was married to Kingsley Amis.

* The promising new online magazine Triple Canopy includes a new story by Sheila Heti: A Logical Love Story.

* We have never been fans of Bret Easton Ellis and although there's little in this profile to make us change our mind or revisit his oeuvre, it's a riveting look at what feels like a trainwreck of a career and well worth your time.

* Financial Times offers a list of five famous literary converts, starting with Evelyn Waugh.

* Michael Chabon's superb The Yiddish Policemen's Union has become the first novel to be nominated for a Hugo, Nebula and Edgar.

* And, finally, not literary but of personal interest: The secret plot to change James Bond's suit.

Comments

[genevieve]

It's a funny old world for Oz books, and I'm glad companies like Text are doing such a good job of securing global rights for their authors. I didn't think we still had these kinds of shenanigans with UK publishers happening, given the 30-day rule. But Mr Rosenbloom should know - best Small Publisher in 2006 I think.
I have just read a volume on Oz publishing between 1899 and 1945, and the Australian market was a bonanza for the Brits then. Apparently we read more poetry than any other 'colonials' until cheap US genre fiction (that's pulp, more or less) eroded the readership.

[ed]

It seems a great disservice against all that is decent to compare the wonderful Ms. Kennedy to a noxious Phil Collins album.

[Richard]

If Bret Easton Ellis has had "a trainwreck of a career," I would imagine that it's one that the majority of published fiction writers in the last quarter-century would have been happy to be on. At nearly every point in an American writer's career, she or he could be described as having a career like a trainwreck; for example, just among writers who began in the 1920s and 1930s, take Fitzgerald (with whom Ellis has some similarities), Hemingway, Faulkner, Hurston, Wolfe, Henry Roth, et al.

While I haven't liked all of Ellis's books, a few of them have meant a lot to me -- and when I've taught him, I've found students do appreciate him.

Schadenfreude is understandable when someone achieves a lot of success, seemingly effortlessly or through connections, at an early age. When Ellis first burst on the scene, I instinctively was prepared to dislike and ridicule both the work and the writer. But when I finally read "Less Than Zero," I was quite impressed, and when I finally met him, I had to agree with people I knew like Meg Wolitzer who'd assured me that he was a really nice, even sweet, man.

[Matt Pearce]

From a different set of standards, I'm not sure if "trainwreck" is an appropriate word there.

[Robert Nedelkoff]

About seven years ago I phoned the late Aaron Asher a few times when working on an article for McSweeney's about "The Cool World" author Warren Miller (who was a friend of Asher's in the early 1960s).
One thing I recall is that Asher sounded remarkably like John A. Zoydberg, MD.

I also remember talking to him right after I read the biography of John Kennedy Toole, "Ignatius Rising," which LSU Press had recently published. In that book is a letter Toole wrote Robert Gottlieb, mentioning his then-unpublished "The Neon Bible," which makes it absolutely clear that so far as he was concerned, it was thoroughly unpublishable juvenilia.

It turned out that Asher knew about this letter from the time he took over Grove Press in 1986 - but that didn't stop him from publishing "Neon Bible" after all the legal hurdles were cleared in 1990. I don't recall his exact words but from what he told me, he seemed to be squarely in the editor-knows-best camp(at least where posthumous MSS were concerned).

[Mark R]

>>Tim Rutten in the LA Times urged: "Go directly home. If you live with others, send them away. Pour yourself a quiet drink and settle into your best chair for an authentic dose of Irish angst ..."<<

Anyone know what a "quiet drink" is? Shhweppes, maybe.

[Charlie]

TEV - how do you get "trainwreck" from that article? Please expatiate.

[TEV]

Ok, seriously and no sarcasm - this is why I love the readers of this blog. You don't let me get away with anything. Literally as I was typing, I thought, "Gee, is 'trainwreck' really the most accurate word here?" So I'm not surprised folks are calling me on it this morning.

If I were to defend its use - and I don't know that would defend it all that vigorously - I was probably being too literal, envisioning the train that is derailed and fails to reach its destination; in Ellis's case, derailed from literary credibility/seriousness, etc. But I concede that it's probably not the best word, although in reply to Richard, I can tell you I would not want his career at all. And I think Daniel Mendelsohn best sums up why.

Anyway, it's a strange day when I agree with Steve Almond on something, so I'll attribute the poor choice of words to temporary bumfuzzlement ...

[Matt Pearce]

I don't know-- I've not read much Ellis, so I won't go into too ardent a defense here-- I remember you posted the link to that Lorin Stein appraisal of the Norman Rush novel that James Wood liked, and the principal part of the blurb you put up was of Stein celebrating the moral ambiguity of the book-- that novels that aren't "justice machines" make people, particularly reviewers, uncomfortable. Could that maybe be part of the case?

[ed]

But Ellis has not seen his career "trainwrecked." As Richard points out above, his work still means something to people. Indeed, see this reassessment:

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php

I get that you loathe BEE, Mark. But I'm wondering why you're going to the trouble of linking to an article just to express a vitriolic sentence that you then need to clear up in a three paragraph comment. Why not just simply place your thoughts out there on why BEE represents everything that is wrong about literature? Surely, it would prevent silly accusations of "vaguely sexist" if you were to elucidate where you're coming from.

[Richard]

Mark,

You would not want Ellis' career at this point in your career, and who would think otherwise?

Write me back in 2030.

[TEV]

Richard, if you're still reading and I'm still posting in 2030, that's a date!

[Richard]

Mark, it's unlikely I'll be alive by then, as I already get into movies for senior citizen prices.

There's a feature article on a writer I mentioned in my first comment, Meg Wolitzer, in today's New York Times. Meg's written some amazing novels and has had a long, productive career, as the Times notes:

"Ms. Wolitzer wrote her first novel while in college, first at Smith and then at Brown. “I was really kind of single-minded about it,” she said.

“Sleepwalking” was published in 1982, a year after Ms. Wolitzer graduated. Reviews were good from the start, and she followed up with a steady output of critically praised, character-driven novels, including “This Is Your Life,” which was adapted for the screen by Nora Ephron, and “Surrender, Dorothy.”

Like so many so-called midlist authors, Ms. Wolitzer established a solid reputation in the literary world. But her book sales struggled to break the five-figure mark. Her most recent novel, “The Position” (Scribner, 2005), sold about 10,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales."

Now, I'd suspect most well-grounded people would rather have Meg Wolitzer's life than Bret Easton Ellis's, but I wonder how many young ambitious writers with one book out would prefer her career to his.

If I type in "Bret Easton Ellis" in the Google Blog Search, I get nearly 10,000 hits, but "Meg Wolitzer" gets fewer than 500 hits. When I rank them by date, I can go pretty far back before I find a reference on a litblog I am familiar with.

The point I was trying to make, as I think Ed ably clarified, is that Ellis's books still resonate with people two decades later and certainly his books have sold more than a mid-list author's and more people, including litbloggers, have probably read his work.

I can remember a time when the most celebrated young fiction writer in America was Jayne Anne Phillips, whose "Black Tickets" is indeed a phenomenal short story collection. But the most recent post on a litblog I'm familiar with that is about this terrifically talented writer is from About Last Night's OGIC and begins:

"Who remembers Jayne Anne Phillips?"

It's hard to sustain a career over decades as a fiction writer. Most authors are mid-list authors who don't get anywhere the attention that Bret Easton Ellis did, and many authors would be happy to have that attention and that many readers.

If you call Ellis's career a "trainwreck," then what would you call Phillips's? How many of you have read her last, rather good novel, "MotherKind" (Knopf, 2000)? How many of you have never read her at all? How many of you have never heard of her?

Yet her novel "Machine Dreams" was named (deservedly so, I think) one of the best books of 1984 by The New York Times Book Review, along with "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and books by Coetzee, Bellow, Doctorow and Vargas Llosa.

I look forward to reading litbloggers' comments on Meg Wolitzer's new novel.

[TEV]

Funny you mention Meg W - she was a co-panelist with me on my recent Titlepage appearance. (I have her new book but did not get it in time to read it for our appearance.)

As I said in another comment elsewhere, the Fugitive Pieces one I think, there is finally no right and wrong in matters of taste. So we can agree to disagree on the merits of Ellis's work. But I would argue that the volume of citations and references you find on Ellis actually has very little to do with his work as a writer, and much more to do with his cultivated persona, something Meg W clearly hasn't bothered with. But I don't know that one can consider Google hits as a measure of a worthwhile literary career. If they can, I already exceed both with 13,000-plus. So clearly, that's not much of a measure.

Sound and fury signifying not a great deal is more or less how I would sum up both Ellis's work and the attention paid it but - as I am fond of repeating - that is merely my opinion and reasonable minds may differ.

[Jim]

Mark R --A quiet drink is one you take when your spouse thinks you're working on a book review.

[Richard]

Mark, I agree with everything you've said although I guess we differ on Ellis' worth.

Obviously you're right about Google hits. But how many writers are as grounded and reasonable as you? Living in New York, it seems that most of the young writers I've met are looking for the Google hits and not thinking about the long run.

By the way, the ratio of Ellis/Wolitzer hits on JSTOR's database of scholarly articles shows a much different ratio, 5:1.

[candace b.]

Someone on another blog mentioned how there are no Ellis type writers now (non-MFA writers with early commercial success), but that's wrong. And I am glad to hear about the article on Ireland's scene.

The complainers are like those endless whiners who weep about their rejection slips instead of taking the necessary steps to make it in today's literary world. They don't like that those steps involve higher schooling. They want to be commercial glamour writers, but the world has moved on. Ellis did not have the MFA opportunities of now.

These would-be writers need to pursue the MFA and find a teaching position and not shun the thriving literary scene as it exists.