The Elegant Variation

GALASSI INTERVIEWED

The legendary Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of FSG, is interviewed in Poets & Writers.

But what if you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and think that you deserve one?
If they deserve one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and not even in his own country.

Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.

CHAPTER 11 FOR ARCADE

Sad news - and no, we're not referring to the use of "impact" as a verb in the subhead.  Arcade, publishers of Andrei Makine in this country, has filed for bankruptcy.

The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henry Miller and Jean Genet to the United States.

HAY GETS WIRED

Sony has become the first consumer electronics sponsor of the Guardian Hay Festival.

A panel discussion hosted by Sony entitled "Brave New World—Rights and Wrongs in the Digital Future" will take place on 29th May as part of the collaboration. The debate will focus on the power and management of online content and digital reading devices.

FUN WITH ERIC

Leon Neyfakh digs energetically (if not altogether fruitfully) to try to get to the bottom of Eric Simonoff's mysterious defection to William Morris:

Publishing people were giddy when they heard about Mr. Simonoff's job change last week, and not even because they were happy for him—though some were—but because it was surprising, and exciting, and an undeniable show of force by William Morris that no one really knew how to explain off the top of their heads. Editors, publishers, agents, everyone wanted to talk about it, and they got into work on Friday still drunk on the news and excited to start calling and emailing one another about it. People asked if a “dominant theory” had emerged, the question invariably coming out sounding hopeful, but also cautious, because no one really wanted the fun to end.

RICHARD NASH DEPARTING

Richard Nash, one of the true good guys in the world of publishing, is leaving Counterpoint.  (Our fellow Nash fans can keep apprised of his doings here.)

(We're off to NY for a few days of family celebrations, and will try to get a precis of last night's Joseph O'Neil appearance up here before we depart, but after that, no updates until we're back Tuesday.)

WHEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PRESSES

The Associated Press looks at the recent hot streak over at one of our favorite small presses, Graywolf Press.

For a publishing company that considered it a big success to sell 2,500 copies of an anthology of contemporary European poetry, it was a new experience to get urgent calls from the Barnes & Noble corporate purchasing department.

That's what happened at Graywolf Press when Barack Obama picked poet Elizabeth Alexander, a Graywolf author since 2001, to recite a poem at his inauguration — putting her in such hallowed company as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. The St. Paul-based publisher is printing 100,000 copies of Alexander's inaugural poem, by far the biggest print run in its 35-year history but not for an inaugural work. Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of the Morning," recited in 1993 at President Bill Clinton's inaugural, was a million seller.

ASIDE: BLACK WEDNESDAY

Like everyone else, we're following with stunned fascination the swift and shocking changes to the publishing landscape, but we have decided not to report all the developments here.  Our logic is there are enough people already doing this, and doing it better than we could; and we've generally tried to keep the focus here on literature and not business.  So perhaps the best antidote to all this gloom is to keep focused on why it is exactly we even care about any of this to begin with - the books themselves. Which is precisely what we intend to do.

QUILLS "SUSPENDED"

Reed Business Information has announced plans to suspend support of the Quill Awards program

THE IMUS EFFECT

The rehabilitation of James Frey has begun.

In some ways, the scandal served him very well – giving him a name he can now trade on, thanks also to his writing abilities. His publicist during the scandal, Kassie Evashevski, chose to part ways with him because of what she called issues of trust. But she also said: "I still believe he's a very talented writer and suspect that we haven't heard the last of James Frey."

It's commonplace to observe that Fitzgerald's dictum "There are no second acts in American lives" is no longer worth the paper it's printed on.  No, what's dizzying is that there's no longer even a decent sized intermission between acts.

NESBIT INTERVIEWED

Literary agent Lynn Nesbit is interviewed in the latest issue of Poets & Writers (the version online is an extended one), in which she peers inside our nightmares:

Everybody talks about how the model for a writer's career has changed. You just talked about a book opening like a movie. There's this blockbuster mentality, especially for debut novels, with astronomical advances and very high sales expectations. How do you feel about that in relation to writers and their careers over the long haul?

Well, if it works, it's fine.… If they spend a lot and the book works, then everyone's happy and your career is launched. If they spend a lot and the book doesn't work, then it's a problem. Because as you know, everyone can see the numbers today. There is no fudging. And that's because of the chains. There are two or three big outlets. It used to be that we couldn't sell as many copies per book. We could argue that this is very good, this new chain system, because you can sell more copies.