But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Now, Jay Baron Nicorvo takes on Genoways in Guernica, defending writing programs:

If fiction is indeed faltering, the university system isn’t at fault, nor are the navel-gazing writers who come out of it. [...] What MFA programs do graduate are people who have mastered some of the uses of written English. And while this mastery might not be the most lucrative skill set, I would argue that it is the skill most widely applicable to making an honest living. Words are everywhere. If you can manage them well, chances are there’s a job for you, even in this economy.

The real culprits, Nicorvo argues, are quite different:

[Editors] attempt to herd the mob because they no longer know how to reach the reader. [...] New media is the internet, and publicity and marketing departments have little central control over the flow of information. Amateur reviews of a book on Amazon are as important if not more so than the professional assessments in Publishers Weekly. And so what do editors do? They cling to what’s working, if not working well—blockbusters. The dominant, dysfunctional business model for movies has been adapted for books. [...]

If there’s anything that’s killing American fiction, it’s not MFA degrees and the institutions that bestow them. It is this: the third degree.

Editors at large houses, like investment bankers at big banks, have for some time been acquiring from the third degree. They no longer acquire according to their tastes—they’re lucky if they can even distinguish their tastes from what their bosses and the bottom line demand. Because editors can’t know which books average opinion genuinely thinks are the best, not until said books climb the bestseller lists or make the shortlist for one of the few major awards, editors are left to anticipate anticipations.

Genoways isn’t totally wrong—there is plenty of self-centered fiction out there. But Nicorvo’s right, too: it’s hard for good work to get out there if editors won’t take a risk on it. Writers may need to “stop being so damned dainty and polite” and “treat writing like [their] lifeblood instead of [their] livelihood,” as Genoways puts it. But so do editors.

At least we know the fight over what’s killing fiction is alive and well.

Photo from http://danishapiro.com/interviews/

In the L.A. Times, author Dani Shapiro reflects on the challenges of a writing career–the lost days of “writing in the cold” for years while building a reputation, the recent “blockbuster or bust” mentality, and how emerging writers can persevere in spite of all of this:

I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology “Best New American Voices 2010,” the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few of the writers published in previous editions, but now the series is coming to an end. Presumably, it wasn’t selling, and its publisher could no longer justify bringing it out. Important and serious and just plain good books, the kind that require years spent in the trough of false starts and discarded pages — these books need to be written far away from this culture of mega-hits, and yet that culture is so pervasive that one wonders how a young writer is meant to be strong enough to face it down. [...]

But in the last several years, I’ve watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like “track” and “mid-list” and “brand” and “platform.” They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

Read the full essay here.

“Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah,” said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. [...] “She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable.”

Photo from Booktagger.com

Deep breath, everyone.

Personally, I have some hesitations about Oprah’s book club, especially when it steps beyond promoting literature and starts promoting lifestyle; this gets at some of the reasons why. But let’s give credit where credit is due: the fact that Oprah devotes time and energy to promote reading and literature is nothing short of amazing. Edwidge Danticat, MacArthur fellow and Oprah book club author, offered these insights into Oprah’s success:

When she calls to tell you that your book has been selected for the book club, she sounds so excited that you feel as though she’s both your ideal reader and your biggest cheerleader. The kind of excitement she showed for these books was contagious. I think that’s why so many people took a chance on books that otherwise they might have never picked up. [...] [She] has had such a powerful impact on publishing not only because she helps sell books, but because she makes reading seem democratic, within everyone’s reach, and also a lot of fun.

Even so, repeat after me: the end of Oprah’s Book Club is not the death knell of publishing. Galleycat offers an argument for publicists to get a grip.

John Irving / photo by Everitt Irving

Recently, though, two big-name authors spoke up about the scary ramifications for emerging writers. In a Big Think talk, John Irving discusses how much harder it is for first-time novelists to get started today, admitting that his first novel would not have been published today. (The half-hour long interview is broken into short, easy-to-navigate snippets and is well worth watching its entirety.)

And John Grisham, author of one of the slashed-price books, commented on the Today Show about the deep discounting, calling it a “disaster in the long term”:

“[The retail price] enables me to make a royalty, the publisher to make a profit and the bookstore to make a profit,” he said. “If a new book is worth $9, we have seriously devalued that book.” [...]

Regarding reading books electronically, he told Lauer: “If half of us are going to be doing it, then you’re going to wipe out tons of bookstores and publishers and we’re going to buy it all online.

“I’m probably going to be all right — but the aspiring writers are going to have a very hard time getting published,” he added.

Not a great comfort to the aspiring writer, but if even bestselling authors notice a problem, will the publishing industry pay any attention?

“Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.” –Margaret Atwood

copyright: George Whiteside

When I was a teenager first flirting with the idea of a writerly life, I used to listen to radio plays with my mother, who’d listened to them as a child, before TV became popular. (We couldn’t afford video games, so I was condemned to be a nerd anyway.) I remember one particular radio play—the only one I do remember, actually—in which two writers talked about how their work would be received in the future.

One writer, exceptionally pompous, declared himself a genius and took it as fait accompli that the future would validate his opinion. The other writer, more humble and sincere, wasn’t so worried about that. He just wanted to write and be a happy guy. Through some sci-fi device they were able to see into the future, and the humble writer turned out to be the better recognized of the two while his pompous counterpart was revealed as a self-aggrandizing hack.

That’s how I remember it, anyway (I’ve tried without success to track down this radio play, so I don’t know whether I’m completely perverting it) and I recall it now when I think about this observation by Atwood–an author who writes fiction that is both literary and immensely popular–on popular art. The perceived differences between literary and popular fiction can cause a lot of strife between writers (and within writers), especially since there’s no clear correspondence in either direction between popularity and literary merit. Books that sell well aren’t necessarily popular, and books that don’t sell well aren’t necessarily literary. Atwood’s description of popular art makes me think less about a boundary between literary and popular than about the function of self-examination, a topic which is much more fertile than artificial distinctions for enabling discussions of what art and literature can mean in a society. The process of a work examining itself—as well a society examining itself through such work—takes place not only in the time of a work’s release but in its future, and it sheds light on how we differentiate between those aesthetic objects history deems popular and those it deems art.

If we take popular fiction as society’s dreams that don’t examine themselves, as we may infer from Atwood, can we then take literary fiction as the dreams that do examine themselves? This is no better a dividing line than how many copies a book sells. A work of fiction can be received as literature by history even if it doesn’t involve a great deal of self-examination. Lautreamont’s Maldoror and Huysmans’ Against Nature, for instance, come across as so atavistic that they hardly seem self-aware, let alone self-examining. William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, though they foster an intense examination of form and language, can barely be said to examine a societal dream in and of themselves. Nor can “found” works like Kenneth Goldsmith’s American Trilogy: The Weather, Traffic, and Sports.

At the opposite ends of the spectrum, plenty of works examine themselves to the point of paralysis but never earn the moniker of “literature” because they are unreadably introverted or just plain awful. Self-examination of a societal dream, then, is neither a prerequisite for—nor a guarantee of—literary fiction. Yet the dividing line between “self-examining” and “non-self-examining” fiction is apt if we include the reader in the formula, as we absolutely must. The works we call literature share the quality of stimulating reflection in the reader, so the reader’s self examination bears more consideration than that of the text itself. The narratives that invite us to reflect on ourselves and our world are the ones that we—and I mean a historical “we” here—deem to be literary, and the ones we don’t end up being called popular. (Or, perhaps, they get called nothing at all because history forgets them.)

Since the works we end up calling literature are chosen by history, the label that ends up on a work is really out of the author’s hands. We can try our hardest, being as high-toned or as hip as we wish, but the issue of whether we’ve created lasting works of literature will be settled decades after we’re dead. It will often be settled and re-settled for each new generation and era; George Eliot and Robert Burns, for instance, both experienced periods of great posthumous acclaim and periods when they’ve been considered afterthoughts. Dickens, called a popularizer by some in his time, is a classic example of the reader’s historical role in literature. We lionize his work today because it has made people examine themselves and their culture. Dickens created fiction that captured its zeitgeist and gave opportunities for reflection, and the historical mass of readers has taken him up on it.

But Dickens wasn’t the only writer who tried to capture a zeitgeist on the page. A lot of us do that and believe we’re creating lasting literature, and not all of us succeed because it’s ultimately not us who can determine whether we’ve captured the zeitgeist or not. The pompous self-aggrandizer in the aforementioned radio play made the mistake of trying to short-circuit the historical, reader-centered process of determining what makes literature. He was famous and adored by the critics—surely he felt some kind of right to believe that, didn’t he?—yet it was his humble counterpart that history chose instead.

I’d like to claim that I’ve always played the role of humble counterpart, but I’ve certainly engaged in my share of pomposity and literary snobbishness. This was especially true in my twenties, when I looked down with great scorn on popular art of all kinds. If it wasn’t literary—if it didn’t examine itself, to borrow Atwood’s phrase—then I was dead set against it. This is common among the ranks of would-be writers, in part because we often have to defend ourselves for throwing our energy into the literary life–especially when our work achieves no popular acclaim or financial reward. If we’re undiscovered or unsuccessful, it’s easy to declare ourselves misunderstood geniuses and presume that we’re creating literature when we can’t truly know. It’s pure self-protection.

I was glad to cling to that belief, to give myself an underdog’s bravado and push myself through the doubt of my formative years, but I am gladder still to grow out of it. Often I feel a cloud of such snobbery hanging over literary fiction, and that cloud bothers me because there are repercussions for this genre if its practitioners don’t sufficiently acknowledge the reader’s role. We already know that literary fiction is becoming more and more of a niche market, which means we’re losing our readers. Why separate them even further from us by acting like they aren’t central to literature? The course of literary fiction depends on present and future readers, and yet some writers act as if they aren’t important—only the community of fellow writers matter. I’ve heard (second-hand) of one writer telling students that “If your book sells more than five hundred copies, you’ve done something wrong,” and this assures me that the kind of snobbery I felt in my twenties is still very much alive today.

But writers who arrogate literature on the basis of their own obscurity—more plentiful in academe than outside of it—forget that rejecting the marketplace and the reader doesn’t guarantee the creation of lasting literature. Ultimately this approach leads to a disconnect between readers and writers, which we see all over America, and probably across the world. Statistics on reading for pleasure in the US show a decline all across the board, as the NEA’s 2007 study shows, and if we aren’t worried about the consequences of making literary fiction too exclusive, then we should look at the example of poetry. Forty years ago, poetry seemed happy to academicize and Balkanize, splitting up into factions that were happy as long at they had a fiefdom somewhere. Today, poetry is struggling for readers who aren’t poets, and we have resorted to putting poems in elevators, buses, and subways to create a readership.

I don’t think this has to happen to literary fiction, and it won’t as long as the body politic of its practitioners keeps the reader in mind. I’m not suggesting that we pander to readers by giving them predictable, market-driven entertainments. I mean that we should write—and send our work out into the world—like the humble counterpart in the radio play. We need to acknowledge the reader’s historical role in establishing the course of literature, and acknowledge the fact that what history deems literary and what it doesn’t will often spring from the same pen.

Further Resources

- Via Random House’s website, read an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood (Nan Talese, 2009); if you’re shopping for a copy, click here to buy from your local indie bookstore.

- For Novel Journey, Mary E. Demuth weighs the words “literary” and “timeless.”

- At the Tomorrow Museum, Joanne discusses a panel at MIT’s The Future of Entertainment 3, considering the role that fan culture plays in the success of a literary novel.

- The American Book Review (30.2) offers a collection of writers’ thoughts on the future of literary fiction.

- The Onion weighs in: “Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever”

- At Blogcritics.com, readers argue the merits of literary and popular fiction.

- Is Electric Literature “the future of literary fiction”?

Tobias Wolff

The Morning News has a great interview with Tobias Wolff by Robert Birnbaum. As contemporary writers go, Wolff has a somewhat unusual publication record: he’s published one novel, one novella, and five collections of stories. But dip into any of them and you’ll see why. Wolff can rightly be called a master of the short form, and in the interview, he shares some thoughts on both it and its future:

RB: You would think somehow that—this being a hyper-accelerated era where time is so precious to people—that short stories would be more popular; they would be more digestible. People would be attracted to them because they have to make less of an investment. Right?

TW: Well you would think so. It would seem to represent less of an investment in time. However, the kinds of stories that people write now, because there are so few outlets…. Actually most of those 300 slick magazines I was talking about were printing detective stories, science fiction, speculative fiction, romance, and so it was genre-work really. And now all that stuff has gone into TV, so the only real people left who write short stories now are people who write literary short stories, if you will. And they are a little more demanding than the average novel; they don’t tend to have neat tied-up endings, which most people tend to gravitate toward. And I think a lot of people, even the ones with those famously shortened attention spans, kind of like the idea of entering a world and staying in it for a week or so, and not having to get used to a new set of characters every time they finish 15 pages. I do. But I also love novels. I just started Richard Price’s Lush Life, and I am loving this novel and I’m really glad that I’m able to stay with him for the 400 or 500 pages of this novel. But at the same time I’m looking forward to this new Jhumpa Lahiri collection. It’ll be a different kind of experience. The short story, I suppose, expects a little more thoughtfulness and engagement on the part of the reader than most readers are willing to give.

Read the full interview for more, including whether any text can be perfect, what value writers add to the world, and why the real value of writing programs might be to create “sophisticated, passionate” readers.

Via the marvelous Millions.

[T]he paper’s top brass have threatened to kill the section’s podcast if it can’t rally more iTunes subscribers.

There’s no concrete deadline for adding more subscribers, Charles says, or even a goal for how many it needs, just “a general mandate to make sure we’re concentrating our efforts on projects that are actually attracting an audience.”

The free podcast provides 10-minute interviews with contemporary authors. Past episodes have featured Francine Prose, James Ellroy, Anita Diamant, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and the late, great John Updike. FREE podcast interviews with writers? Downloaded right to my laptop? Sign me up.

Individual episodes are available through the Book World iTunes store page. Even better, subscribe, and you’ll get them automatically–and maybe help keep this great resource around.

photo by kevindooley (flickr cc)

– The Baltimore Museum of Art is currently featuring an exhibit of paintings — some by renowned artists like Gauguin and Matisse — inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. This is only one event in Nevermore, Baltimore’s year-long celebration of Poe throughout 2009 (in January, Poe would have turned 200). Tonight at the Strand Theatre (1823 N. Charles Street), see David Keltz read/perform as Poe, and afterwards, grab a pint at the Annabel Lee Tavern. For a full list of events, visit Nevermore’s website. (Via NPR)

– Over at The Millions, Ben Dooley suggests curling up with House of Leaves.

House of Leaves doesn’t just frighten. [...] It is a virtuoso effort. Taking full advantage of his medium, Danielewski paints the page like a canvas, exploiting both knife-sharp prose, painfully clever post-modernist narrative devices, and typographical tricks to draw the reader into his tale of horror.

– If visual scares (and social commentary chills) are more your style, check out this week’s New Yorker cover:

*Unmasked* by Chris Ware (cover of the New Yorker, Nov. 2 issue)

– For a so-creepy-it’s-true read, indulge in Adam Kirsch’s essayistic review of the new Ayn Rand biography (thanks, Mom, for forwarding).

– Our definition of scary is now completely turning the corner. Not recommended AT ALL? Halloween book burning at the the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in North Carolina. WTF?! (Via Bookninja) And here’s a link to a video about it, via Inkygirl.

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times’s ArtsBeat reports:

McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a model.

“People have been saying the short story is dying for a lot longer than they’ve been saying newspapers are dying,” Jordan Bass, managing editor of the quarterly, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But you can still put out a great short-story magazine that people want to grab. The same is true for newspapers.”

San Francisco Panorama will be a fat fellow, Sunday-edition-sized, and include news features, sports, short fiction, arts coverage, original graphics and pages and pages of original comics.

Leave it to McSweeney’s to combine two allegedly dying forms. I’m waiting for their LP of telegraphed troubadour songs and their BetaMax cassette of tutorials on scrimshaw and tatting. All joking aside, though, this sounds like an awesome and typically wacky McSweeney’s project, and one I’m looking forward to seeing in person. It drops next month; look for it in bookstores in a few weeks, or subscribe now and let it arrive in your mailbox.

photo by Lordcolus (flickr cc)

In the Arts section of today’s New York Times, Motoko Rich reports on the “tit-for-tat price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon [that] accelerated late on Friday afternoon when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for $8.99 apiece.”

Originally the company had intended to sell these selected books at $10, but Amazon, perhaps feeling threatened by Wal-Mart’s foray into the online retail market, retaliated by lowering their prices on the same titles to a mere $9. So Wal-Mart responded in kind, even if the single penny they knocked off was largely a symbolic gesture. After all, they’re already losing three dollars by selling the Grisham book at this price, so what’s another penny?

Loss leaders are nothing new in business. For example, fast food joints typically lose money on every burger they sell. But they make so much on soft drinks (which cost nothing to produce) that it’s worth the tradeoff. And in the book business this is not entirely new, either. In the deep-discounting price wars of the 1990s, when big box stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were fighting for customer loyalty, discounts on most new hardcovers ranged from 30-40%. Though not sold at a technical “loss,” they certainly weren’t making any money off these books either. The idea was that they’d make their money elsewhere, once they had the customer in the door. Or, with regards to the 60% of independent bookstores that went out of business during this time, once their customers had nowhere else to go.

Now, to say that the deep-discounting price wars caused the collapse of so many independent stores would be untrue. There were numerous contributing factors, among them the rise of online bookselling. But a lot of independent stores did try to compete head-to-head with Borders and B&N, despite the fact that their discounts on these titles were significantly smaller. And, hence, they lost even more money on these loss leaders than the chains. You see, publishers offer a sliding scale for discounts on books—the more you buy, the bigger the discount. So chain stores, which act as their own distributors, can buy in the volume that rewards them the cheapest unit price from publishers. Smaller stores rarely can. Worse, if independent stores need to get books fast to restock a hot title that’s selling, they can’t go to their own warehouses. Instead, they typically rely on a wholesaler (a middle-man) who sells it to them at an even lower discount in exchange for getting it to them 3-4 times faster than the publisher. However, on a loss-leader title, this might erase all profit whatsoever. But the Indie store accepts this necessary evil because it keeps them competitive and keeps customers coming back. Still, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this business model is unsustainable. And for many it wasn’t.

But this time the issue is no longer about business competition, where the game is to see who can walk the razor-thin profit margin tightrope without falling off. Now the losses on these titles are so huge that that even big players like Borders and Barnes & Noble can’t compete, let alone independents. Wal-Mart and Amazon might lose approximately $3 on each copy of Grisham’s Ford Country (list price $24) that they sell, but they’ll lose closer to $8.50 on every copy of King’s Under the Dome (list price $35). That’s nearly as high as what customers are paying for it!

And this is what Rich’s article so accurately points out—that the true impact of the price war between Amazon and Wal-Mart (however select and however temporary) might be a change in what consumers are willing to pay for a book. Once you’ve been offered a lower price for a product, you naturally feel cheated when asked to pay more because the worth of the product in your mind has been reassessed. As David Gernert, John Grisham’s agent, is quoted as saying in the article, “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is finished.” More importantly, as he goes on to say, “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s hardcover for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”

So how will publishing respond? Is this the end of the hardcover? Will more time, energy, and money be poured into those rare authors whose books have “jackpot” potential, in the hopes that they make this “Top Ten” list of Wal-Mart’s? Rich’s article gives the final word to James Patterson, an author whose own book is one of the most popular books preordered on the Wal-Mart site:

Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week’s new movies for $5,” Mr. Patterson said. “You wouldn’t be able to make movies.” He added, “I can guarantee you that the movie studios would not take this kind of thing sitting down.

We can only hope that consumers will see this for the ruse it is: to introduce them to Wal-Mart’s new online endeavor, accepting a loss in one category to make up for it in another. Sadly, writers themselves don’t have other products to fall back on when what they create becomes a loss leader. Or maybe that’s not exactly true. We have other skills, right? I’m reminded of an old joke: “What’s the difference between a writer and a waiter?” Answer: “One letter.”

Though perhaps it’s not all bad news: bookstores will now be able to buy these titles from Wal-Mart and Amazon at cheaper prices than what they would have had to pay the publisher…