What Happens When a Book Doesn't Sell?

Want a candid look at the difficult and sometimes dead-end process of trying to get your work out into the world? Literary compadre Edan Lepucki is bracingly honest in this wonderful essay at The Millions. (The takeaway: Don't stop slogging!)

Penn alumni: Take my free online book group!

book group 55: September 12-22, 2011 (10 days)

Aleksandar Hemon and Lorrie Moore: Love & Obstacles in Contemporary Short Fiction
led by Courtney Zoffness

Courtney Zoffness

Many of the classic love stories we most revere revolve around ill-fated courtships. Romeo & Juliet. Anna Karenina. While storytelling styles may have evolved since Shakespeare and Tolstoy, the themes have endured. “How to Be the Other Woman” by Lorrie Moore and “Love & Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon both follow characters down misguided paths to intimacy and affection. As a group, we’ll explore how Moore and Hemon, two vastly different but widely acclaimed contemporary authors, use a range of narrative techniques to create drama and impact our sympathies. What’s the effect of Moore’s second-person point of view—one that implicates us in her heroine’s infidelity? How does the threat of war in Bosnia reflect in the sexually desperate young boy’s misadventures in Hemon’s “Love and Obstacles”? And what compels us, despite the cynicism buried even in these stories’ titles, to read on?

To enroll, go HERE.

How much should writers consider their future readers?

Dani Shapiro's compelling essay in this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review explores her attempts to shield her son from a confessional and unflattering memoir she penned years before he was born. Unlike most parents who can conceal or disown their pasts, memoirists create an undeniable record. I think the issue applies to fiction writers too: How many of us wrote provocative stories before we even conceived of our offspring? Before we gave a thought to what our children might think of our work? Moreover, even when we opt to have kids or become parents, how much does their potential readership effect what we produce?

Consider these questions after reading THIS.

Art vs. Life and the "Professional Widow"

In anticipation of author David Foster Wallace's posthumous (and unfinished) novel The Pale King, the Guardian conducted an interview with Wallace's widow, artist Karen Green. The article--and their story--is by turns riveting and heartbreaking.

Read it here.

Egan Takes the Gold

How thrilling that Jennifer Egan's smart and playful A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction -- after having won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She chatted with The Wall Street Journal minutes after learning the news and among the choice bits of reflection, she says this: " My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower." Amen.

You can read the entire (short) interview here.

Life after a bestseller

Re-posting a wonderful essay by Elif Batuman, about everything from literary success to industry schmoozing to the challenges of an academic writing life.

Read it here, in The Guardian.

Author, sell thyself?

In a recent article, Laura Miller, senior writer at Salon.com, discusses the changing face of publishing and PR in the days of tight publishing budgets, self-publishing, and the e-Book: authors have to advocate for their own work in order to succeed. The obvious paradox Miller elucidates is that writers -- many of whom are, by nature, reclusive or shy or awkward -- often make crummy self-promoters.

You can read more about this contemporary dilemma here.