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.

Edgar Allan Poe Reimagined

I wouldn't dream of calling contemporary fiction boring -- especially since there are plenty of gems (read: Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad or Díaz's Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). But I will say that Mat Johnson's Pym, a hilarious and clever reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe's only (and unfinished) novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will make most novelistic options seem comparatively dull.

From the drama of chapter one in which Chris Jaynes, the only black male professor at a small liberal arts college, is denied tenure for refusing to sit on the diversity committee, to said professor's seafaring adventure through the South Seas, to his discovery of the only-ever uncolonized species—primitive natives so dark that even their teeth are black, Pym offers no shortage of entertainment and surprise.

I saw Mat give a reading from this novel a few weeks ago at SoHo's McNally-Jackson, where he discussed the challenges that dragged the writing of Pym on for a decade. Among them: How could he imbed literary criticism in a novel without sacrificing the story's enjoyability? His solution, in part, seems to be through humor and narrative drama. In fact, one of the successes of Pym is that it can be understood and appreciated on multiple levels—even for those of us who've never read Poe's Pym.

Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, says that “no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe.” Mat Johnson ensures that this piece of Poe's reputation will be as well canonized as his beguiling "Raven."

Republication

My short story "Lunch in the Labyrinth," which initially appeared in Washington Square, was just reprinted in all of the Weston Magazine Group's tri-state quarterlies, including Rye, Westport, Greenwich, New Canaan, and The Upper East Side.

The layout is lovely! Peep it here (pg. 116).

Open publication - Free publishing - More affluent

Bankrupt Borders

Hurry up and use your gift card (if you have one)...

Filing For Bankruptcy, Borders Hits Troubled Times

Go Goon Squad

The 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award fiction finalists were announced at the end of January. Winner will be announced on March 10th. The contenders include:

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

David Grossman, To the End of the Land

Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

My vote is for Goon Squad, despite how much I enjoyed Freedom, and despite how much I admire David Grossman. My pick is mostly informed by admiration for Egen's playful and contemporary text ... but partially informed by this new data. Can you believe these pie charts?!

I'm Only Really Happy When I'm Writing, Or When I'm Having Lots Of Fun With My Friends And Family

Dear Onion,

Thanks for outting me.

xo,

Courtney

Readings in Brooklyn

I recently gave a reading at the inimitable BookCourt in Brooklyn, furnished by the Brooklyn Writers Space annex. Check out the 2010-2011 line-up!

Reading: apexart gallery

apexart, a nonprofit arts org and gallery in SoHo, hosts workshops, exhibition talks, performances, and reading series. I'll be helping to kick off the 2010 Summer Reading Series, on July 14th. Swing by!

Wednesday, July 14th @ 6:30 pm

291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013 USA
tel. +212 431 5270

—>free admission to all programs and events

Directions: Several MTA trains stop at the Canal Street Station (6, A, C, E, J, M, Z, N, R, Q, W). The gallery is located on Church Street between Walker and White Streets, just two blocks south of Canal Street. The 1 train stops at Franklin Station and the gallery is two blocks east.

Creative Writing Contest winners!

Mat Johnson's Advice to Book Clubbers

A friend of mine recently posted a video in response to an unpleasant visit to a book club meeting.

Hilariously amazing. Watch it, here.

Writopia Lab

I'm involved in an awesome NYC-based nonprofit, Writopia Lab, which offers creative writing workshops to kids ages 8-18. And they deserve a shout-out!

Tots, tweens, and teens can take workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting, and there are now branches in Brooklyn, D.C., and L.A. Spread the word!

reads in progress

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Not yet finished, but I still concede a wee bit of disappointment—if only because I'm so dazzled by her short stories.

Paul Yoon's Once the Shore: artful and enchanting narratives by former fellow Bread Loafer.

Slowly chiseling away at Darwin's The Descent of Man, as research for a novel I'm writing, and The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, in preparation for a nonfiction course I'll be teaching in the spring.

And I've definitely overestimated what I thought I could read during winter break ... Have a back-breaking bag of paperbacks that will likely have to wait their turn. Sigh.

Literary classics

Recently revisited two canonical novels after significant time away. A post on To Kill a Mockingbird and Animal Farm to follow shortly...

Julie Otsuka + "He that can have Patience can have what he will" (-Ben Franklin)

I just watched Julie Otsuka, the last Single Voice Series participant at Allegheny College for 2009. I am shaken and stirred.

Otsuka's first novel When the Emperor Was Divine follows a single family to the Japanese internment camps during WWII.

Before sharing an excerpt from her next project, Otsuka did something I've never seen done at a reading before—at least not before the official "reading": she talked at length about her family history and its influence on her work, shared bits of her bio, and offered insight into her writing process. It was as almost like an "A" without the "Q": she intuited the questions that may be asked and answered them.

I appreciated the contextualization of the author and her work. In fact, I was nearly as compelled by how she came to writing in the first place as I was by the gorgeous and gripping first-person-plural prose she eventually read. (I researched her biography further after I got home.) Julie arrived at Yale in the '80s thinking she'd study history. Then she took an art class and discovered a natural aptitude for sculpture and graduated with a degree in fine arts. Afterwards she pursued an MFA in painting, but plagued by self-doubt, she left after only a few months. It wasn't until years later, after trying and deserting the visual arts yet again, that she took a writing class ... and applied to an MFA program in fiction. Her first (slender) novel took her five-and-a-half years to write. Julie said that she labors over the diction and rhythm of each section, sentence, word, that she's lucky to write a page a week. It took her nine months to form the opening lines of a chapter in her first book.

Otsuka made clear that the writing process can be elusive and thrilling and befuddling. It can teach you things about your narrative that you didn't know and didn't plan. Her second novel, for example, emerged after she laid out sketches she'd done over a year and recognized a story arc. The book's narrated by a group of mail-order "picture brides" who sail from Japan to the States, simultaneously lose their virginities to their new husbands, give birth to children, and reluctantly relocate to internment camps in 1942. Her second novel ends where her first novel begins.

As an early career writer with a love of language and a host of unformed of half-formed or slippery fragments of narrative, with notebooks of sketches and indefinite ideas, I take comfort in her diligence and patience. Otsuka wasn't an early bloomer, but she has intensely important stories to tell. Her work is worth the wait.

Further reading: Random House interview & GoldSea