American Con Artist

2010 Creative Writing MFA Rankings: The Top Fifty

2010-04-07T18:53:00.000-04:00

If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).

Rank	School	Votes (of 508)	Poetry Rank	Fiction Rank	Nonfiction Rank	Total Funding Rank	Annual Funding Rank
1	University of Iowa in Iowa City	253	1	1	1	21	22
2	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	169	3	2	*	16	4
3	University of Virginia, Charlottesville	144	2	4	*	21	21
4	University of Massachusetts, Amherst	132	4	5	*	40	41
4	University of Texas, Austin	132	5	6	*	1	1
6	University of Wisconsin, Madison	129	6	11	*	21	22
7	Brown University in Providence	127	8	3	*	19	20
8	New York University in New York City	125	7	7	*	+	+
9	Cornell University in Ithaca, New York	110	9	7	*	10	2
10	University of Oregon, Eugene	104	15	12	*	27	29
11	Syracuse University in New York	97	20	10	*	5	7
12	Indiana University, Bloomington	93	13	14	*	6	8
13	University of California, Irvine	91	26	9	*	26	28
14	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis	85	17	14	8	29	27
15	Brooklyn College, CUNY	81	39	13	*	*	*
16	University of Montana, Missoula	78	17	17	17	47	46
17	Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore	77	11	16	*	30	30
18	Vanderbilt University in Nashville	76	13	18	23	25	26
19	University of North Carolina, Greensboro	75	10	19	*	33	31
20	Washington University, St. Louis	70	15	24	*	12	3
21	University of Florida, Gainesville	67	22	21	*	13	16
22	Columbia University in New York City	66	38	19	10	*	*
23	University of Notre Dame in Indiana	62	34	22	12	+	+
24	Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia	56	32	26	4	+	+
24	University of North Carolina, Wilmington	56	22	25	5	41	42
26	Arizona State University, Tempe	55	19	28	35	15	18
26	Hunter College, CUNY	55	45	22	6	*	*
26	University of Houston in Texas	55	11	34	18	34	34
29	Colorado State University, Fort Collins	53	20	34	*	42	43
29	The New School in New York City	53	47	27	3	*	*
31	Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York	52	27	33	8	*	*
31	University of Washington, Seattle	52	27	28	*	*	*
33	University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa	51	25	31	29	2	18
34	University of Arizona, Tucson	49	32	28	2	+	+
35	Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana	45	22	40	*	9	10
36	University of Arkansas, Fayetteville	41	31	45	*	17	24
37	George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia	40	39	34	12	+	+
38	Boston University in Massachusetts	39	39	38	*	+	+
39	University of Nevada, Las Vegas	38	48	31	*	35	35
40	Ohio State University, Columbus	35	27	+	35	7	9
41	University of Maryland, College Park	34	37	44	*	*	*
42	Florida State University, Tallahassee	33	39	+	*	38	38
42	Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge	33	*	46	*	3	5
42	Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey	33	*	37	12	*	*
42	University of New Hampshire, Durham	33	39	40	7	*	*
46	Pennsylvania State University, University Park	32	45	46	11	28	14
47	Southern Illinois University, Carbondale	31	27	48	*	14	17
47	Texas State University, San Marcos	31	*	40	*	+	+
49	University of Mississippi, Oxford	31	+	40	*	18	25
50	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	30	34	+	*	4	6
50	Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond	30	+	38	*	31	32
50	Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg	30	34	+	*	8	10

Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.

Keep an eye on...Kathryn Simmonds

2010-04-02T15:01:00.000-04:00

This issue we are happy to present Kathryn Simmonds, a poet and short story writer whose debut collection of poetry Sunday at the Skin Launderette was published to great critical acclaim and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Her idiosyncratic poetry is accessible and lucid without compromising on complexity and beauty. We thoroughly recommend you get hold of the book and keep an eye on what she does next. The Literateur expects great things from this new voice…

You have recently received a great deal of critical recognition. How has this affected your career as a writer?

I think when you spend a long time working on a book, the idea of it having a life in the world is fairly unimaginable, so it was a nice surprise when the poems found an audience. The fact that people seemed to like the collection is obviously a confidence boost, but there is still the problem of the next white page and the page after that, so in that respect it’s business as usual.

Much has been made about how unusually optimistic your poetry is. Jackie Kay has mentioned the ‘joy’ in your poetry, Stephen Knight has written of ‘the ebullience and optimism’. Yet I felt when reading your poems that they perhaps overstate the case. Do you feel there is an over-riding sense of happiness in your work?

It’s interesting that some reviewers picked up the optimism in the book because many of the poems were written during a particularly bleak period, so perhaps my efforts to transform the dross of despair have worked. I think anyone who writes poetry enjoys a good wallow, I mean, if you were feeling insanely chipper all the time, why waste time writing about it? There’s a poem in the book called ‘Against Melancholy’ which is about the ongoing struggle to resist melancholia,and this became a theme; in the end I want to engage with the world, find the bits and pieces that are sustaining, and I’m on the side of Wallace Stevens who said (in his delightfully sexist way) “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

Many of the poems in Sunday at the Skin Launderette are formally structured. Do you set out to write, say, a poem in tercets on a given theme when you write or is structure something that you shape later?

I’ve found there’s something necessarily organic about the process of writing poetry when content and form develop together, so I try to listen to what the poem wants to be rather than forcing it into a particular shape. Sometimes this takes a great deal of patience because the process is as much about waiting and listening as it is about writing. The title poem is a case in point, it remained lines in a notebook for a long time and although I’d jiggle the lines around from time to time, I couldn’t work out how to write the poem. Then one day I realised something about the repetitive quality of the lines suggested a sestina and (after much gnashing of teeth) the poem came together.

You have published a number of short stories in magazines and have written a radio play for Radio 4. Do you consider yourself a poet first and foremost?

I’d hesitate to call myself a poet, that’s a title that has to be earned over many years, but in some loose fashion I’m a writer and I write whatever appeals. Writing poems alone might very well send me a bit bonkers, so I work best when there are various pieces of writing to turn to. I enjoy narrative and character, and I think there’s an interesting connection between short stories and poems, something about the limited space and the fact that stories, like poems, don’t always seek to explain themselves. I probably enjoy reading poetry over anything else and in that sense it’s my abiding passion.

Could you tell us of two poets you admire, one from the past and one from the present?

I love George Herbert. His only subject was his relationship with God, but he is never pious or sentimental, instead he presents all the sorrows and joys of his faith with a complete lack of self regard and in poems such as ‘The Pulley’ or ‘The Flower’ you can experience that struggle. He was also a superb versifier. Sometimes I think Herbert’s great subject is missing from contemporary writing, perhaps because poets don’t know how to approach it in an increasingly secular age, and I think that’s a pity because it is such a rich subject and one that seems uniquely suited to poetry.

There are so many excellent contemporary poets, it’s difficult to settle on one. But in contrast to Herbert I might pick Selima Hill, I admire her inventiveness and sense of fun.

What works can we expect from you in the near future?

That’s tricky, I wish I could tell you but I don’t know myself. I’ve been working on more ideas for stories so perhaps one or two may bear fruit.

Any burning ambitions?

I’d love to stand on stage in a West End theatre and belt out a tune from one of the big musicals, but unfortunately I can’t sing so I guess that won’t be happening. Other than that I’d like to try and write a decent stage play one day.

The Literateur, 28 April 2009

Good idea / bad idea

2010-03-30T20:17:00.000-04:00

If you ever watched the '90s cartoon show Animaniacs, you probably saw a segment in the program called "Good Idea/Bad Idea." If you've never seen Animaniacs, here's a two-minute compilation of some of the Good Idea/Bad Idea sketches (courtesy of Youtube). Hilarious!

Now then: in the publishing world, there are very often scenarios in which what would otherwise be a great idea is actually a terrible idea due to one or two crucial detail(s). As part of your (and, frankly, my) continued education in this industry, I present to you the following examples:

Good Idea: Venting to your friend, spouse, significant other, &c about a negative review of your book.
Bad Idea: Venting to Twitter, Facebook, the Internet at large, &c about a negative review of your book.

Good Idea: Following an agent's guidelines when submitting your novel.
Bad Idea: Following an agent to his or her office/car/home to submit your novel.

Good Idea: Reading industry blogs to improve your writing and querying.
Bad Idea: Reading industry blogs instead of writing or querying.

Good Idea: Selling yourself in order to promote your novel.
Bad Idea: Literally selling yourself in order to promote your novel.

Good Idea: Setting aside a specified block of time to write each day.
Bad Idea: Setting aside your family, friends, and day job to write each day. (May lead to the above scenario.)

Feel free to create your own good idea/bad idea in the comments!

--

Pimp My Blog, 4 February 2010

Poets & Writers Magazine: Top Ten Topics for Writers

2010-03-29T17:24:00.000-04:00

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Ten Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues.

Literary Magazines
- Introduction
- The World of Literary Magazines—Determining Which Are Right for Your Work
- Submission Guidelines
- Simultaneous Submissions
- Cover Letters
- Other Resources
Publishing a Book
- Introduction
- Small Presses vs. Large Publishers
- Chapbooks
- Submission Guidelines
- What to Expect from Your Publisher
- What to Expect from a Standard Book Contract
- Marketing and Distribution
- Self-Publishing and Print-on-Demand Companies
- What is a Vanity or Subsidy Press?
- Other Resources
Literary Agents
- Introduction
- What a Literary Agent Can Do for You
- Finding the Right Literary Agent
- The Query Letter
- What You Should Know Before Signing a Contract
- Literary Agents and Poets
- Fee-Charging Agents
- Other Resources
Writing Contests
- Introduction
- Other Resources
Vanity Presses
- Introduction
- Recognizing Scams
- Other Resources
Copyright
- Introduction
- Glossary of Rights
- Other Resources
Book Publicity
- Introduction
- Developing a Mailing List
- Creating a Web Site
- How to Set Up a Reading Tour
- Hiring an Independent Publicist
- Other Resources
Writers Conferences, Colonies, and Workshops
- Introduction
- The Benefits of Attending a Writers Conference or Colony
- Writing Groups/Workshops
- Online Writing Workshops
- Other Resources
MFA Programs
- Introduction
- What an MFA Degree Can Offer
- How to Choose an MFA Program
- Low-Residency MFA Programs
- Other Resources
Literary Organizations
- Introduction
- Other Resources

A writing career becomes harder to scale

2010-03-27T20:54:00.000-04:00

Authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience. But now it is sell - or else.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends. It was titled "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years," and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.

Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone. Only a few had flourished. Some, he speculated, had ended up teaching, publishing occasionally in small journals. But most had just . . . given up. "It doesn't appear to be a matter of talent itself," he wrote. "Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without."

writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I've been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students' eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don't do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it's the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn't mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.

If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they'd become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.

Rereading Solotaroff's essay, as I did recently, I found that he was writing of a time that now seems quaint, almost innocent. By the 1980s, he bemoaned, the expectations young writers had of their future lives had "been formed by the mass marketing and subsidization of culture and by the creative writing industry. Their career models are not, say, Henry Miller or William Faulkner, but John Irving or Ann Beattie."

With the exception of Irving, most of the writers referenced by Solotaroff (Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joan Chase, Douglas Unger, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alan Hewat) would draw blank looks from my students, and the creative writing industry of the mid-1980s now seems like a few mom-and-pop shops scattered on a highway lined with strip malls and mega-stores. Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

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.

The new bottom line

At the risk of sounding like I'm writing from my rocking chair, things were different when I started. My first three books sold, in combination, fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover. My editor at the time told me there were 4,000 serious readers in America, and if I reached them, I was doing a good job. As naïve as this may sound, it never occurred to me that my modest sales record might one day spell the end of my career. I felt cared for, respected. I continued to be published, and eventually, my sales improved. I wrote a bestselling memoir, appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and published a subsequent novel that found a pretty wide readership. My timing has been good thus far -- and lucky.

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?

Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff's essay: "Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."

The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we'd do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding -- that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.

Shapiro's new book, "Devotion: A Memoir," is just out. She will read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Feb. 24 and Diesel Books in Brentwood on Feb. 26.

LA Times, February 07, 2010, By Dani Shapiro

"Sex" definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools

2010-03-27T15:46:00.000-04:00

A parent's complaint over a 'sexually graphic' definition has seen dictionaries removed from southern Californian schools.

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – "[it's] a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern," said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. "It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

Alison Flood, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

Authors cry foul over Google 'rights grab

2010-03-18T20:09:00.000-04:00

Proposed settlement could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing.

Philip Pullman: 'If I want to sell my rights to anybody, why the hell should I have to go and ask Google first?' Photograph: Rex Features

British authors are divided over plans by Google to create the world's largest online library and profit from out-of-print titles.

Philip Pullman is among those opting out of the proposed Google book settlement, which critics condemn as a "massive rights grab" and an unacceptable reshaping of the copyright landscape to the detriment of writers.

Helen Oyeyemi is also among those opposed to the settlement, currently being thrashed out in the US courts, which could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing.

Google Books would carry "substantial extracts" of books that are out of print but still within copyright, with US buyers then paying to download the title in full. Revenue generated would be split, with 63% going to the rights holder and the rest to Google. Although only US consumers will be able to use this service, the titles include works published in Britain, Canada and Australia as well as the US.

But, in a move that has angered critics, writers had to choose to opt out by 28 January. For those who did not, their work would be automatically included.

Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, said: "Many of us have books that are out of print but still receive a little bit of money from them through the PLR [public lending right]. And, jJust because a book is out of print doesn't mean it belongs to Google. It belongs to me. And if I want to sell my rights to anybody, why the hell should I have to go and ask Google first?"

Nick Harkaway, son of John le Carré and author of The Gone-Away World, said opting out was "the only way of saying I do not believe this is appropriate. What is happening here is a massive rights grab. It's reshaping the copyright landscape. I don't think it beneficial to have a private company, de facto, owning the history of the written word.

"People are quite cosy with Google. But, it is not guaranteed this library will remain with Google forever. Imagine your least favourite media conglomerate buying the sole rights to digitally exhibit the history of the printed word, over 10m titles. You start to sound like a nut. But the scale of this is enormous".

American authors, publishing organisations and Google are currently trying to agree the settlement, which has yet to be ratified by a New York court.

Google insists the proposed settlement "is not about acquiring rights to books". "It is about creating a new revenue channel for rights holders, and opening up access to these books," said a spokeswoman.

However, some writers are bemused by its complexity. Kate Mosse, best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, said she "never really understood" exactly what it meant, and was relieved when her publisher, Hachette UK – originally an objector to the settlement – made the decision for her by advising its authors to remain in.

Its chief executive, Tim Hely-Hutchinson, said the company did not think Google should have interfered with other people's copyright, and the proposed settlement was a "weak compromise". But, like other many other publishers such as the Random House Group and Penguin, that argument had to be weighed against the interests of its authors being better served by retaining the ability to control how titles were used by Google.

John Lanchester, whose has just published his fourth novel, Whoops!, said "every writer I know has opted out. It's is a complete violation of the principle of copyright."

The Society of Authors, which has 9,000 members in Britain, agreed that the settlement "runs against the basic principle of copyright in which you get permission every time you use something". But, said its general secretary, Mark Le Fanu, very few members had raised objections, while "the great majority seemed to think it could have potentially significant benefits".

But there remain a few who are completely unmoved by the clamour. "I leave it all to my agent," said Martin Amis. "I just can't get interested."

Caroline Davies, The Guardian, Monday 1 February 2010

The Case of Amy Bishop: Violence that Art Didn't See Coming

2010-03-14T18:31:00.000-04:00

This is Kate Webster, female killer from my novel The Murderess and the Hangman. For more about the novel, please see my homepage here.

The following article from The New York Times deals with the role of female killers and art, particularly in light of the recent shootings by Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama.

When Ezra Pound declared in 1934 that “artists are the antennae of the race,” and Marshall McLuhan 30 years later called them people “of integral awareness,” both were using modern terms to update the ancient belief that works of the imagination might actually require a talent not only for invention but for attunement — for picking up signals already in the air. This is why the most forceful narratives and dramas seem less made up than distilled. They clarify events and experiences taken directly from the actual world.

Thus, the Jazz Age is better known through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who captured its energies in real time, than through any number of retrospective studies. And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn’t fully exist until J. D. Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being.

But every now and then, it seems, a gap is exposed. Events occur; art offers no guidance. The powers of imagination and attunement falter. Artists suffer a collective loss of awareness. “The culture” emits signals, but they are picked up only fitfully or are missed altogether.

Consider the case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist arrested for shooting six colleagues, killing three, at a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Rampages of this sort have become familiar. But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos.

With remarkable suddenness Dr. Bishop has disrupted the pattern. When she reportedly discharged her 9-millimeter handgun, she also punctured longstanding assumptions, or illusions, about women and violence — particularly as a fuller picture of her past begins to emerge, much of it indicating a possible record of previous violent episodes, including the shooting death of her brother in 1986, and her suspected role in assembling a pipe bomb mailed to a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, when Dr. Bishop was studying there.

Amy Bishop (Bob Gathany/Huntsville Times, via Associated Press)

It is not news that so-called senseless acts often unfold along the coordinates of an inner logic. This is what makes criminal violence so attractive a topic for artists and thinkers. The Western literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, teems with pathologically violent men. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote wrote nonfiction masterpieces about them. They dominate the novels of Don DeLillo and Robert Stone, not to mention films by Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

But the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored. Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.

Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them. So too with “Monster” (2003), in which Charlize Theron, in a virtuosic instance of empathy (and cosmetic makeover) re-enacted the story of Aileen Wuornos, a real-life prostitute who, after years of sexual abuse, began murdering her clients.

A decade or two ago this all made sense. The underworld of domestic abuse and sexual violence was coming freshly to light. And social arrangements were undergoing abrupt revision. The woman who achieved hard-won success in the workplace might well find herself, like the lonely stalker played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” (1987), tormented by the perfect-seeming family of the married man with whom she enjoys a weekend fling.

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

Put it another way. It is not hard to imagine Mr. DeLillo or Mr. Scorsese mapping the interior circuitry of Timothy McVeigh; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer; or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11 — the paranoia, the lethal mix of fantasy and ruthless plotting. But what artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. (Mattel recently announced a new addition, Computer Engineer Barbie, to its line of popular dolls.) A Harvard Ph.D. remains a rare credential for women (as well as for men), but women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop’s short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family’s principal or only breadwinner.

These conditions have been developing for some years now. But the most advanced narratives of female violence seem uninterested in them. There is, for example, Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of performance art who will be honored in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in March, with 35 artists re-enacting five of her works. Ms. Abramovic, born in what was then Belgrade, Yugoslavia, first became a force in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival, where she furiously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, bloodying 10 blades and tape recording the noises she made as she wounded herself. In 2002 Ms. Abramovic was still at it, exhibiting herself for 12 days in a downtown Manhattan installation, wordlessly moving among three raised platforms connected to the floor by ladders whose rungs were fashioned from large knives, their gleaming blades turned up.

There is also Karen Finley, whose avant-garde explorations of sexual violence put her in the middle of the federal arts-financing wars two decades ago. She is back onstage in “The Jackie Look.” Outfitted in bouffant and pearls, in imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ms. Finley stands at a lectern and delivers a monologue on the female body — at one point shedding copious tears — and on the indignities ritually inflicted on public women (Michelle Obama no less than Mrs. Onassis).

All this is stimulating in its way, but it feels curiously outmoded. Although Ms. Abramovic and Ms. Finley are both charismatic presences, their antennae seem to have rusted. They persist in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone time.

For this reason, perhaps, the most useful glosses on Dr. Bishop may come from the world of popular, even pulpish, art — for instance, crowd-pleasing movies like “Black Widow,” “Blue Steel,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” or even “Lost,” the ABC series. In all of them the hypothetical notion of empowerment gives way to the exercise of literal power. So too in crime novels written by women who specialize in the disordered or deranged mind. Genre art has its own limitations. But its strength is that it seeks to reanimate archetypes and is indifferent to ideological fashion.

“Everything is about power,” Patricia Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.” Also: “Firearms are the great equalizer. You don’t have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people.”

Chelsea Cain, the author of a crime series that reverses the formula of “The Silence of the Lambs,” pitting a male detective against a female serial killer, suggested that Dr. Bishop is the latest version of an ancient figure, “the mother lioness that kills to protect herself and her family against perceived threats.”

In fact two middle-aged classics of genre literature eerily prefigure aspects of the Bishop case. In William March’s 1954 novel “The Bad Seed,” later adapted for both stage and film, an 8-year-old girl viciously murders a classmate but is protected by her mother, only to kill again. This parallels the allegations in Dr. Bishop’s case, at least according to the resurfaced police report on the death of her brother nearly a quarter-century ago.

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is “socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. “She is ‘special.’ ” Words that ring ominously in the context of Dr. Bishop.

Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson’s narrator: “She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment.”

Ms. Oates’s feminist credentials are in good order. But her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by Ms. Cornwell: “People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men.”

Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times, February 24, 2010

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - made it to Second Round!

2010-03-04T23:49:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to discover my novel The Pride and the Sorrow (The Knight of New Orleans) has made it through to the Second Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, 2010.

This surprised me greatly given the number of entrants (5000 in the General Fiction category).

For more details, the Award eventually results in 6 round-trip all expenses flights to Seattle, and a Grand Prize - you guessed it - a book deal.

The book deal is with Penguin, is worth $15,000 as an advance (against future royalties), and naturally would receive the Amazon promotional treatment - basically, like winning three prizes in one!

May B & N get in the same game!

To click out my entry - my novel set in New Orleans - please click here.

Prime Suspect: The Ghost Writer

2010-03-04T22:33:00.000-05:00

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor in Roman Polanski’s new thriller.

Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.” A few blogging goons have kneecapped the movie for not providing enough thrills, but that’s the wrong critical direction to go in. The director of “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Macbeth” long ago put away his knives. “The Ghost Writer” offers not the blood and terror of Polanski’s early work but the steady pleasures of high intelligence and unmatchable craftsmanship—bristling, hyper-articulate dialogue (the stabs are verbal, and they hurt) and a stunning over-all design that has been color-coördinated to the point of aesthetic mania. Working with the British writer Robert Harris, whose 2007 novel, “The Ghost,” serves as the basis of the movie, Polanski fed the political material—troubling stuff about rendition and C.I.A. collaboration—into the mazy convolutions of a neo-Hitchcock story. He presents the entire movie from the restricted point of view of a likable young man, a hard-drinking, cash-poor writer (Ewan McGregor), who has been hired to finish the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former Prime Minister clearly modelled on Blair. The writer, who is known in the credits as “the Ghost” (he is never named—the P.M. calls him “man”), is not the first to work at this job. The previous ghostwriter has been found dead on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard, near the house of Lang’s publisher, where the P.M. and his entourage have gathered to work on the book. The Ghost is in trouble from the beginning, and he knows it, but he needs money and self-respect, and he forges on.

The picture is set mostly in the United States, but Polanski, of course, can’t work here, so he used the drab German North Sea coast as a double for the Vineyard in winter. The publisher’s mansion has the island’s requisite gray shingles, yet it’s not some gracious Victorian affair. Instead, it’s a giant modernist shoebox, with generous interior spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on dunes and a dark ocean. The interiors are all chic designer cement walls and flat or sharply angled surfaces; there’s not a curve anywhere, and hardly a cushion. This punitive luxury was created, as a set (by Albrecht Konrad), at Babelsberg studio, in Berlin, and the views through the windows are either projections or digital reconstructions. Looking through those portals, you appear to be seeing a movie of some sort, a tone poem in gray that refuses to reveal its mysteries. The skies are ashen, the rain never stops, and the writer, when he goes out on a bicycle for some air, gets blinded by the wet. For us, this mock-American landscape is a fascinating bad dream, half familiar, half strange. The cinematographer, Pawel Edelman, turns the constant downpour and gloom into a beautiful, slate-colored curtain—or perhaps I should say shroud. Polanski wants an atmosphere of daunting indefiniteness, a subdued but enveloping field of lies and secrecy, impenetrable to the Ghost, who is lost among power players far too clever for him. I don’t know when I’ve seen menace rendered with such delicate but persistent force.

The P.M.’s manuscript is also gray—maddeningly bland and opaque, a veil of debonair evasion. As the Ghost tries to bring it to life, allegations appear in the press that Lang, when he was P.M., illegally turned over captured terror suspects to the C.I.A. for rendition and torture; a former minister from Lang’s cabinet even insists that his old boss should be tried by the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. Suddenly, the house is besieged by antiwar protesters. Playing a powerful man in exile, repudiated and hated by his own party and by many of his countrymen, Pierce Brosnan gives the strongest performance of his rather lazy career. He doesn’t imitate Blair; he offers his own interpretation of a public man’s impersonally brisk and hardened charm—the smile is reflexive, dazzling, and savage. Lang tells stories about his youth with hearty indifference to their phoniness—even in retreat, he’s a calculating pol, playing the angles, manipulating his eager amanuensis. And, when Lang is criticized or challenged in any way, Brosnan’s charm dissolves into fury; he catches the defensive self-righteousness of power, a leader’s disbelief that anyone might be seeing through him. Brosnan is matched by the wonderful English actress Olivia Williams, as Ruth, Lang’s brilliant wife and longtime political adviser. Ruth has lost her husband’s love—and, more important, his ear—and is taking it hard. Slender and tense, with short dark hair, Williams pulls her legs up under her chin as she sits in the discomforting house. (Her Ruth is so angular and hard-edged that she actually seems to belong in this place, where it’s impossible to hide.) Williams’s gaze could sear the fat off a lamb shank, and her line delivery is withering, yet Ruth is badly wounded, and Williams makes her sympathetic—she’s one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier. Polanski observes the character quirks, the long-standing relations strained by the worsening disgrace of Lang’s situation—there’s something, we see, in the frayed connection of husband and wife that could be more significant than hurt feelings. Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach (as a very old, entirely sane hermit living on the beach) make strong appearances, too. The only flaw in the ensemble is Kim Cattrall, who, as Lang’s assistant and mistress, can’t stop smirking (Cattrall lets us know that something dirty is going on). The movie is organically structured—nothing is overstressed, but nothing is wasted, either. The banal manuscript, for instance, assumes an almost totemic power as it’s read, handled, edited, rewritten. It contains secrets finally discovered, decoded.

Life for the Ghost takes a dangerous turn when he finds evidence that Lang is lying about many things, and becomes even more dangerous when Ruth climbs into bed with him. Ewan McGregor’s career got off track in “Star Wars” foolishness, but this movie may put him back in good roles, where he belongs. He’s such a charming actor—avid, bright-eyed, yet slightly acid and self-deprecating, too. His writer, initially no more than a sleepless, overworked hack, grows tired of being a ghost; he wants to be palpable, a man, and he asks questions of powerful people that could get him killed. Polanski takes care that the Ghost’s story is never rushed, mauled, or artificially heightened—the usual style of thrillers now (see “Shutter Island” and every week’s buddy-buddy cop movie for the latest examples). Polanski respects physical plausibility and the passage of time; he wants our belief in his improbable tale, just as Hitchcock did. There may be nothing formally inventive in this kind of classical technique, but, in the hands of a master, it’s smooth and satisfying, and I suggest, dear reader, that you gaze upon it, because it’s all but gone in today’s moviemaking world. Here it works its old magic. You understand, at every instant, what the Ghost feels and knows, and you fear for him. There’s not much violence in the movie, but your scalp tightens anyway.

“The Ghost Writer” plays off the British public’s disillusion with Tony Blair and the recurring complaints about Blair’s alleged collaboration with the C.I.A. Yet, when Lang is cornered by the Ghost, the P.M. speaks with impressive conviction. In effect, he defends the use of torture; he takes the Cheneyesque hard line, ridiculing liberals who want safety and, at the same time, the luxury of high-mindedness. The answer to the question of why he’s so acquiescent to the Americans is worked out in thriller (rather than policy) terms. It’s the kind of supposition that may strike viewers, here and in Britain, as frivolous, or just plain wrong, but it’s a fine piece of mischief—suggestive, wounding to Blair, and, as a fiction, emotionally gratifying in the way of le Carré’s conspiracy plots.

Brosnan’s performance is so forceful in the climactic scene with the Ghost that I don’t think you could easily say where Polanski’s own feelings about rendition lie. But I would guess that he’s split in his personal sympathies—he’s both the man accused of crimes and the Ghost longing to assert his full humanity. Polanski edited the movie while in jail and then under house arrest in Switzerland; the movie’s narrative of an exiled man trapped in a house overtook his own disordered life. He concludes “The Ghost Writer” with a twin flourish: first, a virtuoso travelling shot of an explosive note slowly but inexorably passed through many hands at a social occasion until it reaches its destination, and then a final shot of Lang’s manuscript, the fluttering pages now forlornly scattered about a London street. As in the famous last sequence of “Chinatown,” Polanski is close to despair, but his rejuvenation as a film director is a sign of hope.

--
David Denby, The New Yorker, 8 March 2010

European cinemas join threat to boycott Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-04T21:53:00.000-05:00

Contemplating a dark hole ... Mia Wasikowska in Alice in Wonderland. Photograph: Allstar/DISNEY/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Disney's plans for an earlier-than-usual DVD release prompt film exhibitors to consider pulling all Disney films.

Opposition to Disney's plans for an earlier-than-usual DVD release of Alice in Wonderland - after it has appeared in cinemas - has spread to mainland Europe, according to Variety.

Alice in Wonderland
Production year: 2010
Country: USA
Cert (UK): PG
Runtime: 108 mins
Directors: Tim Burton
Cast: Alan Rickman, Anne Hathaway, Barbara Windsor, Christopher Lee, Crispin Glover, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, Matt Lucas, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall
More on this film

As reported on this site last week, UK distributors are considering a boycott of Tim Burton's new 3D CGI fantasy over Disney's proposal to release the DVD within 90 days of its cinema release. Usually, there is at least a four-month window between a film's arrival in cinemas and its debut on home video.

Now Holland's four largest exhibitors are reportedly threatening not to show Alice In Wonderland unless Disney backs down. Together Minerva, Pathé, Wolff and Jogchems represent between 80% and 85% of all cinemas in the Netherlands.

Youry Bredewold, who represents both Pathé and Holland's National Board of Cinema Owners, said the distributor's decision was not one which had been taken lightly.

"We will lose money due to our decision," he told AFP. "We expected [Alice] to become one of the most popular movies of 2010. But we decided we need to send a message to the whole industry: If you don't accept our terms, we will never show your movies again."

Meanwhile, Variety says that UK distributors have been mollified by a visit from Disney top brass last week, though an LA Times report today suggests that Vue and Odeon, two of the UK's three major cinema chains, remain undecided over whether to show the film. Disney has reached a deal with a third major chain, Cineworld, according to the newspaper. Industry insiders are said to be split over whether European anger will spread to the US or blow over before Alice in Wonderland's release on 5 March. No American chain has yet threatened to boycott the film, although some have said they will pull it from screens once it hits the home video market. Some Italian firms are also said to be considering their options.

The UK release is particularly vital for Disney because the movie has such strong British roots, and would have been expected to make £40m here. Burton, who lives in London, shot Alice In Wonderland largely in Devon and Cornwall. Apart from Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice, the film features a largely British supporting cast, including Helena Bonham Carter, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor.

Disney nevertheless feels that narrowing the release window is vital in the battle against home video piracy. It argues that most people see movies within two months of their theatrical release, but there is then another two-month gap before they can buy the film on DVD, which is exploited by pirates. However, distributors are concerned that they will lose business if the release window is allowed to narrow further, and are also said to be angry because they have recently spent millions of pounds upgrading thousands of screens to show 3D movies.

Bob Chapek, president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios, said on Friday that the company remained "committed to theatrical windows, with the need for exceptions to accommodate a shortened period on a case-by-case basis, such as with Disney's Alice in Wonderland.

"We feel that it's important for us to maintain a healthy business on the exhibition side and a healthy business on the home video side," he added. "We think this is in the best interest of theatre owners, because a healthy movie business is good for them and allows us to invest in high quality, innovative content."

Ben Child, The Guardian, 17 February 2010

Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs

2010-02-20T17:37:00.000-05:00

From poetry to lengthy prose, creative writing can be a great way to express yourself. Of course, even the best students and writers can use a few tips, a little inspiration and a whole lot of help getting their work out there. These blogs offer all of that and more. From blogs that focus on writers still trying to make it in the publishing world to those providing updates from best selling authors, you’ll find all kinds of information geared towards improving and informing your creative writing.

General

These blogs cover a wide range of issues for students of the written word.

Writer Unboxed: Learn both about the creative and business sides of fiction writing from this great blog.
Backstory: Ever wonder where writers get their inspiration? You’ll find loads of posts that record just that and you can contribute your own stories as well.
Write Anything: Check out this multi-author blog to find writing challenges, inspiration and shared writing.
Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers: This blogger not only posts about using the Internet to improve your writing but posts her own comics frequently as well.
Women on Writing: Get information on writing geared just towards female writers out there.
Cute Writing: Here you’ll find posts on writing, blogging and publishing and many articles focus on ways to make your work more efficient.
Write to Done: If you enjoy the blog Zen Habits, you’ll appreciate this blog by the same author. This site focuses on simple, effective ways to write more, better.
The Urban Muse: Freelance writer Susan Johnston provides tips and tidbits for other working writers out there.
Writing Forward: From grammar tips to ideas for improving your creative writing, check out the helpful posts on this site.
Writer’s Write: This blog is a great place to find information about writers, books and the publishing world.
Creative Writing Corner: Connect with your creative side through the posts on this blog.
Creative Writing Contests: Want to challenge your creative skills? This blog can direct you to the great number of writing competitions out there.

Aspiring Authors

These bloggers are writing on the ‘net and off, still waiting to get their best work published.

The Desperate Writer: This writer and cosmetologist shares her stories on this blog, both personal and creative.
Incurable Disease of Writing: Blogger Missy is getting her degree in creative writing and posts about her experiences on this site.
Emerging Writers Network: If you’re just getting started in your writing career, check out this site to learn about the ins and outs of writing and about other writers working towards success.
Ficticity: Check out this site to find posted stories, writing tips and even a few book reviews.
Authors’ Blogs: This isn’t just one blog, but a collection of numerous aspiring writers sites, so you can take your pick of reading material.
Plot Monkeys: These four bloggers talk about everything from their everyday lives to the books they love.
Maternal Spark: Moms who love to write or create on the side

Published Authors

Get some advice, inspiration and motivation from these authors doing what they love and getting paid for it.

The Orwell Diaries: Most writers are familiar with the work of George Orwell. Here you’ll find regular postings from his personal diaries.
Tom Conoby’s Writing Blog: This blogger shares his thoughts on books he reads, his own writing and much more.
John Baker’s Blog: This working writer shares his passions– reading and writing– on this site.
The Man In Black: Young mystery writer Jason Pinter shares his thoughts on just about everything on this blog.
Neil Gaiman’s Journal: This well-known writer has published a large number of books, several of which have been made into major motion pictures. Check out his blog for more about what he’s working on right now.
Wil Wheaton in Exile: Readers of this blog might recognize his name from his days on Star Trek: The Next Generation but these days this actor spends more of this time writing books and posting on his blog.
A Writer’s Life: Love the TV series Monk? Learn more about the writer behind the books the series is based on from this blog.
The Paperback Writer: With several published books under her belt, this blogger shares her writing tips as well as information about her personal life.
Pocket Full of Words: Novelist Holly Lisle shares her experiences as a writer on her blog.
Beyond the Beyond: Bruce Sterling has written numerous science fiction novels and now shares his thoughts on science and technology on his WIRED blog.
Contrary Brin: Scientist and author David Brin maintains this site where readers can talk about issues from his books or just about anything else.
Scott Berkun: This author teaches creative thinking, writes books and give public talks. Read about his writing adventures and otherwise here.

Improving Your Craft

Get some tips on becoming a better writer from these blogs.

Becoming a Writer Seriously: Aspiring writers can find all kinds of helpful advice and guidance on this blog.
WordSwimmer: Learn to understand the writing process a little better with a little help from blogger Bruce Black. There are loads of interviews with authors as well as suggestions on improving your writing.
Time to Write: Blogger Jurgen Wolff wants to strike a creative spark in writers of all kinds by providing tips and inspiration here.
Flogging the Quill: Check out this blog to learn more about the craft of creative storytelling.
Six Sentences: What can you write in six sentences? Share your attempt at this writing exercise on this blog.
Luc Reid: From tips on finding time to practice writing to information about the publishing industry, you’ll find loads of helpful posts on this blog.
The Writing Show: While more podcast than true blog, this site is a good place for writers to get answers to their questions and get help finding inspiration.
Men With Pens: Whether you’re a writer freelancing or just writing for fun, you’ll find tips on how to do it better on this blog.
Write a Better Novel: Make sure whatever you’re writing will get the attention it deserves when time comes to get it published. This blog provides all kinds of information on creating a better novel, no matter the subject.
Write Better: Here you’ll find a wide range of writing tips to get your creative writing in top shape.
Clear Writing with Mr. Clarity: Learn to get to the point and write clearly and concisely whether you’re writing a letter at work or working on a book.
Mike’s Writing Workshop: This blogger is all about posting things that can help writers get better and get inspired.
Kim’s Craft Blog: Learn about writing fiction, memoirs and other creative writing from this writer who teaches courses at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Grammar and Editing

You may have the best ideas but that doesn’t mean much if you can’t write them well. These blogs will help you tune up your writing so it’s publish-worthy.

GrammarBlog: Laugh at the grammar and spelling errors of others while getting tips on improving your own skills on this blog.
Evil Editor: This editor might be evil, but the tips provided on this blog can really help you refine your stories.
Blue Pencil Editing: This blog is both a good resource for working editors and and writers in search of a little guidance.
Editing and Proofreading Hints and Tips: Get simple tips on improving your editing process from this blog.
Headsup: the blog: Here you’ll find posts about the sometimes frustrating world of editing and learn what not to do.
Grammarphobia: This site offers readers the chance to ask their own grammar and language questions and get answers.
Apostrophe Abuse: Think you know how to use the apostrophe? This blog might teach you otherwise.
Daily Writing Tips: Get some daily advice on how to improve the basics of your writing.
ProWriting Tips: This blog is home to numerous grammar and writing tips.
The Engine Room: JD, a copy editor, runs this blog all about language use that can help you get a handle on your usage.
Cheryl Norman, Grammar Cop: If you’ve got some questions about grammar that need answering, visit this blog.
English4Today: Get a handle on the English language through the guidance of blogger Anthony Hughes.

Getting Published

The ultimate goal for many students and professionals working on creative writing is to get work published. This blogs can help you learn about the business, get your work out there, or even publish it yourself.

Ask Allison: Ask your questions about breaking publishing and gets answers from this helpful blogger.
Guide to Literary Agents: Get some tips on where and how to find a literary agent to represent your work when the time comes.
Beacon Literary Services: Emerging writers and those with a little experience under their belts alike can take advantage of the publishing advice offered here.
Questions and Quandaries: This Writers Digest blog answers a wide variety of questions about publishing.
Writer Beware Blogs: While you may be desperate to get your work out there make sure you protect yourself from scams. The information in this blog can help you stay safe.
The Swivet: Colleen Lindsay is a literary agent and you can read her reactions to recent publications and if you meet her requirements even submit your own work.
The Rejecter: This blogger isn’t a literary agent but an assistant to one, the person you’ll have to go through to get your work published, and she posts all about her work on this blog.
Booksquare: This blog works to dissect the publishing industry so you can learn it inside and out.
Pubrants: Literary agent Kristen blogs about everything publishing from queries to working with writers.
Nathan Bransford Literary Agent: Want to know more about literary agents and the publishing world? Check out this blog.
Practicing Writing: This blog posts plenty on writing advice as well as the latest publishing opportunities.
Bob Baker’s Full-Time Author Blog: Thinking of making the leap to being a full-time writer? This blog can be a great resource on publishing your own book to set the stage.
Future Perfect Publishing: Explore all the possibilities for publishing that are out there through the help of this blog by Tom Masters.

Genre Focused

These creative writing blogs focus on one particular type of writing, such as mysteries, romance and fantasy.

Storytellers Unplugged: This multi-author blog is contributed to by writers, editors and publishers and can give you a great background on writing in a wide range of genres.
Gibberish: Science fiction and fantasy writer Jayme Lynn Blaschke posts about his writing and more on this site.
SF Signal: From books to movies, you can keep abreast of all the goings on in world of science fiction through this blog.
SF and Fantasy Novelists: Here you’ll find loads of information on writers working in the science fiction genre.
Reading, Raving and Ranting: If you’re interested in historical fiction you can read about Susan Higginbotham’s experience writing about fourteenth-century England.
Myth and Mystery: Novelist and contributor to the New York Times Rick Riordan is a mystery writer and you can read about his latest work on this site.
Type M for Murder: Learn a little bit about murder mysteries from this multi-author blog.
Crime Fiction Dossier: If crime fiction is your thing, you’ll learn loads from this blog by David Montgomery.
Jungle Red: Six mystery writers contribute to this blog that talks about writing, life, love and much more.
Romancing the Blog: This blog is home to numerous romance novelists who post on just about everything.

Fiction Writing

Most creative writing falls into the category of fiction, so learn more about writing great novels and stories from these blogs.

Advanced Fiction Writing: Written by the "mad professor" of fiction writing, this blog is geared towards inspiring you and getting you writing.
Writing Fiction: Here you’ll find a lively discussion about writing and publishing novels and short fiction.
Killer Fiction: With five published authors contributing to this blog, you’ll get loads of tips and posts on writing.
Ginny’s Fiction Writing Blog: Ginny Wiehardt posts about fiction writing in this About.com blog.
Becoming a Fiction Writer: This blogger is following her dream of becoming a fiction writer.
Blog Fiction: If you plan on taking to the net with your writing, this blogger can give you all kinds of tips on doing it right.
Fiction Writers Review: The writers who run this blog are all about reviewing books but they also discuss what works and what makes truly great fiction.
Angela Booth’s Writing Blog: Whether you’re writing fiction or just freelancing, you’ll find helpful writing tips on this blog.
Fiction Writing: The Passionate Journey: You won’t become a great writer overnight. This blog can help you start and keep going along your journey to writing success.
Fiction Scribe: From grammar errors to book tours, this blog talks about a wide range of issues affecting fiction writers.

Poetry

If verse is more your thing, pay these helpful blogs a visit.

Avoiding the Muse: Doctor, blogger and author C. Dale Young maintains this blog as well as teaching an MFA program on writing.
Poetry Hut Blog: Keep up to date on the latest happenings in the poetry world with this blog.
Poet with a Day Job: Does the title of this blog remind you of yourself? Read this blogger’s posts on writing, reading and everyday life here.
1,000 Black Lines: Posts on this blog are a single line long, some of which record daily events and others that read like lines of poetry.
The Best American Poetry: Learn about some of the best poetry out there through this blog.
harriet: The Poetry Foundation maintains this blog, which posts about happenings in the poetry world and speaks directly to you, the poet.
Poems at the Poetry Showcase: Contribute your poetry to this blog, or read the postings of others.
Poets.org: The American Academy of Poets lets you know about great poetry that’s out there through their blog.
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Where a writer is from is neither here nor there

2010-02-19T18:14:00.000-05:00

Passport control at Gatwick Airport.

We should beware of paying more attention to a writer's nationality than their fiction.

In the literary world, there is perhaps nothing more insulting than being labelled "insular". Any accusation – such as Nobel prize permanent secretary Horace Engdahl's 2008 comments about the parochialism of American letters – is damaging, hurtful and also guilt-inducing. Insularity, after all, is inimical to literature, the opposite of fiction's artistic goal of understanding others. And it's not just writers who are shamed by the allegation. Publishers and, by implication, readers are often indicted on similar charges, their rigid tastes blamed for the shockingly low availability of fiction in translation.

The idea of insularity cropped up in a hugely enjoyable and occasionally bristly recent panel discussion between Aleksandar Hemon, AS Byatt and Tom McCarthy. Together to celebrate the launch of Best European Fiction 2010 – which Hemon edited – the three novelists gave a fascinating insight into what European fiction meant to them, where its boundaries were drawn and what, if anything, bound it together. While the conversation was provocative and illuminating, it was a single comment from AS Byatt that stuck with me as I picked up the anthology later that night. Byatt – about whose fiction I may be critical, but whose understanding, perception and passion for world literature is inspiring – mournfully bemoaned the fact that she knew only one Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. It was a frustration that seemed both entirely genuine and at the same time slightly acquisitive – as though she saw literature as a sort of Risk board, with Albania a weak point of entry that needed bolstering.

It wasn't hard to see her point: for a reader as avid and engaged as Byatt, to be ignorant of writing from anywhere on the globe is to miss out on new voices, new methods of expression, new windows on different cultures. But to me she seemed to be going at it all wrong. Does it really matter that she's only read one Albanian novelist? Is it acceptable to know two Belgian writers but for them both be Francophone rather than Dutch speaking? In short, does it really make a difference where the hell these people are from?

If there's an answer to this question, Best European Fiction 2010 isn't the place to find it. It does not claim to be a complete overview of a continent's literature, nor does it confer national-writer status on those sandwiched between its yellow covers. As Zadie Smith writes in her preface, "Anthologies are ill-fitting things – one size does not fit all." What it offers, instead, is a partial snapshot of Europe's concerns, a whistle-stop tour of old and emerging literary territories, some of which are familiar (Alistair Gray's Scotland; Victor Pelevin's Russia), others discovered for the first time.

Hemon has done an astonishing job in lighting up the map of Europe, opening the doors to these writers, many of whom – Michał Witkowski, Antonio Fian and Ornela Vorpsi in particular – I hope will become more widely known in the English-speaking world. But it hasn't encouraged me to seek out more Polish, Austrian and Albanian literature. Nor has it made me feel that I need to look for countries not included in the collection and find out about their cultural heritage. Their sensibilities as writers are necessarily bound up in their particular upbringings and cultures: centring on them simply as Poles, Austrians or Albanians is to denigrate their status as authors. As readers we should resist tokenism as much as insularity.

It's anticipated that the Best European Fiction anthology will become an annual publication, which should go some way to bringing such exceptional voices to the attention of anglophone readers. If this is the case, this volume will certainly become a highlight of the cultural year. But I hope that in future editions, the writers will be arranged alphabetically, their country of origin left as nothing more than an interesting endnote at the back of the book.

Stuart Evers, Wednesday 27 January 2010

James Patterson, Inc.

2010-02-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

Like most authors, James Patterson started out with one book, released in 1976, that he struggled to get published. It sold about 10,000 copies, a modest, if respectable, showing for a first novel. Last year, an estimated 14 million copies of his books in 38 different languages found their way onto beach blankets, airplanes and nightstands around the world. Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.) This is partly because Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his stable of co-authors, he published nine original hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.

There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.

Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown & Co., a division of the Hachette Book Group, have an unconventional relationship. In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-time Hachette employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him: a so-called brand manager who shepherds Patterson’s adult books through the production process, a marketing director for his young-adult titles and a sales manager for all his books. Despite this support staff and his prodigious output, Patterson is intimately involved in the publication of his books. A former ad executive — Patterson ran J. Walter Thompson’s North American branch before becoming a full-time writer in 1996 — he handles all of his own advertising and closely monitors just about every other step of the publication process, from the design of his jackets to the timing of his books’ release to their placement in stores. “Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his own books,” Michael Pietsch, Patterson’s editor and the publisher of Little, Brown, told me.

A couple of months ago, I sat in on one of Patterson’s regular meetings with Little, Brown to discuss the marketing and publicity for his coming titles. The meeting was held not, as you might expect, at the publisher’s offices in Midtown Manhattan but in the living room of Patterson’s Palm Beach home, a canary yellow Spanish-style house on a small island in Lake Worth. Patterson’s wife, Sue, a tall, athletic-looking blonde whom he met at J. Walter Thompson, served coffee and gooey chocolate-chip cookies to the guests: Pietsch; Megan Tingley, the publisher of Little, Brown’s young-readers books; and David Young, the C.E.O. of Hachette.

Pietsch and Tingley showed mock-ups of covers and presented ideas they had been working on. From the plush, caramel-colored couch facing them, Patterson, who is a trim 62 with a habitual slouch and laconic manner well suited to his dry sense of humor, acted as creative director, a familiar role from his years in advertising. At one point, the conversation turned to the next installment in Patterson’s Michael Bennett series, which revolves around a Manhattan homicide detective and widower with 10 multiracial adopted children (“Cheaper by the Dozen” meets “Die Hard,” as Patterson describes it). Pietsch mentioned a possible promotional line, “New York Has a New Hero.” Patterson instantly amended it: “Finally, New York Has a Hero.”

A number of former Little, Brown employees who attended these sorts of meetings with Patterson in the 1990s and early 2000s described him to me as low-key but intimidating, more cutthroat adman than retiring writer — a kind of real-life Don Draper. Unsatisfied with publishing’s informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-style presentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. “A lot of authors are just grateful to be published,” Holly Parmelee, Patterson’s publicist from 1992 to 2002, told me several weeks earlier. “Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in business together, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.”

But that was when Patterson was still making a name for himself and fighting for his publisher’s full attention. Now that he is the world’s bestselling author and Little, Brown’s most prized possession, Patterson seemed agreeable, easygoing. Even when he shot down an idea, like Pietsch’s suggestion that Patterson promote the new Michael Bennett book with a day of events in all five boroughs, he did so gently: “I just don’t want for it to be like one of those things when an athlete goes through and shakes four hands.” Halfway through the meeting, Patterson suggested that they take a short break to listen to some songs from a musical he’s developing based on his romance novel “Sundays at Tiffany’s.”

When the meeting was over, Patterson and his wife drove everyone to lunch in their matching Mercedes sedans. On our way to the restaurant, they took us past their future home, an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they bought last year for $17.4 million and are now in the midst of renovating. “There’s my little cottage,” Patterson said as the 20,000-square-foot house came into view.

ACCORDING TO FORBES magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over the last two years. Hachette disputes the accuracy of these numbers but wouldn’t provide me with different ones. Regardless, it seems safe to assume that Patterson, who puts out more best sellers in any given year than many publishing houses, is responsible for a meaningful portion of the company’s annual revenues. “I like to say that Jim is the rock on which we build this company,” David Young told me in his office one recent morning.

Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.

The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.

Patterson has been a beneficiary of the industry’s shifting economics, but he was also a catalyst for change at Little, Brown and in the world of publishing in general. When Patterson published his breakout book, “Along Came a Spider,” in 1993, Little, Brown was still a largely literary house, whose more commercial authors included the historian William Manchester, biographer of Winston Churchill. Patterson’s success in the subsequent years encouraged Little, Brown to fully embrace mass-market fiction. But more than that, Patterson almost single-handedly created a template for the modern blockbuster author.

There were, of course, blockbuster authors before Patterson, among them Ma rio Puzo, James Michener and Danielle Steel. But never had authors been marketed essentially as consumer goods, paving the way for a small group of writers, from Charlaine Harris to Malcolm Gladwell, to dominate best-seller lists — often with several titles at a time — in the same way that brands like Skippy and Grey Poupon dominate supermarket shelves. “Until the last 15 years or so, the thought that you could mass-merchandise authors had always been resisted,” says Larry Kirshbaum, former C.E.O. of the Time Warner Book Group, which owned Little, Brown until 2006. “Jim was at the forefront of changing that.”

The lesson was not easily learned. Publishing is an inherently conservative business. Patterson repeatedly challenged industry convention, sometimes over the objections of his own publisher. When Little, Brown was preparing to release “Along Came a Spider,” Patterson tried to persuade his publisher that the best way to get the book onto best-seller lists was to advertise aggressively on television. Little, Brown initially balked. Bookstores typically base their stocking decisions on the sales of an author’s previous books, and Patterson’s had not done particularly well. This was going to be the first of several novels about an African-American homicide detective in Washington, D.C., named Alex Cross; the prevailing wisdom was that the audience for a series built around a recurring character needed to be nurtured gradually. What’s more, large-scale TV advertising was rare in publishing, not only because of the prohibitive cost but also for cultural reasons. The thinking was that selling a book as if it were a lawn-care product could very well backfire by turning off potential readers.

Patterson wrote, produced and paid for a commercial himself. It opened with a spider dropping down the screen and closed with a voice-over: “You can stop waiting for the next ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ” Once Little, Brown saw the ad, it agreed to share the cost of rolling it out over the course of several weeks in three particularly strong thriller markets — New York, Chicago and Washington. “Along Came a Spider” made its debut at No. 9 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, ensuring it favorable placement near the entrance of bookstores, probably the single biggest driver of book sales. It rose to No. 2 in paperback and remains Patterson’s most successful book, with more than five million copies in print.

It’s not hard to understand the popularity of “Along Came a Spider.” It’s a police procedural with an uncomplicated yet ever-twisting plot, some sex, betrayal and plenty of violence. The book’s hero, Cross, is smart and tough, yet sensitive and vulnerable. He has a Ph.D. in forensic psychology from Johns Hopkins, lost his wife in a drive-by shooting — leaving him to raise his two children alone — plays Gershwin on a beat-up baby-grand piano and volunteers at the soup kitchen of his local parish. Still, hundreds of suspenseful, fast-paced novels are published each year; few become successful, let alone blockbusters. It’s entirely possible, even quite likely, that without those ads, “Along Came a Spider ” never would have made the best-seller list, and that James Patterson would now be just another thriller writer.

Patterson quickly turned Alex Cross into a booming franchise, encouraging Little, Brown to unify the series with a single jacket style — shiny, with big type and bold, colorful lettering — and titles drawn from nursery rhymes (“Kiss the Girls,” “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “The Big Bad Wolf”), with their foreboding sense of innocence interrupted. “Jim was sensitive to the fact that books carry a kind of elitist persona, and he wanted his books to be enticing to people who might not have done so well in school and were inclined to look at books as a headache,” Kirshbaum says. “He wanted his jackets to say, ‘Buy me, read me, have fun — this isn’t “Moby Dick.” ’ ”

Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. From there, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.

No sooner had Patterson established himself in the thriller market than he started moving into new genres. Kirshbaum didn’t initially like the idea; he was worried that Patterson would confuse his thriller fans. Patterson’s first nonthriller, “Miracle on the 17th Green,” published in 1996, did very well. That same year, Patterson wanted to try publishing more than one book despite Little, Brown’s view that he would cannibalize his own audience. In addition to “Miracle on the 17th Green,” Patterson published “Hide and Seek” and “Jack and Jill,” each of which was a best seller. From there, Patterson gradually added more titles each year. Not only did more books mean more sales, they also meant greater visibility, ensuring that Patterson’s name would almost always be at the front of bookstores, with the rest of the new releases. Patterson encountered similar resistance when he introduced the idea of using co-authors, which Little, Brown warned would dilute his brand. Once again, the books were best sellers. “Eventually, I stopped fighting him and went along for the ride,” Kirshbaum says.

Patterson’s vision of a limitless empire forced Little, Brown to reorder its priorities. Publishers have finite resources, and the demands of publishing Patterson were extraordinary even for a blockbuster author. Some Little, Brown editors worried that other books were suffering as a result. “To have one writer really start needing, and even demanding, the lion’s share of energy and attention was difficult,” Sarah Crichton, Little, Brown’s publisher from 1996 to 2001, told me. “There were times when some of us resented that. When Jim felt that resentment, he roared back. And he was too powerful to ignore.”

Crichton says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson’s books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. “Jim felt his ambitions weren’t being taken seriously enough,” Crichton says. “And in retrospect, he was probably right.”

WHEN I VISITED Patterson one day in Florida this fall, his wife met me at the door in tennis whites. Patterson soon followed in a white polo shirt, pleated blue trousers and boat shoes. He stopped in the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange Fanta and led me upstairs to his home office, an airy, uncluttered wood-paneled room overlooking a lap pool — Sue, who is 10 years his junior, was an all-American swimmer at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s — and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Patterson’s bookshelves are evenly divided between thrillers — books by Michael Connelly and Jeffrey Deaver — and more highbrow, literary fare like Philip Roth, John Cheever and Denis Johnson. When I asked him what he was reading now, Patterson mentioned “Wolf Hall,” by Hilary Mantel, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s doorstop biography of Robert Moses. “My favorite books are very dense ones,” Patterson told me. “I love ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ and I’m a big James Joyce fan — well, at least until ‘Finnegans Wake.’ He kind of lost me there.”

There is no computer in Patterson’s office; he writes in longhand on a legal pad and gives the pages to his assistant to type up. Hanging above the round wooden table where he works is a photograph of President Clinton taken during the Monica Lewinsky scandal walking down the steps of Marine One with a copy of Patterson’s “When the Wind Blows” tucked under his arm. (Patterson’s popularity in Washington is apparently bipartisan: the wall of one of his downstairs bathrooms is plastered with fan mail from both George Bushes.) Neatly arranged on an adjacent L-shaped desk were 23 stacks of paper of varying heights, Patterson’s works in progress.

Patterson grew up in Newburgh, N.Y., the son of a tough man who overcame a difficult childhood. Raised in the local poorhouse by a single mother, Patterson’s father earned a scholarship to Hamilton College and dreamed of becoming a writer or a diplomat but wound up selling insurance. “He didn’t have a father, and I don’t think he knew how to do it,” Patterson told me. (When his father retired, he wrote a novel and showed it to Patterson, already an established author. Patterson gave him the same advice he gives all first-time novelists: Write another one.)

Patterson discovered books late for a man who now makes a fortune writing them. Right after his senior year in high school, his family moved to a suburb of Boston, and Patterson got a job working nights and weekends as an aide at McLean Hospital in Belmont. With nothing else to do on his overnight shifts, he guzzled coffee and read.

At first, Patterson’s literary taste ran toward the highbrow — Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Genet, Evan S. Connell. “I was a snob,” he says. After graduating from Manhattan College in 1969, Patterson was given a free ride to Vanderbilt University’s graduate program in English literature but dropped out after just one year. “I had found two things that I loved, reading and writing,” he told me. “If I became a college professor, I knew I was going to wind up killing them both off.”

Instead, Patterson moved to New York and got a job as a junior copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. He also started reading commercial books like “The Exorcist” and “The Day of the Jackal.” “I always felt I could write a reasonable literary novel, but not a great one,” he says. “Then I thought, I can do this. I understand it, and I like it.” Patterson set up a typewriter on the kitchen table of his small apartment on 100th Street and Manhattan Avenue and wrote after work every night and on weekends. The result was his first novel, “The Thomas Berryman Number.”

More than a dozen publishers rejected Patterson’s manuscript before his agent, whom Patterson found in a newspaper article, finally sold it to Little, Brown for $8,500. “I remember going up to Boston — Little, Brown was still in Boston then — and walking into this library with a huge fireplace,” Patterson recalls of his first visit to his publisher. “On the bookshelves were all of these other Little, Brown books, ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ ‘The Executioner’s Song.’ I’m thinking, They’re going to publish me? This is so cool.”

“The Thomas Berryman Number” is the story of a newspaperman in Nashville who is assigned to cover the assassination of a local politician and ends up on the trail of his murderer, a professional killer from the Texas panhandle named Thomas Berryman. The action bounces around a lot, ricocheting between Berryman’s various murders, the newspaperman’s reporting and his subsequent effort to turn his articles on the case into a book. “Berryman” bears none of the hallmarks of Patterson’s later thrillers. It’s more brooding and stylized, more classically noir. The bad guy — Berryman — is not a sadist or a psychopathic serial killer; he’s a hired gun. There is no real good guy, other than the reporter and narrator. At its best, the prose can call to mind Raymond Chandler. Here’s Berryman in the book’s opening pages, about to hitch a ride out of Texas with a man he would soon kill: “Thomas Berryman shaded his sunglasses so he could see the approaching car better. A finely made coil of brown dust followed it like a streamer. Buzzards crossed its path, heading east toward Wichita Falls.”

The book won a prestigious Edgar Award for a first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. No doubt, some of those who praised it at the time would now say Patterson has failed to live up to its literary promise. That’s not how Patterson sees it. “It’s more convoluted, more bleak — more of the sort of thing that some people will find praiseworthy,” he says of “The Thomas Berryman Number.” “The sentences are superior to a lot of the stuff I write now, but the story isn’t as good. I’m less interested in sentences now and more interested in stories.”

After “The Thomas Berryman Number,” Patterson wrote several more books for a number of different publishers that were neither successful nor critically acclaimed. In 1980, he tried his hand at the “demonic child” genre — memorably popularized by the film “Rosemary’s Baby”— with the horror novel “Virgin” (which was later retitled and published as “Cradle and All”). In 1987, the year the movie “Wall Street” was released, he published a Wall Street thriller called “Black Market.”

Patterson is unsentimental about his early, somewhat clumsy attempts at popular fiction. “That’s an absolutely horrifying book,” he says of his 1977 novel, “Season of the Machete,” the story of a sadistic husband-and-wife team who carry out a series of gory machete murders on a Caribbean island. “I actually tell people not to read it.”

Several weeks later, I witnessed this firsthand at one of Patterson’s signings. When a woman handed him a copy of the book to autograph, he groaned. “Not my best work,” Patterson said. “It’s scaring me half to death,” the woman answered. “Don’t read it,” Patterson replied.

WHAT IS PERHAPS most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of books it produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those books are published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size, mass-market paperbacks. “Scarcely a week goes by when we aren’t publishing something by James Patterson,” Young told me, only half-joking.

This summer, Patterson will begin his fourth thriller series, “Private,” which centers on a detective agency with branches all over the world. In addition, he does frequent thriller one-offs, including an annual summer beach read, usually set at or near a resort.

The thriller genre is generally not for the squeamish, but Patterson’s tend to be especially graphic, and the violence often involves sociopathic sexual perversion and attractive young women. For instance, the villain in his second Alex Cross novel, “Kiss the Girls,” is a psychopath who kidnaps, rapes and tortures college girls in an underground bunker; at one point, he even feeds a live snake into the anus of one of his victims.

As long as there has been mass-market fiction, it has had its detractors. In the late Victorian era, the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold denounced “the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed . . . for people with a low standard of life.” Yet even within the maligned genre, Patterson has some especially nasty critics. The Washington Post’s thriller reviewer, Patrick Anderson, called “Kiss the Girls” “sick, sexist, sadistic and subliterate.” Stephen King has described Patterson as “a terrible writer.”

Patterson has written in just about every genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, “women’s weepies,” graphic novels, Christmas-themed books. He dabbles in nonfiction as well. In 2008, he published “Against Medical Advice,” a book written from the perspective of the son of a friend who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, and last year, he took on the supposed murder of the child pharaoh King Tut.

Patterson’s fastest-growing franchise is his young-adult books. He published his first Y.A. title, “Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment,” in 2005, not long after the languishing genre was jump-started by blockbusters like “Harry Potter” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Last month, he introduced his third Y.A. series, “Witch and Wizard,” a dystopian fantasy about a teenage brother and sister who wake up to discover that they are living in a totalitarian regime and that they have supernatural powers that have made them enemies of the state. Despite some negative prepublication reviews, the book was critic-proof, making its debut at No. 1 on the Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books.

Each of Patterson’s series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who read everything he writes. His books all share stylistic similarities. They are light on atmospherics and heavy on action, conveyed by simple, colloquial sentences. “I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”

Patterson’s chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in a very literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting whenever possible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimum of telegraphic details. The first chapter of “The Swimsuit,” a recent thriller with a villain who abducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on a beach in Hawaii:

“Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.

“Where was she? What the hell was going on?”

TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of “24.” Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular, unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. “Duke Ellington said, ‘I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn’t know how my music sounds,’ ” Pietsch told me when I asked him about Patterson’s use of collaborators. “Jim created a process and a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.”

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.

Some Patterson fans have complained in online forums that his co-written books feel too “cookie cutter” and lack the “roller coaster” feel of his previous work, but his sales certainly haven’t suffered. In at least one instance, Patterson took on a co-author in an effort to boost sales: last year, after noticing he wasn’t selling in Scandinavia, he invited Sweden’s best-selling crime writer, Liza Marklund, to collaborate with him on an international thriller. Their novel, “The Postcard Killers,” is just being published in Sweden and will be out in the U.S. this summer.

For the most part, though, Patterson draws his co-authors from the vast sea of struggling writers. A few weeks after visiting Patterson, I had lunch with one of his collaborators, Michael Ledwidge, in Manhattan. An amiable 39-year-old redhead in a black leather jacket and jeans, Ledwidge told me he grew up in a large, working-class Irish family in the Bronx. He wanted to be a cop, but when he applied in 1993, the Police Academy was oversubscribed. So he worked as a doorman and started writing a heist novel on the side. When Ledwidge learned that he and James Patterson shared an alma mater, Manhattan College, he delivered his half-finished manuscript to Patterson one morning at J. Walter Thompson. That night, his phone rang.

“It must be James Patterson,” Ledwidge joked to his wife.

It was. Patterson helped Ledwidge get his first book published and his writing career started. A few books later, Ledwidge had garnered some critical acclaim but not much commercial success. In 2003, Patterson suggested that they collaborate on “Step on a Crack,” his first Michael Bennett novel. Ledwidge leapt at the opportunity. The book went straight to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. One book quickly led to another. In 2005, Ledwidge quit his day job as a cable-splicer at Verizon, left the Bronx for Connecticut and became a full-time co-author for James Patterson.

Ledwidge told me that he and Patterson have an easy working relationship, that Patterson playfully teases him when he writes a scene that Patterson doesn’t like and praises him when he’s pleased with something. I asked Ledwidge if he missed writing his own books. “Honestly? ” he asked. “Not at all. This is much more fun.”

ONE NIGHT IN Florida, Patterson and I met his wife and their 11-year-old son, Jack, for dinner at the Palm Beach Grill. When the maître d’ noticed Patterson entering the restaurant, she told him his table was ready. A well-dressed, white-haired woman quickly spun around.

“Are you James Patterson?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes,” Patterson answered.

“I just read your last one. What was it called?”

Patterson hesitated, unsure which book she was talking about.

“It was brutal!” she woman continued.

“ ‘The Swimsuit’?” Patterson ventured.

“Yeah,” the woman said. “Boy, was it brutal! I liked it, but it was brutal!”

After dinner, Sue and Jack went home, and Patterson and I had another glass of wine and continued talking. Patterson told me that Jack, who had been working on his laptop for most of the meal, only recently started to like reading. It required a deliberate effort on Patterson’s part. Beginning a few summers ago, Patterson told Jack he didn’t have to do any chores; he just had to read for an hour or so every day. The first summer Jack resisted. The second summer he didn’t complain. Last summer, he no longer needed any prodding. Patterson ticked off some of the books Jack had recently read and enjoyed — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Huckleberry Finn” — with obvious pride.

Patterson told me that Jack’s initial reluctance to read helped inspire him to move into the Y.A. genre. He wanted to write books for preteens and teenagers that would be fun and easy to read. The young-adult realm was, in one sense, a big leap for an author known for violent thrillers. At the same time, it was a natural fit for Patterson, whose unadorned prose and fast-paced plots are well suited to reluctant readers. Promoting literacy among children has since become a pet cause for him; he has his own Web site, ReadKiddoRead.com, aimed at helping parents choose books for their children. “There are millions of kids who have never read a book that they liked, and that is a national disgrace,” Patterson said. “What I’m trying to do is at least wake up several thousand of them.”

Later, our conversation turned to Patterson’s critics. “Thousands of people don’t like what I do,” Patterson told me, shrugging off his detractors. “Fortunately, millions do.” For all of his commercial success, though, Patterson seemed bothered by the fact that he has not been given his due — that unlike King or even Grisham, who have managed to transcend their genres, he continues to be dismissed as an airport author or, worse, a marketing genius who has cynically maneuvered his way to best-sellerdom by writing remedial novels that pander to the public’s basest instincts. “Caricature assassination,” Patterson called it.

Patterson said too much has been made of his marketing savvy. (A few years ago, a professor at Harvard Business School went so far as to do a case study on him.) To Patterson, the explanation for his success is less complicated. Whether he’s writing about a serial killer, a love affair between a doctor and poet in Martha’s Vineyard or a middle-aged ad executive who miraculously becomes an exceptional putter and joins the senior golf tour, his books are accessible and engaging. “A brand is just a connection between something and a bunch of people,” Patterson told me. “Crest toothpaste: I always used it, it tastes O.K., so I don’t have any particular reason to switch. Here the connection is that James Patterson writes books that bubble along with heroes I can get interested in. That’s it.”

Patterson considers himself as an entertainer, not a man of letters. Still, he bristles when he hears one of his books described as a guilty pleasure: “Why should anyone feel guilty about reading a book?” Patterson said that what he does — coming up with stories that will resonate with a lot of people and rendering them in a readable style — is no different from what King, Grisham and other popular authors do. “I have a saying,” Patterson told me. “If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained. They need to feel something.”

Shortly before we left the restaurant, Patterson brought up “The Swimsuit” again. “I like ‘The Swimsuit,’ ” he said. “It’s nasty, but I like it. But I think I went a little farther than I needed to. I’m going to tone it down for the paperback.”

Patterson noticed a look of surprise on my face; it’s not every day that an author decides to rewrite one of his books. “Look,” he said, “if you’re writing ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ then you can sit back and go: ‘This is it, this is the book. This is high art. I’m the man, you’re not. The end.’ But I’m not the man, and this is not high art.”

Whatever ambivalence once existed toward Patterson inside Little, Brown has long since been replaced by unequivocal enthusiasm and gratitude. Pietsch, who succeeded Crichton as publisher, says Patterson belongs in the same class as Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. “Every novel of Jim’s is master class in terms of plotting, pace and striking the right balance between action and emotional content,” Pietsch told me. “I have never read a writer who I think is better at keeping your eye moving forward and your heart moving forward.”

Thanks in part to Patterson, Little, Brown’s identity has changed considerably since he first visited the publisher’s former offices in a town house on Beacon Hill in Boston. In addition to Patterson, it is now home to such thriving commercial novelists as Michael Connelly and Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular “Twilight” vampire series, as well as consistent best sellers like Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris. In 2008, a year in which many of its competitors were laying off employees and shutting down imprints, Little, Brown gave out Christmas bonuses.

In September, Little, Brown hosted an anniversary dinner in Patterson’s honor — “20 Years of Publishing James Patterson” — in a private room at Daniel, one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan. (Patterson left Little, Brown after “The Thomas Berryman Number” but returned in 1989, a few years before “Along Came a Spider,” with a book called “The Midnight Club.”) It wasn’t the sort of party you see often in the world of publishing, particularly now, with much of the industry in free fall. In addition to a meal of crabmeat salad, beef tenderloin and warm madeleines, the 45 guests were given party favors: bottles of red wine with labels that read “Vintage Patterson.”

Days earlier, Hachette Book Group and Patterson’s representative, the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, hammered out the terms of a new 17-book deal. (Forbes reported that the contract is worth at least $150 million, though Little, Brown and Patterson dispute the number.) “Don’t you need to be home writing?” I joked with Patterson. He told me matter-of-factly that he’d already started 11 of the 17 books, and even finished more than a few of them.

Some toasts accompanied the dinner. Pietsch talked about the conflicting mythology surrounding who actually discovered Patterson. (“Not only did I know the editor who discovered James Patterson, I once ate a hamburger cooked on his grill.”) Patterson’s young-adult editor, Andrea Spooner, recounted her campaign to persuade her father, an English professor, that Patterson was a worthy writer. (“ ‘It’s worth noting, Daddy, that Dickens was one of the most popular and successful storytellers of his time, too!’ ”) When Young told the crowd that Patterson “contributes significantly” to five of Hachette’s six publishing groups, Patterson interjected: “What am I missing?”

“FaithWords,” Young replied, referring to the company’s religious imprint.

“I can do that,” Patterson said.

Patterson was the last to speak. The only man in the room without a tie, he wore a black T-shirt beneath his dark suit. “I’m sorry my good friend Stephen King couldn’t be here,” he began. “It must be bingo night in Bangor.”

Patterson then proceeded to tell one of his favorite stories about his mother’s father, who drove a frozen-foods truck in Upstate New York. During the summer, Patterson said, he would occasionally get up at 4 in the morning to ride along with him. As they drove over a mountain toward his first delivery, Patterson’s grandfather, an irrepressibly joyful man, would be singing at the top of his lungs. “One day he said to me: ‘Jim, I don’t care what you do when you grow up. I don’t care if you drive a truck like I do, or if you become the president. Just remember that when you go over the mountain to work in the morning, you’ve got to be singing,’ ” Patterson went on. “Well, I am.”

It’s no surprise that Patterson loves what he does. What’s not to love? He plays golf most mornings on Donald Trump’s Palm Beach course and spends the rest of the day working on guaranteed best sellers for which he is paid millions.

But the image of Patterson as a carefree man lucky enough to make money doing what he loves is a bit misleading. Patterson is nothing if not relentlessly ambitious. At J. Walter Thompson, he rose from the lowly station of junior copywriter to become the youngest creative director in the firm’s history — along the way dreaming up such ad slogans as “I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid” — and then the C.E.O. of the company’s North American operations. And as Patterson is the first to admit, he didn’t even like working in advertising. It goes without saying that writing was never just a hobby for him.

Patterson’s current preoccupation is Hollywood. Despite some attempts, including two Alex Cross films (both starring Morgan Freeman), which Patterson doesn’t think much of, some made-for-TV movies, a failed ABC series and a lot of books that were optioned but never developed, there still hasn’t been a blockbuster film or hit TV show based on one of his novels.

A few years ago, Patterson hired a former colleague from J. Walter Thompson, Steve Bowen, to oversee the development of his various movie and television projects. In 2007, they signed a deal with Avi Arad, the producer of the “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” films, to make a movie based on Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” young-adult series. In addition to trying to make sure that Patterson is more involved in the development process, Patterson and Bowen plan to produce some projects themselves. They have already raised the financing for a new Alex Cross movie that Patterson is helping to write.

When I met Bowen, a good-looking ex-Marine with a trimmed, graying beard, for coffee in Manhattan several weeks after the dinner at Daniel, he told me that part of his challenge is to change Hollywood’s perception of Patterson. He cited Clint Eastwood, whose name was once synonymous with “Dirty Harry” and spaghetti westerns, as a model for the sort of image transformation they are aiming to pull off. “Jim’s been wrongly stereotyped out there as the master of slash and gash,” Bowen said. “What people don’t fully understand is that there’s a unique talent and storytelling ability that has allowed him to do what he’s done in the book world. He just knows what’s going to grab people. The man has a golden gut.”

IN THE MID-1960S, Jacqueline Susann, the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (30 million copies sold), famously demonstrated — via hundreds of bookstore signings — that even blockbuster books are built one reader at a time. When Patterson was still making his name, he, too, barnstormed the country, signing books late into the night and exhausting publicists. These days, though, Patterson doesn’t do many bookstore events. He certainly doesn’t need the publicity, and he would rather be home with Sue and Jack. But on a Monday night in mid-November, he turned up at a car-dealership-size Barnes & Noble in a strip mall on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J., to promote his latest Alex Cross novel, “I, Alex Cross.”

This is Patterson’s 16th Cross book. Since “Along Came a Spider,” Cross has been through a lot. He has had several jobs and a number of ill-fated relationships; he has chased down numerous serial killers, a Russian mobster and a cult of goths; and has even written his own novel based on his late uncle’s investigation of a series of lynchings in Mississippi in the early 1900s.

Patterson came straight from the Newark airport, arriving early to sign the store’s “I, Alex Cross” stock in a back room. “We haven’t seen you in years,” said Dennis Wurst, a Barnes & Noble manager of author promotions who stopped by to say hello.

“How’s business?” Patterson asked.

“It helps when you write an Alex Cross book,” Wurst answered.

A month before, Barnes & Noble was caught in the crossfire of a preholiday pricing war between Wal-Mart and Amazon, with Wal-Mart dropping its prices on several hardcover blockbusters, including “I, Alex Cross,” to $8.99, more than 50 percent off the retail price. The battle set off a panic inside an already-anxious publishing industry: such deep discounting may help move merchandise, but along with trends like the proliferation of e-readers that instantly deliver many blockbusters for $9.99 or less, it further devalues books. The days of $25 hardcovers are surely numbered. Without those revenues, publishers will be even more reluctant to devote shrinking resources to new, unproven authors, which will, in turn, limit the range of books being published.

Whatever the future of publishing may hold, Patterson’s place in it seems secure. By the time he was introduced at the Paramus store, in excess of 300 people — more women than men, but fairly evenly divided, with a handful of children as well — had crowded into the bookstore’s large event space to see him. Stragglers were looking vainly for a spot on the wall to lean up against. Patterson, dressed casually in a sweater and slacks, delivered some brief remarks, took a handful of questions and then got down to the main event — signing books. To avoid a crush of people at the signing table, the staff divided the audience into several groups by letter. They were told that Patterson would autograph any of his books purchased in the Paramus store and one additional title from their own Patterson collection, but that he would not personalize any copies.

The system quickly broke down. Patterson was soon adding names and short inscriptions to books. He bantered easily with his fans as he wrote. Many asked about Jack; more than one wanted to know if he had brought any pictures.

“I skipped work to be here,” one woman said as her husband snapped a picture of her with Patterson.

“That’s always a good thing,” Patterson said.

“Well, I’m a police officer, so I guess that’s bad,” the woman replied.

“I won’t tell,” Patterson said.

There is something unique about the relationship between readers and their favorite authors, a sense of emotional intimacy that doesn’t exist, say, between sports fans and athletes. Patterson’s fans can read him virtually all year. They aren’t just addicted to his books; they see him as a constant companion, a part of their lives. One woman asked Patterson to sign a book for her grandmother, who passed away a few days earlier. “We used to read your books together, and I want to put it in her casket with her,” she said. Another told Patterson that he got her reading again after a recent stroke. A truck driver said that he had never read any of Patterson’s books but that he had listened to every single one of them on the road: “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

Still another woman gestured at her elderly mother, whom she was pushing in a wheelchair: “She just had heart surgery. You make her happy, and that makes me happy.”

“And that makes me happy,” Patterson said.

After an hour of signing books without interruption, Patterson seemed to be doing fine. “We’re really cooking along here,” he told his publicist. A half-hour later, though, Patterson was starting to tire. “This is getting out of hand,” he said.

After almost two hours, a voice finally came over the loudspeaker: “Will all remaining groups please report to the James Patterson signing area.” Patterson signed his last books, posed for a few photographs with some of the store’s employees and got ready to go. “That was a fairly respectable crowd,” he said as we walked to the escalator.

On our way out, Patterson picked up on a theme he raised with me weeks earlier, during our conversation about his detractors. “This goes to the notion we were talking about in Florida, about my critics — people who call themselves open-minded but then make judgments about what I write,” he said. “Well, these people like it. They’re happy. So what’s the big deal?”

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of “The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution — and Won,” which is just out in paperback.

A Word on Awards

2010-02-15T17:23:00.000-05:00

With the recent announcement of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, I thought the time might be ripe for a brief discussion of literary awards.

Some of you may have wondered, in the process of querying various agents, when and whether it's appropriate to mention any awards you might have won for your writing. Since I don't have time for an awesome flowchart, I'll just give you a few general "Do"s and "Don't"s:

Do:

· Mention any significant awards you've won for your writing (anything from placing in contests judged at conferences to Pushcart Prizes). Obviously if you've won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Hugo, an Edgar, &c, list it. (Although quite honestly, if you have, you probably already have representation.)

· Mention any significant awards you've won for things outside your writing so long as they're relevant to your topic. (E.g., if you're writing a medical memoir, mentioning your professional qualifications and awards is not only germane, it's expected.)

· Mention any previous publications you have, excluding self-published work or work published in a magazine or anthology for which you make editorial decisions. Try to stick to short stories (mentioning where your poetry or journalism has appeared might be helpful if they're really well-known markets, but otherwise, it's just superfluous). Note: if you're submitting non-fiction, any non-fiction or journalistic credits you've got are fair game.

Don't:

· Mention any writing awards that are not a big deal. This includes that ninth-place award you got in your hometown (population: 200) newspaper for your short story about a cat and a dog who become bros despite the biological and social forces working against them.

· Mention any writing awards you won as a child (unless you are still a child or that award is a big deal; see above). No one cares that you got a "Most Thoughtful Essay" award in fourth grade for your three-paragraph treatise on Betsy Ross.

· Try to trick the agent. (Fun fact: everyone in the industry knows that anyone with $50 can nominate themselves for a Pulitzer. Telling us you're nominated won't fool us.)

· Mention where you earned your undergraduate or graduate degree(s), except maybe an MFA, and even then, be judicious. Agents are interested in your book, not the school(s) you attended. (This is not the case if your professional credentials are part of your platform; see above.)

In short: if you've won an award or otherwise earned some kind of recognition that you believe sets you apart from 90% of the crowd, include it. Otherwise, don't put it in your query; when push comes to shove (and it will, gentle authors), agents and editors only care about your novel and your willingness to promote it (in that order). No more, no less.

Snowmageddon in DC!

2010-02-11T11:02:00.000-05:00

Quick, rescue teddy!

Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds

2010-02-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

The World Won't Miss You for a While

Untie your boots and separate your toes,
ignore the compass wavering north/north-west.
Lie down with me you hillwalkers and rest

Quit trailing through the overcrowded streets
with tinkling bells, you child of Hare Krishna.
Hush. Unfurl your saffron robes. How sweet

the grass. And you, photographer of wars,
lie down and cap your lens. Ambassador,
take off your dancing shoes. There are no laws

by which you must abide oh blushing boy
with Stanley knife, no county magistrates
are waiting here to dress you down: employ

yourself with cutting up these wild flowers
as you like. Sous chef with baby guinea fowl
to stuff, surveillance officer with hours

to fill, and anorexic weighing up a meal,
lie down. Girl riding to an interview,
turn back before they force you to reveal

your hidey holes. Apprentice pharmacist,
leave carousels of second generation
happy pills. The long term sad. And journalist

with dreams, forget the man from Lancashire
who lost his tongue, the youth who found it,
kept it quivering in a matchbox for a year.

The Boys in the Fish Shop

This one winds a string of plastic parsley
around the rainbow trout,
punnets of squat lobster and marinated anchovy,
the dish of jellied eels
in which a spoon stands erect.
He's young, eighteen perhaps,
with acne like the mottled skin of some pink fish,
and there's gold in his ear, the hoop of a lure.
The others aren't much older,
bantering in the back room,
that den of stinking mysteries
where boxes are carried.

The fish lie around all day,
washed-up movie stars
stunned on their beds of crushed ice.
The boys take turns to stare
through the wide glass window,
hands on hips, an elbow on a broom,
lost for a moment in warm waters until
Yes darling, what can I get you?
and their knives return to the task,
scraping scales in a sequin shower,
splitting parcels of scarlet and manganese.
Their fingers know a pound by guesswork,
how to unpeel smoked salmon,
lay it fine as lace on cellophane.
A girl walks past, hair streaming,
and the boy looks up,
still gripping his knife, lips parting in a slack O.

Talking to Yourself

It starts with sounds of which you're unaware:
the window, opening, gives a rusting sigh,
saying something, although there's no one there.

The bath brims over while you ask the air
what's the point? The air makes no reply.
It's used to sounds of which you're unaware.

Children see you chattering and stare,
and mothers with their trolleys wonder why
you're whispering, although there's no one there,

just artichokes, an avocado pear –
they cannot tell you how to live and die,
they're lipless, though they may still be aware.

Inside the church the shadows lisp a prayer,
and votive candles clamber to the sky,
insisting something, although there's no one there:

the priest has gone, the altar's been stripped bare.
You've never prayed, but now you kneel and try:
it starts with sounds of which you're unaware, saying something, although there's no one there.

• Extract from Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds, published by Seren Books.

Buy Sunday at The Skin Laundrette at the Guardian bookshop

Kathryn Simmonds, The Guardian, Friday 29 August 2008

Australian writers' stamps send the wrong message

2010-02-08T18:06:00.000-05:00

Spot the difference ... Australian Legends of the Written Word stamps

The all-white, overwhelmingly male selection of authors chosen by Australia Post delivers a very distorted picture of our literature.

I see that Australia Post has issued a new set of themed stamps honouring some of the nation's most popular and celebrated writers.

The "Australian Legends of the Written Word" series from Australia Post features Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Tim Winton, Bryce Courtenay and David Malouf. I don't have a problem with any of the authors listed: they certainly are popular and celebrated. But doesn't it seem just a little bit myopic in a white-male-Anglo-Saxonish manner? Only Malouf and McCullough would fall anywhere outside the net.

Who set the tone and selected the authors honoured here? It would be mealy-mouthed to criticise anyone included on that list; they're all writers worthy of the honour. But, at the start of the night, a few more authors should have been added to give the stamp collection a more comprehensive and realistic vision of the current Australian literary landscape. Where are Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolly, Helen Garner? These women are popular, award-winning authors whose work has been published and praised overseas. Grenville, for example, has been translated into 13 languages and is a winner of the Orange prize. Why doesn't she get a stamp? It's not about political correctness at all, it's about getting it right.

As well as the gender disparity, the list does nothing to indicate the cultural depth of Australian writing today. Christos Tsiolkas, a Greek-Australian author, might feel hard done by not to be included, but I guess he is not safe enough as an author. His writing is controversial, his characters often unpleasant, and his stories reveal the materialistic ennui of contemporary urban life and the social dislocation experienced by many minority groups. But here's the thing: his recent novel The Slap has probably been the most talked about book published in Australia in the past year.

And are there no indigenous authors worthy of a literary guernsey either? Alexis Wright? Sally Morgan? What, exactly, was the criteria for eligibility? I have these horrific images of a group of white men sitting around like Bruces in the philosophy department, going through the names of contemporary authors.

I then wondered if the criteria for eligibility was related to film adaptations. Did each author need to have at least one feature film (or mini-series) adaptation to their name? Actually, no, that can't be right, because Grenville, Garner and Tsiolkas have had their fiction turned to film.

What sort of message does this send out to the young kids of Australia? That almost all of Australia's great writers are white men? That is demonstrably wrong and decidedly insulting. Whoever commissioned these stamps and selected the authors should be given a short lecture in contemporary Australian literary history instead of logging on to IMDB to get their facts.

Evan Maloney, The Guardian, Friday 22 January 2010

The Death of the Slush Pile?

2010-02-07T14:59:00.000-05:00

Even in the web era, getting through the door is tougher than ever...

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.

That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.

JUDITH GUEST

Associated Press

When Minnesota mom Ms. Guest sent out "Ordinary People" in 1975, it was refused by the first publisher. Another wrote, "While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it." It became a best seller and a movie.

Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to legions of would-be novelists, journalists and screenwriters—not to mention "D-girls" and "manuscripts girls" from Hollywood to New York who held the hope that finding a gem might catapult them from entry level to expense account—the slush pile represented The Dream.

Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Web was supposed to be a great democratizer of media. Anyone with a Flip and Final Cut Pro could be a filmmaker; anyone with a blog a memoirist. But rather than empowering unknown artists, the Web is often considered by talent-seeking executives to be an unnavigable morass.

It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)

STEPHENIE MEYER

View Full Image

dpa/Corbis

Ms. Meyer sent 15 query letters about her teenage-vampire saga. She got nearly 10 rejection letters; one even arrived after she signed with an agent and received a three-book deal from Little, Brown. She doesn't need to send out query letters anymore.

"It does create an incredibly difficult Catch-22 on both sides, particularly for new writers wanting to get their work seen," says Hannah Minghella, president of production for Sony Pictures.

Fending off plagiarism lawsuits has become an increasing headache for publishers and studios. "It's become the cultural version of malpractice," says Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of public radio's "Studio 360."

Some producers make it easy: They just refuse to deal with new writers at all. Mike Clements, president of Good Humor, the production company founded by Tom Werner ("The Cosby Show"), has a personal policy against reading any sample or script that is not sent to him by an agent. "I make the occasional exception for a friend, or for my aunt," he says. "I just make them sign a release first."

Lisa Haney

Staying Out of the Slush Pile: Do's and Don'ts

• Find an agent who's hungry—a nd "monetize." "Anyone who wants to break in should read Variety and Hollywood Reporter and see which assistants have just been promoted to agents…anyone can teach a three-act structure. What I want students to get in the mind set of is 'How do we write something with the purpose of monetizing it?'" —Ryan Saul, literary agent, APA, and screenwriting instructor

• Don't be a barista waiting for someone to stumble upon your genius. "Our editors travel, they get around. They look at writer's conferences, at MFA programs. They look at magazine articles and at blogs. That's what editors do, they sniff things out from so many different sources." —Carol Schneider, Random House Publishing Group

• Find another way in Slush pile finds "are the rare exception that give people hope. If we found one writer a year that sent things in randomly, that would be a lot…agents are necessary gatekeepers but it's nice if there is an alternative entry…there are subversive ways to get your stuff read—you just have to be dedicated. A writer I know wasn't able to get treatments read so he started rendering them as comic books." —David Granger, editor in chief, Esquire

• Contests! "I'm always wary to recommend to writers that they go to competitions too much because there are fees and they can end up spending a lot of money. But the ones that do get industry attention are really fantastic opportunities to network and to make important relationships." —Hannah Minghella, president of production, Sony Animation Studios, formerly in development at Miramax

• And buck up. In 1957, Tom Wolfe interviewed James Michener, a former slush pile reader and the author of "Tales of the South Pacific." Mr. Wolfe asked him if he had worried, upon submitting the Pulitzer Prize-winning tome to publishers, about competition lurking in the slush piles. "If you've ever read a slush pile," said Mr. Michener, "you'd know I had nothing to worry about," Mr. Wolfe says. "He knew how much garbage there was out there."

As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.

Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.

The manuscript was passed on to an agent, Jodi Reamer. She liked what she read, a novel called "Twilight." She signed Ms. Meyer, and sold the book to Little, Brown. The most recent sequel in the series, "Breaking Dawn," sold 1.3 million copies the day it went on sale in August 2008. The latest film grossed more than $288 million in the U.S.

At William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, Adriana Alberghetti only reads scripts sent to her by producers, managers and lawyers whose taste she knows and trusts. The agent says she receives 30 unsolicited e-mails a day from writers and people she doesn't know who are pushing unknown writers, and she hits "delete" without opening. These days, she is taking on few "baby writers," she says, adding that risks she would have taken five years ago she won't today. "I'll take very few shots on a new voice. It's tough out there right now," she says.

Book publishers say it is now too expensive to pay employees to read slush that rarely is worthy of publication. At Simon & Schuster, an automated telephone greeting instructs aspiring writers: "Simon & Schuster requires submissions to come to us via a literary agent due to the large volume of submissions we receive each day. Agents are listed in 'Literary Marketplace,' a reference work published by R.R. Bowker that can be found in most libraries." Company spokesman Adam Rothberg says the death of the publisher's slush pile accelerated after the terror attacks of 9/11 by fear of anthrax in the mail room.

A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices. But today, writing talent isn't necessarily enough. It helps to have a big-media affiliation, or be effective on TV. "We are being more selective in taking on clients because the publishers are demanding much more from the authors than ever before," says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group and now an agent. "From a publisher's standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones."

Getting an opportunity in Hollywood as a writer once required little more than affiliation with elite institutions like the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine which spawned writers for "The Simpsons" and a host of others. The Web was supposed to dismantle such barriers. And to be sure, the Web has provided a path for some writers who use it well.

Scott Belsky, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur whose sites include "The 99 Percent," wanted to write a book on how to succeed in the creative industries. To secure representation, he approached agents with data on his Web traffic, samples of reader comments posted on the site, and the number of times various posts had been blogged about, tweeted and retweeted on social-networking site Twitter. This data convinced Jim Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency to take on Mr. Belsky as a client. Mr. Levine used the information to land him a book deal. "Making Ideas Happen" will be published in April by Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group.

ANNE FRANK

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"Diary of a Young Girl" had been published in Holland and was headed to France. But Doubleday's Paris office had marked it for rejection. Judith Jones, then a "girl Friday," disobeyed her boss and alerted Doubleday's New York editors, and the English-language edition came out in 1952.

"These days, you need to deliver not just the manuscript but the audience," says Mr. Levine. "More and more, the mantra in publishing is 'Ask not what your publisher can do for you, ask what you can do for your publisher.'"

But relationships still trump everything. Consider the path of one television series, "Sons of Tucson," set to debut on Fox in March. The show, a sitcom about kids who hire a ne'er-do-well to stand in as their father after their real dad is sent to prison, was created and co-written by neophytes—a rare event.

Tommy Dewey and Greg Bratman worked hard to get their big break, but because Mr. Dewey had done some acting, he was able to sign with a manager. The manager introduced them to a producer, Harvey Myman, who helped them develop a pilot script and got them a meeting with Fox, which ordered a pilot, then the series.

"Sons of Tucson" shows that unknowns can still make it—if they make some connections. "You really do rely on other people to be the arbiters of what may and may not work," says Marcus Wiley, a Fox TV executive. "If I was an agent submitting to an executive, I'm going to be calling that executive next week for something else. So the chances of me claiming plagiarism are slim," he adds. "This keeps both sides honest."

PHILIP ROTH

Associated Press

In 1958, Mr. Roth was an unknown who had barely been published when a short story called "The Conversion of the Jews" was plucked out of a heap at the Paris Review—by Rose Styron, wife of William. The next year it was published as part of "Goodbye, Columbus."

Despite the refrain that most everything sent to the slush pile is garbage, publishing executives confess to a nagging insecurity of missing something big. "Harry Potter" was submitted to 12 publishers (by an agent), all of whom rejected it. A year later, Bloomsbury published it in the U.K.

In 2008. HarperCollins launched Authonomy.com, a Web slush pile. Writers can upload their manuscripts, readers vote for their favorites, and HarperCollins editors read the five highest-rated manuscripts each month. About 10,000 manuscripts have been loaded so far and HarperCollins has bought four.

The first, "The Reaper," came out in July and sold moderately well. Last November, the publisher released another Authonomy offering, a young adult book called "Fairytale of New York," which has sold over 100,000 copies and is a best seller in Britain. HarperCollins also launched a similar platform for teen writers called "InkPop."

One slush stalwart—the Paris Review— has college interns and graduate students in the magazine's Tribeca loft-office read the 1,000 unsolicited works submitted each month. Each short story is read by at least two people. If one likes it and the other doesn't, it is read by a third. Any submission that receives two "Ps" for "pass" as opposed to "R" for "reject" is read by an editor.

"We take the democratic ideal represented by the slush pile seriously," says managing editor Caitlin Roper.

The literary journal publishes one piece from the slush pile each year. That leaves each unsolicited submission a .008% chance of rising to the top of the pile.

Write to Katherine Rosman at katherine.rosman@wsj.com

Martin Amis in new row over 'euthanasia booths'

2010-02-01T17:05:00.000-05:00

Martin Amis has never fought shy of an argument, whether it be with the critic Terry Eagleton (over Islamist extremism), his pal Christopher Hitchens (over Stalin) or fellow novelist Julian Barnes (over Amis leaving his agent – Barnes's wife).

But none of those opponents were as tough as his new target promises to be. Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain's ageing population, calling for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where they can terminate their lives with "a martini and a medal".

The author of Time's Arrow and London Fields said in an interview at the weekend that he believes Britain faces a "civil war" between young and old, as a "silver tsunami" of increasingly ageing people puts pressure on society.

"They'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops," he said. "I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years' time.

"There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal," he added.

His comments were immediately condemned as "glib" and "offensive" by anti-euthanasia groups and those caring for the elderly and infirm. Supporters of assisted suicide, meanwhile, insisted that a dignified and compassionate end should be on offer to those who are dying.

Alistair Thompson, from the Care Not Killing Alliance, said Amis's views were "very worrying". "We are extremely disappointed that people are advocating death booths for the elderly and the disabled. How on earth can we pretend to be a civilised society if people are giving the oxygen of publicity to such proposals?

"What are these death booths? Are they going to be a kind of superloo where you put in a couple of quid and get a lethal cocktail?"

The Alzheimer's Society said there were 700,000 people with dementia in the UK and the figures were set to rise. "It is understandable that people in the early stages of dementia may reflect on the subject of euthanasia," said Andrew Ketteringham, of the Alzheimer's Society. "However, glib and offensive comments about 'euthanasia booths' and 'demented old people' only serve to alienate those dealing with this devastating condition and sidestep the hugely important question of how we can best support those affected to live well and maintain their dignity."

Amis, whose forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, is due to be released shortly, stood by his comments, made in an interview in the Sunday Times.

He told the Guardian: "What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction." He said his comments were meant to be "satirical", rather than "glib".

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer's.

"I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off," he said. "Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they'll say 'he asked me to do it', or 'he wanted to die', Amis said. "That's what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on."

Answering critics who said his comments were "offensive' to older people, Amis, a grandfather, said: "Well, I'm not a million miles away from that myself."

He added: "I had a friend who was desperately ill and she wanted to go to Switzerland, to Dignitas, but she was defeated by bureaucracy at this end. And, I think it is existentially more terrifying to feel that life is something you can't get out of.

"Frankly, I can't think of any reason for prolonging life once the mind goes. You are without dignity then."

In his interview, Amis said his stepfather had died "very horribly". "He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn't get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse."

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was "a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, 'I've entered a dark place'. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don't know the day you've spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished."

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: "Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one." But, it added: "Dignity in Dying's campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of 'euthanasia booths', nor is it in anticipation of a 'silver tsunami'. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards."

Caroline Davies, Sunday 24 January 2010

Magazine fiction's golden age can never be repeated

2010-01-31T17:33:00.000-05:00

Magazine fiction from the 1890s-1950 gave us some of our most-loved characters from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot. With magazines in decline, where to now? The Lady?

The umpteenth return of the Return (of Sherlock Holmes) and the popular success of Avatar are apt reminders that we're a storytelling species with a dominant narrative gene somewhere in our DNA. We simply cannot get enough of What Happened Next?

Avatar, for all its counter-cultural, eco-friendly credentials, is a product of the Hollywood machine, but Holmes and Watson come from somewhere else: the golden age of British magazine fiction that has never been – indeed, could never be – repeated.

Sherlock Holmes
Production year: 2009
Countries: Australia, Rest of the world, UK, USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 128 mins
Directors: Guy Ritchie
Cast: Bronagh Gallagher, Eddie Marsan, Geraldine James, Hans Matheson, James Fox, Jude Law, Kelly Reilly, Mark Strong, Rachel McAdams, Robert Downey Jr., William Hope
More on this film

As Selina Hastings writes in her excellent new biography of Somerset Maugham, another classic storyteller: "In the 1890s the literary market was rapidly expanding, focused on a large, educated middle class, with dozens of new magazines and periodicals launched every year and more than 400 publishing houses in London alone." (The parallels with the 1990s and the new media boom are striking). This was the age that threw up Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, the Jeeves and Wooster series and finally, in the 1920s, the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, and her Poirot and Miss Marple series.

Every one of these has been rendered cinematically for a mass audience on several occasions. We like stories, and especially when they are accompanied by appealing, strong and identifiable characters who can be interpreted by stars.

The postwar era, roughly 1950 to 2000, was far poorer in this genre, for several reasons. The novel became postmodern; in popular mass-market fiction, perhaps only James Bond qualifies as an heir to Captain Hook, Toad of Toad Hall and Hercule Poirot, and Fleming was always more than a touch Edwardian in his instincts (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, for instance). Popular magazines were dead or dying; film and TV had not yet begun to fill the gap (as they are beginning to do now; HBO's House, for example, bears a big, and fully acknowledged, debt to Sherlock Holmes). A hundred years or so after Conan Doyle, your ambitious genre writer is as likely to be working in film and TV as fiction or magazines.

In more recent times, the only fictional character to rival Holmes has been Harry Potter, who exhibits several quite distinct Edwardian traits (he's a strange orphan boy who is sent off to come of age in a public school). The more I write this blog, the more I wonder why no one has written on this theme before. Perhaps they have: the interconnections are certainly intriguing, and they all have to do with the growth of the print media at the turn of the 20th century.

The only really distinguished example of a writer consciously creating a strong identifiable character who can inhabit a series of books is John le Carré's George Smiley. No surprise to find BBC Radio 4 serialising all the Smiley books in the coming year. For the rest, the climate is no longer propitious to serial fiction, though I see that the rejuvenated Lady magazine, under Rachel Johnson, has begun to explore the possibilities of popular genre fiction with the launch of Jessica Ruston's serial. In the art of the story, there are only so many ways to skin a cat.

Robert McCrum, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'

2010-01-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

EL Doctorow: 'I found myself writing this line: I’m Homer, the blind brother – I had the voice; I was off.'

The author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel and Homer and Langley talks to Sarah Crown.

On a quiet Harlem backstreet at the end of a row of stately brownstones is a grassed-over sliver of land, home to a handful of plane trees, a couple of flowertubs and a garden bench or two. A sign on the railings gives its name as the Collyer Brothers Park. It stands on the lot of what was once the home of Homer and Langley Collyer, well-born, educated, affluent brothers who slowly but surely turned their backs on polite society, shuttering their windows and giving themselves over to a shadow-life of squirrelling. After their deaths in 1947 (Langley under a landslide of rubbish; Homer, blind and paralysed, from starvation), their house was broken open: the 130 tons of junk discovered within saw them posthumously ordained as America's most notorious pack-rats.

It's a term of which EL Doctorow disapproves. His latest novel, Homer and Langley, takes the brothers' legend and moulds it, shifting their house into the heart of Manhattan and allotting them an extra 30 years' life; he prefers, he says, to think of them as "aggregators. Sort of like Google". The verminous association is symptomatic, he believes, of the way in which the brothers' characters have been traduced over the years; something that's still going on to this day. It was the spectacle of their reputation being hauled over the coals once more that led to their story, which had simmered in his head for years, offering itself as a subject. "My books start almost before I realise it," he says, leaning forward in the study chair of his unfussy mid-town apartment. "Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now'. I've known about the brothers for years, of course; I wasn't the only teenager of the time whose mother looked into his room and said 'My God, it's the Collyers'!' But a few years back, I saw a piece in the New York Times saying locals were objecting to having the park named after them. I thought, they're still disturbing people, 50 years after they're dead! They've become folklore. This is something to think about."

Doctorow didn't undertake any research for the book, preferring to fish back through his memories of the Collyers' story and expand on them, drawing the mythic elements out. "I didn't want to know, terribly, what the clinical details were," he says. "I found myself writing this line: 'I'm Homer, the blind brother'" – the novel's plangent opening sentence. "I had the voice; I was off. And I learned as I went along. I realised at a certain point that I was writing a kind of road novel, with these two guys talking to each other as characters on the road do, not just for the length of a trip, but for the whole of their lives."

The analogy is a potent one. In the novel, Doctorow sets the Collyers off down two parallel paths. One waltzes them through the American century, where they meet representatives of its tribes (immigrants and refugees; veterans, jazz musicians and mafia hoods; hippies and bureaucrats) and take part in its seminal moments – selling off copper guttering for the war effort, painting bas-relief portraits of the moon landing. The other passes through their house, which comes to embody a continent-in-miniature on which the brothers enact a symbolic colonisation. Airy and open at first, it slowly silts up with the detritus of US consumerism ("artifacts", as Homer puts it, "from our American life") and, in the form of the newspapers which Langley collects daily, the nation's stories.

But the analogy has a wider application. The pliancy of the road novel, its easy subjectivity and whimsical, intuitive relationships with the events it encounters, stands as a metaphor for Doctorow's own flexible association with real-world history. Perhaps surprisingly, given the New York setting of so many of his novels, he says he lacks a geographical pole. "New York isn't a setting to me: it's life, it's volatile, it changes from generation to generation. It didn't confer a literary identity on me the way, say, the Mississippi did Faulkner. With Ragtime" – his novel of the jazz era – "I stumbled on the idea that a period of time was as good a constructive principle as a sense of place." But while figures from his country's past rise up as landmarks in his novels, they're portrayed either provisionally or downright fancifully. Abraham Lincoln in his civil-war epic The March, Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz in Billy Bathgate (which snagged him the National Book Critics Circle award and the PEN/Faulkner award), Harry Houdini in Ragtime – all make their appearances entirely in the service of the story. He's been criticised for this free-and-easy treatment of historical figures by, among others, John Updike, who said of Ragtime that it "smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets". But Doctorow is unapologetic. Indeed, it's hard to see how he could repent of an approach which led directly to the intoxicating unreliability of his best-known work, The Book of Daniel. His barely fictionalised account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, in Doctorow's version), told in a furious crackle by their son, Daniel, located him in the pantheon of great arbiters of 20th-century American life alongside the likes of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow (although he has yet to achieve the same recognition). The novel caused the cultural critic Fredric Jameson to label him "the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past", and saw Barack Obama name him as his favourite author, after Shakespeare. This technical fluidity extends from the quirks of his characters into the pattern of his prose; he is master of the run-on sentence. "They're one of my sins. I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. If you're doing it right," he says, "the reader will know who's talking."

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx in 1931. His parents, children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, nailed their new world colours to the mast by naming him after his father's favourite American author, Edgar Allan Poe. "It wasn't until just before my mother died that I asked her about it," he grins. "I said 'Did you and dad realise you named me after an alcoholic, drug-addicted, delusional paranoiac with strong necrophiliac tendencies?' She said 'Edgar, that's not funny.'" His decision to publish under his initials wasn't a rejection of the name, but was rather his own attempt to follow in the footsteps of the authors he admired. "DH Lawrence, WH Auden, TS Eliot," he offers. "Erm . . . W Shakespeare. F Dostoevsky . . . "

Although his first years were played out against the backdrop of the US's great depression, Doctorow recalls his childhood as "a good time. There was no money, but the house was filled with music and books." His father owned a music shop on Sixth Avenue (it cameos in Homer and Langley, when Langley finds there "a virtual musicologist, with recordings of swing orchestras and crooners and songstresses that no other store had"). And the young Doctorow haunted the public library and read indisciminately, "everything from comic books to Dostoevsky. I remember seeing The Idiot on the library shelf and thinking, that's for me." Education came via the Bronx High School of Science, "theoretically for children who were gifted at science and math. I fled down the hall to the literary magazine, who were my first publishers: a piece of Kafka-inspired animalogical self-defamation called 'The Beetle'. They later put it on their website, which I thought was a cruel thing to do."

From there, he went to Kenyon College in Ohio. "People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction." It turned out to have been a smart choice; Doctorow studied under the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, and became heavily involved in the theatre, where he stepped out alongside Paul Newman, a senior during Doctorow's freshman year. "I began to get some decent roles after he left." It was during his English drama MA at Columbia that he met his wife, Helen. "My thesis was supposed to be a play, but I never wrote it; I was drafted into the army." On his return, he rattled through a series of jobs before landing work as a reader for a motion picture company. It was, he believes, a useful apprenticeship. "And there were moments of real excitement: the company had optioned Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King while he was writing it, and I got to read about 150 pages before it was published. I urged them to buy it, but of course they didn't."

Doctorow's stint on the fringes of the film industry coincided with the western's stranglehold on Hollywood, a circumstance which inadvertently inspired his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. "It was making me ill, reading one lousy western after another," he remembers. "So I wrote a parody in a fit of rage, showed it to the story editor, and he said: 'This is good, you want to make a novel out of this.' I crossed out the title, wrote 'Chapter One', and went from there." The novel, published when he was 28, edged from satire into serious enterprise while he was writing it. "I got interested in the idea of making something real from a disreputable genre. But it didn't teach me much about writing, or myself."

His second novel, Big As Life, a now-out-of-print foray into science fiction which he calls "the worst thing I've ever done", came out while he was simultaneously pursuing a hopscotch career through publishing. "I bounced from being a reader to working for New American Library – in those days a worthy mass-market publisher – and from there to the Dial Press, where I was made editor-in-chief." His roster included Norman Mailer and James Baldwin; while Baldwin was a highwire act, turning in manuscripts then absconding to Paris to avoid his copy editors, Mailer was a dream to edit, "not the bombastic public figure at all. He listened, he was courteous." It wasn't until later that they had their inevitable fight. "Mailer was president of International PEN, and during Reagan's presidency, he secretly invited the secretary of state, George Schultz, to a conference. I found out, and knocked out an op-ed piece protesting the move, which seemed to me to be an insult." They didn't speak again until Mailer got in touch to say he admired Billy Bathgate. At that point, Doctorow chuckles, "there was a rapprochement".

He was proud of his work at Dial, but when he began The Book of Daniel, something had to give. "It was a book that demanded my complete attention. When I was about a third of the way through, I had lunch with the literary agent Don Congden and mentioned that I was unhappy. He knew of a visiting post at the University of California, Irvine, and asked if I would be interested. So my wife and I sat down and consulted the I Ching. It was the 60s! It said: 'You will cross a great water'. And Helen said: 'That's the Mississippi. Let's go.'"

The idea for the novel came to Doctorow in the late 60s, when Vietnam and the civil rights movement had the country in uproar. "Out of the campuses came something called the new left, and I began to wonder how it compared with the old left of the 30s. It occured to me that I could tell the story of this country's life over a 30-year period by dealing with its dissidents. And I realised that the Rosenbergs could be the fulcrum. Everything snapped together."

The pieces were in place, but the story wouldn't quite come – until a moment of genesis as mythic, in its way, as the one Doctorow was trying to conjure. "I was writing in the third person, and it wasn't working. I had this terrible moment when I threw 150 pages across the room and said 'If I can make this story dull, I don't have any business writing.' So I put a new sheet in the typewriter and began to write almost in mockery of my own ambition. It turned out to be page one. Having Daniel tell the story was a way of being intimate with everything that happened without understanding it. That was my position as the writer."

Though Doctorow fans may champion the generosity of his semi-autobiographical novel World's Fair, or Ragtime's wordy antics, The Book of Daniel is now widely held up as his greatest work. Yet since it emerged that Julius Rosenberg, in all probability, did spy for the USSR, Doctorow has been asked over and over: would he write the same book again? Of course, he says. "People who haven't read it assume it's a simple-minded defence of the Rosenbergs. It's not. The book doesn't draw conclusions about their guilt: it wasn't about them, it was about what happened to them. It was about the state of this country's mind." Is the book's anger Daniel's, or his? He ponders the question. "Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry. That's why I did it. But that's the constant question: how much of the book is you?"

It's a question anyone reading Doctorow eventually finds themselves asking. Travel through his novels and you begin to see that certain landscapes are repeated, and a repertory company of stock characters – the charming, impractical father; the senile grandmother; the mother who is capable, handsome, disenchanted – emerges. "That never occured to me," Doctorow laughs. "I guess there is that rough archetype of the parental relationship, but I was steeped in the belief that the author's life is a distraction: the test of a book's quality is not if it reflects my life, but if it reflects yours." World's Fair, his sweetest, straightest story of a young boy, Edgar, growing up in the Bronx "began autobiographically, but even when you use material from your own life explicitly, you still have to make the composition."

Though characters resurface, stylistically Doctorow is a nomad, leaping from the formal prose of his 19th-century New York novel The Waterworks, to the jazz cadences of Ragtime, to Homer Collyer's wry, melancholy reflections. "I don't have a style, but the books do. Each demands its own method of presentation, and I like that. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer. A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to."

Sarah Crown, The Guardian, Saturday 23 January 2010

Wall Street v Wall Street 2: Battle of the Trailers!

2010-01-29T23:06:00.000-05:00

Wall Street (the movie) is 23 years old. Now it's time for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. (The subtitle is a well-known line from the first film.)

The teaser trailer for the sequel has just been released - can it cut it in the big city?

You decide!

The UK's world role: Great Britain's greatness fixation

2010-01-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

In some eyes, but most notably its own, the British government will be in the driving seat of world events this week. Today, G7 finance ministers will be in London to discuss international banking reform and the transaction tax, and – in the claim that the City minister, Paul Myners, makes on our comment pages today – the UK will be "leading international efforts". On Wednesday, diplomats from around the world will meet here to discuss the threat to Yemen from al-Qaida. A day later, attention shifts to another international conference in London, this time on the imperilled future of Afghanistan. Quite a week.

Every country likes to be taken seriously around the world. Lots of nations like to feel they are punching their weight, or even above it. Only a few, however, seem to feel the need to promote themselves as the one the others all look to for leadership. It is one thing – though never uncontroversial, and in some contexts increasingly implausible – for the United States to see itself in this role. As the world's largest economic and military power, the US remains even now the necessary nation in international affairs. It is quite another thing for Britain to pretend to such a status.

The continuing pre-eminence of American clout has been starkly shown by what has happened in banking over the last several days. Domestic political pressures spurred President Obama into declaring a war on the money men, and markets worldwide immediately trembled, as they grasped that his plan could unleash a global drive to split retail and investment banking. There should be no shame for London in wholeheartedly welcoming the initiative while admitting that Britain could never have made such a move on its own. Instead, however, the government carries on as if its own detailed plans for banks' living wills, and its distant dreams of a Tobin tax, are framing the debate.

Britain is a very important country. The sixth-largest economy in the world. The fifth-largest military power. Its claim to what the former prime minister Lord Home used to call a seat at the top table is beyond dispute, though it would be a still more influential one if we sometimes ceded it to the European Union. And yet, more than half a century after the loss of empire, our political culture still seems racked by the need to be the leading nation, not just one of them. Such delusions are most associated with the political right, but Gordon Brown can also seem peculiarly ensnared by them. His Britain must always be first, always at the forefront, must always show the way to the rest. Even in the G7, the G8 or the G20 – never mind the UN – a mere share of the action is never enough, and it must always be Britain that is leading the effort, whether in Yemen or Afghanistan. But this way hubris lies. Mr Brown immodestly let slip to MPs in 2008 that he had saved the world. And as he arrived in Copenhagen for the ill-fated climate change summit last month he announced that "There are many outstanding issues which I'm here to resolve."

In reality, of course, no single nation can resolve the world's problems alone. Only the United States and China, separately or together, can even aspire to set the agenda for the rest. If the US raises its commitment to Afghanistan then other nations are likely to follow. If the US penalises the banks, others soon fall into line.

Britain has no such potency. Yet we still struggle to adjust to our reality. We can propose, as we shall be doing in three important London meetings this week, but we cannot dispose. Every day, the descant of the Chilcot inquiry reminds us of where the refusal to recognise this truth can humiliatingly lead. Our national interest should be to play our important role as a true, trusted and committed European partner on the world stage. No longer the greatest. Just one great among others. Good enough ought to be good enough. The people get it. If only the politicians did too.

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FalseConsciousness

25 Jan 2010, 12:33AM

The UK does have a world role to play, but only as the main ally of US imperialism. Anyone who thinks Britain can achieve even a modicum of independence from the dictates of Washington is engaging in wishful thinking. The US is determined to maintain's its global hegemony against China and other emerging powers. The global economic collapse also guarantees an increase in interstate conflicts due to rising nationalism, militarism, and the prevalence of trade disputes. The US may be leading mankind to the next world war and Britain has no choice but to follow along.
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Armchair99

25 Jan 2010, 12:36AM

The fifth-largest military power
Only the US has real power projection. The UK and France form the second division. Everyone else is nowhere. Witness the extreme efforts Russia had to go to put troops just beyond its borders in Georgia - a conflict they no doubt had planned for for some time. China has just reached the stage of having something approaching a blue water navy in the past year.
though it would be a still more influential one if we sometimes ceded it to the European Union.
It's really mind numbing how the supposedly intellectual Guardian maintains the shibboleth of EU = Good despite everything. Why? Where's your evidence for this? One example of how the UK's interests have been progressed through EU membership?
If the Guardian had any intellectual integrity you'd be asking why the EU was - quite literally - not even allowed in the room when Copenhagen was decided. Come on guys and girls, you're the biggest cheer leader for the EU and the polite face of the green-left in the UK. So..
What's gone wrong? How the did the EU fail what you presented as the most important decision of this generation?
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Joinupsignin

25 Jan 2010, 12:37AM

Perhaps its time we stopped saving the world and sorted out our own bankrupt, non-democratic country, of coffee shops, over priced railways and Nando's.
Only that doesn't appeal to our attention seeking Prime Ministers who too often give up on UK policies (if they ever really were interested in them) and instead fall for the easy ride and ego driven world of international relations.
The thrill of international summits and the end communiqué - re-committing money they promised before, to the latest band wagon, too easily romances our leaders over and above the grim streets of Edlington.
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tightrope

25 Jan 2010, 12:39AM

I think Europe is great and that if the English could understand that they are Europeans and take their pride in that rather than in the narrower identity then a lot would change.
Unfortunately, there appears to be little chance currently that the English will come to appreciate what Seamus Heaney called the "dignity of the European identity".
It is a historical shame.
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TheotherWay

25 Jan 2010, 12:42AM

" In some eyes, but most notably its own, the British government will be in the driving seat of world events this week. Today, G7 finance ministers will be in London to discuss inter national banking reform and the transaction tax, and ? in the claim that the City minister, Paul Myners, makes on our comment pages today ? the UK will be "leading international efforts". On Wednesday, diplomats from around the world will meet here to discuss the threat to Yemen from al-Qaida. A day later, attention shifts to another international conference in London, this time on the imperilled future of Afghanistan. Quite a week."
Tow questions come to my mind. First and foremost, how much has these conferences got to do with discussing the great matters that need a solution and how much of it is posturing for the election. I suspect the answer is the latter.
In the past six months or year we have seen great many of these conferences and high sounding communiques. I have not notices any action or discernible real progress. Who are these great and the good kidding?
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Armchair99

25 Jan 2010, 12:45AM

The US is determined to maintain's its global hegemony against China and other emerging powers.
Both right and left in the US have acted for decades on the basis that increased trade and economic freedoms in china will inevitably result in democratic reform. As these reforms have cnsistently failed to happen we're only now beginning to see that view being seriously reconsidered. The worrying thing is the US has no plan at all with regard to china.
The global economic collapse also guarantees an increase in interstate conflicts due to rising nationalism, militarism, and the prevalence of trade disputes.
So not a good time to cut the UK's defence budget from an already historical low of around 2.2% of GDP then?
The US may be leading mankind to the next world war and Britain has no choice but to follow along.
Seems likely. The left in the UK is gonna get exactly what it's been waiting for for two generations - the fall of US hegemony.
Do you think the chinese are gonna be better masters to us, or the africans, or gays or women of the poor?
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jimfred

25 Jan 2010, 12:55AM

Other countries,(Sweden,Holland,Brazil......etc.etc.),seem to jog along happily without being the' mouse that roared'.
Why do our politicians have us punching above our weight?
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pont

25 Jan 2010, 1:05AM

It really is embarrassing when a pot bellied older uncle puts on a tracksuit and trainers and pretends he is ready for the 5000 metres.
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serioussid

25 Jan 2010, 1:11AM

this earth this realm this toilet.
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pont

25 Jan 2010, 1:13AM

p>Would that be the hollywood/fantasy power projection you are alluring to?
Armchair?
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Garcie

25 Jan 2010, 1:27AM

Actually this is a New Labour and Brown phenomenon,
Brown called the forthcoming Afghan conference because opinion polls showed he didn't have a grip on the war. (Which he doesn't).
Holding a conference and getting the press into a love-in fest is cheaper than buying new helicopters and UAVs.
The FCO must be running around like headless chickens to organise it. It was news to them....they should be fighting a war.
What you are actually referring to is the disturbing propensity of the Labour government to use the British armed forces as the armed wing of Amnesty International. To get headlines. It back fired on them.
This is because they don't believe history is important, and they ignore it. Most Labour MP's wouldn't even know where Afghanistan is.
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Garcie

25 Jan 2010, 1:31AM

After reading the article again it occurs to me that this leader fixation is a leftist fantasy.
Once the Chinese start driving their carrier fleets around maybe you'll wish we still could punch above our weight.
The perfect example is Haiti.
Where is the Royal Navy.? It has been cut so badly that we cant respond.
Only countries like the US, Isreal, UK and few European nations care about the Haitians. We should be there.
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pont

25 Jan 2010, 1:33AM

Having the word "Great" before the name of your country can lead to delusional behaviour .
Perhaps the name can be changed ,therefore leading to a less aggressive and unruly attitude.
Maybe UK/PLC.Corp
or Nice Britain -or Grizzily Britain !
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Garcie

25 Jan 2010, 1:35AM

The US is determined to maintain its global hegemony against China and other emerging powers.
Yeah thank God.
Strange the lefties don't mind it when football fields full of convicts in China are executed and their organs harvested, because, hey, the Chinese are going to outstrip the US in strategic influence. Woo.
Disturbing.
The World will be a crueler place as US and UK influence wains. We are looking at a new dark age.
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pont

25 Jan 2010, 1:38AM

Oooh this Septic Isle.
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Lancsman

25 Jan 2010, 1:39AM

I think I have two questions about this editorial, although it is late.
- Why should Britain not strive to maintain a good seat at the top table when history suggests british political and legal ideas are the best bulwark against the politics of raw power? (and i am not an apologist for the excesses and degradations of empire)
- Isn't this posturing commonplace, in most countries, and is it really consequential?
The essence of this article, that Britain should acknowledge its diminished status vs 60 years ago. Of course we shouldn't try to pretend we call the shots globally. But, as the piece points out, Britain is outward looking and important and should always try to remain at the centre of world affairs.
The idea that we should cede our place at the top table the EU, or anyone else is not sensible. The EU is far from democratic and representative, and it is not some global benign force for good, and neither are its member nations. The fact that it appears less belligerent and right wing than the US and some other powers doesn't make it a great force for justice. The EU's actions on trade vs the third world show it for what it is.
There are several reasons we should maintain our place at the top table, amongst equals, and not seeking dominate. Our stability as a nation state is unsurpassed over the last 800 years. That period has seen the evolution of political and legal systems that are the world-leading. The UN charter is an evolution of political developments in Britain. In commerce, ideas, justice and equality, Britain has often led the way. This isn't just a consequence of empire and reach, but culture. This culture is nothing to do with innate superiority of people but the happy accidents of history and the confluence of peoples and ideas on these islands.
The USA may well be regarded by many as having a superior constitution but it is easy to forget that it is still a relatively new country with a dramatically changing demographic and culture, and a place with an electorate of whom many are in thrall to religious and lobby groups. The EU is new and many of its member states were recently dictatorships. India is relatively new in its current guise. China is certainly not going to be man's last best hope of restricting the influence of power and wealth allowing ordinary individuals to flourish in security. So to my mind, progressives should want Britain right at the heart of things. No-one believes any country acts benignly and against its own interests, but I know if I were Burkino Faso, who I'd want at the G8 or whatever it is now.
The idea that we are alone in our political culture in presenting ourselves as leading the effort for a domestic audience also seems wrong. Most political leaders of most states do that, for obvious reasons.
The notion of potency is central in international relations and diplomacy. But is it so relevant for domestic political and media posturing? Isn't that where most of this hubris manifests itself? If so, is it really consequential? Strange too that you use the example of banks. I would have thought that that was one are we do have some clout.
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Lancsman

25 Jan 2010, 1:48AM

Garcie
I'm not looking forward to Chinese Carriers and subs are roaming round the place. But I'll be happy when the US ones return to port, especially off of our bases. I'll be even happier when we can talk about the UK without people having to bundle it with the US.
And given that no-one knows what the world will look like in 25 years, I'd prefer if we had a deterrent that was actually our own.
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Faversham

25 Jan 2010, 1:49AM

You mean England's embarrassing and highly damaging fixation with its former Imperial status. Us Scots got over the loss of Empire a long time ago and there were plenty of us who, after being on the boot end of it, never gave a fig for it anyway.
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Lancsman

25 Jan 2010, 1:59AM

Faversham,
actually, most Scots wholeheartedly embraced empire and from near bankruptcy and the dissolution of its parliament (albeit under duress), Scotland quickly became an economic miracle and Glasgow was at one point the world's wealthiest city. Scots filled the institutions of empire. I have also heard from more than one Indian that the Scots seemed to embrace the brutality of empire with more gusto than many other colonials.
Britain may no longer be a great military power (and shouldn't be ashamed of that). Yet the armed forces, when their political masters get it right, can still do the business - Sierra Leone for example.
But the legacy of empire is a multicultural nation with unrivalled global connections and a hub of a legal system and culture it shares with vast swathes of humanity.
I'm proud of that not embarrassed. What do you suggest? Board up the windows and not talk to anyone?
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GRD71

25 Jan 2010, 2:24AM

Dear Guardian Editor --
You learn if you want to; Lady Brittania is not learning.
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MynameisEarl

25 Jan 2010, 2:27AM

Weren't successive Thatcher governments built on the premise of rebuilding Britain's image of itself as a world power(eg. the Falklands war) & doesn't the Daily Mail base much of it's demographic based on this concept to this day? If the UK still has issues about the loss of it's empire & not being that important then god knows how Americans are going to come to terms with this.
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farafield

25 Jan 2010, 2:33AM

Be an IMPORTANT EU NATION WHAT A LOAD OF TOSH the EU is undemocractic , corrupt , wasteful , stuffed full of uselees politcains rapidly making themselves rich on expenses, stupid policies such as the CAP and the fisheries policy , unable to defend itself or even resolve civil war in its own backyard without US help, cannot deliver aid with any efficency , and most of its citizens cant even be bothered to vote it only seems to matter to those in pwer or those wanting it. It also costs this country a fortune in contributions which no one questions . We can be of more use to the world and our selves without it . Membership is like being in local club of amateur dramatics with the organizing committee wanting the lime light but no one wanting to organize it or discuss what it is for with the stage crew/audience / media .
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MynameisEarl

25 Jan 2010, 2:38AM

Be an IMPORTANT EU NATION WHAT A LOAD OF TOSH
Well the special relationship worked out well for this country didn't it?
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Scam22

25 Jan 2010, 3:15AM

If the US penalises the banks, others soon fall into line. Britain has no such potency. Yet we still struggle to adjust to our reality.
The reason Gordon Brown has been playing the role of world leader since Obama was elected is that Britain is the world's leading financial centre. Obama is owned by the banks, so he is number two to Brown. He was chosen, partly as a result of his absolute cluelessness.
The banks, despairing of losing their first wholly owned American president have ordered him to say some tough things about bankers. Like healthcare, it will be watered down by the 'opposition'.
Do not expect Britain to do much more than pretend to copy him.
Thatcher restored Britain's leading role in the world by her (almost criminal) deregulation of the City of London (Big Bang). It worked extremely well.
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mikedow

25 Jan 2010, 3:22AM

Currently, I'd say England is tanked out, but when China decides to forclose on the U.S. there is going to be a planet sized fire sale, and there's your chance.
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AntonyIndia

25 Jan 2010, 3:24AM

The UK has some world influence above its actual share because of it language.
English became the world's number one language. This echoes on through its education and it media to the corners of the Earth.
The size of its PM's ego is another matter: lets just call it "inflated".
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namordnik

25 Jan 2010, 3:38AM

Chinese go around the world to settle in chinatowns.
Germans go around the world to escape boredom of domestic lifestyle.
Yanks go around the world to bomb foreign poor people.
Russians go around the world to sit out revolutions.
Brits go around the world to visit their ex-colonies.
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auxesis

25 Jan 2010, 3:48AM

Every day, the descant of the Chilcot inquiry reminds us of where the refusal to recognise this truth can humiliatingly lead.
And from Peter Preston's piece:
Nobody meaningful anywhere on the political spectrum dissents from community sanctification these days, and a mighty chorus of assumed voter approval sings descant
I can't recall having seen the word "descant" in The Guardian and yet here we have it twice in one day.
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JoshRogan

25 Jan 2010, 5:06AM

Britain is a joke and will remain so if it continues to live in the past.
I can't believe they still dish out MBEs, OBEs, etc. We are directly responsible for a lot of the mess the world is in and should be ashamed of our history.
Our leaders should stop being delusional. Brown was shocked to be snubbed by Obama. That's the reality.
If we want to show some mettle then suck it up, scrap the insane nukes, invest in a decent transportation system, sort out the NHS and schools,
but most of all, be ourselves. Say no to the Yanks once in a while.
Sending soldiers to the other side of the world to 'protect' the nation is not the way to go. Gunboat diplomacy they used to call it.
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fortyniner

25 Jan 2010, 5:37AM

Delusions of grandeur is what we are talking about. When it comes down to it the Emperor has no clothes.
All this silly posturing on the world stage does us more harm than good. The impression for many, both at home and abroad, especially since the sycophantic Blair crawled up Bush's a**e, is that we are just a US puppet.
We need to get out of the mindset that the world's problems are naturally ours to solve and we need to be the big shot about it. We need to stop sending our troops into obscure corners to poke our noses into other people's business.
In fact minding our business just a little bit more would be most welcome.
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shuisky

25 Jan 2010, 5:51AM

@auxesis
It's no surprise Britain's singing descant these days - the country's voluntarily had its bollocks removed, and is now the official singing eunuch of the United States.
Racist wars? Torture camps? Bombing Gaza? The loyal British Eunuch knows the descants to all those yankee tunes, and sings them with gusto. It's all Britain knows how to do any longer.
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FalseConsciousness

25 Jan 2010, 6:32AM

Armchair99
The worrying thing is the US has no plan at all with regard to china.
Of course they have a plan, what you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all about? The US is obviously trying to secure Central Asia and its massive oil and gas reserves at the expense of China, Russia, and Iran as well. A strike by Israel or the US on Iran would also seriously endanger Chinese interests. US interference in Sudan and Somalia, and now Yemen, are also partly related to countering China. As are US threats against North Korea and robust US support for Taiwan.
So not a good time to cut the UK's defence budget from an already historical low of around 2.2% of GDP then?
It is not in the interests of the British ruling elite or the UK as a nation-state to cut defence spending, but the UK is dead broke. If the ruling elite is to avoid massive opposition from the working class it must free up funds for social spending somehow
Seems likely. The left in the UK is gonna get exactly what it's been waiting for for two generations - the fall of US hegemony.
I'm not sure what "left" you're referring to, but the real left isn't awaiting the fall of US hegemony in particular, but the fall of world capitalism and imperialism.
Do you think the chinese are gonna be better masters to us, or the africans, or gays or women of the poor?
Probably not, but we're likely to find out sooner or later.
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BrusselsLout

25 Jan 2010, 7:04AM

Well the special relationship worked out well for this country didn't it?
Exactly. Britain has survived on the myth of the Special Relationship for decades (since Thatcher?). It built itself a confidence on nothing.
Working around Europe for well over decade, I put the Relationship to the test on a few occasions. I would ask Americans I had been working with or chatting to casually in bars what they thought of the Special Relationship.
Not one of these Americans knew what I meant. I would explain the details so that there could no mistake.
But a typical reaction would be "News to me".
I mentioned all this here on a number of occasions over the years. But still, articles referring the Special Relationship continued.
One evening, on a BBC Question Time, Michael Hezeltine became the first politician to admit in public that it did not exist. There soon followed an article here (by Marina Hyde) making the same noises as Hezeltine.
Britain lost its empire a very long time ago, so it used the great myth to raise and sustain its own ego. Now the myth is out in the open, Britain is lost.
Britain is now in limbo. And it will remain in limbo until it breaks its ego and gets real.
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BishopKingPawn

25 Jan 2010, 7:20AM

Re shuisky: what's a racist war?
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Amadeus37

25 Jan 2010, 8:13AM

Our image? Don't make me laugh.
To hold this conference on the very week when Blair is at the inquiry into the
Iraq war - the pictures will go all around the world.
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ElleGreen

25 Jan 2010, 8:42AM

Fortyniner
We need to get out of the mindset that the world's problems are naturally ours to solve and we need to be the big shot about it. We need to stop sending our troops into obscure corners to poke our noses into other people's business
I actually think Britain has significantly moved on from these collonialist attitudes. My perception is that we are now choosing to lead by example; it is interesting that Copenhagen is mentioned
There are many outstanding issues which I'm here to resolve
Would we prefer that Gordon Brown went to Copenhagen to jump on a bandwagon or to attend with the goal of solving problems and negotiating an effective agreement. I personally would be more offended if my country's leader had said "I am going to attend but there is not much I can do because my hands are tied by the legislative body".
At least Britain comes with suggestions (ok the Tobin Tax is not flaw-free but its an idea) and a forward thinking attitude (we have one of the highest carbon emission reduction targets in the world). Yes we no longer have the economic or military power we once commanded but we still have a moral imperative that ours is a free and fair country based on innovation and ideas.
Fortyniner (sorry to pick on you again) you say
In fact minding our business just a little bit more would be most welcome.
Please try saying that to nations wrecked by civil war because despotic regimes continue to rule their countries, or to women whose human rights are supressed from birth, or to those who live in the Small Island States which will be devasted by the effects of global warming.
Britain used to try to convince these countries by autocratic rule that liberty, rule of law and progression of ideas were the most effective means of maintaining stability and prosperity. Now, more and more we lead by example(I acknowledge Afghanistan and Iraq sort of undermine this record), promoting our ideals and way of life by suggesting to others that we are a great country (obviously a working progress) who is trying to lead by example.
We could stay quiet and take our place humbly at the table like Sweden or the Netherlands or we could continue to voice our beliefs that ours is a nation based on rights and liberties to which everyone should aspire and to which everyone is entitled.
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farfetched

25 Jan 2010, 8:43AM

Clip | Link Faversham
25 Jan 2010, 1:49AM
You mean England's embarrassing and highly damaging fixation with its former Imperial status. Us Scots got over the loss of Empire a long time ago and there were plenty of us who, after being on the boot end of it, never gave a fig for it anyway.
This sentiment is so unbelievably ignorant and reveals the uneducated basis of Scots nationalism.
If you can be bothered to research the British Empire, how it came about, who pushed for expansion and who benefitted, you'd realise that the Scots (some might say to their credit) were some of the most enthusiastic and diligent colonialists going, and the Scottish economy boomed as a result. There wasn't an outpost of Empire that the Scots weren't involved in.
Of course, it's much easier to blame everything on the English, most of whom lived in abject poverty and were little more than slaves to ruling classes.
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bailliegillies

25 Jan 2010, 9:01AM

Who of us ever benefitted from empire, other than the city and the "great and good". The time to put it behind us is long overdue and we can start by dropping the pretence of being an important voice in the world and accept that we are just a small island off the coast of Europe.
Europe is the shape of the future, not little Britain with it's self delusion of imperial grandeur.
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bailliegillies

25 Jan 2010, 9:06AM

This sentiment is so unbelievably ignorant and reveals the uneducated basis of Scots nationalism.
Farfetched
Err, that's Horsey who lives in Hemel Hemstead and dreams of living in Barcelona. So please don't confuse him with us Scots, nationalist or otherwise
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farfetched

25 Jan 2010, 9:31AM

Err, that's Horsey who lives in Hemel Hemstead and dreams of living in Barcelona. So please don't confuse him with us Scots, nationalist or otherwise
I'm not confused, I've heard the 'blame the English for everything' sentiment enough times when the British Empire is debated.
It's laughable that an article that centres around the imperial ambitions of Gordon Brown is then commented on by a Scot claiming that the Scots are 'over it'. The current government makes it abundantly clear that the opposite could be said to be true.
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hideousmess

25 Jan 2010, 9:36AM

The "white man's burden" paternalist colonialist cr*p is at the back of the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq and every moralistic justification of armed intervention (at least the French don't generally use that self-satisfied justification for military action). The UN at least puts a check on that - except when TB decides it's inconvenient for his personal religion (and income).
Britain's decline as a world power can be most easily demonstrated by the fact that no one queries whether or not having a foreign power with nuclear weapons a bus ride from the centre of the capital is consistent with independence. Can you seriously imagine the Victorians putting up with the equivalent? (Or the Americans for that matter - remember Cuba?).
Give it up, do.
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HowardD

25 Jan 2010, 9:36AM

From my global travels, Britain is still seen as the hallmark of democracy, decency, tolerance, good manners,
If only they knew.
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ElleGreen

25 Jan 2010, 9:49AM

Howard D - unfortunately, comparitively speaking, in this world, I think Britain probably is still one of the hallmarks of democracy, decency, tolerance and good manners.
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KeithSimmonds

25 Jan 2010, 9:54AM

how about we just take a backseat for a change. maybe more people will like us.
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Avikwame

25 Jan 2010, 10:47AM

@Armchair 99
Your assessment is way out ! four years ago I was working in the
Naval Dockyard at Brest France,I counted a Satellite Ship,36 Frigates and Destroyers,two nuclear Submarines and two diesel Electric Submarines who were charging their batteries for a trip,a helicopter Aircraft Carrier and over a dozen Ships on the slipways or in dry Docks being built or being re fitted.
China has embarked on a virulent Shipbuilding programme,and Britain underestimated the Japanese since 1900,s in Naval expectations.
The Indian Ocean over the following 20 years is being groomed for the next "Jutland" ,China is also making in roads into Tibet and Nepal.
The other important omission is the possibility of the North West Passage (see John Cabot) and the Alaska/Canada,Greenland/N.Eire,Scotland,Denmark,Lithuania,Poland Missile Shield. You must also take into account the North East passage from Murmansk to the Kamchatka Peninsular and Manchuria and realize why the Russians are hammering in flags on the Sea Bed. Both the Arctic and Antarctic should figure prominently in your equations,for the Satellites (see feeders and decoders),then theres the situation of Piracy,not forgetting that the guarantor America is 5000 miles from Europe,and 8000 miles from Asia,and inherited the European Colonial territories from the aftermath of World War II.
Dont fall asleep in that Armchair, " They who fall asleep in a Tigers cave,wont be dreaming for long."
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Getridofem

25 Jan 2010, 10:50AM

A Reality Check is essential. We are a small country and we are massively in debt. The days of being a World Power are over and we should adjust our role accordingly. We simply cannot afford it.
It is not just the political right which has this fixation on playing a leading role. No matter which party gets into office they are all the same.
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Berlinenglishman

25 Jan 2010, 10:58AM

Only the US and China are "very important."
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Faversham

25 Jan 2010, 11:11AM

I'm Scottish and live in Scotland.
I don't blame the English people for anything and certainly don't expect them to take the blame for Empire. I'm sure we were bastards too. If anything too they are just as misruled as we Scots are although so many of them are in denial about their real national position that IMO it has made for an unhappy and in my experience a rather angry people. I don't think we are as unhappy or angry because we never really entwined our identity or fortunes with Empire.
The Empire benefitted an Anglo-Scottish aristocracy and those that managed to become part of a new mercantile class. Most working Scots were just as poor and as ruthlessly exploited at the end of Empire as they were to begin with. They were often worse off than those they were sent to enslave. We were indeed great Empire builders and became the Administrators of Empire because of our superior universal education system IMO. We were also in many ways the backbone of the Britsh military to which we still contribute disproportionately today.
But has all this benefitted Scotland as a nation. Is the national collective better off? Are we a Switzerland of the north or a Norway of the British Isles? No, we certainly aren't. Far from it which is a disgrace but proves what a lie this notion of Imperial clout is. That's why Empire must be consigned to history which it already has been for most Scots probably because as I said before we never exchanged Britishness for Scottishness. We always remained Scots despite the powers that be trying to turn us into North Britons. But all this is stuff of the past and I don't even care to think of it.
Scotland needs to move forward as an independent nation and take her rightful place amongst European nations and indeed have her own seat at the UN. I think there would be an integrity in that that most Scots could respond to as opposed to helping maintain an Imperial delusion which is of no real benefit to us and props up a British ruling class which has never really treated Scots and Scotland with respect.
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superscruff

25 Jan 2010, 11:14AM

The words delusion and granduer come to mind about the UK goverments thoughts about our place in the world.
Working for an influential EU is without doubt our best bet.
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Garcie

25 Jan 2010, 11:31AM

Its only when you go abroad that you realise we are great :)

J D Salinger dies, aged 91

2010-01-28T19:05:00.000-05:00

Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger has died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire.

JD Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, has died in New Hampshire at the age of 91.

Salinger, who shied away from publicity and did not publish an original work during the last 45 years of his life, was the creator of Holden Caulfield, the delinquent, alienated anti-hero of The Catcher in the Rye, which became required reading for generations of teenagers after its publication in 1951.

But in recent years its relevance to modern youth came into question and his reputation was tarnished by two accounts, one by a former lover and the other by one of Salinger's daughters, who painted him as a controlling and unpleasant eccentric.

The Catcher in the Rye was praised by the New York Times on publication as "an unusually brilliant first novel". But while an instant hit with many teenagers who related to its tale of adolescent angst and adult hypocrisy, it was met with alarm in other quarters. Some school boards made it required reading. Others banned it amid protests from parents over swearing – including the frequent use of "goddam" and, more rarely, "fuck" – as well as the bad example they believed Holden set.

Four years after its publication Salinger expressed disappointment that the book, which he acknowledged was based on his own upbringing, had met with some hostility.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact all of my best friends are children," he wrote in 20th Century Authors. "It's almost unbearable to me to realise that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach."

John Lennon's murderer, Mark Chapman, cited The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration for the killing in 1980.

Salinger published other books, including the well received Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, before he became an almost total recluse. His last published work – Hapworth 16, 1928 – was printed in The New Yorker in 1965.

Ten years ago it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels that had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he said that he only wrote for himself.

In 1986 Salinger won an injunction against the publication of a collection of his letters. During the case, which went all the way to the US supreme court, he was asked what he had been working on for the previous 20 years.

"Just a work of fiction," Salinger said in a deposition. "That's all. That's the only description I can really give it ... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop I just go on from there."

Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day 1919. His father, of Polish Jewish origin, became wealthy importing cheese and meat. His mother posed as Jewish and he did not find out that she was not until after his bar mitzvah.

Salinger had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched to Valley Forge military academy at the age of 15. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.

He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker that were rejected, including one called I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.

In 1942 Salinger was conscripted to fight in the second world war where he took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. The couple moved to America but the marriage soon fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.

He found fame disagreeable and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York city for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967.

Periodically the spotlight shone on Salinger again.

In 1998 the writer Joyce Maynard published a memoir in which she wrote unflatteringly about an eight-month affair with Salinger in which she described his controlling personality. Two years later one of Salinger's daughters, Margaret, wrote of her father as a recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Salinger was thrust into public view one last time a year ago when he sued to block the publication of an unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later. The writer, John David California, imagined Holden in his 70s.

Chris McGreal in Washington, The Guardian, Thursday 28 January