Three Percent - Article

Video: Reading the World w/ International Writers and Translators from Ledig House

N. J. Furl — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Last Thursday, we held our final Reading the World Conversation Series event of the fall, featuring a group of four international writers and translators in residence at Ledig House — an international writers residency in New York that specializes in hosting authors and translators from around the world.

Now, the video of the event is available. Contained within this eight-part playlist is some reading, some commentary, some strong opinions on translating, and some Q&A:

And here are some more specifics about the event, Ledig House, and our four guests:

November 5, 2009 – Ledig House International Writers Residency is one of the only residences of its type in the United States. Since its creation in 1992, Ledig House has hosted hundreds of writers and translators from roughly 50 countries around the world.

At this event, Chad Post (Director of Open Letter at the University of Rochester) leads a panel of writers and translators from around the world—all of whom are currently in residence at Ledig House. The panel includes readings and discussion from:

Kathrin Aehnlich (Germany): Her first novel, published 2007, became a bestseller in Germany.

Tom Dreyer (South Africa): His second novel received the Eugene Marais Prize. His third was shortlisted for the M-Net Prize.

Linda Gaboriau (Canada): She is an award-winning translator of Quebecs most prominent playwrights.

Pravda Miteva (Bulgaria): She has worked as a literary translator since 1994, and owns a small publishing house.

(This event is hosted by Open Letter and University of Rochester Arts & Sciences. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)

The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part II)

Chad W. Post — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:28:54 GMT

To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction.

And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book subscription—will receive a signed copy of Season of Ash. These won’t last long . . .

More info about the book can be found here and a video of Jorge reading and talking with translator Alfred Mac Adam can be found here. Enjoy!

LATIN AMERICA, A HOLOGRAM

By Jorge Volpi

2. Hologram

Let us be radical: Latin American literature does not exist anymore. Lovely: hundreds or thousands of Latin American writers exist, or better said, hundred of thousands of Chilean, Honduran, Dominican, Venezuelan (et cetera) writers exist, but a unique literary body endowed with recognizable characteristics, no. We have just seen it: the Spanish language is not a shared characteristic. And, if truth be told, there is nothing to lament.

The idea of a national literature, with typical and unrepeatable peculiarities, completely different from any other, is an anachronistic invention of the 19th century. As Benedict Anderson demonstrated in Imagined Communities (1983), the incipient European states were the ones that, threatened by popular revolts in that period, persisted in accentuating the consensus of its citizens through all kinds of schemes, patronage of the national literatures being one of the most powerful.

From 1820 on, while France and Germany reinvented their own respective national traditions, followed by Russia, Italy, and the rest of the countries that little by little surged on to the changing map of Europe, a great variety of institutions were created to study and protect local literatures against their neighbors. Up until then, literature had not been treated as the private property of one or various countries; suddenly the languages and literature bolstered the ideological artillery of the new bourgeois governments. It was only then that specialists sprouted in each one of these fields who, with the same zeal as historians and anthropologists, persisted in discovering and protecting the ”national soul” which was buried in its myths and legends or in the words of its artists, who were promoted from that moment on to demigods or heroes.

Latin America, which just then was fighting to detach itself from Spain, wasted no time in imitating these procedures (and, in some cases, advanced the field); in its need to differentiate itself from the hated metropolis—and, later on, from their no less hated neighbors—every new Latin American nation became obsessed in building its own history and inventing their own literature: even the indigenous and vice-regal writers born in the territories of the new nations became the exclusive property of each one of them. From that moment on the new powers persisted in promoting the writers—who could equally be traced from Europe—that shared this nationalistic faith. It is not surprising that the different Latin American nations were obsessed with finding their essence through literature during the second half of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century: this is why an occasionally militant national tradition, opposed to the cosmopolitan writers who were looking for a way of freeing themselves from the straight-jacket, emerged. The nationalists imposed their kingdom in the different countries of Latin America, although in permanent conflict—and at times, in happy cohabitation—with the universal tradition that never disappeared from the zone.

With the advent of the second half of the 20th century, the power of the literary nationalists became so oppressive that writers who looked to escape their influence began to appear, although there were few with the energy of the poets and narrators born in the first decades of the 20th century, who passed their youth in the shadow of authoritarian and fiercely chauvinistic regimes. Borges, Reyes, or Paz became the symbol of those who turned their back on official nationalism, and following their example, the narrators of the following generation took their defiance to the limit.

The first books by Fuentes, Cortázar, García Márquez, or Vargas Llosa, to only mention the official payroll of the Boom, were perceived as a slap in the face by the nationalist writers and critics: instead of remaining tied up in their respective local traditions, all of them preferred to look outside and incorporate aspects of the European and North American novel into their own creations. All of them—as well as many of their contemporaries—were accused of being traitors by the nationalist critics, as if incorporating interior monologues, temporary dislocations, and stylish games in their novels were acts of sedition.

Unfortunately for their enemies, their artistic bet paid off so well that, by the end of the decade, they were no longer pariahs; they became the authentic—and sometimes the only—representatives of Latin America. United in that nomadic guild that came to be known as the Boom and inflamed with the ideals that the triumph of the Cuban Revolution aroused, they abandoned the obsolete bourgeois nationalism of their countries in order to create, in its place, a united Latin American front from deep Bolivian roots. Paradoxically, when they escaped from their cages, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa helped to found a new nationalism, this time a Latin American one, more original and deeper, but no less exclusionary.

The local critics and academics, followed by their counterparts in the rest of the world, quickly accommodated themselves to the new situation, and without even adjusting their sights, they ended up sanctioning that Latin American literature whose disappearance they now so deplore. The result was a complete success; on one hand, the local media were happy to be able to identify with their own literature, one different from that produced elsewhere, capable of granting an individual identity to the Latin American nations as a unit, while the foreign readers, editors, and critics found the last stronghold of exoticism—of difference—within the everyday, more predictable margins of the western literature. E tutti contenti.

If up-to-date critics and academics pursue an essential characteristic of Latin American literature, and organize dozens of congresses from which Spanish writers are always excluded, it is because the ghosts of nationalism are still among us. Even then, nationalism was losing validity among the new Latin American writers, especially those born after 1960. Witnesses of the crumbling of socialism and the discrediting of utopias, and every day more skeptical of politics, these authors seem to have finally freed themselves from any nationalist constipation. Even though they don’t openly grumble about their origins, this fact is now merely an autobiographical footnote, not a stamp of origin for their work. Unlike their predecessors, they don’t seem to be obsessed with Latin American identity—and less for Mexican, Bolivian, or Argentinean—even if they continue to write about their countries or even about their neighbors.

Yes, neo-nationalists who rend their garments about this lack of identity abound, and now they blame the ”lack of roots” on globalization (it used to be Colonialism or Imperialism). Their incessant whimpering does not take into account that, unlike political frontiers, literary borders have always been permeable: the exchange of ideas and history among cities, regions, countries, and continents has been infinitely more prosperous and natural than movement among people. Globalization has nothing to do with the supposed appearance of an ”international Spanish”, concocted to be successful in the new global market, nor with the scandalous standardization of the stories that a Latin American narrator now feels free to tell. On the contrary: to persist in defining the different countries of Latin America as mere ”producers of exoticism” would constitute a real negative effect of globalization. Cornering the writers of the Third World in ”identity”, obliging them to always take into account the special conditions of their country, is a far more dangerous practice than allowing them to choose their themes with full liberty.

The new Latin American authors are not waging a war against the idea of being Latin American, and their books do not have the declared object of escaping Latin America. There is no confrontation with the neo-nationalists, but a kind of truce, or to say it openly, an enormous indifference before the dictates of the critics. The majority of the writers born from 1960 on, even the veteran members of McOndo or of Crack, have written books that take place in Latin America and that explore different aspects of that reality, in the same manner that they situate other of their stories in foreign territories. In fact, Latin America continues to be one of the fundamental preoccupations of a good number of the books published over the few last years, but their obsession is devoid of the militant character of other times.

Unlike their elders, the writers born from 1960 on do not need to found a tradition—as did Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, or García Márquez. They do not possess a Bolivian yearning and do not aspire to become the spokesmen of Latin America: their method, more modest but also more natural, consists in carefully studying the problems and history of their respective countries, and even of the whole region, without the messianic tone of some of their predecessors.

More than discovering a continent, placing a forgotten region on the map, establishing their own spokesmen, positioning themselves as the avant-garde of the elites, the new narrators speak about their countries without the aftertaste of romanticism or of political compromise, without hopes or plans for the future, and maybe just with the proud disenchantment of one who recognizes the limits of his responsibility in front of history. Instead of presenting themselves as inventors of Latin America—the great achievement of the Boom—they seek to decipher and unarm it.

Their books do not pretend to add themselves to the stones with which the writers of the Boom erected their arrogant cathedral of Latin American literature, but miniatures that hope to condense in themselves all that now can be said of Latin America. The paradigm no longer consists in erecting a new tower or a new cupola, but in creating a hologram: novels that only in an oblique and confused, fractal and fragmentary way are trying to disembowel the mystery of Latin America. Novels that look toward The Savage Detectives and, above all, that magnificent hologram of the region which has been so little explored—and is already so opaque due to prejudices and misunderstandings—the somber and enigmatic 2666.

Latest Review: "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa

Chad W. Post — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Before she left Picador to be an editor at Free Press, Amber Quereshi acquired a few books by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. The first, The Diving Pool came out last year, The Housekeeper and the Professor is the second and released earlier this spring, and there’s one more in the works. (Can’t remember the title, but I know Stephen Snyder is also translating it.)

Ogawa is a pretty big figure in the contemporary Japanese publishing and has written a ton of books, which, with a little luck, will see the light of day in English after this three-book deal runs out. (Any interested publishers—I think Anna Stein is the agent for this . . .)

Anyway, Will Eells is one of my two Japanese-reading interns this semester and is working toward a Certificate in Literary Translation. This is his first review. And it opens:

Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening in an otherwise normal setting” in the mold of Haruki Murakami. As one of the most successful authors to come out of a non-American or Western-European country in the last thirty years, Murakami is surely a success story that publishers want to recreate. The two other kinds of Japanese fiction published in America seem to be horror novels (Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, et al) and hard-boiled, nihilistic crime novels (think Natsuo Kirino and anything yakuza-related.) Of course, this has led to over-saturation on the bookshelves, and I’ve become completely fatigued by novelists that take an ordinary person with an ordinary life in Tokyo, and then throws in a ghost, or alien, a murder, or any event or characters with motivations completely unexplained to the reader for the protagonist to deal with for instant tension. Why does Japan seem to have a monopoly on novels with extraordinary premises? What happened to all the Japanese realists?

Reading Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor was consequently a breath of fresh air, a beautiful and bittersweet tale by a talented female writer. Ogawa has become a huge critical and popular success in Japan in the last twenty years, winning numerous literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize, while also having one of her novels (the one in question) adapted for the screen in 2006. She is also now one of the jurors for the Akutagawa Prize Committee.

Click here for the full review.

The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part I)

Chad W. Post — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:21:25 GMT

To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction.

And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book subscription—will receive a signed copy of Season of Ash. These won’t last long . . .

More info about the book can be found here and a video of Jorge reading and talking with translator Alfred Mac Adam can be found here. Enjoy!

LATIN AMERICA, A HOLOGRAM

By Jorge Volpi

1. Without the pig’s tail

Latin America is magical. García Márquez should not be held accountable for spreading this belief across the globe, but many of his readers think this. If you ask his faithful in the United States, Europe, or Asia to explain his success, many would say that the fantasy of the Colombian writer is based on the magical nature of Latin American reality. A legend holds that, when he arrived in Mexico—there are versions from other countries as well—André Breton discovered the real origin of Surrealism, and according to another local joke, if Kafka had been born in Latin America, he would have described the customs of the region. The myth is maintained: we live in a strange territory, alien to Occidental modernity, where miracles are administered in abundance and anything can happen; a place where violence and the supernatural, misery and prodigies, coexist; a paradise where Pre-Hispanic traditions and Catholic superstitions mingle and where the only logic is the absence of logic. A wonderland elevated to a continent. It is a theme park of the absurd. A fantasy island, even though the fantasy is frequently atrocious.

García Márquez is not given, in this version, much credit: his talent does not reside in his capacity for inventing stories, but in the long and sinuous lectures that enabled him to transfer his everyday experience on to paper. The mistake would not be so regrettable if it had not been used as a pretext to excuse our misery, our barbarism, our mistakes: Latin America is extravagant and irrational, nothing can be done about it; its dictators are savages and inhumane, but we miss them as characters of a novel; and we find solace in its inhabitants’ ability to maintain their will to dream in the middle of poverty and injustice. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is very nice to be exotic, to brown under the sun and to be neighbors with criminals and torturers, to populate chaotic and bloody cities, to believe in voodoo or in the Virgin of Guadalupe, to belong to such gracious and unusual nations. Too bad that none of this pleases us: at least for us, the sad inhabitants of these lands, Latin American reality is as crude and unremarkable—or as fascinating and terrible —as any other.

As the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman pointed out, our continent was not discovered by the Spanish conquerors; it was invented by them. Or, in the best scenario, reinvented in accordance with the dictates of the medieval imagination: a habitat of monsters and prodigies, tropical utopia and tropical hell, a space of our time, refuge of madmen and poets on the borderline of civilization. And even today, when the frontiers of the West are drawn, Latin America is excluded without fear, not withstanding our claim of being, in words of Octavio Paz, an essential portion, although eccentric, of this kingdom (or at least the ”Extreme West” to which the French diplomat Alain Rouquié referred). If no one accepts us in their exclusive club, it is not due to our development problems or our indigenous past, but to the perennial European desire to maintain us as receptacles of their frustrations and wishes, of their fantasies.

This is not the place to discern the academic, petty things that separate ”magical realism” from the ”real wonderful”: it is enough to underline that the artistic category suddenly became a sociopolitical tag for the whole region. The canonic definition establishes that, unlike traditional fantastic literature, where magic or miracles are not lacking, an essential characteristic of the Latin American current is indifference before the extraordinary. A maiden flies on air, and we lift our shoulders; a corpse asks for his father, and we yawn; time runs backwards, and we make a fastidious grimace; children are born with a pig’s tail, and oh, we prefer a soap opera. Since this lack of reason governs us—a lack which in any other place would be considered unnatural and would unleash curiosity, astonishment, or morbid fascination—these events are a mere distraction. When the critics of Cambridge, Harvard, or Paris fill their mouths with the phrase “magical realism”, we imagine a current of socialist realism.

In what role does this thesis leave us? Once again we appear as good savages, dominated by superstition and mystery, accustomed to coexisting with the supernatural, or, in the other extreme, as a primitive people who remain apathetic in the face of the very unusual. The social interpretation of the literature thus acquires an unsettling political shade: Latin American people are not distinguished by our fantasy, but by our resignation. A resignation of a murky Catholic origin that explains the conformism which turns us into docile subjects, cannon fodder, the successive victims of Colonialism, Imperialism, Communism, and Capitalism.

But even in purely literary terms, the absolute identification of Latin America with magical realism has wreaked havoc. In the first place, it erased, with a single stoke, all of Latin America’s previous explorations—from the babblings of the 19th century to some of the brilliant recent moments of our literature, including the avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century. And it became a choke-chain for those writers who didn’t show any interest in magic. If this were not enough, it promulgated a profound misunderstanding of the Boom. And, perhaps most seriously, it elevated literary nationalism above the rich universal tradition of the region.

Let’s see. When, in the middle of 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, no one imagined that it would become one of the most influential literary phenomena in history, much less that it was going to so suddenly disrupt the image of Latin America in the world. The previous works of García Márquez, as well as those of Vargas Llosa (The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral) and Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz, A Change of Skin), had not created a novelistic necessity, and they limited themselves to combining realism with the stylistic resources of the modern French and Anglo-Saxon novel and emulating Faulkner, their god. In fact, when these works came out in their respective countries, they were unanimously condemned by the nationalistic critics, who viewed them as damaging examples of foreign contamination. Even though, in those times, the members of the Boom professed their faith in Castro and the Revolution, the local media accused them of imitating outside models, betraying the Colombian, Peruvian, or Mexican traditions to which they were obliged to belong.

The planetary success of One Hundred Years of Solitude abruptly changed this situation: García Márquez’s prose dazzled European and North American readers to such a degree that, after millions of copies were sold, magical realism became paradigmatic, and after being called sell-outs in their own countries, the Boom ended up as the incarnation of Latin America’s essence. Driven by their avid readers—and even more so by their avid editors—this assigned identity resulted in a huge misunderstanding, and overnight, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar were assimilated into the magical realism myth. A bit later, authors as diverse as Rulfo, Onetti, Cabrera Infante, Donoso and even Borges—yes, Borges—were viewed through the same lens. Unless otherwise proven, being born in Latin America and writing fiction for a living implied a blind faith in magical realism. Authors such as the Argentinean Antonio Di Benedetto or the Mexican Salvador Elizondo, just to give two examples, had nothing to do with magical realism, and even today they are waiting for the place that is rightfully theirs in our literature. The guilt, I want to make it clear, does not lie with García Márquez, nor with the Boom, not with Carmen Balcells, nor with Carlos Barral, nor with Imperialism, nor with the market—the guilt lies with laziness. Laziness and the inertia of the media, who would rather sell a name-tag than admit the impossibility of scrutinizing, in less than a minute, the subtlety of an affirmation.

Repeated a thousand times, the lie transformed itself into dogma: the only legitimate expression of Latin America is magical realism, amen. The local critics, always upstarts and always voluble, did not take long to readjust their sights: at the end of the day, they only wanted to defend nationalism, and if this happened to become the exclusive property of the Boom as such, so be it. Their accusations were the same: Hang the foreign lovers, shoot the cosmopolites, behead the universalists!—except that this time the insults were hurled against the enemies of magical realism, that is, against anyone who made fun of their frontiers. Foreignism had once been measured by stylistic ambition, flashbacks, changes in point of view, or internal monologues; now it was enough for a novel to take place outside Latin America for the author to be detained by the inquisition and stripped of his literary nationality.

In order to carry out this purging mission, the nationalistic critics counted on the inestimable collaboration (no one should be surprised) of foreign critics, foreign editors, and foreign readers. All of them agreed: the only Latin American literature that is worthwhile is, well, this. If a Latin American author does not write as a Latin American, it lacks interest. Why should we read—or study or edit—someone who narrates as, let’s say, a Hungarian, a Pole, or a Frenchwoman if we already have the original Polish, French, or Hungarian on our pay rolls? For editorial, and ideological, reasons, one had to promote only that which was authentic, only those who—and playing the same tune—differentiate this literature from any other.

As has happened with the decline of dictators and guerillas, at the beginning of the 21st century, magical realism has also stopped dominating the literary life of Latin America. Its loss of influence has not been immediate, but it has been irreversible: an overpopulation of ghosts, oracular maidens, and the immortal elderly had snatched away all the freshness of magical realism and ended up conducting it towards a sweetened mannerism. The first ones to show their weariness were the Latin American writers themselves, especially those born from the decade of the seventies on. Fed up with the official moral stories and fairy tales about national identity, and of those who had been educated under the shadow of the Anglo-Saxon culture, it did not take long for them to rebel against the dictates that obliged them to be typically Latin American. Next to the Crack Mexican group, the McOndo anthology was the most representative of this tendency; edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in Chile in 1996, it gathered a dozen Latin Americans, with different aesthetics, who all rejected magical realism.

More than a decade has passed since this anthology was published—and then dismissed as an adolescent tantrum—and their predictions have been verified: in Latin America, the children are not born with pig’s tails anymore, even though thousands still inhabit towns and low-income districts that resemble pigsties. In the rest of the world, the process has been slower, and some readers and editors continue to miss those times in which these prodigal books would arrive from Latin America (in the same way they would be surprised by the arrival of a shipment of bananas or pineapples). In extreme cases, foreign editors have had to resurrect the few authors who have remained faithful to magical realism, or they have simply substituted for the Latin Americans with their followers from Japan or India, the new paradises of magic and exoticism. But the end of the period that exalted this literary current as the sole legitimate expression of our countries has finally ended.

Fiction in Latin America is living through an unpublished moment: for the first time, it is not victim of novelistic necessity. The norms vanished, the canons, the prohibitions—write this way or we will place you in front of a firing squad, do not write that way or we will ignore you—and except for a few venomous and widely-resented critics, nobody pretends to measure the writers of the continent with a yardstick. For the first time, I insist, one can choose any style and be received with the same critical legitimacy (or the same indifference): the subtle decorators of stylish miniatures; the buffalos of political intrigue; those who narrate with whatever skill; the last minute avant-gardes; the ethereal meta-fictionists; the mutants of the novel and the essay; the admirers of Vila-Matas, Amis, Murakami, Kafka, Pérez-Reverte, or Beckett; the post-modern romantics; the devout of the melodramatic; and well, including those who persevere in the magical realism—all can write, publish, and direct their readers without fear of being excommunicated or of being summarily judged. Outside of two or three apocalyptic critics, who rend their garments, crying out for decadence, accusing the market of all of our woes—they were communism or imperialism before—and write reviews only to crush their neighbors, no one laments the change. And even though the absence of laws and norms entails the possibility that a joke may be confused with a work of art or that a trifle may sell millions of copies, this is not due to globalization or the loss of identity, but of an agèd virus Duchamp introduced at the beginning of the 20th century: inevitably, the democratization of taste allows for minor works to become global hits and for masterpieces to be appreciated by just a few.

For many, it is a pity that Latin American literature has been extinguished in this manner, and they deplore the absence of a regional peculiarity in the new generation of Latin American writers: make them different, please, from their European, Asiatic, or American colleagues. This is their problem. Naked, stripped of all exoticism, the Latin American writer can finally carry out his pirouettes and prancing without a safety net: whether his works become everlasting or are thrown over a cliff into oblivion depends only on his talent—and, of course, on the laws of the market, of fashion, and of fate.

Hey There, I'm an Author, You're a Reader . . . (Part V of the French Study Trip) [1]

Chad W. Post — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:28:01 GMT

This isn’t the easiest of series to wrap up. In part because of today’s schedule (I have meetings/class from 10am until 1pm, so god only knows when this post will actually go live), and in part because there are no real conclusions that can be drawn.

Well, except maybe one: Coming at it from a publishing diversity standpoint, the U.S. book scene is totally broke.

I know some people appreciate the stacks of books fronting every B&N in the country, but not everyone. And I find it hard to believe that the endgame results of this are worthwhile. Namely, the fact that everyone in the country is reading the same dozen books at the same time, and that the vast majority of writers are “mid-list,” struggling to make ends meet, stealing away time to work on their art. (Granted, there is something romantic about the starving artist doing what he/she is doing out of love of literature, but thanks to MFA programs, it seems to me that young writers aren’t looking to create the next literary trend, but find a way to create something as entertaining at TV that can land them a two-book deal.)

As I mentioned earlier, one of the main goals of the Study Trip was to explore ideas for new publishing business models. And with good reason. Over the past four days, I hope that it’s become clear that if we continue down the path that we’re currently on (increased readership for eBooks, which have a max price of $10, which are sold in a handful of different proprietary formats, accelerated price wars for print books, more corporate consolidation in response to duplicated overhead costs, shareholder pressure to achieve 15% profit margins, a globalized book market in which America sells its wares everywhere and only the elite of the select of the few get their books translated and published here, advances that are totally insane for totally crappy books like Sarah Palin’s “memoir,” etc.), I believe that corporate publishing will continue to downsize for years to come in order to get out from under their top-heavy operating costs, and the American literary world will continue—thanks to market pressures and MBA grads—to shift from books as cultural item to books as commercial product. We are essentially bankrupting ourselves of art and ideas in search of profits.

(OK, I’ll temper that grandstanding statement: great books are still being published and purchased. And they always will be. That said, you have to admit that things are trending a certain way. For every Bolano, there are a billion “365 Days of Walking My Dog” type books. That wall off the real literature. And that sucks.)

But the thing about eBooks (which I tried to articulate in another multi-part, overly written—though much funnier—essay that I wrote for the Reykjavik International Book Fair) and any other techno-social developments that shake the foundations of the existing power structure, is that these paradigm shifts open up as many possibilities as they destroy. EBooks make things possible that were never possible before. And for all my love of heavy paperbacks, door-stopping, bag strap breaking, paperback, I can still look at the eBook model, at the way a book I want to publish can suddenly be in the hands of every cellphone user in the world, and get really excited.

I have no idea what the future might bring. What publishing might look like in a decade. What device will win out. What format. What business model. But caveats aside, I feel like the only way to really end this series of posts is to speculate wildly. Most of this stuff is probably pie-in-the-sky, Cubs actually win a World Series, sort of stuff, but well . . . actually, I’m lying: my predictions are more likely than that ever happening. (Sorry Cubs fans! Next year!)

So, in no particular order, here are some concluding statements/thoughts:

A steep rise in eBook readership will correspond to the adoption of a universal format and in piracy.

This sort of mirrors what happened with digital music and the widespread adoption of the mp3 format. Right now, we have a fragmented eBook landscape overloaded with proprietary formats and a ton of potential eBook readers (like myself) who are holding out for a cool reader that isn’t tied to a particular retailer. I don’t want to duplicate my love-hate relationship with ~~Cingular~~ AT&T when it comes to EBooks. And in addition to blaming eretailers for their file formats, publishers should unite and push for the epub format, for mostly selling eBooks that will work on the Nook, the Kindle, the Sony device. It’s only a matter of time before Google’s love for open source mixed with their tremendous library blows apart all the other formats—in part through a rise in piracy.

It goes without saying that I’m very anti-DRM. I understand why some publishers want to try and find a way to retain this despite the fact that it failed so miserably for the music industry. Especially when 80%+ of their eBook sales revenue is related to a particular author or small set of bestsellers. If those books were unprotected and rampantly pirated in a way that cannibalized print book sales, then the revenue from e-books would be atrociously low.

But I want to take an even more radical position: looking at this from a long-term perspective, I think piracy would be good for eBooks. Not just in the “content deserves to be free, wouldn’t it be great if people were stealing Open Letter books” way. In the way that piracy generates usage, generates interest, gets more people reading more eBooks. And pirates don’t steal everything. This isn’t a on-off sort of game. They might steal some books, but some others, share even more. Regardless, a rise in pirated eBooks will positively correspond to a rise in eBook sales.

Big Publishing will be slow to adapt and some indie presses will figure out the perfect business model first.

This sort of pro-piracy thing doesn’t go over so well with corporate publishers. They want to protect content. Monetize it. Give out small samples, but never the full book. Going back to an earlier MBA class I took, it’s a pretty commonly held assumption that big companies can’t innovate. They can tweak products, alter distribution methods, make small advances. But radical game-changing advancements come from the little guys. (And Apple.)

Admittedly, coming up with a model for how to successfully publish eBooks (even literary eBooks) isn’t necessarily as revolutionary as other twentieth century advances, but in terms of the overall possibility of making this happen, it’s much easier to envision a smaller, savvier, more nimble indie press with low overhead coming up with a way to cover costs and make money on a mix of sales of $10 ebooks and some printed copies.

I think big publishing will transition, and will get there eventually, but it’ll be a difficult, painful process involving some downsizing, some painful decisions, and a revamping of the company’s focus and infrastructure.

In the meantime, their hold on the industry’s distribution chain will probably loosen. Thanks to Amazon.com, indie presses are already able to reach far more readers than they would if they had to rely solely on bricks-and-mortar stores. Which is—despite any objections one might have to Amazon.com’s perceived business practices—a very good thing. More books available to more people is always a plus. And this will only increase with the rise of eBooks.

And as a result, I think more indie and nonprofit presses will pop up. We’ll start seeing more support from individuals and foundations going to literary publishing houses who are able to better explain their role in today’s book culture. There will be a micropress revolution similar to what’s happened in Argentina.

This isn’t to say that Penguin or Random or Harper will go away, but that the publishing landscape will contain many more top-notch indie presses that can more or less compete with the corporations in terms of recognition, respect, and editorial value.

What happens to a publisher in this era though? I believe their brand and editorial vision will become more and more crucial. As will the ability to market. We already know that marketing has been undergoing a pretty intense evolution from a time when you could rely on newspaper reviews to sell a lot of copies to a time of BzzAgents and proliferating bloggers. This shift will be exacerbated as the industry becomes more and more digital. And more and more concentrated.

Marketing will become more closely tied with a press’s “brand,” which will be a function of their editorial vision. Presses with a tight, carefully curated list will connect with a more avid fanbase (one that can help with word-of-mouth), than will presses with a very diffuse, unfocused list. I wouldn’t be surprised if corporate publishers end up reinventing a lot of imprints in order to more easily give a shape and a reputation to a particular set of books.

Personally, I think this would be a good thing. I know people complain about what’s happened to the record industry, but from an aesthetic perspective, I don’t see any problems. There’s just as much good music available today as there was ten years ago. I’d even be willing to argue that the destruction of the corporate behemoths and the way digital opened up space for more unique, diverse voices (and made it easier to discover these bands) has actually improved the quality of music being made. So maybe the downfall of the giants is actually a good thing . . . (Although Eli Horowitz from McSweeney’s—er, in French, MAC Sweeney’s—was quick to point out that big publishers are doing much better, much more relevant work than the big record labels were doing. Which is totally true and sort of cocks up my theory.)

Authors, now able to connect with readers directly, will have a lot more choices to make and a lot more power.

No one really takes self-publishing all that seriously. (OK, not “no one.” But not many people I know.) Unless a book has been selected and edited by a particular publishers, and is printed with a legit logo on its spine, it’s all just fun and games. So the idea of authors self-producing eBooks and selling them directly to readers, thus bypassing publishers completely is a bit far-fetched. (Like Cubs, World Series, I know, I know, dead horse, flogging.) That said, for some writers, this will become a reasonable option. Those authors who have very popular blogs, who have developed a loyal fan base willing to shell out $10 (or less) to directly purchase a writer’s book . . . In the end, this could financially work out, especially assuming these author’s will have the same ability as Random to make their eBooks available to any and everyone with an e-reader or a cell phone. For some this will be appealing . . .

Others will start looking at publishers a bit differently. Sure, the biggest advance will frequently win the book, but in evaluating presses, the editorial brand and the press’s digital marketing savvy will definitely come into play. Authors will be able to look at presses in a slightly different way than they do right now, when publishers still hold most of the power and are the only real option to getting your work in front of readers.

I think that a publisher’s brand and editorial vision will help to attract a certain quality of author—even more so than it does now. That as a result, editors will become a bit more publicly recognized. Not that the man on the street will necessarily know who these people are, but that publishers will start promoting their editors as key players in the process of producing quality books. Almost like movie producers. Or something. (Analogies are escaping me . . . it’s been a long day.) Main point is that publishers will see value in their editorial staff, not just in an internal, yes we need good editors way, but as something they can leverage to increase awareness of their product and attract quality authors.

Bookstores are most likely screwed.

Not sure what else to say here, but unless we institute a fixed book price law (which I would fully support and I’m sure is somewhere on Obama’s list of things to do), it’s going to become more and more difficult for individual bookstores to survive. They will have to adapt as well, becoming something other than a strict retail establishment. There is a space here for a nonprofit model to come into existence, and for local literary centers to take hold. But I’ll leave that for another set of posts . . .

In the end, books will still be written, and a small, devoted group of people will still read them. In some form. Someones will make money on the exchange between artist and consumer and the world will keep spinning. Who knows what things will look like in ten years. It’s an interesting time . . . And a great time to visit Paris.

Thanks again to everyone involved in making last week’s trip possible—it was amazing, intellectually stimulating, and a lot of fun.