The Penguin Blog

Publicity 2.0, or Online Book PR, or 'Blog me the money!'

Joe Pickering — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:35:52 +0100

Almost as soon as I thought of the subject matter for this blog I began to worry about what I like to think of as my ‘online rep’. ‘Blogging’, one of our work experience children tells me, has been around for some time now (it’s something to do with the interweb, FYI) and there are a few out there who write (the verb is ‘blog’, weirdly) about literature. Now, I use email as much as the next person, and I even have a Twitter account (look mum, look at all those followers! Mwhahahaha…) but blow me down if it doesn’t seem like I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants all this time… I’m a bit worried I’ll seem like a techno dinosaur (although that would be cool).

Of course (wait for it), I’m exaggerating a bit and I do deal with a number of literary blogs and bloggers. I’ve even commented on a few. And I’m pretty honest about nailing my Penguin colours to the mast when I do it. Honesty and integrity, it appears to me, are watch-words of literary blogging, even when I don’t necessarily agree with a review or a point or anything else or don’tmakemecomeoverthereandstartsomething. Sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to stick my oar in. But blogs are all about discussion, at their best, and people need to feel free to say what they want and also have an idea who they’re saying it to, hence me putting my hand up and saying “I work at Penguin, guv.”

The problem with online PR is that, it’s perhaps fair to say, there’s been a certain amount of scepticism in the publishing world as to the merits and affects of book blogs, and even the reasons behind them. In my time emails have gone round the publishing houses warning of someone purporting to be from a print publication that is, in fact, fake, just to get free books, either to read or to sell. Blogs caused suspicion because even if someone linked through to one that clearly existed, it could be a fairly ad hoc enterprise, one that potentially took little effort on the part of the blogger to circulate or even write when compared to the book-y rewards they were receiving. It’s a quid pro quo agreement, sending review copies out, albeit a flexible one.

Two things have caused me and I’m sure many others to have a re-think. Firstly, the simple fact that there’s now less space in the traditional outlets, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, etc, and every book publicist in London is competing for it. It’s always the hardest part of the job, convincing someone that they should consider, look at, perhaps read and, if you’re lucky, cover a book and there’s less room now than there used to be, for various reasons. So as publicists, we have to look beyond where we’ve usually aimed for coverage.

(Who’s this guy with Joe the Publicist?)

The second reason is the obvious increase in the number of serious, quality book bloggers and sites out there. Blogs such as ReadySteadyBook, Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Untitled Books or Asylum have clear aims in mind, an important ethical and aesthetic approach to their book coverage and, most importantly and informing all of this, a passion for books that means they take it very seriously and do it, well, properly. They’re not after any free copy they can get their hands on and won’t just review a book well, or even at all, because they’ve been sent it.

An interesting discussion appeared on Twitter recently about the effect of book blogging and online discussion. While it remains hard to judge what sales come directly from a blog, from a particular online review or comment, or whether one blog is ‘better’ or more effective than another, the phrase that keeps coming to my mind is word of mouth. That phrase is mentioned a few times in the Twitter discussion and it seems to be mentioned, at least indirectly, in online forums. People who interact with book sites do it more and more frequently; relationships and trust builds up; you get to know other peoples’ tastes and they get to know yours; and it’s no longer a closed circle for a certain type of person. In short, getting a review on a widely-read blog gets the book you’re working on talked about somewhere, and that is far, far better than silence. As publishers that’s essentially what we’re trying to do. Yes, we need to make money but we’ll never do that if no one is talking about our books. You may not be able to measure sales from them 100% but neither can you do that with a lead review in Sunday Times Culture.

So I’m going to carry on with my mission of finding out more about the sites and bloggers I already work with and do my best to cast my net a little wider and discover more. I’m hoping to find out what they like, what they read, what they look for from books, and publishers, and I think I’ll learn a lot from it. As publicists, and as publishers, we need to look beyond what we’ve always seen as a benchmark for a publicity campaign and see what we can do to push ourselves, and our books, a little further.

For your reading pleasure (you need something to help you get over how serious the above got, right?) here are five literary blogs I’ve discovered and enjoyed recently:

http://robaroundbooks.com/

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/

http://www.booklit.com/blog/

http://www.acommonreader.org.uk/

Joe, Literary Publicity (@Joethepublicist – I know, I know)

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Can we be of service?

Penguin Blog — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:25:34 +0100

As Penguin's Digital Publisher, I've had any number of conversations over the last few years with traditional book editors where I've tried to convince them that we're in 'the content business' rather than 'the book business'. I've realised, as I eat my lunch alone, that in a company full of book-lovers these editors don't really want to think of themselves as content producers, however I dress it up in sexy new-media jargon. Or, perhaps, because of the new-media jargon.

And as the debate about the value and price of digital content rages on, I'm testing out a new mantra on my suspicious colleagues; services not content. The idea, ill-formed as it is in my head, is that while we might continue find it a challenge to get consumers to pay for digital content, we might be able to use our skills, expertise and experience to create services that people will pay for. Services are what we do for writers, so perhaps there might be services we can create for readers. (note - I'm not the only person thinking along these lines - it's worth having a look at Bookseer and Bkkeeper, both from James Bridle and HarperCollins' BookArmy initiative).

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so I'm happy to be launching our first 'service' - a suite of storymaking tools for children. At We Make Stories children (of all ages, though the site is aimed at 6-11 year olds) can create, print and share a variety of story forms. They can make pop-up stories, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and develop a variety of entertaining adventures.

So we'll soon find out whether there is an audience for paid-for* services from publishers and whether, as well as publishing books that people want to read, we can develop services that people will find useful and entertaining. Otherwise, I guess I'll be looking for a new mantra before too long.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

*We Make Stories isn't free though it is very reasonably priced - and we've got free memberships for the first five people who leave a comment below

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Special Guest Post: Philip O'Ceallaigh on inspiring short stories

Penguin Blog — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:16:47 +0100

We asked author Philip O'Ceallaigh what his favourite or most inspiring short stories were.
This is what he said:

Hard to choose a favourite Hemingway story, but it would have to be from his first collection, In Our Time, and most days I’d go for Big Two-hearted River. It’s a strange story, because nothing much happens. In it, a man walks into the wilderness to find a good place to fish. It describes the places he walks through, the heat of the day, the light through the pines, the weight of the pack on his back, how he made his camp, and the fishing itself. Once in one of my own stories I described a man reading a story, immersed, while in a busy street of a crowded city. I didn’t name the story, but I was imagining him Big Two-Hearted River, and registering my own reaction to what Hemingway had achieved:

“What was beautiful about the story was… a sensual pleasure, in each of the things he saw and did. …It was a feeling for beauty that the writer of the story possessed. In the words he chose, in his intention to observe and report the world, there was something very pure and solitary. And when you followed the words and saw the things as the man walked and camped and fished, you too felt that the world was once again something new to be seen and noticed and felt.”

Hemingway describes the natural world so that you feel it, but it is his ability to describe conflict that critics remark more often. Like Isaac Babel, he describes terrible things without seeming to register any writerly distress. Frank O’Connor in The Lonely Voice, his classic study the short story form, claimed that what the two men had in common was the ‘romaniticism of violence,’ presumably because they did not explicitly condemn the events they described.

My favourite Babel stories are those describing his boyhood in the ghetto of Odessa in Tsarist times. The Story of My Dovecot describes the young Babel’s attempts to be an exemplery student, to gain admission to education in the face of an ant-Jewish quota system. He gets his exams on the same day a Cossack pogrom tears through the ghetto. A lesson on the power of the pen, perhaps. (Babel was executed during the Stalinist purges. He had given up writing, but at that point even a writer’s silence was a crime.) Other Babel stories I love are In the Basement (“I was a deceitful boy. That was the result of reading…”) and Guy de Maupassant, where he goes from a romantic appreciation of the writer’s spirit to a knowledge of the facts of his terrible life of illness and madness (“I was brushed by a foreboding of truth.”)

O’Connor got it wrong. Babel did not romanticise violence. He just knew it was there.

Chekhov is another kind of artist. His prose never calls attention to itself. It is measured and understated. One of my favourites is simply entitled My Life, the leisurely tale of a young provincial of good family who innocently decides to earn his living by manual labour. Interestingly, My Life is on the long side, and you sense that arbitrary definitions of form do not trouble the author. The story takes as long as it takes. These days his publisher would tell him to pump some air in it so they could put it out as a novel.

Hard to choose from among such Bukowski classics as Six Inches, All the Pussy We Want and The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California. In the latter, two winos steal a corpse. It turns out to be the best date they’ve had in quite some time. They have epiphanies such as “she can’t say NO!” and “Everything is so sad – that we live all our lives as idiots and then finally die.” In the drunk exhausted dawn they push her out to sea, and among the seaweed and the waves, with her hair moving in the current, she becomes a mermaid.

I like Bukowski because he turns the junk of life into art. And that his style is so delightfully un-literary, anti-literary. He does stuff you shouldn’t do, says what doesn’t get said, seems less to be courting a readership than spitting in its collective eye. And yet he’s a marvelously efficient, concise writer. His best poetry works in the same way as his stories, as compact punchy narratives, and so many episodes from his novels could stand alone as stories too.

What defines a short story? Sometimes they’re not even all that short. Other times they’re poems. About all you can say about them is they are self contained, that they work. Sometimes they’re even bits of something else that doesn’t really work: I’m thinking of a novel I’ve just read by Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch. Ridiculous novel. But I’d throw chapters 23 or 28 in there among my favourite short stories.

Philip O'Ceallaigh

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Penguin Design Award 2009

Penguin Blog — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:11:44 +0100

The 10th floor of 80 Strand was brimming with fresh talent on Wednesday night as the winners and shortlist of the third annual Penguin Design Award gathered for the awards ceremony and an exhibition of their entries. The students mingled with the teams from the Penguin Art departments, judges and tutors before being presented with their certificates and prizes.

This year students were invited to design a cover for Donna Tartt's The Secret History and we were deeply impressed by the imaginative concepts and assured design skills of the covers submitted. Our resident judges were joined by author Hari Kunzru and graphic designers Amelia Noble, Frith Kerr and Jonathan Barnbrook for an afternoon of lively debate as they selected the winners.

Their unanimous choice for winner was Peter Adlington from Stockport College who last night picked up a cheque for £1,000 and will be joining us in August for his six week work placement in the Penguin Art Department, where he'll be put to work on live briefs. Second place went to Jia Ying Gnoh and joint third place to Edward Essex and Lucy Pritchett.

All of the winning and shortlisted entries can be seen at www.penguindesignaward.co.uk.

Tora Orde-Powlett

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Doing more with less

Penguin Blog — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:08:56 +0100

Every now and again I leaf through the pages of the advertising trade magazine Campaign to boggle my mind at the amount of money that companies spend on marketing their products. Tens of millions of pounds are spent on digital campaigns for chocolate bars, margarines and air-fresheners. When you get to the amount spent on marketing movies, video games or new music releases the sums are frankly mind-blowing.

In publishing we don't have the luxury of million pound marketing budgets to create CGI TV campaigns or project the Penguin logo onto the moon. Luckily, people generally like stories and books and like talking about them to each other, which makes our job easier. And very luckily for all of us at Penguin we have in Anna Rafferty a Digital Marketing Director who last night was recognized as having made the greatest individual contribution to New Media at the New Media Age effectiveness awards. Shortlisted for producing vital, innovative and engaging initiatives such as blogapenguinclassic, spinebreakers and penguindating, the public voted Anna to victory against incredibly illustrious competition from some of new media's biggest guns.

We know how fortunate we are to work with Anna and I can't help wondering what would happen if she were given a multi-million pound budget to work with. My guess is that pretty soon sales of Moll Flanders would go through the roof and there would be absolutely no need to project the Penguin logo onto the moon.

Congratulations Anna.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Around the World in 80 Books: the fifth leg

Penguin Blog — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:28:13 +0100

So I've finally made it into Central Europe. I can't apologise enough for the delay, and this isn't really one of those instances where I can claim... wait... The dog ate my passport?

Well, either way, here we are again, battling into deepest darkest Osterreich (according to Googlemaps).

Fifth stop: Austria.

Book: Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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Anyone who gets their own fetish named after them has to be of some interest, don't you think? Or are they? While this book is notoriously autobiographical, one can't help but wonder how thrilling Sacher-Masoch's dinner parties were when he puts words like these into his anti-heroine's mouth:

'Make a point of remembering what I'm about to tell you: Never feel safe with the woman you love, for a woman's nature conceals more dangers than you think. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders would have it, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. A woman's character is her lack of character. The best woman sinks momentarily into the filth, the worst woman rises unexpectedly to great good deeds, putting her despisers to shame. No woman is so good or so evil as not to be capable at any moment of both the most diabolical and most divine... thoughts, feelings, actions.'

I don't object to this idea, just that a) Sacher-Masoch clearly believes it to apply only to women, for some baffling reason, rather than all humanity, and b) I can't bear this kind of trite dialogue from man or woman. I suspect I'm just being wilfully naive about a man who signed a contract (included in the back of the edition I read) with his wife to be whipped and humiliated, etc. Maybe his dinner parties were actually hilarious saucy hubbubs of fun, with wife-swapping and men crowbarring themselves into their servants' uniforms.

Conclusions as a traveller:

Best off visiting Ischgl, Vorarlberg or the Stephansdom. Avoid anything dungeon-esque.

Sam the Copywriter

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Dirty Rotten Scavengers

Penguin Blog — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:16:45 +0100

At the Penguin Press ‘launch lunch’ I talked about a book called Waste, by Tristram Stuart, which we're publishing in July. It's about food waste. We throw away up to 20 million tonnes of food in the UK every year, and that amount is matched by some other European countries, Japan, and the US. If there was a way of redistributing the excess it would feed 1 billion of the world's hungry three times over. Food is wasted all along the supply chain. Farmers overproduce because they know as much as a quarter of their crop may be rejected for aesthetic reasons – if a potato is too knobbly or a carrot too wonky it will be thrown away. In the supermarket, because of unnecessarily strict food safety guidelines and sell-by dates that again are there for aesthetic reasons, food is thrown out weeks before it would be unsafe to eat. And finally, in the home, we buy too much food and don't eat it all. If we wasted less, global food prices could stabilise, thereby allowing the hungry to afford more, and because there would be less demand in the rich West, the countries that export food to us at their population's expense would sell it where it was needed. Pollution would be drastically reduced – there would be fewer cows emitting methane and fewer fuel-guzzling machines transporting and processing food.

The author lives by example. As a student he fed himself on what food shops and supermarkets threw away. He is a Freegan. To this day, as well as the pigs he rears and his vegetable patch, he lives largely on what is discarded by others. Now I have always wanted to go bin-dipping, and when I mentioned this to my colleague, Emily Hill, she confessed that she did too, so on a Sunday afternoon in April we went looking for our dinner in bins around the Strand and Covent Garden.

***

The first supermarket we came to had closed a few minutes before we arrived, and there was no sign of food being wasted front of house, but when we went around the back we saw a man unloading several green pallets into a green skip. The pallets were full of food that had reached its sell-by date but was fit to eat. When we asked if he minded us taking pictures he was delighted. He had complained to his manager about the amount wasted every day but was told there was nothing they could do about it. Not only was this food fated to expend its nutrients in an incinerator or pit, it was sprayed with blue dye to prevent the food being sold on, a slightly less offensive deterrent than bleach, which some supermarkets use to put off scavengers.

The second supermarket, within walking distance of the first, was more careful about who it let look at its bins. We came to locked doors and a warning sign that rhymed: ‘This door will not open before 8AM, unless it is the dustbin men.’ We moved on to a doughnut shop. A black bag nestled innocuously by its doorstep. It was heavy. I opened it and found a buffet of multicoloured, icing-smeared, cream-filled unhealthy snacks. They had been put in the bag an hour earlier, when they would have been fine to eat, and now were soiled by cup dregs and damp tissues.

Our last two stops were coffee shops. One we passed as it was closing, saw the fridge shelves stacked with ready-to-eat sandwiches and resolved to come back to find out what was being done with them. The other we were drawn to by the small hill of transparent bin bags outside it. The first, we discovered, did not throw its sandwiches away, but saved them till the next day – a guiding star of frugality in a sea of commercial effluent. But the see-through bin bags of the second were full of sticky Danish pastries, soggy bread pitted with dried fruits, and croissants.

We went home hungry, but not because there wasn’t enough to eat.

Phillip Birch

Assistant Editor, Penguin Press

Emily Hill

Publishing Co-ordinator, Penguin Press

In the audience at QI

Penguin Blog — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:50:53 +0100

We sat, incredibly smugly it must be said, in the best seats in the house (turns out it is all about who you know - in our case Alan Davies, author of My Favourite People). Far enough away from the front so we didn’t get drawn into the warm up act (also crucially away from the swooping crane camera) but directly opposite the panel.

It was the 7th episode in the series and Stephen Fry kicked off by asking the audience to think of an interesting word beginning with G. I noticed the audience shift uncomfortably in their seats. It had all become worryingly interactive very early on. I wondered whether I was the only one sweating slightly as all known words floated out of brain. All words that is apart from the word 'green'. How original. Feelings of said smugness disappeared rapidly.

Luckily our host put us out of our misery and chose ‘gallimaufry’ (Yes I was clueless too - clearly he’d had time to prepare) and asked us to shout out the word so he could record it on his phone and upload it for his Twitter followers. With the audience nicely warmed up/feeling suitably humbled, Stephen introduced the theme of the episode – the gothic and his guests; Jack Dee, Jimmy Carr, Sue Perkins and of course Alan Davies. The latter fully decked out in Viking gear.

Cameras rolling, the five comedians wisecracked for 2 hours on the macabre (with only the occasional interruption by Stephen Fry, ‘Hang on, hang on, shhhh please … I’ve got a man who comes in my ear you see. No no no no! Talks! Talks in my ear’ as the producer gave feedback).

Customised coffins in the shape of giant red chillies and Air Canada planes particularly fuelled Jack Dee’s irritation, ‘There’s nothing worse than being inconvenient when you’re dead.’ And the disturbing revelation about a company that offers a webcam service in coffins so you can watch people rot brought to light Alan’s fear, ‘I am quite scared of being buried alive’.

Stopping for a 5 minute toilet break for Jimmy, the panel were absolute pros only needing one pick-up at the end of the set. Two hours passed in a flash and soon us yellow wrist bands wearers were led into the Green Room where we helped ourselves to the beer and wine on offer but stayed well clear of the dreary assortment of appetisers including what we thought could be sausage on a stick but could have equally been potato.

Most of our time was spent chatting to Alan who joked that he'd only just realised half of Penguin are following him on twitter and know exactly how many words he’s done each day ( http://twitter.com/alandavies1). A memoir of growing up in the 80s, he genuinely sounded like he wanted the book to be as good as it could be (although he seemed a bit stuck on 1988 - suggestions anyone?) He admitted that You Tube had been initially helpful in kick starting memories but had recently turned into an addiction with all night binges taking over.

A very heavily made up Jimmy Carr bounced over to say hello to The Penguins saying thank you for publishing his book all those years ago and earning him some well needed cash. As if reading our thoughts Alan commented as Jimmy disappeared, ‘He doesn’t normally wear that much eyeliner. I mean he does wear a lot but maybe he wanted to bring out the goth theme.'

A remarkably chirpy Jack Dee appeared from nowhere (I was mute at this point for fear of saying something totally ridiculous and getting a scathing response) and entertained us with stories about the annoying questions journalists have asked him in the past.

‘What are these?’ Alan said, pointing to what we thought could be sausage on a stick but could have equally been potato. He took a mouthful, ‘Ah! Ugh. Potato. Disappointing.’

On that note we left Alan with the gallimaufry of appetisers (see what I did there? Stephen Fry would be so proud) and headed home.

Ruth Spencer
Commercial Marketing Manager

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Woman of Courage 2009

Penguin Blog — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:32:18 +0100

Yesterday afternoon was somewhat of an emotional rollercoaster for many of the visitors to 80 Strand. It was not down to the fact that it was a Monday, or that some of us had lost out on the Eurovision sweepstake by backing the somewhat unlikely Lithuania and Ukraine. There was something altogether much more special going on in our building – the Lesley Pearse Women Of Courage Awards.

The ceremony was the third for Penguin, but the first for me. I started as the General marketing assistant back in December, and it wasn’t long before I was helping Jen with the finer details of the ceremony – the display boards, the menu, the giant cheque . . .

I was lucky enough to have the chance to read through a lot of the nominations that were sent in from right across the country. Aside from a slightly bizarre nomination for a Desperate Housewives actress, the entries were really astounding. It’s a real eye-opener when you see just how many women are dedicating their lives to helping others – often when they haven’t been dealt the best hand in life themselves. So many of the nominees had managed to overcome such terrible circumstances and go on to do amazing things – helping those less privileged than themselves, caring for the sick, overcoming illness to do something remarkable. Once the five finalists had been chosen they were invited down to London for the ceremony.

It was a little nerve-racking when I walked out onto the tenth floor yesterday as the room had already started to fill with the nominees, but I needn’t have been worried. As I started talking to the ladies and their guests, it became clear that they were absolutely lovely people who didn’t regard themselves as anything out of the ordinary. During the welcome drinks I managed to squeeze in a quick chat with Maureen from Sunderland, who had been nominated for her work with Young Offenders to keep children out of jail and out of care. After chatting about the merits of all things northern following my three years at Newcastle University, I learned a bit more about the children she has helped. “I’m just doing my job,” she said modestly, as I stood awestruck over everything she had told me.

I also grabbed some time with the family of Gemma Enolengila, who couldn’t attend the ceremony because she’s in Tanzania - helping to build schools and end the practice of female circumcision. I chatted to her relatives about going on safari, and the best way to run away from an elephant (zigzags, if you’re interested – they can’t turn corners very easily), but the overwhelming undertone was how proud they were of Gemma, and her dedication to the tribespeople she works with.

After welcome drinks, we sat down for our meal. I was fortunate enough to be sitting on a table with Tina Fay and her two adoring sons. Tina was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and has since raised £35,000 for research into the illness. In spite of her ill health she continues to organise fundraising parties and charity auctions, as well as caring for her elderly mother, who has Alzheimer’s. We were all chatting away like old friends, and I was even permitted to see a photograph from a recent stag weekend of debauchery her sons had been on – it was the stag, wearing orange y-fronts and a gold belt (dressed like a wrestler, apparently).

Our Woman of Courage for 2009 was Kerry-Ann Hindley. Kerry-Ann managed to turn her life around after a terribly troubled youth of personal tragedies and drug abuse. She put herself through college and now helps youngsters who are in danger of following down the same path. She got up to give a tearful speech – there wasn’t a dry eye left in the room by the time the ceremony came to a close!

So that’s how the afternoon went, a strange dose of humour and normality amongst some of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever heard. By the time Lesley got up to announce the winner, I had realised that it didn’t matter who actually won – it’s a cheesy line, but these women were all equally special. They were fantastic. I felt completely humbled by the entire afternoon, and my eyes have been well and truly opened to the lengths that other people will go to in order to help those around them. It’ll be a struggle to match the efforts of the 2009 nominees, but I have a feeling that, somehow, there’ll be some women out there who are more than worthy for Women of Courage Award 2010.

Claire Purcell
Marketing Assistant

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This is why I work in publishing

matt clacher — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:13:53 +0100

Full Disclosure: What follows is a highly subjective narrative based on my personal experience of being a 100% fan[1] of the above pictured writer who was known for his favouring of incredibly long sentences and footnotes but more importantly was inhabited by a crushing brilliance and infallible genius that allowed him to describe exactly what it feels like to be a live, thinking homosapien in this crazy modern world we call home.

Yesterday, at Hamish Hamilton, we announced a major new acquisition that is of particular significance to me; the posthumous masterpiece, the ‘Long Thing’ my literary hero had been working on since Infinite Jest, a new novel from David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. When The New Yorker ran an extract from the novel, Wiggle Room, I couldn’t believe it. Still raw from the tragic loss of his death, suicide at a mere 46 after a lifetime of severe depression, I couldn’t believe that there was more. And not just an unpublished story, or an essay, but a novel. D.T. Max explains how this all came about in his brilliant and devastating essay ‘The Unfinished’ (also in The New Yorker):

'In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a f***ing human being.” He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose.'

My love affair with David Foster Wallace’s writing began after a combination of Janet Street Porter’s bile (‘I thought it was some kind of evil practical joke’) and Paul Morley’s enthusiasm (‘the way of using words in all sorts of extremely gymnastic ways is continually a sexual and intellectual thrill’) during a discussion of Oblivion on Newsnight Review compelled me to buy a copy. I had never read anything like it, despite being in a pretty intense DeLillo/Pynchon/Auster place at the time. The stories just blew me away, especially Good Old Neon, which I still maintain to this day (as my colleagues here in the office can attest to) is one of, if not, the[2] finest pieces of short fiction ever written. After Oblivion I quickly, or as quickly as one can with DFW, devoured the rest of his books and discovered a writer completely without peer[3].

In his fiction he explored hideous men, anxiety, obsession and addiction; in his non-fiction he tackled everything from luxury cruise liners to Presidential campaigns, state fairs to dictionaries of American Usage. Oh, and tennis, always tennis. Through it all, his insane genius is evident and all is peppered with gut-wrenching hilarity and an epiphanic sadness that just plain nails the human condition. With The Pale King (and I’ve been lucky enough to read 120 pages of it so far) he describes the lives of the employees at an Internal Revenue Service centre, and its central character is a David Wallace[4]. It is about boredom (which was apparently coined before the word ‘interesting’),

‘About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the subject is, in and of itself, dull … There may, though, I opine, be more to it … as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size’.

His aim was to be emotionally engaging and to write about boredom while being entertaining and to show the world what it was to be a human being.

In all his work he has shown me this. Which is why he is my favourite, why I love his writing, why I was devastated by his death and why I am unbelievably honoured, excited and privileged to be able to work on this book and to bring this peerless chronicler of modernity to the audience his singular genius deserves.

Matt Clacher

Literary Marketing Executive

@threemarketeers

[1] I would go out on a limb here and say, w/r/t David Foster Wallace, that he is in fact my favourite writer of all time and has, in Infinite Jest, written the most accomplished and enjoyable novel I have ever read.

[2] An honourable mention should also go Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener

[3] As HH’s own Zadie Smith says, ‘he’s so modern he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us.’

[4] Although as his author’s forward claims, w/r/t him (the real David Wallace) being the main character, that this isn’t a cute, look-mum-no-hands “metafictional titty pincher”.