Category Archives: Books

Crime pays, lol

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Okay, so the blogosphere is abuzz now with the revelation that James Frey’s best-selling A Million Little Pieces, billed as a “memoir,” is actually “made-up-oir.”

From Smoking Gun:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.

Am I the only one whose mind jumped associatively to the ruckus over Primary Colors?

Moral of the story: when you’re drafting that proposal for your non-fiction book, be sure to include a few ideas for some post-publication shell-games to titillate the media, embarrass at least one public figure, and keep that title o’ yours high up on the NYT bestseller flagpole ;-)

Book Reviews

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I’m sure I’m not the only writer out there who has had this experience: your first book is published. You google the title. You get a lot of hits and at first that’s a bit of a thrill, until you realize that 99.99999999 percent of them are the result of keywords being auto-harvested by websites hoping to tap into Amazon affiliate dollars.

Over time, your book does get mentioned by a few actual human beings (Outwitting Dogs gets a hat tip here and here, for instance) but these are the exception, not the rule. So the question is: where are the virtual book reviewers? (I’m deliberately excluding Amazon’s reader review system, if for no other reason than that the reviews don’t come up on search engines.)

I know from experience, having been involved in DYI book publicity for two titles now, that sending review copies to mainstream media can be an exercise in futility. The venue is too finite. If you don’t happen to hit a reporter for whom your concept clicks, whether for personal reasons or because he/she “gets” why your concept is topical, then you are sunk.

What we need are more reviewers.

I’ll do my part by posting an occasional review here. Updates to follow.

Novels: an exercise in subjective judgment

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Yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch reported on a bit of gotcha journalism by the London Times, “one of those periodic ambush articles”

in which the reporters make themselves feel wonderfully superior by submitting two Booker-winning novels from the 70s anonymously to 20 publishers and agents. (One is VS Naipaul’s IN A FREE STATE; the other is Stanley Middleton’s A FREE STATE.)

Surprise, surprise, none of the publishers offered the anonymous submitters a $1 million advance.

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile.

What would be really interesting, though, would be to resubmit a couple of novels that didn’t quite make the Booker Prize grade and see if they could land a deal.

Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth had a nice run in the late 1800’s. How about submitting For Women’s Love?

Rothsay left the talkative hackman and passed on. [ed. No, Mrs. S. didn’t mean to suggest he died.]

A hand touched him on the arm.

He turned and saw old Scythia, clothed in a long, black coat of some thin stuff, with its hood drawn over her head.

Rothsay stared.

“Come, Rule! You have tested woman’s love to-day, and found it fail you; even as I tested man’s faith in the long ago, and found it wrong me! Come, Rule! You and I have had enough of falsehood and treachery! Let us shake the dust of civilization off our shoes! Come, Rule!”

Narnia

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I picked up a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to read to my daughter a couple of years back. It blew me away. I immediately bought the rest of the set.

I knew little about CS Lewis at the time, although I was aware that he’d written books about his Christian faith.

I didn’t need to know anything about him. The Chronicles of Narnia are ideal children’s literature. Partly because they are so well-written. But mostly because the children are the heroes, yet not one-dimensionally: these aren’t saccharine characters. They become heroes by wrestling with conflicting impulses (some noble, some base) and by experiencing first-hand that one’s choices have consequences in the greater world.

Somewhere (I thought it was here but offhand can’t find the exact reference right now) I read that Lewis conceived of Narnia by asking a question something like this: what if the Christ myth had embodied itself in a different land, a fantasy land?

I know some people dismiss the Chronicles for that very reason; they fancy the books are “only” Christian allegory.

But they aren’t. They are myth, in the highest sense of the word.

What any writer wants is to create (or would that be “tap into?”) myth; what any decent writer understands is that true myth is felt.

The Narnia books give us a felt myth.

Movie version works, too.