Archive for the 'magazines' Category

Juding books by their covers at the New Yorker

paperhaus July 9th, 2008

Let’s say you’re working on a book. Let’s say you’d like for it to be reviewed in the pages of the New Yorker, and not sitting on the free-to-a-good-home book bench.

A good idea — short of becoming Philip Roth — would be to start planning your cover right now.

When you sort through hundreds of books a week, it’s hard not to resort to snap judgments. Anything with women’s shoes on the cover is chick lit; anything with a title that takes up the entire cover page is a thriller; anything with a plain blue background and text in thin white letters is some abstruse but probably fascinating scholarly book from M.I.T.

I think it is unjust that people who get paid to sort through books are resorting to snap judgments. But since they are — and have the guts to admit it — I think authors should be prepared.

If you want to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers at the New Yorker, here are some tips:

  • don’t include any women walking, or women with closets, either of which might tempt a cover artist to render a woman’s shoe.
  • no long titles. This is no guarantee — for example, PREY, just 4 letters, was rendered in a big font — but you’re asking for trouble with a lot of long words. So if you were thinking of following in the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, think again.
  • use plain words. Plain words that will not lead people to think you are abstruse. In fact, avoid “abstruse.” Otherwise you will end up with a book that looks smart. A book that appears, to the people who sort through books at the New Yorker, to be bafflingly smart. To the giveaway book bench with you, smartypants book!

What’s really interesting is that these rules don’t hold true at all. Sure, the MIT Press website has a blue background, but many of their books’ covers are brightly-colored; a good percentage have cool photos (America’s Food, Andy Warhol: Blow Job).

As for titles? Amazon’s bestsellers in thrillers are evenly divided between BIG AUTHOR NAME/little title and little author name/BIG TITLE. I know some of these books are designed to SCREAM AT YOU from an AIRPORT BOOKSTALL, but many of them have jumped on the more subtle, literary-fictionlike design wagon. Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw has a tiny title and a big black and white photo, maybe from the 1950s, of a woman sitting in a man’s lap in front of a cafe, lost in a kiss. And on the cover of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett’s name is much larger than the title, both of which are superimposed over a line drawing of plans for a gothic cathedral. Way arty.

But then we get to shoes. Indeed, 20% of Amazon’s top 20 women’s fiction books have shoes on the cover (BTW, go Janelle Brown, clocking in at #8!, with a sundae, not a shoe). The only “literature & fiction” book with a shoe on the cover is the one that tops the women’s fiction list. Shoes still indicate chick lit. Beware: even The Time Traveler’s Wife has shoes on the cover. Not a Chicago library. Shoes. So if you have a character that walks or travels, you may be sucked into the shoe-cover vortex; it seems there is no escape.

Two thesis bits

paperhaus June 23rd, 2008

I’m heading to the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study for my third day of research for my thesis. Stumbled across a 1926 letter from DW Griffith to Adolph Zukor, complaining for 10 pages about scripts being forced on him and changes he’d been bullied into, then ending with “no ill feeling.” Zukor took 10 days to send an unbending note back; Griffith followed up immediately with another long treatise. Ten years earlier he’d revolutionized the film industry, making long-running pictures with an astonishing level of artistry, but by 1926 he was getting the brush-off. His letters show he wasn’t taking it well.

This only has tangential connection to my thesis, I admit. But archival research is so much fun! And some things — like the elaborate Paramount budgets, written in pencil — are concretely related.

Meanwhile, Stop Smiling magazine talks to David Milch, the creator of Deadwood, for their gambling issue. In the excerpt online, they never get to Faro, which is the gambling that would have been played in Deadwood. Faro is in my thesis (and it was there before Deadwood, thank you very much), and I think it’s the strangest game of chance ever. It’s sort of like card-based roulette — you bet on a card or cards, and wait for the dealer’s draw to match yours. No skill at all — just guess and wait. And it was so insanely easy for the house to cheat at Faro, it’s a wonder anyone played it. But it was massively popular. Maybe Milch gets to it in the print version.

All of this seems to indicate that my MFA thesis is a work in progress. Indeed. My coursework is finished, but the thesis is due later this sumer.

Short story dead? Nope - the podcasts are coming.

paperhaus April 10th, 2008

Short Story magazine, based in Columbia, South Carolina, has announced a call for entries for — you guessed it — short stories. They’ll be selecting 52 to record and podcast — the podcast site isn’t up yet, but they’re reading submissions now.

A new Short Story project called Short Story Podcasts will be launched in September 2008. One story a week will be read and available on the Short Story website. 52 stories a year.

It’s a wonderful idea — podcasts are an ideal delivery system for the short story. Are they the first to think of it? Anyway, send ‘em your short stories now. If you become podcasted, they’ll even toss you 25 bucks.

The only catch: submissions must be mailed, hardcopy, to a PO Box. No e-mailed entries. (Not entirely Web 2.0 after all.)

Submit submit submit

paperhaus February 23rd, 2008

Seen the Call for Entries for the spring issue of Hot Metal Bridge? The deadline is Feb 25, and the subject matter is up to you. Rumor has it that more submissions in creative nonfiction are welcome.

Looks like Hobart is looking for stories for their baseball issue. I hear spring training has started. Batter up!

Yesterday I went to a crazily well-attended panel with editors from Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction and No: A Journal of the Arts. The upshot was: we get a lot of submissions, be smart and read the magazine you’re submitting to, don’t be discouraged if you get rejected, keep trying. Pretty standard, seemed to me, but the room was packed; maybe it was new to everyone else.

Duotrope has a searchable database of literary venues — 2100, they say — and their deadlines. So go get ‘em.

The New Yorker & Raymond Carver

paperhaus January 6th, 2008

Raymond Carver is perhaps the most esteemed short story writer of the latter half of the 20th century. His biography is well-known — an early marriage; a period of dissolution, struggle; “discovery” by editor Gordon Lish and fame, security, a second marriage — then early cancer.

Carver’s history is not so well-known, however, that it should be chronicled anonymously, as though it were some oft-repeated commonplace. In the Dec 24 issue of the New Yorker, an unsigned 2,200 word Life and Letters piece frames the life and work of Raymond Carver, paying particular attention to his relationship with Lish, followed by letters between the two and an original Carver story, unedited (with edits online). Quite a piece. But no authorial attribution for the 2,200 word bio? What’s going on?

Maud asked this question back in December, and I can’t find an answer. Life and Letters pieces going back to 2006 have been signed. I’ve been a subscriber for more than a decade and I can’t think of another unsigned piece of any significant length. 2,200 words is no brief paragraph — it’s substantial work, one that makes a specific argument. Who wouldn’t want to take credit for it? Why would the New Yorker, which values writers as much as any contemporary periodical does, omit this particular byline?

All this new fuss about Carver — his relationship with Lish and the extent to which Lish may have crafted his signature style — is getting attention as Tess Gallagher, his widow, makes moves to print his pre-edited, pre-Lish stories in a new book.

The efforts to publish his work unedited seem to go hand in hand with the calcification of the uncomplicated, lost-and-then-found version of his biography. The anonymous New Yorker author writes, “At Knopf, Lish signed Carver to a five-thousand-dollar contract for his next collection of stories. Carver and Maryann Burk had separated, and he was living, happy and sober, with the poet Tess Gallagher. Teaching jobs and grants were also coming his way. Carver’s ’second life,’ as he called it, had begun.”

That was 1977/78. But to call this “a new and miraculous beginning,” as the anonymous New Yorker writer does, is to give his “first life” short shrift. Lish published his first Carver story in 1971. In 1972, Carver had a yearlong Stegner fellowship at Stanford. He won 3 O Henry awards during his first life (and 3 during his second). Yes, Carver was married too young, was frustrated with his familial responsibilities, was plagued by financial difficulties. Yes, he drank too much. But it wasn’t all so bad. He was writing, he had a life.

And those life experiences seem to be material for his stories. Whether you read the well-known “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” or its pre-edited incarnation, “Beginners,” you’re reading about two couples, with their own tensions and troubles, sitting around a kitchen table one afternoon getting drunk. The domestic resentments, the quiet aggression, the destructive behaviors of Carver’s characters seem, to this reader, to come from his early years, his drinking years, his “first life.”

Maybe I’m biased (but I’m willing to admit it, and explain why, and put my name — Carolyn Kellogg — to it). When I took a creative writing workshop with Chuck Kinder in the fall, he shared some stories with us about those years in northern California, when he was friends with Raymond Carver. He passed out a copy of a Carver story — with Carver’s own handwritten edits. It all makes Carver’s “first life” (when did he say that “second life” thing? and to whom? in what context?) to have a resonance that the New Yorker missed.

The New Yorker article bore bias not just in the biography, but in the selection/excerpts of the Gish-Carver letters, which seems, as JE Luebering says at the Britannica Blog, editorially heavy-handed.

So I wonder about the New Yorker’s version of his biography. It seems too VH-1, not very thoughtful, and the anonymity is just plain weird. An attribution, however belated, would be welcome.

Magazines I love, part 1: The New Yorker

paperhaus March 19th, 2007

In 1994, when I was living in LA, my grandmother got me a New Yorker subscription. At first I couldn’t figure it: Gram, a lifelong Connecticut-ian, was more likely to drive to Vermont to cross-country ski than to zip to the city to attend the theatre. I was working at Disney, writing for the music ‘zine Fizz, and going to a lot of rock shows. One of my roommates even played in a rock band. The other? A hairdresser. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about foreign policy, or contemporary literature, or even media powerhouses like Lew Wasserman. (Maybe David Geffen came up once in a while. We weren’t Philistines.) Perhaps my grandmother noticed that my conversation was slipping. Or maybe one of those blowout cards landed on her desk. Who knows.

Doesn’t matter, because The New Yorker was amazing. Politics, profiles, art, music — opera? was I actually reading about opera? — science, new fiction. Shit, Anthony Lane’s film reviews opened a new world of hysterical. Sure, it was during the much-derided Tina Brown years. And no, I couldn’t get through one before the next week’s arrived. Didn’t matter. The New Yorker provided — provides — broad cultural discourse that is also deep and funny and smart.

When I moved to New York, I’d whip through the magazine in less than a week, and I finally got to use the listings up front. That year, Gram died suddenly. I renewed The New Yorker on my own.

The magazine isn’t perfect: Joan Acocella is unbearable, the war coverage — Sy Hersch aside — is wearing, James Surowieki is a cut-rate Malcolm Gladwell, and the new fiction issue has dropped from a dozen authors to 3 or 4. Nevertheless, The New Yorker sets the bar, week after week.

No matter where I live, I wager I’ll remain a New Yorker subscriber until I shuffle off this mortal coil.

(Not a lifetime subscriber, which has been trouble for another mag — what I mean is, I’ll pay for each year as it comes along).