GalleyCat - The First Word On the Book Publishing Industry
Tuesday, January 25

Whitbread, Levied

levy.jpgAs predicted, Andrea Levy has taken home the £30,000 Whitbread, making Small Island the first book to win both the Whitbread and Orange Prizes.
Sir Trevor McDonald, chair of the judges, said Small Island had been a "clear winner".

"It is a brilliantly observed novel of a period of English history that many people seem not to know very much about.

[...] "Strangely enough I was one of the few people on the judging panel who had read a great deal of that period," he said.

"But I didn't need to sway the judges on that account. I wasn't the one who pushed the book. Everybody admired it enormously."

You Never Think About My Fillings

I'm off to get this many cavities filled. (How many? That's right. This many.) I was hoping the Whitbread Book of the Year Award would be announced before I had to go, but, if you're eager to know who wins, occasionally click here until you see results.

Making Fun of Celebrities That Don't Exist Yet

Today's next Zadie Smiths, after all, are merely the faded child stars of tomorrow, all burnt-out and bitter. Or, worse still, after initial world-shaking success, they are heaped with praise, fame and wealth in equal measure and become the Drew Barrymores of the literary world, incapable of a decent follow-up.
Wait -- What was worth a follow-up by Barrymore? I can't recall. Either way, it's worth noting --as the Guardian article doesn't -- that the majority of writers, young or old, end up being bitter and/or one-book-wonders.

School? Not For the Serious.

The literary hack, first cousin to the journalistic hack, wasn't exactly born yesterday.

Still, the rise of the writing schools has added whole new universes of meaning and possibility to hackery, a word that demands redefining above and beyond (or below and beneath?) its present meaning as, according to Webster, "a bullock cart" used in India. A career as a writer of fiction can now be pursued with precisely the same single-minded calculation as a career as a writer of insurance policies or medical prescriptions. Like business school or medical school, writing school now provides all the hoops through which the aspirant must jump and all the gradations by which accomplishment is measured. In what has been called the credentialed society, writers are now as credentialed as everyone else.
On behalf of writing programs everywhere, I find the accusations of success insulting.

Scrapbook

    AZ.jpg
  • Filed under We Did Not Get That Memo: "Chick lit has carved a solid niche in contemporary fiction; it ranges from exquisite post-feminist literature to excruciatingly brainless gal fluff."
  • We agree with the Saloon: when it comes to lit awards, this one's got the worst name ever.
  • "How well does the world wide web represent human language?" asks the Economist. AFAIK - LOL - not very.
  • A poll of London's top 30 books ranks the city's A-Z street atlas over books by Woolf, Waugh, and Conrad.
  • According to LA blog Defamer, Audrey Tatou has joined the Hanks-led cast of The Da Vinci Code, "instantly making the whole movie adorable and quirky."
  • "Can you think better when you're typing?" Wouldn't know, I've never tried.

Resident Evil

Your Sikh neighbours go bananas over Behzti, a play they weren't even planning to see, and you've got to sum up the ensuing kerfuffle. Does Doug capture the complexity of this culture clash? Sadly, no. His poem has the rhythms and repetitions of the crudest agit-prop - not to mention the chopped-up prose.
The Independent dares to ask the question we all assumed was settled: are the poets-in-residence of theatres, police stations and golf clubs ever good?

To my readers who (rightly) complain about this blog's design,

countdown.gif

GC Gets Proppian

I wasn't joking yesterday when I said articles about book culture repeated the same (five, six, seven -- the number doesn't matter) plotlines. During my worst days, the repetition makes reading claustrophobic -- like I'm living in a Groundhog day constructed from newsprint, and nothing changes except the nouns in the papers' mad lib blanks.

I know this is isn't the best attitude for a blogger to have or, worse, express; I should make reading the news feel like infectious fun, everyday a wild ride into our culture's eccentricities. But, I'm proposing an experiment: instead of relaying the more familiar articles about dead writers' shacks/houses/villas, teenage girls with sexy memoirs, and self-mythologizing retrospectives in UK papers about becoming writers, I'll begin relaying these articles solely for classification purposes.

For example: here's an article about the Burns National Heritage Park being in crisis. The larger, archetypal plotline: Dead Writers' Property, In Need of Rescue. (And maybe once I've compared more examples of this plotline, the Burns National Heritage Park will also exemplify a sub-type ... I'm thinking this new classification project should be as precise as it is shrug-inducingly pointless -- at least, for non-semiotics majors.)

I've a long queue of articles, found over the past 24 hours, to be categorized and then reported. But I'd also love contributions -- ideas about what categories are absolutely necessary ("the debut writer's horror story"? "the complicated literary friendship"?), or links to articles you've already rolled your eyes at.

Update: Here, however, is a story I'm not sure I've read before.

Quotebook, "A Literary Life"

Spender's hedonist friend Cyril Connolly once warned that all excursions into journalism, broadcasting and magazine work, like the more obvious snares of society and the fashionable world, are largely traps for the unwary. These "enemies of promise" encourage poets and novelists to waste their best selves on unworthy projects, to dissipate the energy that should be reserved for masterpieces. It is a stern, high-minded dictum -- and one that Connolly himself could never follow, since, as Sutherland notes, he wasted the finest lapidary prose style of his generation on weekly book reviewing. Just so, Stephen Spender apparently couldn't refuse an invitation, and so awoke one day to find himself not Byron but rather Yeats's "sixty-year-old, smiling public man," ideally suited for visiting professorships and editorial boards, glamorous enough for talks, black-tie dinners and international literary festivities, an adornment to the book pages of London or New York and, finally, a required antique presence wherever two or three hundred were gathered together to honor the muses.
--from Michael Dirda's review of John Sutherland's Stephen Spender: A Literary Life

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