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Wednesday, Jan 04
Assorted Odds & Ends
- Lawrence Van Gelder (NYT) catches up to that story about the old novels spurned by today's publishing industry, allowing the spurned writers to express the snottiest aspects of their nature in responding to their rejection by just about every publisher and literary agency worth knowing in England. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," sneered Thomas Middleton, while Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul blames the modern publishing industry for hiring people with stupid, stupid minds: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is." I dunno; I'm still willing to consider the fact that it could be the books that fell short here, not the readers: Would anybody be surprised if this same experiment were conducted in 2035 with Vernon God Little and the exact same outcome resulted?
- Meanwhile, Indian author Chetan Bhagat seems to carving out a successful career for himself reinventing Microserfs. Bhagat's latest bestseller, One Night at the Call Centre, follows six characters during "one eventful night at a call centre handling customer queries for a US-based computer and appliances company," with the existential self-loathing matched only by the ethnic self-loathing inspired by addressing themselves to stupid Americans with their stupid technical problems. The story's clearly resonating with somebody, as it's sold 100,000 in only a month, well outpacing just about any competitor in the Indian publishing scene.
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