There’s a Place Called Omaha, Nebraska

By Ron Hogan on September 22, 2008 7:03 AM

They set up a photo booth at the opening night reception for the fourth annual (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest, and GalleyCat wound up in a group portrait with festival organizer Timothy Schaffert, hometown-memoirist-made-good Rachel Shukert (who let slip that she’s moved on from her current publisher, Villard, having sold her next book to HarperPerennial), and featured guest of honor Charles Bock. As you can see, we tried to fit independent publicist Lauren Cerand into the frame, but with only partial success. (She made up for it afterwards.)

GalleyCat took part in two of the day-long event’s panels, beginning with a discussion of plagiarism and fraud that covered most of the usual suspects—although we spent a substantial chunk of time on Laura Albert, in large part because one of the other panelists, Laurie Stone, was one of the first people to introduce readers to “JT LeRoy,” in the 1998 anthology Close to the Bone; the bloom is off that rose, that’s for sure, and it’s not purely objective literary criticism, either. (At one point, one of the other panelists commented that Albert was “clearly a disturbed woman,” at which point this correspondent may have reflected how odd that was, given the overall levelheaded stability of literary fiction writers; the observation was also made that, judging by the reaction to James Frey‘s novel, the media was unlikely to give Albert a chance to be anything but “the woman who used to be JT LeRoy” any time soon.) Anyway, we didn’t even get to talk about “Margaret B. Jones,” but somebody did throw in an Ian McEwan reference, which was a nice curveball…

Later that afternoon, Publishers Weekly journos Claire Kirch and Jonathan Segura joined GalleyCat and Cerand to discuss the current state of the publishing industry. We agreed that while book publishing faces significant challenges, it’s far from dead or even dying. For that matter, reports of its death may come as some surprise to successful independent publishers scattered throughout the United States—as someone else commented afterwards, beyond the immediate surroundings of Manhattan, the news that New York had declared publishing doomed was probably along the lines of “Wait, when did the New Yorker write about the book business?”