Still Life with Book Maven

In Which I Refute a That Richard Russo Is "A Misogynist"

In the August 5, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff has an article called “Is Richard Russo a Misogynist?” in which she claims to show that Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling novelist Richard Russo…is a misogynist. (I believe this makes her title rhetorical, but I will leave that for composition teachers to debate.) 

Before I look at Yabroff’s article, let me then respond simply to its title. I’ve read and studied and devoured a lot of literature, and done a great deal of all three within the auspices of what we call “the academy.” In The Academy, one pays a great deal of attention to a work’s biases. Is the author racist? Ageist? Hate little dogs too? No author is safe from the scrutiny of grad students, nor should any author be. While those writing dissertations on literature may not be rocket scientists, they do serve a function within reading society: To ferret out authorial context, prejudice, and weakness, so that we know Ernest Hemingway was a member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. 

All right, all right, I’m taking things a little too far, but you get my drift. It actually is useful, and sometimes even important, for us to know how a particular poet or novelist regards “the other.” Since the two largest human groups of otherness are men and women, it stands that we all might be interested in how writers of stature regard the opposite gender. 

I say this all to make it clear that I take no umbrage with Yabroff’s motivation in challenging a high-profile novelist’s take on women. We should look at how Richard Russo creates, develops, and treats female characters; this is a premise that has launched hundreds of thousands of dissertations. We should also look at how Richard Russo treats his male characters. 

Yet Jennie Yabroff doesn’t much bother with Russo’s treatment of men, whom he treats “pretty roughly” as she says Philip Roth and “a lot of Updike” do. She skips straight to calling Russo’s novels “fuzzy, golly-gee” books instead of talking about what he actually does do with male characters. Without going into a dissertation-like mode, let’s just say these characters wind up kidnapped, terrorized, haunted, and stuck head-first into a prickly hedge. There aren’t any angelic men in Russo’s novels. 

Similarly, there aren’t any “single-minded” women in Russo’s novels, as Yabroff says – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first address a Yabroffian trope: She claims that the women in Russo’s novels are like Deborah, the wife in television’s “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom: “Smart, competent, emotionally mature but still fabulous-looking women act as foils for immature, self-deluded schmucks, then roll their eyes and sigh good-naturedly as they wait for their lesser halves to get with the program.” Yabroff says that Russo’s women “aren’t afforded the luxury of conflict or shortcomings.” 

There are so many ways I could deal with this blanket and inaccurate generalization. Should I machine-gun quotes from “Empire Falls,” “Straight Man,” “The Whore’s Child,” and “Bridge of Sighs,” among other works by Russo? Or should I simply note that Russo has many different types of female characters, including villains, doormats, spitfires, and ingénues? 

Perhaps I’ll note that I read Russo differently than Yabroff does. Where she sees foils, I see detailed portraits of women whose lives have been forever changed and sometimes ruined by the actions of men they’ve chosen to love and live with (both in bleak blue-collar towns and in cosmopolitan cities). Where Yabroff sees men simmering with resentment towards women, I see men who can’t live without women and know it – they’re trying mightily to figure out what lack in themselves causes them to need women yet also not treat them on an equal level. 

Russo, to this reader, grapples with the twentieth century’s conflict about gender roles in an honest and yes, masculine way.  Russo doesn’t always understand women. What man does? But Yabroff truly goes too far in the following passage from her article: 

“In That Old Cape Magic, for example, there is a passage describing Griffin's father's decision to write his (dumb, bovine) fiancée's Ph.D. dissertation for her. ‘Granted, this was something she should've been able to do for herself, but so what? It could be their secret. She'd be so grateful her frozen p---y would thaw.’ Aside from the tired characterization of the fiancée as using sex as a bartering tool (a common tactic of Russo's perfect bitches), this passage is troubling because it's impossible to tell who's speaking. Griffin's father's point of view is not expressed anywhere else in the book, so it can't be his voice. Griffin himself couldn't know these details of his father's sex life. It must be the author himself.” 

Um, Ms. Yabroff, it’s called “third-person narration.” Many authors use it! It allows a certain omniscience – i.e., one can know Griffin’s father’s views – without a character speaking. Griffin is, in a sense, translating his father’s “tired” characterization of his fiancé, a characterization that infuriates the son. Griffin wants nothing more, in “That Old Cape Magic,” than to understand the ineffable, transcendent something that makes a man and a woman hold on to a relationship despite not understanding each other in the slightest. Is that the author himself? I think so. 

What to Do with 15 Seconds of Fame...Make That 14...

So some of you by now have heard and/or read that I made it into Page Six over last week's "kerfuffle" with Alice Hoffman -- my kerfuffle, of course, riding on the back of Hoffman's own. On Sunday, the Twitter messages she sent out about Roberta Silman's Boston Globe review of Hoffman's new novel resulted in a lot of tweets, several stories, and Hoffman's Twitter account being shut down entirely. You can read accounts of what happened here, and here, and here. 

It's very funny to see my name in such an infamous column, but I don't feel I can really take any credit for it. The item was really about Alice Hoffman first, Roberta Silman second, and me -- a distant third. Various friends and colleagues have written to me in the past 24 hours to say "Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity!"

Opportunity? What were they talking about? I actually feel a bit creepy winding up with publicity due to an author's public outburst. I got involved in the whole "kerfuffle," as I called it in this blog and on Twitter, not because I wanted to humiliate Alice Hoffman, but because I wanted to defend a fellow book critic. Regardless of how good or bad Hoffman's latest book is, I felt her tweets about Silman crossed a line.

So, as my seconds of fame tick away on this "opportunity," I'll take them so that I can support all of my friends and colleagues who continue to read, review, and critique books. I'll take them so that I can respond to everyone who says "Reviews don't matter." 

Because what happened in the Hoffman kerfuffle was that people started talking about Silman's review. It had good points and bad points, according to the Twitter, print, and blog fray. Some people said it wasn't all that negative and said nice things, too; others pointed out that Silman really did give away too much of the story. Still other people were prompted by Hoffman's tweets to find out more about Silman herself, who has had a distinguished career.

If nothing else, this brief skirmish shows that book reviews can prompt discourse. Isn't that what social media is all about? I hope that with my remaining seconds of "fame" (7...6...5...) I might encourage a few people to read and talk about a book review or ten. 

So let me quickly close with something I can take (some) credit for: The Book Studio. The reason I want to talk about that site in this blog entry is because our team is making a focused effort to develop a new place for excellent book reviews. I write up the Book of the Week, but a small and growing posse of freelance book critics will be contributing reviews in a variety of genres (literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, women's fiction, food/cooking, biography/memoir, YA...and that's just to start). Here's a link to Sudip Bose's review of Love and Obstacles, the new short-story collection by Aleksandr Hemon. Later today we'll have a brand-new review posted, so watch for it.

Many thanks to everyone who has supported me through this interesting online debate. 

The Runner Stumbles: How Not to Respond to a Negative Review

Several years ago I saw a video of a 1979 movie called "The Runner Stumbles." It's based on a real-life story that playwright Milan Stitt dramatized and then wrote the screenplay for, starring Dick van Dyke as a Roman Catholic priest with a very dark secret. It's an amazing movie; go out and rent it! 

But I digress. Long after the movie's plot itself had faded a bit from my mind, I remained obsessed with its elegant and meaningful title, which derives from The Book of Isaiah, 40:31: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew [their] strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not be faint." 

Never fear, readers; you've come to the right blog! I'm not about to indulge in heavy Biblical exegesis here at Still Life with Book Maven. It's enough to say that no matter what we place our faith in (one God, many, none, Haagen-Dasz, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, deadlines, etc.), sometimes we who run stumble even when we're not weary.

Such was the case today with famous novelist Alice Hoffman, whose latest book, The Story Sisters, received a negative review from well-credentialed critic and novelist Roberta Silman in The Boston Globe Books section. You can read more about the kerfuffle here at Ed Champion's blog, but let me go back in time a week or so and let you know why it came to my attention in the first place.

In my ongoing and determined quest to maintain a career in books in the current economy and state of the publishing industry, I wear many hats. One of those is as the moderator of BN.com's Center Stage book club. Last week Alice Hoffman was our guest. I wrote a message she disagreed with, she responded and missed all of my points, then told her Twitter followers she was having a "tiff" with me. 

I tell you all this, as I said, to put what Hoffman did today in context. She published Roberta Silman's private phone number and email address and told her "readers" (you'll understand the quotation marks once you've read through Ed Champion's post) that "If you want to tell Roberta Silman off," to contact her at phone or email and "Tell her what u think of snarky critics." 

No matter how bad Silman's review was or wasn't (see Champion's post; the review really wasn't all that bad), and no matter how "public" the records of Silman's contact information are, to encourage one's reading public to tell a respected colleague "off" is simply poor form. 

Perhaps Hoffman is having a rough time on different levels: professional, personal, psychic -- or not. But she does seem to have forgotten that the book media is rarely in the business of attacking any author personally. I care about books and authors; so does Silman (and I'm not putting words into another journalist's mouth; if she didn't care about books and authors, she wouldn't be writing reviews; simple as that). I'm sorry that Alice Hoffman has stumbled, or thinks we stumbled -- but the truth is that the road ahead is quite long, and we have to get up and not be weary if novels are to continue to be written, published, and reviewed. 

Obviously, many people will disagree with me on any number of points here. What I wish I could write instead has already been written for me (not to mention tweeted, by author Julie Klam) by Virginia Woolf, an artist, novelist, critic, and essayist greater than anybody else around these parts:

"Criticism, whether praise or blame, should be accepted in silence as the legitimate comment which the act of publication invites."

 

Fable of My Deconstruction: A Response (of a sort) to Sonya Chung at The Millions

Warning: This is Really Long. If you read the whole thing and actually leave a comment, I may have to send you some flowers.

This post at The Millions by Sonya Chung inspired a flurry of comments online and in the Twitterverse. There are few readers, it seems, who do not have an opinion of some sort about what can and can’t be called genre fiction and what can and can’t be called literary fiction.

Chung approaches the “controversy,” if it can be dignified with the name (that’s not a diss on Chung, but on the state of reading), from the high-brow side of the fence. Chung, a freelance writer and fiction teacher whose debut novel will be published next year, writes: “In my fiction classes, I always ask students to fill out a brief survey on the first day of class so I can get a feel for their reading interests; invariably, a number of students list Dean Koontz or Dan Brown or Nora Roberts (most recently and markedly) Stephenie Meyer as their touchstones. When I see these writers' names or hear them mentioned in class, something goes thud in my stomach and a low-grade dread begins to buzz in my head.”

Chung goes on to say that if on reading that you think she’s a snob, “…we may be at an impasse.” Her entry (which goes on much longer, and contains many smart, thoughtful arguments about the need for smart, thoughtful fiction writing) focuses on the fact that much genre lit (and she does point out that she knows not all genre lit falls into this rut) merely entertains and does not enlighten.

But you’ll have to forgive me for not responding to the entire post, for Chung had me at “students,” and it’s about those students I’d like to hold forth for a few hundred words. (I’ll let the blog and Twitter commenters continue the rest of the debate for now, which is a very interesting one; I’ll take it up later this week).

Please bear with me; this story may be a tad discursive, but I promise I have a point. For nearly four years in my growing-ever-more-distant past, I taught nighttime community-college English composition and literature. My students , many of whom were soldiers, worked all day and then came to up to four hours of class each sweltering Texas evening. Some were working on associate degrees, others fulfilling credits towards bachelor’s degrees, but let’s put it this way: Not one of them was there based on love of literature.

(NB: Chung’s students presumably are taking writing classes because they do love literature and/or they want to “be writers.” Chung and I and most of the rest of you know that the two things are not congruent, nor is the urge to Have Been Published the same as living a writing life, but those are problems to be taken up at another time.)

Like Chung’s students today, when asked to list their favorite authors on the first-day-of-class index cards I handed out, nearly all of my students named genre writers: James Patterson. Dean Koontz. Tom Clancy. Robert Ludlum. Nora Roberts. Danielle Steele. The occasional Jeffrey Deaver or Thomas Hamilton or Jan Karon. Those, of course, came from the students who actually had a favorite author, or even a favorite book (if there was no “Favorite Author” on the index card, usually “Favorite Book” would be “The Bible”).

When I began teaching these classes, I was just months finished with living inside The Academy as we refer to that place of heuristic action for intellectuals. (Side note: If “The Academy” were a video game, black-leather-jacketed theoryhead thugs would roam tree-lined paths at will, seeking muddleheaded students like me to beat up with stinging phrases like “Derridean dogma” and “You probably like reader-response criticism,” but I digress.) This will tell you all you need to know in case you’ve never considered pursuing a PhD in literature: During my years in graduate school, I never once picked up a book for sheer pleasure. I can remember the day I finally did to the very hour. I saved “Possession” by A.S. Byatt to read after I’d passed my master’s orals. I passed, left the building, walked across Grounds and bought a pair of earrings I’d been coveting, and then went straight home and began reading.

That was pretty much the hour I knew I’d never go on to earn a doctorate. I know that others are able to do what I could not: Continue to love reading while plowing through volumes and manuscripts of academic writing. I needed to return to enjoying books and not deconstructing them. (Of course, maybe I was just tired. But sometimes battle fatigue determines a life’s course.)

However, despite my experience with “Possession,” I was still so much a product of the ivory tower that I didn’t at that time connect my devouring of Byatt’s big fat piece of high-brow genre lit with anyone else’s genre lit. When I’d get those index cards back from my students, my snobby little heart would sink.

I’d spent years deconstructing poems, novels, and plays, but (sob) I’d never been to me.  Go ahead, laugh. I certainly did when I realized how single- and simple-minded I was being in judging these reading choices.

For here, at last, is my point (I told you I had one!). When I finally clued in to just how different my own recent experience was from that of my students (I was married, but child-free during grad school, with no financial worries and no job save schoolwork), I realized that they could not possibly find the same way in to literature that I had. Books, stories, and movies are full of tales in which a struggling blue-collar person’s life is Changed Forever by reading Kerouac or Balzac – but in real life, my hard-working students were more apt to find their lives changed by Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography than Shakespeare.

But I was not only charged with teaching them Shakespeare; I wanted them to learn to read and appreciate Shakespeare. What I had to do – and what I did do, with mixed success – was to figure out what it was that drew them to genre fiction in the first place. I was probably the best lab rat ever for this experience, since I’d never read any of it. My mother was hugely controlling in (mostly) the best way, reading real literature to me from her own college textbooks when I was very, very young: My favorite bedtime story during elementary school (I kid you not) was “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. My sixth-grade teacher gave me “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin. I flirted with Victoria Holt during junior high, but returned to Henry James during high school.  But anyway…many of you reading this could recount similar histories. I was as dissimilar from my students as possible.

So I started reading some genre fiction. In those pre-Internet days, I had to either drive nearly two hours to Austin and BookPeople if I wanted to find something good to read, or or pick up whatever I could find at the local mall’s WaldenBooks. Since I had a toddler at home, WaldenBooks usually won out – and its selection of genre fiction was just dandy. I bought mysteries. I bought thrillers. I bought spy stories and detective novels and romances and fantasy. After I’d finished grading (mostly miserable) papers and placing Post-It Notes on new spots in my increasingly ragged Norton Anthologies, I read the books that my students read – on weekends, on vacations, on work breaks.

Any time they wanted to escape.

Sonya Chung, again:

“But enjoy your genre books, I say. Life is tough, we all seek ways to effectively distract and soothe ourselves. Consume your genre series with gusto and pleasure, like a drippy, juicy bacon burger; kick back and let them carry you away weightlessly, like an after-midnight Wii session. But do not imagine or attempt to argue that they play a vital role in augmenting the human experience. They allow for, are designed for, reader passivity and thus do not do what Joe Meno described eloquently in Edan Lepucki’s profile this week:

‘Books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination.’”

Here is where I differ from Chung, although I do not entirely disagree: The books my students read, while not as nutritious as more serious fiction, were just as vital in their human experience. When you don’t know that blueberries are full of antioxidants or hell, you just loathe their taste because you didn’t eat them while you were growing up, you may turn to junk food for your fruit. If you grow up in a home where there are no books, where no one reads anything deeper than the phone book, well, then, your “way in” to literature may be James Patterson. Or Jeffrey Deaver. Or Nora Roberts. And so on.

 This is an extremely long response to Chung’s post. Let me summarize my rambling thesis: In my first post-graduate-work job teaching, I learned that not every student came to literature with the same reading experience, and I came to understand and even at times enjoy some of the genre fiction that my students did.  

Next: What I Learned from Canned Lit

 

 

 

BEA Book Blogger Signing: Where You'll Find Me (on the web)

It's been weeks since I posted on this, my so-called "personal" blog (which is really just an excuse to carry my professional life into off-hours). My apologies! Here's what keeps me busy:http://www.ny1.com/Default.aspx?ArID=99589

The Book Studio: WETA/PBS's flagship book site, with author interviews in every form (video, audio, text), original book reviews, and soon: Other Reviewers Besides Me (all of whom are credentialed critics, authors, and journalists). Check out "PBS + Books," too, for a fresh perspective on who's reading what.

BN.com/CenterStage: I moderate this weekly chat with today's most exciting authors.

BN.com/UnabashedlyBookish: I contribute twice a week to this group blog for the B&N Community.

NY1: You can find me talking up books twice a month on this Manhattan cable news channel; here's a link to my latest appearance about summer books.

More soon, I promise -- but at the moment, I've got to dash over to Book Expo America and see my people!

Love the One You're With: Book Review Ethics Re-examined, Part Two

Before writing this post, I took the time to read over Garth Risk Hallberg's long and excellent post on The Millions about the future of book coverage. I was intrigued by his penultimate paragraph:

"Finally, no reimagining of the NYTBR will succeed without more rigorous attention to the quality of the writing. With its privileging of print, the NYTBR has tended to assign books to authors rather than to critics; if the NBCC is to be believed, however, there's now a great untapped pool of the latter out there, just waiting for the next call to arms."

I think that this brief excerpt is quite important to my previous post, but let me recap that post for just a moment before I explain why I think Risk Hallberg's words are so important. When I left off, I was talking about the ethical divide between British and American book critics, one that I've heard held up by my esteemed colleague Michael Dirda, who has said in the past that The Washington Post Book World does not assign reviews to to people who have so much as interviewed an author, let alone someone who has developed a friendship with said author. (One of his fellow panelists at the time, novelist Katharine Weber, said that no such rule was in place at Publishers Weekly -- but I daresay that's because PW's "industry standard" reviews are almost all published without bylines.)

Now, like everyone else, I've noticed that the standalones (I would say this is now singular, but remember: Book World does continue to exist online!) have assigned more and more reviews to "authors" rather than to "critics." Hmmm. Who has a bigger axe to grind with another author -- his or her fellow author, who (as often as not) has written a similar and/or competing book? Or a professional critic, whose standards and goals are much different? 

I don't think that we need to throw the author out with the critical bathwater; there's certainly a place for reviews written by authors -- many of whom are well-established critics, too. Author bylines can draw more eyeballs, and it can be much more interesting to read a review by an author and/or expert. 

Yet since many authors are also critics...many critics are also authors! There actually is a vast, untapped pool of talent out there; the only mistake is that it's not all within the NBCC corral (full disclosure: I am a dues-paying member of the NBCC). Several of the best-published authors I know who also write book reviews have either let their NBCC membership lapse, or have never joined, despite penning reviews for top publications, both print and online. 

If we don't have to "mind the gap" between authors reviewing other authors' work, why should we have to do so as critics reviewing authors' work? Why can't we simply all be grownups and understand that criticism does not by its nature mean that ad hominem attacks will follow? I've written before about critical and/or negative reviews I've crafted that, once published, resulted in truly thoughtful and sometimes even grateful responses from authors. I mention those critical reviews so that you will understand I don't believe that reviews written by critics who know the author will always result in soft-shoe twaddle, either.

I don't have all the answers, and there are many bones to be picked with the things I've said here. However, I do believe that it's been far too long since we looked at this issue, and it has become crucial that we do look at it carefully in our new media universe.

Next: A Modest Proposal

Logrolling in Our Time: Book Review Ethics Re-examined, Part One

I grew up too close and yet too far from Manhattan: Too far to actually visit regularly, but too close to avoid knowing what I was missing. Each time I did get a teenaged trek into "The City," it was too little of what I longed for. Heading back home on a dingy MetroNorth train meant always leaving too early (trains are scarce after 11 p.m.) and incurring depression as I re-entered a town without a bookstore (this was long before there was a B&N in every strip mall, kiddies; "Barnes & Noble" meant the Fifth Avenue store, and it was Mecca). 

But the Metro-NYC network affiliates reached our Hudson Valley home, and so did other kinds of media. I am just old enough to remember SPY Magazine's tongue-in-chic heyday, and how its po-mo schtick features seemed hip beyond belief (come to think of it, Elvis Costello is as mired in his look from that time period as founding SPY editor Graydon Carter is in his).

One of those was the cheeky "Logrolling in Our Time," which provided examples of authors giving blurbs to each other, either obsequiously, suspiciously, or both. While jacket blurbs are supposed to come from authors acting as disinterested peers, let's face it: Publishing is a relationship game. I haven't even published a piece of fiction, yet I've had a few famous authors tell me that they admire my writing so much that they'd be happy to give me a blurb if I ever do. That isn't because they were trying to curry favor or a good review (most of these encounters had nothing to do with reviews). Giving a blurb is something that authors can do for people, and in an industry that doesn't involve swag suites at every event or producer gigs, an honest and freely given blurb for a book seems rather innocent.

Yes, yes, yes: Some blurbs are smarmy and dishonest. Further discussion of those another time. My point today is that logrolling qua logrolling isn't always a terrible thing. For example, sometimes the only way an unknown writer can get his work noticed is to have a blurb from a very famous writer on it, garnered from time in an MFA workshop or from having a manuscript passed along via a friend of the very famous writer's. My point today is that few among us can afford to avoid all networking, favors, and conflicts of interest. We try to avoid the big ones, but honestly: If Richard Russo sincerely recommended your novel to a book critic (as he did recommend one of his MFA student's to me, during an interview), would you say "Oh, no, please, book critic, do not read my work. It is tainted for you because of my prior relationship with Russo. I only want readers who come to my work without such brainwashing."

HAAAAAAhahahahaha. Hee, hee, hee. Ooooo, that's a good one. 

What would be wrong, and why "Logrolling in our Time" was so funny, is if you became as famous as Russo, and the two of you just started giving lovely, vapid compliments to each other's books as a kind of insider-trading scheme. Who cares if the book is good, bad, or indifferent? We'll push its sales no matter what! Besides, what fools those reading mortals be; they have no idea whether or book is good, or not. 

No one wants that. No one wants to have writers giving empty praise to their cronies, and that's why for many years in the United States, book critics adhered to a policy of not reviewing books written by their friends, relatives, and colleagues. 

I say "in the United States" because in the United Kingdom, the literary world is too small for such standards. If British authors waited for someone they don't know to write a review, they wouldn't get any reviews. We all know about the famous Amis (see what I did there? Of course, I'm the woman who gave one child the middle name "Grace Kelly" inadvertently, because I was trying to get my maiden name of "Kelly" in there)-versus-Barnes review wars -- but those were a matter of ad hominem attacks coming into reviews, rather than stemming from them. Most of the time, writers across the pond get a bad review from someone they know professionally and/or personally -- and just keep going.

Next: Love the One You're With: Book Review Ethics Re-examined, Part Two

The Curious Case of the Flippant Release Letter, Part Two

Even Publishers Weekly can't keep up with the bloggers, hehehe. They're writing about this hit for Quirk, while we're busy hitting back!

Just kidding, Quirk Books. We bloggers love all publishers, even if you don't love us back the way we deserve to be loved. But let me continue the story I began in my previous post. QuirkBooksPR (henceforth known as QBPR) said that Flavorwire's Victoria O'Toole had omitted part of the original letter addressed to "Hey Blogger Friends." I asked her to send me the Letter in Full, which she did. I am going to scan the letter in and show it to you, but the omitted material is rather brief, so I can share it with you by typing it in. Here's what QBPR wrote that was not published on Flavorwire:

"Okay, enough of the serious stuff.  If you have any questions, my contact information is below.

Thanks again, and thanks for your support!"

You got it. Her "serious stuff" is our discontent. That was the "second half" of the letter. Hmmm. My fractions and hers do not match.

Yes, QBPR does thank the "blogger friends." That's not really enough, but it's also not the real story here. PRs make gaffes all the time (and I made many during my achingly brief tenure as a publicist, so I am a tad more sympathetic than some other bloggers might be towards Stupid PR Tricks. There are plenty of Stupid Blogger Tricks, too). QBPR whipped off a letter a little too quickly and sent it out without further thought. It probably (as O'Toole notes) won't and hasn't hurt the book at all. In fact, QBPR said, with a sigh: "I didn't mean to create a stir, but there's no such thing as too much publicity, I guess." You might groan back and say "Oh, puhleez." I just note all of this For The Record.

To me, the real story is about how bloggers are going to choose to be treated. I don't believe that QBPR's intentions were evil, but that doesn't mean the letter should be given a free ride. Simply tacking on a "Thanks" to a letter isn't enough to stop book bloggers from saying Wait. Hold on there a minute. Why are we being treated this way?

QBPR says that several bloggers sent nasty emails when they were asked to take down material due to the embargo. I can understand those nasty emails; perhaps those bloggers received the FIRST LETTER and had never been made aware of the embargo! 

Therein lies the rub, to me: Bloggers are not mindreaders. "Several" bloggers who unwittingly wrote to complain about having to take down content are a) not wrong and b) should not make a publicist talk down to all other bloggers. 

I'll say again: I don't consider this to be all QBPR's fatal flaw. A true and full discussion of book blogging as a professional activity with professional boundaries has yet to be made. I do not say that lightly. A few weeks ago, I attended the annual National Book Critics Circle Annual Meeting and Awards, and I was astonished how little many print-based critics knew about blogs and social media and how hostile many of them were to the idea that book coverage, book reviews, and publishing news could be covered properly in any medium other than a newspaper column or a magazine page. 

It is my sincere hope that this kerfuffle over one PR's flippant approach to book bloggers will be the catalyst for a debate about how the entire publishing industry -- publicists, editors, marketing managers, salespeople -- treat book bloggers and literary web sites. Yes, I'm biased. Yes, I could go on. 

But I prefer to hear from the wider community, first. I wish that QBPR had felt the same way before The Flippant Letter found its way into anyone's mailbox. I look forward to your comments, tweets, emails, feedback, and flames.

The Curious Case of the Flippant Release Letter, Part One

NB: If you'd like to follow some of this controversy on Twitter, the hashtag is #quirkppz

It all began in early 2009 when the ever-quirky Quirk Books folks revealed that they would be publishing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a new novel by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. 

Don't laugh. This book has just hit #3 on The New York Times Bestseller List. Love it or hate it, Grahame-Smith's literary mashup is...COMING TO GET YOU. (See my post about making up litmash titles. Some of these are hilarious!)

Anyirreverentway, lots and lots of people got excited about this book, and those people included lots and lots of litbloggers. So many litbloggers (yours truly included) blogged about the book that Quirk's PR department set up a site/email address so that bloggers could request review copies. On that site, they originally stated that there were 50 copies to give away. Quirk PR told this Maven that they actually wound up sending out 100 that way, to bloggers. (Another NB: Nonblogging reviewers received review copies with a different letter than the one I'm about to mention, a fact which I learned from a Twitter user and which has been confirmed by Quirk. You can see that letter here and here and here and here. Please also note that that last photo displays that the book is available for "excerpt, feature, or review." According to Quirk Books, after that letter went out, an exclusive excerpt deal was made with a particular source (NB: I am waiting to here which publication that was).

Full disclosure (or is it "Full Did Not Get?"): I did not ask Quirk for an early review copy via that site, so I did not receive a copy with the letter I'm about to mention.

WHAT FRICKING LETTER? you now want to scream. Hey, I'm building up tension. Literary mashups do that, and so do blog writers. Only kidding...

This week was release week for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Its content was embargoed until a certain date. Those are two facts you need to know in order to understand this post from Flavorwire, written by Kristen O'Toole. She calls the scanned letter from Quirk Books "a lesson in how not to treat bloggers." I don't want to reproduce what has already been reproduced, but from the salutation "Hey blogger friends" to the breezy explanation of what "embargo" means and on to the "If you don't abide by these terms, we will never work together again" line, many a litblogger took umbrage at this letter's flippant tone. 

Bloggers already work really hard at establishing credibility, and there is a longstanding, ongoing debate about whether or not bloggers are "real" critics and write "real" reviews (More full disclosure: I face these challenges squarely with my fellow book and litbloggers. Even though I am a member of the National Book Critics Circle and have published reviews in respected, editor-vetted publications, my blog reviews remain suspect. Even to Mr. Bethanne.)

When I came to this Twitter discussion today, via my blog reader, fellow Twitterholic, and Northern Virginia colleague @SKrishna (her Twitter handle, or TweetName), I knew I couldn't leave it be. First, what could the publicist have been thinking? Second, I need a copy of this book!

Using all of my journalistic might, I uncovered the Quirk Books phone number. (Read: I Google'd "Quirk Books" and found it under "Contact Us" on their web site.) I had to draw on more mad journo skills to pick up the 'phone and call PR to find out what was going on with this seen-as-disrespectful letter.

Quirk Books PR was genuinely shocked to learn that Quirk Books PR had become a story, instead of generating a story. QBPR had not seen the tweets about the Flavorwire story, let alone the story. I sent her the link and we discussed it after she had a few minutes to read it through. 

Her immediate reaction? "Kristen O'Toole cut off the bottom of my letter!" 

That, my tweeple and readers, is the first part of the story.

Next: The Purloined Paragraphs

The Power of Bigmouth Marketing, Part Two: Glenn Taylor Gets His NY Groove On

Since Richard Nash (@r_nash on Twitter) just tweeted a link to Part One, I thought I'd better get busy with Part Two.

When last I wrote, I told you about how I blogged a bit about M. Glenn Taylor's novel "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" from West Virginia University Press. 

A day or so later, I received a lovely email from the author himself, thanking me for the mention. I also received a lovely email from Dr. Mr. Reverend Neighbor's wonderful wife, thanking me for the mention. I was happy. I thought: I have done something good and honest, and the people involved noticed. 'Nuff.

So I was flabbergasted, a few weeks later, to receive an email from a young woman whose name was completely unknown to me -- but her email indicated that she was with the Susan Golomb Agency. I know Susan Golomb! This new agent (a former big-publishing-house employee) wrote that she was a big fan of my blog, and particularly liked to check out what I was currently reading. "Because of you," she continued, "I've just signed my first client."

Guess who? Yes, M. Glenn Taylor!

Not only did this agent sign Glenn as a client of her agency -- she (immediately, it seems, but I'm sure it took a little work!) got him a two-book deal with Ecco. They'll be re-releasing "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" this summer, and Glenn is working on his next novel. 

Now, I have no idea how Glenn's book bubbled up the National Book Critics Circle voting tree this year. I certainly didn't get it onto the list nominees for the NBCC Fiction Award all by myself. I'm not claiming that I have special powers of literary discernment; many of my colleagues were evidently just as discerning as I am (joke!). 

However, I do know that my blog helped nudge a winner closer to the starting block. As I read that email from Glenn's new agent, I could not have been happier or prouder than if I'd just had my own first novel published (hey! pigs do fly!). 

"The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" did not win this year's NBCC Fiction Award -- but I'm pretty sure Glenn Taylor didn't mind at all. His book had been considered in the same company as those of Roberto Bolano, Marilynne Robinson. But there was one more treat to come...