Publishers Weekly has Victor LaValle’s response to Laura Miller’s ridiculous attack on the fiction judges of the National Book Award.
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A Good Fight
Posted in Reading
Tagged laura miller, national book foundation, publishers weekly, usa, victor lavalle
A Quiet Spot to Read, Write, and Think
Laura Miller at Salon explains why libraries still matter.
Posted in Reading
Tagged laura miller, library, new york, salon
Hours Spent Not Writing
Laura Miller of Salon questions the trend of author self-promotion.
It has become a mantra that today’s author–whether self- or conventionally published–must learn to promote his or her books. Some, like Eisler and Hocking, happen to be good at it, but many aren’t. People often become writers because they’re introverted or awkward in personal encounters and have poured everything they want to say to the world into their work.
Posted in Writing
Tagged laura miller, publishing, salon
Delicate Combination
Stories at National Public Radio and Salon are cautiously optimistic about the future of independent booksellers, noting Google’s revenue sharing program for e-books.
From the former:
“The potential is for there to be two trends,” [Jessica Stockton Bagnulo] explains. “Digital content—which is ubiquitous and everywhere—and the local, boutique, curated side. And the chain stores unfortunately don’t have the advantage in either of those areas. I mean, they can’t carry every book in the world in their store, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to their neighborhood that a local store does.”
And the latter:
If Google is as smart as it’s made out to be, it will realize that its indie bookstore affiliates are its secret weapon. Helping readers find new books and new favorite authors is their area of expertise.
Posted in Reading
Tagged bookselling, ebooks, google, laura miller, lynn neary, npr, salon, usa
Just to Tell You Once Again
Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with “Bad Writing,” a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don’t necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful.
At Salon Laura Miller riffs on the theme.
Posted in Writing
Tagged editing, laura miller, salon, steve almond, vernon lott
Kiddie Pool
Laura Miller of Salon reviews Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
It turned out that a whole lot of people were just then realizing that, like Carr, they had lost their ability to fully concentrate on long, thoughtful written works. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do,” Carr wrote. “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” At first assuming that his fractured mental state was the result of “middle-age mind rot,” Carr eventually concluded that his heavy Internet usage was to blame.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, internet, laura miller, nicholas carr, salon
The Only Books on Their Shelves
Laura Miller at Salon reviews Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America.
At the heart of the dispute between Olivier and Parrot is what Olivier calls “the awful tyranny of the majority” and his conviction that “there can be no art in a democracy.” An egalitarian society, he says, will support no “class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble.” And while Parrot cannot accept this proposition, he also recognizes that, for all his “aristocratic imbecility,” there is a radiant quality to Olivier that will fade from the earth with the eventual passing of his kind.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, laura miller, peter carey, salon
Utterly Ambiguous Moment
Laura Miller of Salon reviews David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.
In his introduction. . .Lipsky writes that when he pulled out these transcripts a year after Wallace’s death, “one thing kept touching me: We were both so young.” The text is studded with contemporary interjections noting that this independent bookstore has since shuttered, that literary publication has folded. The cultural apparatus that made the ascension of “Infinite Jest” possible no longer exists.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, david foster wallace, david lipsky, laura miller, salon, usa