According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called "Wuhan-400" - eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a "kill‑rate" of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the "perfect" biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.
Links of the week March 2 2020 (10)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
9 March 2020
But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer's Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.
In Homer's Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollo's priests. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.
The novelist didn't realize how fervently society wants to turn us into calculators - every action has a payment or a fee - until she had her first child. Here she reckons with motherhood's ticking meter: every minute with her kids is work lost, and each minute writing subtracts from precious, un-price-able joy.
The Meter Keeps Ticking
Today, I am thirty-seven weeks pregnant with our second child. I promised to turn in a draft of this piece before the end of the week. I just dropped off our first child, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, at his daycare, which he attends part-time on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I'm drinking coffee that I purchased at the gas station, $2.59 for a bucket-sized cup; the flavor was labeled "Turbo." Now I feel like there is a blinding sunrise happening inside my mind. Coffee has turned the baby inside me into a fetal ninja, but it has not yet helped me to find the words I need, or my rhythm on the page.
If you had asked the late Christopher Booker, the English journalist and author would have told you there are a limited number of story plots to go around. He had such conviction in his theory that he even wrote a book about it. According to Booker, every novel falls into one of seven plot categories: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, or rebirth.
While stories are rarely this monochrome, there may be some truth to Booker's claim-especially when it comes to mysteries. Mystery novels already tend to follow a formula; you've got your inciting incident, call to action, trail of evidence, and so on. There's almost always a sleuth, whether amateur or professional, pitted against some cagey suspects in a quest to find a killer. The voyage and return plot that sees a protagonist leaving home, facing trials, and coming back changed is quite prevalent, and whether that voyage is literal or figurative, the character arc it creates is a pillar of good fiction.
Mystery writers pull from the same stack of literary devices, including flashbacks, foreshadowing, and metaphor. The same goes for narrative techniques like cliffhangers and ticking clocks. In other words, no matter how you shuffle the deck, there are always a finite number of cards to choose from.
A few years ago, I was surprised to open a newspaper and read that the head teacher of a London public school had decided to ban my books from his library. He described the adventures of Alex Rider, which have sold around 20 million- copies worldwide, in terms so derogatory that I have no mind to repeat them. Suffice it to say that the article quite put me off my cornflakes.
But the strange thing was that - once I had got past the sheer offensiveness of his language and a mindset that believed that banning books could ever have good connotations - I was actually quite sympathetic to his wider point of view. Everyone agrees that children benefit from reading, but we seldom discuss what exactly we would like them to read. I've always believed that a worthwhile children's book should encourage young readers to raise their game; it should enlighten and illuminate as well as entertain. And that is what I hope I've written.
Last week newspapers reported that J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series seemed to have fallen out of favour with secondary pupils, who were instead turning to titles such as David Walliams's Gangsta Granny and Mr Stink. Personally, I find Walliams entertaining and I think Tony Ross, whose illustrations often take up most of the page, is a genius. If children like these books, it would be crazy to put them off buying them. But that said, Rowling reinvented modern children's literature, created a fully realised world that ignited the dreams of millions, and proved that a book with 600 pages could still be manageable. I read this news with a heavy heart.
Malorie Blackman took to Twitter to explain her position this weekend in the wake of some negative reaction to Thursday evening's broadcast of the first of six episodes of a new BBC dramatisation of her 2001 novel for young adults.
Her book examines life in an alternative Britain where black people dominate national life and have most of the money, the imagined legacy of an African colonial powerbase in "Albion".
Writing in the Daily Mail, Calvin Robinson argued that "it was less a TV show than a political statement". He added: "In places, at its worst, Noughts & Crosses stoops to naked race-baiting, stirring up antipathy under the pretence of attacking racist attitudes."
Robinson's comments have been supported by online commentators and on Saturday Blackman responded. "To those accusing me of being anti-white or stating I must hate white people to create such a story as Noughts & Crosses, I'm not even going to dignify your absurd nonsense with a response. Go take a seat waaaay over there in the cold, dark and bitter haters' corner," she wrote.
Simon & Schuster, the publishing powerhouse behind best-selling authors like Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin and Judy Blume, is up for sale.
Its owner, ViacomCBS, announced Wednesday that, after a "strategic review," the book publisher was no longer essential to its business and that it would seek a buyer.
Founded as a publisher of crossword puzzle books in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, Simon & Schuster expanded into a major house with 50 imprints, including Charles Scribner%u2019s Sons, the publisher of 20th-century heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. The company now has 1,350 employees and publishes roughly 2,000 books a year. Notable Simon & Schuster authors include Annie Proulx, Bob Woodward, Walter Isaacson and Hillary Clinton.
The Scottish Poetry Library Library focusing on contemporary poetry written in Scotland in Scots, Gaelic and English. Can borrow free in person, but 50p charge for postal borrowings. www.spl.org.uk
In a February statement pointing to its code of conduct, the library said there had recently been "bullying" and calls for no-platforming-a term meaning barring people from public debate-of some writers following an "escalation, particularly on social media, of disharmony".
Its director Asif Khan told the National that social media "pile ons" against some authors had affected their mental health and incomes. In its statement, the library stressed it would not work with writers who engaged in online abuse. It said: "This does not mean that we are taking sides in any particular debate but we will not be passive if we are made aware of behaviours within our community that do not align with our values."
But around 200 other people including Lionel Shriver and Father Ted" creator Graham Linehan have now signed a letter supporting the library's "unequivocal stance". Some did so under pseudonyms, saying they were afraid of repercussions. It says: "From universities to arts organisations, libraries and government departments, the no-platforming and bullying of anyone holding views not actively endorsing extreme gender ideology is destroying our cultural life.
When Hachette bought Woody Allen's autobiography, they no doubt expected it to be controversial. And no doubt they expected it to be a commercial success.
He is, after all, one of the great American writers and directors. And the notoriety and outrage that have continued since his daughter Dylan Farrow accused him of sexual abuse bring additional interest regarding what he might have to say on the subject. Following the staff walkout on Friday, and critical statements from Dylan and Ronan Farrow, they have now dropped the book. Very swiftly, the book became too damaging to Hachette's reputation to publish.
This is worrying for writers and for readers. The staff at Hachette who walked out last week clearly thought that they were doing the right thing morally - protesting against the publication of a book by a man who has been accused of abusing his own child. But, as has been repeated many times, Woody Allen was investigated on two occasions and has never been charged. While Dylan and Ronan accuse Woody Allen, he has not been found guilty. Nothing has been proven. There is in fact no acceptable reason for not publishing Woody Allen's book.
2 March 2020
One of the world's biggest international literary events, the London book fair, has been cancelled over coronavirus fears, amid growing anger that the delay in calling it off was putting people's health at risk and an unfair financial strain on publishers.
Organiser Reed Exhibitions announced on Wednesday that the escalation of the illness meant the fair, scheduled to run from 10 to 12 March, would be called off. Around 25,000 publishers, authors and agents from around the world had been due to attend the event, where deals for the hottest new books are struck.
But the event was already set to be a ghost town when it opened its doors, after publishers and rights agencies began withdrawing en masse over the last week. Some of the world's biggest, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette had already pulled out, as had Amazon and a host of literary agencies including Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing.
I strongly advocate all authors start and maintain a website as part of their long-term marketing efforts and ongoing platform development. But it's an intimidating project because so few authors have been in a position to create, manage, or oversee websites. Where do you even begin?
With this guide, I hope to answer all the most frequently asked questions and make the process a manageable one.
Buy your own domain
The domain is the URL where your site lives, and it should be based on the name you publish under, not your book title. Your author name is your brand that will span decades and every single book you publish. If you can't get yourname.com, then try for yournameauthor.com, yournamebooks.com, or yournamewriter.com. If that fails, consider something other than .com (like .net or .me).
There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space - and these things cost money
Let's start with me: I'm not sure how or if I'd still be a writer without the help of other people's money. I have zero undergrad debt. Of my three years of grad school, two of them were funded through a teaching fellowship; my parents helped pay for the first. The last two years my stipend barely covered the childcare I needed to travel uptown three days a week to teach and go to class and my husband's job is what kept us afloat.
Once, before a debut novelist panel geared specifically to aspiring writers, one of the novelists with whom I was set to speak mentioned to me that they'd hired a private publicist to promote their book. They told me it cost nearly their whole advance but was worth it, they said, because this private publicist got them on a widely watched talkshow. During this panel, this writer mentioned to the crowd at one point that they "wrote and taught exclusively", and I kept my eyes on my hands folded in my lap. I knew this writer did much of the same teaching I did, gig work, often for between $1,500-$3,000 for a six to eight-week course; nowhere near enough to sustain one's self in New York. I knew their whole advance was gone, and that, if the publicist did pay off, it would be months before they might accrue returns.
Editing is energizing, where you take your solid creation and nudge it into brilliance. It's taking a pile of words and shaping it into something that resembles the story you envisioned. Sometimes, a book looks mighty ugly in its early draft form, but even rough, flawed words are so much better than a blank page. You've already conquered the blank page. No problem, right? Now it's time to push up your sleeves again. Here are four exercises to help you notably improve your story.
We all want to be active players in our own life, right? Not someone pushed around by everything that happens to us. Characters are the same way. Reading a day-by-day accounting of someone is not as thrilling as reading a day-by-day, turn-by-turn, twist-by-twist story of a character taking charge of whatever situation they are in for better or worse, for guts and glory.
Do things happen to your character, or are they an active player in the story? A powerful protagonist should not only react to different circumstances. They need to make choices on their own. They need to have agency. They need to be an active player in their own story.
As a reader of thrillers and mysteries for close to my whole life, I've always been drawn to the flawed protagonist, the vulnerable hero, the amateur with a hill to climb. I do occasionally crack a book in which a mythic hero-Jack Reacher, say, or Miss Marple-saves the day by virtue of being stronger or smarter or purer than their adversaries, but I'll usually wander back into fictional realms where ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary situations.
And these days some of these ordinary heroes are grappling with more than just a murderer in their midst. There has been an explosion of recent books in the mystery and thriller genre in which the protagonist is dealing with psychological disorders. Along with the melancholic and alcoholic detectives that have become the norm, we've seen agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder creep into the narratives.
Writing in the Observer in 1980, Martin Amis took to task a young New York-based writer, Jacob Epstein, for plagiarising him. In Wild Oats, Epstein had taken not just plot structures or character ideas from Amis's debut, The Rachel Papers, but had duplicated whole sentences. "The boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague," Amis wrote - but Epstein had "decisively breached" that "hazy" line. Rather magnanimously, Amis went on to praise Epstein as a writer of talent; he simply believed that the similarities ought to be made public.
That boundary remains hazy. Among the 13 novels longlisted for this year's International Booker prize, announced last week, is Red Dog by Willem Anker, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel W Heyns. It tells the story of Coenraad de Buys, a seven-foot agent of war who lived and died in the violent, fractured Cape Colony. When I reviewed the novel, unfavourably, in the Times Literary Supplement, my objections lay not just in what I found to be a derivative, repetitious and at times deeply unpleasant book, but in a few sections that bore a striking resemblance to those in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which raised - as I wrote then - "some discussion about the nature and justification of plagiarism".
As we celebrate World Book Day in the UK, our country's strong connection with children's books is clear to see. It is a reminder of how fortunate we are to have a strong children's book publishing industry, evident as schoolchildren mark World Book Day by dressing up as their favourite characters from Harry Potter to Paddington Bear. British children's authors have inspired young readers at home and abroad, creating life-long fans of literature.
While a cause for celebration, World Book Day should also be a time to reflect on the urgent need to end illiteracy around the globe. There are over 700 million people in the world who are still unable to read and write, including 115 million young people. At Room to Read, we believe World Change Starts with Educated Children.
By educating children, we can empower communities to overcome their challenges, from poverty to climate change. We need children to fulfil their potential to create a safer and more prosperous world.
That is why we must redouble our efforts to end the damaging impacts of illiteracy. To achieve this, we need to think about deep and meaningful change, with a focus on publishing children's books.
Our world, more than at any time in history, is all about stories. Snapchat feeds capture your entire day, Instagram users meticulously curate their pages and stories, and detailed Twitter threads recount what happened on the morning commute. We are storytellers, narrators, transmitters of tales - occasionally those of others but mostly our own. We've been assured we all have a story and what we need is the courage and space to tell it. But these days it's not enough just to have an experience, or even just to share it. People feel compelled to claim stories, to plant a flag and proclaim: "This is mine." Instinctively, some people privilege their own experience over any other; that their story is always the "authentic" one.
When that story is rooted in trauma, a whole host of ethical implications suddenly come into play. How do we tell the story of such experiences? Why should we? To what extent does it desensitise the audience to future stories? And perhaps the most pertinent question, at least in this Era of Authenticity, is: who gets to tell it?