I can still remember the strange thrill I experienced on first reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré's third novel, published in 1963, and the one that made his name and brought him lasting international success. I must have been in my early 20s, I suppose, but I can vividly recall that feeling of privileged access that the book gave to you - as if you were being let into a private club, a clandestine world for initiates only. It was a bafflingly difficult novel, also, and that added to the engagement. When I came to read more le Carré I discovered that you, the reader, were expected to pay attention. Only that way could you participate in the slow and tortuous decryption of what was going to be revealed as the narrative unspooled.
Links of the week December 21 2020 (52)
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:
28 December 2020
John le Carré didn't invent the literary spy novel. He joined a tradition, and made it new and invigorating. It's a very British tradition, as well. No other literary culture has embraced the espionage novel as we have done. You can argue that the first proponent was Joseph Conrad with his books The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). W Somerset Maugham wrote spy fiction, as did Eric Ambler and Lawrence Durrell (Mountolive is a spy novel, in its elaborate way) and, also, pre-eminently, Graham Greene.
"Perplexed" was a common reaction. Rowling had never been a particularly controversial figure. Her books sold hundreds of millions of copies, they inspired films that brought in billions of dollars, and she used the money she made to save children from orphanages. In 2012, she gave enough to charity and paid enough in taxes to knock herself off the Forbes billionaires list. In 2020, she was tweeting links to a store that sold pins that said F*CK YOUR PRONOUNS.
Read another way, though, the latest turn in Rowling's story looks perhaps less perplexing than inevitable. It is the culmination of a two-decade power struggle for ownership of her fictional world - the right to say what Harry Potter means. The Harry Potter books describe a stark moral universe: Their heroes fight on behalf of all that is good to defeat the forces of absolute evil. Though the struggle may be lonely and hard, right ultimately beats wrong. For fans, when it came to the matter of trans rights, the message of Harry Potter was clear. For Rowling, this was no less the case.
If you are not someone who spends much time with young children, you may only be dimly aware of Donaldson's work - although you will probably be familiar with her most famous creation, the Gruffalo. If you have children, however, you will know her as a cultural juggernaut whose influence among children is perhaps only surpassed by the works of Disney and CBeebies. Donaldson, who is 72, has written more than 210 books: chiefly picture books, but also poetry, plays, a 60-part phonics reading scheme and a novel for preteens.
Every night at bedtime, millions of children - pyjamas on, teeth reluctantly brushed - curl up to read or listen to a Donaldson story. Her fans include Michelle Obama and Prince William, who awarded Donaldson a CBE in 2019. 2Julia Donaldson is the unassailable queen of picture books," Kes Gray, creator of the hit Oi Frog! series, told me. The bestselling children's author David Walliams called Donaldson a "complete and utter genius," adding: "I am in total awe of her talent."
I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I'd just finished the novel I'd been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren't hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I'll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers-novels, memoirs, essays, histories-things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks.
How other people live is pretty much all I think about. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out. People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don't add up to a plot. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed - one action springboards into another, greater action. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life.
Covid-19 has radically transformed the ways people live and work. For those who are in the business of making children's books-which are as much art objects as works of fiction or nonfiction-the pandemic has forced art and design professionals to both reevaluate their workflow and assess what has been lost and gained in these unpredictable times.
Many who PW spoke with detailed the dramatic changes to the day-to-day of producing a book and the shift to working remotely. "When we moved to a work-from-home environment, we had to figure out very quickly how to maintain a level of quality of our books while limiting the number of touchpoints between those objects," says Raymond Colón, director of production at Macmillan Children's Publishing Group.
The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle and Netflix have agreed to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the author's estate, which alleged that the film Enola Holmes infringed copyright by depicting a warmer and more emotional version of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle died in 1930, and while the majority of his writing is in the public domain, 10 of his stories about the famous detective remain under copyright in the US. In the UK, where copyright lasts for 70 years after an author's death, all Holmes stories are out of copyright.
The estate argued that Holmes was previously depicted by Conan Doyle as "aloof and unemotional". But when the author lost his son during the first world war, and his brother four months later, "it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind. Holmes needed to be human. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy ... He became capable of friendship. He could express emotion. He began to respect women."
The suit claimed that Springer's novels, in which she created a younger sister for Holmes, and the film adaptation starring Millie Bobby Brown in the title role, made "extensive use" of the copyrighted stories, which "constitutes wilful, deliberate, and ongoing infringement of the Conan Doyle Estate's copyrights".
For the publishing industry, 2020 began with an explosion and ended with a contraction.
In January, a book positioned to be the first big release of the year found itself embroiled in controversy as soon as it hit shelves. American Dirt, about a Mexican mother and son struggling to make it to the US border, sold at auction for a reported seven figures and arrived with glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King. But it was greeted by furious reviews and an unexpected media narrative.
As 2020 wore on, more and more workers within the industry voiced their general disenchantment with its inequitable truths. Staffers walked out of the publishing house Hachette Book Group after it announced it would be publishing Woody Allen's memoir. Black authors started the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe to draw attention to the disparities between advances received by white authors and those received by authors of color. An ensuing #BlackoutTheBestSellers campaign sought to bring attention to the vast purchasing power Black audiences offer despite the fact that publishing tends to underserve them. Publishing's Day of Action became an industry-wide walkout. A private Slack group emerged as a place for labor organizing.
A new interactive article from the New York Times examines just how white the publishing industry actually is. And despite the number of high-profile books from non-white authors in recent years, the demographic data is bleak: according to their data, 95 percent of published authors are white.
We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author's race, 95 percent were written by white people.
At this point, what is really left to say about 2020? It was pretty bad, overall. Some parts were okay. There were some good books. There were some bad actions. There were some much-needed reckonings. Our lives and listicle intros were overwhelmed by a deadly pandemic (bad), a treasonous president (worse), and righteous protests (better, but bittersweet). Still, time stops for no man nor website, and soon it will be 2021. Is the transition from one year to the other symbolic at best? Of course. But this is how we register the shape of our lives, not to mention our content, so there's no use stopping now.
The glut of books this season has caused its own problems, as authors and publishers find themselves not only competing for limited attention but also for limited paper, as the country's two major printing companies are in dire straits. "Print runs for new titles are getting squeezed and pushed back," wrote Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. "Carefully calibrated publication schedules are being blown up as books are moved into late fall and even next year. . .
At 8 p.m. on March 22, the capital of the American book publishing business all but shut down. Two days earlier, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York had announced stay-at-home orders that would temporarily shutter all in-person businesses throughout the state that were not deemed essential-bookstores, libraries, and publishers among them-in order to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon, similar orders were put in place across the country, affecting employees of book-related businesses from coast to coast.
The most important people in the book business in 2020 are not the powerhouse agents or the megabestselling authors or the Big Five CEOs. They are the booksellers, debut and midlist authors, editors, librarians, printers, publicists, sales representatives, and warehouse workers, to mention just a few - the workers, who have been the most important people in the business all along.
Mr. Hannaham was just one of countless targets in a mysterious international phishing scam that has been tricking writers, editors, agents and anyone in their orbit into sharing unpublished book manuscripts. It isn't clear who the thief or thieves are, or even how they might profit from the scheme. High-profile authors like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan have been targeted, along with celebrities like Ethan Hawke. But short story collections and works by little-known debut writers have been attacked as well, even though they would have no obvious value on the black market.
In fact, the manuscripts do not appear to wind up on the black market at all, or anywhere on the dark web, and no ransoms have been demanded. When copies of the manuscripts get out, they just seem to vanish. So why is this happening? "The real mystery is the endgame," said Daniel Halpern, the founder of Ecco, who has been the recipient of these emails and has also been impersonated in them. "It seems like no one knows anything beyond the fact of it, and that, I guess you could say, is alarming."
In my latest romance novel, How to Catch a Queen, my heroine finally achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a queen following an arranged marriage-only to find herself in a country where the voices of women aren't respected, and queens are powerless.
The "happily ever after" comes only after Shanti and her king, Sanyu, navigate toxic masculinity, a government made of old men who refuse to respect fresh ideas from younger generations, and a community of marginalized people who organize in the back of a bookstore to help drag their country into the future.
Somehow, despite a history of politically engaged books, some of them written by political stars like Stacey Abrams, people still see romance novels as apolitical fantasy fluff. (That would make for a delicious Ben & Jerry's flavor, wouldn%u2019t it?) The fact that so many assume the romance genre can't be political - that it isn't inherently so - is, well, political in itself.