What I've Been Reading

hopefully not any pisseurs de copie*

Last chance to sign up for my nonfiction book proposal course— starts Monday!

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Publishing Related

—This review of Monsters by Laura Kipnis, discussing “biographical supremicism,” indirectly outlines problems with how many are currently reviewing, assessing, and commissioning books right now:

“This is now our official national culture: Exemplary conduct is required of all (even the dead), deviations will be career-ending. Artists once again serve at the pleasure of officialdom, whose purview—like the surveillance state itself—grows more total by the day.

Do we really want musicians to rein in the eros, filmmakers not to depict anything sexually untoward, allegations to equal guilt? Artists of decades and centuries past to be held to present-day comportment standards? The consensus appears to be yes. What a prissy and punitive world ours has become.”

This current current is nothing new: it was much the same in my undergraduate days, too. But when a 30-something writer I admire told me he won’t read a famous midcentury woman writer because he “heard she was anti-semitic,” I become terribly, terribly sad, too tired of this to be angry (thanks to Kipnis for doing it for me). Nor is calling out a biographical fallacy something only male critics can do; women can, too. Here I am, calling it out.

—An absolute banger from the consistently banging SHuSH by Kenneth Whyte.

“Without a critical mass of commercially viable publishers, the whole of our independent book publishing industry will eventually collapse, taking the art with it…”

Would that Belt were Canadian, and eligible for government grants! Except that would still not be enough!

—Related, a great read from Christine Sneed:

“Some observers of the industry claim presses need to publish celebrity and influencer titles to keep the lights on, but I don’t buy it for a second. They don’t have to do a lot of the things they do, such as allow auctions to vault well past the threshold of good sense and accountability,…

The same media conglomerates running the Hollywood studios own most of the corporate publishing industry. Over the last few decades, these conglomerates bought up dozens of unique, editorial-led presses and were able to report annual gains to their shareholders because they’d acquired each new imprint’s assets. They weren’t selling more books, only buying up publishers and their entire backlists…

The argument that corporate presses are giving readers what they want doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, either. Readers are being marketed too. They’re being taught to want certain things—which is of course how advertising works. Who needed a Beanie Baby or a pet rock? No one. Ever. But they were bought by large numbers of people, and they made their purveyors millions of dollars because successful ad campaigns were mounted to flog these silly products.”

—I love browsing The Untranslated, a project focused on great literature currently inaccessible to English-only readers. It could use our support!

—More on the annoying, reigning aesthetic in book cover design.

—This project by Susan Straight to map American novels geographically parallels the mission of Belt. Our goal is not to celebrate a region; it is simply to point to it, and to highlight good writing.

At The Crossroads of Publishing and Leisure

—I continued my (Muriel) Sparkathon with A Far Cry from Kensington*, which a few of you recommended to me because it features publishing. And does it! Hahahahaha. My favorite it the printer who is owed money and stands on the sidewalk outside the building looking up at the office, all day, every day. He’s the literal email you receive every two weeks that you keep deleting. It’s a great novel, but The Girls of Slender Means remains my #1 Spark thus far.

Pure Leisure

—I read The Wager because who doesn’t love a good yarn, and that’s what it is—a fine seafaring tale. (I did wish it was something else, too, something more, but it isn’t.)

—I’m currently reading Age of Vice and really enjoying it! It is a bestseller but I’ve read little about it, even thought much has been written about it, reminding me once again how terribly siloed readers are ( like-minded friends are still asking me about Colleen Hoover!)

—I did not enjoy this overly stylized, derivative profile in Vanity Fair. We need a new magazine writing aesthetic! (Or a post-magazine writing style, perhaps)

—Speaking of stylized, I read about 2/3 of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs and then stopped, something I rarely do. I really like that Kerry Howley is playing with form and structure of a certain type of nonfiction is novel ways (pun not intended), but there was an animus or..something?…behind it that repelled me. And once I decided to look at the endnotes and/or bibliography to see how it was researched and reported, I was unpleasantly underwhelmed. I haven’t thought about my reactions to the book enough, nor finished it of course, so my response to it isn’t anything other than, well, vibes, as the kids say. At some point I’d like to read what others who have read it carefully say it about it. And maybe also finish it.

By My Press

Belt’s May and June titles are all now shipping from our Cleveland offices! Check ‘em out…

…and head over to Belt Publishing to buy yourself one or twelve.