At night, when I get home from work, or from whatever I’ve done after work, I open packages from publishers. Then I stack most of the books* along this wall, behind the dining room table and next to the liquor credenza. Classy, I know. But it’s an improvement.

At our old place, when the galleys piled up, Max and I had trouble getting to the pots and pans. The tower quickly grew into a fat square structure taller than our kitchen table that the cats enjoyed sunning on. We needed to rent or borrow a van before inviting guests over for dinner. Or, really, before inviting guests over at all.
 

When we fled Greenpoint rents and cramped quarters and bought a co-op two years ago, we chose a building with a part-time doorman, as a concession to the galley tidal wave. (Someone has to be around to sign for books while we do the things that actually pay the bills.) Luckily this apartment is huge** by New York standards, so it would take at least a year’s worth of accumulation to impede our meals or the preparation thereof. Friends can eat sitting down and stand to put on their coats afterward even if we let the stacks grow, as we have recently, for a couple of months.

Evidently the old place is still getting slammed, too. Someone recently wrote to say: “I wanted to let you know that tons and tons and tons of packages come to our building every week, and piles of it collect.” For the sake of those who who now live at my former address — and trust me, they need our sympathy for many reasons — let it be known far and wide that I no longer reside on Dupont Street.
 

See the glowing screen at left of the photo at the top of this post? It’s a (poorly-lit) shot of my new iPad. I’m hoping to reduce some of the tsuris by going galley-digital.

I know many reviewers want to receive everything in hard copy, and under different circumstances I might prefer that, too, but it would be a great help if publishers could send me ebooks whenever possible from now on. Sometimes I might want a physical book, for one reason or another. But if I do, I can ask for it.

For the record, the Maud household has plenty of shelved volumes, too.

* The fact that a book is haphazardly shoved against the wall does not mean I have not read or will not read it.

** And has a terrace! If you’re willing to move this far out, the living is easy.

What will happen to your email account, blog, or Twitter feed when you die?

New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.
 

In the current Wired, Scott Brown looks at “three companies — AssetLock.net, Legacy Locker, and the charmingly named Deathswitch.com — [that] have arisen to keep customers’ passwords, usernames, final messages, and so on in a virtual safe-deposit box.”

Here’s how it works: For around $10 to $30 per year, or $60 to $300 for a lifetime — prices depend on the services you want and how much you’re storing — these companies organize and store all Net-borne Protrusions of You… Once it’s determined that you’re fully and finally degaussed, your probate probes fan out across the Net, making your last epayments, Old Yellering your avatars, perhaps even euthanizing your FarmVille stock, and, ultimately, sending sign-off messages to friends, followers, frag-buddies, and hookups: “Status update: I’m dead. It’s been real!”

Under many circumstances, these lockboxes will work out fine. For instance, if you don’t have a will, but the person you’re handing the keys over to is the same person the law says should get them, no problem. And if you have a will, and it’s consistent with your online directions, okay.

But let’s pretend you’re a young, single writer who’s estranged from your parents (or you’re married, and in the process of getting divorced; you’re a storyteller — you can spin out the scenarios). You’ve kept a blog for years, and you die with no plan, except a digital lockbox, shortly after your first novel has been published to wild acclaim and unprecedented sales.
 

Under state intestacy law, your parents may very well be entitled to your blog and email account and the rest of your online accounts, even if you’ve directed a site to place them in the hands of your best friend, your lover, or your sister. As one site says:

AssetLock offers no legal expertise and therefore can not draft legal documents such as Wills or Trusts which dispose of property after your death… If you die without making valid documents such as Wills or Trusts, the state government will disperse and tax your assets and belongings for you according to the law, no matter what you wrote down in AssetLock.

Of course there would also be the matter of the proceeds from your novel — your parents would probably get those too — but at least, once the book was published, it couldn’t be deleted. Unlike a blog. Or your personal email.
 

If you’re a writer, and you don’t have a will, you really should make one. And if you’re not sure how, Neil Gaiman’s tutorial is a good place to start.

Vladimir Nabokov famously instructed his wife Vera to destroy his final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, if he didn’t live to complete it. At his death, the draft consisted of a stack of notecards which he’d shuffled through, added to, and rewritten right up until the end.

Vera, having once saved an early version of Lolita from the incinerator, found herself unable to carry out his wishes. The task fell to their son, Dmitri, who waffled for years — publicly and dramatically but also somewhat understandably so, for not only had Nabokov reaped the benefits of the Lolita rescue, he’d approved of the decision to save Kafka’s drafts against the author’s express commands. While Nabokov may have claimed to believe that every artist should “ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication,” many of his own papers survived him.
 

All the post-death uncertainty over the fate of the book culminated, finally, in publication last fall. The Original of Laura is a facsimile series of the original index cards, with transcriptions below them, which can be detached along their perforated edges and held in the hand just like Nabokov’s.

The story being unfinished, character development is slight. The most remarkable aspects of the nubile love interest, a young woman with the “frail, docile frame” of a child, are the men who desire her: her mother’s lecherous charmeur, whose name, “no doubt assumed,” is Hubert H. Hubert (Lolita’s Humbert in a new incarnation?); her own novelist lover, who “destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her”; and her husband, Peter Wild, a stingy, obese, and lovelorn neurologist with tiny feet. Despite all that’s missing in The Original of Laura, though, an intensity characteristic of Nabokov’s work (and missing in most of the self-consciously experimental fiction that purports to borrow from his) pervades it.

Wild strives to inflict upon himself the “sweetest death,” to will himself out of being, body part by body part, starting with his toes and working upward, in an act of “self-deletion.” For all their abstraction, these passages are fresh and surprising and sometimes moving. And as many have observed, the final card in the series presents a list of synonyms for annihilation — “efface, expunge, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” — that, inevitably, casts us back to a consideration of its author’s fate.

The Original of Laura is not really a novel. It is a fascinating artifact, an almost-story that thwarts immersion by continually calling attention to its architect. As I made my way through the notes, I kept imagining the author of Pale Fire and Look at the Harlequins!, at his most mischievous and perverse, plotting not just this last book, but the whole publish-or-destroy drama it engendered, from his deathbed.

Other commentary: Aleksandar Hemon, Why The Original of Laura should never have become a book.; Stoppard, Burn It; Banville, Nabokov’s Laura is “little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet“; David Lodge, Shored against his ruins; Jeanette Winterson, “a sane decision.”

And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.

Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.

That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”

Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.

Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….

[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.

I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I notice philosophy or politics creeping too overtly into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it. 1984 too, but it doesn’t hold up as well in my memory). Your comments are welcome.
 

See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.

Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor and Larry Brown a fireman. Faulkner did guv’ment work.

Jonathan Lethem once worked as a bookseller; if he weren’t a writer, he says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
 

Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)

Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I keep saying we’re going to start up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)

Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)

I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this kind of service in a recession, though.
 

How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?

I’m genuinely curious and opening up comments. Anecdotes about favorite authors are welcome.
 

* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.

But every curmudgeon is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am no exception. I visit writers’ houses, read their recipes, and sometimes stop in at the White Horse Tavern, a bar that has nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that Dylan Thomas was served his last drink there. Last night A.N. Devers gave me a replica of Mark Twain’s pen knife. It’s sitting here on my desk next to — ahem — the Poe figurine.

And now I am going to recommend a book for your coffee table.
 

My friend Dwight Garner’s Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, a revealing cultural history marketed as a novelty book, collects one hundred years of book ads, from the creatively manipulative to the hilariously misguided. Read Me shows, more effectively than any treatise could, how pitches to book-buyers evolved in the last century, and also that the marketing arm of the publishing industry has always had the capacity to be more than a little tone-deaf (as in the perky ad for Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, below).

It’s the perfect thing to pass around and read aloud from after holiday meals, while everyone is still drunk and merry and not wanting to contemplate the moment they’ll have to head back out into the cold.

“Snagged this from my managing editor’s desk,” said a friend who works at a newspaper, following the announcement that Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews will be shuttered. “The teaser in the upper right… Oof.”

I guess my cardigan and the cat hair I couldn’t lint-roll off of it must’ve screamed “truly, I have renounced every aspect of being an attorney,” but, in light of my background, I was surprised to be selected for a civil jury today.

Evidently the trial is an expedited, one-day affair. I’ll be at the courthouse tomorrow. Can’t say more, but you get the gist.
 

To mark the occasion, here’s a link to “Regarding the Insurance Defense Attorney,” a story I wrote in early 2003. Looking back, it’s a pretty amateur piece of work, although I still like a handful of lines. Or at least the one about the thong.

With a single exception, all the sentences are questions; in that sense the piece is a pretty blatant rip-off, structurally, of Donald Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard.”

It was Padgett Powell who introduced me to Barthelme’s fiction, in a college writing class. And now Powell has published a new book, The Interrogative Mood, which is composed entirely of questions. You can hear him asking some of them in the video above.

Gregory Cowles enjoys The Interrogative Mood most in small doses. Me too.

In an evocative review at Words Without Borders, Emma Garman calls Sansai “a novelist at the absolute height of his powers.”

It’s common knowledge that, at the end of WWII, many German war criminals fled from justice via “ratlines” to South American countries. Less notorious, though, are the Nazis who, like the title character of Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s excoriating new novel, The German Mujahid, found permanent refuge in Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria and Algeria. Inspired by a visit to a European-style Algerian village whose mayor was a former SS officer, and by what he views as the Arab world’s “erasure” of the Holocaust, Sansal has written a bracingly unsentimental, ingeniously structured story that not only lays bare past collusions between German fascists and Arab governments, but draws explicit parallels between Nazism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, all the while grappling with the emotive question: “are we responsible for the crimes of our fathers, of our brothers, of our children?”

The German Mujahid is banned in the author’s native Algeria, according to Garman.

Judging from the advance reviews at Amazon, some readers seem to expect The Joy Luck Club, but for Japan, which is not at all the story they find.

The book is deeply preoccupied with girls, talent, and power. As Mockett has observed, talented women often fare badly in fiction. And yet Satomi, one of the main characters in Picking Bones from Ash, expects her creative virtuosity to ensure her independence. Her monologue opens the novel.

My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.

This is different from being intelligent or even educated. The latter, she insisted, could get a girl into trouble, convincing her that she has the same power as men. Certainly the biggest mistake a woman could make was to rely on her beauty. Such a woman is destined to grow old and ugly very quickly because she is so much more disappointed by what she sees in the mirror than someone who is busy. “But when you are talented,” she whispered to me late at night as we lay in our futons, “you are special. You will have troubles, but they won’t be any of the ordinary ones.”

For more Mockett, see the profile in the Columbia Spectator, her thoughts on talented girls, her book notes for Largehearted Boy, her advice for aspiring writers, her interview with Colson Whitehead, and her recipe for bamboo shoots. She also has a blog.

“Happy and buoyant don’t force you into action on the page,” Drabble (pictured, in an earlier era) told Daphne Merkin.

These kinds of arguments in favor of depression as a creative impetus — not uncommon from writers — tend to be greeted with wariness by mental health practitioners, who typically view depression, and the obsessive rumination that flows from it, as an affliction to be cured, in every case.

Yet some scientists are suggesting that depression — peculiarly prevalent for a mental disorder — is not a malfunction at all, but an evolutionary adaptation, a state of mind which can have debilitating effects, but also promotes highly analytical thinking.

Depressed people, they contend, tend to “dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.” A special depression receptor enhances focus, allowing “depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage.” Writing speeds the process:

if depressive rumination were harmful, as most clinicians and researchers assume, then bouts of depression should be slower to resolve when people are given interventions that encourage rumination, such as having them write about their strongest thoughts and feelings. However, the opposite appears to be true. Several studies have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and they suggest that this is because depressed people gain insight into their problems.

From this perspective, depression is less a malfunction than “an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.”

Updated to add: A friend writes (and I agree): “Did you read Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf? She’s so astute about Woolf’s mental illness, and makes the point over and over that her depressive episodes got in the way of her work, and then killed her. I’m of course reacting to your post! (And am printing out the SA piece as I type.) I guess the thing there is…for some it can be adaptive, and for others (DFW) — really not.”

And a psychiatrist offers his insights: “While it is true that we view depression as an affliction to be cured, it is not true that we feel this should be done in every case. The key test in mental illness is the effect on day-to-day functioning including employment, study and relationships. In my practice if a client or relation of a client cannot demonstrate that there is an adverse effect on what is termed “functioning” (I know, very ugly term) then I don’t necessarily treat. If the client requests treatment at that point I don’t hold it back, but I won’t push it. This is the case with the majority of the people I work with too.”

Previously: Too far down: writing and the emotions, even Nobel Laureates get the blues, writers and depression, more on writers and depression (by Stephany Aulenback), and February haters unite.

Even as the printing press was taking hold, the Abbot of Sponheim urged his monks to keep copying texts by hand. The written word on parchment, he said, would last a thousand years, whereas words printed on paper were cheap and fleeting.

His argument has echoes in the ebooks debate. But somehow rigorous prose withstood the demise of parchment — and of the scroll and the cuneiform tablet before it. I’m pretty sure it will also survive the Kindle, the iPhone, and whatever else emerges.
 

Ebooks have really taken off recently, but as a culture we’ve actually been using electronic books for awhile now, even if we haven’t always thought of them that way. On the Internet we’re constantly encountering texts — dictionaries, encyclopedias, public domain works of all stripes — that were once bound and shelved. The change has happened so gradually, and so naturally, that it sometimes seems as though we’ve suffered a collective case of amnesia: the moment a text moves online, we forget that we used to perceive it as a book.

If I start reading a history of the printing press on Google Books and then check the volume out from the NYPL, am I doing something fundamentally different because I can turn the pages in my hand? Some people I respect would say yes, but I don’t see it.
 

Maybe I think in this fluid way because my day job is in legal publishing, where everything, from the shortest local law to the most massive scholarly treatise, is available (for a fee) online, and has been for more than a decade. Not that the shift was painless. When I started law school in the mid-’90s, some professors saw research databases like Westlaw and Lexis Nexis as a fad. The sites were said to foster laziness and sloppy thinking, to fly in the face of tradition and threaten jurisprudence itself. Proper apprehension of the law, it seemed, involved cross-referencing dusty tomes and using our highlighters. But by the time I graduated — and certainly while I was practicing — the vast majority of legal research was happening on the Internet.

Nowadays most medical practitioners and scientists rely on the same kinds of databases. Academic journals are migrating online at an astonishing rate. Google Books, JSTOR, and online card catalogs (like the NYPL’s) help researchers pinpoint sources for all manner of specialized subjects. Classics are available, through Project Gutenberg and other sites, for free in myriad formats. Print periodicals like Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Granta are making their archives available to subscribers online. Even dictionaries have gone electronic — and it’s become a cliche to say so, but I literally can’t remember the last time I consulted a print encyclopedia.
 

Last June, William Gibson predicted that everyone eventually will own a single volume. It will look like the ones on your shelf, he said, but will be “whatever book you desire, when you open it.”

I guess it’s not terribly surprising that the author who prophesied the coming of cyberspace (and is a Borges fan) would conceive of an infinite library collapsed into a single device — particularly when techies have been decrying “treeware” and awaiting an e-reader revolution for years now. But what has become clear since Gibson’s pronouncement is that ebooks are going mainstream in multiple formats, and will continue, at least for the moment, to coexist with print.
 

At home I still turn mostly to hard copy for reading novels, but increasingly I rely on my iPhone while commuting. Not only does it hold your page if you drop it on the subway tracks, but the device quickly becomes invisible, which is the best compliment I can pay it.

As Toni Morrison observed in her endorsement of the Kindle, reading novels means entering another world. When I’m fully immersed, I don’t focus on the pages, or how I move between them, but on the story itself.
 

While the increasing migration of the books into electronic formats is a foregone conclusion, we don’t know yet exactly how the shift will affect literature.

Will literary magazines continue to spring up online? Will control of publishing, as William Gibson implies, shift dramatically? As the reading experience changes, what will happen to stories themselves? Could hyperlinks and interactive maps and theme songs and video games undermine or even destroy the fictional narrative as we know it? And, given the way technology is always changing, how do we ensure preservation of past and present writings for future generations?

Lots of free-association here, I know. Maybe too much. Next Sunday afternoon I’m moderating a panel on Literature and the Digital Age at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I figured I should set down some of my own thoughts before coming up with questions for the panelists: John Freeman, Dwight Garner, and Sarah Schmelling.
 

See also How writer and ebook pioneer Josh Koppell’s own publishing disaster spawned the Iceberg reader; Budd Parr, Carolyn Kellogg, and me on the literary iPhone; how to build a literary app for the iPhone; Mike Cane’s The eBook Test; and PDAs of the ancient Sumerians.

The Battle Scene image, above, is taken from the medieval illuminated manuscript Book of Maccabees 1, and appeared in the Met’s recent Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages show.

Today at The Second Pass, Emma Garman returns to Françoise Mallet-Joris’ The Illusionist and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, two compelling and remarkably amoral novels narrated — and written — by teenage girls in the middle of the last century.

The Illusionist centers on the protagonist’s affair with her father’s mistress, while Bonjour Tristesse involves the heroine’s “plan of sexual deception that ingeniously exploits the vanity, jealousy and desires of everyone around her.” “What resonates,” according to Garman, is the “shared mood of irresponsibility, in which the wider consequences, moral or otherwise, of one’s actions are scarcely of concern.”

“Fantasies of weddings and babies and maybe even a career, so omnipresent in contemporary chick lit, are conspicuously and pleasingly absent.” Although The Illusionist was published sixty years ago, Garman says its author “could have given Gossip Girl’s arch villainess Blair Waldorf lessons in amorality.”

Amid all the discussion of massive layoffs and restructuring in publishing, I keep hoping someone will take a detailed look at how books fared during the Great Depression, and consider how the current economic crisis compares.

Conventional wisdom holds that books have done well in hard times, because they’re cheaper than many other gifts people might give. Even without reference to hard numbers, however, the emergence of the (cheap) paperback in the mid-1930s seems to undercut the idea that publishing has sailed through previous major downturns.
 

In his wonderful forthcoming biography of John Cheever, Blake Bailey offers some actual data:

“I don’t know how I’ll get along unless I sell a story,” [Cheever] wrote Denney, a few days after moving to [Walker] Evans’s studio [in January 1935]. It was, perhaps, the worst time in history to be starting out as a writer. In 1934, only fifteen authors in the United States sold fifty thousand or more books, and the magazine market was even more straitened; advertising was at an all-time low; and many of the mass-market, high-paying “slick” magazines had either shrunk or folded.

As for the WPA, Cheever wrote later that year, “I can’t get a WPA job because I can’t get on relief because I can’t establish residence… And there don’t seem to be any other jobs.” Read more about the WPA Writers’ Project — and Cheever’s take on it — here.
 

Image taken from Business Week.

Says my friend, “‘EBook’ in the headline of the press release? Classy. But perhaps it’s shrewd — no shameful shuffling in the checkout line, no awkward moments when your boss and his wife are over for dinner, perusing your bookshelves while you serve the hors d’oeuvres… Just a little secret between you and your hard drive.”

Image taken from the New York Daily News.

By request, and in the hopes of doing some small part to ease the struggles of great bookstores like Powell’s, here is an incomplete list of books and essays I enjoyed this year:

• Fiction: Richard Price’s Lush Life, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields, Julia Leigh’s Disquiet, Amara Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Stories and Other Writings, Francie Lin’s The Foreigner, Keith Lee Morris’ The Dart League King, Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief, Kathleen Kent’s The Heretic’s Daughter, Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, my friend Mark Sarvas’ Harry, Revised, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder, and ZZ Packer’s (ed.) New Stories from the South 2008. Out-of-print (but discovered this year due to the author’s death): Theodora Keogh’s My Name is Rose.

• Nonfiction: Harold Schechter’s (ed.) True Crime: An American Anthology, Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat, Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (just started reading), and Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’ John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (eternal disclosure).

• Essays & opinions: David Grann’s “Letter from Poland” (The New Yorker ); Richard Schweid’s “Nashville’s Other Skyline” (Oxford American); Sean Rowe’s “Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine” (Oxford American); my friend Emma Garman’s “Brother’s Keeper” (Nextbook); Colson Whitehead’s “Visible Man” (New York Times); my brother-in-law Joseph Clarke’s “Spectres of a Young Earth” (Triple Canopy); Harry Crews’ autobiographical riffs (Georgia Review); and Rebecca Solnit’s “The Archipelago of Ignorance.”

Some of the above links are to my reviews, excerpts, or thoughts; some are to other venues, because I never got around to writing down my reaction.

For my brevity, I blame the short days and crazy-person winter doldrums, but it’s also possible that Twitter is rotting my brain. The list may grow as other books occur to me.

Over Christmas I’m going to embark on 2666. And for whatever reason, I still haven’t read Netherland, although I’ve looked at the first page about forty times and will eventually push past it.

The Doubleday and Nan Talese imprints wind up under Sonny Mehta’s Knopf. The Dial Press, Bantam, and Spiegel & Grau imprints are shifted under the Random House Publishing Group umbrella. Crown takes on…

Ah, screw it — normally I don’t go into detail about these kinds of developments, but this is such a staggering reorganization — and such a sign of these uncertain times — that I’ll reproduce the text of the memo below.
 

Meanwhile, if you’re not sure what all of this means, here’s a trusted friend’s analysis:

even though they say the imprints will maintain editorial independence and their own individual identities, soon enough some will disappear and others will blend into one another. More consolidation also means less competition among publishers for authors and agents. Consolidation on this scale also means big time job cuts coming in all departments – editorial, publicity, rights, etc.

It also means that SONNY MEHTA is now publishing DAN BROWN. How in the hell does that make any sense?

The only one that makes sense to me is the Crown consolidation. At least there’s some continuity among all those imprints in what they publish. Everything else is just crazy.

The image, by the way, is taken from Franklin Foer’s December 1997 Slate article on the state of book publishing, which is interesting as a snapshot of how things stood eleven years ago.
 

Here’s the memo:

Dear Random House Colleagues:

I am writing today to tell you about a new publishing structure and a new leadership team for the adult trade divisions at Random House, Inc. here in the U.S., effective immediately. After looking closely and extensively at our organization and its rich diversity of authors and resources, we have created a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company. It will maximize our growth potential in these challenging economic times and beyond.

The new structure will augment the exceptional publishing programs of the Random House, Knopf and Crown divisions and draw on the veteran leadership of Gina Centrello, Sonny Mehta and Jenny Frost, respectively.

The Random House Publishing Group, under the leadership of President and Publisher Gina Centrello, will expand to include the imprints of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, including The Dial Press, along with Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau.
The Knopf Publishing Group, led by Chairman Sonny Mehta, will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group.

The Crown Publishing Group, under the direction of President and Publisher Jenny Frost, will expand to include the other imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group — Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah.

As a result of this reorganization, Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin, two colleagues who have dedicated many years of service as the publishers of Bantam Dell and Doubleday respectively, will step down from their positions as announced in the accompanying memos.

Within the new Random House Publishing Group, Ballantine, Bantam Dell and Random House will continue to have separate editorial departments. Random House, true to its heritage as the flagship imprint, will continue to publish its diverse list of distinguished and bestselling fiction and nonfiction in hardcover and trade paperback. The addition of The Dial Press and Spiegel & Grau will make this group an even greater force in literary and high-profile publishing. Side by side, Ballantine and Bantam Dell will be a commercial powerhouse with their stellar lists of bestselling and critically acclaimed authors.

The Knopf Publishing Group will augment its enduring reputation as a leading publisher of quality nonfiction and literary fiction — and now some of the biggest names in fiction — with the addition of the flagship Doubleday and Nan A. Talese Books imprints. Collectively, Doubleday and Knopf have more than two centuries of distinguished publishing history, and Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta is committed to supporting the great publishing traditions of their now sister imprint. The group will take on a new name, The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and the hardcovers of all their imprints will feed the extraordinary paperback lines of Vintage and Anchor Books.

The Crown Publishing Group’s unique and editorial diverse portfolio combines lifestyle and business books, along with prominent authors and branded businesses which have long dominated their nonfiction categories. The addition of Broadway as well as Doubleday’s business and religion imprints will complement and solidify these core areas of publishing strength. The group’s high-quality nonfiction and fiction frontlist programs will feed the impressive trade paperback lists of Broadway and Three Rivers Press.

I want to stress the fact that all the imprints of Random House will retain their distinct editorial identities. These imprints and all of you who support them are the creative core of our business and essential to our success. The newly formed publishing groups will continue to bid independently in auctions. Each group will have my full support to publish autonomously, promote aggressively, and strive for more competitive advantages in the marketplace.

Through greater collaborative efforts among the publishing, marketing and sales departments, we can sharpen our priorities, market our books more effectively, and respond more quickly and directly to a constantly changing marketplace. That, in turn, will strengthen our vital partnership with our customers.

Coordinating our online marketing and growing our digital publishing business will be further priorities.

Gina, Jenny, Sonny and I will share our more specific publishing plans and organizational structure in due course.

The highly regarded Random House Children’s Books division, led by President and Publisher Chip Gibson, will continue its remarkable publishing programs without change.

We are all proud of the hundreds of years of publishing that our combined imprints represent. In order to preserve this legacy of excellence and build upon it in the future, we must continuously examine the way we do business, and the way the business is changing. Our aim is to always be a leading force in American trade book publishing.

Because of the current economic crisis, our industry is facing some of the most difficult times in publishing history. We are very fortunate to have four of the most dynamic and accomplished publishers to lead us into this new phase of our life at Random House.

I greatly value the support of all of you who care deeply about our authors and the content and quality of the books we publish. I share your commitment to publish the best books in the best way, and I am excited about the opportunities that these changes offer us. I am convinced that our new organization, drawing on our expertise and focusing on the market with a team-oriented approach, will make our great company stronger than ever before.

Your opinions (kept anonymous, as always) are welcome. Mail to maud [at] maudnewton [dot] com.
 

Update: More discussion — and bad news — at Galleycat (1, 2, 3) and Editorial Ass (Publishers Lunch calls it “Black Wednesday”).

For this proliferation I blame Jonathan Franzen, but not in a bad way. Say what you will about The Corrections — my reaction was mixed — Franzen made it look easy. It’s not his fault that so many of his imitators produce emotionally empty, utterly plotless stories that drift from one unsympathetic character to another and culminate in wishy-washy epiphanies.
 

On my visit to the A Public Space office with a friend a couple months ago, Brigid Hughes offered me her extra copy of Keith Lee Morris’ The Dart League King. Later, on the train, I deduced from the cover blurbs and copy* that the book is a close-third, alternating-perspectives work of fiction, and was immediately prejudiced against it. Still, there was nothing else to read on the ride home, so I started in — and soon was as engrossed as Brigid predicted I would be.

Somehow even this wasn’t enough to overcome my bias immediately. Back at home, I put Morris’ novel aside in favor of seventeen other books I was reading or planning to read. And even though I’ve thought about the characters — especially the one haunted by the time he took a pretty girl for a swim in a freezing lake, with tragic results — many times, only this morning, on the way out the door, did I pick up the novel again. It had floated to the top of one of the stacks in my books-from-publishers closet.

I wish I could point you to an excerpt, but Tin House doesn’t seem to have made the one it published in the magazine available online. [Addendum: Oops, here it is.] So, without permission, here’s a little section that’s good on its own but doesn’t really capture the momentum the story gathers as the characters’ perceptions and stories unfold and get tangled together.

On the evening before his college graduation, Tristan Mackey walked into the campus library, probably with the notion of trying to steal or deface a book or two — he couldn’t seem to remember exactly now, but probably to do something of the sort, something to make him feel more like himself and less like the other self, the one that seemed like a version of Tristan borrowed by other people in order to suit their own purposes. At any rate, he was bent on making some sort of trouble, probably because he was a little drunk already, and the library, because it was quiet and secret, offered the sort of trouble he seemed to be looking for, which was quiet and secret trouble, the kind of trouble that would be known only to himself, that would nave no consequences outside of his own head, that wouldn’t keep him from graduating.

The trouble he found there was Liza Hatter, a girl from his political science class. He found her in the second-floor reading area, wearing shorts and a sleeveless top that showed her long limbs to advantage, thumbing through the latest issue of Lucky magazine, bored, killing time, her flip-flop sandals clicking softly on the floor. Liza Hatter had a thing for him, Tristan happened to know, in the same way he almost always knew, was almost never wrong, almost never made a false move or assumption when it came to love, or sex, or however you wanted to refer to it, as if Tristan cared one way or another, the object generally being the same….

Liza Hatter had in mind for the evening something she called “nesting,” which involved a trip to the grocery store to get more beer and margarita mix, and a trip to the video store to pick up movies. By the time she’d reached the part about “cuddling on the couch” Tristan had begun to grow bored, and he hated boredom more than anything else, probably because it was the state at which he arrived more often than not when he was with other people, because when it came right down to it he didn’t find people all that interesting, as they all seemed more or less to have the same kind of thoughts, perform the same sort of actions, very little variation occurring between the experience he had with one person or group of people and the next, and this was disturbing to him, because he was a conscientious person in the large ways and the deep ways if not in the small and everyday, and so wanted to think of himself as someone who tried to be helpful, someone who cared, even while he realized that he wasn’t very helpful and usually didn’t care, at least not until long after the fact, so that he passed up new opportunities for helping or caring due to his preoccupation with the missed opportunities of yesterday or the month before or last year. Right then, in fact, he was thinking about a girl named Kelly Ashton whom he had slept with last weekend at his parents’ lake house and never called afterward, which was more than a little puzzling to Tristan, since he had been in love with Kelly Ashton as far back as junior high. He mulled this one over, this surprising lack of feeling for Kelly Ashton, while Liza Hatter ticked off in an excited voice the potential choices of new releases on DVD, and in thinking of last weekend Tristan’s mind got settled on the lake house for some reason, and a potential avenue for escaping his increasing boredom started to take shape, an avenue that seemed to offer the possibility of at least being able to tolerate the several-hour prelude to sex with Liza Hatter, and so he laid out to Liza this plan — grab a twelve-pack and make the three-hour trip to the lake house, spend the night there, come back the next morning for his graduation….

Can’t wait for the end of the workday, so I can read the rest. For this feeling of anticipation I’m grateful to Keith Lee Morris, who has singlehandedly managed to knock down one of my least rational contemporary fiction prejudices.
 

* Here’s the ARC back-jacket description:

Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom. Taking place in a single day, The Dart League King follows five characters at pivotal moments in their lives. In the midst of the lague championship match, the intertwining stories of those gathered at the 321 club reveal Russell’s dangerous debt to a local drug dealer, his teammate’s involvement in the disappearance of a collect student, and a lovel triangle with a former classmate. The characters in Keith Lee Morris’s second novel struggle to find the balance between accepting and controlling their destinies, but their fates are inextricably linked.

Last week a publishing CEO typed a few excited words about a celebrity manuscript into his Twitter feed. Although he seemed a little nonplussed when Publisher’s Weekly reported and pored over the entry, you didn’t hear Lynne Spears or her agent complaining.

The discussion since has centered on Twitter’s potential as a buzz-builder, but online small talk, especially pre-deal, is a double-edged sword.
 

When former Gawker writer Emily Gould’s proposal was being shopped around recently, her agent, Melissa Flashman of Trident Media, tried to prevent leaks by requiring editors who received the submission to share copies only by courier. (Despite the restrictions, roughly a quarter of New York City was soon in possession of the document, but it never did seem to make its way to Gould’s ex-boss.)

Apparently no one thought to put constraints on Twittering. Shortly after the manuscript went out, HarperCollins publicity manager/memoirist Felicia Sullivan said she was “trying hard to be objective whilst reading a proposal from a certain NY media hyped author.” (On her blog that same day, she decried blog stars and the “hurt circus” that is the Internet, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out whose book she meant.)

By Thursday afternoon Sullivan was shut in her office, kicking stuffed animals. “If it’s a million, I’m breaking out the shovel and a 12-gauge,” she wrote, a few hours later. In the end Gould’s manuscript sold for a rumored low six figures, presumably immunizing the HC offices against a shooting rampage.
 

Was Sullivan’s post behind the $1 million rumor that spread through New York media even as she was proclaiming triumph? If so, I guess it was good for business. But I’ll be curious to see how agents will try prevent leaks in an increasingly-Twittering publishing world.

Update: Galleycat’s Ron Hogan hopes Twitter will bring down the media embargo.

Front Porch Journal posts a video clip of Mary Gaitskill reading from work-in-progress at the Katherine Anne Porter House. A fitting locale, I think; the foxy, mercurial, ever-prevaricating Texan author would make an interesting subject for Gaitskill should she turn her hand to biography. (Via Jacket Copy.)

Previously the Texas State literary magazine has featured readings from Charles Baxter, Dennis Johnson, Percival Everett, Tim O’Brien, and YiYun Li, to name just a few of many.
 

In other news of recent author appearances, Amardeep Singh saw Rushdie at Google last week, although the talk is not yet available online.