Shakespeare & Co. To Open New Stores in NYC, Philly

The old Shakespeare & Co.
on Broadway (via Yelp)

Independent bookstores in New York City and elsewhere experienced a fatal period from the late 1990s through the early 2010s. A number of the iconic (Gotham Book Mart, A Different Light,  St. Marks Bookshop, Left Bank Books, Coloseum, Barnes & Noble flagship, etc.) and less well known indies and mini-chains (Posmans, Bent Pages, 12th Street Books, New York Bound Books, Revolution Books, Book Court, etc.) in the city shuttered their doors, sometimes with the promise or at least hope of reopening, and, as was the case with St. Mark's, eventually doing so only to close their doors permanently. Between the assault by larger chains, the exorbitant rental prices, the dip in readers, and other problems, the once bookstore-rich has become a comparative desert over the last 25 years, though some indie bookshops, like McNally-Jackson and Greenlight Books, and chains, like the financially precarious Barnes & Noble have hung on.

One survivor, now under new ownership, that is now on the verge of expanding is Shakespeare & Company. After having shrunk to a single store, its 939 Lexington Avenue space next to Hunter College on the Upper East Side, the holding company that took over the lease for the remaining store and bought its trademark in 2015 now plans to open two new Manhattan stores, one on the Upper West Side at 2020 Broadway (between 69th and 70th Streets), and a new one in the West Village, at 450 6th Avenue, near 11th Street, in what was the old Jefferson Market. Both have planned openings in the fall of 2018. Alongside these new stores, S&Co. also will open a café right outside the Hunter-68th Street 4/5/6 (Green line) train station, at Lexington Ave. and 68th Street. As the press release notes, the UWS store is a homecoming, since the first Shakespeare & Company opened in that neighborhood in 1982 and closed in 1996, but the West Village store will also be a significant return for the bookseller, since its Broadway storefront next to NYU's campus also had a major following up through its closing in 2014. (Other branches, in Brooklyn and on 23rd Street, had also disappeared.)

That branch was one of the first to carry my first book, Annotations, and it also is where I met the Canadian poet, director and intellectual James Oscar Jr., now in Montréal. He worked there, and we used to have long, illuminating conversations about literature, life and everything else. One other significant component of that old Broadway branch was its section featuring British imprints, which it updated and sold at reasonable prices. This is hardly a big deal today, when you can order books from almost everywhere in the world and get them in a reasonable amount of time, but in the mid-to-late 1990s, it was tough to find any bookstores, including most in NYC, that had British versions of US-published books, as well as rare finds that weren't available anywhere else, on the bookshelf. I can think of a number of volumes, including editions of novels by J. G. Ballard, Will Self and Peter Kalu, and several anthologies, that I found there and nowhere else.

The old Shakespeare & Co. on
Broadway, in Manhattan (via Yelp)

In addition to the New York openings, S&Co. plans to open a Philadelphia branch as well, in the Rittenhouse Square area of Center City, at 1632 Walnut Street. This will be the company's first store outside Manhattan. All the stores will have an Espresso Book Machine, which are produced by On Demand Books, a sister subsidiary to Shakespeare & Co. headed by CEO Dane Neller. McNally-Jackson currently has an Espresso Book Machine, which allows visitors not only to print published books on demand, but also self-publish books as well. S&Co. is already experimenting with customizable children's books, and will feature some of the self-published works near the Espresso Book Machines. I've watched books being printed up and have done so once myself at McNally-Jackson, and I find the process and machinery spell-binding. I think it may be a possible way to get Seismosis, now completely sold out and thus out of print, back into readers' hands (at far less than the $50-$100+ it now sells for online.)

One worrisome note is S&Co. CEO Dane Neller's comment that "My vision for Shakespeare & Co. has always been to create the biggest little bookshop in the world." (You can find a longer interview with Publishers Weekly here.) I understand the expansive dreams, but haven't we seen this before, with disastrous results on multiple levels? I immediately think of Barnes & Noble, which became a behemoth and drove many smaller chains and indie stores out of business, only to fall prey itself to an even more massive beast, Amazon, which has undercut bookstores and retailers of all sorts and continues to grow with abandon. Perhaps I'm reading too much into Neller's comments, but I sincerely hope that as the company grows, it takes into account the broader publishing and literary ecology. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, which covered the closing of the Broadway store, features a brief, positive interview with Neller about the new stores.  My fingers are crossed that this will all work out!

Book Expo America 2017

Part of my book haul (I had Sinclair's
book, so now I have an extra copy)

In 2013 I wrote about my first visit to Book Expo America (BEA), which I'd heard about but never attended. Or had the opportunity to attend, as I usually was in Chicago and Evanston in the spring while BEA was running in New York City. (Ironically BEA initially began in Chicago, though before my time there.) I returned the following year, and then BEA returned to Chicago (and my knees began acting up), so I ended up taking a few years' hiatus from this massive publishing fair. Oddly enough, I did not go either year that Counternarratives appeared, either in hardcover (2015) or paperback (2016) version, though I believe I made up for it by attending a wide array of other book events, from AWP to the Brooklyn Book Fair. In any case, I also gave myself a short reprieve on gorging on free books, which is one of the great benefits of BEA, and a chief reason that, as I witnessed during my prior visits, so many attendees arrive and depart with suitcases, roller bags, and other large mobile containers to haul as many books back home--for their own libraries, public and private ones--as possible.

This year I decided to drop by the Javits Center on the festival's final day primarily to see several events my friend David Barclay Moore was scheduled to participate in. David's debut book, The Stars Beneath Our Feet, is a Middle Grade novel set to appear this September from Random House, and as part of the book launch he was on several panels, including one for "Buzz Authors" (writers singled out as likely to create a buzz among readers this year), and  also participated in a single author book signing in Random House's ample, skillfully arranged publisher's area. (Congratulations again, Dave!) I did get to see David speak about his book with other Middle Grade authors, learning something about the genre in the process, and it was also fun to watch him receive VIP treatment with his book signing, which required a ticket to get in line. When I got to his book signing table, I related the following conversation to him:

Woman #1 (in line across from mine, to her friend, Woman #2): Who are you going to see?
Woman #2 (in line in front of me): David Barclay Moore.
Woman #1: What did he write?
Woman #2: The Stars Beneath Our Feet. Who are you going to see?
Woman #1: Lawrence O'Donnell. The TV show host, on MSNBC.
Woman #2: Oh, OK. Tell him I said hello!

Between David's panel and book-signing, and again towards the end of the afternoon, I wandered around the floor, taking in the various booths and designated sections. I did get to see a bit of Lawrence O'Donnell's conversation with Ed Asner, but unlike at the two previous BEAs, where I happened upon Congressman John Lewis, Tracy Letts, Dick Cavett, and others, they were among the very few already famous people I encountered, and I did not step over the cordon to introduce myself to either one. This year the people at the elite university press booths were indifferent at best, or outright ignored me, but since it was the last day of BEA--with Book Con, a book fan-focused gathering at which books are not free--I followed etiquette by asking whether I could take books, and, receiving neither positive nor negative response, I helped myself to a few. Quite a few clusters of people--agents, booksellers, people selling various services (audio rights, etc.)--were huddled at tables all over the place, so the book business writers and certainly most readers rarely see or think about was clearly on display.

At other presses, particularly the smaller university presses, the non-US ones, and the indies, as well as publishers of graphic texts, comics, children's books, etc., the representatives were very friendly, and I ended up collecting roughly a sizable box's worth, which I hauled around at first in my arms until I commandeered one of the rare book bags I could find--most had already been snapped up, I think, over the previous two days and Friday morning--and then mailed straight to my Rutgers office. I won't detail all the books I picked up, but I will mention one book I did grab, after of course asking and not receiving a "No, don't take it": Chris Kraus's new biography of Kathy Acker, simply titled After Kathy Acker. I had to get this book because I was an enthusiastic reader of Acker's work in my youth, and having read and nearly taught Kraus's I Love Dick, and then having watched Jill Soloway's quirky but addictive TV version, I am now on a sort of Kraus kick, if you can call it that. (I taught Kraus's 2013 novel/memoir Aliens and Anorexia as part of a graduate workshop in the spring of 2016. Some of the students loved it, a few absolutely hated it, but it provoked passionate responses in both cases.)

In general I was looking for another literary diamond, one of those texts I'd happened upon before at BEA, like Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy, which rocked my world when I brought it home and read it, and which has gone on to become one of the signal texts of the last few years. I did pick up some gems, including Jordan Abel's Injun (Talonbooks) and Hoa Nguyen's Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books), both of which made the Canadian shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and hope to get to some of them before the summer slides into fall. Perhaps because I went on Friday as opposed to the first or second day, and perhaps because it was the afternoon rather than the morning, the fair felt a bit subdued. Certainly some of the booths, like W. W. Norton's, where New Directions' books would usually be, featured shelves stripped bare--by readers, I think--and though I did pass lines for book signings, they were not anything like I remembered in the past. The FedEx office where I mailed my books was packed, though, and as one of the photos below shows, those suitcases were brimming too. Perhaps next year I'll aim to catch more of the readings and events, and maybe I'll bring a suitcase or roller bag. Or maybe not.

David Barclay Moore and his fellow Middle Grade
Buzz Authors: Kamilla Benko, The Unicorn Quest: The Whisper in the Stone;
Molly Ostertag, The Witch Boy; Eucabeth Odhiambo, Auma's Long Run; and
Jake Burt, Greetings From Witness Protection!

Dave, Kamilla and Molly

Filmmaker Ndlela Nkobi, another friend,
recording the panel for posterity

David and fellow Middle Grade authors

One of the displays

The Confucius Institute's books

London Review of Books (LRB) booth

African American Expressions booth

Columbia University Press, Princeton UP, etc.

New books signing tables

Skincare treatments for book lovers

Barron's financial press books

A kiosk with a book signing behind it

Ed Asner (center) and Lawrence O'Donnell (right)

Printing Korea booth

Counterpoint Press/Catapult/Soft Skull
(with one of my incoming student's first
novel prominently displayed above the
head of the man at right!)

Some great books from Coffee House
Press and others (Dawn Lundy Martin's stunner
Good Stock Strange Blood among them)

From Talonbooks

The line for Dave's book signing

Random House scanning badges
 for the book signing

David signing books for his brother
and niece, in from Atlanta

Directing readers to another book signing

David Funches, of Lion Forge Press

Books by Olive Senior and others
(they would not gift me with these)

Graywolf's offerings (including a new
book by Danez Smith)

Kevin Hart, in cardboard form

Readers, checking out books

A subsequent panel, featuring designer
Zac Posen (at right)

This booth had something to do with
L. Ron Hubbard, I think,
hence the person in the costume

Harvard theorist Danielle
Allen's new nonfiction book
about her cousin, Cuz

Packing those suitcases!

The Javits Center Atrium at the end of the day

Fitzcarraldo Wins Republic of Consciousness Prize for *Counternarratives*!

Republic of Consciousness
Prize Announcement

Yesterday evening in a cozy room in London, as I moved through my usual Thursday workday, meeting with students and giving a mid-term exam in Newark, the ceremony for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses was underway. Last fall I blogged about this new prize, which author and publisher Neil Griffiths established to honor smaller British presses that took the financial risk, which is substantial, of publishing more formally and thematically challenging writing. As the RoCP's initial announcement stated, the prize selection criteria could be boiled down to two elements, "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose." In November the British edition of Counternarratives, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was named to its longlist, and subsequently its shortlist of eight finalists in January.

Neil Griffiths, speaking to RoCP's
ceremony audience, Fyvie Hall

At the packed London ceremony in Fyvie Hall on Regents Street, Griffiths, accompanied by the judges, and in the presence of the nominated publishers and their staff, journalists, writers, editors, and other members of the British literary world, announced that Fitzcarraldo was the winner of the first Republic of Consciousness Prize for Counternarratives! In their unanimous decision, the six-judge jury described the collection as a "once in a generation achievement for short-form fiction," and lauded its "subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose." Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard and Fitzcarraldo PR guru Nicolette Praça were there to accept the prize, and Testard offered remarks about the award's importance for Fitzcarraldo and for small presses in the UK and everywhere.

Fitzcarraldo received the top £3000 prize, and the shortlist finalists, which were Tramp Press, which published Briton Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones (winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and & Other Stories, which published Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield’s novel Martin John, each received £1000. In addition, publisher Galley Beggar received the Best First Novel or Collection Prize and £1000 for UK author Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line, which Griffiths praised for its "multitudinous energy." The Guardian wrote up the ceremony; you can find the article here. Publishing site The Bookseller also wrote about the prize here. You can also hear Testard and Griffiths spoke about the award and small presses in a radio interview on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London (beginning at 1:09:20).

'''

I've never had the pleasure of meeting Jacques Testard in person, but he, Nicolette Praça and everyone affiliated with Fitzcarraldo have been a dream to work with, and I am very thankful that he took the leap of publishing my book. (And especially delighted still in the press's choice of Yves Klein International Blue for its fiction covers!) Many thanks also to the prize jury, who unanimously chose Counternarratives, and once again, a million thanks to Neil Griffiths for establishing the award, for his work as an author and publisher, and for his advocacy of small-press publishing.

Counternarratives on Belgian Radio, in a French Journal, and on a British Prize Longlist

A few weeks ago, sound engineer and radio host Alain Cabaux spoke with Emmanuel Requette, from Brussel's Librairie Ptyx (Ptyx Bookstore), hosted a lively, enthusiastic conversation about the French edition of Counternarratives on Radio Campus, based at the Université Libre du Bruxelles.

It would take a while to translate the entire thing and they unfortunately do not provide a written transcript, but it was clear that both Cabaux and Requette enjoyed the book and were sparked to think quite a bit about it, even broaching a few topics that haven't received much discussion in US reviews, on topics such as religion.

If you speak French, you can hear the entire conversation here, as well as music by Matana Roberts and the great Bluesman Robert Johnson. Many thanks to both of them and to my brilliant translator, Bernard Hoepffner and publisher, Éditions Cambourakis, because of whom the book is on Librairie Ptyx's bookshelves. Enjoy! (H/t to James Oscar for telling me about meeting Mr. Cabaux, and his kind comments on the book, too.)


***

Also, in the French journal En Attendant Nadeau, Claude Grimal pens a throrough, praiseworthy review of Contrenarrations, titling it "Sujétion, Liberté et Imagination" (Subjection, Liberty, and Imagination), with the summary that "Le romancier américain John Keene fait preuve dans son Contrenarrations de beaucoup d’ambition, d’érudition et de talent. La force épique de son livre et l’extrême attention qu’il porte à l’écriture sont la preuve d’une foi énergique en la littérature." (Translation: "The American novelist John Keene show evidence of great ambition, erudition and talent in his book Counternarratives. The epic force of his book and his extreme attention to writing are evidence of an energetic faith in literature.")

The review continues in that very positive.  He concludes the review by saying:

L’auteur, qui dote ses personnages d’une remarquable imagination afin de montrer qu’elle est en elle même émancipatrice, est pourvu comme eux de ce don. Il faudrait adapter pour lui les pensées qu’il attribue à Melle LaLa, flottant au dessus du sol, reliée par la bouche à son fil : « je voudrais suspendre la ville entière de Paris ou même la France elle-même à mes lèvres… je cherche à dépasser les limites imposées à moins que je ne les aies placées là, car c’est à cela que je pense quand je pense à la liberté ». Penser à la liberté est un chemin pour les écrivains, autant que pour les assujettis comme le montre, avec un brio acrobatique, les histoires de Contrenarrations.

(The author, who endows his characters with a remarkable imagination in order to show that it is in itself emancipatory, is provided like them with this gift. It would be necessary to adapt for him the thoughts he attributes to Miss LaLa, floating above the ground, connected by her mouth to her wire: "I want to suspend the entire city of Paris or even France itself from my lips...I aim to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom." Thinking about freedom is a way for writers, as much as their subjects, as Counternarratives' stories show, with an acrobatic brio.)

Many thanks to Mr. Grimal for this reading, to En Attendant Nadeau for publishing it, and of course, to Bernard Hoepffner and Éditions Cambourakis.

***

Finally, on the other side of the English Channel, or La Manche, depending upon your perspective, a new prize, The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, has named Counternarratives to its Longlist! What's the rationale behind this prize? Here's what writer and publisher Neil Griffiths, its founder, has to say.

The winner will be chosen based on two criteria, perfectly expressed on the Galley Beggar website as ‘hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose’. 

Eligible publishers will have a maximum of five fulltime paid people working for them. The prize is open to UK and Irish publishers. 

One novel or single author collection of short stories per publisher can be summited in the calendar year. With one wild card entry per judge.

The Times Literary Supplement wrote about this prize, quoting Griffiths:

"Whatever one thinks about awards in the arts, they do tend to attract attention, boost sales, and provide a little momentum – which is always a good thing. And even though the money won’t be Booker or Costa levels, any money is always welcome. And if the prize can include the independent bookshops – as judges and points of sale – then everyone wins".

It also noted that the 9 judges are "Griffiths, his co-chair Marcus Wright, and the booksellers Sam Fisher (Burley Fisher Books, London) Gary Perry (Foyles, London) Anna Dreda (Wenlock Books, Shropshire) Helen Stanton (Forum Books, Northumberland) Lyndsy Kirkman (Chapter One Books, Manchester), Emma Corfield (Book-ish, Crickhowell, Wales) and Gillian Robertson (Looking Glass Books, Fife, Scotland)." The Guardian also wrote it up.

Originally, the Longlist wasn't to be announced until November 30, but it appears to have been moved up. The Shortlist won't be determined until next January, and the prize won't be awarded until March 2017. At the Review 31 site, Mr. Griffiths elaborates on the prize, and writes blurbs about each of the book. Here's the marvelous summary he wrote about Counternarratives, which is the kind of comment you can't pay for!

Fitzcarraldo Editions for Counternarratives by John Keene

Counternarratives is a work of great distinction, a once in a generation addition to short form fiction. It moves the form on; it deepens it. Few works of fiction operate on this kind of intellectual and textural level and still remain rooted in the human experience. Spanning four centuries, many countries, using different narrative forms as inspiration, each story unfolds with a control and wisdom that is startling. When compared to this, most other prose seems oddly ingratiating, as if Keene has decided that to ask for our indulgence is to undermine some fundamental truth being enacted in the stories. Few novels are works of art and few works of art are moral acts – this is one of them. And what’s more it’s a pleasure to read. That this set of stories and novellas has not made every shortlist its eligible for is a travesty.

Here's Mr. Griffith's announcement of the prize:


Whatever happens, it's wonderful for the book and its British publisher to receive some recognition, and many thanks to Mr. Griffiths, his committee, and Fitzcarraldo Editions!

Who Runs the Publishing Industry?

UPDATE: Jonathon Sturgeon has just posted a piece on Flavorwire comparing the publishing industry to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, and gives Counternarratives a shout-out in the process.

The semester has begun, Blizzard Jonas and all, and I can already see my blogging pace dwindling, so I am going to try to follow a plan I set out a few years ago but have never followed, which is to maintain my blogging activity by posting micro introductions to interesting things I find on the web, and just let the articles speak for themselves. (I also hope to do this with the stubs of pieces I've begun but not finished in the recent past.)

Marlon James at the Man Booker Prize ceremony

So here goes. Last year Marlon James, author of several novels, including the 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead, 2014), stated at a Guardian-sponsored event in London that the publishing industry "panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, 'older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life'."

He went on to say:

[B]ecause white women readers dominate the market, “the male editors will only accept one type of story. Everyone knows what a New Yorker story will look like. I could have been published 10 times over – I knew that there was a certain kind of prose I could have written; intense scenes that hinted, rather than explored.”

In its report on James's remarks, linked above, the Guardian noted that "Women, particularly white women, make up the vast majority of regular fiction readers, purchasing two thirds of all books sold in the UK. Almost 50% of women classify themselves as avid readers, compared to 26% of men." He expanded a bit on these assertions in a highly entertaining and informative Guardian Books podcast.

James was responding, in fact, to a Tin House essay, "On Pandering," by Claire Vaye Watkins, who received multiple prizes for her 2010 collection Battleborn. Watkins' is a rich, exploratory attempt to make sense of her experiences as a white woman writing in a tradition that usually valorizes white men, abets sexism and racism, and consciously and unconsciously urges women, including white women, to write against their perspectives and themselves.

Claire Vaye Watkins

To quote her:

The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.

I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

In The New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy took issue with James's assessment, penning a response, "Don't Let Men Attack Pumpkins Spice Literature,"filled with links to others responding to Watkins' essay. In it she asserted that James was half-right, and was focusing on literary sexism. She contrasted his take with freelance writer Nicole Perkins' reading of "On Pandering" in the Los Angeles Times, and stressed the need for a more intersectional understanding of the literary marketplace, and for the voices of women of color to be heard (yes!). (NYRB critic, author, translator and blogger Tim Parks offered thoughts about conformity in literature that sidestepped any discussion of race or gender, but which I thought connected at certain points with what all these critics were saying.)

There have been many other essays and articles on the lack of diversity and need for equity in publishing, including in children's literature. There are even organizations, like We Need Diverse Books, dedicated to highlighting and transforming this situation. A few years ago, a former student and I attended a great workshop in Brooklyn on diversifying children's literature, especially in the speculative fiction and fantasy genres. Shortly before he passed away the late, highly acclaimed writer Walter Dean Myers and his son Christopher--who used the term "apartheid"--published essays in the New York Times calling for diversity in children's literature. But the need across all genres remains, and not just in the US, but in other plural Western societies, like the UK.

Yesterday, Electronic Literature posted an article based on a new publishing diversity baseline survey by children's book publisher Lee and Low showing that the US and Canadian publishing industries are overwhelmingly white and dominated by cis-gender, abled heterosexual women. Moreover, executive level publishing jobs US and Canadian publishing executives are even more concentrated in the hands of straight, cis-gender, abled white women. Shades of Hollywood, though with a gender reversal. These are the decision-makers in the book biz.

These facts suggest that real diversity, beyond lip service, is necessary if the publishing even wants to begin to reflect the reality of the society around them; James' critique has a basis in the sheer facts of who runs the industry; and that Watkins' understanding of the internalization of male-centered values extends beyond writers, to the people and institutions that put books into readers' hands.

I'll conclude by saying that my own experience as an author has tended more towards what Marlon James says, though I have never let that stop me. In fact, I even encountered pushback from industry people--though not, thankfully, my publisher, New Directions, whose chairperson is the legendary editor Barbara Epler--concerning Counternarratives. In other ways, however, I have been fortunate to encounter people from all backgrounds--all races and ethnicities, genders and sexualities, national origins, class, religious affiliation, physical abledness--who have been supportive of my work, and whose work I could enthusiastically support.

Counternarratives at Year's End & Blogging Honor

UPDATED!

Roughly 7 months have passed since Counternarratives appeared on bookshelves, though at times they feel like a year or more. Along the way, the collection, which has received strong reviews--only one, however, in a major daily newspaper, The Wall Street Journal (thank you, WSJ!)--also has made its way onto various "Best of 2015" lists, for which I am deeply grateful, not least because it is challenging book both aesthetically and perhaps even more so in its themes and ideas.

I want to offer my sincerest thanks to all of the book's readers and gifters, its reviewers, and its champions, who have promoted it at bookstores, in their classrooms, to friends and family members, and as one of their top selections for the year. (Thanks also to the reviewers who have written to say that reviews are forthcoming, too, in 2016!)

As a result of the books' sales, New Directions will be issuing a paperback version in 2016, which is already online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for pre-order, though you can also urge your local bookstore to order it as well. An independent British publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, has purchased the rights for the UK, so it will appear there under that imprint, in a cobalt blue cover, in 2016. Their small but glittering backlist includes books by my brilliant former colleague Eula Biss, philosopher Simon Critchley, Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, and the scholar and writer Mathias Énard, winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt.

Among the most recent "Best of Lists" the book has been fortunate to grace include:

• Conversational Reader--"Favorite Reads of 2015: #2 Counternarratives by John Keene" 
• Entropy -- "Best of 2015: Best of Fiction Books" 
• Flavorwire -- "Best Fiction of 2015" and "50 Best Independent Press Books of 2015" (This follows the earlier selection of Counternarratives as one of their "Best Books of 2015 (So Far)"
• UPDATED: Full Stop -- "Best of Reviews, 2015"
• Lambda Literary -- "Ten of this Year's Standout LGBTQ Books" 
• LitHub - "25 Best Books of the Year, According to Booksellers" 
• Mosaic Magazine -- "Best Books of 2015" 
• Slate - "The Overlooked Books of 2015" 
• Vanity Fair -- "Best Books of 2015 for Gifting...and Hoarding" (This follows their earlier selection of Counternarratives as one of their "Top Spring Picks for Parks and Picnics")

Again, to all these publications, many of the small, independent and online, and to all the booksellers, editors and reviewers who have offered praise and support, I send my deepest thanks always!

***

Although I have been blogging for a decade now and though some prior blog posts have been cited (including, as one of my former colleagues noted with dismay, because I was and am not an expert in the field, in a dissertation on dance!), this December marks the first time that a blog post of mine has received a public honor of any sort.

What am I talking about? In addition to shining the best light on Counternarratives, Flavorwire's Jonathon Sturgeon also selected my blog post (later republished in Atticus Review) "On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics" for that site's "Best Literary Criticism of 2015."

Thanks again to Mr. Sturgeon and Flavorwire, and thanks also to the more than 11,000 readers who've read and forwarded the post!

Amazon to Pay by Page Turn + WORD Jersey City Reading

The behemoth strikes again. By behemoth, I mean Amazon, the global retailing corporation that also is the world's largest bookstore, and a major force in contemporary (American) publishing. According to a Monday report in The Guardian, the most recent big news in the annals of Amazon's publishing ventures involves its decision to start paying writers based on page turns. Page turns! This policy won't, however, affect all authors whose ebooks are available on Amazon. Yet. Right now it applies only to self-published authors whose books appear in Amazon's Kindle Owner's Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited services. But it portends a shift in publishing that writers may want to pay attention to.

Amazon, as a book publisher, originally paid self-published authors royalties once a customer read 10% of an ebook. This unfairly penalized authors of longer works (compare a 600 page novel to a 60 page novella, or long form essay), who got nothing if readers stopped reading before the royalty trigger. Some authors then decided to start dividing up works into shorter pieces to ensure their royalties, leading to a potential flood of material--or more than already exists--on Amazon's site. So Amazon came up with a new plan to address the problem, as well as a system to normalize the meaning of "page" in ebooks and what counts as "reading it"; think time spent on the page, standardized fonts, and so on.

In The Guardian, Amazon says of its rationale,

We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read. Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it.

In other words, if you write that 600 page novel and someone reads it all the way through, you'll be paid more than the author of a 60 page novella. But if a reader gives up 10% of the way through the longer book (i.e., 60 pages), both of you will earn the same. It should also be noted that the payments will come from a limited, dedicated pool of money Amazon calculates on a monthly basis--based on total sales?--so authors will be competing against each other directly for royalties.

As I noted previously in a February post on ebooks and surveillance, this is part of the advancing corporate intrusion into what had previously been for centuries a private experience; since the advent of silent reading of codex books, no one truly knew how much or in what ways you read. With e-reader tracking, this information is readily accessible by all e-book publishers. E-devices, however, can now track you down to how far you get into a book, what you reread, and where you stop reading, as many readers do with many books. These activities are being commodified and financialized, quietly in the cases of the e-reader companies themselves, but overtly now with Amazon's new move.

In my earlier post I also suggested, following the lead of Francine Prose, who wrote about e-reader tracking in The New York Review of Books, that this surveillance and the data resulting from it would begin to reshape how some authors imagined their work, which is to say, their aesthetics. It's a direct line from anticipating, based on data, what will draw readers, to feeling pressure to write based on what will generate page views--and turns--and then from there to publishers' demands to do so. Longer books with each element shaped by data about what keeps readers turning pages...of course this is something some authors may grasp intuitively, and some books that fit this criterion are very well written, and true works of art.

But the write-by-the-numbers approach could also have disastrous effects on literary production, while also further breaking down the already shaky publishing system's financial base. This may sound like dystopian view of things, but we have, as I pointed out, the example of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. If no one ever reads a book to the end or stops halfway through most books, most authors will earn even less than they already do. And as the examples of the journalistic and music industries show, will any but a very few earn a fair and liveable amount for their creative labor?  The lure of market-based thinking is a strong one these days. Amazon is a apex predator corporation, and other publishers, especially the bigger ones, will feel the need to follow Amazon's lead.

Put the two together...well, let's write that horror film another time.

***

Many thanks to everyone who came out to last night's reading at WORD Bookstore in Jersey City! Thanks also to everyone at WORD, especially Caitlin and Zach, for making the reading possible. It was energizing to see a healthy crowd, filled with so many familiar faces, and to be able to share with a live audience something I hadn't yet read aloud--the final pages of "Rivers"--from Counternarratives.  

Also, thanks to WORD for having a good number of copies of Counternarratives in stock, and to everyone who bought a copy. I have one more New York area reading, on July 1, before heading off to Ithaca for Image Text Ithaca, so please come out to McNally-Jackson Bookstore, where I'll be reading and participating in a conversation with Christine Smallwood!

If you are in Jersey City, make sure to stop by WORD, which is at 123 Newark Ave., just steps away from the Grove Street PATH station. A few photos: