Max Perkins Lives!

When I am not wearing my Bloomsbury Press hat or my Dr. Syntax periwig, I serve on the board of the Center for Fiction--a literary organization formerly known as the Mercantile Library. The original name reflects its origin, in 1820, as a lending library organized by Wall Street businesses so their clerks could improve themselves through literature. This fall, the Library has renamed itself and embraced a new mission toward which it has been evolving for many years. It is now the only organization in America exclusively devoted to the art of fiction--including the reading, writing, publishing, and most importantly, enjoyment of it. I like to think this makes us simultaneously one of the oldest and one of the newest cultural centers in the country. 
Monday night was the Center's annual benefit dinner and awards ceremony. We awarded the our First Novel prize--chosen by a panel of first-class writers including last year's winner, Hannah Tinti--to John Pipkin's extraordinary Woodsburner. (For the full list of finalists, which all had ardent supporters, visit the Center's website.) And I had the enjoyable task of presenting the Maxwell Perkins Award to Doubleday editor Gerald Howard. 
The Perkins Award, named named after the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, honors a publishing person who has, over a career, discovered, nurtured, and championed writers of fiction. (Past winners are Nan Talese, Gary Fisketjon, Drenka Willen, and Jonathan Galassi.) Launching and sustaining fiction writers is demanding and sometimes lonely work; we hope to provide one ink-stained wretch a year with some recognition, and at least one night away from the manuscripts. 
I can remember being an editorial assistant and shirking an hour of work with some colleagues while one of them read aloud from a hilarious and brilliant first novel by one David Foster Wallace. It had been published as a paperback original by Gerry Howard. He's still publishing surprising new writers twenty years later. 
One of our colleagues called Gerry “the champion of the transgressive,” and I know she meant that as a high compliment. It’s challenging enough, at this cultural moment, to publish books by authors that everyone admires and those who have a track record of success; it’s far more demanding to find writers whose work is unfamiliar, against the grain, or that makes people uncomfortable, and to publish them with skill, energy and commitment. But this is what Gerry has managed to do for a few decades now. He has published, among many others, Gordon Lish, Don DeLillo, William S. Burroughs, A. M. Homes, Walter Mosley, Paul Auster, Ana Castillo, Walter Kirn, Kate Christensen, and Gore Vidal. Chuck Palahniuk, who has published with Gerry since his first novel, flew to New York from the Pacific Northwest just to present a tribute to Gerry at Monday's event.
It's a wonderful irony that Gerald Howard once wrote an article titled “Mistah Perkins--He Dead.” In that essay, published in 1989, he unflinchingly considered the many pressures that squeeze editors in the commercial publishing business; how difficult it had become for a would-be Max Perkins to find and acquire work of the best quality; and how hard it was to publish that work with success in the crowded, noisy marketplace that we operate in.

Many of the problems Gerry identified back then have only grown more acute; but I think he himself has given the lie to his article. Even in a book industry dominated by blockbuster titles and mass marketing, dedicated editors still ply their trade. Whether you think they are bucking the system or justifying it, editors like Gerry--and many others, too many for the Perkins award to recognize all of them--continue to find and publish original, challenging, and enduring books. 

(Disclosure: some of the above is drawn from remarks I made in presenting the award. If you were there on Monday, please forgive redundancy. You also got to listen to Chuck Palahniuk's far funnier appreciation of Gerry so you've come out ahead.) 

Whither BookExpo?

I enjoy a good rant, and Richard Nash has a fine one today at the Huffington Post about BookExpo America. BEA used to be a bona fide trade fair, where publishers took orders from booksellers. In recent years, when the chains and Amazon have come to dominate bookselling, the business of meeting and pitching to individual booksellers has become a much smaller part of the fair—it doesn’t really generate enough dollars in itself to justify the costs of exhibiting.

In response, publishers have cut back on their booth space, parties, promotional expenses, etc. Some have skipped the convention altogether. Now, with profits drooping and expenses being slashed all over the industry, BEA is planning further economies, including a move to midweek instead of being held over the weekend as in years past.According to Richard, the BEA organizers have now abandoned an idea proposed after last year’s fair, to open the exhibits to the general public for an afternoon before the programming began and hold an opening night party as some other book fairs do. He argues, 

the explosion in the number of books available means that publishers need to motivate readers to read their books, and not take for granted they'll walk into bookstores and buy… the event needs to be about exciting readers/customers, not hustling the retailers.

I agree that this is a real missed opportunity. Granted, BEA has never been about marketing books to the public, and there are all sorts of logistical complications in moving in that direction. But this seems a classic example of industry shortsightedness. BEA has been all about traditional channels of bookselling, which everyone agrees aren’t effective enough anymore. Publishers are concerned they’re wasting their money at BEA, and with good reason. But instead of reinventing the show, transforming it into a new, better way to market our product—yes, to the public as well as booksellers, librarians, and media--the current approach seems to be to try to do the same thing in  a cheaper way. 

Hm, sounds like the general strategy most big publishers have adopted over the last couple of years. Bashing mainstream publishing for its stodginess and lack of imagination is all too easy, and many of those who do so have no idea of the constraints we operate under. Still, I am pretty sure that the way forward for publishers, in an environment where so much is changing, is never going to be “do what we have done before but spend less money on it.” 

The Book Obama and the Joint Chiefs Should Be Reading

News reports say the President Obama is "soon" going to decide on a strategy for the U.S. in Afghanistan. While Obama and his military advisers ponder whether to continue the American presence there, and on what terms, there has been inevitably much discussion of Vietnam and the missteps we made there five decades ago. Evidently a few recent books about Vietnam are being avidly read around the Pentagon and West Wing, including Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein and A Better War by Lewis Sorley.
I have a better suggestion: Jungle of Snakes by James Arnold. Arnold looks not only at Vietnam, but three other counterinsurgency wars of the 20th century: the U.S. in the Phillippines at the beginning of the century; the British in Malaysia following World War II; the French in Algeria; and the U.S. in Vietnam. The first two of these were successful campaigns that defeated insurgencies, the second two were failures.

As many observers have pointed out, Afghanistan is different from Vietnam in many ways. Nor is it exactly like the other conflicts I just mentioned. But all counterinsurgencies have features in common, as Arnold's work makes clear--for instance, any counterinsurgency must begin by assuring security of the civilian population; the success of any campaign depends on quality intelligence; and no counterinsurgency can succeed in the absence of a central government that earns the population's trust.

Rather than obsessing over Vietnam--admittedly, the most painful wound in the nation's military psyche--our strategists might profitably expand their data pool by considering what has worked, or failed to work, in other settings as well. Arnold, a veteran military historian, crisply and dramatically conveys what it was like for American boys plunked down in a Phillippine jungle, or French officers trying to tell friend from foe in Algiers (where, disastrously, they resorted to torture). And he steps back to sort out some key principles that any commander facing outlaws and guerrillas needs to know. I recommend Jungle of Snakes to anyone who wants to understand the kind of "asymmetric conflict" our nation is likely to be involved in for the foreseeable future.

How Should an Author Respond to a Bad Review?

The Kerfuffle of the Week in the book reviewing world was the dustup between Mark Danner and George Packer over the latter's mostly negative review of Danner's new book, Stripping Bare the Body, in the New York Times Book Review. Danner responded to Packer with a 1400-word rebuttal, or rather a 1400-word critique of Packer's review and of the Times for assigning it to him in the first place. (Packer than riposted in a shorter answer also published in the TBR.)

I admire both writers' journalism, and not having read Danner's book, I won't try to pick sides in the dispute. I merely want to point out how lucky Danner is to have been given so many column inches to punch back at a review he didn't like! Usually trying to rebut bad reviews is a losing game. Few publications can, or care to, allot much space to an author with a chip on his shoulder (justified or not) about a poor review. As you can imagine, the wronged author typically has a lot to say about what was wrong with his review--then he or she finds his epic fulmination edited down to a 200-word bleat. Making it worse, the reviewing organ gives the original reviewer space for a re-rebuttal that is often longer than the author's critique.

This is one reason why I often suggest to authors that they ignore bad reviews. It's better to be philosophical and figure that any publicity is good publicity. (I have come to believe this is usually true, with some ghastly exceptions.) But even if you believe that your book has been misrepresented and the record must be set straight, the result of the tit-for-tat-for-tit exchange rarely comports with your sense of justice.

My advice to authors is to take the approach of one notoriously controversial writer, who--at least according to literary legend--had a pre-printed postcard that he used to reply to readers who wrote in to excoriate him for a some column or article.  It read, entirely, as follows:

Dear Sir or Madam,
You may be right. 
Sincerely, H. L. Mencken.