Search Results for: new yorker

There Are Three Types of People Who Can Afford to Write Books

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.

George Packer, in The New Yorker, on Amazon and the book business. Read more from Packer.

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Photo: chasblackman, Flickr

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Secrets of the Fiction Writing Economy

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 1,269! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments — though these abound — but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared with other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers — what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts — but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation — of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength — is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, California, to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Tallahassee, Florida (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at The New Yorker offices on 42nd Street).

The Art of Fielding author Chad Harbach, in n+1, on the state of the MFA and literary cultures across the U.S.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports

OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling.

But that doesn’t mean, as it turns out, that stories about sports can’t be fascinating. The economics! The moral gray areas! The egos! It’s like a reality show in there.

I’m not going to start watching sports anytime soon, but thanks to these stories, I’m starting to see why other people do.

Does Football Have A Future? The N.F.L. and The Concussion Crisis

Ben McGrath | The New Yorker | Jan. 31, 2011

This story has moved on quite a bit since 2011—there is now a book, a movie and something called The Concussion Blog—but McGrath’s story is a good primer on the issue of football players suffering severe mental damage in old age, and foreshadows both the huge pressure on the NFL and its head-in-the-sand response.

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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

Reading List: Stories About Unlikeable People

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The New Yorker, Rookie, Buzzfeed, and Salon.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 5, 2014

Stories About Unlikeable People

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Last Thursday, the NBC series “Community” returned with its creator and original showrunner, Dan Harmon, at the helm. I like “Community.” I do. It’s warm and dark and funny and self-referential. In spite of its absurdity—perhaps because of its absurdity—it is human; its characters are far from perfect. In this list, I wanted to include unlikeable people who are just that: people. People who do more than they thought they could do, who survive despite heartbreak and prejudice, who show us our truest selves and what we could be and, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “to care and not to care.”

1. “‘Community’ Two: Electric Boogaloo.” (Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker, January 2014)

The characters of “Community” are beloved, sure, but that doesn’t make them likable. Chevy Chase/Pierce Hawthorne was booted off the show for Harmon’s sake. His character was the worst human ever and probably the most human of all “Community” characters, but that’s neither here nor there. Nevertheless, the show is back, Jeff Winger is making ethically questionable decisions again, and we get to watch friendship avert the darkest timeline—hopefully.

2. “Enjoy the Show.” (Pixie, Rookie, December 2013)

A short story about falling in love and placeholders and Christmas gifts and when people you like do things you hate.

3. “Not Here To Make Friends.” (Roxane Gay, BuzzFeed, January 2014)

Gay ponders why it feels important to like the characters in the books we read, and why we feel revulsion to those who don’t immediately endear themselves. She approaches several novels written by women and explores what makes their characters unlikeable and therefore worthwhile: “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.”

4. “I Used to Love the Bride.” (Anna Pulley, Salon, April 2013)

“You have no idea what kindnesses you’re capable of,” Anna writes, because Anna loves Ellie. They were going to get married, but it fell apart, and now Ellie’s engaged to someone else. Anna’s going to be in the wedding.

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Jan. 3, 2014

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

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A Brief History of Epic Parties: Reading List

The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

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No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort, Silvio Berlusconi, or the kids from Saturday Night Fever?

1.  “The Great Fratsby” (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, December 2013)

While Jay Gatsby may have spent lavishly, in the end he did it for love;  in Martin Scorese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort does it all for the money.

2. “Suck and Blow: The Oral History of the Clueless Party Scene” (Jen Chaney, New York magazine, December 2013)

Before we were rolling with the homies, director Amy Heckerling had to figure out if Cher Horowitz would totally gag if she had to go to a party in the Valley.

3.  “The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy” (Devin Friedman, GQ, September 2012)

The hottest club in Las Vegas has Italian princes, ten-thousand dollar tables, a champagne fairy, air of pure oxygen, and you’re not invited.

4. “Basta Bunga Bunga” (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, June 2011)

The era of Berlusconi may be at an end, but the legend of this  Italian version of Benny Hill will never be forgotten, nakedly chasing after topless nymphettes while running the country into the ground.

5. “A Night to Remember” (Amy Fine Collins, Vanity Fair, July 1996)

Truman Capote kept telling people that he was going to invite everybody to his party at the Plaza Hotel in November of 1966. Guests were required to wear only two colors, black and white, to mirror the ascot races in My Fair Lady. Masks were to be worn by all upon entry and  removed only at midnight.

6. “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” (Nik Cohn, New York magazine, 1976)

By day, Vincent sold paint in a Bay Ridge hardware store; by night he was the best disco dancer in all of New York City. And in 1977, he would be played on screen by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Cohn, meanwhile, later admitted to making most of the story up.

Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About

For four years now, the Longreads community has celebrated the best storytelling on the web. Thanks for all of your contributions, and special thanks to Longreads Members for supporting this service. We couldn’t keep going without your funding, so join us today.

Earlier this week we posted every No. 1 story from our weekly email this year, in addition to all of the outstanding picks from our Best of 2013 series. Here are 10 stories that we couldn’t stop thinking about.

See you in 2014. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Sentence I Read This Year

Aileen Gallagher (@aegallagher) teaches magazine journalism at Syracuse University and is a contributing editor to College @Longreads.

“The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than to something with better odds, like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion which went to the worst place of all.”

-From David Finkel’s “The Return,” in The New Yorker (subscription required). Not sure how such an Esquire-y sentence made it into The New Yorker, but I’m glad it did. The sheer weight of the sentence and its many clauses suggests the soldiers’ psychological burden. That sentence carries the cruelty of fate.

The Return

David Finkel | The New Yorker | September 2013

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