Category Archives: fiction

July 18, 2011   Jane   fiction, Jane, opinion  
4

The mystery of what comprises commercial women’s fiction

So last week I was looking for a novel that is representative of the category of commercial women’s fiction. During one of our morning meetings we actually had a lively discussion about what constitutes this kind of book. Is it romance?  Does it include women’s psychological suspense?  What about certain kinds of mysteries and thrillers?

Are literary women’s novels included in this category? Can women’s fiction be written by men or must these novels only be written by women? Are these books published in mass market or are they hardcover and trade paperbacks?

I just found this website which does help to define the category.  Here, the definition is quite clear, really: women’s fiction includes various types of novels that generally appeal more to women than to men.

Using this definition, I did select a book to read for our company book club.  I wonder though what you think.  How would you define “commercial women’s fiction”?

July 15, 2011   Jessica   e-books, fiction, Jessica  
1

Pleasure Reading

Back from vacation—a week spent in Cape Cod, where the beach is near, the light is crisp and a stomach bug cut a swathe through my extended family.  A virus or possibly food poisoning felled us, one by wretched, wretching, one. But when not by the seaside or the sickbed, I did sneak in a bit of pleasure reading, including:

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, a debut historical novel on the relationship between Aristotle and his equally celebrated pupil, Alexander The Great. Lyon restores Aristotle, granddaddy of dead white guys, to startling life, and I’ve had a soft spot for A. T.G. since I stood in the spot where he consulted the Oracle of Amun in Egypt’s remote Siwa Oasis. He asked the Oracle whether he was meant to be Pharaoh. I asked if I should accept the recent marriage proposal of my future husband. Happily, the Oracle gave the greenlight to both endeavors.

I also read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which was—as critics and colleagues promised—terrific, but reading it on my Kindle was a mistake. However convenient the Kindle can be, in a book in which the chapters tell a Rashomon style story, I found myself wanting to go back, reread certain chapters in the light of later revelations, and otherwise have the ability to flip through the book. This is not easily accomplished on a Kindle. Have you had similar experiences with books ill suited for digital reading?

But by far the best thing I read was the happy news that my client, the prodigiously talented Valerie Trueblood, was short listed for the Frank O’Connor prize for short stories. In the words of the Seattle Times, her collection, Marry or Burn, “probes the idea and range of marriage…forming a dangerous, sharp-edged mosaic.”  These provocative, profound stories are a far cry from your typical boy meets girl, girl consults oracle tales, and like all great fiction, are quietly, glowingly, wrenchingly true.

June 15, 2011   Miriam   fiction, fun, inspiration, literary, Miriam, opinion  
6

Under the influence

Driving into the City on Monday, I heard a snippet of a segment on NPR where they asked their listeners to discuss books that have influenced them.  I made a mental note to look up the program online when I got to the office and had forgotten all about it by the time I’d crossed the GW bridge (now, of course, I can’t find the link).  But, the subject stayed with me.  As a result, I’ve been noodling about the influence of books for the last couple of days.  Obviously, all of us bookworms have been swayed by literature—both high and low—but how, specifically?  It’s rather obvious that books shape our intellectual growth but what about other areas of our lives?  How much of our beliefs, tastes and dislikes, career paths and other big-ticket choices have been influenced by books?

I think every aspect of my life has been touched by books.  For instance, I believe my view of politics and policy was shaped by those “You Were There” books about the American Revolution that I read in elementary school and all those biographies of three-letter presidents (FDR and JFK); my ideas of romance were an unholy mish mash of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Colette, Mary McCarthy and Jacqueline Susann; my career choice owes a lot to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; and my general take on the human condition far too impacted by the darkness of Russian novels and the sinister whimsy of Latin American greats like Borges and Garcia Marquez….

But, when I tried to think of one book that influenced me above all others, I couldn’t.  It seems that, for me, literary influence is an aggregate of themes and ideas culled from, probably, every book I’ve ever read.  Even in the most banal, tedious narratives I’ve been able to find a phrase or thought that influenced my thinking or my doing.  And, that, to me, is what’s so amazing about literature.

So, what are the books that have influenced you?  Is there one title (or many) that you can claim changed your life?

June 06, 2011   Jim   fiction, Jim, what we're looking for  
12

Send me good stuff!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted what I’m looking for, so it seems like as good a time as any. Because let’s be honest, the idea that publishing shuts down in the summer is more or less a fiction. Things might happen at a slightly slower pace because vacations interrupt things and we have the option of cutting out a little earlier on Fridays, but the volume of work, judging by my inbox and Kindle certainly, never slows down all that much. And I’m always on the lookout for new talent.

I’ve long said that I’m not especially interested in historical fiction. Then a year or so back, I signed on a delightful historical romance author. And at BEA a couple weeks back, I snagged a copy of Amor Towles 1937-set novel Rules of Civility which I read in one sitting and tumbled head over heels in love with. It’s not that I’m not interested in novels set in the past, it seems. I’m just not interested in novels about history. Which is to say that if someone novelizes Napoleon’s life, I’ll still not be interested. If, however, someone writes a rollicking murder mystery set in an interesting past, then I’m right on board. So now I’m thinking I’d particularly love to find something rich and exciting set in an exciting period. My personal taste would lead more urban and plot focused than rural and ruminative. Think more The Alienist than The Girl with the Pearl Earring.

It would be a delight for me to find some young adult fiction set in the real world. I adore the paranormal, fantasy, and sci-fi novelists I work with, and I’m certainly open to more, but with very few exceptions, I don’t have much real life fiction. I’d love to find some more—think Sarah Dessen or Lauren Myracle. Basically, I love what I do, but I’m always interested in expanding my boundaries and trying new things.

Has anyone read Swamplandia? I loved that book—the author depicts really unusual characters whose lives aren’t remotely mainstream, but she never relies on quirk or absurd humor to render them. It’s a beautiful book about people whose story isn’t necessarily relatable but whose feelings and thoughts are. It reminded me of Geek Love and made me want to find a novel about a bunch of misfits to call my own. Want to get started on a specific idea? In the early 20th Century, Coney Island was the home of “Lilliputia, the Midget City,” a self-contained village for little people that charged admission for visitors. I once gathered about 100 pages of information on this fascinating place thinking I’d use it some day before I remembered that I don’t write. So someone else: hop to!

And then, of course, I want to find the next astounding, jaw-dropping, brilliant, wonderful, high concept, bestselling, award winning novel in any category, adult or young adult. So if you have that, by all means, send it along!

Anything that you all would give your right arm to see on the shelves right now?

On a side note, an orange randomly appeared on the roof outside my window last week, and I’ve checked on it every day, waiting for decay to inevitably set in. I anticipated long weeks of IM’ing my colleagues updates on the state of the orange. If I’m being honest, I probably would have included State of the Orange updates in my blog entries. In fact, I just went to the window to photograph it—the beginning of the long saga of a lonely fruit. Alas, the orange has disappeared. I’m suspecting foul play. Now I’m going to need to come up with more new blog ideas. This is all very alarming.

May 27, 2011   Rachel   fiction, fun, Rachel S., setting  
10

If I close my eyes and wish real hard…

There are few things more stressful than apartment hunting on a deadline. This is currently my life and I’m finding it hard to think of much else this week. Despite my determination, my efforts have still come to naught, though I’ve got a little over a week left in which to find the most brilliant new home. Or, you know, the acceptable one that I can afford in my neighborhood.

In moments of fitful insanity, I have taken to throwing all sense of realism out the window and searching for residencies either way out of my price range or in far off lands (like France! And Norway! And Portland!). Did you know that it’s much cheaper to live in almost all places that are not New York? It’s true and it makes me jealous.  In any case, after looking at the heartbreaking pictures of palatial abodes that I won’t be inhabiting any time in the near future and frantically searching for the “cozy” (real estate term for “SMALL”) spaces that I could possibly move into, I started thinking about all of the amazing houses and apartments I’ve read about an wistfully hoped were in some way real.

The Mortmain house/castle in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle remains one of my favorite idealistic homes. The intricacies are detailed so well and the decrepit castle transformed into a modern (in mid-twentieth century terms) space has such a Romantic feel to it that it’s impossible not to want to live there. The grounds, the turrets, the moat and high ceilings all project such an air of fading elegance, which of course is the point of the story. The part of me that cries at Satine’s death in Moulin Rouge, yet kind of feels like it would be so lovely to die of consumption (the galloping consumption) as perfectly as she does, is the part of me that wants to live in this crumbling house.

Then there’s the professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Maybe I have a thing for huge, old twisty houses? Regardless, a good game of hide and seek proves how amazing this house is. And people come just to take tours of it! And the hide and seek combined with the getting out of the way of the tours GETS YOU INTO NARNIA. Sometimes. Even without the whole “portal to another world” part, I’ve always wanted to live in a house with so many passages and rooms that you could get lost in it if you were unfamiliar (oh, now my brain is moving on to Hogwarts, where even Dumbledore doesn’t know all of its secrets, but I’m refraining and trying to stay away from fantasy/magical homes for now).

I will end with the apartment in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The action of this book rarely leaves the confines of 7 Rue de Grenelle and the bourgeois Parisian address is almost too much to read about without calling Air France and demanding a ticket immediately. Much like George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, Barbery uses the building itself to precisely detail the lives of its inhabitants. Its history is their history and the legacies are concrete. So much is tied to family and name, but also to the floors and apartment numbers themselves. While I’m sure I’m hardly alone in my longing for a lovely European apartment (apartement?), this time size notwithstanding, it’s much easier to imagine a life as an ex-patriot when someone describes your new ideal home with such emotion and, well, elegance.

It’s long been a saying that a good book will transport you somewhere else entirely, and so I would think that this is something anyone whose ever called themselves a reader, or heck, read a book period, has considered. What spaces have you read about that you’ve wanted to go to so badly you’ve convinced yourself they’re real? It might be that the author describes them so well or that the characters that live in and around are so lively and endearing that they make the home what it is. Whatever the attraction might be, if you could pick up and move to any literary place, where would you settle down?

May 18, 2011   Miriam   celebrity, controversy, culture, fiction, Miriam, nonfiction  
3

Scandals/Scandales

The thing about taking turns blogging once a week as we do here at DGLM is that you sometimes have the perfect subject to write about but it’s not on your designated day.  Then, Wednesday rolls around, you had a miserable commute into the rain-soaked city, your lower back aches and you’re walking around like an 80-year-old who’s nine months pregnant (you know how pregnant women waddle when they’re in their sixth trimester…or was that just me?), the piles on your desk are mocking you, and all you want to do is read everything you can find online about the Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn scandals.  So, in lieu of something pithy and informative about publishing (e-books, the business as we know it is dying, yadda, yadda), I’m just going to ramble on about these two current headliners.

The Schwarzenegger story is tawdry and lurid in a way that we’re so used to (John Edwards is cackling madly somewhere) that it’s really just a fill-in-the-blank kind of scandal.  Doesn’t mean I’m not going to pick up my copy of Star as soon as it hits the newsstands.  The Strauss-Kahn case, however, is much more interesting because it is so multi-layered and speaks to so many different kinds of abuses and contradictions.  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity is hurtful to his family and fans in the way that these kinds of betrayals generally are.  Strauss-Kahn’s alleged actions will have an effect on the global marketplace and the fate of several countries currently facing huge financial crises.  Criminal behavior is an apt description and not just because of the appalling nature of the offense.

So, being that it’s the way my brain is wired after 150 years in the business, I see potential for books in both stories: Schwarzenegger’s would be a novel—Jackie Collins meets Dominick Dunne perhaps?  Strauss-Kahn’s a serious, non-fiction exploration of why powerful men, whose careers are devoted to helping humanity in macro ways, often turn out to be such sleazeballs and our complicity as a culture in letting them get away with it—this is more of a Michael Lewis meets Philip Gourevitch for a long discussion over coffee kind of book.

Which, if either, would you buy and read?  And why?

May 06, 2011   Rachel   fiction, fun, Rachel S., reading, trivia  
5

Did you know?

I love trivia. Like really, really love trivia. The single worst thing about not owning a television is that I can no longer watch Jeopardy! every night at 7:00. Any other show I’d care to watch, I can find online, but there’s no magic in watching a rerun of Jeopardy! The best kind of anecdotal knowledge is the kind you pick up by accident. Of course, knowing facts and information because you’ve studied it or gone out of your way to research is valuable and fulfilling stuff, but it’s the answer you blurt out that you didn’t even realize you knew that means the most. The “I have no idea how I even knew that” qualification after correctly answering an obscure question really gives weight to your knowledge.

While you must, of course, be careful trusting history or information given in a novel as fact, as a  novel is, by definition, fiction, I’ve learned many useful (and many more useless) things simply by enjoying a book. Whether it be rudimentary philosophy, practices unique to various cultures or eras, definitions or obscure words or scientific classifications, every writer of every book has a knowledge and understanding unique to themselves—as do, of course, the readers! In so writing purely what one knows (as goes the age-old advice), there must be some assumption that every bit of background or situational intelligence is common knowledge. Otherwise, books would have to be at least twice as long purely on account of necessary explanation of every little thing.

Sometimes it’s just that a book was written in a past decade or century, and society as portrayed in, say, Pride and Prejudice may not have been a groundbreaking description when Austen first published, but is insightful to modern readers. Even just a sense of a different human experience can spark an interest that was previously dormant and leads to further reading and research. Luckily, my passion for trivia is trumped only by my passion for books, so the two feed well off of each other. What sort of things have you been lead to learn more about because of a novel? Are there any novels in particular that you feel have taught you something—whether or importance or simple fun fact?

April 27, 2011   Miriam   canon, fiction, fun, great books, inspiration, Miriam  
4

Art imitates art

Herman Melville’s pompous dictum, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation,” notwithstanding, I love retellings of great stories.  From Marion Zimmer Bradley’s wonderful The Mists of Avalon to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (some of my favorites) it’s hard for me not to see the possibilities for retelling in a book or play or television series or film that I especially enjoyed.  Of course, the closer a work is to classic status, the easier it is to imagine a modern spin—in part because the author is probably long dead and unable to complain that zombies and werewolves have been inserted into their 19th century storyline.

This  Flavorwire post got me thinking about what books would benefit from a new retelling.  Madame Bovary as a Real Housewife of New Jersey, anyone?  Moby Dick with spaceships and a lot less talk about whale fat rendering?  A Tale of Two Cities set in the present-day Middle East?

What are your favorite retellings and which stories would you like to see retold?

April 26, 2011   Stephanie   advice, agents, authors, fiction, Stephanie, writing  
2

I really love lists

Evaluating a manuscript is always an interesting thing.  The fact is, when an agent or an editor considers a novel, every detail really does matter. This is an important thing for any hopeful writer to consider, because in the end it could affect that final answer: yes or no. Some thoughts:

  1. In keeping with what John spoke about earlier today, make the premise of the story clear from the beginning, and throw conflict in early on. If it takes too long for the reader to become invested in what’s happening, or even know what the story is about, they likely won’t continue reading.
  2. Give your characters desire and agency. Understandably, characters that are not driven—either positively or negatively—become boring fairly quickly.
  3. On the topic of characters, avoid introducing everyone all at once.
  4. Be mindful of your point of view. Often, a story is stronger when the action is experienced through the perspective of the main character. This is certainly not imperative, but something to consider.
  5. Most importantly, try to avoid over-writing.  Making your writing stand out is important, but can also be tricky. Don’t let your writing get in its own way.

Can you think of any other important tips to keep in mind?

April 13, 2011   Miriam   fiction, Miriam, timing, writing  
4

The readiness is all

We’ve all heard that old cliché about the timing of a relationship just not being right. On paper it all looked good. He was smart and funny. So was she. They were both crazy about dogs and children. They both loved country music and British humor. You get the picture. They were perfect for each other. But the relationship fizzled after a passionate start and when they looked back on that interlude, they told themselves that the timing just hadn’t been right. And, occasionally you hear the story of a couple who find each other after many years apart and discover that the spark that initially drew them together is still there. Only now they are in a place in their lives where they can finally make it work. Sure, it’s a Lifetime movie or a Nicholas Sparks book, but it also happens more often than one would imagine.

I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately and have been blown away by some of the new novels I’ve come across and underwhelmed by others. Generally speaking, the difference in my reactions is not due to a great disparity in the authors’ talents. We’re privileged to represent some very gifted writers around here and when something doesn’t “work” it is, like those star-crossed relationships, often due to timing.

When I say timing, I don’t mean that a novel has to hit some kind of zeitgeist nerve in order to be publishable. Sometimes, it’s about letting a subject, an idea, a character…whatever…percolate, get seasoned, and simmer until it’s fully cooked. All writers know what a difference a few days or weeks can make in terms of their perception of their own work. The manuscript you thought represented the second coming of Proust the day you typed the final period seems like an incoherent mess a month later and that day is when the real work of editing and polishing should begin. This kind of bad timing stems from falling in love with a premise/idea, no matter how flawed, and wanting to unleash it on the world before all the kinks have been worked out. The good new is that as long as an author is able to be somewhat objective and, more important, willing to dig deep and revise until the novel is ready, this is the best bad timing problem to have.

The worst kind of bad timing is when the book is good, maybe even great, but for external reasons—the market is suddenly glutted with chick lit, vampire books, memoirs, etc., or a news event makes the subject seem in poor taste or offensive, for instance—it will be impossible to sell. Then, there is nothing for it but to take that lovingly crafted manuscript, put it on a shelf and let it percolate for a few months, maybe even years, until the time is right to unleash it on the world.

One of our authors just published a novel she’d been working on for years. A new title, a new publisher (not the one who originally bought it) and a lot of seasoning and it’s finally on the shelves. The readiness is all….

Do you all have stories of projects that worked or didn’t because of bad timing? We certainly do.

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