Category Archives: Miriam

January 25, 2012   Miriam   advice, culture, inspiration, Miriam, trends  
19

Helping ourselves

So, as we do around here, we’ve been talking lately about what book categories are thriving and which are tanking.  As Jane mentioned in her post earlier this week, categories wax and wane (and so do we).  The other day, during a staff meeting, Jane and I were fondly remembering the self-help boom of the late ‘80s to late ‘90s.  All those Women Who Love Too Much and the Men Who Find Them Annoying bestsellers, along with the mystical/empowerment titles like Women Who Run with Iron John, made for fat royalty statements back in the day.

Not so much any more.  Aside from the inspirational/health/nutrition/lifestyle books by any of the Real Housewives and the occasional Let Me Tell You How You Can Fix You book on the New York Times list, the self-help category seems sadly quiet at the moment.  We are clearly in need of help as a culture—individually and collectively, and this piece in The Hairpin points out the kinds of situations some of us could use  guidance with.

All kidding aside, though, what happened to the self-help category?  Why are those books not making the kind of splash they did 15 or 20 years ago?  Certainly, we’re not any more well-adjusted.

So,  really, what happened?   Serious question here, why do you all think that the self-help bubble went bust?

January 11, 2012   Miriam   fun, inspiration, Miriam  
14

Whimsicality

In my fervid hunt for a blog topic this morning, I stumbled upon this wonderful video, which was  shot at Type Books in Canada by Sean Ohlenkamp (a marketing director who must be a passionate book lover).  It made me happy.

Ever since I can remember, my need to be surrounded by books has amounted to something like a personality disorder.  When I hear people say they can’t buy any more books because they don’t have room for them or, worse, that too many books somehow clash with their décor, I get a bit twitchy.  For me, books bring a room to life; in fact, all the lives contained in books fill a room as surely as a gaggle of guests at a cocktail party.

So, despite the fact that my e-reader has hundreds of titles in it, I can’t imagine how bereft I’d be if there weren’t thousands of lively physical editions in my house and office, making general nuisances of themselves, lining the walls, peeking around corners, leaning precariously on stools, and threatening to jump out from tables and shelves in their eagerness to be read.

Do you anthropomorphize your book collection or is it just me?  And do books have a life force too?  I think they do.

December 21, 2011   Miriam   advice, fun, great books, Miriam, reading  
2

I wish you books…

Read a book!

Because it makes you smarter.

Because it’s fun.

Because it sharpens your wit and develops your capacity for empathy.

Because it makes the existential void a little less like a black hole.

Because it allows you to defy the laws of physics and travel through time and space.

Because it forces you to consider other opinions, other practices, other “right” ways to do things.

Because it allows you to walk into the most well attended, interesting party, listen in on outrageous conversations, get caught up on all the gossip…and leave whenever you want.

Because the more you read, the more your brain and soul expand.

Because you can’t be lonely when you’re immersed in a good book.

Because just this year, I’ve hung out with Keith Richards and Patti Smith, fallen in love with Hemingway all over again, realized that Dr. Seuss writes the best self-help books, been dazzled by Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan, transported by Mary Stewart, titillated by Eloisa James, and tickled by Nora Ephron’s latest review of her crazy life.

Because I can’t imagine how bleak the world would be without books to record and re-imagine our achievements and losses, our  triumphs and tragedies, and all the greatness and smallness of our shared humanity.

So, go to your nearest bookstore or click on the “buy now” button on your eReader and get a book (or books) and start reading.    Then, tell everyone about it.

Happy holidays!

December 14, 2011   Miriam   advice, agents, authors, contracts, Miriam  
9

Know when to walk away, know when to run…

I warn you, I’m feeling crabby this week.  Christmas is in ten days and I’m woefully behind on my shopping and general preparedness.  Sure, I’m not like Jane who’s finished buying everyone’s holiday present by July 4th weekend, but I like to give myself a little leeway and not have to deal with the last minute rush to buy, wrap, and decorate.  This year, I’m so swamped, I can’t even run out during lunch to visit the shops in Union Square Park.

I know, I know, I should be grateful that business is booming at a typically dead time of year.  And in theory I am.  Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with a slew of difficult contract negotiations that have me yanking at my already unmanageable hair.  In general, difficult contracts don’t make me all that crabby.  The difference right now is that the negotiations are unnecessarily difficult—lots of lawyerly requests for language that does nothing but overgild the lily  without adding anything of substance to the deal.  Or, worse yet, a negotiation that has taken weeks of pointless back and forth for something we advised our client to walk away from in the first place.

To be clear, we don’t often advise our clients to walk away from any deal that has the potential to make money for them.  That would go against their interests and ours.  But we draw the line at allowing our clients to be treated unfairly or exposed to onerous terms and liabilities without a strong word of caution and a push in the direction of “run, don’t walk away from this deal.”  It pains us when our advice is not heeded because, usually, we’re right.  And even when the most dire consequences do not materialize, a process that starts out as contentious and unreasonable usually continues to be so up until the bitter end…of the book project that is.

So, while we like to keep our clients busy and happy and in funds for their own Christmas shopping, sometimes the only thing that makes sense to us is for them to walk away no matter how tempting it might be to take a bad deal.

Here’s my question to you guys:  If your agent is suggesting that you walk away from an offer—whether it’s a publishing offer from a house that wants your first born in exchange for print publication of your work or a chance to collaborate with a celebrity housewife on her juicy tell-all, say— and you are not in desperate financial straits that leave you without choices, would you listen and take his/her advice?

P.S.  Boy, you guys really don’t have any interest in headlines, do you?  I’m gonna call it a tie between Tamara and Sarah.  Send me your addresses at miriam@dystel.com for your prizes, ladies.

December 07, 2011   Miriam   contest, fun, Miriam, news  
5

Headlining

As loyal followers of this blog know, I am a little headlines obsessed.  Usually, this takes the form of scanning 1,237 blogs and websites every day before our 8:30 meeting without actually reading a single article (you can learn so much from the right caption).  Sometimes, it manifests as trying to come up with the proper headline for an everyday occurrence which is just weird or eyebrow raising enough to merit column inches in The New York Post.  But occasionally, the right headline makes me think, “Ooh, what a great novel could be built around ’44-Year-Old UK Man Lives Off Road Kill for 30 Years’” (true story).

So, here’s the gray, drizzly Wednesday challenge:  Pick a headline from today’s crazy roster—The HuffPost on Blagojevich’s sentencing is “Big Hair to the Big House.”  Positively Postian, no?—on the blogosphere and give us a paragraph on what the book you’d write based on it would be.

(You need to tell us what the headline is and where it came from for authentication purposes. First prize is a cookbook by one of our lovely and talented authors.)

November 30, 2011   Miriam   controversy, fiction, memoir, Miriam, nonfiction  
9

Fact or fiction?

On long road trips with my six-year-old, as parents have from time immemorial (or, okay, since cars and freeways were invented), we often while away the minutes between bathroom stops with games like “Fiction or Non-fiction?” and its first cousin “True or False?” What’s interesting to me about this exercise is how hard it sometimes is to explain to a child how certain things can be true/non-fiction, even if we haven’t experienced them ourselves. Case in point? Dinosaurs. Literal minded kids (or kids under a certain age) think that because they don’t exist now they must be fiction or part of a great left-wing conspiracy.

Anyway, my point, rambling though it might be, is that gray areas exist when trying to categorize fiction and non-fiction. Certainly, this is something that is daily evident in my line of work. You have only to read an artfully crafted memoir to wonder how much is true/non-fiction and how much is the author’s imagination/ambition/skill/lousy memory at work and, therefore, false/fiction. As far as I’m concerned, as long as things are clearly labeled—i.e., “I remember it this way but I confess the years may have dimmed my powers of recollection”—I’m okay with narratives that are more well wrought than truthful.

For me, in fact, the thornier issue is fiction, where anything goes. Right? Or does it? This piece in Jezebel about Alexander Maksik’s much lauded novel skeeves me out precisely because it raises uncomfortable issues about what and how much is allowed when an author puts on his/her novelist hat. Using fiction to tackle difficult subjects is de rigueur in literature, accomplishing creative expression while avoiding legal liability. But what about the collateral damage? Is it okay for Mr. Maksik to exploit his alleged experience with a student for literary fame and success? Must we defend his right to do so as elemental to the whole concept of creative freedom? Or do we just call a sleaze a sleaze?

Help me out on this one folks. I don’t want to condemn Mr. Maksik out of hand but given all the recent headline grabbing scandals about authority figures abusing their power over kids, I wonder if instead of praise for his artistry, we should be censuring his alleged behavior. What do you all think?

November 23, 2011   Miriam   fun, holidays, Miriam  
4

Meowsings

I’m not a cat person.  I’ve had hamsters, ducks, rabbits, geckos and other reptiles, parrots, and several dogs, but I’ve never had a cat as a pet.  Oh, I’ve known some delightful cats who managed to combine elegance and aloofness with winning moments of affection.   I’ve also known some CFH (cats from hell).  One in particular terrorized me in my first post-college apartment.  The furball in question was my roommate’s and we shared a small place in a questionable block on the upper, upper west side of Manhattan.  It was the kind of block that, back in the day, you were scared to walk through alone at night, especially if you were young and female.  And yet, I felt safer among the drug dealers and pimps who owned the neighborhood than in my apartment with the homicidal cat.  My roommate, who loved the beast, thought her kitty was adorable—even when he flew at you with claws fully extended and spittle flying from his open mouth (seriously, he was possessed by Satan).  Happily, our association ended without harm to animal or human, but it could have gone badly for both.  After that episode, I considered pot-bellied pigs, skunks, spider monkeys and miniature horses as pets (actually, I considered them for my husband who is crazy about animals) but never a cat.

So, yeah, I’m not a cat person.  And yet, I love pictures of cats doing silly, stupid, adorable things.  I’m the audience for all those websites that show cats with Post-it notes on them or dangling from chandeliers or typing away at a computer keyboard.  ‘Cause, really, who can resist cute kitties and how much better is it when you don’t have to vacuum cat hair off all your clothes and furnishings to get your feline fix.

Because it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow and any of you reading this blog are preoccupied with thoughts of stuffing and how to avoid great-aunt Greta at dinner, instead of e-book pricing and effective query letters, I thought I’d treat you to this site, where every time you hit the 100-word mark you are rewarded with a picture of a pretty puss.

Enjoy!  And happy Thanksgiving to all!

November 16, 2011   Miriam   fiction, inspiration, Miriam, news  
7

Ripping (off) headlines

Every once in a while I find myself so enraged, befuddled, or even charmed (rarely) by the news cycle that I can think of little else.  This week, like most of you, I’m sure, I find myself filled with ongoing, white-hot, animal rage about Jerry Sandusky and the whole Penn State scandal.   Simultaneously, I’m incredulous (and not in a good way) that  someone who doesn’t seem to know what’s been happening with Libya lately is seriously running for president.  And then, just when I think I need anti-depressants to get through the newspaper, there’s Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, making the media rounds to promote their new book and seeming so courageous and true to each other.  Their story is a palate cleanser to chase away the taste of bile the other headlines leave behind.

As immersed in different ways as I’ve been with these events and personalities, I find myself wondering which would work in a fictional retelling.  Novelists, from Zola to Grisham have been ripping off ideas from the headlines from time immemorial, of course, but with the relentless coverage of happenings big and small to feed the great gaping maw the Internet has created, I think it’s gotten harder to take a major news story and turn it into a compelling, important novel.  Still, I wonder what Tom Perrotta would do with the Penn State tragedy, what Allegra Goodman could make of the Giffords/Kelly saga, and what merriment would result from Carl Hiaasen’s take on the Cain, Perry, and Bachman campaigns.

Perhaps it’s only fiction that can truly make sense of the horror and absurdity.  Sometimes, too, fiction is the only way to capture the complexity of love, passion, bravery in a way that doesn’t reduce these qualities to a Hallmark card.

What headlines would you rip off and turn into classic fiction?  And what authors would you pair what stories with?

November 09, 2011   Miriam   Miriam, opinion, reading  
12

When the wrong character dies

Killing off a beloved character is a surefire way to grab your reader’s attention and piss him/her off.  Say, you’re slogging along, about 9,000 pages into Gone with the Wind, Scarlett’s already been married a couple dozen times, the South has burned and come back as a theme park, Rhett has decided that maybe it’s time to retire to Boca, and then (Jim tells me I have to issue a Spoiler Alert! here) Melanie dies.  Seriously?  Melanie?  If anyone should kick the bucket in that book it’s clearly Ashley, he of the tedious sense of honor and the inability to choose the right woman to obsess over.  You kill Ashley off and Melanie and Scarlett can just get on with their lives—go shopping for a decent outfit for Scarlett to replace the curtain gown, start a book club with the other Confederate widows that includes lots of cocktails, go back to Tara and redecorate, etc.  But, no.  Melanie’s dead and Ashley just goes back to being his ineffectual, wan self.   I guess Melanie’s death was supposed to teach all the major players a lesson and Ms. Mitchell did win a Pulitzer for her epic novel, so who am I to gainsay her.  Still, the choice rankles.

This piece in The Awl about beloved characters who were almost killed off by their authors has me brooding about literary deaths.  I can’t help but muse about who would have gotten the ax if I were the one writing the book.  Given my general feminist tendencies, there would probably be a lot more women still alive at the end of the classics, especially given some authors’ penchant for using death as punishment for rebelliousness in females—for every Sydney Carton and Cyrano de Bergerac dying heroic deaths, there are dozens of Anna Kareninas jumping ignominiously in front of trains, after all.

So, who would you kill off in your favorite books in place of the character who actually dies?  And how would that change the narrative?

P.S.  You guys cracked me up with your responses to my “high concept” blog post last week.  After much cogitating (in a totally subjective and intellectually unrigorous manner) the mug goes to MS because the “what if” posted is both provocative and gives you an immediate idea of what the book/film would be about.  Thank you all for playing along!  (MS, please send your mailing address to miriam@dystel.com.)

November 03, 2011   Miriam   contest, fun, Miriam, queries  
18

High concept pitches (and a mug)

Film people—producers, agents, managers—come by our offices quite often and when they do, we all sit around the conference table and listen to them tell us what they’re looking for this season.  Lately, an interesting trend has surfaced.  In our last several meetings, a Hollywood person has told us that all they need is a title.  Often, they use Sh** My Dad Says or Go the F*** to Sleep as examples of titles that they can use to build a tv show or movie around.  The first time I heard it, I thought, “Well, dang, that’s taking the high concept thing in a tragic direction.”  I mean, it’s one thing to pitch someone the contents of a book by saying, “This story is Transformers meets Annie Hall,” but you’ll have to read the manuscript (or at least the coverage) to find out how that unholy pairing is possible.  It’s quite another to have the title be both the pitch and the content.

You might think I’m about to launch into a screed about  Hollywood’s ongoing jihad against our collective intellect, but you would be wrong.  The title-as-high-concept trend does intrigue me.  In fact, it has made me think about how much more entertaining query letters for books would be if, instead of a boring synopsis, authors included a succinct, pithy, immediately graspable description of their book.

Wikipedia tells us that “High concept narratives are typically characterised by an over-arching ‘what if?’ scenario that acts as a catalyst for the following events.” I confess, I’m a sucker for “’what if?’ scenarios.”   If nothing else, it’s a fun parlor game to try to sum up your favorite books this way—e.g., “What if a sparkly vampire and a sullen high school girl fell in love?”

There’s also the Transformers meets Annie Hall approach, as mentioned above.

And, then there’s the title-as-high-concept. Snakes on a Plane anyone?

Applying any of these devices to commercial fiction is one thing but how about to literary fiction?  Are literary novels high-concept proof?  Can you guys send in your high-concept tag lines, either for your own work or published books that we’re all familiar with?  There’s a DGLM mug for the best high-concept pitch I get….

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