When Sarah Pinborough's thriller Behind Her Eyes was published in 2017, even she described it as a "Marmite book". Her publisher slapped on equally dire warnings, hyping it with the hashtag #WTFthatending.
Links of the week February 15 2021 (07)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
22 February 2021
Now the novel is a hit Netflix miniseries and Pinborough is still boggled by her own twist. "I finished watching it and then I had a shower and went to bed and I was still thinking, ‘That ending, man!' - and I made it up!" she says, speaking from her home near Milton Keynes. "But it's different seeing it."
Behind Her Eyes is the story of Louise, played by Simona Brown, a single mother who has a one-night stand with a man in a bar, only to discover that he is her new boss, David, played by Tom Bateman. Louise's new friend Adele (Eve Hewson) also happens to be David's wife. As Louise gets to know the couple, she sees the cracks in their marriage widen. So far, so run of the domestic noir mill. But Pinborough made her name in horror and science fiction before she turned to thrillers - so when the big reveal comes, Behind Her Eyes is genuinely #WTFthatending.
There is a new app. It distills books, both classics and modern bestsellers, into brief, accessible summaries. You can listen to audio versions of summaries, or read them on your phone. The app is called Instaread-or it's called Blinkist, or it's called GetAbstract or Joosr or 12Min or StoryShots or SumizeIt or CatchUp. These apps' interfaces and summary lengths vary, but all of them do pretty much the same thing: summarize books. Most of these apps were founded in the past decade. 17 million people use Blinkist alone. What is going on?
Firstly, readers are mostly using these apps for nonfiction summaries. Though Instaread offers summaries of titles by fiction greats like Nabokov, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Cline, and Jonathan Safran Foer, most of its contemporaries only offer summaries of nonfiction, and even given the option, readers tend toward business and informational reads. App reviews reflect this: says Instaread user Mikester1983, "I love staying on top of the best business reads but don't have the time or money to buy and read the actual books." Instaread user Nicky Beaird refers to the app as "Leaders Digest." In these cases, readers view books as tomes of facts to be synthesized, rather than the unified experience a novel is intended to provide. Instaread's first displayed section is "Business and Economics"; many of the texts are about self-improvement (Extreme Productivity; Managing Oneself; Millionaire Success Habits). It follows that a reader searching to optimize their life will also want to optimize their reading experience. The efficient snake efficiently eats its own tail, and, satiated, embarks on a day of closing deals.
Book-to-screen deals are reported by the Hollywood trades in pieces that dutifully mention the novelists, directors and actors involved but often leave out the people who actually made it happen - the agent or manager who hooked up the players, the producer who optioned it years ago, the book scout whose secret source shared the proposal before book publishers had even seen it.
Below are a few of Hollywood's most important behind-the-scenes movers, shakers and connection-makers - agents, scouts, managers and execs. Not all of them toil in obscurity, but each contributes mightily to the adaptation process that puts all those pages on the screen.
Even if-as per my last essay for Lit Hub-we know how to read, there remains the equally vexed question of what we should read. If the 21st century is notable for anything much at all when it comes to literature-and I use the term in its broadest sense, as will become clear-it's the spiking of formerly big literary guns, and the dismantling of what used to be understood as the canon. In truth, the canon was both a comparatively recent phenomenon-if by this is meant a collection of texts the reading of which was deemed essential if you were to consider yourself cultured-and never by any means the overbearing and fortified phenomenon its detractors love to hate and besiege.
Put bluntly: the canon only really existed-in my view-as a genuinely culturally conditioning phenomenon for a few decades before it began to fire blanks. Prior to that there was an evolving literary culture that, by definition, was restricted to the literate. Its influence may have shaped general culture and values-but just as natural religion allows for far greater latitude than preachers of the vulgate would allow, so this proto-canon scarcely affected the cultural mores of the unlettered. In some ways the analogy would be between the Protestant Reformation and the inception of web offset printing combined with universal literacy: Just as the aim of the former was to make Divine writ accessible to all-so the latter was hell-bent on making the writ of humanity similarly ubiquitous.
Much of the loudest buzz within the book business is of Random House's plan to swallow Simon & Schuster.
S&S among other advantages could enjoy more outlets for its books. But such a vision still reeks of "shuffling chairs on the Titanic."
Merger or no merger, and regardless of Random House's profits, the industry as a whole is a dismal underperformer, as shown by pre-Covid numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics-covering publishers of all kinds, large and small.
Americans in 2019 were spending 33 times more on big-screen TVs, Netflix, and other nontext diversions than on books and other forms of recreational reading. Many U.S. publishers have enjoyed a bump in book sales during the pandemic (especially to well-off households locked up at home and interested in home-schooling children).
But reading-related expenditures, in fact, might on the way down or at least end up flat for too long if we extrapolate long-term from some BLS numbers.
Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online "in bulk", according to Which?
The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from £5 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products.
It suggested the firm was facing an "uphill struggle" against a "widespread fake reviews industry".
An Amazon spokesman said: "We remove fake reviews and take action against anyone involved in abuse."
Sales of print books continued to ride a hot streak into February with units jumping 25.7% in the first week of the month over the first week of February 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The increase was the highest yet this year, and unit sales of print books were up 22.1% through February 6, 2021.
Once again, all six major categories had double-digit sales increases over 2020, with sales in the young adult segments skyrocketing; fiction was up 55.7%, and the small nonfiction category rose 67.3%. The latter category benefited from the release of Brave by Sissy Goff, which landed in second place in its first week on sale and led to a 158% jump in sales in the social situations/family/health sub-category. The jump in fiction sales was spurred by the release of two new titles: Star Wars, The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray topped the category bestseller list, selling more than 17,000 copies in its first week on sale, while Scott Cawthon's The Twisted Ones sold over 9,000 copies.
In early February, after a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: "I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher."
If the first lockdown was about finding space to write (along with a blitz spirit and a Tesco delivery slot), then the second has been far bleaker and harder for creativity. Whether it is dealing with home schooling, the same four walls, or anxiety caused by the news, for many authors, the stories just aren't coming.
"Stultified is the word," says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. "The problem with writing is it's just another screen, and that's all there is ... I can't connect with my imagination. I can't connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what's going on in the world."
Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. "My subconscious is just basically screaming: ‘Get us out of this'," she says, so there's no space to create fiction. "I don't have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows."
A few years ago at a Radcliffe Institute exhibit, I came across photos of a draft of what would become Angela Davis' autobiography. A foundational Black literary text, bare-boned and vulnerable, is not something you often get to see. The manuscript bloomed with the strokes of a blue pen, notes from the editor on what needed to be changed. In the caption of the photo, the editor's name was noted: Toni Morrison.
There is so much power in that photo. It tells us a lot about Davis, but it tells us even more about Morrison. Morrison, one of the most beloved Black writers, lovingly and painstakingly edited the manuscript of Davis, one of the most beloved Black activists. For many, Morrison is mostly lauded as a writer. Yet her role as an editor at Random House shimmers beneath the veil, a fun fact buried beneath the weight of her literary accomplishments.
"If you would be a poet," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man who would know, wrote in 2007, "create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if it means sounding apocalyptic...."
For nearly the better part of seven decades, Ferlinghetti not only wrote such poems but sold them, from San Francisco's City LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/ Booksellers, which he founded with Peter D. Martin in 1953, and published them, at City Lights Publishers, which he started in 1955. Martin left the business that year, but Ferlinghetti remained, mentoring generations of people of letters of all sorts along the way.
Still, even the greatest verses end: Ferlinghetti died on February 22 at his home in the Golden City, his bookstore confirmed; his daughter, Julie Sasser, told the New York Times the cause was interstitial lung disease. He was 101.