David Zinczenko, fitness guru. (Getty Images)

David Zinczenko, former Rodale Executive and EIC of Men's Health, just signed a deal with Random House which the publisher is calling "unprecedented in scope."

Not only will Mr. Zinczenko, BFF of Dan Abrams and author of the hugely succesful series Eat This, Not That, be penning new titles for a Random House imprint under his new contract, but will be getting his own, separate imprint as well, along with a publishing partnership for his new company's titles, and, oh yeah, a swoonworthy amount of cash. And guess what? He's totally worth it.

According to The New York Times:

The first part of the deal is that Mr. Zinczenko...will now write three yet-to-be-titled books on exercise, diet and nutrition for Ballantine. The first book will appear in 2014.

Mr. Zinczenko has also entered into a partnership with the Random House Publishing Group to form a new imprint — Zinc Ink — which will publish six to 12 general nonfiction and lifestyle books annually, beginning next year. He and the publishing house will share in profits.

Additionally, Random House will distribute books created and packaged by Galvanized in association with magazine publishers and other media clients. The first announced partner is American Media Inc., a publisher that owns Shape and Men’s Fitness. As distributor, Random House will keep a percentage of book sales.

Galvanized Brands being the company that Mr. Zinczenko started with another former exec after he left Rodale at the end of 2012. Though the exact amount that Random House is paying for these three new health books has yet to come out, it's been put in the multimillions. And that's just for the Ballantine books.

So why the huge amount of interest (and cash) directed at The Abs Diet author? Well, look at the facts: the Eat This, Not That books sold a total of seven million print copies, which, to put it in perspective, is 14 times the amount that Lena Dunham's book would need to sell in order for Random House to turn a profit after paying the first time author $3.7 million. If Mr. Zinczenko has the track record of selling such an enormous quantity--and has a built-in market to boot--the multimillions start to make sense.

The really smart move isn't the books, but the Zinc Ink imprint deal, which will allow both Random House and Zinczenko to share the profits from whatever titles the Oprah of Fitness puts his stamp of approval on. Not to mention the partnership with the magazine publishing company behind Men's Fitness, which should stick in Rodale's craw for awhile. And really, is there ever a better incentive to make a deal than being able to stick it to the former employers with whom you notoriously did not get along with?

Of course not. We all have busy lives. It's hard to read everything--reading takes time. Or maybe you have read all the nominated books (in which case, great, but stop showing off) but still need a reminder because you read some of those books so very long ago.

Here is a refresher on what's nominated--plus links to sample chapters so you can talk about the winners without doing too much legwork. Check out the list below (thanks to the good people over at Galleycat).

Oh yes, and follow us on Twitter (you should follow us anyway). We will be live-tweeting the ceremony.

National Book Award Finalists for 2012

FICTION

Junot Dí­az, This Is How You Lose Her
Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
McSweeney’s Books

Louise Erdrich, The Round House
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Little, Brown and Company

NONFICTION

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 Doubleday

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Random House

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
Knopf

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas
Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

POETRY

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
University of Chicago Press

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies
Southern Illinois University Press

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal
Etruscan Press

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Susan Wheeler, Meme
University of Iowa Press

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets
Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach
Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down
Balzer+Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered
Scholastic

Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—- and Steal– – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press

Photo credit Twitter

In last week’s installment of her Vice column, “Amphetamine Logic,” Wild child blogger Cat Marnell announced that her time at the hipster web mag was coming to an end.

“I’m writing my last columns,” Cat Marnell explained when we reached her late Friday afternoon .“I almost feel addicted to them, like I could go on forever.”

However, Ms. Marnell, who celebrated her 30^th birthday earlier this week, is ready for her next venture. She said she has become a perfectionist. “I’ve  just got to do it right. When you are writing weird, it’s make it good or go home, you know?” Ms. Marnell noted she scrapped this week’s column because she wasn’t happy with it and missed her deadline.

“I miss my deadlines all the time, and my editor just has to deal with me like Jane did.” Ms. Marnell was the Beauty Editor at xoJane.com until June. Ms. Marnell said she still talks to Jane Pratt all the time, and they plan to have dinner soon.

“I love her, she’s the great love of my life,” Ms. Marnell said of her erstwhile mentor.

But, even though she readily admits she's difficult to deal with, Ms. Marnell said she has enjoyed a great working relationship with Vice EIC Rocco Castoro.

“I mean, I’m a nightmare person to have work for you,” she said. “Half the time they give me edits and I don’t accept them and they are cool with that.”

“Rocco is very empathetic. He’s not happy that I have missed my deadline like multiple times. He’s offered to get me help if it’s a substance issue. He’s manly, I’ve never had a male editor-in-chief.”

To illustrate Mr. Castoro's testosterone quotient, Ms. Marnell told us about how he invited her to an upcoming Vice BBQ by texting her pictures of tomatoes and cucumbers (“so cute!”) to entice her. “He was like, you need to come to my backyard and grill meat.”

Ms. Marnell is preparing her book proposal, which she described as 80 percent done and said she hopes to have finished by next week. She noted that she should have already finished it this summer and said her agent, Byrd Leavell (who reps Tucker Max) of the Waxman Leavell Agency is mad at her for taking so long.

She originally thought her book, which she described as The Devil Wears Prada meets The Basketball Diaries was going to be an addiction memoir. Instead, she now sees it “not as a druggy book, but more about how it worked out.”

“As soon as I said, 'Fuck it,' things started working out for me,” she said. Accordingly, Ms. Marnell said she has adopted a new motto, which she got from a wheelchair advertisement on the side of a bus: “If you can’t stand up, stand out.”

Although known for her drug use, Ms. Marnell believes her writing and progress towards some semblance of sobriety is often overlooked.

“I go to parties, but I don’t really party that much. I’m not, like, Charlie Sheening,” Ms. Marnell said.

As proof of her newfound moderation, Ms. Marnell pointed out she hasn’t smoked PCP in a month.

“I’ve been working really hard at being a better person, but it’s not something I’m writing about.”

Until now!

In what might be the single greatest Salon post of all time, a woman named Abby Mims comes forward as The MFA Fiction Classmate Who Hated And Then We Came To The End author Joshua Ferris, whose first novel was nominated for a National Book Award, which must have really driven her crazy! Anyway: She claims to be Ferris' nemesis from their grad school days. The piece is titled "Joshua Ferris is My Nemisis" (dek: "The classmate I resented in grad school went on to become wildly acclaimed. It's taken years to get over it").

Since we'd like to blockquote almost this entire post, but can't, highlights:

She Won't Call Him By His "Successful Name."

We’ll call my nemesis Josh, since that’s his name. He goes by Joshua now — Joshua Ferris — but calling him that makes me uncomfortable, so for these purposes I’m going with Josh.

When This Story Started, She Didn't Know Life Was Unfair, Maybe Because She Was So Possessed With Talent

We were in the same class at UC Irvine, two of the six they let in. I was 28 at the time, and possessed a shocking naïveté about many things, including: men, professors, academia, workshops, fairness, and life.

And By "Naivete" She Means "Naivete"

I imagined it would be an artist’s utopia of sorts, with lots of cheerleading and gentle suggestions and group hugs. I also believed it would be the place where I met the love of my life.

That's all before the end of the third full paragraph. Then: She cries after her first workshop because her work is torn down.*  She wants to clear up the "falsehood" that attacks on people's work in MFA workshops are impersonal.** And then, she explains the moment she realized Joshua Ferris was her nemesis: A colleague received a scathing critique from their professor, and Ferris responds.

“Well, she needs the criticism,” Josh said earnestly. “I’d love that kind of a workshop. I’d welcome that kind of feedback.”

This from the golden boy whose stories had been universally praised, lauded even, who’d never had one negative thing said about his writing.

What happened next was that I simply lost my shit. Lost it big time, much to the horror of my fellow colleagues. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. “You have no fucking idea what that is like. NO FUCKING IDEA.”

Two points, here:

1. Who knows what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes? Only someone obsessed with assuming such a thing.

2. Criticism—no matter what it's base ingredient or motivation is—is good for anyone, because even if it is personal, there is still likely some bit of truth worth extrapolating and using to move forward and step on the faces of those who have tried to personally begrudge you for their petty reasons (in this case, the professor, but welcome to the world of Anonymous Internet Comments, too). If anything, it's the further dismantling of ego, which is never—ever—a bad thing.

Anyway, the story continues:

His attitude was never malicious, it was simply maddeningly superior.  Outwardly, he had not a shred of insecurity. It was hard not to hate him for this.  And I will say, too, that he was a man obsessed. While the rest of us were screwing around with our crushes and debating whether or not to use our middle initial when published, he was writing. I mean really writing, all the time, sometimes a rumored fourteen hours a day. (I don’t mean to say the rest of us weren’twriting; we were. If any of my fellow Irvine-ites were also writing fourteen hours a day, my apologies. I, most assuredly, was not.)

What a terrible person this Joshua Ferris is! He works really hard and isn't painfully insecure so as to project negative emotion towards someone else (like the author), who at one point "gets" Ferris and feels vindicated because he writes a bad sentence in a piece written from the perspective of a woman about to have a mastectomy. Hilariously, the criticism is not that he wrote that classically cliche male-penned bad sentence about a woman regarding her breasts; it's that he didn't write that sentence! Woe is Joshua Ferris, who naturally doesn't pay much attention towards this criticism.

You know how this ends: Ferris gets an advance, writes his book, becomes famous, and charms everyone (including Gawker—at that time, untouchable for its then-staff's scabrous eye towards the more boldfaced names of the New York Literati). She seethes at her former classmate's success.

And then, one day, comes to the realization that hating someone who is massively successful is useless and a great impediment to her own success (advice most often given in a brilliant cliche you'd think someone would've said to her by this point: "Swim in your own lane, sister.").

All of that said, Abby Mims deserves to be loudly lauded for her work, here. She wrote the most singularly fascinating thing on the internet today, and possibly for the rest of the week. It is a stark, honest, brutal revelation that this anger exists. It's a thing.

And it's an impediment towards the success of people who could give themselves a better opportunity than one that involves hating decent writers they once knew before they were famous (also, with whom they share an agent, but that's an entirely different and far funnier blog post). It's a sociological and psychological moment that should probably be a reference point for years to come. Especially because, in the end, how self-aware is it? Has anybody truly let go of a "nemesis" who never really regarded them as such when the last paragraph of their tell-all blog post is this?

So I write, even if it’s over here in the almost-dark. At the same time, Josh is out there, really out there, with a second novel that was customarily trashed, working on his third with the kind of pressures and expectations I can’t imagine. I can finally appreciate that difference for what it is, and embrace the beauty in being unknown and for the fact that I am still writing. On my best days, this carries with it a freedom that borders on the infinite.

This is still a conclusion in which one person differentiates themselves from another. At least the entire enterprise is consistent.

Joshua Ferris Is My Nemesis [Salon]

*An emotion yielded from the dismantling of ego, which existed before this story started, but you, the reader, should assume no such subtext.

**Again, an assumption built by the ego of someone who thinks the world is hungry to constructively mold the work of an artist, instead of a craven and competitive place in which self-interest and bottom lines rule all, which—if you've ever spent more than an hour inside of a literary agency, you'd learn very, very, very quickly, but that's a reality many MFA candidates would like to forget exists while honing their craft. Also: She hasn't seen Wonder Boys?!

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The result of the American Psycho author embracing the platform has him seeing a new phase of glory for his far-too-entertaining feed, where he's written treatments for an American Psycho sequel and given out helpful (and hilarious) ways for the world to further embrace 50 Shades of Grey, including open casting suggestions to actors on Twitter. And then there was that whole thing about the threesome with Rielle Hunter.

Today, Mr. Ellis had a particularly wonderful tidbit for his followers: A claim concerning Deadline Hollywood Daily Editor in Chief and business journalist Nikki Finke, who's widely known as one of the more vindictive, unforgiving, relatively feared and fairlyshadowy trade reporters Hollywood's ever seen (context: also, someone who once famously claimed to have "bitchslapped" New Yorker editor David Remnick over the process of trying to publish a profile of her).

Though Mr. Ellis would dare to argue otherwise:

What spurned Bret's issues with Ms. Finke? Five minutes later, he Tweeted:

ICM: International Creative Management, the monolithic agency whose Amanda "Binky" Urban has been Ellis' longtime book agent (who also made a brief appearance as part of the plot of Ellis' novel Lunar Park). And from what The Observer hears, Mr. Ellis' claim that Ms. Finke rang up ICM (and basically threatened to wring them dry) is true.

A few folks who got word of what happened tell us: Ms. Finke rang Binky Urban's office, and not being able to reach the agent, gave her assistant what was characterized to us as an epic, otherworldly screaming-at, the likes of which the assistant had never previously experienced. What we didn't hear was: Why?

UPDATE: One reader writes in with the theory that a Tweet in June from Mr. Ellis may have inspired the call to Binky Urban's office:

It'd certainly make sense. As we noted above, Ms. Finke is notoriously private: Gawker once offered a $1,000 bounty for a photograph of her, while The Daily once published what they allege to be a photo of Ms. Finke, which she adamantly denied.

UPDATE 2: Gawker's John Cook saw that Penske Media (under which Deadline Hollywood Daily operates) is listed as the owner of an apartment in Bret Easton Ellis' building. Neat! No word on whether or not it belongs to Finke in any way or if she happens to occupy it, but Cook points out that the Hollywood Reporter once tried to poach Finke with an offer that included an apartment in Malibu. Was it Cook's query to Finke as to whether or not she lived in the apartment that alerted her to the Tweets, resulting in the enraged call in the first place? Who knows!

Ms. Urban and her assistant declined to comment; Mr. Ellis (who hasn't Tweeted anything about the fracas since) and Ms. Finke did not immediately return requests for comment.

Do you know if this is the beef between the two? Any specifics about what Ms. Finke screamed at Ms. Urban's (vacation-deserving) assistant? We'd love to hear it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Beck

This time last year, Glenn Beck made former Air Force pilot and Mormon congressional candidate Chris Stewart’s history book, The Miracle of Freedom, a bestseller by promoting it on his radio show. Now the Tea Party media mogul hopes to repeat history with Mr. Stewart’s series of thrillers, The Great and Terrible.

But first Mr. Beck rewrote them, removing references to Mormon scripture and gospel beliefs from the books, which the Wall Street Journal otherwise described as a blend of “Middle East politics, techno high jinks, and end-of-the-world derring-do.” The six-book series has been renamed Wrath and Righteousness and expanded into ten ebooks that will be released over twelve months by Mr. Beck’s imprint, Mercury Ink, and promoted across Mr. Beck’s media empire.

"We're bringing them out quickly because I don't want readers to lose the track of the story," Mr. Beck, who is also a Mormon, told the Journal. "It's either going to be wildly successful or horribly disappointing."

The first one will be available tomorrow for $2.99.

Kate Lee with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (Patrick McMullan)

The publishing world received a blow today when publishing prodigy Kate Lee officially  left her role at International Creative Management (ICM). (Five days before her scheduled departure date, no less!) Ms. Lee has been with ICM for what would have been 10 years next month, and her trajectory from an assistant at the company to a Talk of the Town subject at 27 undoubtedly served as inspiration for many young agents trying to break into the grind of the publishing world.

Ms. Lee's reputation rose  as a wunderkind agent who spied the trend of publishing Internet writers before anyone else (The New York Observer's own Editor In Chief Elizabeth Spiers was one of Ms. Lee's first clients), and her departure will undoubtedly send many unrepresented bloggers howling into the night.

So why is she leaving?

Dispelling rumors that the recent restructuring of ICM--to give ownership to its core partners--was the cause of her leaving, Ms. Lee told The Observer over the phone today that she had been considering her departure for some time now.

"I thought long and hard about it...this wasn't an easy decision to make, but it was the one I ultimately arrived at. I'm really looking forward to taking some time off and reading a book for pleasure."

"I've had a truly amazing time and career here (at ICM), working with wonderful colleagues at an amazing company," Ms. Lee continued. "I'm sad to go, but excited for what's next."

So what was next? Ms. Lee was vague about future projects, but promised us that she wouldn't be leaving New York (except for that much-needed vacation she'll be taking soon).

"Please tell us you're not retiring!" We begged.

"I'm too young to retire!" Ms. Lee retorted. "That is NOT happening!"

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]>

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2012/02/cormac-mccarthy-punctuation-02202012/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:37:17 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/02/cormac-mccarthy-punctuation-02202012/ Foster Kamer http://www.observer.com/?p=222980 The relatively-elusive novelist Cormac McCarthy has deviated from his job as novelist from time to time, and whenever he does—whether a rare appearance for press duties on his book, or a project that isn't a novel—it usually makes a fuss. This one's no exception. Cormac McCarthy, copy-editor, has emerged, and with him are some strong ideas about punctuation.

The Oprah-approved author of harrowing, sparse-prose mastery such as The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian has taken on a special project in editing the paperback version of last year's well-received biography of famed scientist Richard Feynman, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.

As it turns out, Mr. McCarthy was a huge fan of the book, and offered his services to Quantum Man author Lawrence M. Krauss unprompted. With them, however, he also offered some distinct, Cormac McCarthy-esque adjustments.

Via Pageview:

"To start with," Krauss writes, "he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature." The novelist, he adds, "went through the book in detail and made suggestions for rephrasing in certain points as well."

And so it was. Question, though: For what it's worth, Richard Feynman was an exclamation point of a scientist. For example, would McCarthy have taken out the exclamation point in the title of Richard Feynman's most famous work?

In the mean time, as a biography of Richard Feynman becomes a tribute to the minimal elements that the man may have lived, that distant tapping sound you hear is the furious deletion of the aforementioned punctuation marks by many an MFA candidate. Previously: Cormac McCarthy, playwright, brute-force killer of euphemistic racial-tension in theater. Hopefully he'll next emerge on Madison Avenue and tell every menswear fashion buyer in the world why non-effeminate bracelets have no place in their stores.

[Via ArtsBeat]

The news comes in today's (un-linkable) Publishers Lunch deal email via PL editor Sarah Weinman, in which they note that the book—entitled "Masters Of Our Universe" and based on his Fast Company piece "The Great Tech War of 2012"—concerns the modern warring of today's biggest tech conglomerates. It's primarily concerned with "Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as they expand beyond their traditional services and move aggressively into each other's territory, battling for dominance of our lives."

Mr. Manjoo's agent Larry Weissman of Weissman Literary sold the North American rights to Jofie Ferrari-Adler at Simon & Schuster for what we're told is somewhere in the "mid-200s" (S&S's Mike Jones also picked up British rights to the book). Preemptive foreign territory deals were also picked up Brazil's Intrensica and China's China Citic. Mr. Manjoo's deadline is Summer 2014.

As for whether or not he'll be selling or reading at McNally Jackson, it's likely too soon for either party to figure out (whether or not independent bookstores will even be around by then); maybe an armistice can be had. That said, given one McNally Jackson staffer's past objections concerning that scenario...

If you ever see Farhad Manjoo reading to a few rows of empty chairs in a store somewhere, please don’t sit down. First because he is confused and full of “rankle” and might not be very entertaining, but more importantly, because it would kill literacy. No, I don’t know if I’m being sarcastic there either.

Chances are, probably not.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek