Soft Skull News

So one of the casualties of the book coverage carnage is to be Peder Zane, soon-to-be-former Books Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. He's got this to say about the books he's loved since assuming that about-to-be-discontinued position.

If I could burst through this page, I'd give you a copy of With. Donald Harington's 2004 magical novel about a kidnapped girl who grows up in an Edenic (and haunted) patch of the Ozarks is one of the best books I've read since becoming the N&O's book review editor in 1996.

On top of "With," I'd hand you Cloud Atlas (2004), David Mitchell's dystopic tour de force that tells six related stories, stretching from the 19th century to the distant future, in six different literary styles. Then I'd add "My Happy Life" (2002 [but now out in paperback from yours truly]), Lydia Millet's quirky masterpiece, narrated by an abused and forgotten young woman who makes Candide seem like Chicken Little.

(Parenthetically, we got sent Harington's With back in 2003, and oh boy did I want to publish that book. But Soft Skull only pays $1K advances, and he said he got more than that in pre-inflation 1972 dollars for his first book. Eventually Toby Press picked it up, and re-issued his backlist, so all was well for him)

But, more generally, Peder's situation is quite interesting, in that while the paper is dropping the Books Editor position, he will now be the paper's Ideas columnist. Now, in the midst of the rightful concern about the collapse of book coverage, and the laying off of editors and such, we might, as some have surmised, be wise to not insist on the retention of the status quo ante—Peder could do more for Books as an Ideas columnist than a Books columnist. It is, after all, standard in book publicity to prefer "off-the-book-page-coverage" to the regular book review pages because it sells more books.

Now, I believe that newspapers should be devoting more time, intelligence and column inches to dealing with books overall (the demographics of book consumers and newspaper consumers overlaps to a great degree), but isolating that coverage in a stand-alone section with a sequence of one-person-says-a-few-things-about-one-book isn't necessarily the best way to engage readers OR writers.

The problem, of course, is that there is little sign amongst management in the larger newspapers that they will respond to the pressure for more advertising dollars and cost reductions by doing this. So I grasp why a good short-run tactic is to demand that book review sections will be preserved. But if, in certain circumstances, management will trust the dynamic editors and writers who know books to sprinkle throughout the paper, something great could be accomplished, and the current activist sentiment might well be well-directed in the long run to advocating for this more holistic approach. Could some of the articles that would otherwise be about the annual March-April flood of baseball books be incorporated into the fat start-of-the-baseball-season-sports supplement? Could self-help books being in Living sections? Current Affairs books by in the National or International pages? And could Arts & Ideas be a forum for novelists and poets to be discussed alongside filmmakers and dancers and philosophers and political scientists?

And then, could we abandon the absurd false distinction between newspaper and blogs. Y'all're writers, fer cryin' out loud. That's it. Bloggers are not the Barbarians at the Gate, and the individuals working in print media are not inside the Gate fiddling and fussing while Rome burns. There's a natural continuum, exemplified by newspaper critics blogging, and bloggers writing print reviews. The single most boring thing for me to read, on- and off-line, is the carping about the Other Side.

Anyway, a long lost for what originated as a way for me to tell everyone that we just put Lydia Millet's My Happy Life out in paperback (can you believe this book, which won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction, was never put out in paperback? Mad, mad, mad...)