LitPundit Home of all things literary

Nick Antosca has penned a nice article on writing the first novel and more importantly publishing it independently.

Here is what having a first novel published is like: it’s like having a child via particularly complicated headbirth and feeling proud but then forgetting the child exists until, several years later, you notice a small cluster of people standing around it cooing and saying aw, while all around them other crowds have gathered to admire other children. At least that’s been my experience.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing in Washington Post, remembers the desks where she learned to write

In 1997, I left home to attend college in America. When I returned four years later with the final page proofs of my first novel, my parents had put a desk in my room. It was square and sturdy, and I spread out my page proofs and edited and marked them there. Two years later, when I returned to work on my second novel, my parents had installed an air conditioner; the lights blinked when I turned it on. I transcribed interviews and edited old...

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Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie recently won 2007 Orange Prize for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. This achievement set off comparisons between her and Chinua Achebe. Sunday Sun sought the opinion of some leading Nigerian writers from across the globe on this school of thought, with almost all correspondence seeing them "as two different people with different personalities and achievements that cannot be compared."

Chimamanda is herself and I cannot regard her as a new Achebe. She is a unique fresh voice in Nigeria's burgeoning literary tradition. But you could say, of course, that she is building...

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Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College has an interesting article At The Chronicle on Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on the occasion of its 40th birthday this year in which he muses on how, for him, the book's value has changed over the years.

My own relationship with the book has changed over time. I first read it in my teens and was transformed. It was the late 70s, and García Márquez's impact was being hailed: He had reinvented Latin America through his pen, infusing the region with magnetism....

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The New York Magazine has a nice list of works that "is crying out to be translated into English". Among them are

EGYPT
The book: Albert Cossery’s Les Couleurs de l’Infamie (The Colors of Infamy), which I’m translating.
Why we should be able to read it: “He writes in a French that belongs entirely to him about a Cairo that exists in his memory and imagination— he left Egypt decades ago. Personally, I don’t believe in national literatures.” —Alyson Waters, professor of French studies, Yale

ARGENTINA
The book: Marcelo Cohen’s El Fin de lo Mismo (The End of the...

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New Yorker has a lengthy piece by Günter Grass titled "How I Spent the War". Grass created a storm in 2006 when he admitted that he was a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS, after 60 years of "Germany's most ardent advocate of full disclosure and penance"

When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No...

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Dale Keiger has an absorbing piece on author Stephen Dixon in the Johns Hopkins Magazine

Dixon has never had a bestseller, never earned a large royalty check. If he gets $3,000 as an advance for a new novel, that counts as a big payday. When Frog was shortlisted for the National Book Award, its hardcover edition had already gone out of print. There were copies on the shelves of stores, but the book's publisher had distributed its entire first press run and had no intention of printing more, award or no award.

Did you think Fahrenheit 451 was about government censorship? Of course you are free to that opinion but it is interesting to know that the author Ray Bradbury never meant it that way. Rather, it was about the attack of television on reading.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

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Stephen Mitchelmore laments, as he puts it, the "paucity of genuinely original novels" in his blog

This blog has been quiet lately because I haven't been able to find the words to express how extremely I have felt recently about the way novels are written. How disjunctive to experience they seem; how novelistic; the work of craftsmen and showmen rather than mortals. And I don't mean that they're unrealistic. All genres, including supposedly literary fiction, seem to take for granted the space opened up by writing. Narrative as relief from the insufferable void of experience is indulged, celebrated even....

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Los Angeles Times staff writer Josh Getlin covers the recent war of words that has broken out between Litbloggers and the traditional newspaper media.

"If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books, or on a web site written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biogafriend?" Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, wrote in the Washington Post. "The book review section … remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow...

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