We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office. We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town. If we won against the post office, then the federal government was declaring that this book was not objectionable. That was the idea, and it worked out in exactly that way. The post office has its own special court, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same man. We brought in all these famous writers. Malcolm Cowley was a witness. He was particularly good because he was deaf and couldn’t hear the questions of the prosecutor—so he gave a lecture.
.. The judge, if you could call him that, ruled against us. We lost. Even so, I felt a great wave of sympathy coming from him, the way he stated things and the fact that he let us put all this evidence into the record. Getting things into the record was really important, because the judge who rules on the appeal only looks at what’s in the record. No new evidence is allowed.
.. In Brooklyn they came after me, the publisher, and charged me with conspiracy. They claimed that Henry Miller and I conspired to have him writeTropic of Cancer—that I commissioned him to write it in Brooklyn in 1933! That was a mistake, right? I would have been ten years old, and anyway he wrote the book in Paris. It was insane.
.. Now people come to Paris to buy the book, and they bring it back, and each book that gets into the United States is read by fifty people. What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case? In five years they’ll assign it in college courses and no one will want to read it!
.. His wife told me, When he gets here he’s not going to be friendly about this. I think you should publish it, but I will pretend I’m against it, because anything I say, he disagrees with me.
.. Science fiction or wandering between the centuries never appealed to me. But I tell you, if I knew how it was going to sell, I would have bought it. And if I knew how Tolkien, who was offered to me, was going to sell, you better believe I’d have published it. But I couldn’t understand a word of it. I mean, I didn’t object to it. It wasn’t like it was a fascist tract.
.. We were forewarned that Genet was a kleptomaniac. That night Loly was wearing very lovely earrings. We ate at a restaurant at the top of Montmartre, and Genet took us to the window. He said, Can you see the view, and all the things going on down there? The whole time Loly has her hands over her ears because Genet was trying to get the earrings off! But not a word was spoken about it. Jean Genet was a thief, but he was a real thief. He was a thief from the inside out. Like Sartre said, he was a saintly thief.
.. Do you think that it’s possible for a young publisher to do something like Grove again today?
ROSSET
In terms of editorial judgment, yes. If you had enough money. I told a friend the other night that if you want to be a publisher, you should inherit a lot of money. If you don’t inherit it, then you should marry a very rich girl. Preferably both! If you don’t have either, forget it. That’s the history of good American publishing.
How not to talk about African fiction
The history of modern African fiction is essentially 100 years of branding disaster. In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the west has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue. “Such and such a novel explores colonialism.” Done. “So and so offers a searing representation of the scourge of misogyny.” Done. “Corruption takes center stage in so and so’s novel.” Done.
African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.
.. Here are the opening sentences of the Amazon blurb of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Compare this to the only opening sentence of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
.. To reduce all the flirty, humorous beauty of Adichie’s novel to “a tender story about race” is just wrong and borderline patronizing. But it also demonstrates the inherent bias in the way readers are invited to encounter African novels.
..‘I’m wary of “getting tagged”’: author Helen Oyeyemi
The Self-Hating Book Critic
The death of the newspaper review meant the end of the literary authority who would declare that books by straight, white men are always the best of books. That books by the conglomerate publishing houses are the best of books. That literary culture exists only in New York City.
.. And that is what all those people on the picket line fought to save: a sexist, racist, elitist system.
.. I want to tell them: this world is not for you, you are better without it. Outside the gates, not in. This world was in fact, in part, designed specifically to keep you out. It does not want you. It will not nourish you.
.. Nobody really wants to be James Joyce, though. When it comes down to it.
.. Totally inaccessible and publishing poison, forced to self-publish with the help of two (inadequately celebrated) lesbians, thought to be a madman, and still cursed to this day. No one really wants to be James Joyce, living in borderline poverty with an insane daughter and a layabout son, quietly changing the world but very rarely, if at all, acknowledged for it. So completely out on the frontier his books were confiscated and destroyed by multiple governments.
But everyone wants to think they’re James Joyce, in their cozy teaching jobs, in mortgaged homes, writing about the same things that everyone else is writing about.
.. Anxiety’s primary function is to ready the body for action and for change. It is a complicated uprooting process, the gathering together of energy and focus so that when you decide what to do, you are able to do it.
.. Give a person absolute freedom and probably what they will do is just copy the person closest to them. The anxiety of making a decision under absolute freedom is too much to bear.
.. It’s why the Internet culture is just a copy of newspaper culture, but with a few fucks and shits thrown in.
.. Don’t think there weren’t nights where I woke up with the thought “My entire purpose in life is to help people make decisions about which books to buy; I am simply part of someone’s marketing strategy,” chilling me to the bone.
You Can Do Anything if You Just Do it Slowly: An Interview with Lauren Groff
President Obama called her novel Fates and Furies his favorite of the year. The New York Times named it a bestseller. Amazon.com bestowed its top annual pick upon it. Seth Meyers and Charlie Rose even sat down for interviews with her.
.. I almost never feel like I know what I’m doing, which is actually a really exciting and wonderful feeling.
.. I initially try really, really hard to leave as much mystery as possible in the writing process as long as possible. So I don’t want to know what I’m doing. I want this to be messy. And so even when I think I have a really firm grasp of the character, I know for sure that that does not necessarily mean that I have a grasp of what the character has done in the past or will do in any given situation.
One theme that pops up in all of your novels is narcissism. What interests you about narcissism?
I’m from people for whom narcissism would be the worst thing you could possibly have, and so I was hypersensitive to it for a very, very long time. My decision to become a creative person in the world seemed to be working against the grain of what I had always been taught — not to be the biggest narcissist on the planet.
I don’t think we all are narcissists but I think there is a time in our lives when we all believe that everyone else around us is a robot and was created for us. And I see it in my little boys right now. And eventually most of us grow out of that phase, and it’s really interesting to see people for whom that phase has not ended in their adulthood.
.. I think that we’re in this place right now, and it’s really exciting to watch, of a kind of radical transparency; but also, at the same time, those people are pretending while posting selfies, which should be a hundred percent nonfiction right? They’re constructing this narrative, which may or may not be truthful.
.. So I think that people have gotten confused. I think possibly the internet has blurred a lot of the lines, which, before the internet, were really, really stark and defined.
.. I honestly, honestly love Nabokov. I think Speak, Memory is one of the best books ever written. But I am most interested by Véra.
.. You can write a million books about Véra Nabokov and never reach the end of her because she is a complicated, flawed, interesting human being.
.. but it was written in not-straightforward realism. It was written using a different toolbox, I think. And of course he would prefer the first half because I used every single narrative trope — historically masculine trope — that I could, right?
.. I’m a working writer. And I think working writers never, ever feel like a big deal. And I know for a fact that I’m not, because I’m still as confused and angsty and nervous about my work as I’ve ever been. I could have told you I had more confidence when I was eighteen years old and that would’ve been absolutely true. The deeper I get into this life of writing and making things, the more I understand that I don’t know.
.. I just re-read Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. It is the best book I’ve ever read.
.. He was saying that as a fiction writer his biggest goal is to connect — that was the word he used, connect.
.. Would you agree? Do you have a different word — or is it about connection for you too?
That’s sort of the goal, right? I mean it’s to make people feel better about their existence, right? I think that’s the ultimate thing that you could do in life. And we get this one extraordinary tool of writing to make people happier. Or maybe even not happier but make people feel the magic of being alive, which is so easy to overlook.
.. Well I’m such a shy person, like inherently shy. I don’t think I talked to anyone outside of my family until I was in third grade. So my very first major connection to other people that weren’t in my immediate family was through books.