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One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Should I hire a book publicist?” Whether I am speaking at a conference or tweeting about the state of book publishing, writers are often fickle when it comes to the hows and whys of the publicity for their book. I can’t say I blame them—it seems like there is a new “platform” every five minutes along with articles about the death of newspapers. Though it may seem difficult, there are some things one should know before working with a publicist.

Understand the basics of what a publicist does.
While my job is a bit tough to describe to my five-year-old, it is not shrouded in mystery. Publicists are the individuals who help craft a pitch for your book; we are audience curators, media connectors, news junkies, blog researchers, idea think tanks, and most importantly, we are readers.

Write a list of goals you would like to achieve by hiring a publicist.
One of the first questions I ask potential clients is, “What are your goals for yourself/your book?” If you are thinking about hiring a publicist, you must first know why you want to hire one. Is it to help with review coverage? Place op-eds? Consult with you about your online presence? My suggestion is to make two lists—the first should be an absolute wish list. Write down the biggest and best things you would like to see happen for your book. The second list should be the nuts and bolts of what you envision for your publicity campaign. Think it through: based on what you know about book-review sections, do you think your book has a shot at getting reviewed in print? Can you write something topical that a publicist can place as an op-ed? Are you willing to spend some time learning how to use Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit (among others) to promote your book? These are just a few considerations to keep in mind.

Know that you will have to spend money.
After I have an initial phone consultation with an author and she requests a proposal from me, I make sure I create a plan that is comprehensive and customized for her, which includes the fee I will charge for my work. This is where things get tricky. While I understand authors have limited budgets (doesn’t everyone?), I also want to point out the economics of being a freelance publicist: If we are paid well, we do not have to take on loads of projects to make up income. If we start lowering our fees to accommodate everyone’s budgetary limits, we have to take on a lot of extra work. The scenario an author should want is the one where a publicist is paid well for the work and can put a lot of focus on his project. If you shortchange your publicist, you are shortchanging yourself.

Be flexible.
Part of a good publicist’s job is to have honest conversations with clients. If a campaign isn’t working, perhaps it’s time to change the focus. For instance, if print editors are not reacting to pitches, maybe it’s time to move on and think of other ways to make people aware of the book. There are loads of books published every year, and only a fraction of them are reviewed. Of those books reviewed, most, if not all, are released by major publishing houses. If you are a self-published author, your chances of being reviewed by the New York Times are pretty slim. This does not mean all is lost; it just means the strategy for promoting your book needs to be fluid. The best author-publicist relationships are partnerships where each party has a vested interested in the outcome of the campaign and can openly discuss what may or may not be working.

A day in the life of a publicist.
When I compile status reports for my clients, I include information about what has been done on their behalf—not only contacting the media, but making copies, stuffing envelopes, lugging packages to the UPS Store. Mundane? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. What most authors don’t realize is that while it may seem like a publicist is being too quiet, it doesn’t mean we are not working. We are always working. The fact is, most pitching is done via e-mail these days, and that is pretty time consuming. A publicist can send out between fifty and one hundred e-mails pitching people and maybe, if they are lucky, get a handful of replies. If it sounds dreadful, it is. No publicist worth her salt will guarantee results—she will, however, guarantee a herculean effort to get people to pay attention to your book.

We’ve earned your business, now trust us.
If you hire a publicist who has quite a few years of experience under his belt, you should take stock in the counsel he gives you when it comes to press materials, following up with contacts, book events, format, pricing, etc. I am a firm believer in author-publicist communication, but there is a point when you have to let us do our job. We will always respect your opinion on how you think your book should be pitched, but we also know the people to whom we are pitching. What you may think is a great Today show pitch might be an absolute stinker to the producer there. A good publicist knows what to pitch where—and what their contacts are looking for in regards to guests, interviews, reviews, and content.

Publicists don’t ever set out for a book to fail, but we are often on the receiving end of much blame when things don’t go exactly as the author had planned. It does count that we follow-up a dozen times with our contacts even when they don’t respond. It also counts that we advise authors on various aspects of the publication process. We are therapists, assistants, travel agents, and media mavens all wrapped up in one package. And that is worth every penny.

——

About the author: Kathleen Schmidt has over 15 years of experience in the publishing industry. Currently, she is CEO of KMSPR, a book publicity firm. Find her on Twitter: @Bookgirl96 or @kmspr.

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——
We met as fans, which is to say that we read each other’s writing and wished for more of it in the world. Few of us have met each other in person, although it’s always a bit of a jolt when we do—we’ve known each other’s minds and words, but have only had a thumbnail image of what those brains were wrapped in. The speaking voice is always a shock.

We talk up each other’s books and repost each other’s new publications on Facebook and Twitter. When we’re struggling with some business-related detail or see an interesting call for submissions, we call out on social media, “Hey, writer friends!” When we’re struggling with mojo gone missing, we look to the community for reassurance.

We’ve heard the gripe that there are too many writers—so many, in fact, that agents can’t read more than a paragraph of our manuscripts before making a decision. Editors take upwards of a year to respond. No one gets paid well because there are so many of us willing to work for free.

What are we to do? It’s not as if we’re going to be manipulated into participating in some literary hunger game, where the last one standing gets a plum regular writing gig with one of the big magazines or a juicy book deal.

Is there jealousy among us? Probably, because we’re human, although we agree it’s bad form to talk about it publicly. The jealousy was worse when were younger; we’re all now far enough along that we can recognize that only we can write what we’re writing. When we read somebody’s work that makes our teeth hurt with its awesomeness, it’s not exactly jealousy that overcomes us. It’s a certain kind of wistfulness, a certain awareness of what we lack in our own toolboxes. A sense of humor that makes the reader giddy. A doggedness in reporting. A talent for synthesizing seemingly unrelated ideas into a gorgeous piece of writing. A precise eye for detail, an intellectual edge, an ability to master more than one genre.

We writer friends, we swoon over each other.

•••

However, there are some unspoken rules.

These rules can be summed up with the overarching theme of Act Like a Normal Person.

We don’t know what it is about publishing that makes some writers lose both their minds and common sense, but many of us have been victim to another writer’s bad manners. The more successful among us have felt the weight of other writers trying to ride our coattails.

The rest of us have endured conferences where other writers try to establish their importance, aren’t interested in an actual conversation, and vampire the energy from the room. We’ve spoken with writers who drop the phrase “my agent” so many times, one might suspect the two were lovers. We’ve been cut off mid-sentence at the mere appearance of someone better known than us. We’ve had writers we don’t even know ask big favors. We understand the blurb requests that come out of nowhere—we’ve been there ourselves—but the demands to post an Amazon review, the insistence that we publicize work when there’s been no reciprocal effort, the incessant social media without a glimmer of the human life behind it? It irritates us because it undermines our wish to be generous.

And we want to be generous—it’s practically the only currency we have. We’ve all been the recipients of good will from writer-mentors who’ve gone before us. We don’t dole out our editorial contacts to just anyone, but we have soft spots for people who are just starting out. But, while it sounds terrible to say, the key is to know your place. Put another way: if you’re a community theater actor, you don’t tweet to Meryl Streep that you’d appreciate a shot to co-star in her latest movie.

•••

People say the power is shifting from the publishing industry professionals to the writers themselves. One of the more compelling bits we’ve seen on the subject was by comedian/actor/writer Patton Oswalt. In a talk at the 2012 Just for Laughs Festival, Oswalt read two letters—one to his fellow comedians and another to the gatekeepers.

(You can watch the talk here or see a fan’s transcription of it here.)

To his community, he wrote, in part:

I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.

We’re seeing this notion take form in a lot of our friends. A lot of you out there. You, for instance, the person we’re writing to. Your podcast is amazing. Your videos on your YouTube channel are getting better and better every single one that you make, just like when we did open mics, better and better every week. Your Twitter feed is hilarious.

To the gatekeepers, he wrote:

In a couple of years it’s going to be f—g equal. I see what’s f—g coming. This isn’t a threat; this is an offer. We like to create. We’re the ones who love to make shit all the time. You’re the ones who like to discover it and patronize it support it and nurture it and broadcast it. Just get out of our way when we do it.

This applies to us writers as well.

We’re seeing it happening. Some of the most exciting short-form writing out there is coming out of writer communities. The Nervous Breakdown began as a literary community headed by Brad Listi. The Rumpus was founded by Stephen Elliott and a cohort of his friends. Dear Teen Me started as a project founded by E. Kristin Anderson and Miranda Keaneally, who’ve gone on to publish an anthology of primarily young adult authors writing letters to their teen selves. And those are just a few groups of writer friends finding ways to reach an audience.

Some of us are part of these communities, and some of us aren’t. But all of us are beginning to understand what we can do as a collective. We talk about VIDA (itself a community) and figure out the markets that do or don’t want us. We discuss the new realities of publishing: some of us are frustrated that few of us can make a living wage writing; others of us know, in our heart of hearts, that we were never going to make a living wage with our work anyway. We talk contracts and fees and all the little details that kept us in our figurative isolated rooms with the pen and notebook.

The talk of the nitty gritty is essential, but our bonds are made from the intangibles. We take heart when someone whose work we admire receives rejection, just like the rest of us. We’re the ones who advise each other to get as revved up about the potential good news as much as we want; it won’t sting any less if the deal doesn’t go through. We’re the living examples of writers whose prose has gotten better—deeper, more gripping, more assured—over the years. It’s easy to get drained of our individual dreams. Essentially, we writer friends are the spigot of hope.

——

About the author: Jennifer Niesslein (@jniesslein) is a writer and editor living in Charlottesville, Virginia; she blogs regularly for VQR. Visit her website at jenniferniesslein.com.

Tree hugging house, near Arctic Circle, Northern Iceland. Photo by Bill Hayes.

I’ve just returned from my third trip to Iceland in a year. When this comes up in conversation, I am inevitably and understandably asked why—what takes me there?

It’s not business; yet vacation doesn’t seem the right word either. The question as to why Iceland would be most easily answered, I suppose, by photographs of its supernatural beauty. But let’s say you’re stuck next to me on a plane and we start talking. Here’s what I would tell you:

That it is clean; the streets and sidewalks and air and water are clean, unpolluted, unlittered by cigarette butts and trash and people’s spit and dog shit.

That it is small—only 300,000-some people on the whole island—but does not feel small. (Or, when it does, like a sexy dress or good suit, it is small in the right places.)

That Icelanders know their history and feel part of it.

That, as one Icelander explained to me, “fame has no value here.”

That one rarely sees Icelanders walking down the street or sitting in cafés or bars or cars staring into iPhones, oblivious to others and walled-off from human contact; indeed, this is the easiest way to spot an American in Iceland—eyes lowered, ears plugged, iPhone held to the face as if in anticipation of a kiss.

That there is virtually no violent crime in Iceland.

That Icelandic police do not carry guns.

That Iceland’s prime minister is a lesbian, legally married to another woman (same-sex marriage has been legal, with little fuss, for years). Her wife is respectfully called the First Lady.

That one’s family is of upmost importance—elderly or ailing parents or troubled older siblings are taken into one’s home—and yet definitions of family are not necessarily traditional; it isn’t uncommon for a man or woman in Iceland to have children from several different partners.

That there are swimming complexes in virtually every neighborhood. People of all ages, from babies to the elderly, come not only to swim but to socialize. In the hot tubs, neighbors and friends catch up and laugh after work as aches and pains melt away.

That Iceland’s chief form of energy and heat is geothermal.

That freeways outside cities are not cluttered with billboards and advertising. What you see when you drive is the mountains and the sea and land largely as it was before settlers arrived.

That Icelanders are proud of their language and yet also speak English with disarming style, choosing words carefully—for example, a photographer tells me that he prefers 35mm film cameras over digital because “film has more charisma.” Or, a woman says to me of her life, she is “always busy with the moment”—not busy because of her job and kids and spin class but “with the moment,” as if each moment is her partner.

Finally (and this list was just a start):

This is a little hard to describe, but that there is a soft, wordless gasp built into their language—haaa!—which often comes in response to something another person says (rather than “yeah?” or “okay” or “really?” or “uh-huh”). One may be at a table, gathered with family and friends for a meal, describing what one has seen or done or feels—say, for example, talking about why one loves Iceland—and all the while, from all around the table, you hear not words but these lovely, quiet, short intakes of breath: “haaa … haaa … haaa …”

It is as if the sound of wonder is central to being Icelandic. The sound of breath being taken away.

Reykjavik - January. Photo by Bill Hayes.

On the road to Raufarhofn. Photo by Bill Hayes.

On the Prerogative to Change One's Mind - Reykjavik. Photo by Bill Hayes.

Siglufjordour. Photo by Bill Hayes.

About the author: The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction (2013-14), Bill Hayes is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of the books The Anatomist, Five Quarts, and Sleep Demons. He is now at work on two books, both forthcoming from Bloomsbury:  Sweat: A History of Exericse and Insomniac City, a collection of essays about New York. Visit his website.

I doubt that Knopf/Random House planned it this way, but the publication of Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead coincided with the release of the latest VIDA Count. I suspect that Sandberg herself would be interested in the data that VIDA has provided regarding publication rates of women and men in what it calls “many of the writing world’s most respected literary outlets.” (Condensed findings: In most cases, women aren’t faring well in these venues.) Strikingly, some of Sandberg’s messages can be extrapolated beyond the worlds of leadership or corporate culture and applied to the world of poets, fiction writers, and essayists, perhaps especially as VIDA has described it.

To begin: Both Lean In and several much-circulated responses to the VIDA count (Julianna Baggott’s March 31 blog post is one example) focus on women and ambition. Sandberg’s main point is that beyond the “external” or institutional barriers to women’s success, women “hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” Importantly, she adds: “Whatever this book is, I am writing it for any woman who wants to increase her chances of making it to the top of her field or pursue any goal vigorously.”

In other words, her book “makes the case for leaning in, for being ambitious in any pursuit.” (emphasis mine)

Sandberg presents both research studies and anecdotes that demonstrate women lacking confidence when their male counterparts do not, women waiting for opportunities to be offered when men “seize” such prospects, and women being more concerned with pleasing everyone around them (or, at least, not giving offense) when men seem to be oblivious to such concerns. And time after time, as I read Lean In, my mind ran to analogous instances in my own and other women writers’ experiences.

Sandberg’s chapters are titled to lead the reader into a specific segment of the overall “Lean In” philosophy. Here are six that seem most applicable to writers—especially women writers, regardless of partnership or parenthood status. [1]

1. Sit at the Table

Between Sandberg’s LEAN IN and the 2012 VIDA Count, I kind of want to submit to 100 magazines today just to make a statement.

— Anna Saikin (@AnnaSaikin) March 31, 2013

In this chapter, the overall message is that women suffer from underestimating their abilities more than men do. “[F]eeling confident–or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” From refraining from raising their hands in the audience to sitting on the sidelines rather than taking seats at the conference table, Sandberg shares examples of women holding themselves back.

For writers of fiction, poetry, and essays, one of the ways to “sit at the table” can begin, quite literally, with sitting at a table of fellow students and an instructor for a writing workshop. I won’t comment here on the ways that gender dynamics and stereotypes crop up in these situations, because I’ll digress to a point of no return (besides, you’ll get a glimmer of this in the next section, “Success and Likeability”).

But the VIDA count reminds us of other tables and other seats. Where are women “sitting” in those venues? Where do they show up at in the tables of contents and bylines and within prominent literary magazines and book reviews? VIDA and its proponents seek institutional change, but what if that isn’t enough? Some female writers who may not habitually submit their work may realize that—like the woman whose tweet is cited above—they need to take some steps themselves.

But as Sandberg observes, even when offered opportunities, women don’t always accept them. One of the most eye-catching accompaniments to this year’s VIDA count was Amy King’s interview with Tin House editor Rob Spillman, who described that earlier VIDA statistics had prompted Tin House “to take a deep look at our submissions.” One of Spillman’s most attention-grabbing revelations was grounded beyond the slush pile: “Although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published.”

2. Success and Likeability

Among other salient points, this chapter includes a lesson on the importance of “learning to withstand criticism.” But there’s a larger message brewing here, something about how certain behaviors that get a pass (or are even admired) when displayed by men are perceived negatively in women. At the same time, the messages that women internalize about the importance of “being nice” and remaining likeable hold them back in other ways.

This reminded me not only of my own experiences, but also of the more autobiographical sections in Stephanie Vanderslice’s recent book, Rethinking Creative Writing: Programs and Practices that Work. Here’s one brief excerpt:

During my MFA program, I’d found many of the unspoken rules unsettling, but as a “good girl” I was adept at submerging such feelings without a second thought. I saw what happened to “bad girls”…. Our teachers derided them when they left the bar after class. I knew I had a limited amount of time to learn what I could from this system. I had no intention of wasting my time trying to change it. Instead, I bowed my head, re-adjusted my blinders, and got to work.” [2]

Even more recently, I couldn’t click anywhere—not Facebook, not Twitter, not the Poets & Writers daily news round-up—without encountering references to Deborah Copaken Kogan’s My So-Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts & Letters. More than once, I saw this line quoted:

It’s career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they’ll smear you.

It’s so much safer to be a “good girl.” To stay nice—and quiet.

Sandberg describes how she came to accept that being liked—while important and even essential for a number of reasons that she also explains—can’t and shouldn’t be her top priority. She concludes the chapter with a snapshot from her first formal review as Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer: “One of the things [Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg] told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress. Mark was right.”

3. It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

Sandberg paraphrases another woman, Lori Goler, and writes:

[L]adders are limiting—people can move up or down, on or off. Jungle gyms offer more creative exploration. There’s only one way to get to the top of a ladder, but there are many ways to get to the top of a jungle gym. The jungle gym model benefits everyone, but especially women. … The ability to forge a unique path with occasional dips, detours, and even dead ends presents a better chance for fulfillment.

This is a useful and encouraging idea for writers, too. Surely, I’m not the only one who has thought: If only I’d won writing prizes in college … won admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop right after college … won a Stegner right after that … published my first book in my twenties (or, at the latest, by my early thirties).

If only I’d somehow followed that nice, neat, direct route to fame and fortune.

In truth, many writers’ paths more closely resemble the jungle gym route. Especially today, with so many new literary networks and publishing venues, there is no single “right” way to pursue writing. More and more of us are late bloomers, publishing our first books after the age of 40, often having spent years invested what might appear, at first glance, to be unrelated work. That may have something to do with why I am encouraged by the “jungle gym” idea. I don’t think that I’m alone.

Every few months I have to update my list of authors who debuted over the age of 40–so, did it. But who am I missing?randysusanmeyers.com/2012/04/debut-… — Randy Susan Meyers (@randysusanmeyer) April 4, 2013

4. Are You My Mentor?

Mentorship is big in creative-writing culture. In my low-residency MFA program, the faculty we worked with each semester were called our “mentors,” regardless of how much mentoring actually took place during the semester, let alone long-term. Not long ago, an entire anthology titled Mentors, Muses & Monsters provided a number of authors’ accounts on “the people who changed their lives”; the Vanderslice excerpt above is connected with musings on mentorship; and one literary magazine recently announced a call for submissions on the theme of “Mentors and Tormenters.” In fact, one of the most challenging questions I’ve ever been asked in author interviews is the one that required me to describe the role of mentors and mentoring in my own writing life.

Sandberg worries that the concept of mentorship is misunderstood: “Now, young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.” Mentorship is important, Sandberg says, but “the strongest relationships spring out of a real and often earned connection felt by both sides.” Says Sandberg: “We need to stop telling [young women], ‘Get a mentor, and you will excel.’ Instead, we need to tell them, ‘Excel, and you will get a mentor.’”

Importantly, Sandberg also acknowledges that modes of mentorship have changed. “The good news is that guidance can come from all levels,” she writes. Nowhere may that be more true than for writers, where we can find advice and inspiration from a diverse set of people, in a variety of face-to-face and online settings.

5. The Myth of Doing It All

Sandberg describes a favorite poster that declares in big red letters, “Done is better than perfect.” She says, “Done, while still a challenge, turns out to be far more achievable and often a relief.”

Or, as Anne Lamott has so memorably told us writers, there’s a whole lot of value to “shitty first drafts.”

Not all of this chapter sits well with me, possibly because the book presumes a uniform definition of “doing it all” that relies heavily on securing a wedding ring and attending the soccer games of one’s own offspring. But relinquishing perfectionism and setting attainable shorter-term goals, as well as highly ambitious long-term goals, echo the changes that have helped me and others, not only with discrete projects, but also with entire phases of our writing lives.

6. Let’s Talk About It

Here is where writers who are most interested in—and exercised by—the VIDA count may find their strongest alliance with Sandberg. As she nears the book’s conclusion, Sandberg traces the influences and reasons behind her decision to take up a feminist mantle and her realization that certain gendered battles remain to be fought. She sketches out the path that led to her book, including the stepping-stone of that famous TEDTalk, the response to which convinced her that “addressing these issues openly can make a difference.”

She concludes:

I made this my ‘thing’ because we need to disrupt the status quo. Staying quiet and fitting in may have been all the first generations of women who entered corporate America could do; in some cases, it might still be the safest path. But this strategy is not paying off for women as a group. Instead, we need to speak out, identify the barriers that are holding women back, and find solutions.

Which is remarkably similar to what I see VIDA trying to do.

And that’s my point. For all of the critiques and commentaries on Sandberg’s admittedly exceptional vantage point, she wants something that a lot of other people—including those who are invested in the ambitions and accomplishments of women writers—are also striving to achieve. Perhaps the realizations and suggestions embedded within Lean In may help us all.

———

[1] This is important, because many of the critiques and commentaries surrounding both Lean In and the VIDA count seem to focus on work-family-life issues in ways that exclude women who aren’t partnered and/or aren’t raising children.

[2] Vanderslice has published her own take on “Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Lessons for Writers.”

———

About the author: Erika Dreifus (www.erikadreifus.com) is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories (Last Light Studio), which was named an American Library Association Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. Like Sheryl Sandberg, she is a member of the Harvard/Radcliffe Class of 1991. She lives in New York City.

Pictured above: The Silent History app, and two of Silent History's creators: Eli Horowitz and Kevin Moffett

Editor’s Note: For those who have been reading or following The Silent History, a serialized fiction experience delivered via iPhone/iPad app, then you know that the main narrative concludes today, more than 6 months after the October 2012 launch. We asked Mark Athitakis (@mathitak)—a writer, editor, critic, and blogger—to review the project.

——

The developers of iPad book apps have exploited public-domain literature of all sorts, but no one book seems to have captured their imagination quite like Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. An app produced by the New York Public Library is stuffed with commentaries and original documents connected to the 1818 gothic tale, including a reproduction of Shelley’s handwritten manuscript. A lush rewrite produced by the British design firm Inkle gave the novel a choose-your-own-adventure cast, allowing readers to inhabit the minds of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster alike. A Brazilian-produced app called Frankie for Kids retools the story for tweens, using animation and sound effects to lesser effect, but proving further that this particular monster refuses to die.

Why so much interest in Shelley’s tale, when so many other free and familiar options abound? (No similarly rich options relating to, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Tale of Two Cities are currently on offer in the App Store.) Maybe everybody loves a horror story. Or maybe developers have found the Frankenstein story an apt metaphor for what the iPad reading experience represents: a shift in human behavior, a rewiring of an action as simple and familiar as reading, and its new relationship to technology. Something new, grafted onto the old. As University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins says of Frankenstein in a Q&A on the NYPL app, the novel is “centrally concerned with the limits of knowledge and the disruptive potentials of technology.”

Inhumanity versus humanity, humanity versus technology, technology versus narrative—there is, now, an app for all that. The more time I spent with The Silent History, an interactive e-book for the iPad and iPhone, the harder it was for me to avoid connecting it with Shelley’s novel, both in terms of its story and in what it suggests about how we relate to storytelling. Released last October, the novel is framed as a series of dispatches about the emergence of humans born without the capacity for language. Told in brief “Testimonials” by a host of characters—27 of them, each with less or more importance to the story—it tracks the phenomenon of “silents,” and the public’s shifting attitudes toward them, from 2011 to 2041.

The primary instinct when assessing a new piece of electronic storytelling is to consider how fully it employs the new options available to it, rather than anything about its inherent virtues. So the most meaningful question relating to The Silent History—is it any good?—has to take a back seat to other questions. But those questions are important too, and the “good”-ness of the novel (which we’ll get to) is in many ways a function of those other questions.

Is it user-friendly? Very much so: The chapters, a new one released every weekday, are brief and punchy, designed to be consumed without too much effort during commutes or waiting in line. (The former smoker in me thinks of them as cigarette-break long.)

Is it well-designed? That too. The app’s colorful design corrals the Testimonials into elegant circular holders; tapping a wedge in the circle calls up the particular author, location, and date of the chapter, and a button within each entry lets you see all previous entries contributed by that narrator. A slick introductory video cleanly establishes the story’s Frontline-ish, now-it-can-be-told tone. When a new chapter is ready at 6 a.m. Eastern time, the app plays a tone, brief enough to be unobtrusive but somber enough to get your attention—true to the book’s dystopian mood, it’s a chord in the key of “uh-oh, something’s just happened.”

Is it interactive? Audaciously so. The app’s makers have designed it to accommodate “Field Reports” by readers that are meant to supplement the Testimonials. And the makers have insisted that both the Field Report writers and their consumers get as site-specific as possible. In order to read a particular contribution, you must physically be where the report is pinned on the map included in the app. As I write this, there are more that 250 Field Reports available, including 25 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 34 in and around New York City, 19 in London, and 13 in Brisbane, Australia. In the Washington, DC, area, where I live, I have access to only one Field Report. And it turns out I don’t have access to it: Its pin appears to be dropped inside the Oval Office, and a civilian like myself can’t get past the White House gates and close enough to access it.

But in a way, that’s only shown how well the app has done its job. I want to know: How did the President respond to an epidemic of silence in 2015, when a whole generation of parents had begun to go mad with heartbreak and confusion?

***

For nearly two decades, the Testimonials explain, the chief response to the silent epidemic (“Emergent Phasic Resistance,” to use the official term) was fear and contempt. The epithet mutetard became common. The silents mostly kept their own council, gathering in groups small and large, baffling onlookers. By the early 2020s it becomes clear that the silents have developed their own means of communication involving facial expressions. But while researchers see a communication breakthrough in those tics, the torches-and-pitchforks crowd sees only further evidence of the silents’ inherent monstrousness. One regular Testimonial contributor, Margaret Lafferty, launches an anti-silent group out of concern that they’re scheming. “Those moon-faced kids staring and squinting and twitching at each other, like their skin’s being prodded by underneath wires, and who even knows what they’re transmitting?” [6.2]

To the central (and Frankensteinian) question the plot raises—can we, should we, take the not-quite-human and make them fully human?—arrives neuroscientist Dr. August Burnham. Skeptical about the virtues of face-talking as a language (“it just doesn’t have the potential to escalate” [5.3]), he pursues a translation mechanism, hitting pay dirt in 2034 with a device he calls the Soul Amp, which grants silents the ability to speak. When he tests it on an early patient, Calvin Andersen, his speech stuns his parents, who “slid off their chairs and knelt on the floor as if God himself had entered the room.” [13.2]

The Soul Amp takes off—by the late 2030s it’s Federal law that all silents be implanted with one, and the story’s central tension is in the rise and fall of the device. Calvin reports that he was initially thrilled to speak: “[T]he implant had lifted me up above the treetops and allowed me to soar freely in the sky where I could take in the whole endless horizon.” [13.5] Four years later, though, with implants managed by a central computer and tools allowing tweaks to silents’ voice and diction, some kind of puppeteering is going on, and Calvin is poised to revolt from Burnham: “[B]ecoming his living experiment has in no way set me free. I am not a happier person. My soul is not singing.” [18.2]

As with many novels that alternate among a cast of narrators—and here’s where the “is it any good?” question enters the discussion—the reader winds up being invested less in the character that’s speaking than with the milieu he or she occupies. How, exactly, did Calvin’s mood shift from liberation to oppression? We’re never sure—there are too many other Testimonials in the mix to let the reader feel fully invested in just his. The four-year gap between reports from him is filled with plenty of scenes, but nothing about the shift in his emotional pitch. That sketchiness is the chief flaw in The Silent History—because each entry is so brief, and hews so closely to official-transcript style, the story acquires a tonal similarity that flattens Margaret’s high dudgeon and August’s arrogance and Calvin’s frustration. Too long to serve as an imitation of a punchy oral history and too brief to serve as chapters, the Testimonials become subservient to the app’s larger need to keep the story moving, and establish an overall mood of anxiety across the country.

Which is itself pretty flat, even though the Testimonals are datelined all over the country, from Maine to Brooklyn to Northern California, where the first successful silent schools and communes took root. How much has America changed in the 30 years tracked by the novel? Hard to tell. There are hints that the America of the future has become increasingly influenced and perhaps bested by Asia—violence in Pusan is mentioned, kids listen to Kazakh black metal and “Pho Hop,” adults watch Noh theater and Indonesian knife fights—but the epidemic of silents appears to be the nation’s chief concern. There are vaguely apocalyptic noises—hunkering down in missle silos, raids on central servers—but the armies of doom that such dour circumstances imply don’t come into view.

Such sketched-out storytelling is essential to The Silent History as a project—it is a feature of the app, not a bug. In order to accommodate a variety of perspectives from outside contributors, the core text needs to strip itself of some of its own authority and lend it to those who might contribute Field Reports. And what the creators want out of the Field Reports is not narrative thrust but a contribution to an overall vibe—that the epidemic of silents can happen anywhere. Indirection and vagueness are the stock-in-trade of the horror story, of course—they free us to project our own terrors onto the story. What The Silent History has done is engineer itself to accommodate a universe of projections beyond our own. Consider the writing guidelines produced by the creators of The Silent History for the field reports: “The technological aspects of this project should provide an opportunity to look outward, not further downward,” they explain.

To rephrase that a bit more bluntly: The Silent History is engineered to privilege breadth over depth. The story has its share of engaging characters who retain a novelistic consistency and integrity. I was particularly taken with Francine Chang, who winds up in California’s Bohemian Grove, transformed from a masters-of-the-universe playground to a commune of silents. But her stability is a counterpoint to the silents, whose behavior constantly shifts across the decades: They morph from a compassionate if odd clique to a children-of-the-corn-ish murderous tribe. Is this an autonomous demographic category or victim of talking humans’ meddling? Ultimately, they are whatever readers (or, more to the point, the Field Reporters) say they are. A pair of Field Reports set in 2018 foreground only the inscrutability of the silents. One is written by a boy who’s been barred from hanging out with a silent girl who’s “caged-up” and kicking at the wall of her room. In another, a woman observes a homeless man, a “neighborhood mascot” who inexplicably becomes a magnet for the silents: “Twenty, thirty kids crowded on that sidewalk, and him sitting in the middle, enormoums and beaming and chattering, them staring at him, rapt, absolutely adoring.” That there’s no evidence of the silents behaving in so cultic a manner with “normal” people in the core narrative doesn’t matter; the app is engineered to contain multitudes.

That’s a troubling way to treat the core characters in what would add up to a 500-page novel in print. The horror of Frankenstein’s monster was in the gap between his urge to be fully human and his inability to transcend inherent monstrousness. When it gains the ability to speak, he revels in his newfound potential to connect:  “I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love,” he tells his creator. The silents have no analogous clarity of purpose. So when a central plot thread involves a silent couple’s effort to save themselves and their child from implantation, where are readers supposed to place our sympathies? Especially if they never have the opportunity to tell their stories? By its closing chapters, this feels less like a carefully cultivated ambiguity and more like a purposeful slackening to accommodating interactivity. Art for app’s sake.

***

It is the duty of the creator of any book app to assume that whatever sense of immersion we enjoy in a conventional book can be improved upon. More things to become immersed in, the logic goes, means more immersion, which means a better book. The makers of The Silent History have considered this matter carefully. It’s not promiscuous with bells and whistles. But it strongly favors a popular buzzword in publishing circles: community. The Field Report model is designed to give the book’s consumers something to contribute, which in turn is designed to be talked about. The site-specific demands on readers serves a viral function as well as a gatekeeping one, and adds a dash of gamification (to use another buzzword) to the book.

The book app as a concept will perfect itself when their makers recognize how to address each of these opportunities for the needs of its stories. Where The Silent History struggles is in weakening its core narrative to accommodate others’ attempts to shore it up. “As you’re writing your field reports,” the app guidelines explain, “ask yourself if the entry could plausibly be read and enjoyed in any random location; if so, you’re probably not sufficiently utilizing the actual experience of the setting.” This mandate could be the future of literary fiction, or little more than a glorified walking tour supplementing it. How much of the narrative thrust of a story should a novelist give up for the sake of other contributors? The Silent History is an argument that storytelling needs to make concessions to the crowd in the name of “engagement.” (It may say something that the app doesn’t emphasize who actually wrote it; the names of its four lead contributors are tucked in the app’s credits section.)

In 2040 an arrogant Dr. Burnham makes a statement about his work: “I want to be memorialized not as a puppet master but as an innovator, a codebreaker who breached the steel walls guarding the delicate machinery in the human brain that creates pure language.” The makers of The Silent History are after something similarly audacious, rewiring the narrative experience in a new way. But we readers are meant to understand that Burnham’s comment is soaked in hubris, and there’s a clear lesson in his failure: He should have known that his creation would revolt against attempts to rewire human nature. There’s a classic novel about that. A few variations on it are available in the App Store.

———

About the author: Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper and many more publications. His blog, American Fiction Notes, launched in January 2008, has been honored as a Top Ten Book Blog by Readerville’s Karen Templer and one of 10 Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs by the Elegant Variation’s Mark Sarvas.

Today’s guest post by Adam Baer (@glassshallot) complements his piece on sheet music in our Spring 2013 issue, titled Sound + Vision. Click here to review the entire spring issue.

——

If you keep up on music and technology you may have noticed that bloggers have recently taken to discussing a new music notation system called Hummingbird, depicted above. I tried to learn it. It borrows its method of displaying rhythm from piano rolls, showing us the amount of time a note should be held, like GarageBand and other music software. What’s more, it points up for sharps and down for flats, which a demanding violin teacher might do with a pencil. Aside from that, it’s deceptively complicated and requires learning different symbols. How much easier it would be for someone who has never learned music, or lacks a teacher, is questionable.

New systems (and apps) are best when they solve problems, but learning to read Western music notation isn’t a problem that requires a solution. It’s not easy. But like learning to read English, it’s eminently doable, and fraught with fewer variables and exceptions. Reading Western notation—and there have of course been many precursors to what we use now, as well as many alternatives, including Braille and an integer-based system—has also proven to be good for your brain, and we don’t need to simplify it. The current sharp and flat note symbols work fine; you just have to remember them.

Hummingbird appears to be a nicely designed dumbing-down, and not an especially noteworthy one in an age of design-fetish and how-to videos. Shortcuts—like guitar tablature—should really be shortcuts. This new system basically just makes reading music different, and it doesn’t seem to allow for new ways to notate sounds that we cannot yet notate. I’m in favor of new music technologies and notation systems, but Hummingbird should first show me why Western music notation is a problem, and why Hummingbird is a necessary alternative. For now, especially given our abundance of online music-education resources, it’s not.

For more information about alternative music notation systems that may solve what some perceive to be standard notation problems, check out The Music Notation Project.

——

About the author: Adam Baer is a former NPR producer who has reported on music technology for the New York Times and written music criticism for various other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and the New Republic. He is also a contributing editor at Inc.

ALL OVER THE INTERNET

Recycled Movie Costumes: The costume from Downton Abbey that looks curiously familiar? This Tumblr will tell you where you’ve seen it before. Guaranteed to suck away at least thirty minutes of your valuable time.

Your LL Bean Boyfriend: “He will make you a table and then he will have sex with you on it.”

Dear Television Reviews: Girls, Mad Men Dear Television is composed of four alt-aca writers: in other words, academics who write for broad audiences, much in the same way that I do. If you like engaged, fiercely intelligent commentary, then you’ll like Dear Television (now in its new home at the New Republic).

Tom & Lorenzo, “Mad Style”: Style bloggers Tom & Lorenzo recap Mad Men elsewhere on their site, but the real treasure is their exhaustive look at the fashions of each episode, with fascinating contextualization and analysis. My go-to after every episode.

The Kanye West Wing: Like Kanye Wes Anderson, this Tumblr pivots on a simple joke: the combination of stills with lyrics from Kanye West songs. The results are far more amusing than they have any right to be.

FILMS FOR A FRIDAY NIGHT IN

Your Sister’s Sister: If you’re missing the Pacific Northwest, this small film, set on Orcas Island in the San Juans, will be your cure. Beautiful performances from the puppy-dog-eyed Mark Duplass and always amazing Rosemarie DeWitt and Emily Blunt.

Jesse and Celeste Forever: This film, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, came and went rather quietly–but it’s a richly textured delight. Jones co-wrote and co-produced, which makes me like it even more. Bonus: a perfect soundtrack.

The Intouchables: Is this enormously successful French film an updated version of Driving Miss Daisy? Maybe; kinda. But it also features an enormously charismatic performance from Omar Sy, the first black performer to win a “Best Actor” César.

BROCCOLI RECIPES

Double Quinoa Broccoli, 101 Cookbooks. Not for the faint of broccoli heart.

The Best Broccoli Dish You’ve Ever Had, GQ. Lightly tempura-ed? It’s amazing.

Broccoli Parmesan Fritters, The Smitten Kitchen. Somewhat labor intensive, but worth every step.

ARTICLES

Wendell Jamieson, “The Crime of His Childhood,” New York Times. Forty years ago, a man threw acid on a young boy. What happened next–and in the four decades after—is by turns heartbreaking and heartrending. Touching in the most surprising of ways.

Amy Boesky, “The Ghost Writes Back,” Kenyon Review. During her graduate school years at a prestigious college, Boesky ghostwrote dozens of Sweet Valley High novels. A meditation on presence, absence, and authorship.

Mike Dash, “For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII,” Smithsonian.com. I read this entire piece with my mouth hanging open. So many questions left unanswered.

Martin Douglas, “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show,” MTV.com. “There’s a sense of defiance that comes with liking something you’re not ‘supposed’ to like; in a way, I knew I was sabotaging the uniform order among black kids my age. But mostly, it felt like something I could claim for my own, a part of American culture that wasn’t handed down to me or illustrated in history books. It wasn’t my parents’ music. It was something that was happening right now, and regardless of the color lines placed between it and me, it was something that I was a part of.”

HUMOR

“Jon Hamm Needs to Stop Dressing Like a Total Slut,” Thought Catalog.

“Is Taylor Swift a Feminist?” The New Inquiry.

“Best Guesses at Prince’s Email Address,” The Awl.

“If ’90s Dude-Crushes Were Food,” The Hairpin.

“Taylor Swift Now Dating Senator Joe McCarthy,” The Onion.

“39 Ways Men Use Pinterest,” Buzzfeed.

“Instagram Filters Inspired by My Parents’ Reaction to Yet Another Return Home as a Single Man Who Has Not Enrolled in Graduate School,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

MUSIC

Rhye, Woman. Choice track: “The Fall.” The latest Sade-esque indie darling. Perfect everything music.

Kasey Musgraves, Same Trailer, Different Park. Choice track: “Merry Go Round.” I grew up in a small town and loved country music, but knew it was always describing a startlingly different reality than what I experienced. Musgraves’s writing is as catchy as it is honest. My favorite Musgraves lyric: “we get bored so we get married.”

Phosphorescent, Muchacho. Choice track: “Ride On/Right On.” The start of this album makes you think you might just be listening to the next sad sack heavy instrumentalized Pitchfork poster child. But listen on: the album contains multitudes, by turns infectious and sedating.

——

About the author: Anne Helen Petersen writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood for The Hairpin, blogs at Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style, and teaches media studies at Whitman College.

This month’s poster features a poem from David Mason. It appeared in our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. To download a high-resolution PDF of this image, click here.

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Author Jessica Francis Kane (@JessicaFKane) was born in Berkeley, California; grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and graduated from Yale. Her first short story collection, Bending Heaven, was published in the US (Counterpoint, 2002) and the UK (Chatto & Windus, 2003). Her first novel, The Report, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2010. This Close is her second story collection, published last month by Graywolf Press. It has just been long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Awards and honors for her work include the Lawrence Foundation Prize from the Michigan Quarterly Review, fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her stories have been presented on BBC Radio 4 and published many places, including VQR, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s, The Yale Review, A Public Space, Narrative, and Granta.

———

Robert Birnbaum: Say something.

Jessica Kane: Hello, it’s good to be back.

Good. Are you related to Caleb Kane?

No.

Being facile with the search engine, I came across a Caleb Kane who had written a song called “This Close.”

Oh, I did not know that.

I wondered why the title of the story collection, This Close, did not come from the title of one of the stories?

I can tell you a funny story about the title.

Tell me.

I had a hard time titling this collection. I don’t like to title story collections after one of the stories. It’s just a quirk of mine. I feel that it places too much emphasis on one story. And so I have always tried—in my first collection and in this collection—I have tried to find a title that would be overarching. We were this close to actually calling this one Evidence of Old Repairs, which is my editor’s favorite.

Which is a story in This Close.

Yes. So I was about to give in, but I decided to think just a few more days. And one day I was on Twitter and I tweeted that I was this close to settling on a title for my collection. And Larry Dark, the director of the Story Prize, happened to be on Twitter at the same time. He tweeted back, “This Close isn’t so bad for a story collection. That’s a pretty good title.” Out of the blue, out of the blue. But honestly—

Not a bad name for a band either (laughs).

—a light bulb went off in my head. I hadn’t considered until that moment—that’s what the stories are about. About friends and neighbors and family members, and the closeness and the not very closeness of those relationships, and so that seemed to be a title that worked.

I can’t help but think that makes the title arbitrary—that I may be able to come up with a simple sentence that you could make work as a title. If fiction posits some universality in human encounters, almost any title will do. Can do.

Noooo, the title has to be better than that. It has to echo the stories.

Had Dark read the stories?

I am not sure if he had read stories of mine.

I’m guessing he hadn’t read the collection.

Certainly, not as a collection. He may have seen a story or two of mine—

Let’s twitter him right now. (Both laugh)

I did see him recently and gave him a copy of the book and thanked him for the title.

I didn’t see that anywhere in the acknowledgments.

Yes.

Shame on you!

Probably should have.

The CFO of Facebook has a book out. Noreen Malone chose to hilariously review it through the lens of it being a 140-page book with 7 pages of acknowledgments.

Oh.

So I must compliment you on the brevity and succinctness of your acknowledgments.

I have followed Lean In publicity. I think acknowledgments are terribly important—because I write short stories, I am firmly in the less-is-more camp. I think you don’t have to go on and on about everything that happens in the course of all the years it took to write a book. It’s sufficient to name the most important people.

Jeez, that’s so old school.

I guess.

(laughs) And the book is dedicated to your children and your husband?

I did, this one.

Given a choice, would you rather read short fiction than a novel?

I love both. I really love both; I hope to continue writing both. I thought for years I might just be a story writer because it took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel. But having done it, I would like to do it again. Very much. I am at the beginning of a new one. But I also have a few unfinished stories.

Are you able to go back and forth easily?

I can, I like that.

When you say “I would like to do it again” in the context of telling me that you are writing another novel, that suggests a certain uncertainty and, dare I say, a lack of confidence.

It depends on the novel. I certainly have more confidence now having done it once. But I think every novel is different, and this novel will not be a historical novel. And some of the tricks I learned writing The Report aren’t going to work for this book. I do have to reinvent it. I have more faith now that I know how to do that. But it’s still like a new game. And I have to learn the rules of this game. And I think I can do it.

It’s an amazing part of the life of creators that it is so difficult to hold on to that confidence that you can finish what you start.

Right. It is. And that’s why a lot of us won’t talk about new projects until we have reached a point of no return.

The way some people view announcing pregnancy.

(laughs) That’s true—as the story goes, you don’t want to say you have had a miscarriage. The same might go for a novel. You don’t want to have to say, “No, that novel isn’t going to pan out after all.”

I read story collections—

—I’m curious did you read mine in order?

No.

I tried so hard—you were meant to.

I understand. I understand I risk missing some piece of code. My reason for not doing it is because I am not committed to reading the whole collection at one time. And it’s been rare that the whole of a story collection has been greater than the sum of the individual stories.

The only reason that this time it mattered to me was because there are sets of stories. And the table of contents is meant to reflect that—there are groupings of stories that are meant to show the sets and those sets follow the same characters over time. So I was hoping the cumulative effect would mean something. I know you can’t control a reader—

I might have killed myself by the end of the collection—there is a somber portrayal of old age. (laughs) There are two stories that did really grab me. The last one, which I read first. And as always I wonder how a writer can really reach the empathy for something that is foreign to them—in this case, you have characters in their seventies. And your story makes it clear why people sour in old age.  I found it remarkable that you hit all these notes.

Thank you.

The other story was “Lucky Boy,” where a protagonist’s girlfriend mentions that some relative’s florist who had served the family for years was looking forward to doing one of the family member’s weddings, seeing that transaction as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. An outstanding insight.

Thank you.

What else is there to say?  (pause) What’s the meaning of life? (both laugh)

Well, to me. Making stories. Looking beyond my own life.

You seem to be drawn to—was there even one upbeat story?

Upbeat story? Nooo. (RB laughs) Who wants to read an upbeat story? My stories—I guess I am not interested in reading happy stories, and I don’t write happy stories. I am interested in the misunderstandings of life and how they happen.

Well, that means you have a lot to choose from.

Right. My grandmother—I was very close to her as a child, and she used to tell and retell stories, and would forget that she had told me before about her cousin Jenny. And overhearing her cousin Jenny referring to my grandmother as not looking very well in the color maroon. This was a minor insult that she carried with her for the rest of her life. I just think it’s amazing—those little misunderstandings. And there was another story about her hands being too large. She was a great gardener, and she had strong, wonderful hands. These things fascinate me, and I find I turn them over in my mind until I find a character that suits the thing I am interested in. And then I make a story out of it. And, invariably, the story isn’t happy. But there are some hopeful endings. Where a character may be off on another path.

That [hope] is another issue. It’s all hopeful until you are dead. (JK laughs) You have recommended Christopher Beha’s novel, as have others. I read it and did not get what was so outstanding about it.

I was grabbed from the beginning by the narrator’s voice. I felt very pulled in. It was such a confident opening. It reminded me of Graham Greene, and the moral questions of the story are very Greene-like. I enjoy that. I do think the ending is a bit flawed—there are too many steps that lead to the end of the book. But overall, I was excited by that.

OK, we don’t agree. But I don’t think less of you. How is it that some public conversations and exchanges on the merits of particular books seem to rise to high levels of animus?

Where people hate each other because they disagree?

One can on occasion read bitter and angry exchanges—

I don’t know, I don’t know people like that. (laughs)

A recent example was William Giraldi’s NYTBR piece on Alix Ohlin’s newest books—

Oh yes.

—he wrote what I read as a precise account of the failings of her work. But it was a vivisection, within the bounds of literary analysis with supporting quotations. And it turned into a partisan battle where Ohlin’s cheering section expressed outrage, and what they were not shy about expressing were Giraldi’s maledictions.

That seems to be a concern—in a general sense, people are concerned with the criticism of “niceness” that seems to have taken over.

The anti-snark manifestos and campaign of the early aughts (00’s).

Yeah. I understand it. I engage in Facebook and Twitter. I really don’t do much reviewing. There is so little space for reviewing and coverage, I question why a book would just be destroyed in the little space that we have. Why not write a more positive review? It doesn’t have to be glowing.

Well, that’s an overview one can have as a creature of the literary planet—that there are a lot of good books that deserve attention and there are too many that get none.

Right, right.

That’s the [righteous] view of people who are intimately involved in the world of literature. But if I am just a reader, I don’t think about that. And I suppose if I am a book editor I probably don’t care, do I?

Some editors might.

I am not referring to specifically literary journals. Are we expecting that from the New York Times or the Washington Post? As an ambient fact of interest, my conversation with Giraldi at my blog Our Man in Boston consistently gets hits, more than any other item, other than my recent George Saunders chat.

Really? They say the only bad publicity is no publicity.

Well, Giraldi’s reputation is not at stake. His work at LARB is outstanding. He has a sharp mind and a dedication to literature. Is the takeaway that we are not prepared for this level of intelligent critique of books?

I don’t know.

Any sense of your own standing in the world of books? Are you a rising figure? (JK laughs) Why are you published by Graywolf?

Because I want to—because I am fortunate. This is my second book with Graywolf.

Who published the first collection?

Counterpoint. About 10 years ago. And the novel was sold many years later to Graywolf, and I thought they did a terrific job with it. So when I had this new collection ready, I was very happy to stay with Graywolf. I think they are wonderful.

I agree.

I think they are getting better.

In the publishing world, there is Graywolf, Sarabande, Cinco Puntes, Tin House. And there’s the so-called Big 6. When George Saunders’ latest book was published, there was a profile in the New York Times which was packed with, uh, hyperbole. Soon thereafter Saunders’ publisher purchases a full-page ad in the paper. That represents a large monetary investment in a story collection. So if someone writes that yours is the second best book of the year, will Graywolf respond similarly? (laughs)

My collection may not be reviewed by the New York Times. [JK’s first collection was.] I don’t know, I hope it is. But regardless, Graywolf stands prepared to do that sort of thing. Look at the success they had with Out Stealing Horses by Pederson—when that was given the front page of the New York Times Book Review. They followed that with tremendous publicity and it became an international bestseller. They stand prepared to back their books—more and more. Yes, it is a smaller press. It doesn’t have the money that Knopf has. But the dedication is no less. In recent years, as there has been so much in transition in this business, I have felt that Graywolf ship is very steady and on the rise. While we have watched the Big 6 and wondered who is next to buy whom, I have felt very comfortable and safe at Graywolf.

I would surmise that a small publisher in Minneapolis is not under the pressure to deliver a 20% yearly revenue growth like the conglomerates operating out of NYC and beyond.

It’s very different because it’s nonprofit. They have to raise money, which is a different kind of pressure. But the business model remains interesting because their books are selling.

You were a book publicist early in your working life.

I was. I worked for WW Norton.

I have noticed that publicists are making the quid pro quos more explicit—almost demanding the details of one’s interest in a review copy request. And this is before one has had a chance to look at the book, touch it, read it.

Is that right?

Sure, “When’s the review coming out?” without me having anything but cursory knowledge of the book. And the whole attitude starts to imply that literary journalism is an adjunct to the publicity initiatives. I’ve had people contact me a day or two before an author’s local appearance asking if I was interested in an interview. I don’t think they have any idea if I am capable of hyper speed-reading, so I assume they don’t care if I read the book. For my part, I believe if I have an obligation, it is to read some or the entire book.

Much has changed since I was a publicist. We were still sending out black-and-white photos. We barely had e-mail.

I recall that time and I could feel the joy of the publisher that I showed some interest in a book.

It must be much more confusing now, with so many websites and bloggers asking for books. It might be very hard to figure out who is serious and who is just looking for a free book.

Because you have experience in the business end, do think about the business of getting your stuff out to people to read it?

Oh, I don’t.

How do you restrain yourself?

I write what I am interested in, and hope it will find an audience. I don’t know that it would make a lot of sense to do it the other way around.

No pressure to produce material on a timely basis?

Certainly no pressure that I don’t place on myself. I would like not too many years to pass before I have another book ready, mainly because that would be beneficial to a long-term career. It’s not like I have anybody saying I must have a novel next year, and another the year after that.

What kind of discipline do you impose on yourself?

I try to write every day, every morning. I am at a stage now where the children are both at school, so without any extra babysitting, I have about 5 or 6 hours a day. So that’s lovely—it represents a new era for me. I had to cobble together a writing schedule around babysitting. Now that they are in school, and I have that time, I am trying to be disciplined about it.

And how much have your children affected your writing?

I don’t know. I don’t know yet. A lot of my writing, if you look at my stories, it’s about the relationship between adult children and their parents. Until this point in time, I have spent a lot of time looking in that direction—up, toward the older generation. And maybe my own and my generation’s negotiations with them. Only now am I beginning to shift and look their way—now I am a parent and I certainly wonder what my children are thinking about and how it will all work out. That hasn’t come out in my work so much yet.

There is that story, “Next in Line.”

Where she loses her toddler.

I wonder how a parent can write that?

Oddly, that story was the very first story I completed after my daughter was born—the oldest story in the collection. I had a hard time getting back to writing after she was born and figuring out how I was going to do both of these things—write and mother. And that was the story that emerged. And I thought that was bizarre. My mind was working out the worst that could happen.

Some people are superstitious and think if you can name the thing and recognize it, it won’t happen. I am not sure that’s what I was doing in that story, but I was worried. And I did have awkward things happen with the baby and me—she was very fussy. And I was out and about with a crying baby, and I felt that I was being stared at. And the anxiety of being a new mother went into that story. There are certainly things that are coming out in the writing.

Did writing a story about a young child’s death require compartmentalizing? That’s a deep, dark place.

I think that’s how I function as a writer. I have always left the house to write, and when I am out, I am a writer, and when I return, I am a mother. That separation is required. In my novel there was a child who died, and it is very hard to think about those things. There are times when it has made me very sad. But I don’t know why I think about what I think about. I don’t feel like I have total control over it. (laughs)

Where you in a trance when you wrote “Next In Line”?

That story—it came fast if that’s what you mean. I was so delighted to be writing again. And I was able to use all this material that suddenly seemed at hand—worry about a child, nervousness about being a mother. There it was and then I was just happy to be writing again.

I can think of 2 novels for which children’s death is central. Stephen Dixon’s Interstate, which I could not read past the first chapter. And John Burnham Schwartz’s Reservation Road—

That’s a very important book to me. That book contains an epigraph to my novel—“When hope is lost, blame is the only true religion” comes from that book, and I used it in The Report. I know that book well.

Is that phrase original to Schwartz?

Yes, it was his.

I did read that book—I guess it was a little less unsettling than the Dixon novel. Do you know Lionel Shriver’s novel We Have to Talk About Kevin?

I have not read that. I know what it’s about. It seems compelling and upsetting.

Very.

I don’t usually shy away from that.

What are you reading?

Can I just say—you’re pressing me on why I write about these things that are so difficult to imagine. I think what’s interesting is what comes next. It’s the aftermath. It’s the endurance. A lot of writers when they write about a tragedy and what comes after—what they are writing about is how people endure. That’s a theme that is fascinating. If there is any link between my historical novel and my contemporary short stories, that’s the link—how people will endure, whether it’s an accident in wartime, or being a neighbor for 30 years, or having the same family members for 40 years.

That is the nub of it all, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Understanding endurance and durability seems not to be teachable—perhaps Native Americans understood it. We don’t teach our children about death and dying. Consequently, there is real aversion and fear about the inevitable. You were going to say what you have been reading.

At the moment I have been very busy reading the books by the authors I am appearing with over the next two months while I’m on tour.

Two months?

It’s not constant—it’s back and forth. Little trips here and there. I am going to Nashville to read in Ann Patchett’s bookstore—it’s more of a literary pilgrimage than a reading. I just finished The Mothers by Jen Gilmore, which I thought was fantastic.

Patchett was brave to open up a bookstore.

She certainly was. And she has been such an advocate for all independent bookstores. I’ve loved her novels, particularly Bel Canto. I’ll read anything that she writes.

Who are other authors of whom you will read anything they write?

Ian McEwan, Peter Cameron.

Upon Joan Wickersham’s recommendation, I read Cameron’s recent Coral Glynn. It was excellent.

I’m reading it right now.

Cameron and—

I always have a hard time with this—Elizabeth McCracken, Marilynne Robinson, and Alice Munro. I loved Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge, but they are both dead. So I guess I won’t be reading anything more of theirs.

You’ve read everything by them?

Fitzgerald, yes. She is a favorite of mine. Not everything by Bainbridge. There is a new writer I love, Emma Straub (Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures). I am reading with her.

What’s that like? What if you read a book and you don’t like it?

That’s always a possibility, but I don’t feel the need to broadcast the books I don’t like. I will say anything, anywhere, about books I love. But I am not going to go on Facebook or Twitter and say this book was a huge disappointment. There is no need for that. That’s not my role.

That’s fine. There are so many deserving books that need to be talked about.

Also, I don’t see myself as a critic. I appreciate that there are critics and there should be smart criticism in the country. Those people shouldn’t feel hampered to say nice things about everyone.

I have wondered why The Report hasn’t been made into a movie—it’s the kind of story the BBC does well.

The film rights have been optioned by a young British filmmaker. It may yet be. I’ll keep you posted. He is going to be the producer and director, and he has hired a screenwriter who is at work now adapting the book. The stage rights were also optioned. It exists as a play now, too, by Martin Casella. I saw a table reading of it and I think it’s magnificent. It’s a large cast—for twelve, which I gather is large. I hope some theater out there will take it.

Will I turn on Dancing With the Stars one day and see you?

Noooooo. They are all past their prime, those people, aren’t they? I don’t watch that show.

I don’t know. Do you think about writing for film?

Never. I don’t watch television, but I read about it.

You don’t have to watch TV.

I am aware there are some great shows.

Have you seen Girls?

No. I read about it a lot so, I stay in touch with the culture. I don’t want to be entirely outside the culture. But I can’t figure out how to find time—that’s the thing that gave. When children, writing, some modicum of exercise —the thing that gave was TV watching.

I do what is called “binge” watching.

Where you watch a whole season at once.

I never watched Girls but what I read reached a kind of critical mass when I read Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation) in New York magazine and then Megan Daum’s response, which made me very curious. I too want to stay in touch with the culture.

I agree. There is utter saturation. You have to choose.

Why are you on Facebook?

Originally, so that I would see pictures of my nephew. My younger brother was on Facebook from the beginning. When his son was born, I thought the only way I am going to see pictures of this baby is if I’m on Facebook.

Where does he live?

Michigan. And I was in Germany at the time. I thought for a few days I would keep it just as a family thing. That quickly became impossible. People just find you and then it feels wrong not to accept a friend request. Then it became a professional tool. And so now I like the writers and the booksellers who are on there—I have read things I wouldn’t have read because of links they put up. It’s a very strange mixture of personal and professional. I find it compelling—I think all writers talk about finding a balance with the social media requirements and just doing the work. Having the quiet and peace to do the work.

And Twitter?

I actually did first.

Why isn’t the verb “to twitter” rather than “to tweet”?

I don’t know. (giggles)

I found the balance—I suspended my Facebook account. Too many posts from people reporting quite trivial things. Writers announcing how many words they wrote that day. All these new media impose a speeding up—as if you are obliged to respond immediately to an e-mail or twitter—

It can feel that way. I don’t text and I enjoy that freedom.

My 15-year-old son doesn’t e-mail. He texts. I keep telling him I am in front of a computer throughout the day and I don’t always know where my phone is.

Right.

He still texts.

I wonder what it will be with my children.

Any grander plans or ambitions than continuing your writing career?

Grander than another novel? Unthinkable!

Is writing your whole life?

No, I have 2 children. At the moment the writing and the children take all my time. Now that the children are a little older I might like to try teaching. I see that on the horizon as something I’d like to do. I would love to do more magazine writing.

Why?

What I mean is I’d like to write essays.

Could you spend the rest of your life in NYC?

I love NYC, but I love to travel. There are many places I want to see. I miss the mountains. I really want to go back to the mountains. After living in Munich for a year—we did a lot of hiking in the Alps. I can’t wait to go back.

Did you learn how to yodel?

(laughs) No.

C’mon, you did. You’re holding back.

We did see those long, long Alpine horns. They are haunting.

Do your kids understand what you do?

I think they do, yeah. My daughter certainly does and she likes to write stories. They are both aware and both ask for me to sign a copy of the books for them that I keep on their shelves. Which is very sweet.

They haven’t discovered eBay yet?

Not yet. I am sure that’s coming. At the moment they are treasured on their bookshelves. But that will change, no doubt.

Well, once again it’s been a pleasure. Thanks.

Yes, thanks for talking with me again.

——

About the interviewer: Robert Birnbaum’s Social Security number ends in 2247. He lives in zip code 02465 and area code 617. He was born in the 2nd month of a year in the 20th century. He doesn’t social network (used as a verb) except through his Cuban retriever Beny (named after Beny More, the Frank Sinatra of Cuba). Izzy Birnbaum also has cloud storage and uses electronic mail. He hopes his son Cuba is the second coming of Pudge Rodriguez. He mutters to himself at Our Man In Boston.

I recently read Katherine Boo’s 2012 National Book Award–winning portrait of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, with my students in a creative nonfiction class at Dartmouth College. Boo spent a little more than three years in the slum, Annawadi, practicing what’s sometimes known as immersion journalism. It’s a term she may have taken too literally: “To Annawadians,” she writes in an author’s note, “I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle, given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping.” That’s close to all we know of her adventures, though, because Behind the Beautiful Forevers is written in a voice that might be called “strictly third person.” Besides that note, there’s no hint of Boo’s presence in the lives of the slum dwellers.

“Dickens,” observed one of my students—as in Charles, as in fiction. The word “paternalism” arose, though more as a question than a charge: Did Boo, in assuming the role of an omniscient narrator, inadvertently set herself up to look down on Mumbai from on high? Another student wondered why one of the blurbs on the back was from David Sedaris. “Isn’t he, like, funny?” Behind the Beautiful Forevers is not a funny book, but it wasn’t the blurb-presence of a humorist that caught my student’s eye. It was what Sedaris wrote: “It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel.”

Emphasis mine, cliché Sedaris’s. Should we blame him? He liked the book. He wanted people to read it. And Sedaris is nothing if not a savvy salesman. He must’ve understood that the promise of “enjoyment,” married to all that is implied by a novel—characters, plot, resolution, a seamless world—would give Behind the Beautiful Forevers a readership far beyond the market share for true tales of relentless filth and poverty. Especially if the promise is made by a bestseller such as himself. “Reads like a novel”—that’s the elevator pitch. That’s how you sell suffering for $27.

Tom Wolfe made the phrase like a novel his own in the introduction to his influential 1973 anthology, The New Journalism. “Like a novel, if you get the picture,” he wrote; emphasis his. Wolfe really did have Dickens in mind, nineteenth-century fiction that derived its “unique power” from its “immediacy.” But immediacy is an illusion, the disguise of the mediation that is the author standing between you and the reality depicted by the story. Immediacy is fiction. It’s what screenwriter Ed Burns, in an episode of The Wire about falsified you-are-there newspaper stories, derides as “the Dickensian aspect.” Offered up by blurbers with the best of intentions, the immediacy implicit in like a novel suggests that the book on hand can be engaged with as art rather than as fact, so realist it’s not real; a story rather than the state of things, a condition in which we might be complicit. The blurber may be speaking of craft—the use of scene, dialogue, character—but publishers traffic in genre, the overstated distinction between art and fact that makes one book “current events” and another “a timeless story”—that is, a book with a shelf life.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx? “Like a novel.”

Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, a hair-pulling anxiety disorder of a book about financial ruin? “Like a novel.”

Sonia Faleiro “brings a novelist’s eye” to another account of degradation in Mumbai, Beautiful Thing; Aman Sethi, author of A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi, “possesses a novelist’s ear.” I’ve never heard the nose of a literary journalist compared to that of a novelist, but there’s no shortage of praise within the genre for “pungent details,” the kind novelists are thought to be especially good at producing.

To be “like a novel” seems in many other renderings to be a sort of spiritual condition. In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Anne Fadiman explores a tragic culture clash between Western medicine and a Hmong immigrant family with what Richard Bernstein in the New York Times describes as “a novelist’s grace”; William T. Vollmann rambles through the history and statistics of poverty in his nonfiction Poor People with “a novelist’s grace,” according to Esquire. Powell’s markets Blood Done Sign My Name, Timothy B. Tyson’s astonishing hybrid of history, memoir, and reportage, as written with the “eloquent grace of a novelist.” Grace is a gift, of course, and in this sense it functions as a modern metaphor for the muse, and a romantic conception of writing at odds with reporting.

It’s not just literary journalism. Historian Kevin Boyle’s erudite account of Jazz Age race relations and murder, Arc of Justice—also a National Book Award winner—“holds the reader like a fast-paced detective novel,” according to the Washington Post. Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia, a National Book Award finalist, “illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis [and] the problems of globalization,” warns the Los Angeles Times, but don’t be deterred—it’s “recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace.” (Presumably not Proust’s.) Worried that the brutal details of the eighteenth-century slave trade might be too pungent for an enjoyable read? Don’t fret—Bury the Chains, the National Book Award finalist by Adam Hochschild, possesses the “dramatic power of a great epic novel,” says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

These are brilliant books, all, pulled from my own shelf. But I’d dread the novel that delved into the economics of the slave trade with as much cool detail as Bury the Chains; and much of the interest in Beautiful Thing lies in the ways Faleiro’s subject, a bar dancer named Leela, fails to resolve as a “character.” That’s because she isn’t a character, she’s a human being who has been partially documented by Faleiro. It’s no insult to Faleiro to note that her documentation is incomplete, that she can never know her subject as well as she knows the characters in the novels she writes. The best nonfiction recognizes the impossibility of perfect representation, the dream of the 1:1 ratio.

Sometimes that acknowledgment is explicit, as in James Agee’s lament in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that he cannot offer, instead of words, a box full of “lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.” Sometimes it’s just a nod, albeit a crucial one, as in Boo’s description in her author’s note of her prolonged attempts to draw the unarticulated thoughts of some subjects to the surface, where they could be rendered in approximate English by Boo’s translators.

So why, my students wanted to know, would Boo want her masterpiece of reportage, its “pungent details” acquired only with great effort, to be described as “like a novel”? If she’d wanted to write a novel, why hadn’t she? If she hadn’t wanted to write a novel—if the actuality of Abdul the trash sorter and Sunil the scavenger mattered to her—why wouldn’t she bridle at the comparison?

I didn’t have a ready answer. My own work has on occasion been compared to a novel, and whenever it was, I was delighted. I knew that for a book to be “like a novel” meant that it was safe for mass consumption. I knew that to be “like a novel” meant sales, even though nonfiction outsells fiction. But facts like that are beside the point. For Sedaris to say that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is like a novel is to reassure the reader that the suffering documented on every page isn’t what matters. It’s the experience. The reader’s, that is. This book will make you feel close to that suffering, but not too close.

Boo’s reviews are almost uniformly positive, with only one really notable exception at the Times Literary Supplement. TLS assigned Behind the Beautiful Forevers to the legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who faults the book for failing to offer a reform agenda in response to the poverty it depicts. Nussbaum seems wholly innocent of the tradition of literary journalism, of which muckraking is just one strand, but there’s a sense in which she’s taken the idea of “like a novel” seriously, and followed with a logical question: “What kind of novel?” Dickens, yes; and what does that tell us? “The English novel was a social protest movement from the start,” she argues, “and its aim (like that of many of its American descendants) was frequently to acquaint middle-class people with the reality of various social ills, in a way that would involve real vision and feeling.”

Along with Wolfe, it seems, Nussbaum feels that such novels possess “a unique power.” But where Wolfe seeks sensation, Nussbaum believes these realist novels should result in “constructive action.”

You may, like me, be wincing: The philosopher seems to have missed the point of fiction, a genre distinct from the petition and the manifesto. “If readers are to be steered in the direction of intelligent action aimed at change,” writes Nussbaum, “the narrative journalist needs to give them not just sympathetic characters, but also historical and economic analysis.”

The idea of Boo “steering” her readers to “intelligent action” smacks of a more troubling kind of marketing altogether, even if Nussbaum’s definition of such action is compatible with all the most high-minded ideals. But in a way, Nussbaum has stumbled backward into the problem with the notion of nonfiction being “like a novel.” In staking its limited representation of the world on a relationship to fact, every work of literary journalism asserts at least an implicit historical analysis, if not an economic one.

Nussbaum compares Behind the Beautiful Forevers to Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance, also about an Indian slum. As fiction, Boo’s work couldn’t stand the comparison; as nonfiction, though, her book shines with what Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” It isn’t like a novel because it’s true. True not in the abstract sense, the sense in which novels may possess truth, but trued, like a wheel, aligned as closely as possible with arguable facts. That attempt—and its inevitable failure, too—matters more than “sympathetic characters.”

That attempt is one of the two essential facts of any work of documentary prose; the failure of the attempt is the other. We can true a wheel, but to some degree it will always wobble. We can research and fact-check and interrogate every assumption, every mark of punctuation, but the words are not the things they stand for, only coded approximations. That’s what literary journalism is: an approximation. It’s not like a novel, it’s like nonfiction, only it hasn’t quite gotten there. It’s still trying.

So, since like Sedaris I want you to read Behind the Beautiful Forevers even though it’s not “immediate,” even though it’s not illusion but rather documentation—to the best of Boo’s perception—of a reality all too common but perhaps startling to the average American middle-class book buyer, I’ll just say this:  It may surprise you how enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as if everything in it were true.

That’s the ambition.

——

About the author: Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to VQR, teaches literary journalism at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Family, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and Radiant Truths, forthcoming in 2014.