Page 630 – Electric Literature

Everything You Wanted to Know about Book Sales (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Posted on June 30, 2016October 28, 2019 by 007595

Publishing is the business of creating books and selling them to readers. And yet, for some reason we aren’t supposed to talk about the latter. Most literary writers consider book sales a half-crass / half-mythological subject that is taboo to discuss.

Most literary writers consider book sales a half-crass / half-mythological subject that is taboo to discuss.

While authors avoid the topic, every now and then the media brings up book sales — normally to either proclaim, yet again, the death of the novel, or to make sweeping generalizations about the attention spans of different generations. But even then, the data we are given is almost completely useless for anyone interested in fiction and literature. Earlier this year, there was a round of excited editorials about how print is back, baby after industry reports showed print sales increasing for the second consecutive year. However, the growth was driven almost entirely by non-fiction sales… more specifically adult coloring books and YouTube celebrity memoirs. As great as adult coloring books may be, their sales figures tell us nothing about the sales of, say, literary fiction.

This is literally the sixth best-selling book of 2016

This lack of knowledge leads to plenty of confusion for writers when they do sell a book. Are they selling well? What constitutes good sales? Should they start freaking out when their first $0.00 royalty check comes in? Writers should absolutely write with an eye toward art, not markets. Thinking about sales while creating art rarely produces anything good. But I’m still naïve enough to think that knowledge is always better than ignorance, and that after the book is written, writers should come to publishing with a basic understanding of what is going on. Personally speaking, my knowledge of the fundamentals of publishing helped me not even think or worry about book sales when my own book was published last year. And since I need a reason to justify the time I’ve spent dicking around on BookScan, here is my guide to everything you wanted to know about book* sales (but were afraid to ask).

*Because “books” is an impossibly large category covering everything from Sudoku puzzles to C++ guides, I’m going to focus on traditionally published fiction books in this article.

THE BASICS

What is a book sale?

Wait, you say, everyone knows what a book sale is. Ah, yes, but, what this section presupposes is… maybe you don’t? Actually, one of the things that makes the conversation about book sales so confusing is that there are several different numbers thrown around, and often even people in the publishing industry completely confuse them. Here are four different numbers that are frequently conflated:

1) The number of copies of the book that are printed.

2) The number of copies that have been shipped to stores or other markets like libraries.

3) The number of copies that have been sold to readers.

4) The Nielsen BookScan number.

These numbers can all be wildly different. It’s not uncommon at all for a publisher to, say, print 5,000 copies, but only sell 3,000 copies to bookstores/other markets, of which, 2,000 copies are actually sold to customers. Meanwhile, BookScan shows 600 copies sold. And we haven’t even gotten into ebooks yet (more on that later).

A publishing employee calculating a royalty statement

What’s the actual number of books sold? Well… basically a combo of 2 and 3, plus ebook and audiobook sales. A publisher sells books to retailers like bookstores, but also to some institutions like libraries. However, retailers normally (though not always) have the right to return unsold copies. So some copies that are “sold” will eventually be unsold. (On author royalty statements, a certain amount of money is always withheld as “reserve against returns.”)

While this is basic, it’s surprisingly common for authors and publishers to either intentionally or unintentionally confuse these numbers: brag about their sales while citing the print run, for example. On the other hand, the media almost always references the BookScan number without any context about how wrong that number can be.

What Is BookScan and Why Should We Care?

In my hypothetical above, the Nielsen BookScan number, is the least accurate. It’s the furthest away from the “true” sales of the book. And yet, if you read any articles on book sales it is precisely the BookScan number you will see. This is because while publishers and authors (via royalty statements) have access to the real numbers, they are almost never released to the public or to rival publishers. Thankfully, there is Nielsen BookScan, an industry tracking tool that records point of sales based on ISBNs. (Yes, this is the same Nielsen of TV’s Nielsen ratings.) People in publishing can use BookScan to get a general sense of what books are selling, the health of the industry, or tear their hair out in frustration while looking up the sales of their rivals.

So Why Can BookScan Be So Inaccurate?

Nielsen BookScan counts cash register sales of books by tracking ISBNs. A clerk scans the barcode, and the sale is recorded. Pretty simple.

So why can it be inaccurate? To begin with, BookScan only tracks print book sales. Amazon and other major ebook vendors do not release ebook sales, so basically no one has any idea how those are selling (outside of publishers tracking their own sales). Ebook sales vary wildly from book to book (and genre to genre), but are typically less than 1/3rd of sales. For certain genres, especially science fiction and romance, ebooks can be as much as 50% or more.

Even for print books, BookScan can only do so much. BookScan gets data from most big bookstores (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble), but it doesn’t get all of them. It also doesn’t track library sales — which can be significant — or any sales that don’t go through a bookstore. BookScan itself claims to track 75% of print sales, and that may be true overall. For a popular literary fiction title, for which library sales or hand sales are a tiny percentage, BookScan is probably getting at least 75% or more of print sales. For other types of books, BookScan might record as little as 25% of print sales. Small press books, for example, can sell most of their copies at conferences, book festivals, and direct sales on the publisher’s website or at readings. BookScan misses all of that.

Lastly, BookScan was only introduced in 2001, so numbers for any books published before this millennium are completely inaccurate. (I’ve seen people bemoan the small sales of, say, Infinite Jest compared to some recent bestseller without realizing that.) All that said, BookScan does a good job showing general trends in the industry and seeing which books are doing better than others. But you should keep in mind that total book sales are perhaps twice that of every number listed.

A young author ready to publish his first novel

How Much Does an Author Make Per Sale?

So let’s say you bought a book (like, oh, how about Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel), how much would the author make? Author royalty rates vary, but the industry standard is about 8% of the cover price for paperbacks and 10% for hardcovers (escalating to 15% if sales go well). Ebooks, which have variable pricing, are 25% of the publisher’s take. Now, as an author I’d love for those rates to be higher, but I do think it is important for authors to understand that the majority of the cover price doesn’t go to the publisher. Well over 50% of the cover price goes to the retailer that sells books to customers and the distributor who gets the books to retailers. There is plenty to be said about whether the publishing model could be more efficient, if middlemen could be cut out, etc. etc. But when certain corners of the writing world — such as certain self-publishing ideologues — scream about how publishers are ripping off authors and taking 90% of the pie for themselves, that isn’t really accurate.

A young author opening his first royalty statement

Don’t Most Authors Make No Money From Sales?

Correct. Most authors do not make any money off of actual book sales because most books do not “earn out” their “advance.” Traditionally published authors are paid money up front, before a book is released. This “advance” is money given up front to the author out of future royalties so that the author can buy ramen and pay the overdue electricity bill. “Earning out” means the book has sold enough copies that the total royalties (not the total sales) match up to the advance, thus providing a (most likely tiny) trickle of royalty money to authors for all sales thereafter.

This ‘advance’ is money given up front to the author out of future royalties so that the author can buy ramen and pay the overdue electricity bill.

Here’s an example: Writer von Author writes My Big Literary Novel and Big Publishing House Press pays her $50,000 dollars as an advance. The cover price of the book is $20 dollars and her royalty rate is 10%. (In reality it would be more like a ~$25 hardcover at 10–15% followed by a ~$15 paperback at 7–10%, but I’m simplifying.) If the publisher sells 10,000 copies of the book, the total sales are $200,000 and the author has earned $20,000 from royalties… except that she was already paid $50,000 so she is actually at negative $30,000. She doesn’t have to pay anyone back either though, the publisher takes the loss. However, if the book sells 25,000 copies, then the author would earn back her advance and at copy twenty-five thousand and one, she would start earning $2 per book sold.

A young author after reading his first royalty statement

How Does Publishing Survive If Most Books Don’t Earn Out?

To begin with, publishers survive on a handful of hits. A 50 Shades of Grey here or a Gone Girl there make up for a lot of low-advance books that don’t sell well. This is similar to how movie studios survive on a few massive blockbusters to offset the costs of movies that don’t earn what is expected at the box office. Additionally, the publisher makes money before the author does. Even if the distributor and retailer take, say, 65% of the sale price (and it can be as much as 75%), the publisher is getting 25% to the author’s 10%.

When an article talks about how some huge advance given to a debut author and/or celebrity author won’t earn out, that doesn’t actually mean the publisher won’t make money. (Here’s a blog post breaking down the example of Lena Dunham’s huge advance.) In fact, publishers may give huge author advances on books they know won’t earn out as a way of paying a de facto higher royalty rate.

Take our example above. If My Big Literary Novel sells 20k copies, the author still hasn’t earned back her advance yet the press is taking in $90,000 (35% of cover price minus 50k advance). Of course, the press also has to pay for the printing costs of the book as well as any marketing costs or money spent on cover art before it can even pay the various employees that worked on the book… but you get the general idea.

WHAT DO BOOKS ACTUALLY SELL?

Two authors gossiping about their friends’ book sales

Okay, Let’s Get to the Dirt: What Does an Average Book Sell?

Probably not surprisingly, the answer is… it really depends. The first thing that writers need to understand is that book sales — like advances — are all over the place. This is true even for individual authors. It’s not unheard of for an author to get roughly similar critical acclaim for their first three novels, yet have them sell 10k, 100k, and 10k respectively. Publishing is full of luck, timing, and unpredictable trends. (I mean, adult coloring books? Really?) And even then, publishers give dramatically different amounts of support and marketing even to books published by the same imprint.

That qualification aside, most fiction books published by a traditional publisher garner somewhere between 500 and 500,000 sales. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

Can You… Narrow that Down a Little?

Ignoring the outlier megastars like Stephen King or runaway hits like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, most novels published by a big publisher BookScan somewhere between 2,000 and 40,000 books. Most short story collections issued by big publishers get about half that: between 1,000 and 20,000.

People really really really love this book

You can scale this down for publisher size. An independent small press is averaging more like 500 to 10,000 for novels and 300 to 2,000 for story collections. A micro press is more like 75 to 2,000 regardless of book type — at this level, the author’s “platform” and fan base matter more than if the book is a novel, story collection, or poems — with outside successes getting above 5k.

For debut books, you could cut all those numbers in half. Do keep in mind that this is after at least a year of sales. If your book just came out this month, don’t panic yet (and don’t check BookScan for a long time, if ever).

So the Average Novel Sells 20,000?

Well… no. Like baseball salaries or box office returns, book sales are heavily skewed by the minority of books that do really well. If you go into your local bookstore and look at all the books on the various tables, most of those will BookScan between 2,000 and 40,000 after a couple years of sales. The big books by the big names on the tables will get between 100,000 and a couple million.

However, most books struggle to find adequate distribution, much less coverage. Most books do not get placement on tables, and many do not even get to many bookstores at all. The majority of traditionally published novels sell only a couple thousand, if that, over their lifetime.

What Constitutes “Good” Sales?

As with anything here, we need qualifications. What constitutes “good” sales is entirely dependent on what type of book you are publishing, what size your publisher is, and what your advance was. 5,000 copies of a short story collection on a small press is a huge hit. 5,000 copies of a novel from a big publisher that paid a $100,000 advance is a huge disaster.

You also need to factor in the format. Selling 10,000 hardcover is worth more than 10,000 paperbacks. For ebooks, prices can be all over the place, even from a major publisher.

Qualifications aside, if you are a new writer at a big publisher and you’ve sold more than 10,000 copies of a novel you are in very good shape — as long as you didn’t have a large advance. It should be easy for you to get another book contract. If you sold more than 5,000, you are doing pretty well. You’ll probably sell your next book somewhere. If you sold less than 5,000, then you could be in trouble with the next book. (Although it is, as always, dependent on the project. If a publisher loves your next book, they may not care about previous sales.)

The smaller the press, the more you can scale down. One publisher of an independent press told me that most indie press books sell — not BookScan — about 1,500 copies, with 3,000 being good sales. Even then, the publisher stressed, an author selling 3,000 is really just paying for themselves. To be contributing to the operations of the press, they’d need to sell over 5,000.

An author (right) begging an editor (left) for a second chance

What Do Acclaimed, Buzzed-About Literary Books Sell?

So let’s say you jump through the hurdles of writing a book, getting an agent, and selling it to a respected press, AND you become one of the handful of books that is well-reviewed in big outlets and buzzed about in the literary world. How many books will you sell?

Most people would be surprised at the drastic range of book sales even among the books that people are buzzing about. If you took the ten literary fiction books that all the critics, Twitter literati, and well-read friends are discussing, their BookScan numbers might range from a couple thousand to 100k. Last year, NPR looked at the book sales of the Pulitzer Prize finalists and found the books ranged from under 3,000 to low six figures.

If you took the ten literary fiction books that all the critics, Twitter literati, and well-read friends are discussing, their BookScan numbers might range from a couple thousand to 100k.

That’s a small sample though, so I went through the BookScan numbers for every fiction book listed on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014. I used 2014 instead of 2015 to make sure each book had at least 12 months of sales. No list is perfect, but the NYT list includes story collections and small press books alongside the big name literary authors and award contenders. 2014’s list includes names like Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Marlon James, and David Mitchell as well as small press debuts by Nell Zink and Eimear McBride. It’s a good sampling of the “books that people are talking about” in the literary world.

The BookScan sales of those books literally ranged from 1,000 to 1.5 million, with an average (mean) of just over 75,000 copies sold per book. That 75k number is pretty skewed by the existence of Anthony Doerr’s runaway literary hit, All the Light We Cannot See, which sold over 1.5 millions of copies. (The next highest book was about 270,000.) If we remove the best and worst selling books on the list, we get a mean of 46,550 copies and a median of 25,000 copies.

(Once again, I’ll remind you that these are BookScan numbers for books published in 2014. The actual sales totals will be moderately to significantly higher depending on the book, and all of these books should continue to sell copies over the years.)

A photo of Stephen King reading this article

What If You Are a Finalist for a Major Award?

Let’s say you really hit the jackpot and are a finalist for the Pulitzer, what kind of sales would you get? Again, the range is huge. I looked up five years of nominees (from 2011 to 2015) and the range was 5,600 to over 1.5 million (yes, All the Light We Cannot See again). The mean was 250,100 and the median was 72,300. For the National Book Award, the mean was 178,600 and the median was 91,318

For comparison sake, I checked the finalists for science fiction’s prestigious Nebula awards. They ranged from 2,100 to 387,900 with a mean of 35,600 and a median of 12,300. That’s surprisingly less than the major literary awards, despite the frequently heard claim that genre fiction is more popular than literary fiction. (Although keep in mind that science fiction ebooks typically sell better as a percentage of total sales than literary fiction ebooks do.)

A famous author being awarded the National Book Award

What Does a #1 Bestseller Sell?

On average, a lot more. I checked the BookScan sales for all the books that hit the #1 spot on the New York Times list in 2014 and the mean sales were 737,000 with a median of 303,000. The top selling book was, as you can probably guess, 50 Shades of Grey at nearly 8 million. But the lowest was only 62,700, meaning more than 50% of NBA or Pulitzer finalists sold better than it. In fact, a whole lot of the 2014 literary award finalists sold better than bottom 2014 best sellers. If that’s confusing, remember that this is the list of books that were the best selling book in the country for one week, not for the whole year. Sales of commercial fiction books are often far more concentrated than the sales of popular literary fiction books, the latter of which can have very long tails.

Once again, I want to stress that these totals are perhaps 75% of book sales and do not include ebook or audiobook sales.

What About Short Story Collections? No One Buys Those, Right?

It’s a truism in the literary world that no one buys short story collections, and that even when you sell a collection a publisher will only buy it so that your future novel will do better. I myself have always believed this to be honest, even though I wrote and published a short story collection. However, looking at the data it actually seems that while fewer story collections sell, the ones that do can sell almost as well as novels. The seven story collections on the NYT 2014 list had a median of 23,000 BookScan sales… only 2k less than the median novel. When I expanded the data to include short story collections from the 2013 and 2012 list, the average sales were 53k and a median of 22.5k.

So All the Publishers that Rejected My Collection Are Fools!

Well, no. Those are mostly collections by buzzed about debut authors or established older writers. As I said, fewer story collections sell (although fewer are also published) and the ones that don’t sell fail harder than novels. And there’s a cap on story collections. No story collection is going to sell millions of copies like the biggest novels. All of the authors whose collections I counted in the last section sold better as novelists if they had novels out. Since big publishers survive on the few break-out books, it makes more business sense to bet on novels or push authors to write novels instead of stories. Whether that’s good for the culture or the art of literature is another question…

Still, it was heartening for me, as a lover of short stories, to see that collections from authors like Junot Diaz, Alice Munro, and George Saunders can BookScan over 100k, and a collection by someone like Stephen King can reach a million. (In fact, having looked at a lot of sales data I’m convinced Stephen King is the best-selling living short story author in America and probably the world). More importantly, great short story authors like Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, and so on will BookScan between 10 and 50k… which is comfortably in the range of what acclaimed literary novels sell.

How Does Genre Fiction Compare?

I’ve talked before about how the idea that literary fiction is a tiny niche market and that the various genres sell more is largely a myth. “Commercial fiction” — which is not a synonym for genre — can sell a lot more, especially when we are talking brand name like John Grisham, James Patterson, or Danielle Steel. YA fiction is also having a much-discussed boom these days. But for most writers of adult science fiction, romance, fantasy, and the like, the numbers will be roughly what I’ve listed in this article.

How Does Non-Fiction Compare?

Non-fiction is an insanely huge category that encompasses everything from craft books and joke books to travel guides and memoirs. While there is some variation in average sales between different types of novels, non-fiction sales are entirely dependent on which of the 1,000 types of non-fiction books you are talking about. I’m afraid I just can’t help there, except to say that what you might think of as literary non-fiction — lyric essay collections, memoirs, etc. — will be roughly similar to the numbers listed here.

What About Self-Publishing?

Like non-fiction, self-published books vary so wildly that they can’t really be generalized. If you publish your book through an established press, you can most likely guarantee a certain level of professionalism, distribution, and hopefully coverage for your book. Self-publishing, on the other hand, contains both professional full-time authors who spend time and money marketing their books as well as people who just think it would be fun to put an ebook up on Amazon and never spend any time marketing. Overall, self-published books sell far far less (in part because the majority of the market is still print, and it’s near impossible for self-published print books to get a foothold in stores), but of course their cut of each sale is much higher.

Which Sells More: Hardcover, Paperback, or Ebook?

Another surprising (to me at least) fact from the data I looked at is that books quite often sell the same amount in hardcover and paperback editions. If a book truly takes off, the paperback sales will eclipse the hardcover many times over. But for most books that are published in hardcover first, the paperback sales will be close to the same. Perhaps that’s a feature of the ebook era where readers who prioritize an affordable option will often choose the ebook?

As for ebooks themselves, the sales aren’t available publicly anywhere so it is impossible to say. According to a recent survey, ebooks account for about 20% of the total book market. From talking to publishers and authors, it seems ebook sales are erratic and — as a percentage of overall sales — vary wildly from book to book, publisher to publisher, and genre to genre. To add even more confusion, ebook prices fluctuate a lot more than paperback or hardcover. It is simply hard to pin down. For most traditionally published books, the percentage of sales that are ebook instead of print is somewhere between 10% and 50%.

A writer debating writing working on a novel or going back to dental school

So What Does All This Meeeaaan, Man?

I often hear that fiction is basically just an irrelevant niche and no one reads books at all. Now that we’ve looked at the numbers, well… I guess it depends on your point of view. If the average well-distributed novel is BookScanning only 10,000 copies, that seems pretty niche. Then again, there are plenty of industries where sales of 10k per product would be respectable. And we have to remember that the actual number of sales might be 20,000, and then maybe 30,000 people have read the book since plenty of people use libraries, pirate, or borrow books from friends. Every year, dozens of new books sell 100k copies on BookScan, and a couple sell a million. A recent Author Earnings report suggested maybe 4,600 writers earn 50k a year off of book sales alone. Not so shabby, maybe, until you realize that about that many MFA students graduate each year. Then again, that’s just looking at book sales, and not money made from freelance writing, speaking engagements, teaching classes, or other author income streams. And honestly, even getting a thousand strangers to read something you poured your heart and soul is pretty okay. Bottom line; who knows what any of this means, but at the very least if you are a newly published or aspiring author you now know the world you’re going into.

As for me, I’m going to get back to work on a weird novel that will never sell, but, hell, is damn fun to write.

There Will Be Tokens (But It’s Not That Kind of Arcade)

Posted on June 30, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

There is a strange assertion going around the news dealing with the Orlando, Florida hate crime that took place at Pulse, a gay nightclub, in the early morning of June 12, during the club’s Latin night line. This assertion is repeated over and over again by various lawmakers and pundits, and paraphrased, it seems to be something like this: the victims weren’t just gay, they were Americans. A friend of mine wondered aloud on Facebook a few days ago how long it would be before us “gays,” meaning the LGBTQ community at large, would be demoted from the grand AMERICANS (which, by the way, not all of the victims were — there were several who were in the country illegally and the US oh-so-kindly agreed to give their families a whole week in our glorified country in order to attend to the wonderful task of funeral planning and body transporting) to being just “gays” again.

In that spirit, and directly after the massacre, I had the great pleasure of reading Arcade, by Drew Nellins Smith, a book that is both incredibly American and incredibly gay, and I’m pretty sure the latter trumps the former in this case when describing quality. It is also a book that very clearly sees and discusses the feeling of otherness that’s instilled in people questioning their sexuality and acting upon any deviant desires — that is, desires that aren’t het and cis.

Arcade, according to an interview with Smith in the LA Times, had some interest from one of the major publishers, but even after an editor told him to take out all the sex, the book still didn’t get out of the acquisitions process and was eventually turned down. When Olivia Smith — no relation to the author — editor at the excellent Unnamed Press, took on the book, her first editorial request was that the author put all the sex back in. And thank goodness, because without it, Arcade wouldn’t be what it is: a landscape of several months in which the importance of seemingly gratuitous sex scenes and the obsessions of a lovelorn man come together and are made equal, neither more important than the other.

[A] book that very clearly sees and discusses the feeling of otherness that’s instilled in people questioning their sexuality

The novel’s plot is not what the novel is really about, but in brief, it follows an unnamed narrator who occasionally goes by the false name Sam, as he very slowly overcomes an unhealthy obsession with “the cop” he was involved in (also never named) and the cop’s new boyfriend, “the kid,” who is 19, almost ten years younger than the narrator, and has replaced the narrator in the cop’s affections. It also follows the narrator’s discovery of a hookup spot whose front is an adult video store on the outskirts of the Texas town he lives in. And, finally, it follows his friendship with a gay man named Malcolm with whom he talks regularly and jerks off with.

The sex in the novel is nothing short of splendiferous — deserving of the word in that it is varied, fascinatingly intimate at times and completely detached at others, and unflinching to the point where some readers may be uncomfortable. Personally, I found it rather steamy. The arcade, which is really a series of booths in two corridors — one smoking and one non-smoking, very civilized — in which mostly men come together in various configurations and according to various codes is where the narrator spends much of the book. Though not meant as a manifesto by which to force readers to look at queer sex close up and accept it without flinching, it does have that unintentional side effect of presenting sex as both neurotic, which it is for many of us, and completely normal, as it is for many of the characters grazing at the narrator’s body and its outskirts (because the narrator doesn’t always participate directly but often watches from the corner).

There is something essentially satisfying about passages in books that present, intentionally or not, a metaphor for the novel as a whole. About halfway through Arcade there is one such:

One of the great gifts of the arcade was the way it put us all on the same level. Of course I could tell which men were rich or poor or middle class, but it didn’t matter out there. After the three dollar threshold, we were all the same. I went to the arcade when I was flush with cash, and at other times when I was so hard up for money I debated whether or not I could really drop a fiver on the venture. It didn’t change anything. It didn’t change my luck. It was the first and only level playing field I’d ever been on. I liked the idea that most of us never would have met or interacted if it hadn’t been for that place, divided as we were by our jobs and incomes.

This closes a chapter in which the narrator presents the arcade as incredibly different from his workplace (he’s a clerk at a motel, down on his luck after a career in real estate that ended with the crash of the housing market), and the next chapter begins with what struck me as a laughably apt continuation of this metaphor: “I drove to the cop’s house almost an hour away.” That is, chapters describing sex, chapters describing the narrator’s job, chapters describing his philosophy of the arcade, and chapters describing his outright obsession with his former lover — they are all presented as an equal playing field, none made more particularly important than others, even if we, as a society, would like to put some sort of claim on the importance of the narrator’s fascination with sex with other men, still a taboo subject in many parts of our society (and the novel is set, remember, in Texas, a red state with blue spots, but a red one nonetheless). The novel’s structure simply doesn’t allow that.

Another remarkable thing about Arcade is its refusal to be a coming-out novel. From its start, it’s clear that the narrator is interested in sex and romance with men, though at first he tries to explain to himself that it is just about the cop. He uses the philosophy of “I’m not into men, I’m into one man.” His actions belie this, of course, and he describes in passing how his coming out happened accidentally as he began to fall apart and cry obsessively about the cop whenever he was with friends or family. But that’s not what the novel is about; the narrator’s coming out is a byproduct of his personal realization that he’s gay, and even that isn’t what the novel is about. It almost doesn’t matter, except that it matters hugely because of the culture of the arcade (that of LGBTQ spaces historically occupied by gay men, spaces like bathhouses and other cruising spots) that the narrator becomes embroiled in and as obsessed with as he is with the cop.

Yet even so, it’s impossible to wrap the novel in any sort of simple “this is what it is about” narrative. As it’s a book in which both almost nothing and a great deal happens — both externally and internally for the narrator — it defies the notion of how we think of many novels. Still, there is a journey of sorts, and it is one that is worth following from its bitterly beautiful start to its bitterly wonderful end. The narrator’s frantic obsessiveness may be uncomfortable or overly familiar to readers depending on the state of each individual’s anxiety levels, but what is almost guaranteed is that the bafflement of the narrator’s actions, his difficulty in understanding himself even as he parses and analyzes every tiny thing he does, will be discomfiting because we’ve all been confused and lost and exactly where we’re supposed to be at one point or another.

Julia Franks Brings Appalachia to the Page

Posted on June 30, 2016August 21, 2024 by 007595

Set in a small Appalachian village in 1939, Julia Franks’ debut Novel Over the Plain Houses (Hub City, 2016) tells the story of preacher Brodis Lambey and his wife Irenie, who struggle with the forces of modernization that arrive unbidden into their sheltered mountain community and drive a wedge into their marriage. Dealing with such issues as the government’s role in the lives of individuals, the responsibility of humans toward the environment, and the place of women within their communities, the book feels at times remarkably contemporary. With careful attention given to the Appalachian landscape and an intimate feel for the tensions of society played out within a single family, the novel is a striking portrait of a place in transition, told by a gifted storyteller. I sat down with Julia recently in Atlanta to discuss her love of the outdoors, her literary influences, and her role as an educator.

Bronwyn Averett: The first thing I noticed about your novel was its incredibly vivid portrayal of the Appalachian landscape. Can you talk about your background a little, and what leads you to be so familiar with the mountains?

Julia Franks: I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up. And my parents are both very big outdoors people. So my dad was a Vietnam vet. Some vets come back and they go “Oh I never want to go camping again ever in my whole life.” And others, they want to be outside, you know, they want to be in the woods. My dad was the second kind, and my mom was pretty outdoorsy too. We just spent a lot of time in the woods. So other people would be going to Walt Disney World for their vacations and we would be going backpacking. You don’t really realize it’s weird until about middle school. But I was very comfortable going outside from a very young age.

Averett: Irenie is very much the figure of the Appalachian woman. She knows the woods so well she can walk them in the middle of the night. She knows how to go out and collect plants that have medicinal uses. She knows how to preserve all the food she needs. When I read her I was reminded of these Tennessee mountain women who are sort of legendary on my Dad’s side of the family. Was Irenie based on any women in your family, or anyone you know?

Franks: She is based on a person I never met. In 2008, my husband and I — I was married at the time — we bought a property in Western North Carolina, on the backside of Tennessee. And it’s a very long story but it was one of these homesteads that had been there since the middle of the 19th century. And the husband had died and the wife had lived there basically until her grandkids had taken her to a facility. And they never cleaned out the house.

So we get to this house that’s built in 1865 and it’s full of stuff. She collected stuff and she would save things in jars and she would label them. The house was full of these containers with these labels, and she saved weird things like teeth and fingernails. I never met her. But if you’re a novelist and somebody leaves you a house full of stuff that’s labelled, and boxes of letters and diaries, you’re gonna ask yourself: what were these people like? What were their lives like? So I guess you could say Irenie is based on how I imagined this woman. And her husband was a circuit preacher. They were both eccentric, and people told us a lot of stories about them. In fact, the story of the hawk is a true story. I wish it weren’t, but it is.

Averett: This is the moment in the book where Brodis traps a hawk because it is killing their chickens. And Irenie protests, saying that no one in her family has resorted to that kind of violence in the past. Between them, there seem to be conflicting ideas of how to run the land. Brodis wants to control it, and Irenie wants to live with it. Are these different ideas of stewardship?

Franks: Brodis has a very Old Testament view. He uses the word “shepherd” — that it’s his job, to shepherd his family and shepherd the land, and he has his way of doing it. And it’s not out of the question if you’re a farmer to kill hawks, to kill foxes. But really Irenie is the exception, saying that she doesn’t want to kill these predators, who are preying on their livelihood. If you take a step back, you can see where Brodis is coming from. It’s just that even he questions if that’s the right way to do things.

Averett: The conflict here is also indicative of Irenie being more connected to the land than Brodis. And it’s partly from her familiarity with the land that he starts to think she is a witch. Where did that come from?

Franks: I don’t know where the witch idea came from. It was very early part of the story. If I had to guess, I think it just comes from being a woman in this culture. This is what we do. When women don’t behave the way we want, we demonize them. Look at the upcoming election. There’s a certain demonizing that can happen when you’re strong. We might not call a woman a witch, but we find other ways to demonize her. If you’re fearless, you’re demonized. It’s a way of making you not as human. It’s a kind of marginalization.

When women don’t behave the way we want, we demonize them.

Also, Irenie is doing things she wants to keep from her husband. She has her own interior life that she keeps from him, which is the real thing that he senses, that she has this life that she has not shared with him. So Irenie is ascribed these powers that she doesn’t have. She’s just struggling with these really basic things, like how not to have a baby.

Averett: And that’s something that she finds help with through her friendship with the USDA agent. Why did you choose to focus on the story of a figure from the government who comes in and tries to modernize this “backwards” village?

Franks: It was a thing that happened in that area of the country. There were a lot of government agencies and charity agencies and church groups that came in and wanted to help, with good intentions, that sometimes went awry. The traditional way of farming was sustainable, in the sense that you’re growing everything you eat, and most of the things you use. So barely sustainable, subsistence farming. But it worked, and it was a model that had some advantages. And when the Depression came along, those people who were growing everything they ate were not that effected. They were already poor, and they weren’t as effected by the outside economy, because they weren’t interacting with the outside economy.

Averett: Did these conflicts, especially the distrust of the government, feel contemporary to you when you were writing?

Franks: We’re in this moment right now, where angry, rural, white men are in the spotlight. When I wrote this they were not. But now it does feel very contemporary. But Brodis does have reason to be angry. His wife left him and his economic livelihood is lost. And this profession that he used to love he no longer has access to. But what do you do with that anger? And this is the question that feels relevant right now — what do you do with this anger and frustration?

Averett: There is a certain timelessness to the theme of anger caused by a changing world. It’s something that all writers deal with in different ways, but it does strike me as something that Southern writers have been particularly attentive to. Were you influenced by certain voices as you began writing?

Franks: Well, Flannery O’Connor is a pretty clear influence. And Faulkner and McCarthy. And you can almost put Martin Luther King in the same pocket as them, in terms of syntax. They all use a lot of King Jamesian syntax. And then I have to say Charles Frazier, because he’s a personal favorite. His constructed linguistic world is wonderful.

Averett: Do you situate yourself in a particular Southern tradition? The South is composed of so many different communities, and there are so many different styles and concerns in the literature. Do you find yourself somewhere specific in all of that?

Franks: Now I’m being called an Appalachian writer. And my aunt is actually Mary Lee Settle — an Appalachian writer who won the National Book Award, which I’m hoping is a gene that can be passed down! So in terms of my roots, that’s the area I most identify with in the South, even though I live in Atlanta.

Overlooked Appalachian Lit: Six Contemporary Southern Books Everyone Should Read

Averett: Does living in Atlanta at all influence the kinds of things that you think about and want to write about?

Franks: Yes, just because this is a lot more racially diverse than Appalachia. And that reminds me of another Southern writer I admire: Zora Neale Hurston. Everyone got so irritated by what she did with dialogue. But if you look at a huge percentage of Southern literature, white people speak in non-dialect, and black people speak in dialect, these ways that have been phonetically modified. White people drop their g’s. And white people don’t pronounce the “t” in Atlanta. But we never see it rendered phonetically on the page if the person is white. And I’ve seen it that way in history books too! It’s incredibly patronizing. So even though people didn’t like how Hurston rendered dialogue, at least it was even-handed.

Averett: I’m sure you find a lot of opportunity to discuss these kinds of things in the classroom. Would you mind saying a bit a bit about how you see your role as a teacher?

Franks: Some people teach because they want to write, but I’m actually very much an educator. One of the things I’m working on is to change the way we teach literature in secondary schools. I think what needs to happen is that kids need to have more choice. This is a bit of a crusade for me. I started a web-based business, Loose Canon, which is a resource for teachers to manage free choice in the classroom.

When you give them choice, the difference is crazy. I had all these seniors, a bunch of boys, and I could tell they weren’t reading. So I said at the beginning of the second semester: you can either read the books here on the syllabus, or you can read twice as many books that you choose. Of fifty kids, every single one of them chose to read twice as many books. And yeah, some of the books were lightweight, but a bunch of these boys got on a Cormac McCarthy tear. And really they’re these Cormac McCarthy experts now!

Averett: So how is that different than what the “powers that be” in education want for students and reading? What do you want?

Franks: They want kids to be reading books that are too hard. Fewer books that are harder. But we need volume. We need inundation. We need a firehose of books. And some of them will be powerful and some of them will be part of the water.

Averett: Here’s the hard question for you though. It’s obvious for people like us who love books, but for much of the world it isn’t. Why is it so important that young people read? Why shouldn’t they take more math classes?

Franks: To paraphrase Tim O’Brien, when you’re reading literature, it’s the only time you’re in somebody else’s head. It’s the only time you’re going to be inside the head of a 16-year-old cowboy. It’s the only time you’re going to be inside the head of a soldier in Vietnam. Narrative will always live on in these other forms, movies and video games. But nothing is like reading. People who read literary fiction have a different level of empathy.

Here’s How Twitter Reacted to Cormac McCarthy’s Death Hoax

Posted on June 29, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

Cormac McCarthy Is Dead. Long Live Cormac McCarthy

Yesterday, a fake Twitter account designed to look like Knopf (@aknopfnews) announced that Cormac McCarthy had died at age 81 from a stroke. USA Today quickly picked up on the news and retweeted it, leading to a frenzy of concern that the author of novels like The Road and No Country For Old Men had passed away.

It was soon revealed that the news was a hoax by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti. Debenedetti has created fake accounts for authors in the past (DeLillo, Marquez, Munro) but Twitter seemed to enjoy the idea that McCarthy, he of guns, blood, and apocalypse, had survived death (or maybe as McCarthy would put it, survived being buried alive.)

Cormac McCarthy is alive and well and still doesn't care about Twitter.

— @penguinrandom

Cormac McCarthy isn't dead, but his work will continue to make you feel dead inside

— @fivefifths

My new band is called Cormac McCarthy Is Dead. We have one drummer & three guys who play the gun.

— @kashanacauley

Cormac McCarthy is alive and well and thinking of ways to describe the sunset that make it sound like it murdered a troubled man.

— @mhbertino

I expect Cormac McCarthy to bury us all. I mean that literally.

— @ditzkoff

Or perhaps Debenedetti is the hoax, and something else is going on…

joyce carol oates reported the fake death of cormac mccarthy so quickly you have to wonder what's going on under the surface there

— @rachsyme

Neil Gaiman’s New Book Will Be a Novelistic Retelling of the Norse Myths

Posted on June 29, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

The gods of Asgard are coming, courtesy of the author of Coraline

8Author Neil Gaiman, The Nine Worlds of Norse Mythology

Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline and The Sandman series of graphic novels, has written a novelistic retelling of the Norse myths to be published by W.W. Norton in February. Gaiman has been interested in Norse mythology since he was a child and their influence is stamped on much of his writing, from the appearance of the Loki and Odin in his children’s book Odd and the Frost Giants to his fantasy novel American Gods.

The new book, Norse Mythology, will begin with the genesis of the nine worlds and continue through the tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, and the rest of the gods on Asgard.

Gaiman told his publisher, “To get the opportunity to retell the myths and poems we have inherited from the Norse was almost too good to be true. I hope the scholarship is good, but much more than that, I hope that I have retold stories that read like the real thing: sometimes profound, sometimes funny, sometimes heroic, sometimes dark, and always inevitable.”

INFOGRAPHIC: 37 Fictional Drugs and Substances

Posted on June 29, 2016March 22, 2019 by 007595

10 Novels about the Struggle for Revolution around the World

Posted on June 29, 2016January 21, 2022 by 007595

The Fourth of July is just a few days away. What better weekend to do some revolutionary reading? There are thousands of books about the American Revolution you could pick up on your way to the beach or to that backyard cookout, from schooldays favorite Johnny Tremain to David McCullough’s monumental 1776. But the American colonists were hardly the first, or the last group of rebels to band together to fight for their independence.

This year, why not look abroad for your Independence Day fix?

The desire for independence seems to unite cultures around the globe. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines independence as the time when a country or region gains political freedom from outside control. Dictionary definitions can only go so far in the best of times, and here it falls far short of encompassing all that independence means. Fortunately, there is literature.

The novels on this list encompass the many aspects of the struggle for independence: the spark of freedom, the violence (often terrible), the loss of life, the stress of self-realization and the questions of identity that follow.

Revolution isn’t pretty, but the stories that emerge are always compelling.

The Partition of India and Pakistan: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

It’s hard not to love the set-up for Rushdie’s Booker’s-prize winning novel: 1,001 babies are born at the stroke of midnight on the eve of India’s independence from Britain, each imbued with special powers. The book follows one baby in particular, Saleem Sinai, as he grows up and his family migrates around the subcontinent. Using a blend of allegory, magical realism, and historical fiction, Rushdie intertwines Salem’s growing pains with the growing pains of a new nation, and a country newly divided.

Irish War of Independence: A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

Like Ireland herself at the turn of the century, Henry Smart is born without status or privilege. Surviving the slums of Dublin with an alcoholic teenage mother and a one-legged, whore-house bouncer of a father prepares Henry to fight, and fight he does. Henry becomes a soldier and hit man for the (real life) leader of the Irish Citizens Army, Michael Collins. What makes Doyle’s novel such an interesting read is his ear for voices and setting. Lest you forget, the Irish revolution didn’t take place in a vacuum, it took place on the rowdy, rumbling streets of Dublin.

South African Apartheid: Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Set in the mid 1970s, Gordimer’s novel follows Rosa, a white Afrikaner whose parents are anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Rosa’s parents are imprisoned for wanting to overthrow the South African government and, after they die there, Rosa is left to deal with their legacy. Gordimer’s book, which was banned in South Africa, asks some difficult questions about the fractured struggle for independence and how a multiracial society could come together after Apartheid fell.

The Iranian Revolution: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi’s story of growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution makes for a powerful graphic novel. The revolution occured in 1980, when Satrapi was six, and she details how her life changed under Islamic law, from wearing a veil to a sudden segregation from the boys at her school. Satrapi’s memoir reminds us that revolutions bring change, whether its welcomed or not.

The Mexican Revolution: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when President Porfirio Díaz was ousted from power. Fuente’s dreamlike novel begins years later, when ruthless ex-soldier and businessman Artemio Cruz is on his deathbed. The novel is a series of flashbacks recalling Cruz’s life and how he capitalized on the time of war to kill, blackmail, and bribe his way to power.

The October Revolution of Russia: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

This epic novel traces Dr. Yury Zhivago from his childhood in czarist Russia through the October revolution and the Russian Civil War, ending during Stalin’s regime in World War Two. As the revolution unfolds, it becomes clear to Zhivago that there’s more than one way to be a dangerous citizen: through violence, or by becoming a stooge of the revolution. It’s a sad revelation that after fighting for independence from the Czar, independent thought is crushed in the name of Mother Russia.

The American War in Vietnam: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In English-language literature and film, the story of the Vietnam War has mostly been told though the eyes of Americans. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us the view from the other side, namely a Vietnamese army captain who’s living in the US as a spy. This is a story of a war for independence; Vietnam had just freed itself from the shackles of French imperialism when it came under the American sphere of influence. But for the captain, as for most Vietnamese, there is an added layer of misery, because as North fought South, it was a civil war as well.

The Cultural Revolution of China: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

This novel by Dai Sijie takes on a different kind of war of independence. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, two teenage boys are sent from their home in Chengdu to a mountain village to be “re-educated.” During their time in the village, they meet the “Little Seamstress” and all three become romantically involved. Love triangle aside, this novel is motivated by the boys’ relentless quest for the art and culture they’ve been forced to abandon. Mao’s forbidden music, literature, and films are a defining part of the boys’ identities and they risk everything to keep them.

The Egyptian Revolution: City of Love and Ashes by Yusuf Idris

Yusuf Idris set his award-winning novel in a specific time and place: Cairo, January 1952. The proceeding months saw the demise of the Egyptain monarchy under King Farouk, a puppet government controlled by the British. City of Love and Ashes is the love story of two young rebels, Hamza and Fawziya, as they fight for Egypt’s freedom and grapple with the question of how to shape a post-colonial identity.

The French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most famous novels about the French Revolution (and has one of the most quotable opening lines). The novel jumps back and forth between London and Paris and a wide cast of characters, first exposing the brutal life of French peasants — and the British poor — in the years before the Revolution. As the French Revolution unfolds, the violence, unwarranted imprisonment, and general misery ramps up. The final scenes point to a hopeful future for France, but as with most revolutions, Dickens underscores that the cost to human life is high.

Three Stories by Zakaria Tamer

Posted on June 29, 2016March 21, 2019 by 007595

Translated by Maia Tabet
Recommended by The Common

HASSAN AL-MAZAZ AL-SHAGHOURI’S FINAL VICTORY

HASSAN AL-MAZAZ AL-SHAGHOURI HAD NEVER COMMITTED an ordinary, everyday crime: he hadn’t killed or robbed anyone, had never raped a girl, had not joined a party — either pro- or anti-government — and not once had he set foot in a police station, jail, or court of law. He did not smoke in places where smoking was banned, could not name the current president if asked, and would have had no use for the sword of Khalid Bin al-Walid himself, other than to peel an orange or cut open a watermelon. Nevertheless, the vigilant security authorities that knew the unknowable saw fit to detain him and jail him for nine years without charge until, at the start of his tenth year in detention, he was led into a court of law to appear before a judge. Head lowered, he stood to attention, stealing sideways glances at the judge, who sat engrossed in a book about Italian pizza while repeatedly blowing her nose into white paper tissues. Hassan was stunned: wasn’t she his old neighbor? The one who had been notorious for her love of money and her lust for young men, for the easy credit terms she offered, and for her devotion to numerous husbands and lovers? He was about to ask her, and as he parted his lips and licked them with the tip of his tongue before speaking, a guard poked him with the butt of his rifle, silencing him, and instructing him to speak only when spoken to. Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri looked at the stern-faced guard and suddenly asked him in a cheerful but quiet voice, “Your face is familiar. Weren’t we schoolmates at Muawiyah? You’re the guy who specialized in stealing students’ lunches from their bags, aren’t you?” The guard had to suppress a smile to keep a straight, and stern, face. “And I remember you,” he said. “Weren’t you the one who specialized in stealing people’s shoes from mosques?”

Pointing at her, Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri was on the verge of saying something about the judge, but the guard stopped him. “Shush. The world has changed,” he said. “It’s different now: those once below are now above you.”

The judge closed her book and readied herself to speak. A fearful silence reigned over the room as she addressed Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri. In a stern voice, she told him that he was being released immediately and that, because he had been found undeserving of it, his citizenship had been withdrawn. He was therefore no longer entitled to remain in any of the country’s prisons. Dumbfounded, Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri told the judge that God’s earth was vast and that he and his wife and children would go someplace else as soon as he was able to sell his house. The judge informed him that the house no longer belonged to him following its sale at auction by the tax revenue authority to collect on unpaid taxes and the resulting fines. Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri replied with levity that the house was old, it was unbearably depressing, it had witnessed the birth and death of his father and four other of his ancestors, and the thought of dying there was not in the least attractive to him, whereupon the judge notified him that his wife was no longer his legally wedded spouse and that divorce proceedings had been initiated shortly after his arrest, to which news Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri retorted that were he a woman he would have ululated with joy, his wife having lost whatever beauty she once possessed and become a coarse-tongued gossip that he long ago would have divorced had it not been for the children. The judge now informed him that his small children too were no longer his, that they had been farmed out years ago to childless women who wanted to adopt them. That was the right thing to do, Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri told the judge, as his children were rowdy and quarrelsome and his heart had grown tired of filling the bottomless pits they had for bellies. His heart was also no longer his, the judge further informed him, since he had donated it for an organ transplant, to which Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri replied, “Good riddance to that which brought little besides pain and suffering,” and then begged the judge to also consider the donation of his stomach. His offer was accepted forthwith. The judge now ordered him to lie on the ground and for a pillow to be placed under his head, and as soon as those orders were carried out, both his guards and hers worked together on extracting his stomach, his heart, his kidneys, and his liver, following which, to the judge’s great surprise, a bloodied Hassan al-Mazaz al-Shaghouri stood up and beseeched her to let him go, that he might reach the border before nightfall. Although he appeared to be living, the judge pronounced him dead, and she refused his request as the guards carried him away and laid him down to rest inside a narrow hole in the ground, which they covered with cement while he carried on extolling the compassion of his neighbor, the judge, who by now appeared to have forgotten the deportation order she had issued and allowed him to remain within the bowels of the earth, enjoying a safe and peaceful life.

TABOO

AMINAH WATCHED HER elderly father getting ready to leave the house. “Who am I?” she asked him, smiling.

His response was instantaneous even though the question had surprised him. “Why, you’re my daughter! Who else might you be?”

“OK, what’s my name?”

“What kind of question is that? You think I’ve forgotten your name?”

“Never mind — indulge me.”

“Your name is Aminah.”

“And what day is it: Monday or Tuesday?”

“Today is Friday.”

“And where are you going?”

“I’m rushing off to the mosque for noon prayers… You know that good deeds cancel out bad ones, and our good deeds are all too few, as you are well aware!”

“And what are you doing afterward?”

“I will go and visit your late mother’s grave, may she rest in peace.”

“But it’s quite a ways from the mosque to the cemetery.”

“I’ll take a taxi.”

“Will you sit there and commune with her for hours?”

“Good heavens, I’m not so crazy as to start talking to the dead.”

“How long will you stay at the cemetery?”

“Just long enough to go in, read the fatiha, and come out again.”

“How will you leave the cemetery?”

“I will come out of the cemetery by the gate I used going in. Once on the street, I will hail a cab and go to your sister’s. There, I will spend time with her rambunctious children and cajole that husband of hers who’s always complain- ing that we don’t visit enough.”

“And how will you get home?”

“Your sister will call me a cab.”

The father chuckled, adding, “Look at me — I’m fit as a fiddle. There’s noth- ing to worry about. I’m sound of mind, and both my health and memory are just fine!”

Aminah thought this over in silence, smiling to herself, and then said, “So you’re basically saying that you’ll be gone three or four hours. How can you bear to leave me all alone that long in this big house?”

The old man chuckled and suggested she watch television or sleep. Aminah stretched lazily and declared that sleep was indeed the best thing.

She saw her father to the door and warned him to be careful crossing the street. He reminded her caustically that he wasn’t a small child. He promised to stick to safe routes where there were no crazy drivers and hurried off. Once outside, he slowly made his way toward the nearby mosque and entered, head bowed reverently, noting all the male worshippers lined up behind the imam. To stand right behind the imam was to ensure that the rewards and blessings of prayer were greatly magnified, and the old man therefore tried making his way to the front row, but he was pushed to the back by the shoving and jostling of arms and shoulders. This upset him, as he considered the back rows fit only for new congregants and not for long-standing ones like himself. He left the mosque muttering angrily, “It is He Who made you inheritors of the earth, and elevated some of you above others in degree in order to test you in what He bestowed upon you.” 1

No sooner had he taken a few steps toward the cemetery than he suddenly felt weak all over. Now, he no longer cared about any of the things he had meant to do and just wanted to get home. He walked back slowly, moaning under his breath, and beseeching the Almighty to let him die in his own bed and not sprawled at the feet of passersby on the street. He was groaning by the time he reached home, and he hastened to his room, noting the unnatural silence that reigned over the house. Aminah was surely asleep.

He was flabbergasted to find her in his large bed, bareheaded and naked, grinding down on a man younger than her whom he didn’t recognize, as if she wanted to make him plead for mercy and renounce his manhood. Horrified, the old man gasped in disbelief. He looked around the room desperately, and, catching sight of a white towel, he grabbed it with trembling hands and threw it over his daughter’s bare head.

“Do you not know that hair is taboo?!” he reprimanded. “And that it may not be seen by strangers? God help you in the next world!”

The old man was gladdened to see the blood drain out of Aminah’s face and to watch her shaking at the thought of what awaited her in the afterlife — praise the Lord, girls still feared the flames of hell! But he was offended by the rude conduct of the young man, who had run off without so much as a by-your-leave and left behind his cheap underwear — as if the house he’d been in had no owners.

1. The Qur’an, Surat al-An’aam (Chp. 6), Cattle, verse 165, trans. Tarif Khalidi (Viking: New York, 2008).

EAT OF THE DELICACIES WE HAVE BESTOWED UPON YOU

IT WAS ALMOST TIME FOR LUNCH. The guests had grown tired of oohing and aahing over the properties, the streams, the lakes, the banks, the airplanes, and the beautiful women.

“You are about to behold a rare kind of sheep which you will soon be eating,” announced the master of the palace and surrounding farms, as he stood pointing with his right index finger at a giant television screen.

The guests stared at the screen, where a gaggle of beautiful young women, shapely and fair-skinned, their silky golden or jet-black hair streaming in the wind, picked flowers as they romped through a verdant garden filled with trees, cavorted in a turquoise pool, splashing one another and laughing, and finally sat around circular tables, surrendering themselves to ravenous and seemingly insatiable appetites as they devoured the finest foods. The master of the domain addressed his guests once more: “When sheep are upset or frightened, their meat is tough and leathery, and it tastes like sawdust. Our sheep enjoy only the happiest of lives, leaving their flesh succulent and juicy, so tender that it melts in the mouth and hardly requires chewing — moreover, they are all slaughtered in the prescribed, halal manner.” Turning to his eager assistant, the master added: “Yahya, please give our guests a brief summary of what is required for halal ritual slaughter.”

The assistant launched into the subject matter with alacrity, as if reading from a script. “Slaughter can be considered halal only if it meets the following requirements: the intended object must be alive at the time of slaughter and free of contagious disease; it must be led to the place of slaughter gently and without the use of force; the slaughterer must be a Muslim, who is of age, sound of mind, devout, and also skilled in his trade; before proceeding, he must invoke the name of God, intoning ‘Allahu akbar’ — ‘God is great’ — over the object of slaughter, or ‘Bismillah’ — ‘in the name of God’; the animal to be slaughtered must be positioned to face the qiblah, the direction of Mecca; the instrument of slaughter must be finely honed and made of metal, and the slaughtering cannot occur within sight of other animals; no part of the slaughtered animal may be cut away, and it may not be skinned or immersed in hot water before ascertaining that it has breathed its last and that it has bled in a manner commensurate with its size and type; further, the slaughter must be carried out manually, and the jugular veins, trachea, and esophagus must be severed.” The guests greeted the assistant’s words with audible sighs of impatience and loud yawns, prompting a chuckle from the master of the domain, who told them jokingly: “There’s also a fascinating and entertaining film of a sheep being slaughtered… Maybe you’d like to see that too, so as to be sure the meat is truly halal?”

The guests protested vehemently that it was time to eat — bellies and mouths needed satiating; this was no time for films and health education or nutritional counseling. The master of the domain led the way to the garden behind the house, where meat was grilling over charcoal embers, and the guests ate voraciously, insatiably, as he looked on, smiling, happy in the knowledge that his efforts had not been in vain, that they were recognized and appreciated. “God be praised,” he said in hushed and reverential tones. He expected that in the weeks to come, his guests would return his hospitality with banquets whose artistry would similarly delight and amaze diners.

The British in Europe: A Brexit Reading List

Posted on June 28, 2016March 14, 2019 by 007595

With the British people voting to leave the European Union, world markets in tailspin, nativism on the rise, leadership faltering, and recriminations and regret dominating the international conversation, it seems the long and fruitful relationship between Britain and the continent may be coming to an end, at least in its current form. We decided, then, to take a look at some of the literary bounty of that relationship: books by and about Brits in Europe.

Nothing seems to inspire the British quite so much as getting off the island. From the Grand Tour to the Romantics to servicemen, black marketeers and modern-day expats, the British have always enjoyed their freedom of movement across the continent, those more or less open borders and the liberation of being far away from home and its many burdensome customs.

Here’s a list of 10 books by and/or about the British in Europe. (Coming soon, a reading list from the canon of transplants to Britain…)

1. A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor,

The ultimate memoir of vagabond youth. A young Patrick Leigh Fermor sets out on foot from London to Constantinople. Along the way, he relies on the kindness of strangers, from innkeepers to barge masters to aristocrats. Fermor was quite possibly, the most interesting, charming Brit of all time.

2. Reflections on a Marine Venus

by Lawrence Durrell

One of Durrell’s many travelogues, each of them learned, engaging and evocative. After World War II, during which Durrell traveled the Mediterranean as a press attaché, he secured a posting in Rhodes, took up residence in a Turkish cemetery, and wrote this poignant account of his stay.

3. The Third Man

by Graham Greene

Yes, this isn’t Greene’s finest work (it was written as a novella in anticipation of the screenplay he was penning for Carol Reed’s great film noir), but the atmosphere — dark, lawless, ominous Vienna — is spot on, and combining the reading with the movie-viewing creates a special kind of Euro-alchemy.

4. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

Lee’s memoir recounts his busking days in London and Spain, when he lived hand to mouth in villages across the countryside, playing the violin outside cafés and sleeping in whatever inn, barn or open field would have him. When Civil War broke out in 1936, Lee returned to England, but only for a short while, as he found himself drawn back to Spain, and the fight to come.

5. A Room With a View

by E.M. Forster

Turn-of-the-century Brits mingle in the grand cities of Italy hoping to find love and hoping to one day have their love stories made into a Merchant-Ivory film featuring a young Daniel Day-Lewis. That timeless romance.

6. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

Another tale of geopolitical tension and intrigue for the Brits in Mitteleuropa. Le Carré’s breakthrough remains, a half century later, a cultural touchstone and the gold standard for espionage thrillers. This one is a cat-and-mouse, double agent story out of newly-divided Berlin. It was a time when a new European war seemed all but inevitable.

7. Murder on the Orient Express

by Agatha Christie

Here we expand (not bend) the rules slightly, but with good reason. Christie’s Hercule Poirot, once a detective with the Brussels police force, then a refugee settled in England, is one of fiction’s best-loved characters. And in perhaps his most famous mystery — Murder on the Orient Express — you’ll recall that the crime is committed at 12:37am in Vinkovci, Croatia.

8. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage

by Lord Byron

The birth of the Byronic hero, the epic poem that launched a thousand disaffected, privileged youth on their jaunts from Britain across Europe.

9. Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

Shelley’s tale of the Promenthean monster isn’t about Brits, of course, but the Shelleys famously left the homeland for the continent, and one summer, on the shores of Lake Geneva they decided, along with Lord Byron and John Polidori, to put on a contest to see who could write the best horror story…

10. In altre parole

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri considers herself American (she was raised in Rhode Island), but she was born in London, and frankly, her recent transformation is too on-the-nose not to include here. After a long residence in Italy, the award-winning novelist wrote her latest book, a memoir, in Italian. She says she finds her writing to be “more essential” and her thoughts “less inhibited” in the language she has been ardently studying for years.

My Summer of Slam: Poetry, Tom Waits, and What Stays With You

Posted on June 28, 2016January 16, 2024 by 007595

I owned an expensive suit that summer — the gift of a hopeful father — and I had a few practiced skills. I could open a matchbook and light one of the matches using only one hand, and without detaching the match in question from the pack (what you do is bend it around back with your thumb — note that you can burn your thumb this way). I could also recite big swaths of Shakespeare and improvise convincingly when I missed a line or flubbed it. That brace of talents, along with how to mix a proper stinger (two parts brandy, one part crème-de-menthe, highball glass, rocks) were about all I knew of the bigger world. I certainly knew almost nothing about the world that came to life at first light and hummed till 5 pm.

I was mistaken for a bike messenger at my first corporate interview (“Who sent you?”) and turned away with instructions to get a haircut and lose the earrings before I rescheduled. When I did land a job — in the mail room of a sleepy monolith — I found the sorting so numbing I often took a puff of marijuana at lunch and spent the next hour casing nooks where I might curl up to sleep. One afternoon it came to light that an exceptionally thin woman who worked alongside me had shined for a year as a tap dancer in New York.

I was mistaken for a bike messenger at my first corporate interview (“Who sent you?”) and turned away with instructions to get a haircut and lose the earrings before I rescheduled.

“You were a dancer in New York?” asked our boss, a shifty man who carried no bag or briefcase (“I like to travel light”).

“Oh sure, I was in shows. I danced off-Broadway.”

The copier washed us green.

“Why’d you quit? You’re still young enough.”

“Well,” her mien was blasé. “I just gave up and faced reality and got a real job. Like John did, right John?”

: : :

The basement of the Cantab Lounge in Boston was hosting the 1999 National Poetry Slam finals and it was lousy with audience. Some of the seats were filled with kids and some with ghosts who were still alive. A sly old devil with a handshake that could castrate bulls took my three dollars at the door and welcomed me as though I were a prodigal son. It was my first time there and I’d never recited a poem of my own in public. When I stood up to read the folded pages I’d brought along — some piece of surrealist nonsense with “a basket of rain” inside it — somehow the crowd stayed with me. When they clapped at the end the host said they’d like to see me back the next week. “And bring a basket of rain!” It was the doorman with the ordnance-grip. I’d found an audience.

It was my first time there and I’d never recited a poem of my own in public.

College had ended that spring, and until that night I hadn’t known there was a club around the corner. A friend from class had invited me out dancing and I’d taken philanthropic drugs and made some friends. 6’4’’, black leather and slicked hair, right side of my face obscured by a maze drawn with eye-liner in the dark, I was getting on well. I’d been kissed by a few strangers and the night was young.

I wasn’t a gifted dancer. A friend on the floor with me said, “No, not like that. Try to imagine you’re making love.” Seconds later: “Oh wait, no, don’t do that.” Later, by the bar, it came out that I’d been writing some poems, inspired then by my former teacher Bill Knott. “You’ve got to go to the Cantab,” my class friend said. “It’s practically next door. Let’s go now and come back in an hour.”

So we wandered down the steps of a dive bar filled with Cambridge locals (people who actually worked, as distinct from Harvard types) and into a room where I’d come to spend two years’ worth of Wednesday nights. Folding chairs and small Formica tables would always wait around a slightly raised black stage with a single microphone. The sign-up list would always fill up fast. Judy at the bar would always pour the well drinks strong.

That night, a woman my age — I’ll call her Vanessa — sat at a corner table with what I remember as two separate binders full of poems. They were her own poems and she and I started to flip through them and read them to each other, oblivious of the competition from the stage.

There are times when you feel attracted to a stranger simply because they’re attracted to you. That was Vanessa and me, both of us. We looked good together and people were good enough to note it. They’d tell us to get a room. But if they got a room, we decided, they wouldn’t have to watch us. Later that summer we’d go night swimming at Walden Pond, dance close at clubs, and talk about the real world not at all.

I’d only just met her — she’d just moved back to Boston from Cornell — but Vanessa made me proud when she reached the microphone that night. She looked at her notes and led us through our breathing by breathing herself, slowly. She backed away from the mic. The room settled back. She had that marvelous capacity to wave the room away and lure us into a kind of trance. How much of this was a put-on? And, in the context of performance poetry, does that question mean anything?

“Hush,” she said. The title? It seemed to be a known poem among the construction-job kids in the back rows and big-heeled barflies — they hooted. There were nods and hums. “Alright.” “Mmm.” Like some slam poets can do, she assumed authority by setting her shoulders, conjured the atmosphere of a Sunday service. We waited in attendance.

we children watch …

waiting for the marked to hum
for lips to leak and for the evening

to shadow to hover …

It wasn’t a revolutionary story and it was far from being, I’d later learn, Vanessa’s strongest work, but the manner in which she told it — the pauses, the casual leap that drops itself into sacerdotal water — allowed her to make something marvelous of it. The poem wasn’t something from the page but something from the air, a song, almost:

We knew the white folks and their kitchens

and bathrooms and broom-closets and their money.
We knew how to hold onto one another

“Hush,” she said again, and she held the hush. Slam poetry, then thoroughly derided in academic circles, is about as close as our culture comes to the kind of pre-literate half-chant of epics that Homer’s listeners would have known, or that Parry and Lord found in the Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs of the 1930s. Done well, it can have the same effect — like the best music, it makes us complicit in its progress; like the best stories, it moves quick and bright.

“And we hush.”

Applause.

: : :

“Hush your wild violet,” begins Tom Waits’ 1985 song “Hang Down Your Head.” Then: “Hush a band of gold.” I heard it nearly every day that year, and each time the story came fast: a gorgeous courtship, a marriage, but hush. He rumbles on: “Hush you’re in a story / That I heard somebody told.”

Has she been unfaithful? She has. “Tear the promise from my heart,” he whispers. There’s someone new in her life. He has to go and he’s broken about it. “Hush my love a train now …”

It’s standard ballad stuff, and you figure a ballad would be what he made of it, but he doesn’t. Instead he turns it into something that sounds like a pop song, maybe the Beatles. There’s syncopated drums, like Ringo’s in “Drive My Car.” The beat advances with a kind of lopsided rhythm. The baseline is tart and upbeat; the guitar is warm.

But because Waits is Waits, the parts don’t mesh, and therein lies the allure. A pump organ blankets the back with chords and harmonies, but from time to time it strays off-key. The lyrics resemble a Beatles song not at all. This is a song about shame: “Hang down your head for sorrow / Hang down your head for me.” The singer’s ashamed himself and yearns for the person who betrayed him to feel it too.

If anything, I dismissed the song completely when I first heard it on Rain Dogs, Waits’ masterpiece of 1985, because there was so much else there too. “Jockey Full of Bourbon” is the rocker, “Downtown Train” is the hit, and “Time” is the weeper (if you could watch Tori Amos sing the latter on Letterman right after September 11th and not choke up, then you were in a better place than the room full of people who saw it with me).

No, the first time I heard it, “Hang Down Your Head” head felt purely functional — something to transition the listener from what Waits calls a brawler to what he calls a bawler. In that capacity, it does its job, easing us into something more reflective while maintaining the drums and the electric guitar we’ve grown used to. But I didn’t see what else it did.

: : :

At the gig that succeeded my time in the mail room, I drummed out ad copy for Compaq’s high-end servers. It was regular work and I swallowed Vicodin and downloaded music from Napster to make the time pass. This until Carly Fiorina bought the company and disbanded it. Until then, for about two years, I made good money compiling booster pieces lauding the ProLiant DL380 and I did so to the sound of Rain Dogs, composing poems in my head that would sound good out loud.

And I read those poems out loud every Wednesday night. I was cocky at the Cantab, more so than I’d been before or have been since. I made friends at a heady clip. The kinds of verse they recited weren’t like the kind of verse I’d read on the page, and I liked that about them. Today, a settled snob, if I encountered that kind of poem-making, I’d call it bad poetry. But this is unhappy snobbishness and I didn’t hold it then.

Today, a settled snob, if I encountered that kind of poem-making, I’d call it bad poetry. But this is unhappy snobbishness and I didn’t hold it then.

Relying not on scansion or lexical delicacy but on the musicality of their delivery, the readers at the Cantab hummed and barreled their poems. I mentioned a church service above and I did so for a reason: slams and open mics and (some) featured guests at the Cantab felt more like such a ritual than anything I’ve experienced at a reading since — much more.

One night that February I sat between Vanessa and a woman I’ll call Ellen, a theater teacher from New York I’d dragged along. Ellen was skeptical, a mood that only deepened when it was revealed that the featured reader that night would be a towering and muscular poet named Zeus.

“Huh?” Ellen quietly scoffed. “Imagine if I started calling myself Zeus at school. Oh, here’s your professor this semester, Zeus.”

When Zeus himself appeared and it became apparent he was black (which Ellen and I are not) she waited until Vanessa had stepped out to smoke then added, “Does he realize ‘Zeus’ was the kind of thing slave masters used to call their property? It’s like what you’d name a mastiff. I just feel like … I don’t know his issues so maybe he knows and doesn’t care.”

Ellen was later described by a Wall Street friend we had in common as “a very unhappy young woman.” Probably because she rejected him. But there was something to it. She would change her identity periodically — her name, affect, milieu. There’s a book to be made about Ellen but she needs to write it. Suffice it to say I knew her in the drug-addled haze between her difficult girlhood in Appalachia and her suburbanite 40s as a mom. I loved her a little, and she loaned me good books. And we both loved Tom Waits more than we loved anything.

I loved her a little, and she loaned me good books. And we both loved Tom Waits more than we loved anything.

I don’t recall what Zeus read that night, probably the same sorts of pain and suffering every poet writes about. But his performance — his convincing, possibly authentic performance of sincerity — made Ellen bashful enough to quiet her. When Vanessa said, “That Zeus reading … I can still feel my skin tingling,” Ellen offered no retort. We made our way to my apartment in silence. Before that night I’d only seen Ellen that quiet when she was angry. But she wasn’t angry. I doubt she knew how she felt. That was me too.

: : :

On the uptown C to 81st Ellen and I sniggered over the college kid with the big grin at the end of our car. He was dressed in pointy buckled shoes with silver toes, a secondhand suit in carefully rumpled brown, and a porkpie hat. So of course we knew where he was going.

“It’s not a Tom Waits concert,” Ellen said, “it’s a Tom Waits lookalike contest.”

We thought ourselves superior out of habit but also, we reasoned, with cause. We both loved Tom Waits, and we were just as excited as the kid about the concert we were speeding toward, but we wouldn’t have imagined going so far as to dress like the guy. Was it cosplay or delusion? Surely he knew we were the only two to whom the mysteries had been revealed.

But then who had I pictured the audience would be made out of? Truckers on their final livers? Actual hobos from the ‘30s? You can sing all you want about Bowery bums — if you’re playing uptown, they can’t spring for tickets.

At the theater, we were incensed to discover that kid wasn’t the exception but the rule.

Even the old guys wore Tom costumes: fedoras and Cuban shoes and skinny ties. One especially dense example by the bar revealed himself only after a second glance to be Elvis Costello. Fellow lookalikes approached him for autographs. So this is what show business was: show, the careful re-creation of a slippery authenticity. Two or three years later the word hipster would be loaded with new carriage. So I had stepped away just in time, or just too late.

Once the show began, Tom was small onstage and he shouted through the first songs. He wore a bowler made of tiny mirrors, which I thought unbecoming. Cheering was compulsive and felt that way, as though there were Applause signs and points for the loudest. I was settling in for more disappointment when the lights dimmed and he sat at the piano for his solo set.

So this is what show business was: show, the careful re-creation of a slippery authenticity.

He began it with “Hang Down Your Head,” acoustic: Tom on upright piano and Greg Cohen on upright bass. All at once, the song opened up as it hadn’t before. I quit feeling critical of the dream, apart from it, and fell back into it. I was one with the song.

Tom only touched the keys as he sang — In pauses between verses the keys were quiet. Like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline can do, he filled every word to capacity. “Hush, my love the rain now / Hush my love was so true.” I heard the trochees at the start of the lines, the spondees at the ends. Then in the chorus, everything’s stressed: “Hang down your head for me.” I’m ashamed, it says, I’m lost. Show me I still mean something to you. It’s please and sorry in the same breath.

It’s that moment of misfortune when you’re as humbled by the wrong that’s been done you as you are incensed at your betrayer. A fight with a love where you want her to be quiet and you also want to stop time, hush the clock. The one who says hush is both the betrayed and the betrayer who strays. The one who pleads hush can’t say more.

The one who says hush is both the betrayed and the betrayer who strays. The one who pleads hush can’t say more.

The act of empathy for fellow sufferers this slowed song evoked in me began in self-pity but didn’t finish there. Feeling sorry for one’s self is the mechanism by which we learn to feel sorry for others. I do you no harm because I know what harm is, how it feels. I’ll hang down my head, you hang down yours.

: : :

The doorman at the Cantab had bad lungs, so we smokers were advised to “please step outdoors.” We understood step as clamber and outdoors as the back stairway by the bar, within easy hearing of the stage. The steps wound up to an alley we never used and I was happy just to be hanging out on them with other poets in Cambridge. Vanessa was smoking Camel Reds that year but I’d wake up sore from them. Instead I’d share Dunhill’s and sips from flasks with the crowd Vanessa formed around her.

We were the hot shit that year, and we were fast becoming superior, chuckling over the bad poems, chuckling at anything. Vanessa sometimes joined the laughter, but more often remained serene, like the old woman in her poem, the one who chided hush. The rest of us, meanwhile, made fun of the way the worst of the open mic poets seemed more concerned with cataloguing their hardships than sculpting objets d’art.

We were the hot shit that year, and we were fast becoming superior, chuckling over the bad poems, chuckling at anything.

Probably, I ought to have regarded the least euphonious of the Cantab crew as the sort of writers Randall Jarrell described in Poetry and the Age, when he said, of bad print poets, “it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with ‘This is a poem’ scrawled on them in lipstick.”

But if there’s a way to be a sophisticate and remain aesthetically egalitarian at the same time, I still haven’t found it. There’s a reason only magicians can make Shakespeare live out loud. The poets I wanted to read wrote about things that couldn’t be communicated simply, at exactly three and a half minutes in length, and onstage. My best poems were getting shorter and shorter as I pared my language down, cut out anything that seemed showy for its own sake, or that repeated itself, or that seemed too wordy. You can write a brilliant poem that’s both simple and short, but I couldn’t do it, and neither could 99 percent of the readers in Cambridge. Increasing sophistication narrows the spectrum of what we’re able to appreciate, or at least it did for me. To confirm I wasn’t misreading things, I’d read John Ashbery poems or Lyn Hejinian poems at the mic — I’d read them well — and all I saw greet them on listeners’ faces was apologetic confusion.

I’d read John Ashbery poems or Lyn Hejinian poems at the mic — I’d read them well — and all I saw greet them on listeners’ faces was apologetic confusion.

During the slam competitions (as opposed to the open mics) various audience members were deputized as scorekeepers. No special qualifications were required — democracy reigned. And in that reign it practiced every vice Polybius and Montesquieu warned us on and on it might.

: : :

The polity at the Cantab consisted of more-or-less the same audience every night; as a result, that polity developed relationships with one another and, when they were appointed judges, felt free to pursue any personal grievance that suggested itself.

More obviously, the listenership at the Cantab was generally unschooled. They didn’t read poems by people they didn’t know and they could have been a lot more critical of their own craft. Often, when a given poet didn’t have any new material to read that night, they’d read the same poem they’d read many nights before. This was encouraged as a way to perfect those poems. In all but a very few cases, I found it tedious. It reminded me of all the wrong parts of church, the parts I couldn’t stay awake through.

It reminded me of all the wrong parts of church, the parts I couldn’t stay awake through.

I did stay awake through the sex poems, mostly. Slam poetry remains the one medium outside of formal pornography in which I’ve seen the most naked expressions of human desire. There’s plenty of desire in music, of course, but it’s always more abstract. The sounds that go along with the words surround the performer and protect them, so do their instruments and the other musicians around them. The standard meter and rhyme of a pop song makes it seem less of a personal statement and more public, more of a ritual. The bodies of performers aren’t just bodies, they’re symbols.

The best songs immerse; the best slam dazzles. The simplicity, even anonymity of “Hang Down Your Head” remains with me in a way Vanessa’s “Hush,” much as I loved it then, does not. When I hear great slam I’m swept up, yes, but always with an eye on the performer. There’s a reason slam readings are judged — everyone without a scorecard is judging them too: judging the character of the reader, their looks, their right to brag or lament, the sincerity in their tone. Slam is confrontational, from reader to listener and vice versa.

Slam is confrontational, from reader to listener and vice versa.

The slam I admire doesn’t aim to comfort me. But the songs I admire do. Tom Waits, too, is just another white boy, but it doesn’t matter. I love his songs because they’re polymorphous. When a girlfriend strayed and I felt both angry and ashamed, it was “Hang Down Your Head” I played in the car. Likewise, when I began to lose my hearing — I’ll never again hear the song the way it sounded in my 20s — it was “Hang Down Your Head” that ran through me like a wound. Hush, I’d whisper to myself in loud restaurants. Hush I’d shout at the roaring tinnitus in my ears. “…the rain now … “ “ … because it takes me away … “ All I wanted was an echo of the sadness and beauty of the world, and I found it there.

Slam lives in the body, but it’s the performer’s body. You may admire them, or pity them, or desire them, but you won’t be them. When you hear a song you love, on the other hand, you’re both listener and speaker. Music has the ability, somehow, to do that. Both arts are necessary and both have their place: the one provokes empathy, the other sympathy.

I’ve grown more compassionate since 1999; a good deal of that was picked up from the hardship stories I heard at the Cantab Lounge, an apprenticeship that started in 1999 when the left side of my face was drawn with flowers, but a good deal also came from the practice of sympathy music can evoke, the spell it casts, the words and sounds that can bear your weight.

After an afternoon at a bad job lying for Silicon Valley, on my walk home through the Back Bay, the old money houses and the busy cars on Mass Ave and their Masshole horns, the word hush felt like the distillation of what I wanted the world to understand, to be for me and for anyone who needed it.

THE BASICS

What is a book sale?

What Is BookScan and Why Should We Care?

So Why Can BookScan Be So Inaccurate?

How Much Does an Author Make Per Sale?

Don’t Most Authors Make No Money From Sales?

How Does Publishing Survive If Most Books Don’t Earn Out?

WHAT DO BOOKS ACTUALLY SELL?

Okay, Let’s Get to the Dirt: What Does an Average Book Sell?

Can You… Narrow that Down a Little?

So the Average Novel Sells 20,000?

What Constitutes “Good” Sales?

What Do Acclaimed, Buzzed-About Literary Books Sell?

What If You Are a Finalist for a Major Award?

What Does a #1 Bestseller Sell?

What About Short Story Collections? No One Buys Those, Right?

So All the Publishers that Rejected My Collection Are Fools!

How Does Genre Fiction Compare?

How Does Non-Fiction Compare?

What About Self-Publishing?

Which Sells More: Hardcover, Paperback, or Ebook?

So What Does All This Meeeaaan, Man?

Cormac McCarthy Is Dead. Long Live Cormac McCarthy

The gods of Asgard are coming, courtesy of the author of Coraline

The Partition of India and Pakistan: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Irish War of Independence: A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

South African Apartheid: Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

The Iranian Revolution: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Mexican Revolution: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The October Revolution of Russia: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The American War in Vietnam: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Cultural Revolution of China: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The Egyptian Revolution: City of Love and Ashes by Yusuf Idris

The French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Translated by Maia Tabet Recommended by The Common

HASSAN AL-MAZAZ AL-SHAGHOURI’S FINAL VICTORY

TABOO

EAT OF THE DELICACIES WE HAVE BESTOWED UPON YOU

1. A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor,

2. Reflections on a Marine Venus

by Lawrence Durrell

3. The Third Man

by Graham Greene

4. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

5. A Room With a View

by E.M. Forster

6. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

7. Murder on the Orient Express

by Agatha Christie

8. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage

by Lord Byron

9. Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

10. In altre parole

by Jhumpa Lahiri

DON’T MISS OUT

YOUR INBOX IS LIT

Translated by Maia Tabet
Recommended by The Common