Scribner Books

Like many others, we read Neil Genzlinger’s article on “The Problem with Memoirs” and felt a bit huffy. After all, Scribner has published quite a few memoirs over the years, and if we do say so, they’re all pretty spectacular. (The Pulitzer committee and the National Book Award judges seem to agree.) 

And yet, Genzlinger has a point. There is a lot of navel-gazing going on in the culture now – but this is a story that’s already been written, and re-written. McNally Jackson has made this point very well; we may as well apply this rant to food, movies, blogs, etc… For every three mediocre memoirs Genzlinger could pull off the shelves, there are three brilliant, moving, and transcendent works he could have found, too.

We’d like to think, atop our soapbox here, that one of the jobs we take most seriously, is filtering content and nurturing stories and writers that we believe are worthy of your time. Independent bookstores, who pride themselves on hand-selling, also do this. Perhaps Genzlinger’s problem, shouldn’t have been with the content itself, but the medium he chose to view it in (ahem, a certain online bookseller), and his own porous methods of choosing the books.

“Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes. Early in the new century book publishers, confined within their history and outflanked by unencumbered digital innovators, missed yet another critical opportunity, seized once again by Amazon, this time to build their own universal digital catalog, serving e-book users directly and on their own terms while collecting the names, e-mail addresses, and preferences of their customers. This strategic error will have large consequences.”

—Jason Epstein in his review of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson in the New York Review of Books

Despite the fact that modern publishers never intended, or wanted, to sell directly to the public, this is a fairly accurate assessment of the past 20 years in the publishing industry. Ironically, we couldn’t read the rest of the article because it was behind a pay wall.

“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

“Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.”

Source: Paris Review

Courtesy of Blake Bailey, in a great (old) Wall Street Journal article:

“This is writing that makes us see the world afresh—the kind of writing that is better than actual living. Or rather it makes us want to live better, in every way.”

slushpilehell:

Not that I would compare myself to Hemingway, but if you read my novel, you’ll see that it’s as brilliantly simple as The Old Man and the Sea, as poetic as The Sun Also Rises, and as epic as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Well, at least you didn’t compare yourself to Hemingway.

Yeesh.