Author Archives: U.R. Bowie

Thoughts on Publishing and the Plight of the Writer of Literary Fiction

Posted on by

Lot of good ideas by V.N. Alexander, in her recent post on publishing; co-op publishing may be the future. For me the great innovation in book publishing is POD. V.N. Alexander’s article makes it crystal clear why pre-printing an entire run of books–I have, largely, literary fiction in mind–makes absolutely no sense anymore.

“Other roles of the traditional publisher have been effectively eliminated by technology.” Right. Then again, the author, through social media, is now expected to do all, or practically all, publicizing of the book. Who needs a publisher, then?

“The two most valuable services that traditional publishers provide are editing and proofreading,” but, as V.N. asserts, finding competent people to proofread or copy edit books is not that difficult.

Actually, there is one big thing that traditional publishers can do for a writer of literary fiction. They can get the writer IN with the literary establishment. This, ultimately, is the only thing that really counts. Once you are IN, your books get reviewed by Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Booklist. If you never get IN nobody ever knows you exist. And the huge majority of all writers who publish literary fiction will remain, egregiously, OUT. Continue reading →

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

Posted on by

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (“Beati Immaculati”), Vintage Paperback, 1989, 278 pp., with an introduction (“An Interpretation”) by Mark Schorer, and the author’s dedicatory letter to his wife Stella Ford (January 9, 1927). The novel was first published in 1915.

 SERIES: LOOKING BACK AT GREAT WORKS OF LITERARY FICTION

The blurb on the front cover is from Graham Greene: “One of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our [20th] century.” Blurbs usually exaggerate. So too does this one, but it exaggerates in the wrong direction. The first time I read this book I thought, “This is the great American novel.” In rereading it again for this review, I have not changed my opinion. Continue reading →

On Nikolai Gogol

Posted on by

There’s Gogol, and Then Again, There’s Gogol

Among others, Ivan Turgenev could not believe that The Inspector General, the greatest play in Russian literature and “one of the most subversive comedies ever to appear on stage,” was written by the same man who wrote the bloated and ingenuous sentences of the essays in Arabesques—and, later, the moralizing and preachy epistles, coruscating with derangement, in Selected Passages from Letters to Friends.

Of course, it was not the same man. The Gogol writing fiction was a genius, and that glorious fiction welled up from some genius of a neuron deep in his brain. The Gogol writing nonfiction was a sententious fool. As Karlinsky writes, “nonfictional Gogol is hard going: verbose, rhetorical, convoluted, and all too often beside the point.”

Gogol lived and wrote in the nineteenth century, but the most prominent theme of his fiction is a twentieth century theme: the illusory nature of all human identity. The man who wrote Gogol’s fiction is a twentieth century writer.
Continue reading →

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Posted on by

“Every time the flight I’m on takes off. Or if I can hear a flight take off.” – From “Come As You Are,” in Harper’s “Readings,” April, 2019. From accounts of nonsexual orgasms documented in “Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: A Content Analysis.” Study published in The International Journal of Sexual Health, November, 2018

Flights (Riverhead Books, 403 pages) is a fascinating, while quirky, eccentric book, often factual, non-fictional, often clearly fictional. The fiction is mixed in with the fact to the point that you sometimes cannot tell which is which. The ‘I’ narrator informs us early on that she

“started writing a book. It was a story for travelers, meant to be read on the train—what I would write for myself to read.” She continues as follows: “I was able to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls. But I never became a real writer . . . . In my writing, life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections—and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as to the whole.” Continue reading →

On Literary Fiction: Nabokov’s Influence on Updike

Posted on by

CARICATURES BY DAVID LEVINE

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation or ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen-sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

Adam Gopnik

U.R. Bowie

On Literary Fiction: Flannery O’Connor

Posted on by

Wise Blood

Fifty years after its publication Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is still quite the bizarre little book. “Its parts seem not to fit together. For a book about the defiance of God it is strangely sportive, at once seedy and shiny bright.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

That “strangely sportive” can be applied to nearly all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. It lends to her stories their special little gleam.

“Good Country People”

O’Connor wrote one of her most famous and memorable tales, “Good Country People,” in only four days. The story practically wrote itself. A quote from O’Connor: “I didn’t know he [the bible salesman Manley Pointer] was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable.”

O’Connor read Nikolai Gogol while she was a grad student in Iowa and admits to being influenced by him. You wonder how aware or unaware she was of the similarity between Manley Pointer, her gatherer of human dead souls, and Pavel Chichikov, wholesale buyer of dead souls in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. Both characters are traveling rogues, in the employ of Satan. Manley is Chichikov’s little brother.

U.R. Bowie

 

 

Florida, by Lauren Groff

Posted on by

For the past couple of years I’ve been reading lots of short story collections by living American writers, looking for something that sparks with creativity, not often finding much. Lauren Groff is generally accepted as one of the prime divas of the MFA world of writing. The stories in this new collection, “Florida” (Riverhead Books, 2018), have been previously published in some of the premier venues in the U.S.: The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Granta, Tin House, among others. They have been featured as well in three different anthologies of Best American Short Stories. Does that mean they are good? Alas, owing to the stranglehold that the standard MFA racket in fiction holds on these once-august publications, I’ve learned not to get my expectations up too high. Continue reading →