Authors, Fiction

Ortlund: “I am an endlessly hungry dead thing”

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Mike Duran interviews Eric Ortlund about his zombie novel, Dead Petals. Ortlund says, “At some level, I am an endlessly hungry dead thing; but I’m also watching to see how I might survive that evil. And it got me thinking about what the apostle Paul says about humanity being dead in sin in Ephesians. Then I wondered, if a zombie could talk while still undead, what would that sound like? Then the writing started happening. . . .

“The influences are many. First, the Old Testament is the first apocalypse—i.e., it first got that particular way of looking at reality going. Second, the OT has a fund of cosmic symbols (the abyss, the storm, the holy mountain, the tree) which cannot be translated or decoded without essential loss. . . . Third, the OT has this really interesting way of protesting the surrounding idolatrous culture and also “highjacking” it—taking over symbols and themes and images and using them to talk about the real God.”

Bookselling, Publishing

What Is the Dispute Between Amazon, Hachette?

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James Stewart asked someone at Hachette about their dispute with Amazon. “This person said that Amazon has been demanding payments for a range of services, including the pre-order button, personalized recommendations and a dedicated employee at Amazon for Hachette books. This is similar to so-called co-op arrangements with traditional retailers, like paying Barnes & Noble for placing a book in the front of the store.”

Stewart report describes the efforts Third Place Books has made to capitalize on Amazon’s refusal to pre-order a popular book. They offered The Silkworm at 20% off with free, personal delivery the day it was released. The owner, Robert Sindelar, “along with several other store employees, delivered the books (although a surprising number of customers said not to bother — they wanted to come into the store for their copy). He also handed out what he called ‘Hachette swag bags’ with a T-shirt and advance copy of a coming Hachette novel. Some buyers also received a surprise visit from a local author, Maria Semple, who wrote the best-selling book Where’d You Go, Bernadette.”

Sindelar calls the promotion successful. He sold 60 books that day. Normally, he doesn’t believe he would have gotten any pre-orders and maybe a few sales on the day of the release. (via Shelf Awareness)

Authors

Mamet Shuts Down His Play Over Gender Reassignment

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The Milwaukee Alchemist Theatre received a cease-and-desist letter from playwright David Mamet after one performance of Mamet’s Oleanna, a play about a pompous male professor accused of sexual harassment by a female student. The Alchemist’s production cast a man in the role of the female student. Theatre owners claimed they “did not change the character of Carol but allowed the reality of gender and relationship fluidity to add to the impact of the story.”

Mamet disagreed. I don’t think he plays the “gender fluidity” game. (via Prufrock)

Reading, Religion

Francis Schaeffer on Sharing the Gospel

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“Francis Schaeffer was asked what he’d do if he had an hour to share the gospel with someone. He responded by saying he’d listen for 55 minutes and then, in the last 5 minutes, have something meaningful to say. In other words, he listened in order to speak the gospel.

Our evangelism is often unbelievable because we don’t listen at all. All too often the gospel we share is an information download, not a loving articulation of how the good news fits into the needs, fears, hopes, and dreams of others’ lives.”

— Jonathan Dodson, Unbelievable Gospel: How to Share a Gospel Worth Believing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Field of Prey,’ by John Sandford

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I should probably apologize for promoting John Sandford’s Prey novels, of which Field of Prey is the latest installment.

I mean, I always have to warn you about the language, which can be pretty coarse, and the psycho serial killers, who just get more and more creepy. In a way you could call these books horror novels (Psycho seems to be an inspiration for this one), and I don’t even like horror.

But… but I like the writing and the characters. Sandford deftly relieves the horror with episodes of mordant cop humor, and some dissing of political correctness.

And most importantly of all, he writes about Minnesota!

At one point in Field of Prey, Dr. Weather Davenport, wife of the hero, says, “TV. It’s like if you’re not on it, you don’t exist. The single most pernicious idea in our culture.”

I’m kind of like that with books. Those of you who live in Manhattan or LA or Chicago are used to seeing stories set in your home towns. But I’m a boy from Goodhue County, Minnesota, and Field of Prey is set precisely there, mostly. My home town isn’t mentioned (though I’m pretty sure Lucas Davenport drives through it at one point), but the story starts in Faribault, and then there’s Owatonna, and Red Wing, and Zumbrota, as well as a fictional town called Holbein.

My home area is in a bestselling book! We exist!

Also the book is pretty exciting, if you can put up with the rough elements.

Publishing, Writing

Horwitz Not Thrilled with Digital Bookselling

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Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, writes about the thrills and spills of being a digital bestseller.

I finished writing in late January, just as the State Department prepared to issue a much anticipated report on the Keystone XL. If I were writing for a traditional publisher, I’d have to wait months to see my work in print. This time, I’d be read within days, right on top of the news!

Exhausted but exhilarated, I headed to the liquor store for a celebratory bottle and returned to an urgent call from my editor in Sydney. “Mate, we’re [bleeped],” she said. The Global Mail’s backer had had a bad financial setback at his firm and evidently decided he could no longer afford a folly like quality journalism. He’d abruptly pulled the plug just hours before I filed my copy, making The Global Mail a dead letter.

Worse still, for me, Byliner hadn’t yet inked its deal with the Aussies. Suddenly I had no platform for a very long story on a subject that was about to be all over the news. And I’d yet to be paid anything beyond my original travel budget (which I’d overrun, in any case).

At this point I called my literary agent, whom I’d foolishly failed to involve in the project. (Another fantasy of the digital world: Writers can do it themselves and dispense with all those middlemen.)

And there’s more.

Non-fiction, Poetry

A Great Poet’s Glossary

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A new, engaging resource for poets has come out this year. A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch is the reference work you would expect from the name and a readable commonplace-type book to boot. The interconnections between words and examples given for each term do not come from a dead literature professor collecting dust on tenure, but a poet who sounds as if he would be routinely in the running for favorite teacher.

The Washington Post says Hirsch “explains each term in clear, direct prose, often moving from a general definition to a layered explanation of how each term has evolved over time. Take, for example, the opening entry, abecedarian, which begins, ‘An alphabetical acrostic in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet.’ Many readers have seen this ancient form but may not know that it was often employed for sacred texts. Hirsch explains this connection and highlights a psalm in the Bible as well as poems by St. Augustine and Chaucer within just a few lines.”

Hirsch is the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Religion

It Wasn’t an Affair. It Was Rape.

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To anyone who flirts with the idea that words are meaningless, I ask you about the difference between the words rape and affair.

Did you see the article in Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal several days ago from a convicted rapist who described his crime as a warning to others? He was a youth pastor at the time, and his victim was a minor. This detail wasn’t revealed until the end of a long piece on how hard his temptations were and how badly he feels now. He gave little, if any, time to the pain his victim feels or her family and friends. More than this, he cast his sin in terms of adultery.

“The anonymous article was saturated with a self-pitying tone, some horrifying reframing of his sin (statutory rape is not an ‘affair’), and a stunning lack of concern for the young woman upon whom he preyed,” Michelle Van Loon explains in an article about how sexual abuse is common in places it should be rare.

The editors of Leadership Journal noted at one point: “Some of the language in the article did appear to portray the ‘relationship’ he had with his student as consensual. We regret any implication of that kind and strongly underscore that an adult cannot have a consensual sexual relationship with a minor. This was not an ‘affair.’ It was statutory rape.” They have removed the article completely now and apologized for posting it.

I can’t find the full article now, but it’s probably somewhere. Author Mary DeMuth gives you all the information and response to it you need.

If the convict had taken the full blame for his crime, the article would have been better. If the convict had considered his victims instead of himself, it would have been better. But importantly, if he or his editors had pushed themselves to call things by their proper names, the reaction would not have been as harsh as it was.

In their apology, the editors state, “The post, intended to dissuade future perpetrators, dwelt at length on the losses this criminal sin caused the author, while displaying little or no empathic engagement with the far greater losses caused to the victim of the crime and the wider community around the author. The post adopted a tone that was not appropriate given its failure to document complete repentance and restoration.”

Perhaps if the man had cast his words in terms of how he excused himself at the time, he could have kept half of what he’d written, but on his suffering of consequences, he has no room to complain. No one wants to listen any more.