famous authors

Review: Revenge is Best Served Boiling Hot

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★★★★

Meet wildly paranoid and sociopathic Jane Morgan. She’s a midlist author with a dismal career; an obnoxiously superior, unsupportive husband; and a deep wellspring of jealousy and rage.  Being half-Asian has always been a source of shame for her because her family is poor and she’s not slim, glamorous, and beautiful.  She thinks she deserves to be one of those Crazy Rich Asians.

She hates herself as “wildly mediocre,” hates that husband, her career, social media influencers, successful writers, and especially hates California where she grew up because it’s the worst place in the world for someone antisocial like her:

“It’s too loud, too sunny, too fucking friendly. Everyone gets revved up on kale smoothies and cocaine so I can’t even get a tub of hummus without the Trader Joe’s checkout lady grinning at me and calling me honey and asking me how I’m doing and what are my plans for the weekend?  Californians just can’t help themselves.  If I stayed there any longer I was bound to kill someone.”

Jane’s rancid, roiling sarcasm doesn’t simply cut with a razor throughout the book, it wields an axe–and that’s perversely entertaining in this dynamic thriller.

When Jane did her creative writing masters at Oxford University, she became obsessed with Thalia, a gorgeous, charismatic, and wealthy woman in the same program. Thalia seemed to like her, which astounded Jane. Their lives mesh in reality and fantasy as the book goes back in forth in time, taking readers deeper into Jane’s pathologies. 

Sutanto has a superb ear.  She’s given Jane a dazzling, dark, compelling, sometimes appalling/sometimes hilarious voice of a woman trapped inside her own head who hesitates at the simplest reply because she has to make sure that it sounds “normal.” After all, she thinks that her “thoughts are spiders waiting to leap from my tongue and poison everything they touch.”  And they’re worse than that since she often thinks of stabbing people just to shut them up.

She can also imagine walking through a museum “with a little razor, casually slicing apart priceless canvases” because “there’s just something about perfection that makes [her] want to defile it.”  Plain Jane is a ferocious savage inside.  Does Thalia tame her?

Some readers might find the multiple plot twists in the final chapters excessive.  All the same, Jane and Thalia’s story is a cunning exploration of hero worship, shame, internalized racism, and the splendors and miseries of female friendship. On top of everything else, it’s a sharp and knowing satire of publishing: “Anyone who thinks that publishing is a meritocracy is not in publishing.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

The Secret World of Author Blurbs

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Before I got my first book published, a novelist I knew quipped, “The only thing worse than not being published is being published.” I had no idea what he meant, but I soon figured it out.

Take blurbs. Begging for blurbs for your forthcoming book is a definite downside of being published. It’s humiliating to have grovel to for them rather than have your publisher take care of it (when they remember!). You can feel like Dorothy in Oz.

Far too many authors think blurbs will magically rocket a book to success. That the right, brilliant blurb by some famous author will impress the publisher, readers, reviewers–and of course our friends, family, and fans.

But do blurbs really make a difference in terms of sales? It’s hard to say. How can you quantify a blurb’s impact? As a reader, there are actually some authors whose names make me not want to read a book because they’re what’s known in publishing as “blurb whores” and love having their names on as many book jackets as possible.

What you can be sure of is that not getting a blurb you hope and pray for is a major buzz kill, and getting it is often like July 4th on steroids. The entire world is ablaze with joy. Someone famous, or at least someone you admire, has given you their blessing. They like your book, they really like it–won’t their fame be contagious?

Is it any wonder blurbs can make us writers frazzled? A writer friend told me a hilarious, sad story about a new author asking a national best-selling author for a blurb. I can’t name the celebrity writer, but she’s huge. The newbie waited and waited. No response. So the anxious author tried again. This time she got a swift and stinging reply:

“My Dear: I understood your letter to be a request, not a demand.”

I sympathized with the celebrity author feeling put upon, but I felt sorry for the writer who was embarrassed, and wished The Famous One had simply said “no” the first time.

Stories like that have made me determined never to ignore a request from an author or publisher asking for a blurb. If I can’t do it for whatever reason, I always let them know ASAP.

Still, you never know how competent a publisher is. Once a publisher of mine in New York never got advance copies of my book out in time for blurbs and had to rely on reviews for my previous book. That wasn’t a disaster, but it was very frustrating. And I recently did a blurb that the author loved, but despite her insistence, it didn’t show up on the book. The publisher wasted my time and the author’s, which is just more proof–if anyone needed it–that publishing is a crazy business.

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Guide is Bunk and 24 other books in genres from mystery to memoir which have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The New York Times Outs a “Blurb Whore”

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This week Malcolm Gladwell was outed by the New York Times as a “blurb whore.” The Times didn’t actually label him that, but it’s the term publishing insiders use for an author like Gladwell whose name appears promiscuously on book jackets.

The Times article revealed how often Gladwell blurbs books totally outside his own areas of expertise and that his name “adorns scores of book covers not his own.”

If blurbing were an Olympic sport, he’d clearly get the gold.

“It’s hard to compete with Malcolm Gladwell,” said A.J. Jacobs, the author of four books, including The Year of Living Biblically, who was once such a prolific blurbist, his publisher demanded that he stop writing them. “He is always going to get the front cover. I get the back cover or, maybe, inside.”

Gladwell’s blurb helped make Freakonomics a best seller and publishers hope for similar success for their books when they enlist the nation’s Blurber-in-Chief.

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The Times reported that Gladwell hands blurbs out “like Santa,” though he doesn’t seem to care if authors are naughty or nice. No matter what the book’s genre, it does seem to help, though, if there’s a personal connection: “Many of the people for whom Mr. Gladwell has written blurbs he knows socially or has even dated.”

But the personal apparently goes deeper than that.

When Jacobs wrote about his “blurbing problem” a few years ago in the Times, he said that Gladwell told him tweeting and blurbing were “conceptually identical: the short, targeted judgment in which the initiator draws attention to himself while seeming to draw attention to something else.”

Blurbing is clearly an ego-boost and good publicity for authors writing blurbs, no matter how famous they are. Jacobs confessed in that article: “I get a thrill from seeing my name scattered throughout the bookstore.”

His tone was less serious than Gladwell’s, but the story sounds very much the same: “Me! Me! Me!”

Lev Raphael’s books–from mystery to memoir–can be found on Amazon.

This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post.