Publishing

Brilliant, Scary Satire

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As a book reviewer, you can often feel like you’re on a high-speed train missing all the terrific possible stops along your route. People wherever you go mention books that you somehow never got to read read or read about because you’re too damned busy reading and reviewing other books. 

Back when I worked for half a dozen different publications, I remember weeks where I was reviewing three or more books on deadline and either reading or writing with no break whatsoever. Okay, I did eat and go to the john.  And maybe hit the gym, but in my head I was always thinking about the next review–and the one after that–and the one after that.

So I confess I missed the bravos for The Other Black Girl, but I am here to tell you that it is a laugh-out-loud, gorgeously written, and effing brilliant satire of the publishing world–and much more.  I love this powerful novel and I envy the author her style, her humor, her satire, her poise.  She is stone cold amazing. And for those readers who think MFA programs turn out cookie-cutter writers, guess again.  She is an original.

The set-up is great: Nella, whose name recalls the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, is the only Black editorial assistant in the prestigious Wagner publishing house.  A publisher whose mail room staff is all people of color but whose editorial, art, and publicity staff are all uniformly white, many of them quite privileged.  Nella’s little cubicle is a lonely place, and “blacksplaining” cultural realities and events to her White colleagues often works her last nerve. 

She’s not a legacy hire and though her family was comfortable, they weren’t wealthy and that helps isolate her even more–at least in her own mind.  She’s also not happy being stuck at a low pay grade, though she loves the work, most of the time.  Enter Hazel, a much hipper Black editorial assistant with whom she feels she can (and should) bond, but things quickly get weird, competitive, and creepy in the extreme.

The author worked at Knopf for three years so she has an inside track on creating a workplace filled with kooks and quirks, competition, hypocrisy and back stabbing.    Like so many organizations today, Wagner makes feeble attempts to embrace diversity and the author’s wit here as elsewhere is stiletto-sharp.  The satire is never laid on too thick, however, and Nella is a wise, weary hero to admire and root for.

And so you feel you’re deep in a novel about workplace competition, Black solidarity and White cluelessness/condescension–until the book expands way beyond what you might expect when we learn the meaning of the title.  That’s when the book plunges deep into an alternate, hair-raising reality that’s a spoof conspiracy theorizing.  The  register becomes fantasy-horror and it’s a dazzling switch. I was glad that I put everything aside this weekend to read the book straight through.  The Other Black Girl is a knockout debut.

Lev Raphael, author, editor, and teacher, is a prize-winning publishing veteran.  His 27 books span genres from memoir to mystery.

Mystery and Mockery

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My European-born mother was given to making pronouncements about life in the U.S. that were halfway between a judgment and an epigram. One of my favorites: “There is no such thing as enough in America.”

I thought of that while reading  the entertaining Yellowface, in which a struggling author, June Hayward, steals a manuscript from her famous, best-selling Chinese-American friend after she dies.  June fills in gaps, polishes it extensively, and gets it published as her original work.  She becomes a huge success, but every thing she gains makes her hungry for more.

It’s initially great fun to watch her first rave about the stolen manuscript, then slowly find fault with it, then fix the problems she sees and tone down the excesses, and finally claim that’s it’s undeniably hers because it’s so much better.  And isn’t she doing her friend a great service in making it a better book?

Selling the novel turns her world upside down and June is overwhelmed by her good fortune: a vast amount of money, a publishing house that really cares about her, headlines everywhere she turns, best-seller status, great reviews, profiles in prestigious magazines and newspapers, strangers recognizing her.  She becomes a celebrity author, though she knows that it could just as easily have been someone else who was picked to be turned into a star. 

The downside is her incredibly masochistic addiction to reading everything she can about herself in print and on social media, which can either be a serotonin boost (as she’s overly fond of saying) or infuriating when she’s accused of cultural appropriation because she’s white and the book is primarily about Chinese laborers in France during WWI.

Kuang certainly knows how to mock the publishing world as well as Robert Harris does in The Ghost Writer, and she takes special aim at complaints of cultural appropriation that will remind you of the controversy over American Dirt.  She also eviscerates what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery” that elevates certain writers for other reasons than the quality of their books.

Yellowface can be read as a sort of mystery-thriller because as soon as June steals the manuscript and decides to publish it, you feel a clock ticking: won’t someone discover her fraud and shame her–or worse?  Of course, it doesn’t take long for the predictable Twitter mobs to attack her, and the waves of Twitter warfare in this book are exhausting.

You may be wondering if the book ever explains why June steals Athena’s work, and the real answer goes beyond jealousy in a devastating set of revelations. 

Given that Kuang is the kind of megastar author who dies in this book, is her satire of the struggling friend empathetic or cruel?  That’s one question.  Another is the revised, stolen novel itself.  When June shares some sections of the book that she actually wrote (bragging about their brilliance), the writing doesn’t seem stellar, yet she claims the audience is under her spell.  Why didn’t Kuang’s editor pay special attention to those passages to make them more convincing? 

As reported in The Washington Post, this novel “is now at the center of a real-life publicity frenzy, its cover gracing tote bags, railway ads and a giant mural at the London Book Fair.”  That’s the kind of PR that June gets in the novel for her book.

Yellowface interrogates friendship, jealousy, the randomness of fame, and the truly bizarre realities of publishing today.  The last half really gathers steam and elevates the book above satire.  After you finish, you might well decide to cut Twitter loose and give up doom-scrolling forever.  If you can. . .  ★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Press and many other publications.

 

Summertime…and the Christie is Breezy

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Agatha Christie has been in the news lately along with other authors as someone whose “potentially objectionable” comments about characters needed to be censored for contemporary audiences.  Several of her novels have been rewritten by her publisher, as reported in The Guardian:

[The] edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as “of black marble” and a judge’s “Indian temper”, and removed terms such as “Oriental” and the N-word. The word “natives” has also been replaced with the word “local.”

Sure enough, this new collection of short stories seems to mock gay men and has a “fat Jewish woman” and “Asian” is used as a pejorative.  Moments like that might give you pause–or you might just accept them as representative of her time and her class.  Will they spoil your enjoyment of these light summer reads?  I long ago accepted her antisemitism as par for the course in The Gilded Age and in her social milieu.  My appreciation of her work inspired me to write three books including one of my best-known mysteries, The Edith Wharton Murders.

Christie is the first mystery novelist I read way back in junior high school and though she might make me occasionally wince, I’ve always relished her clever plots and her keen attention to incongruity in dialogue and action.  She’s masterful in that regard and often very entertaining.  Her satire of Brits abroad is always delicious, as in “The Oracle at Delphi”:

Mrs. Peters had tried hard to take an interest in Ancient Greece, but she found it difficult.  Their statuary seemed so unfinished; so lacking in heads and arms and legs.  Secretly, she much preferred the handsome marble angel complete with wings which was erected on the late Mr Willard Peters’ tomb.

We of course find Miss Marple here, in the very well-plotted–if not quite believable–tale The Blood-Stained pavement, remarking as usual that “There is a great deal of wickedness in village life.”  Poirot’s little grey cells are keenly at work in a story whose title is perhaps too much of a giveaway, but is diverting anyway: “The Double Clue.”  Poirot also solves a case without leaving his home in “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim,” demonstrating the superiority of thought over feeling once again.  But Miss Marple can do something similar elsewhere in the collection, based as always on her keen observation of human nature.

Throughout the collection, the characters are described briskly and the dialogue is well-tuned.  There’s sometimes the whiff of port and cigars shared by an after-dinner raconteur and you might feel you’re enjoyably back in the Edwardian era of a ghost story-telling.  

The best story is the fast-paced and highly amusing “Jane in Search of a Job” about a young women hired under unusual circumstances.  It’s got some lovely twists and tart observations like this:

In moderation Jane did not object to crime. The papers had been full lately of various girl bandits. Jane had seriously thought of becoming one herself if all else failed.

As with other new Christie titles published by Morrow, the book is beautifully produced with a pleasingly readable type font and an attractive cover. Though  Morrow’s volume of ghost stories released last Fall for Halloween is somewhat more entertaining, it’s still a fun, quick read for fans of the Queen of Mystery.

Lev Raphael was the longtime crime fiction reviewer for the Detroit Free Press and is the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries set in contemporary academia.

Tribute to My First Editor

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The famous New York editor who helped launch my book publishing career, Michael Denneny, is dead. He was a founding editor of the highly influential magazine Christopher Street, and in 35 years at Macmillan, St. Martins Press, and Crown published major authors like Edmund White, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Buckminster Fuller while championing gay fiction and nonfiction.

I’d been publishing stories for over a decade before approaching this giant of LGBTQ publishing at St. Martin’s Press with a collection of gay stories, but he thought it was incomplete. He knew my work and asked, “Why don’t you bring all of yourself into the book: you’re gay, you’re Jewish, and you’re the son of Holocaust survivors. Nobody has ever written a book quite like that.” He was right, and we launched a beautiful partnership when he offered me a contract for the book that became Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book put me on the map, with dozens of reviews across the country and the Lambda Literary Award it won the year after publication. I’m the figure on the cover. I was doing heavy weights at the gym and Michael thought pairing my body with a skull cap would hit the right notes. It did. Another well-known editor, the late George Stambolian, told me it was “the cover of the year.”

 

Denneny had started at St. Martin’s Press in 1977 when there wasn’t a single mainstream publisher in New York bringing out gay books.  He soon became celebrated as the doyen in that field for hardcover originals and his line of Stonewall Inn Editions, handsomely produced paperbacks of gay fiction and nonfiction.

Michael was an amazingly hands-on editor. He had me bring copies of dozens of stories to New York and we sat on the floor in his bohemian living room and looked at what might fit, what could be left out, what order the stories should take to seduce and enthrall readers. But that wasn’t the end: he and I spent easily seven months after that going back and forth with revisions as he helped me hone each story to make it as clear and forceful as possible. It was a master class in editing and revision, and his insights were never short of brilliant. He’s one of the many editors who have helped me enormously in my career as a teacher and editor myself—and one of the best.

Here’s an example of his help: I had shied away from writing sex scenes, but he said that sex revealed a side of characters that couldn’t be known in any other way and especially with characters who were venturing into new territory, so it was important for me to follow them. I did. The book was a success, winning a Lambda Literary Award after receiving dozens of reviews, most of them adulatory.

Michael admired my sense of humor and urged me to write a mystery series with a Nick and Nora Charles feel. That’s how the Nick Hoffman mysteries were born and that’s how I started getting reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, ended up as a professional reviewer for newspapers and radio stations, got invited around the country and abroad to speak about my work, and saw professors take me on an as a subject for academic essays, papers, and book chapters.

Without Michael, I doubt that Special Archives at Michigan State University’s Library would have pursued my papers for a decade and finally purchased them for a hefty sum.

It’s not self-serving to say that his taste was superb and he didn’t just publish major gay writers, he published Ntozake Shange—and she’s the writer who apparently encouraged him to publish gay authors. I remember Michael made a prediction about my career. He said, “You might never have a best seller, but like Shange, you’ll be making a lot of money doing speaking engagements because people will want to hear you speak from your unique perspective.”

He was right. I’ve done hundreds of invited talks and readings across the U.S. and in Canada, Germany, Scotland, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Israel. Without his intense belief in the value of my work—and its quality—I might never have gotten this far.

Or felt so very grateful.

Shit People Say to Writers

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Nobody tells you that when you publish a book, it becomes a license for total strangers to say outrageous things to you that yourself could never imagine saying to anyone.

I’m not just talking about people who’ve actually bought your book.  Even people who haven’t read your book feel encouraged to share, based on what they’ve gleaned from friends, reviews, the Internet, or ESP.

At first, when you’re on tour, it’s surprising, then tiring — but eventually it’s funny, and sometimes even offers you material for your next book.

All the comments on this list have been offered to me or author friends of mine.

–I liked your book, but I hated the ending.

–Your characters shouldn’t be so nice.

–Your characters should be more likeable.

–You need more sex in your books.

–There was too much sex in your book.

–The book doesn’t make sense unless there’s a sequel.

–You used too many words I had to look up.

–Too bad you’re not better known.

–It’ll never sell.

–My bookstore doesn’t carry any of your books.

–I found some typos in your book — you should fix that.

–I’d like you to write my book.

–What’s up with that cover?

–Can you tell your agent about me?

–You have a way with words.

–You need to put a nice lesbian in your next book.

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 book in genres from memoir to mystery, has taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London.  If you need writing coaching or editing, you can contact him at https://www.writewithoutborders.com

(free image from Pixabay)

Every Writer Needs an Editor (Guest Blog by Meredith Phillips)

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Guest blog by Meredith Phillips

Everyone needs an editor–even editors. Why? Primarily because an editor brings objectivity to your writing. When you proofread your own writing, you sometimes see what you expect to see, what you meant to write, on the page or screen before you. The editor brings an outsider’s view and is much more likely to pick up typos or mistakes. And truth be told, auto-correct or spell-check will not pick up homonyms.

Furthermore, because of editors’ training and wide reading background, they can spot an infelicity, misstatement, or erroneous fact—not to mention a plot hole. The editor’s job is to make the writer look good by preventing the reader’s confusion, making things as clear as possible. If you’re not “traditionally published,” which would presumably include professional editing, you should hire an editor at your own expense. You’ll find it is well worth the money.

When it comes to traditional or legacy publishing, after acquisition or commissioning a book, ideally several levels of editing take place. Those can range from development and/or substance editing to line and/or copy editing to proofreading. My own experience is mainly in fiction editing, the majority being crime fiction, but I’ve worked on all kinds of nonfiction as well, from cookbooks to handbooks to how-to guides. Over forty years I’ve edited hundreds of books and I still love it. I’d rather spend my time with red pen in hand, or these days with Word Review on the screen, than doing most other things. This has served me well during the pandemic.

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How does anyone become an editor? I doubt that any children say they want to be editors when they grow up. And I suspect that most editors originally began as writers, as did I. After first writing magazine pieces, a guidebook, and then a mystery, I decided that I’d rather tell other people how to write than do it myself. And I’ve done so ever since (although a certain amount of writing of catalog copy, blurbs, press releases, etc. is inevitable in the job). As well as learning by doing, I read books and articles on editing and joined professional organizations.



I spent the first ten years alone at Perseverance Press, editing and publishing new mystery writers who usually had other kinds of writing backgrounds. After ten of these books, some award-nominated, I went “on hiatus” and concentrated on freelance editing for mystery writers with NYC publishers. I was lucky enough to again be working with professional writers and didn’t have to deal with newbie writing problems.

But freelance editors are definitely at the bottom of the publishers’ totem poles, and liable to be blamed for all snafus. Then came the opportunity to partner with an old friend who wanted a mystery line in his small independent publishing company. And from 1999 to 2021, John Daniel & Co. / Perseverance Press published more than eighty traditional mysteries by established writers. This idyllic arrangement came to an end with John’s death, so I’m a freelancer again. And I was lucky enough to be available when Crippen & Landru needed an editor last year for their respected collections of Golden Age short fiction.

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Does editing mysteries differ from mainstream fiction editing? Not a lot. The plot structure is usually tighter in mystery/suspense, and attention must be paid to suspects’ activities and alibis. In the end, order should be restored and readers should feel that they had a chance of figuring out the puzzle. The background environment, geographical setting, and/or the historical period in a mystery are often rendered in detail, as they may contain clues. The conscientious editor should do some research (via Google and Wikipedia these days instead of a trip to the library) to be conversant with the milieu depicted by the author. I’ve bought a lot of books on editing but have found only a few of real use: Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d recommend to all writers.

Do mistakes still happen? Of course! In my early days I let an author get away with putting the protagonist in “a room with no doors or windows.” And much more recently, a main character kissed a man who wasn’t her fiancé, whom she didn’t like, and who wasn’t even in the same place as her. This goof sneaked by the author, me as the editor and two proofreaders. But of course it was pointed out in an Amazon review!

That takes me back to the first line, above….

[Free Images from Pixabay]

Writing is My Passion–But It’s a Business Too

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My father had a small business which I thought imprisoned him, so when I was growing up I swore I would never “do retail.”

Boy, was I wrong.  As an author, I wound up owning my own small business and it’s as vulnerable to competition and the vagaries of the marketplace as any physical store.  Sometimes it’s just as exhausting.

From the beginning of my book publishing career in 1990, I was deeply involved in pushing my work, contacting venues for readings, investing in posters and postcards, writing my own press releases when I thought my publisher hadn’t done a good job, and constantly faxing or mailing strangers around the country about my latest book.

Then came the Internet and everything shifted to email.  Add a website that needs constant updating; Twitter and Facebook, Goodreads and Instagram; keeping a presence on various listservs; blogging and blog tours; producing book trailers; updating ebooks in various ways; and the constant reaching out to strangers in the hope of enlarging my platform and increasing sales.  It never ends.

And neither does the advice offered by consultants.  I’m deluged by offers to help me increase my sales and drive more people to my web site.  They come 24/7 and when they tout success stories, I sometimes feels as if I’m trapped on a low-performing TV show while everyone else on the schedule is getting great Nielson ratings.

Going independent for a few books after I published with big and small houses momentarily made me feel more in control, but that control morphed into an albatross.  My 25th was brought out by a superb university press, Terrace Books, and I was relieved to not be in charge, just consulted.  Ditto with nos. 26 & 27, mysteries published by Daniel and Daniel.

Way too often, the burden of business has made writing itself harder to do, and sometimes it’s even felt pointless because it initiates a whole new business push.  So this isn’t a blog that promises you magic solutions to your publishing problems.  This blog says: If you’re going to be an author, prepare to work your butt off at things that might not come naturally to you and might never feel comfortable, whether you’re indie published or traditionally published.

One author friend who’s been a perpetual NYT best seller confided to me that despite all the success she’s had, “I still feel like a pickle salesman, down on the Lower East Side in 1900.”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He coaches and mentors writers, as well as editing manuscripts, at writewithoutborders.com.

Why I’ve Never Gone On a Writers’ Retreat

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Fans often ask me if I go to writers’ retreats. I never have and I’ve never really wanted to, because I live in one.

The mid-century house I bought over 30 years ago in a heavily-treed subdivision is extra quiet because it’s dead center, even though there are some major roads nearby. That means you can’t hear any road noise whatsoever whether you’re inside the house or sitting out on the patio or the deck. There’s also very little traffic through the subdivision itself, sometimes none at all. 

What you can hear is bird song of all kinds: chickadees, robins, finches mourning doves–and of course we see our share of hummingbirds because they like our Rose of Sharon trees. Oh, and I also hear people biking by, neighbors with strollers chatting on their phones, minor stuff like that that forms a pleasant soundscape.

Yes, there are lawnmowers in the Spring, leaf blowers in the Fall and snow blowers in the Winter. But as someone who grew up in New York, that seems close to silence. For a few years when I lived in Queens, I was directly under a flight path to LaGuardia Airport, and sandwiched between the roar of the Long Island Railroad and the craziness of Queens Boulevard. 

My street is lined with maples that form a canopy when they leaf out, and a sculpture garden when the leaves fall.  From my study window, whatever the season, I have a view of a tall, graceful Gingko tree. If you don’t know this tree, they have succulent green fan-shaped leaves that turn a Napoleonic yellow in the Fall and can drop all in one day like gentle snow.  It has special resonance for me because there was Gingko near my elementary school in Manhattan.


I can see the tree down at the base of the driveway while I write at my PC and while I make corrections on printed-off manuscripts sitting in my reading chair. It’s just one of the majestic trees around the house and it symbolizes home for me.   As does the enormous oak at the very back of our yard which a former neighbor told us was standing here in the 1920s when a 400-acre farm was subdivided into lots for houses.  I like to do handwritten notes on a printed-off text outside looking  at that tree for inspiration.

Growing up in New York, I had very little sense of the change of seasons, but here I can watch it change by the day–and sometimes change back,  because as people in many states say, “If you don’t like the weather here, wait an hour.”

The trees remind me that Michigan is where I became an author, not New York.
I experienced a five-year drought after publishing my first short story in a national magazine and it was only after moving to Michigan that the drought ended and my work started being accepted again.  I apparently needed a major change of scene to blossom. 

In Michigan I was fully free to become the writer I turned into, someone multiply anthologized, publishing across genres, taking the lessons my college writing mentor gave me into the classroom at Michigan State University and then beyond.  I now work with writers online at writewithoutborders.com, mentoring, offering individualized workshops, editing manuscripts of all kinds, and enjoying an even greater level of freedom than I had before.

I know that one of the appeals of a retreat is escape from where you are, but I don’t need that.  And people also go to commune with other writers, but I had that intense experience for two and a half years in my MFA program and I’ve hung out with writers at numerous conferences across the country.  I once interviewed Julian Barnes and asked who his writer friends were and he said, “They’re next door, in my library.  They’re my oldest friends.”

The books in the shelves around me in my study–biography, history, fiction– inspire me as much as the quiet of home.  This is where I’ve taken root. 

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in a dozen genres ranging from memoir to mystery.  His most recent book is Department of Death, which Publishers Weekly called “immensely enjoyable” in a starred review.

(Gingko image by Marzena P. from Pixabay)

(Oak image by Csaba Nagy from Pixabay)

Michigan Notable Book Awards Ignore LGBTQ Books

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Every year since 2004, the Library of Michigan has publicized as many as 20 Notable Michigan books “reflective of Michigan’s diverse ethnic, historical, literary, and cultural experience.”

But that diversity has a huge gap. No book with LGBTQ content has ever been among the books annually celebrated and publicized statewide. That fact was confirmed to me by one of the judges, who had no explanation. This judge did note that the award once went to a gay writer, but there was no gay content to the book: “So that doesn’t really count, does it?”

The awards program actually stretches all the way back to 1991 under different names. It sponsors statewide author tours for the winning authors, so it’s a big deal. The Detroit Free Press describes what it means to be a winner:

While there’s no cash award that comes with making the list, there is a real economic reward for writers and publishers in terms of increased sales. Emily Nowak, marketing and sales manager at Wayne State University Press, said appearing on the list can lift sales by several hundred copies. For regional titles with small press runs of between 1,000 and 3,000 copies, that’s a significant boost and could push a title into a second printing. Many Michigan libraries often buy multiple copies of books that appear on the list.

And then of course there’s the free publicity, which is priceless, and the invitations to speak that an award generates, and the prestige.

But evidently since 1991 there hasn’t been a single book with LGBTQ content published by a Michigan press or written by a Michigan author living here or elsewhere worthy of recognition.

Think about it: No notable LGBT books by talented queer Michigan authors in almost thirty years that the judges thought deserved being honored. Not one. The Library of Michigan’s web site claims that the awards “help build a culture of reading here in Michigan.” Perhaps so, but that culture being built is limited in its diversity.

Isn’t it time for the sponsors and judges of the Michigan Notable Books to stop ignoring LGBTQ books?


Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery. Publishers Weekly called his latest campus mystery Department of Death “immensely enjoyable.”

(Image by Sammy-Williams on Pixabay)

Warning to Writers: Don’t Diss Your Peers

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“Writers should not attack their peers.”

That’s what a famous author I deeply admired told me near the start of my career, and what he meant was personal attacks.  He’d made that mistake and it launched a feud that lasted years. 

I’ve been careful in my career not say much in public when fans ask me what I think about fellow authors if they’re not my favorite writers. If I do express an opinion, I keep the comments to something technical. So I might focus on their most recent book and say I wasn’t convinced by the point of view if that’s one of the problems I saw, of course.  I don’t make things up.

Even after a reading at a reception or a restaurant when things are more relaxed, I’m cautious, because whatever you say may travel much further than you expect and end up making you look bad. And what you say can end up on Twitter in seconds.  That’s what my mentor was trying to explain to me well before social media created firestorms.  He regretted disparaging another author personally because it made him look bad and they became enemies.

I saw something similar happen in my own career, though without the feud. A celebrated American author I’d never met and who had never insulted me in the U.S. apparently decided to mock me personally in an interview in a foreign magazine when he was on tour in Europe. He didn’t know the freelancer he was talking to was an acquaintance of mine who reported the incident in detail, with some scathing comments about the author who should have known better.

Feuds come and go in American fiction, and some of them raise questions of literary taste, commercial vs. literary fiction, sexism among reviewers, but what about rudeness and bad taste?  Jonathan Franzen has been a lightning rod because critics have praised him so highly.  Is that his fault? Best-selling author Jodi Picoult has dismissed him as nothing but a “literary darling,” ditto Jennifer Weiner who’s done so while publicly reveled in her wealth and mocking those at The New York Times who’ve ignored her as balding (a “hairist” remark if ever there was one). Whatever the legitimacy of their complaints, should authors be engaging in this kind of snark?   I guess the mockery had an impact because Weiner eventually became a contributing opinion writer at the Times….

But authors let loose on reviewers too.  Franzen himself has outdone them when he attacked Michiko Kakutani a few years ago after she panned his last book, calling her “the stupidest person in New York.” And Alice Hoffman attacked the Boston Globe reviewer who gave her novel a mixed review, actually asking her followers on Twitter to call this reviewer and express their outrage. None of this makes authors look good, no matter who the target is.

A writer friend of mine was once banging out a rebuke to a reviewer when his wife came up behind him and read what was on his Mac screen. “Do you want to be respected for your work,” she asked, “or have people think you’re an asshole?”

It’s a question every author should consider when getting ready to light into a peer.  It’s one thing to talk about the work, another to diss the writer.

Lev Raphael’s 27th book is the mystery Department of Death which Publishers Weekly called “immensely enjoyable” in a starred review.

(free image from Pixabay)