BOOK NEWS: The struggle to make novels matter 1965-99

 Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999

BY EVAN BRIER

U of Iowa P, 2024

ISBN: 9781609389390

https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-competition

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

“Novel Competition is a beautifully written institutional history of the literary novel in the United States from 1965 to 1999. Placing the novel in a larger cultural field—in competition with journalism, popular music, and films for cultural prestige—Brier illuminates not only novels, but their readers, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers.”—Erin A. Smith, University of Texas at Dallas

“Novel Competition confronts a fascinating and important subject: an examination of how the novel came to matter differently over the last third of the twentieth century. This decline is something that scholars of the novel have bemoaned for some time, and Brier offers a useful approach to making sense of it without resorting to well-trod and over-simplified answers. It is an engaging and important book.”—Emily Johansen, author of Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Life

“As a longtime Evan Brier fan, I’ve been eagerly waiting this book, his account of the American novel’s response to its declining fortunes. Brier dazzles with a virtuosic reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that takes us through the culture of The New Yorker, the Kansas literati, and the first stirrings of publishing’s conglomeration. He delivers an extraordinary investigation into Toni Morrison’s career as an editor—culminating in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters—and her publication of The Black Book. We follow Philip Roth to Eastern Europe and Cynthia Ozick’s and Saul Bellow’s characters into diaspora. Minimalism, rock and roll, New Hollywood, Rushdie’s fatwa, the American West—an astounding account of Larry McMurtry’s career—the memoir boom. Brier touches it all. Brier quietly transcends the limitations of dominant norms in the practices of literary history and the sociology of literature to give us an nth-dimensional view of American literature since 1965: how the novel became residual. He tells us what it means to believe—or disbelieve—in the power of fiction. It’s no less than thrilling.”—Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Evan Brier is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is author of A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Book News: Southern women writers' short story collections and their framing strategies

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers

BY HEATHER A. FOX

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840516 hardcover, 9781496840509 paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Arranging-Stories

A riveting history of how southern women writers negotiated authorial control in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century periodical market

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter—the authors featured in this book—publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection’s textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories’ arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works.

"Drawing heavily on archival materials, including reproductions of many photographs, letters, manuscript pages, and other materials, Arranging Stories is a treasure trove of previously unreleased materials that sheds important light on these authors and their works. It draws attention to the amount of agency that these authors wielded over their work, in ways that we haven't previously considered."  - Monica Carol Miller, author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion

"With impeccable research, Arranging Stories reveals the struggles of early women writers working for acceptance and agency within a patriarchal publishing world dominated by White men."  - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Heather A. Fox is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Her work in southern studies has appeared in south, Southern Studies, Janus Head, The Explicator, and the Faulkner Journal.

Book News: The key role of editors in the postwar era

The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America

BY ABRAM FOLEY

U of Minnesota P, 2021

ISBN 978-1-5179-1167-6

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-editor-function

Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.

The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and fresh textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

"The Editor Function fills an enormous void in the literary history of the postwar era. Abram Foley’s meticulous archival scholarship reveals the centrality—and the elusiveness—of editors and their practices. This is a must-read book for scholars of contemporary U.S. fiction and poetry, as well as for those interested in small-press publishing and avant-garde communities." —Paul Stephens, author of Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art and Literature

"If early modern Europe saw the ‘author function’ assume some of the social and legal roles traditionally played by publishers, Abram Foley shows us a more recent assumption of literary and artistic roles by editors. In the process, The Editor Function boldly extends the scope of literary history to the dynamic practices of publishing itself." —Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Abram Foley is lecturer in literature and the creative industries at the University of Exeter. He has worked as editorial fellow for Dalkey Archive Press and is the founding editor of ASAP/J.

Book News: Prizewinning poet and his publisher

 John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship

BY PATRICK SAMWAY S.J.

University of Notre Dame Press, October 2020

Hardcover ISBN 9780268108410

https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268108410/john-berryman-and-robert-giroux/

This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914–2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914–1972), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry. From their first meeting as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the early 1930s, Giroux and Berryman became lifelong friends and publishing partners. Patrick Samway received unprecedented access to Giroux’s letters and essays. By incorporating either sections or whole letters of the correspondence between Berryman and Giroux into this book, Samway makes available for the first time a historical account of their relationship, including revealing portraits of their personal lives.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

As Giroux edited over a dozen books by Berryman, his letters to the poet were often filled with editorial details and pertinent observations, emanating from his genuine affection for his friend, whose talent he never doubted, even as Berryman endured prolonged periods of hospitalization due to his alcoholism. Giroux gave Berryman the greatest gift he could: sustained encouragement to continue writing without trying to manipulate or discourage him in any way. But Giroux also had a deep-seated secret desire to surpass the essays written about Shakespeare by Berryman, as well as the book on Shakespeare written by their mutual professor Mark Van Doren. Giroux’s volume, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was finally published in 1982. Samway’s fascinating account of a gifted but troubled poet and his devoted yet conflicted editor will interest fans of Berryman and all readers and students of American poetry.

"Samway . . . charts in this revelatory literary study the close relationship between John Berryman and Robert Giroux. . . . Promising to show 'one of the most extraordinary personal and professional relationships in the history of American poetry,' Samway succeeds with a work both definitive and effortlessly readable." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A fascinating, in-depth analysis of the editor who saw Berryman through the publication of all of his major works.” —Paul Mariani, author of Dream Song

“The new insights gained from bringing Giroux into play are genuinely significant. The illumination of the mid-century literary publishing scene, far beyond Giroux’s involvement with Berryman, is revelatory.” —Peter Maber, author of William Marshall

Patrick Samway, S.J., professor emeritus of English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, is the author or editor/co-editor of fifteen books, including The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton (2015) and Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership (2018), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.