Tag: Now in Paperback

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/the-modern-face-of-book-tours/407641/?utm_source=SFTwitter

I miss your face. I miss tracing its contours with my finger while you slept or tried to eat. I miss your little feminine touches around our home—the candles, the food, the toilet paper. Everything reminds me of you, all the things you left behind—your photos, your books, your brother. I really thought he’d move out when you did, but he’s still here. On the couch. Constantly reminding me of you.

I miss that, no matter how much we’d argue, no matter who had their feelings hurt, or who felt belittled or emasculated, no matter whose penis was snickered at or whose vagina was mocked, whose money was stolen or who was told they smelled like an old wizard, no matter who put a dead mouse in whose gym bag or who brought whom back to life after suffocating them with a decorative pillow—no matter what, I always knew that the next morning we’d be lying by each other’s sides. Or I guess I should say, I thought I knew.

I miss having someone in my life with whom I was comfortable enough to just sit in silence for hours and hours without feeling pressure to say a single word. I remember our little “comfort silences” often lasting for days, even weeks; so that when we finally opened our mouths to speak all that came out was a series of stuttered dolphin yips. I miss that.

I miss your little quirks, like the way you’d cry while chopping onions and keep crying for hours afterward. Sometimes even for hours before. You always reacted so severely to onions.

You took our iPad. I miss it. I miss the apps and games. I miss checking my e-mail and surfing the Internet. I miss the crisp graphics and how surprisingly lightweight it was. I miss the mini easel that propped it up on tables. I loved that thing.

I miss being your partner on Pictionary nights with our friends, and the unspoken connection that we had. All you had to do was draw bunny ears for me to yell out, “You’re sleeping with Richard!” Not every couple can communicate without words like that. Not even our Pictionary friends, Amy and Richard.

I miss handing the phone to you when telemarketers would call asking for the lady of the house. Now I’m forced to say, “Just a second,” and then come back to the phone dressed like a woman because I’m ashamed to say you’re gone. That you gave up on us. That your brother won’t leave. All of it.

There’s a hollowness inside of me that was once filled by you. The kind of hollowness you feel when you tap on a secret wood panel in a rich old business tycoon’s library. But there’s no women’s underwear or Nazi memorabilia hidden behind my panel. Just emptiness. And sadness. Because you’re gone, and you took our freaking iPad.

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.

As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.

Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.

“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”

But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Photo

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.

The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.

“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”

Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.

Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.

Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.

“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.

At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.

“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.

Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.

“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”

Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.

The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.

But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.

Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.

As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.

On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.

The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).

It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.

At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.

Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.

“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”

Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.

As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.

Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.

“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”

But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Photo

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.

The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.

“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”

Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.

Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.

Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.

“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.

At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.

“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.

Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.

“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”

Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.

The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.

But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.

Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.

As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.

On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.

The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).

It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.

At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.

Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.

“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”

The New Yorker   6/5/2015  By Christopher Beam

One evening last week, a group of writers, including Paul Auster, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, and Murong Xuecun, gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to denounce censorship in China. Franzen read aloud a letter written by the Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 after being convicted of separatism. Homes read a poem by Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo. Behind them, protesters held up Shepherd Fairey–style portraits of the artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. A sign in front read “Governments Make Bad Editors.”

The rally, organized by the PEN American Center, was timed to coincide with BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s largest trade show in the United States, which was held across three days at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. As this year’s “guest of honor,” the Chinese government had sent a delegation of more than five hundred people from a hundred publishing houses, as well as twenty-four authors, and had rented twenty-five thousand square feet of space for a China-themed pavilion. “The Chinese government is using B.E.A. to paint a rosy picture of the world of letters in China, and to present its approved literature to the world,” said Andrew Solomon, president of the PEN American Center, in a speech on the library steps.

The backlash did not surprise B.E.A.’s organizers. “This is not specific to B.E.A., and this is not specific to China,” said Ruediger Wischenbart, head of international affairs for B.E.A., who has also worked at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Such events, he stressed, are always coming under fire for their invitees. In 2001, four weeks after September 11th, the Frankfurt Book Fair hosted a number of radical Muslim publishers. “People would ask, ‘Why are they here?’ ” he said. “I would say, ‘That’s the role of the book fair.’ ” At the Frankfurt fair in 2009, which also featured China, two dissident writers were invited to speak at an event, then disinvited, then re-invited after German journalists and diplomats protested, prompting Chinese officials to walk out and the fair’s director to apologize to China. In 2013, B.E.A. invited Russia; two years before that, Book World Prague hosted Saudi Arabia. These events, Wischenbart said, are not forums for literary or political debate. “Fairs are very practical things.”

The PEN protesters argued that the Chinese government was exploiting B.E.A.’s pragmatism for political purposes. In a speech at the rally, Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Center, called the expo “an opportunity for China to spread its soft power and show that creativity and literature are flourishing despite repressive one-party rule.”

That may indeed have been China’s goal when it accepted B.E.A.’s invitation. But when I visited the Javits Center, a massive glass complex on the Hudson River, China’s soft-power push didn’t seem to be making much headway. If anything, the China-themed events highlighted the failure of Chinese publishers to sell books abroad, and reflected the challenges the country faces as it tries to improve its public image and export its culture around the world.

The China pavilion was set off from the rest of the fair, both geographically and aesthetically. Whereas the tables of American and international publishers were covered in colorful banners and stacks of books and swag, the China section, which occupied its own square on the top floor, looked like an extremely well-maintained, poorly attended library. Plants sprouted from rugs of fake grass laid across white benches. What little explanation there was of the book displays did not appear to have been proofread. One sign announced, “Book Exhibition for the World Anti Fascist War Victory Memorial Cum Chinese People Anti Japanese War Victory Seventy Anniversaries.” (Perhaps governments do make bad editors.)

Walking into the main event space for the pavilion’s opening ceremony, I noticed that the audience was almost entirely Chinese (something I noticed at later events, as well). During his opening remarks, Wu Shangzhi, vice minister of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, said he looked forward to a “deep conversation” between Chinese publishers and authors and their American counterparts. But the target audience seemed to be viewers back home.

A theme quickly emerged: China is the second-largest publishing market in the world, but a massive gap remains between the number of American books published in China and the number of Chinese books published in the U.S. In his speech at the opening ceremony, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, celebrated our cultures’ shared love of books, quoting both Confucius (“You never open a book without learning something”) and Thomas Jefferson (“I cannot live without books”). But he acknowledged that “the number of Chinese works that have been translated and published in the U.S. remains very small.” According to vice minister Wu, in recent years China has published six times as many American books as the U.S. has published Chinese books.

I asked Zhang Gaoli, an editor for China Publishing Group, why Chinese publishers had trouble attracting American audiences. He had just finished screening a video that was part of a multimedia package called “The Chinese Dream,” in which talking heads had discussed the rise of China against B-roll of street cleaners, flying birds, and a smiling Xi Jinping. “Most Americans don’t understand China,” Zhang told me. Translation is part of the problem, he said, as is the obliviousness of most Americans to global affairs and the foundations of Chinese culture. But he seemed confident that the tables would soon turn. “In a few more decades, China will become the most advanced culture in the world,” he said, at which time Americans will want to study it. For now, China just needed one big book, one big author, to blow open the American market.

The problem, from what I could tell, was that publishers didn’t seem to know what American readers wanted. After the opening ceremony, the two Chinese officials, Wu and Cui, gave deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman a tour of the pavilion, showing him around the display shelves while a gaggle of Chinese media trailed behind. They paused to point out such books as Xi’s autobiography (largely a collection of speeches), an academic work called “Why and How the CPC Works in China,” and another book, titled “Confessions of Japanese War Criminals for Carrying Out Aggressions Against China.” The American nodded politely. If anyone present saw a connection between the overtly propagandistic nature of the books being promoted and disappointing sales outside the mainland, they didn’t let on, but the tour did seem to suggest that suppressing independent voices wasn’t just bad for writers, but bad for business.

Even the Chinese delegation’s most promising soft-power weapons, the twenty-four authors, had trouble drawing crowds. On Friday, a Chinese newspaper lamented the lack of attendees at the on-site book signings. “Where Did the Readers Go?” read the headline. According to the article, during one signing featuring the crime novelist A Yi, the author grabbed a book and tried to push it on a middle-aged American man as he walked by. A Yi soon returned, dejected. “You’d better stop,” said another author, Su Tong, jokingly patting him on the shoulder. “You’ll humiliate our country.” The article went viral in China, before being deleted. (ChinaFile has a translation here.) The rest of the planned book signings were cancelled as a result.

I asked Xu Zechen, whose novel “Running Through Beijing” focusses on the gritty life of an ex-con, why, given the critiques from some Chinese writers and PEN America, he had agreed to participate. He said it was simply a matter of promoting the English translations of his books. He hadn’t heard about the protest against the book fair, he said: He only has a Chinese cell phone, so “I can’t get online here.” When I told A Yi that some Chinese authors, such as Murong Xuecun, were criticizing those who joined the delegation and asked for his reaction, he responded, “I’m sorry, that is a very hard question for me to answer.”

Close observers of the Chinese literary world argue that breaking down the community of writers into dissidents and collaborators misses the nuances of Chinese publishing and politics. Some of the authors who were invited to join the B.E.A. delegation, such as Sheng Keyi, who published the novel “Death Fugue,” about the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, have had books banned in China. (Sheng was unable to get a visa at the last minute.) Others, like Feng Tang, also pride themselves on writing about taboo subjects.

“People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” said Eric Abrahamsen, an American translator and publishing consultant who lives in Beijing, and who drew up the initial list of Chinese authors to invite to B.E.A. Chinese writers don’t go to jail for writing novels, he said: “If that was happening in China, Sheng Keyi would be in jail. Yan Lianke would be in jail. And not only are they not in jail, they’re part of the system. They’re part of the Writers Association. They’re drawing a stipend from the government. They’re getting literary prizes. They have difficulties—sometimes they have trouble publishing, sometimes they don’t win prizes they would have otherwise—but their feet are on the streets.” Dissidents like Woeser, Tohti, and Liu Xiaobo, he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing. “People talk about Liu Xiaobo as a poet,” he said. “But he’s not a very good poet, and he’s not in jail because of his poetry. He’s in jail because of his political commentary on Charter 08.”

The twenty-four invited authors did ultimately manage to bridge some of the gap with American audiences, and perhaps sell some books in the process. On Saturday afternoon, the poet Lan Lan read some of her works at the Bowery Poetry Club, to a mixed Chinese and American audience. At the China pavilion, the literary critic Dale Peck talked to Xu Zechen about, among other things, his views on Tolstoy. And, at the Center for Fiction on Friday night, A Yi, who was a cop before he became a crime writer, expounded on the psychology of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” Occasionally, there was even substantive political debate. At the Javits Center, Zhang Weiwei, a professor at Fudan University, argued in favor of the Chinese government’s authoritarian model, while Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an analyst who hosts a show on China Central Television and wrote an authorized biography of former president Jiang Zemin, challenged Zhang’s assertions that this model will be sustainable once economic growth slows down.

When I approached Franzen at the PEN rally, he told me that, after visiting China, he’d come to understand the case for censorship. “China has known so much misery, so much social instability in the last century, that there’s this deep cultural fear of it that cuts substantially across political lines,” he said. “From the point of view of the Chinese government, trying to maintain social stability, there are reasons for censorship. And that’s a point of view that has a right to be heard, in the same way that the writers we were supporting here have a right to be heard.”

* This post was amended to correct the number of Chinese authors who appeared at BookExpo America.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/censorship-and-salesmanship-at-americas-biggest-book-fair

The New York Times   5/22/2015   By ALEXANDRA ALTER

If anyone knows how to sell books, it’s Jeff Kinney.

Over the last eight years, Mr. Kinney has built one of the most popular and lucrative franchises in publishing. His middle-grade series, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” the fictional illustrated diary of a middle-school misfit, has more than 150 million copies in print, in 45 languages. The series has spawned three feature films that have earned more than $225 million worldwide at the box office.

His fans still want more. Mr. Kinney is finishing the screenplay for a fourth film, working on two animated TV specials for Fox and furiously writing jokes for the 10th book.

But lately, Mr. Kinney’s attention has wandered elsewhere.

“If my whole life were ‘Wimpy Kid,’ it wouldn’t be very fulfilling,” he said during a recent interview. “I don’t want to be designing ‘Wimpy Kid’ pillow cases for the rest of my life.”

He’ll keep a studio on the third floor, where visitors can catch a glimpse of him at work, drawing on the 23-inch tablet that he uses to create his cartoons.

“We’re hoping my notoriety as a children’s author will be a draw for people,” he said. At the same time, Mr. Kinney says he’s wary of leaning too heavily on his brand and wants the store to outlast him. “This is not going to work if it’s just a shrine to my books,” he said.

Mr. Kinney, who made more than $20 million last year, might have become a patron rather than a practitioner of the trade, like the novelist James Patterson, who donated more than a million dollars to 178 bookstores around the country last year. But he wanted to leave a physical mark on Plainville, a former manufacturing town that is home to about 8,200 people.

“I wanted to add a bookstore to the landscape,” he said. With this foray into retailing, Mr. Kinney is joining a handful of authors who are injecting cash and a dose of literary celebrity into what seemed a dying trade. The novelist Ann Patchett came to the rescue of the Nashville literary community when she opened an independent bookstore there in 2011. Other authors who moonlight as booksellers include Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, Garrison Keillor and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Many small bookstores nationwide, surprisingly, are holding steady and even thriving. After years of decline, booksellers have rebounded lately as print sales have stabilized, and their ranks are swelling. Last year, the American Booksellers Association counted nearly 2,100 member stores, compared with about 1,650 in 2009.

Ms. Patchett, the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, said she had expected her store to be a financial drain. Instead, Parnassus has flourished, so much so that the store is expanding with a mobile book van. Ms. Patchett has used her clout as an author to persuade prominent writers like Elizabeth Gilbert, Donna Tartt, David Sedaris and Michael Chabon to give readings at the store.

When Mr. Kinney visited Nashville last year for a “Wimpy Kid” event held by Parnassus Books, he grilled Ms. Patchett about her business.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Just between us, how much money did you lose the first year?’ ” Ms. Patchett recalled. “And I said, ‘Jeff, I made money.’ ”

Mr. Kinney says he doesn’t expect to recover the millions of dollars he sank into the construction of the store, but he wants to create a sustainable business, one that could have a ripple effect and help revitalize the town. “Hopefully, we’ll break even,” he said, adding optimistically, “or even make a profit.”

Plainville, Pop. 8,200

Mr. Kinney, who was born on an Air Force base in Maryland and grew up in a suburb of Washington, has lived in Plainville for the last 12 years, with his wife, Julie, and their two sons, ages 9 and 12. He’s easy to spot riding around town on his red scooter. A tall, energetic, boyish-looking 44-year-old, Mr. Kinney coaches soccer and still works at his day job as the creative director of Poptropica, a story-based gaming website he created in 2007.

The Kinneys settled in Plainville because it was the one place that met all their criteria. They were looking for a town near her parents in Worcester and close to Boston, the headquarters of Funbrain, a company where Mr. Kinney worked. They drew a Venn diagram on a map of New England, and Plainville was in the middle. They took to the town immediately. They considered moving to a bigger city when the first “Wimpy Kid” book became a breakout best seller in 2007 but decided against it.

“We like the size of it,” he said. Instead of leaving, they moved into a bigger house.

With the bookstore, Mr. Kinney is extending his roots in Plainville.

“Obviously, the man could live anywhere in the world, and he chose to live in Plainville,” said Joseph Fernandes, the town administrator. “The real fortune for Plainville is that Jeff doesn’t have to rely on how much money he makes running a bookstore to feed his family. Without Jeff Kinney, I don’t know how well a bookstore would do at that location.”

The store’s playful name is meant to evoke tall tales, but it is fitting in other ways. The arrival of a bookstore is an unlikely turn for Plainville, a town incorporated in 1905 that was once home to manufacturers of jewelry, eyeglasses and plastic parts. The new store is an anomaly next to venerable institutions like Gerry’s Barber Shop and Don’s Diner (“Family Owned Since 1936”).

In 2012, Mr. Kinney surprised residents when he bought a crumbling building in the town’s historic center for $300,000. Over the decades, the building, which dated to the 1850s, was a barbershop, a drugstore, a tearoom and a general store. Then, for 17 years, it sat vacant, a depressing blight on the town. Like everyone else in Plainville, Mr. Kinney grew tired of looking at it.

Mr. Kinney was not sure what to do with his new purchase at first. At one point, he sought advice from his core audience, a group of local fifth graders, whose suggestions included a roller coaster, a swimming pool filled with M&Ms and a bookstore.

The bookstore idea stuck, especially since a nearby Borders had closed. “What’s the thing that everybody loves and treasures the most?” Mr. Kinney said. “It’s a bookstore.”

The project had a rocky start. An inspection revealed that the building could not be salvaged, and it had to be demolished rather than restored. “That was a tough day for a lot of people,” Mr. Kinney said. “You felt history being erased.”

In its place, Mr. Kinney commissioned a three-story building with architectural echoes of the old general store. The building is made from reclaimed wood and other recycled materials, and the interior features hand-painted replicas of old signs that hung on the building over the decades. Mr. Kinney designed the store’s logo and sign himself: a bug-eyed cartoon elephant holding a book with its trunk, under the words “An Unlikely Story.”

The story of Mr. Kinney’s rapid rise to fame is itself pretty unlikely. He studied computer science and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, and he intended to become an agent with what is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Instead, he ended up as a programmer at a medical software company and then a game designer at Funbrain, an educational gaming website.

On the side, he created comic strips, which he had loved since his childhood. But his work was rejected by newspaper syndicates. In 1998, he came up with the idea for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” the illustrated diary of an acerbic and devious middle-school boy named Greg Heffley. The stories were semi-autobiographical, loosely based on Mr. Kinney’s childhood and “put through the fiction blender.”

He had been working on the series for six years when his boss at Funbrain suggested he post it on the company’s website. It attracted millions of readers. Two years later, he sold it to Abrams, an art and illustrated-book publisher.

When Mr. Kinney started writing “Wimpy Kid,” he had adult readers in mind. His editor persuaded him to publish it as a children’s book instead. The Abrams children’s imprint, Amulet Books, had measured expectations and printed 15,000 copies of the first book in 2007. It was an overnight success that has grown exponentially with each book. Last year, demand was so high that Amulet printed 5.5 million copies of the ninth book in the series. This fall, the 10th book will be published simultaneously in more than 90 countries.

Mr. Kinney’s empire has grown so large that Abrams measures “Wimpy Kid” sales separately from the rest of its children’s and adult imprints. A “Wimpy Kid” team made up of about half a dozen people meets weekly to manage the brand.

“When you’re buying enough paper for five and a half million books, the stakes are high,” said Michael Jacobs, president and chief executive of Abrams.

Bringing a Store to Life

One morning, a few weeks before the May 30 opening day, Mr. Kinney was a bit groggy as he surveyed the store’s progress. He had had just three hours of sleep the previous two nights. He spotted a patch of ceiling in the basement that needed to be painted, and he questioned the placement of a big bookcase in the cafe. The shelves, with enough space for 3,500 books, were still bare, but the leather armchairs and display tables for new releases had arrived.

The space was coming to life, with fanciful touches like flying books hanging from the ceiling with their pages spread like wings. A few chalkboards were scattered through the section, hidden at toddler level behind secret panels, so children could write messages or discover one of Mr. Kinney’s doodles.

The store will have a prominent “Wimpy Kid” section, with a roughly 500-pound bronze statue of Greg Heffley by the sculptor Allyson Vought, along with “Wimpy Kid” books, stationery and T-shirts.

The nearly 16,000-square-foot building will double as an event space for local theater performances, yoga classes, ballroom dancing, karaoke nights and occasional screenwriting and cartooning workshops, which Mr. Kinney will teach. It will also serve as the new headquarters for Wimpy Kid Inc., which Mr. Kinney and his two full-time employees now run out of a small house next to his home.

Over the years, Mr. Kinney has visited hundreds of independent bookstores. When he decided to open his own, he needed to learn how to run one. He sought advice from the owner of one of his favorites, the Northshire Bookstore in Vermont, and took a few of his staff members there for a retreat last summer.

“We talked about the nitty-gritty of running a bookstore, everything from numbers to relationships with publishers and the aesthetics of a store,” said Chris Morrow, co-owner of the Northshire Bookstore.

Early on, Mr. Kinney hired Paz & Associates, an organization that trains and counsels independent bookstore owners, which studied the town’s population size and traffic patterns and advised him on a variety of things, including the store’s layout and inventory and how many employees and parking spaces it would need. They told him that a bookstore in Plainville would have been impractical for the average owner, but a world-famous author had a better shot at succeeding at making it a destination.

“I’m sure they were thinking we were crazy to open a bookstore in a town of 8,000,” Mr. Kinney said. “Maybe they still do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/business/media/the-bookstore-built-by-jeff-kinney-the-wimpy-kid.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

The New Yorker   5/8/2015   By John Kenney

“Look Who’s Back,” a satirical novel by the German author Timur Vermes, imagines Adolf Hitler waking up, Rip Van Winkle-style, on the streets of Berlin in 2011. He’s mistaken for an actor and becomes a talk-show host and a YouTube phenomenon. Since it first appeared in Germany in 2012, the book has sold two million copies in that country.

—the Times

Dear Sally,

How funny is Pol Pot? I’d wager he’s funnier than a lot of people think. So imagine this idea for a novel: it’s present-day Los Angeles. Santa Monica, say. On a park bench, a man wakes up. It’s Pol Pot. Except, because it’s Santa Monica, there are a lot of guys asleep on benches, and on the bench next to Pol Pot is Lon Nol. (Except, for some reason I haven’t figured out yet, neither recognizes the other.) They become friends when they figure out they’re both from Cambodia. Turns out they both love the weather in L.A. and don’t miss the humidity of Cambodia at all. At first, no one recognizes them, because (a) it’s Los Angeles and (b) neither is very recognizable. They get jobs at a Starbucks and, eventually, customers start thinking they look familiar, but, because it’s Los Angeles, everyone just assumes that they’re character actors or extras on “The Good Wife.” Problem is, every time someone orders a cappuccino, Pol and Lon think the person is saying “Kampuchea,” and it triggers something, and they kill the person. Maybe not literally, though. Maybe they just shout “Kampuchea!” and it becomes a hilarious new thing that people say, and it goes viral, and they have a show on Amazon Prime about two guys trying to make it and not kill anyone in L.A., “Togetherness,” but with a cast capable of killing everyone in Los Feliz. I think it could be funny but also serious, with a message, though at present I have no idea what that message might be. Let’s talk.

***

Hey, Sally,

Haven’t heard from you since I sent that Pol Pot idea, which you probably guessed I wasn’t serious about (unless you liked it, and then I very much was). But I’ve been thinking a lot about mass murderers and how funny they are in a satirical-but-with-a-deeper-meaning way. So. It’s present-day Moscow. On a park bench, almost frozen to death, is Josef Stalin. Why is he not dead in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis? No idea. But there he is, alive, in a swanky neighborhood, near the Patriarshiye Ponds. He’s in a bad mood because (a) he’s freezing to death and (b) the neighborhood now has an H&M and a Panera Bread, and he’s wondering why there’s so much “stuff” on the shelves. People recognize him, of course, but assume he’s an actor. Somehow, he gets a job at a TV station. He works the night shift. The station shows reruns of “Magnum, P.I.,” and Stalin becomes obsessed with Tom Selleck because they have identical moustaches and thick, wavy hair. He loves T. C. and Rick, but finds Higgins deeply annoying, and decides that, when he meets Magnum, he will have Higgins purged. Eventually, Stalin finds his way back to power, but Russians don’t notice any difference from Putin and assume Putin has grown a beautiful moustache and gotten hair plugs, which no one wants to mention.

***

Hi, Sally,

Left you a bunch of messages but haven’t heard back. Your assistant said you guys are no longer representing me? She’s funny. Anyway. What about this? Just one word: Pinochet. Followed by more words. It’s present-day Williamsburg. General Pinochet wakes up on a park bench, outside a cold-press coffee shop. He’s in full-dress uniform. No one thinks this is odd. In fact, people ask where he got the marvelous epaulets. He enters the coffee shop and is surrounded by men with beards and women with tattoos. He assumes he has wandered into anti-establishment headquarters. He mentions this to the barista. The barista says, “No, man. This is the establishment.” He is heartened by this. A Rihanna song is on the radio. Pinochet likes it. Near him sit two hip-hop record producers. They notice that Pinochet has jotted down, Dat ain’t cold, dat’s Chile. They sign him to a record deal that instant. On the flight to Los Angeles to record the song, Pinochet throws them both from the plane. He’s soon recognized for who he really is and takes a job at Goldman Sachs, where he becomes the head of fixed income within six months and, for some reason, earns the nickname Chet the Pants Man.

***

Hey there, Sally,

I’m actually outside your office. It’s raining. And I really need to use the toilet. Can you guys buzz me up? I know you have one of those security cameras and can see me. Haha. In the meantime, I have what I think is a very exciting idea for you: he was funny. He was funny-looking. He was Heinrich Himmler. Head of the S.S. His middle name was Luitpold. How great is that? It’s present-day Scarsdale. Himmler wakes up on a bench. Three members of the boys’ varsity lacrosse team happen to be walking by, and Himmler says, “Stop. Are you Jews?” Well, this is a mistake, as one of the boys is Mike Schneider, a six feet four all-Westchester defenseman, who got in early decision to Duke and will most likely start on the team in the spring. Mike can bench-press four hundred pounds and picks Himmler up by the larynx. Before blacking out, Himmler wonders why there are no S.S. guards to be seen, just fit women in yoga pants. Mike, who’s a sweet kid, feels bad for hurting the old guy. He buys Himmler a Coke. After practice, which Himmler watches excitedly, rooting for Mike but also occasionally shouting anti-Semitic slurs, which Mike gently corrects by saying, “Dude, seriously, you can’t say that stuff,” Mike shares some of his music with Himmler. They listen to the Indigo Girls song “Watershed,” off the “Nomads Indians Saints” album. Himmler asks to hear the song over and over and is deeply moved, saying, in an awed whisper, “Not even Leni Riefenstahl could sing like this.” Himmler undergoes an immediate change of personality and later helps Mike take second prize in his oral-presentation class, with a speech titled, “What Hitler Was Really Like—And It Wasn’t Good.” At a party for Mike’s graduation, the family dog, a German shepherd, chases Himmler into the street, where Himmler is struck and killed by a truck. The truck is carrying kosher food. The dog’s name is Luitpold.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/to-my-literary-agent-re-look-whos-back?mbid=social_facebook

New Republic   5/9/2015  By Oliver Farry

In Wim Wenders’s very earnest new film Every Thing Will Be Fine, James Franco plays a young writer, Tomas, who is involved in a fatal accident and can’t seem to decide if it has affected him badly or not. The inference one is probably expected to draw is that it has had an adverse effect, but literary success follows, so maybe it was not such a bad thing after all. When challenged at one point in the film about his books after the accident being better, Tomas says, in a scene that might have been culled from a daytime soap: “I’m a writer. With every book I write I hope to get a little better. That’s all there is to it.”

Wenders used to make beautifully wistful films about social misfits, nostalgia, and lack of belonging. That was way back in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, a few serviceable documentaries aside, his work is of a far lower stamp. Every Thing Will Be Fine does not quite plumb the depths of his career nadir, The Million Dollar Hotel, a 2000 collaboration with Bono, but it takes itself way too seriously for such an insubstantial film. Part of the problem is Franco in the main role, who despite how much he might say it on screen, does not pass muster as a writer, and certainly not a critically-acclaimed one. Franco in real life is a published author, but he is also an artist and a filmmaker, none of which he is particularly accomplished at (his two Faulkner adaptations, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, were as pointless as they were bloodless and thankfully barely noticed by anyone). He is more campus dilettante than Renaissance Man, but another problem with Every Thing Will Be Fine is that watching mournful films about writing and writers is just not much fun. Few writers in history, the good as well as the bad, have led interesting lives (as recent events have shown, they are sometimes not even very smart) and their craft is a particularly undramatic one.

Another recent film, the French thriller A Perfect Man, directed by Yann Gozlan, makes writing very dramatic indeed by portraying it as fraudulent. Mathieu, played by Pierre Niney, is a twenty-something aspiring novelist gifted with the industriousness common to budding writers who don’t realize how untalented they are. He knocks off a novel in a hurry, probably without even rewriting it, sends it off to a Left Bank publishing house and receives a suspiciously abrupt rejection letter. He loses faith until, one day when working as a removal man, he stumbles upon a rather gripping war diary left behind by a recently deceased veteran of the Algerian War. Sensing an opportunity, he types it up and submits it as a novel. It is a roaring success, the reviews dythrambique, as the French would say, and he lands an improbably sexy young literary critic (Anna Girardot) for a girlfriend. She grants him access to the French haute bourgeoisie and the royalties on the book allow him to live comfortably until his publishers get antsy about the delay on his “difficult” second novel. Mathieu then starts getting anonymous threatening letters from someone who appears to have seen through his ruse.

A Perfect Man is a silly, enjoyable caper that is deliciously trashy but nonetheless resolves the conundrum of making a none-too-convincing character’s literary success credible. Not that it’s terribly original— its storyline is similar to the 2012 Bradley Cooper film The Words, which in turn has been accused of plagiarizing a Swiss novel from a decade earlier. And while A Perfect Man cannot be considered too realistic, it does provide a palpable sense of the fear and shame one gets from going a sustained period without writing.

The better, more enjoyable films about writers tend to externalize the writerly angst in a heightened, almost baroque fashion. John Torturro’s Barton Fink struggles to write on his first job in Hollywood and winds up being framed for a murder. Two of the more accomplished Stephen King adaptations, Misery and The Shining, play on the anxiety of literary fame and writer’s block, respectively. In Rob Reiner’s Misery, bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) falls into the clutches of Annie Wilkes, a deranged fan played by Kathy Bates. Sheldon is promptly, ahem, “persuaded” as to the folly of killing off his bestselling character, Misery Chastain, and by immobilizing him with some heavy-handed tactics, Annie sees to it that he has no distractions from his writing.

In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1981), writer Jack Torrance takes on the job of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the Rockies, bringing his young family with him. He is convinced that the isolation and the light workload will be conducive to getting to work on his novel. It is a feeling familiar to many writers, convinced that a retreat will be the catalyst to productivity. The reality turns out to be somewhat different, with Torrance stalling for weeks on end and eventually being driven to madness, apparently by ghosts of the hotel’s past. Jack works through his writer’s block by typing “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeatedly, and he also takes to writing on the walls of the hotel. Though Stephen King himself disliked the film, it is, in its particular over-the-top fashion, a fine parable of thwarted literary effort. The fact that Jack, in his madness, turns on his wife (Shelley Duval) and young son is a barely sublimated portrayal of the writer who allows devotion to their work to destroy their relationship with their family.

One of the great over-the-top films of this type is John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness, a critical and commercial flop on its release in 1995, but which is a brilliantly horrific account of the power of the writer. In this case, the writer, a reclusive horror master Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), is absent— he has gone missing, and his publisher assigns an insurance investigator, played by Sam Neill, to locate him. Cane’s books have been known to induce violent hysteria in some readers and it appears his latest magnum opus, In the Mouth of Madness, is the deadliest yet. The film is part satire of the publishing industry and part white-knuckle thrill ride, and is a hugely enjoyable example of a small sub-genre of film where manipulative writers confuse and terrorize their characters.

Alain Resnais’s 1977 collaboration with David Mercer, Providence, stars John Gielgud as an ageing novelist who conceives of his relationship with his family in a series of imagined “drafts.” This approach was later used in a rather clumsier way by Marc Forster in Stranger than Fiction (2006), in which Emma Thompson was the puppet-mistress of a bemused everyman played by Will Ferrell. The recent Norwegian film Blind (directed by Eskil Vogt) features a novelist who has recently lost her eyesight and who projects her fantasies and suspicions through her writing, imagining her husband cheating on her with a younger woman, upon whom, on a whim, she bestows sudden blindness.

More successful still is Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, in which two screenwriting brothers, a fictional version of Kaufman and his even more fictional identical twin sibling Donald, are living together while pursuing wildly different projects. Charlie is tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s 1998 non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, about rare-orchid poaching in Florida, while Donald is attending Robert McKee seminars and is pitching a trashy thriller to a Hollywood studio. The pair end up collaborating after Charlie runs aground, and they encounter Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, and the film diverges sharply, or rather desists from attempting to follow, her original text. The screenwriting credits for Adaptation are shared by the two brothers, making Donald Kaufman, along with the Coen brothers’ editor Roderick Jaynes, one of the few fictional people to be nominated for an Oscar. It is also one of the few instances where real-life authors have been integrated into the meta-textual fabric of a film (Guillaume Nicloux’s 2014 mockumentary The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is another). One imagines the rarity of this happening is less due to reticence on the part of authors than the fact that most writers are simply not recognizable enough for the conceit to be fully effective.

One of the main problems with films about writers is that the films are too often very inarticulate when talking about books. This is clear from some of the worse films of the sort, such as biopics of Sylvia Plath (Sylvia, 2003) where Ted Hughes, played by Daniel Craig, actually tells the young Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) to ‘write what you know;’ and Iris Murdoch (Iris, 2001), where Murdoch’s lectures are rendered rather gauche by Richard Eyre’s terribly middle-brow direction. Jane Campion has made two of the better literary biopics in An Angel at My Table (1990), in which Kerry Fox plays the troubled New Zealand writer Janet Frame, and Bright Star (2009), which dramatizes the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The first succeeds because it is based directly on the first volume of Frame’s memoirs, the second because it doesn’t concern itself overly with writing, focusing instead on the tale of doomed love.

Elsewhere, even films that have a credible writerly presence—such as Ethan Hawke’s Jesse (Hawke is another real-life writer) in the Before Sunrise trilogy— can’t escape sounding silly when talk turns to books, as a clunky conversation about Jesse’s work demonstrates in the third film Before Midnight. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel Wonder Boys on the other hand undercuts the pomposity of the literary world, having a fabulously self-regarding Updikesque character played by Rip Torn (his opening words in a conference speech are “I… am… a… writer”). When Michael Douglas’s creative writing professor Grady Tripp shows the manuscript of his long-awaited second novel to a student played by Katie Holmes, she is disheartened to find the 2,000 page behemoth is nigh unreadable, bogged down in superfluous details, such as “horses’ dental records.” Wonder Boys is an intelligent but light-hearted campus romp, its setting a site of literary ambition, both hopeful and frustrated (why else do creative writing MFAs exist other than to give a living to impecunious writers, themselves graduates of the same courses?) and it is as funny as the better Woody Allen films about writers (of which there are many, from Love and Death to Midnight in Paris).

One of the few better “serious” films about writing is the 2006 Norwegian film Reprise, directed by Joachim Trier and written by Eskil Vogt, director of Blind. The film recounts the contrasting fortunes of two childhood friends who attain literary fame at around the same time, one of them turning away from it after a bout of depression. Reprise is particularly good at talking about literature in a way that most films about writers aren’t. Erik, Phillip, and their circle sound like real writers in their conversations among themselves and also in their TV appearances, parroting Knausgaardian axioms about creating one’s own literary destiny by living it out. It is as annoyingly pretentious as it is credible, but these are convincing young writers, possessed of a certainty they are radically reinventing literature from the cocoon of the world’s most comfortable society. Joachim Trier doesn’t spend any time showing us his heroes’ efforts at writing— the drama takes place at margins of writing: the bravado, the anguish of poor reviews, and the withering confidence of the afflicted writer. Reprise is a good film about writers because it recognizes that much of the stuff of writing and literary circles is, well, talk. And unlike many other such films, it can talk that talk.

This article was originally published on New Statesman.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121754/how-make-good-film-about-writing

4/19/2015   New Republic   By William Giraldi

The committed bibliophile is cousin to the obsessive, an easily seduced accumulator frequently struck with frisson. Cram your home with books, and you’re lovingly called a collector; cram it with old newspapers, and you’re derisively called a hoarder. But be honest: The collector is a hoarder, too—a discriminating and noble-minded hoarder, perhaps, but a hoarder just the same.

Not long into George Gissing’s 1903 novel The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, you find a scene that no self-respecting bibliophile can fail to forget. In a small bookshop in London, the eponymous narrator spots an eight-volume first edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “To possess those clean-paged quartos,” Ryecroft says, “I would have sold my coat.” He doesn’t have the money on him, and so he returns across town to his flat to retrieve it. Too broke for a ride on an omnibus, and too impatient to wait, he twice more traverses the city on foot, back and forth between the bookshop and home, toting a ton of Gibbon. “My joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought. Except, indeed, of the weight. I had infinite energy but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching—exultant!”

A pleasing vista onto the early twentieth-century life of one English writer, Gissing’s autobiographical novel is also an effusive homage to book love. “There were books of which I had passionate need,” says Ryecroft, “books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment. I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them”—to have and to hold—“my own property, on my own shelf.” In case you don’t quite take Ryecroft’s point, he later repeats “exultant” when recalling that afternoon of finding the Gibbon—“the exultant happiness.”¹ Exultation is, after all, exactly what the bibliophile feels most among his many treasures.

Those of us who dwell within mounts of books—a sierra of them in one room, an Everest in another; hulks in the kitchen, heaps in the hallway—can tell you that, in addition to the special bliss of having and holding them, it’s a hefty, crowded, inconvenient life that’s also an affront to the average bank account. (New hardback books are expensive to buy and economically neutered the second you do.) What’s more, your collection is a fatal Niagara if it falls. Every collector knows the probably apocryphal story of the nineteenth-century composer and bibliophile Charles-Valentin Alkan, found dead in an avalanche of his own books, crushed when his shelves upended onto him. Like the sex addict who suffers an aortic catastrophe during coitus, Alkan, at least, died smiling.

Although some see a distinction between the bibliophile and the collector, your Merriam Webster’s nicely insists that “bibliophile” means both one who loves books and one who collects them, which makes supreme sense to me—I can’t conceive of one who loves books but doesn’t collect them, or one who collects books but doesn’t love them. I employ “collector” as Robertson Davies does in his essay “Book Collecting”: not as a quester after books both rare and valuable, but as a gatherer of all books that match his interests. If you have lots of interests, you better have lots of rooms, and mighty floorboards to boot.²

What does it mean when what you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you’ll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes: Someone with a thousand books is someone you want to talk to; someone with a thousand shoes is someone you suspect of belonging to the Kardashian clan. Books are not objects in the same way that shoes are objects. This is what Milton means in his sublime “Areopagitica,” as necessary now as it was in 1644, when he asserted that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Potency of life, purest efficacy, living intellect: These are the world-enhancing elements you have in any well-made book worth reading.

For many of us, our book collections are, in at least one major way, tantamount to our children—they are manifestations of our identity, embodiments of our selfhood; they are a dynamic interior heftily externalized, a sensibility, a worldview defined and objectified. For readers, what they read is where they’ve been, and their collections are evidence of the trek. For writers, the personal library is the toolbox which contains the day’s necessary implements of construction—there’s no such thing as a skillful writer who is not also a dedicated reader—as well as a towering reminder of the task at hand: to build something worthy of being bound and occupying a space on those shelves, on all shelves. The personal library also heaves in reproach each time you’re tempted to grab the laptop and gypsy from one half-witted Web page to another. If you aren’t suspicious of a writer who isn’t a bibliophile, you should be.³

But you might have noticed: The book as a physical, cultural object is worth very little and losing value every quarter, it seems. As any urbanite knows, you’ll find them in boxes in alleyways on the first of every month—people can’t give them away. And now that more readers are choosing the electronic alternative, the illuminated convenience of downloading books and storing them in the troposphere where they remain accessible but simulated … well, I’ll let James Salter pull the alarm. “A tide is coming in,” he wrote in 2012, “and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance.”

One tide or another is always surging in on us—technology always makes certain modes of consumption obsolete, and for much of that obsolescence we can be grateful—but perhaps we should heed Salter’s anxiety here, because bibliophiles won’t be the only ones left denuded should the physical book be put to death.

My own book collecting began in high school, at just about the time I was certain that literature would be my life—not an occupation but an existence. It’s been a back-aching, U-Hauling two decades because I’ve resided in a dozen homes across four different states. I’ve also inherited a book collection from a beloved mentor, a colossus that sits boxed and bulging in my grandparents’ basement in New Jersey—I can’t wedge any more books into our Boston home without inciting my spouse and children to mutiny. In the mid-’90s, when my grandparents lived near the Raritan River, I stored several hundred titles in a first-floor bedroom, and when the river swallowed half the town one year, all those books were swallowed, too. After the waters retreated, I laid the books out in the sun on the sidewalk, cataloging my losses in a kind of requiem. In 1941, Rose Macaulay wrote beautifully about losing her library, her whole apartment, in the Blitz—“a drift of loose, scorched pages fallen through three floors to street-level, and there lying sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of mortality”—and I’ve never read that essay without blurred vision.

When a bibliophile reads a classic, he tends to remember most vividly those portions that might by chance speak to an ardor for books—he’s pleased to find some kinship with the greats—and so some of my most dominant memories of Rousseau’s Confessions or Boswell’s Life of Johnson or Waugh’s A Handful of Dust or Woolf’s Night and Day or Orwell’s Coming Up for Air happen to be those swaths of prose which confirm my own hunch that a life with books is more meaningful than a life without books. As a child reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I was spun around by that mention of Captain Nemo’s personal library aboard his vessel, all 12,000 tomes of it. The narrator, Pierre Aronnax, comments that Nemo must have “six or seven thousand volumes,” and Nemo replies, “Twelve thousand, M. Aronnax. These are the only ties which bind me to the earth.” If Nemo indeed owned 12,000 books, I knew, the way a beast knows the coming season, that I wanted 12,000, too.

One collects books for reasons that are, of course, acutely personal, but I have a memory of the afternoon when I was shown how others perceive the flexing brawn of a book collection. At 19 years old, in surrender from an unkillable Northeast winter, I moved to South Carolina, and one day a police officer arrived at my apartment to question me about cash that had been thieved from someone with whom I’d spent a night—she thought the thief was me and not, as it turned out, her roommate. There were prints on the box from which the cash had been stolen, and the officer asked if I’d be willing to go to the station to have my own prints taken. Of course I would, I said, and as I asked for driving directions, he squinted at the bookshelves. “All those books,” he said, and then asked the infamous cliché of a question, the question that occurs only to nonreaders: “You read all those books?” I told him that I’d read fewer than half—the truth was that I’d read fewer than half of half—and he said, “Well clearly the thief’s not you. No one smart enough to read all those books is dumb enough to steal cash from such a pretty gal.” And then he began walking his fingertips along the spines as if he’d just realized that the books might confer on him some magical capacity.⁵

He’d have been right about the capacity but wrong about the magic. A life with books is a life of pleasure, yes, but also a life of work. Not just the work of lugging their heft each time you move, but the work of reading them, the work of discernment, of accepting the loquacity of the world’s bliss and hurt and boredom, of welcoming both small and seismic shifts to your selfhood, of attempting to earn those intimations of insight that force the world briefly into focus. That’s the reason the cop was wrong in thinking that readers are smart by default: Dedicated readers are precisely those who understand the Socratic inkling that they aren’t smart enough, will never be smart enough—the wise are wise only insofar as they know that they know nothing. In other words: Someone with all the answers has no use for books. Anthony Burgess once suggested that “book” is an acronym for “Box Of Organized Knowledge,” and the collector is pantingly desperate for proximity to that knowledge—he wants to be buffeted, bracketed, bulletproofed by books. Leigh Hunt wrote of literally walling himself in with his collection: “I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. … When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my head against them.”

The physicality of the book, the sensuality of it—Oliver Wendell Holmes called his collection “my literary harem”—the book as a body that permits you to open it, insert your face between its covers and breathe, to delve into its essence, its offer of reciprocity, of intercourse—this is what many of us seek in the book as object. In his bantam essay on book love, Anatole France starts off swinging: “There is no true love without some sensuality. One is not happy in books unless one loves to caress them.”⁶ There was little that escaped the Updikian caress, and he wrote more than once about the pleasures and peculiarities of book collecting. In an essay called “The Unread Book Route,” about A History of Japan to 1334, Updike wrote: “The physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim, the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it.” Leave it to the unerringly sensual and curious Updike to a) refer to book type as “tasty,” and b) think as a youth that he needed to know something about Japan prior to 1334.

Borges said: “My father’s library was the capital event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it.”

Updike’s point about the Proustian talisman is a crucial one for bibliophiles: Their collections are not only proof of their evolution but monuments to their past, fragrant and visual stimulators of recall. Gissing’s hero Ryecroft says just that: “I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” Across a collector’s bookshelves, upright and alert like uniformed sentinels, are segments of his personal history, segments that he needs to summon in order to ascertain himself fully, which is part of his motive for reading books in the first place—whatever else it is, a life with books is incentive to remember, and in remembering, understand. Borges said: “My father’s library was the capital event in my life. The truth is that I have never left it.” Borges’s own books, then, are both collection and connection, an emotional umbilical to his father. In his autobiography The Words, Sartre spends several pages of the first chapter recalling his grandfather’s book love and the sanctity of the old man’s library, how as a boy Sartre secretly touched those much revered tomes, “to honor my hands with their dust,” and in that honoring, the honing of affection for his dear grandfather.

Since bibliophiles are happy to acknowledge the absurdity, the obese impracticality of gathering more books than there are days to read them, one’s collection must be about more than remembering—it must be about expectation also.⁸ Your personal library, swollen and hulking about you, is the promise of betterment and pleasure to come, a giddy anticipation, a reminder of the joyous work left to do, a prompt for those places to which your intellect and imagination want to roam. This is how the nonreader’s question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophile’s answer must still be no. Agonizingly aware of the human lifespan, the collector’s intention is not to read them all, but, as E.M. Forster shares in his essay “My Library,” simply to sit with them, “aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm, are waiting to be used”—although, as Forster knows, books don’t have to be used in order to be useful.⁹

One of the most imperishable notions ever set down about a personal library can be found inside Sven Birkerts’s essay “Notes from a Confession.” Birkerts speaks of “that kind of reading which is just looking at books,” of the “expectant tranquility” of sitting before his library: “Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.” Expectant tranquility and sense of futurity—those are what the noncollector and what the downloader of e-books does not experience, because only an enveloping presence permits them.

I’m sorry but your Nook has no presence.

Forgoing physicality, readers of e-books defraud themselves of the communion which emerges from that physicality. Because if Max Frisch is correct in defining technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it,” then one might argue that we aren’t really experiencing a novel or poems on our e-readers. We might be reading them—although I find that an e-reader’s scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to read—but fully experiencing them is something else altogether.

You scroll and swipe and click your way through your life, scanning screens for information and interruption, screens that force you into a want of rapidity. Why you’d welcome another screen in your life, another enticement to rapidity and diversion, is a question you might ask yourself. Paradise Lost will not put up with rapidity and diversion, and that is exactly why, for some of us, a physical book will always be superior reading, because it allows you to be alone with yourself, to sit in solidarity with yourself, in silence, in solitude, in the necessary sensitivity that fosters development and imagination. A physical book makes it possible to fend off the nausea roused by the electronic despotism we’ve let into our lives—it doesn’t permit blinking, swiping, scrolling, popping-up impediments to your concentration, doesn’t confront it with a responsive screen trying to sell you things you don’t need. On a train with only a paperback of Paradise Lost, you are forced into either an attempt at understanding and enjoyment or else an uninterrupted stare out your window. Your Kindle Fire is so named because Amazon understands that we Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless choices, the arson of our calm. At the first signs of Milton’s difficulty, you can nix the whole excursion and romp around with a clattering of apps.

Let me pre-empt certain mumbles by saying that I can recognize the value of electronic reading and would not wish it away. The e-reader is a godsend to those travelers who want to carry all eight volumes of Gibbon with them. (Although you can question if a traveler would really make use of Gibbon’s dreadnought while traipsing through foreign climes. Aldous Huxley has a funny essay called “Books for the Journey” in which he writes: “Thick tomes have traveled with me for thousands of kilometers across the face of Europe and have returned with their secrets unviolated.”) E-books have aided an infirm publishing industry while offering an inexpensive option to those who would never spend $35 on a hardback. The e-reader is also sometimes the only way to have a book if you don’t live near a library and if the postal carrier has trouble reaching your wilderness grot.

At my alma mater recently I gave a lecture on the importance of literature in this digital age, and I might have half-earnestly referred to the Internet as an insane asylum where the misanthropic and lonesome go to die, because afterward a 90-year-old woman three-pronged her way to the podium to give me a deserved lashing. Without the Internet, she said, without e-books blaring forth from an illuminated screen, she wouldn’t be able to read at all, such was the condition of her eyesight after 85 years of reading. How does the cyberskeptic counter that? He doesn’t.

You can easily locate the science that says we read more comprehensively when we read on paper, the neurological data that shows how our memories are motivated, soldered by the tactile, how we learn most fruitfully when our senses are stroked, but those are not what truly vex the bibliophile. The point, like so many literary points worth emphasizing, is an aesthetic one—books are beautiful. What you hear in the above anxiety by James Salter is not really a condemnation of e-readers, but an anxiety about a loss of beauty. Robertson Davies got it right when he wrote this about beautiful editions of good books: “We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.” Gissing’s narrator in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft admits: “The joy of reading the Decline and Fall in that fine type! The page was appropriate to the dignity of the subject; the mere sight of it tuned one’s mind.” The dignity of the subject—remember that formulation, and savor the excellence of that last metaphor, one’s mind tuned by the fine type of such sweet pages.

I feel for Salter’s anxiety, and I agree with Burgess when he wrote, commenting on those delectable editions produced by The Folio Society in London: “We have to relearn pride in books as objects lovely in themselves.” But allow me to assure you of this truth: Like the bicycle, the book is a perfect invention, and perfection dies very, very hard. The car hasn’t murdered the bike, and the Web won’t murder the book. There are innumerable readers for whom the collecting of physical books will remain forever essential to our selfhoods, to our savoring of pleasure and attempted acquisition of wisdom, to our emotional links with our past and our psychological apprehension of others—essential not just as extensions of our identities but as embodiments of those identities. Books, like love, make life worth living.