1/16/2015   The New York Times  By Anna North

Writing about your feelings, a practice long embraced by teenagers and folk singers, is now attracting attention as a path to good health. And a recent study suggests that reflecting on your emotions could help you get over a breakup. But, one of its authors says, journaling can have its downsides.

Is structured self-reflection, as some suggest, a healthy tuneup for the heart and head — or can it make hurt feelings worse?

For a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Grace M. Larson, a graduate student at Northwestern University, and David A. Sbarra, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, looked at self-reflection through a speaking exercise. They recruited 210 young people (they ranged in age from 17 to 29) who had recently broken up with their partners, and then split this brokenhearted sample into two groups.

One filled out a questionnaire on how they were feeling, then completed a four-minute assignment in which they were asked to talk into a recording device, free-associating in response to questions like, “When did you first realize you and your partner were headed toward breaking up?” This group repeated the same exercise three, six and nine weeks later.

The second group filled out the questionnaire at the beginning and the end of the nine-week study period (they did the speaking exercise only once, after filling out their final questionnaires).

Ms. Larson and Dr. Sbarra found that the breakup sufferers in the first group experienced greater improvements in “self-concept clarity” than those in the second. Dr. Sbarra defines self-concept clarity as “the degree to which you understand yourself as a person.” He and Ms. Larson measured it by asking subjects how much they agreed with statements like “I do not feel like myself anymore” or “I have regained my identity.”

Much of our understanding of ourselves can be bound up in our relationships with our partners, Dr. Sbarra explained — and if we break up, it can be hard to answer questions like “Who am I?” or “Who are my friends?” or “How should I spend my time?” The speaking exercise helped people, he explained, because “it improved their sense of self independent of their former partner.”

That improved sense of self, in turn, led to reductions in loneliness and “emotional intrusion.” As for why the exercise worked, Dr. Sbarra has a few theories. “There is a degree of habituation that takes place as you are repeatedly thinking and talking about the process” of a breakup, he said. “You defang it a little bit.” And, he added, hearing yourself say something may prove revelatory. He imagines a subject’s internal monologue: “I didn’t know I seemed to be getting better until I said I seemed to be getting better. I must be getting better.”

For people going through breakups without the benefit of psychology researchers to record their thoughts, Dr. Sbarra says the study offers some insights. Getting back your sense of self after a breakup, he argued, is crucial: “You really need to figure out a way to pull yourself back together and to try to get some reorganization in terms of who you are, what you do, how you spend your time.” You may not need a recording device to do that — Dr. Sbarra believes that you might also be able to rebuild your self-concept by writing, “in a stream-of-consciousness way, how you’re feeling about things.”

Other researchers see benefits from self-reflective writing beyond soothing post-breakup pain — and the practice is drawing media attention, too. At the news website Mic, Rachel Grate cites research by a team from New Zealand showing that writing exercises may aid wound healing. She also quotes the psychologist James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin: “When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health.”

According to James Hamblin at The Atlantic, a 2012 study found that writing improved quality of life for breast cancer patients. Laura I. Miller at the website Bustle offers 12 reasons we should all resolve to write more in 2015. And “if writing about the difficult parts of your life were a drug,” writes Drake Baer at Business Insider, “it would be making bank for some faceless pharmaceutical company.”

But if it were a drug, it might be one with a maximum recommended dosage — and warnings for certain patients. In another study, Dr. Sbarra found that divorced people assigned to do expressive writing exercises — essentially, exercises wherein they reflected on their feelings — showed no greater improvement in measures of emotional well-being than those asked to write, without emotion, about what they did during the day. And subjects who tended to ruminate on their situation actually did better if they were assigned to the emotion-free writing.

The prompts in the expressive writing study were more involved than those in the speaking-exercise one — instead of responding to simple questions, participants were asked to “really delve into your deepest emotions and thoughts” or to “work toward creating a coherent story and narrative, with yourself as the storyteller.”

“I think the expressive writing intervention at times can be too heavy-handed,” said Dr. Sbarra. “It can be too directive without allowing people’s natural coping tendencies to do what they’ve done over the course of evolutionary history.” And for some people, reflecting too much on their feelings can make things worse. “That’s the real danger of our journaling culture,” he added — diary writing isn’t “one size fits all.”

For many, the key may turn out to be some self-reflection, but not too much: writing about your feelings, “but then not necessarily mulling over it or doing any more. Just write it, talk about it, leave it, do it again.”

“There’s a really delicate balance between avoiding and getting over-involved for every stressful event,” Dr. Sbarra explained, “and so you touch on it, you think about it, you put it out there, you reflect, and then you sort of create some distance.”

So if you ever get a prescription for writing, it might read: Spend a little time with your diary — and then go for a walk.

http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/the-best-way-to-get-over-a-breakup/?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

3/19/2015

Planes, Trains and Automobiles with #Noahbaumbach #WhileWereYoungtour @whilewereyoungmovie

https://instagram.com/p/0aZM9HrouK/

Ten years ago, my first novel Prep came out. Three novels later, here’s what I’ve learned about the publishing industry and writing since then.

BuzzFeed   1/15/2015   by Curtis Sittenfeld

Amazon won the book war. In a series of rare interviews, the company tells us what’s next

The Verge    By Casey Newton

Chris Green holds an envelope. At least, it looks like an envelope. In reality, it’s a piece of office copy paper that’s been cut and folded into the shape of a Kindle Voyage, the latest in Amazon’s bestselling line of e-readers. Green, the head industrial designer at Lab126, the secret lab where Kindles are designed, unfolds the paper to show it has been stuffed with everything that makes a Kindle: a CPU, a modem, a battery.

Green is a boyish sort, and he hands me his fragile bundle of electronics with a certain glee, but the most important thing in his hands is actually the paper itself. For Amazon, paper is more than a material for making prototypes. It’s the inspiration for the Kindle of the future: a weightless object that lasts more or less forever and is readable in any light. “Paper is the gold standard,” Green says. “We’re striving to hit that. And we’re taking legitimate steps year over year to get there.”

As Amazon popularized ebooks over the last decade, it catalyzed a necessary change in our reading habits. By 2007, when the first Kindle emerged, the publishing world had to compete with Facebook, mobile games, and a hundred other distractions; to retain their vitality, books needed to adapt. Over the years, Amazon has stuffed its e-readers with features making them easier to read, like embedded dictionaries and translators; it’s added a social network; it’s even introduced a feature that seamlessly turns text into audio and back at our convenience. Books are vessels for transmitting ideas, and today the vessels have ideas of their own own: about what we should read, and how we should read it.

Hundreds of millions of tablets and e-readers have been sold, but today we’re still inclined to think of a book as words on a page. Amazon’s success with Kindle has hinged on recognizing how much more they can be. So where does the company go from here? In a series of rare, on-the-record interviews for Kindle’s 7th anniversary, Amazon executives sketched out their evolving vision for the future of reading. It’s wild — and it’s coming into focus faster than you might have guessed.

Inside the lab

“Welcome to the inner sanctum,” Gregg Zehr says. “This is as inner as inner can get. You are one of a very few who can see this.” This is a nondescript conference room on the top floor of Lab126 in a Sunnyvale, California office park. As secret labs go, it’s a bit underwhelming: There’s a conference table, a whiteboard, and a 10th-floor view of Highway 101 — the congested freeway that links San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Against one wall is a row of Kindles, every model since the device was first introduced. On a long conference table sit dozens of prototypes for this year’s Kindle Voyage.

Zehr, a kindly, soft-spoken type who previously ran hardware engineering at Palm Computing, has been in charge of Lab126 since its opening. (Famously frugal, Amazon’s gift to Zehr on his 10th anniversary was a new employee badge with a celebratory red striped border around his picture.) After making gadgets for years at Palm, Zehr felt drawn to Amazon for the chance to work on something unique. “What we had to do on the first reader,” he says, “since no one had done it before, was to be as creative as possible.”

It’s been a decade since “Fiona” was first imagined, the codename Amazon gave to the first iteration of the Kindle. As recounted in The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s rollicking 2013 history of Amazon, Jeff Bezos commanded his deputies in 2004 to build the world’s best e-reader lest Apple or Google beat them to it. To Steve Kessel, who was put in charge of running the company’s digital business, Bezos reportedly said: “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

It took three years for Kindle to come to market. The first model wasn’t particularly beautiful: a $400, off-white chunk of plastic with a full QWERTY keyboard. But before the world had ever heard of an app store, Amazon had integrated its bookstore directly into the device. For the first time, you could summon almost any book you could think of within seconds, no matter where you were.

The initial, never-quantified run of devices sold out in five and a half hours, and soon Kindle became synonymous with e-reading. Amazon has never released sales figures for the Kindle, but analysts believe the company has sold more than 80 million of them, and Morgan Stanley estimated the devices would generate revenues of $5 billion this year. (Amazon declined to comment on sales figures.)

More than that, Kindle brought ebooks into the mainstream. About 28 percent of Americans read an ebook last year, up from 17 percent in 2011. And the more popular they became, the more Amazon pushed to transform them.

Breaking the book

“When you’re reading, you want to fall down the rabbit hole,” says Green, a native of northern England who came to Amazon after eight years with Bay Area creative consultancy Frog Design. Amazon has actually built a rabbit hole, of sorts: a reading room somewhere at Lab126, stuffed with comfortable chairs, where pinhole cameras study the way people really read. (Because test subjects are in there using prototype devices, I am not allowed inside.)

It’s in this room that Amazon learned people switch hands on a book roughly every two minutes, even though in surveys they claimed not to. (This is why the Voyage has identical page-turn buttons on both left and right.) The Voyage’s page-forward button is much bigger than page-back, because Amazon’s data showed 80 percent of all page flips are forward. As Green describes research like this, it seems likely that Amazon has spent more time studying the physical act of reading than any company before it.

From the start, Amazon has defined its hardware mission narrowly: to build devices that disappear in the hand, with uniquely useful features, for a low price. “We would never make a gold thing, because that’s too distracting,” Green says. “There are many companies that create pieces of jewelry. We’re not going to do that, because that’s an added cost that takes away from the actual content.”

Instead, Amazon wants to enhance what’s on the screen with software. If there’s a unifying idea to the Kindle as an app, it’s in fixing the little things that once made you put down your book in frustration. A feature called X-Ray, for example, stores a books’ most common characters, locations, and ideas. Just press on a character’s name and a miniature bio pops up; in an epic like Game of Thrones, it’s a godsend. Amazon knows from its embedded dictionary which difficult words tend to trip us up, so on Kindle, they are defined in superscript above the text. Rather than send you to Google to look up a short passage in a foreign language, Kindle translates it for you automatically. It tells you how long it will take you to finish a chapter, based on how quickly you normally read.

Features like these emerge from Amazon’s famously unusual meetings, which begin around the company with employees reading six-page narratives written by their co-workers laying out the points they want to make. These meetings are very quiet — until they aren’t. “It’s not kumbayah — we are yelling at each other,” Green adds, with a wide grin. “The documents help solidify the yelling.”

The result is a book that can can translate itself; can explain itself — who its characters are, its themes, which ideas are most important. Last year Amazon bought Goodreads, which lets you to connect with friends and fellow book lovers to talk about what you’re reading. So as soon as you finish a book, Kindle asks you to rate it for the benefit of your friends — and then, naturally, suggests books for you to buy next.

The story in Seattle

There’s another dimension to the future of reading, beyond how we read. It’s what we read: who writes it, who publishes it, how it gets distributed. Nowhere are more important decisions being made about those issues than at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. With physical bookstores in a state of seemingly perpetual decline, Amazon has achieved a dominant position: the company sells 40 percent of all new books in the United States, and two-thirds of ebooks.

On one hand, that represents less than 10 percent of Amazon’s overall sales. But even as the company has pursued its dream of becoming a place to buy anything, books have retained an outsized place in the corporate imagination. “Books are home for us,” says Russ Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle content. “It’s where we started. Not only is it a great business that we like, and many customers know us for, but it’s something about which we have a passion. A lot of us on the team are personally passionate about books. Books changed our lives.”

In more ways than one. Because they are easy to ship and hard to break, and because Amazon.com could offer more of them than any physical store, books were the ideal launching pad for Jeff Bezos’ original vision of a universal retailer. Two decades after the company was founded, books remain the business in which Amazon is most dominant — and most feared.

Initially, publishing houses found Amazon to be an excellent partner in selling books, in part because it returned many fewer books than the chain stores that previously dominated the business. But as it became more powerful, Amazon extracted a higher and higher percentage from the sale of every book, charging publishers fees for placement on its homepage and in search results. It has proved willing to remove books from the store of any publisher that won’t play along, raising the specter of a world where important books become unavailable because of corporate disputes.

These battles have been chronicled in exquisite detail this year by publications including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. A key issue is who sets the price of ebooks; each side has jockeyed for control. For now, there appears to be a kind of détente: Amazon’s high-profile war with Hachette ended last month with a multi-year agreement that lets the publisher continue to set ebook prices, with Amazon offering unspecified incentives for Hachette to price them affordably. A similar deal was signed with Simon & Schuster earlier in the year.

If you’re just a person buying a book, it’s not always clear why you should care about these negotiations: merchants fight with their suppliers all the time. (The largest publishers declined interview requests for this piece.) But there are real worries about what the world would look like if Amazon’s dominance continues, and the company’s relentless downward pressure on book prices is understandably unsettling to authors. “In the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome,” George Packer wrote in the New Yorker this year. “It would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.” If Amazon squeezes traditional publishers out of existence — or simply pushes them into irrelevance — what will we read?

I put the question to Amazon’s Grandinetti, who leads negotiations with publishers. For starters, he says, we shouldn’t assume that publishers’ woes mean that important writers will no longer be able to make a living at their craft. Writing literary works has never been a particularly lucrative occupation; authors have long relied on universities, foundations, and other non-profits to supplement their income. Publishers remain talented at finding and promoting literary works, Grandinetti says. “It’s as viable to write that work as it ever was,” he says. “And I feel reasonably confident, based on the way books are going, that it will continue to be as viable.”

Meanwhile, other forms of writing may become more viable. The rise of self-publishing, which Amazon has heavily promoted, has led to an explosion of genre fiction. Kindle Singles, which allow authors to sell work of medium lengths, has become a home for projects no traditional publisher would consider. Cable TV, YouTube, and Netflix created avenues for new kinds of visual storytelling, and new ways to make money; the elimination of gatekeepers in the world of books is doing the same for text.

“Technologies change, and then what people make with them changes,” Grandinetti says. He points to the way cable allowed for both Breaking Bad, which told a single story over 62 episodes; and True Detective, a multi-season series that tells a complete story each year. “Nobody would take a chance on those TV shows 10 years ago, because the model didn’t exist. So even though the evolution of these media may taketh away in some places, it giveth in some others. And I think the same may be true in books.”

Meanwhile, Amazon has led an effort to translate more foreign-language books into English, potentially a rich new source of high-quality literature that hasn’t previously been accessible. As new kinds of books become digitized, too, they’ll change in ways that are hard to predict. Sales of travel guides declined as much of the information contained in them became available free of charge online; Grandinetti believes they will evolve in new ways and become useful once again.

They will have to evolve. Everything else that competes for our free time — social networks, games, television — is going to be evolving just as quickly. “Our job is to invent all the things we can to make taking that journey as pleasurable and as rewarding as possible,” Grandinetti says. “And I don’t think it’s mine to say, or ours to say, if you want to talk about it in zero-sum terms, that books are going to do better or worse in the future … Where reading will go will be determined, enhanced, or constrained by how inventive we can be in how we support it.”

The book you don’t read

A few years after Amazon was founded, and a few years before Apple introduced the iPod, a company called Audible introduced a digital audio device. The $200 Audible Player had 4MB of memory, enough to store about two hours of audio, which it sold at Audible.com. Don Katz, who co-founded the company, was an unlikely tech entrepreneur: he was previously a magazine journalist and book author, of the sort whose fortunes have lately been threatened by changes in the publishing industry. Audible went public in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, and survived the bust by making its catalog available through Apple’s iTunes store. In 2008, Amazon bought the company for $300 million.

The company’s headquarters are in a mid-rise office building in Newark, NJ, a few blocks from a train to New York. From his office on the 16th floor, Katz has a clear view of Manhattan, where he once got big advances for deeply reported non-fiction about postwar America and companies like Sears and Nike.

In the early 1990s, Katz saw a shift at the institutions where he had made his name. The magazines he wrote for began commissioning shorter, less ambitious work. “I bailed from career one when I saw the handwriting on the wall from my 10,000-word articles becoming 7,500 words, then 5,000, then 3,500,” he says. “Little did I know it was going to get down to 140 characters!” Before there was such a thing as an MP3, Katz founded Audible out of a conviction that we would one day walk around with, as he calls them, “solid-state devices filled with culture.”

Early on, Audible faced skepticism that listening should be considered as worthy a pastime as reading, or whether listening to a book should count as “reading” at all. Katz became practiced at recounting the history of literature — which began, of course, not with the written word but with oral tradition. “Reading is nothing more than the memorialization of what was thousands of years of rich oral culture,” he says. Katz will remind you that the Greeks were deeply critical of the written word, which they worried would destroy our ability to memorize texts. And he notes that American literature was born out of the unique rhythms of our speech, which were first captured by writers like Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. “Great writing ought to get into people’s brains,” Katz says. “And how it gets there shouldn’t be a matter of religiosity.”

Under Katz, Audible’s catalog has grown to more than 180,000 audiobooks. In its headquarters are six recording studios, where producers and voice actors create new audiobooks 16 hours a day, seven days a week. In 2012 Amazon introduced a feature that lets you switch back and forth easily between the written and audio versions of a book; put down your Kindle when you leave for work, and listen to the recording where you left off through the Kindle app on your commute. There are now more than 55,000 books you can “read” this way, a fact that challenges our notion of what reading even means. A future generation could listen to the Western canon on their phones. We will define literacy differently than we do today.

Just before I met with Katz, Amazon released Echo, a talking speaker that can play music, tell you the weather, and let you shop, among other things. I ask Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for hardware, whether Echo will eventually read books to us. He declines to speculate, and yet it seems inevitable that Echo will eventually become another node in Amazon’s system for ubiquitous reading and listening.

“The reality is that there are unbelievable amounts of time during the day that you can’t use your eyes to read a book or look at a screen,” Katz says. “What we’ve done is taken really rich, literate material and then refracted that through an ever-more sophisticated performance. We say, let’s reposition this as a production of some of the greatest scripts of all times — books!”

One more thing

When I graduated from college I moved to a small town in Indiana to work for a newspaper. The town was culturally barren, but in the shopping center where I bought groceries stood a Borders. Nearly every weekend, I would stop there on my way to the market and spend an hour or so walking the stacks. At a time when I felt disconnected from cultural life, a chain bookstore offered me a tether. The books I bought there, and skimmed there, sustained me for the years I spent visiting it.

Today Borders has been liquidated, the location I used to visit replaced by an electronics store. Between the web and social media, I read more than I ever have — and yet I read fewer books than ever. Reading over all my notes about the future of reading, I see I have reported it out of hope that books will evolve to repair what other technologies have started to break: my ability to concentrate over hundreds of pages. I think of a line from The Tender Bar, by J. R. Moehringer: “‘Every book is a miracle,’ Bill said. ‘Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly — and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake — and tried to tell us the rest of the story.”

I’ve never actually read The Tender Bar — I just saw that when someone shared a screenshot of the passage on Twitter.

“Reading is going to have to continue to morph and get better,” Don Katz tells me, “both from a quality and a technology (perspective), to maintain its position.” The book of the past was a nearly perfect machine for displaying text — but the present has revealed many flaws in its approach.

Russ Grandinetti likes to quote Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” And so the future of reading will be shaped, in part, by what Amazon invents — by how else it decides to augment, alter, or otherwise transform the text in front of us. Anyone that wishes to compete has to reckon with the insight Amazon had seven years ago — that the text in a book is not the end, but a beginning.

 

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/17/7396525/amazon-kindle-design-lab-audible-hachette

10/24/2014    New Republic   By Evan Hughes

Matt Yglesias has a little “real talk” for us at Vox. Amazon is doing us all a favor, he says, by crushing the fundamentally useless middleman between author and reader: the book publisher.

Yglesias’s piece is mostly a rehash of familiar arguments that often come from people who occupy a similar position to Yglesias’s: They are, broadly speaking, outsiders to the publishing world and more closely associated with the broader fields of business, economics, and technology. They appear to believe their outsider status allows them to see more clearly how broken publishing is; they’re not captive minds. The insiders tend to respond that the outsiders could stand to be less ignorant of the industry they’re criticizing. This fight tends to devolve quickly.

Perhaps it would help to reframe what a book publisher really is in terms that might resonate with Yglesias and his teammates in this debate, such as Josh Barro and Marc Andreessen and a long line of book-industry critics that precede them.

A publisher’s list of books is in essence a risk pool, a term most often associated with health insurance. In the insurance business, the profits from the healthy people outweigh the big losses from the sick ones because the healthy outnumber the sick. In publishing, it’s the opposite, yet the underlying concept is the same. Most books lose money, but the ones that make money earn enough to cover all those novels that didn’t sell.

The publishing scenario that Yglesias is advocating is a world without health insurance. (Ironic, I know.) In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die. “So what?” Yglesias might say, because that’s the kind of ruthless neoliberal thinker he is. “If people didn’t buy the book, that’s just proof of its worthlessness.”

But I’m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he’s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended “good, unusual books” such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. “I’m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,” Krotov writes.

Most of the “really important influences” that Yglesias recommends in those posts were published by the trade houses he wants to see crushed. Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family sounds interesting. I wonder how well Okin would have been compensated if she had uploaded it to Amazon rather than being paid an advance from Basic Books, which absorbed a lot of the risk for her. I wonder if Yglesias would ever have encountered Okin’s book amid the ocean of Kindle content. Would Okin even have written it without any guaranteed payment?

Yglesias writes:

But what really matters here is that book publishers are not charities. They are for-profit business enterprises. If advances don’t make financial sense, then they will die off regardless of what happens to Amazon. If they do make financial sense, then they will live on as financial products even as the rest of the industry restructures.

But we already know that on some level advances make financial sense: Book publishing is a profitable business. Last I checked, the Big Five publishers (not the Big Four, as Yglesias has it) all make money in a typical year. Otherwise they would be dead by now. True, the margins are skinny and unreliable, and after doing a fair amount of reporting about the industry, it is still a little mysterious to me why giant publicly traded corporations are interested in owning publishers, but they obviously are. You would not know from reading Yglesias that the system basically works.

What is more, the premise of the entire paragraph I quoted is flawed, though it may appear unobjectionable at first. The observation that book publishers are not charities but business enterprises is largely accurate, but it does not capture the whole truth.

For one, there are nonprofit publishers—a lot of them, and some pretty big names!—but leave that aside. Even the for-profit publishers do not always operate in a way that most corporations would recognize. For instance, Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes a lot of poetry, using time and energy that could easily be directed to more lucrative ends. There is really no plausible business justification for doing that. Publishing poetry may bolster prestige, but I suspect that FSG publishes it because they think it’s important. That may be impossible for some people to understand, but I know a lot of people who understand it with no difficulty at all.

Evan Hughes is the author of The Trials of White Boy Rick and Literary Brooklyn.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing?utm_content=bufferf7286&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

10/28/2014    The New York Times    By ZOE HELLER and ANNA HOLMES

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Zoë Heller and Anna Holmes discuss the havoc books can wreak on relationships.

By Zoë Heller

Do you want to be one of those dreary couples who are always delivering their identical cultural opinions in the first person plural?

Many years ago, when I was in my 20s, I went on vacation with a boyfriend to a remote Scottish island. We spent the days going on long, wet hikes and drinking in the pub. At night, we huddled in our freezing house and read aloud to each other. Neither one of us, it turned out, cared much for the other’s choice of book. I had come with “A Legacy,” by Sybille Bedford, which my boyfriend found mannered and pretentious. He had brought “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson, which I thought was tiresome and unfunny.

These differences of opinion did not strike me as a big deal. It was mildly disappointing, perhaps, that my boyfriend should be impressed by the drug-brag of Hunter Thompson and oblivious to the genius of Sybille Bedford. But it wasn’t as if I was auditioning him to be my literary adviser. Chacun à son goût, I thought.

He, on the other hand, was deeply troubled by our clashing literary tastes. He kept worrying at the subject — demanding to know how I could resist the charm of Thompson’s antic wit and what exactly was so alluring about Bedford’s “rich, snobby” characters. After a few nights, we gave up reading to each other, but his hectoring questions about why I liked what I liked (and didn’t like what I didn’t like) continued.

By the end of the vacation, we were at war. His view was that our failure to enjoy each other’s books was a sign of a more general and fatal incompatibility. (He couldn’t love someone who didn’t love Hunter Thompson.) My view was that he was fetishizing his own literary enthusiasms in a precious and rather creepy way. (I couldn’t love someone who placed such a premium on having his girlfriend underwrite his cultural preferences.) Soon after returning home, we parted ways.

The value of agreeing with one’s friends about books has always seemed to me overrated. Nothing in my experience suggests that literary taste is a reliable guide to a person’s character, or that shared literary passions bespeak deeper spiritual kinship. (Think for a moment of all those Nazis who loved Goethe.) I can see how disagreements about certain works of nonfiction might matter. If I were to come across a dear friend scribbling approving comments in the margins of “The Bell Curve,” that could be a game changer. And there are a few explicitly ideological novels (anything in the Ayn Rand oeuvre, for example) that I would be dismayed to find on a friend’s Favorite Books list. But the revelation in both these instances would be one of politics, of worldview, not of literary sensibility. Were a friend to tell me that he hated Jane Austen, my view of him and of our friendship would suffer not at all. I’ve known lots of fine men who did not “get” Austen and quite a few Janeites who were brutes. Besides which, my love of Austen is between Austen and me; it doesn’t need cheerleaders.

This surely is one of the great advantages of reading as a pursuit — that its pleasures do not rely on teammates or fellow enthusiasts, that the reader’s relationship with an author has no need of endorsement from third parties.

Insisting that your loved one’s literary judgments be in harmony with your own suggests to me a rather dull and narcissistic notion of what constitutes intimacy. Do you really want to be one of those dreary couples who are always delivering their identical cultural opinions in the first person plural? (“Oh, we’re loving the latest volume of Knausgaard!”) One of the happiest romances I ever had was with a man who regarded George MacDonald Fraser’s “Quartered Safe Out Here” as the pinnacle of literary excellence. He also believed that Saul Bellow was a second-rate writer because “nothing ever happened” in his books. I thought he was mistaken in these matters, but I can’t say it bothered me much. Love is not love which alters when a man fails to appreciate “Herzog.”

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

◆ ◆ ◆

By Anna Holmes

It may also say something that I refused to mingle my books with his, keeping mine on a bookshelf in a room he rarely entered.

Let me clarify from the outset that I never discovered a much-loved copy of “Mein Kampf” or “Atlas Shrugged” in a romantic interest’s underwear drawer, or had it revealed to me that a favorite book — say, “Pride and Prejudice” — was so loathed by a beau that he had to be ejected out of my bed, my heart, or even my life.

What books have done, however, is become flash points within already troubled relationships, especially with regard to the fact that I pay any attention to books at all. Books, and more broadly, the written word, have strained some of my most important love affairs — and in certain cases contributed to the disintegration of them. I was drawn to men who displayed a tendency to chafe at the very idea that I might find sustenance or succor in anything other than them.

I learned at a young age that for some men, books equal betrayal. My first boyfriend, a fellow N.Y.U. student one year my senior with whom I lived for two years, complained when I buried myself in narratives of long-form magazine journalism or pages of both classic and contemporary fiction. (In 1994, I started “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” but didn’t finish it, in part because of his protestations.) His insecurity, which he communicated via whining and pawing at me while I was reading, was flattering at first but ultimately not very persuasive, so he tried other methods of distraction, like initiating arguments that he knew I didn’t have the self-discipline to avoid. Granted, we were both about 20 years old.

The contours of a more recently failed relationship were also defined, in part, by how much I read, both for work and for pleasure. The times, of course, had changed: Instead of college textbooks or physical copies of Harper’s Magazine or 1,000-page sci-fi novels, I lost myself in the illuminated screens of, in no particular order, my laptop, iPad and iPhone. But the effect my love of reading had on the relationship was the same — a resentment so vicious and ultimately intolerable that it prompted me to flee ever deeper into that which was supposedly creating much of the conflict: my love affair with the written word. (It may also say something that I refused to mingle my books with his, preferring to keep mine on a bookshelf in a room that he rarely entered.)

I suspect I am not the only woman to become involved with men who profess to value her for her ability to be emotionally present, curious and passionate only to reveal, down the road, an expectation that this sort of generosity of time and energy be restricted solely to interests and activities that include them. I hate the idea that there is a type of person whose impulse when witnessing a partner’s clearly rewarding, other-directed engagement is to react with contempt, not celebration; to expect the prioritizing of one’s own needs far above hers. In my experience, daring to honor my interior life — not to mention my professional commitments — has proved, in the context of coupling, to be a controversial, radical act.

To be fair, there’s a difference between sticking one’s nose in a printed book and scrolling, trance-like, through the almost infinite options served up by digital media technology. A printed book, after all, is still a physical object, with a front and a back, an author and a reader, a beginning and an end. Digital media, on the other hand, suggests not only numerous authors but numerous respondents — and it’s difficult to walk away from, meaning that maybe the sense of betrayal communicated by my recent ex was felt even more acutely. I don’t know for sure; he won’t really say. But I do recall that, after a number of especially devastating arguments with him, I used to wonder if he would have demonstrated such disgust for my need to be in communion with the written word had I simply been cradling a copy of a paperback book.

Anna Holmes is an award-winning writer who has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Newsweek and The New Yorker online. She is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s website she created in 2007. She works as an editor at Fusion and lives in New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/books/review/have-you-ever-had-a-relationship-end-because-of-a-book.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

11/23/2014    New York Magazine    By Christopher Bonanos

Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.

In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.

This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.

That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand. “Books to go down!” is extinct. So is Book Row, the Fourth Avenue strip that fortified the readers and writers of Greenwich Village. Though there are signs of life in the independent-bookseller business — consider the success of McNally-Jackson — few secondhand-book stores are left in Manhattan. Only two survive in midtown, and the necrology is long. Skyline on West 18th Street, New York Bound Bookshop in Rockefeller Center, the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th — closed. Academy Books is now Academy Records & CDs.

So, then: Why is there still a Strand Book Store?

In large part because of Fred Bass. He’s pretty much the human analogue for the store’s gray column. His father, Ben, founded the Strand around the corner in 1927, and he was born in 1928. Ask him about his childhood, and he recalls going on buying trips on the subway with his father, hauling back bundles of books tied with rope that cut into his hands. (“Along the line, we got some handles.”) Ask him about the 1970s, and he’ll tell you about hiding cash in the store because it was too dangerous to go to the bank after dark. He’s 86, and he still makes buying trips, though mostly not by subway. “Part of my job is going out to look at estates — it’s a treasure hunt.” New York, to him, “is an incredible source — a highly educated group of people in a concentrated area, with universities and Wall Street wealth. The libraries are here.” Printed and bound ore, ready to be mined.

Four days a week, he’s on the main floor, working the book-buying desk in back. Stand there, and you’ll see the full gamut of New York readers. Critics and junior editors, selling recent releases. Academics. Weirdos. “Book scouts,” who pan for first-edition gold at yard sales and on Goodwill shelves. They walk in with heavy shopping bags and leave with a few $20s. Usually fewer than they’d hoped: The Strand rejects a lot, because unsalable books are deadweight. Whatever arrives has to go out quickly. “Our stock isn’t stale,” Bass says. “You come in, and there’ll be new stuff continually.” Slow sellers are culled, then marked down, then moved to the bargain racks outside, then finally sold in bulk for stage sets and the like.

Secondhand books have to be judged individually as they come in, a process that requires time and experience. (A couple of buyers have been on the job upwards of 40 years.) Though it takes less experience than it once did: Arriving books now have their UPCs scanned, and the database “gives us information where it used to be guesswork,” says Bass. “The guesswork was so great then, I filled up an 11,000-square-foot warehouse with unsold books.” He pauses, deadpan. “Using my expertise.”

All of this suggests that the Strand is a used-book store. It isn’t, not exactly. Over the past decade or so, new books have come to represent about 40 percent of sales. They constitute, Bass explains, a more predictable business: “New books, we can sell 50, 100, 200 copies of. I make less money, but it’s a little bit more scientific. The used-book business, we have a bigger market — of course, we have to carry a bigger inventory.”

Founder Ben Bass in 1938.

Those new books are also profitable because of a source almost unique to the Strand: broke editorial assistants. When the Strand buys their review copies, it pays about a quarter of the cover price, sometimes less. They’re indistinguishable from new, and the Strand sells most of them as such. (When Bass buys from wholesalers, he generally pays about 40 percent of list.) Publishers hate this gray market but accept it; one book publicist I know cringes when she sees her press releases peeking out of copies at the store. Bass shrugs: “I tell them it’s the cost of doing business.”

If the old used-book Strand is built around Fred Bass, the new Strand is a joint production with his daughter, Nancy Bass Wyden. She started working here three decades ago as a teenager, and the family has done well since: Fred lives in Trump World Tower, and Nancy married a senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon. (She is charming with me, although a few bloggers say that she’s not so patient with her employees.) You get the sense that she’s trying to leave the core of the business intact while branching out beyond East 12th Street.

For example, at Fifth Avenue near 21st Street, there’s a satellite Strand built into a Club Monaco. It’s spotless, selling mostly new books plus some expensive first editions. “Not a home run,” Fred says, “but it’s working.” Adds Nancy, “We now have this expanded customer base — people who are Club Monaco shoppers who may not have been to the Strand before.”

The Basses have also tapped into New York’s great subsidizing resource: the global rich. If you’ve bought $15 million worth of living space on Park Avenue, it probably has a library, so what’s another $80,000 to fill those shelves? Make a call to the Strand with a few suggestions — “sports, business, art” — and a truckful of well-chosen, excellent-condition books will arrive. (Fred recalls that when Ron Perelman bought his estate on the East End from the late artist Alfonso Ossorio, the Strand had just cleared out Ossorio’s library; Perelman ordered a new selection of books, refilling the shelves.) In more than a few cases, the buyers request not subject matter but color. In the Hamptons, a wall of white books on a few favored topics is a popular order, cheerfully fulfilled.

Nancy has also grasped that the Strand’s future can be bolstered by selling things besides books. Fifteen percent of the store’s revenue now comes from merch: T-shirts, postcards, notebooks, superhero action figures (they’re near the graphic novels), and especially those canvas tote bags, produced in dozens of variations. The success of the tchotchke business is, she says, one way in which book shopping has changed. Whereas individuals used to come in and root around for hours, today’s buyers shop faster and in a targeted way, often in groups. More tourists come than ever, and books about New York are piled up by the front for them. The store also has a big event space, and the wine flows regularly: launch parties, signings, a book-swapping mixer created in partnership with OkCupid. Bookstore visits are “a social thing,” Nancy explains as we walk past a wall of T-shirts. She points to one that displays a John Waters quote: “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t f**k em.” She chuckles: “My father hates that one.”

Are there existential threats to the Strand? There are. E-books, which require no retail space, have cut into best-seller sales. The Strand has pushed back with remaindered hardcovers, placed by the front door under a sign reading LOWER-PRICED THAN E-BOOKS.

There’s also the Strand’s relationship with its unionized employees, who were organized by the UAW back in the ’70s. They just signed a new contract this past month. Mostly, the labor-management situation seems equable; still, every few years, when contract time comes, someone writes a news story about strife. “The union demands something up here,” says Fred, gesturing, “and we’re down here … There’s always going to be conflict.” In general, the union is quite aware that the Strand is not Google, and the Basses are perfectly aware that relative harmony benefits the business. In October, a pro-union staffer named Greg Farrell published a graphic-novel-style book critical of both management and the union’s representatives. Oddly, he still works at the store. More oddly, the Strand sells the book.

Internet used-book sales, too, would seem to be a long-term concern. When you visit Amazon or AbeBooks (which is owned by Amazon) and search for an out-of-print title, your results are usually listed from cheapest to most expensive. The first “store” on the list often turns out to be a barn full of books in rural Minnesota or Vermont. Some are charity stores, selling donated books—no acquisition costs at all. They certainly aren’t paying Manhattan overhead. Yet here, too, the Strand is holding on, owing mostly to that churning turnover and the quality of its stock. That barn isn’t going to have many of last year’s $75 art books for $40, and the Strand always does. Plus there are the only–in–New York surprises that come through the store’s front door. Opening a box can reveal a Warhol monograph that will sell for more than $1,000, or an editor’s library full of warm inscriptions from authors.

If that’s the future, could the Strand wind up virtual? Surely operating out of one of those barns would be cheaper. “Not with our formula,” says Bass firmly. “We need the store. This business requires a lot of cash flow to operate,” and much of it comes in with the tourists. That funds the book-buying, which supplies the next cycle of inventory.

Which requires this expensive retail space, and the renovation of 2003 did not just come from a desire to spiff up. It happened because of a specific event, one that probably saved the Strand: In 1996, after four decades of renting, the Basses bought the building. “Frankly,” Fred says, “for a while, I thought, This isn’t going to work anymore.” He’d always negotiated the lease renewal with his landlord at the nearby Knickerbocker Bar & Grill — they once had to reconstruct their deal the next day, after knocking back one too many — and a bookstore would not have been able to hang on to 44,000 square feet for much longer. It took Bass two years to hammer out a price, but once he became his own tenant, he paid rent at a significant discount. “When I want to negotiate my own lease,” he jokes, “I have to go to the bar myself.” He’s got leverage in those talks, because the store occupies four floors out of 12, and rent from the others flows back into the business. Warehoused books, once upstairs, are now in much cheaper space across the East River.

There is only one true long-term threat to the Strand, and it comes from within. Bass, whose entire life has revolved around this business, loves bookselling. It appears that Nancy does, too. The store makes money, if not a crazy amount, and the family has good reasons to keep it going. But the Strand is, when you get down to it, a real-estate business, fronted by a bookstore subsidized by its own below-market lease and the office tenants upstairs. The ground floor of 828 Broadway is worth more as a Trader Joe’s than it is selling Tom Wolfe. When a business continues to exist mostly because its owners like it, the next generation has to like it just as much. Otherwise they’ll cash out. If Nancy stays, the Strand stays. If her kids do, too, it stays longer. Simple as that.

 

12/11/2014   The Cut   By Chloe Schama

More than five years had passed since Sam and I had last seen each other when he sent me an email with the subject line: “IMPORTANT.” The email was sent to my work address. It was terse but portentous. “You might be in a position to help me,” he wrote, “so I’m sending you this.” Attached to the email was a manuscript. A novel.

I was a character, a central one. I had been given a pseudonym (as I am giving him here), and there were some elements of other women — fictional or real, I wasn’t sure — that had been grafted on. But there were also features that were unmistakably mine. The pseudonym he’d given me was more of an inside joke than a disguise.

I stayed up late that night and finished the manuscript, reading with a strange sense of honor. Isn’t it every woman’s fantasy, to some extent, to be someone’s muse — to feel as though her beauty, intelligence, and grace are so extraordinary that they inspire not just devotion but art? I’d never admit to desiring celebrity, but that doesn’t mean that I’d turn down the chance to be immortalized — or at least captured for a moment — by someone else. At art museums, I’ve always played a game: Matisse or Picasso, Manet or Degas, Rembrandt or Rubens — whom would I prefer to sit for?

But there was horror mixed with the honor. I’d never asked myself: Bellow or Roth, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? It seemed too terrifying to be made three-dimensional — to be faced with someone else’s portrait of your psyche. If the depiction seems to miss the mark, but includes just enough to make you recognizable, then you’d have to wage an endless personal PR campaign with anyone who came in contact with the text: No, reader, you don’t know me. But if the novel contained some shades of truth — perhaps the attributes you don’t share widely (aren’t they always the most compelling?) — then you face an even scarier prospect: Yes, reader, you know parts of me before we’ve ever met.

Reading Sam’s novel, I vacillated between annoyance that he’d gotten parts of the story wrong and annoyance that he’d gotten parts of it right. Sam and I had met our freshman year at college and had quickly fallen in love; the two main characters similarly, speedily fall for each other. It was flattering to read his account of first setting eyes on “my” character — a scene that involved something like a vision emerging from across the campus quad. (He remembered the outfit I was wearing! I still had that skirt!) But the closer he got, the more uncomfortable it became. The character was elegant but uptight; generally correct, but also a scold, deploying righteousness to shield impatience. In my most honest assessment, I’d say I possess shades of all these attributes and that they are some of the things I like least about myself.

Of course, there is no “right” or “wrong” in fiction — and no “right” or “wrong” in the way he chose to assemble elements of our shared past. Fiction requires no fidelity to reality, just dedication to the elements from which it is composed. And all prose has perspective; he was going to tell our story however he wanted. But I still couldn’t help but think I was allowed to feel annoyed that he’d turned me into both some kind of idol and a nag.

***

I should not have been surprised that this manuscript appeared. In one of our infrequent post-breakup phone calls, Sam had mentioned he was writing a book. But, more fundamentally than that, Sam and I were both compulsive scribblers. Freshman year, he’d slip poems under my door. I thought they were embarrassing; my roommates thought they were brilliant — or maybe they were just being kind. Sam left school for a spell, and we wrote letters while he was away. Wandering around the country, he did not have regular access to a computer — I’m not sure he even had an email address, though by that time everyone did — so we would use his parents’ house as our poste restante. Occasionally, he called when he found a phone, but it is the letters that I remember.

The novel wasn’t even the first time Sam had made me into material. When he returned to school a few semesters later, we took a creative-writing class together. (Not a good idea.) We fought over what he could and could not write about; I made him change the details of some of his stories so that I could sit through class without passing out. I wasn’t entirely prudish about privacy, however. Sam published some stories in a campus magazine that made me feel proud rather than violated.

When I graduated and moved to Washington, D.C., Sam remained at school. We both assumed we would stay together, but the distance strained. We grew apart, and then he broke up with me. Perhaps every surprised girlfriend feels that her would-be boyfriend is not being rational when she’s rejected, but I truly thought he was making a major mistake.

That changed when I visited him a few months after our split. I don’t remember much about that trip, but I do remember that a plant that I had given him had grown so large it was as though someone had slipped it steroids. The branches reached the ceiling; Jurassic leaves blocked the light from his tiny dorm room window. It had mutated into something that pushed against the confines of the room — a kind of organic manifestation of the claustrophobia I felt. I saw him a few months later, and then again a few months after that, then the time between our encounters yawned into years.

After several years, I got engaged and, not knowing where to find him, left a message on the voicemail of the last phone number I had for him. I felt like I was throwing pebbles into a black hole; the communication had no tail. I never heard back. This is how it ends, I thought.

Except, it didn’t, quite. I worked Sam into stories I was writing — squeezing them in whenever a niggling memory made my fingers twitch. Perhaps, I thought, if I had had more affairs, I would have more inspiration. (I’d met my now-husband a few weeks after Sam and I broke up.) But I never really felt a dearth; there was plenty in my head to keep me going. I didn’t try to publish any of these fragments. I don’t think I even showed them to anyone. When I read over them with a little distance, they seemed immature and raw. But even if I knew the work wasn’t for publication, I could still sense it had a pulse.

***

Sam’s novel had a pulse as well. It was messy, but it had the ingredients of good campus fiction: privilege, precociousness, girls on bikes, and boys in scarves. Was this assessment what he wanted? Some pointers — like I’d given him in Creative Writing 101? Or did he want something more practical? I’m loosely connected to the world of publishing and I had no idea where or how Sam was spending his days. Maybe I was only a connection to be tapped for professional help? And if so, wasn’t there something shamelessly mercenary in his pressing me into service: Yes, you’re a character; get over it and help me with my prospects. Or did he dispatch the manuscript with slightly more aggressive undertones: Screw your memories; here are mine.

Eventually, I wrote to ask. The answer was straightforward: He wanted me to tell him what I thought, and to help him, possibly, figure out how to get it published. I could deliver on the first request; I could hardly stop myself. I told him where the structure did not seem entirely successful. I felt certain elements of the plot were too sketchy. And I took issue with one character in particular: me. Why didn’t he give me more of an internal life? Why did I make such bad decisions?I tried to keep my questions from seeming too whiny or too prude. Too similar to objections the character would have voiced herself.

There was no way, however, that I could help him with his second request. Promoting the book would seem underhandedly conceited, as well as just bizarre. And I wasn’t sure that the novel was good enough to overwhelm my hesitations; I was pretty sure that it was impossible for me to judge. (It didn’t help that my judgment was certainly clouded by annoyance that he’d put me in such a position.) In the end, I gave him some names of people he might contact but made no invitation to use mine.

***

About a month after I sent him my notes, he texted me to say he would be visiting Washington, where I still lived. We met for lunch the following day. It had been years. I was nervous, repulsed by my chicken salad. He came out with it: Did I mind, he asked, that he had made me a character? Underneath the question lay a proposition, maybe: He was offering to bow out, concede the contest.

Sam was no Matisse or Manet, but he was probably the only man who would know me well enough to attempt to distill a little piece of me, to boil it down and strain it into art. My husband, for all his wonderful features, is not stirred by creative impulses. But I don’t think it was pure vanity that led me to turn down his offer. It was part of reckoning with what it meant for him — and with the labor of writing itself. I did not want him to pull apart his work because I understood the sweat it had involved.

Okay, I had to feel this way. Sam’s novel had sent me back to my computer to write this essay. Was I trying to do to him what he’d done to me? You use me, and I’ll use you. “Whoever writes best wins,” said a writer friend, shrugging, when I told her what I was up to.

When two writers meet, and fall in love, and break up, and then begin to write, is this competition impossible to avoid? Even in nonfiction, truth one can butt up against truth two. I haven’t intentionally invented anything here, but if Sam swore that he’d sent those freshman-year notes to my campus mailbox rather than slipping them under my door as I remember, would I vehemently disagree? Did we really send letters to his parents’ house? (Or do I just read too many 19th-century novels and like the antique feel of a “poste restante”?) Would Sam even remember the overgrown plant, which has become for me a symbol of a love that no longer fit?

More important, does it matter if our accounts diverge? Probably not, and not just because one is nominally fiction. Fiction or non — there’s no such thing as a single truth when you’re writing the story of a breakup.

Years later, Sam sent me a new version of the manuscript. I skimmed it and got the impression that it cohered much better than before. He’d taken my advice and dramatically revised “my” character — he’d revised her so much, in fact, that she had ceased to be a recognizable representation of me. I felt relief, and then I felt sad.“The End” had finally arrived.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/never-date-a-writer-youll-end-up-as-material.html?mid=facebook_nymag

10/30/2014   New York Times  By ALEXANDRA ALTER

Print has been good to Jeffery Deaver. Over the last 26 years, Mr. Deaver, a lawyer-turned-thriller writer, has published 35 novels and sold 40 million copies of them globally.

But his latest work, “The Starling Project,” a globe-spanning mystery about a grizzled war crimes investigator, isn’t available in bookstores. It won’t be printed at all. The story was conceived, written and produced as an original audio drama for Audible, the audiobook producer and retailer. If Mr. Deaver’s readers want the story, they’ll have to listen to it.

“My fans are quite loyal,” Mr. Deaver said. “If they hear I’ve done this and that it’s a thriller, I think they’ll come to it.”

“The Starling Project,” which came out in mid-November, will test the appetite for an emerging art form that blends the immersive charm of old-time radio drama with digital technology. It’s also the latest sign that audiobooks, which have long been regarded as a quaint backwater of the publishing industry and an appendage to print, are coming into their own as a creative medium.

A Selection From ‘The Starling Project’

Just as original TV series like “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” transformed Netflix into a content creator as well as a distributor, Audible is aiming to distinguish itself in the booming audiobook market with original audio dramas that are written specifically for the form.

So far, Audible has commissioned and produced around 30 original works, as varied as a serialized thriller about a conspiracy that drives India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war, and original short stories set in the world of Charlaine Harris’s vampire novels.

“You have this massive opportunity when you don’t have to fight for people’s eyes,” said Donald Katz, chief executive of Audible. “It’s time for us to move from sourcing content that can produce fantastic audio, on to imagining what the aesthetic of this new medium should be from the ground up.”

Some are shunning the term “audiobook” and trying to rebrand their content as “audio entertainment” or “movies for your ears.” “The Starling Project” runs to a little over four hours and has 29 actors performing in 80 speaking parts, with the English actor Alfred Molina in the lead role.

Next year, the audiobook producer GraphicAudio will release its first two original series, including a Western crime drama and a full-cast epic fantasy that’s complete with elaborate sound effects and recorded in surround sound.

Some see the current audio renaissance as a modern version of the Golden Age of radio drama — a rare instance when technology is driving the evolution of an art form, rather than quashing it. Along with the surge in audiobooks, podcasts have become a surprising new form of popular entertainment, with some programs drawing audiences that rival those of cable shows. One standout example, “Serial,” a true-crime saga that re-examines the 1999 murder of a teenage girl in Maryland, unfolds in weekly episodes and has been streamed or downloaded more than five million times since its introduction in October.

“You can create a picture in your mind with sound that’s every bit as vivid as a movie,” said the novelist Joe Hill, whose eerie comic book series, Locke & Key, is being adapted into an audio drama for Audible, with 30 actors and sound effects that were recorded in a historic mansion in Maine. “A lot of filmmakers who work in horror say what’s really scary is hearing, not seeing.”

It’s no surprise that authors are eager to make their mark in the medium. As the print business stagnates, digital audiobooks are booming. In the first eight months of this year, sales were up 28 percent over the same period last year, far outstripping the growth of e-books, which rose 6 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, hardcover print sales for adult fiction and nonfiction fell by nearly 2 percent.

Audiobook publishers, scrambling to meet rising demand, released nearly 36,000 titles in 2013, up from 6,200 in 2010, according to the Audio Publishers Association. Audible, which Mr. Katz founded nearly 20 years ago and sold to Amazon in 2008 for a reported $300 million, still dominates the market, with more than 170,000 works, including 18,000 produced this year alone.

But the company faces growing competition as more companies seek a foothold in this fast-growing corner of the digital media marketplace. This month, Penguin Random House’s audio division introduced its first app, Volumes, which allows listeners to sample free content, play audiobooks from their digital libraries and buy audiobooks with one click from the iBooks Store. Barnes & Noble just released an audiobooks app for its Nook tablets and Android devices, with more than 50,000 titles.

Other newcomers jostling for a slice of the audiobook market include the e-book subscription platform Scribd, which recently added 30,000 audiobooks to its digital subscription plan, and Skybrite, a new streaming audio service that has 10,000 titles and an all-you-can-listen to membership for $10 a month.

To foster binge-listening and attract new users, Audible needs to provide a constant stream of new content. And original works from well-known authors like Mr. Deaver could be a potent new weapon in the battle for people’s ears.

Audible began a push for straight-to-audio works a few years ago, focusing on popular genres like science fiction, mysteries and thrillers. “The Starling Project” is one of Audible’s most prominent and ambitious audio dramas to date. Mr. Deaver said that when Audible approached him about writing an original story for them, he was excited and a bit daunted. “It was like a nonvisual play,” he said.

Mr. Deaver had collaborated on two other original audio works for Audible, with more than a dozen other thriller writers. But he had never written something start to finish from scratch.

First, he created a flow chart outlining a plot about a retired army intelligence officer, Harold Middleton, who is recruited to stop a shadowy mass-murder plot called “The Starling Project.” The action spans the globe, with scenes in Mexico, Washington, London, Marseille and central Africa.

Mr. Deaver quickly ran into problems, though. It was tricky to establish geographic locations through dialogue in a way that didn’t seem hokey (he opted for a flight attendant’s announcement in one scene, welcoming travelers to France). He struggled to incorporate sound effects without muddying characters’ conversations with blaring motorcycle engines and machine gun fire. Without an omniscient narrator, he had to find new ways to establish relationships between the characters.

“You don’t want to write too on the head and say, ‘I don’t like you, you did something bad back then,’ ” he said.

A sex scene also proved challenging. “I didn’t have a clue how to handle that,” he said. “Do we have a zipper sound? Two shoes falling to the floor?” (They went with swelling music instead of sound effects for that scene.) But Mr. Deaver adjusted his writing style to the medium, and he finished the book in about five months.

Mr. Deaver says he has no plans to turn “The Starling Project” into a traditional book. Instead, he’s hoping the project will help him build a new audience of listeners.

“There are so many time-wasting alternatives to reading out there, and authors are up against formidable competition with things like Assassin’s Creed, Minecraft, Angry Birds,” he said. “This is an easier way for people to get access to good storytelling.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/business/media/new-art-form-rises-audio-without-the-book-.html?referrer=&_r=0

12/2/2014   The Cut   By Maureen O’Connor

“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We ­actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.

“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.”

“Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a ­supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”

Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature ­marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?

Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.

“You’re familiar with the term success theater?” Sam asked when I brought the topic back up. The term gets tossed around the tech start-up world to describe the difference between presenting the image of a successful-sounding company and actually running one (tech reporter Jenna Wortham has used it to describe the act of showing off on social media). “I’m eightish months out of my last relationship and very concerned about winning,” Sam said. She then walked me through a timeline of the breakup, as illustrated through Instagram links. First, a period of silence. Then, a sexual war of attrition: pictures of Sam cavorting with new love interests, partying in a rooftop swimming pool, posing with a semi-nude actress at “Queen of the Night.” “Before that one I actually said, ‘Let’s make my girlfriend jealous,’ ” she recalled with a sort of nostalgic pride, as though she were an aging football star fondly remembering a game-winning touchdown.

But what if the whole game is rigged? “Winning is complicated for me because I want to care less, but I also want to see the validation of me being cool and over it in his eyes,” my friend Maya explained in a Gchat. (Since caring in public is a loss, her name and some others have been changed.) “But that’s not really winning, because really I just want to see him again, but am excusing it by pretending I am merely showing up to ignore him. I guess the problem is when, instead of trying to win the breakup, you’re actually just trying to win him back.” Put another way: Does caring about “winning” the breakup mean you’ve lost?

Placed on the Kübler-Ross scale of loss and grief, “trying to win him back” might be aligned with stage one, “denial.” Whereas “trying to win the breakup” could be an expression of stage two, “anger.” (How dare you stop loving a girl who looks this good in a bikini?!) Or stage three, “bargaining.” (If I look good enough in a bikini, someone will love me.) And though neither attitude seems particularly healthy, the masquerade does have a certain “fake it till you make it” quality. In the success theater of breakup grief, “winning” is about reaching stage five, “acceptance,” before your partner does. Even if you’re going on Instagrammable dates just to spite your ex, ultimately you are still, you know, going on dates. You’re dragging yourself out of bed, brushing your hair, and putting your freakum dress on. A recent study found that 23 percent of recently broken-up college students reported “revenge motives” when sleeping with a new partner post-breakup; the worse they felt about the breakup, the more likely they were to seek sexual revenge. Although, one male friend noted, “if you’re looking to ‘win’ breakups like they’re UFC cage matches, where the person who climbs out of the cage with the least blood on them wins? Well then, you’re definitely a crazy bitch.” I have yet to punish him for saying that, but I’m sure it will involve some sort of holier-than-thou social-media vengeance. Once a petty cyber-winner, always a petty cyber-winner. “I mean, in a good breakup, everyone wins,” he concluded. “Ultimately it boils down to, ‘Did I fuck up?’ and ‘Was I better off before?’ The ultimate win on both sides is if you can be legitimately, unconditionally happy for the other person when they find love again.” At the time, I teased him for sounding like Gwyneth Paltrow, boasting about ­“conscious uncoupling.”

“I consider lots of sex winning,” said my friend Eric, age 31. “Back when I was young and crazy, I needed to have better first-rebound sex. So I would legit-stalk: asking friends of friends, keeping windows to each of their social-media accounts ­permanently open in Google Chrome. ­Checking the locations of their posts. Checking the events they RSVP-ed on Facebook and then showing up.” But the brokenhearted make terrible detectives: “I remember my ex had his Twitter account linked to his GPS, and he sent a tweet that showed up three or four blocks from his apartment, and I was like, ‘Well, looks like he already found some guy on Grindr who lives next door.’ When in reality it was probably just some GPS fluke.”

“Wait, GPS shows down to the block?” I asked in horror. The dangers of Big Data had never really hit me until I saw social media through the eyes of an ex-boyfriend scorned.

“Thank God my last breakup was with someone who had no social media,” Eric continued. “It took literally just a week to get over that guy.”

Of course, winning is subjective. Though memorializing my victory over Brett in this magazine could be a bald-faced bid for a win, the event is now so long in the past that even acknowledging that I remember it is definitely a loss. Even the best breakup victories tend to be Pyrrhic. Or, as Holly said when I described my new boyfriend’s reaction to his predecessor: “The only drawback to winning that hard is that then you want to be like, He used to be so much better!” Except, well, he wasn’t. And neither was I.

*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

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