The Missouri Review

I was riding my electric bike through the neighborhood last evening at the quiet hour.  No wind, no traffic, no hard pumping up the hills. A few people gardening in their front yards looked up and smiled as I tooled by.   And what was I thinking about?
The meaning of the suffix “-ate.”  Yes, that’s right.  [...]

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Recently my wife Kris and I went to London to research “Found Text” possibilities for TMR. We intended to go to several plays and wander around happily between the British Library, the Tate, theaters, and so on. But it was cold and rainy for all but a couple of days. I got a cold (haven’t had one in three years) or possibly something worse, since it did require my going to a doctor, who after glancing at my throat and writing a prescription charged me 135 pounds ($270). I told her that she was being hard on an impecunious scholar. She smiled sweetly and said, “You can pay the secretary.”

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Recently, on a lazy evening, I saw the movie “The English Patient” a second time, and it reminded me of the weirdness of the “romance.”  To what degree is such a storytelling genre true to the subject as lived in life and how much is pure artifact?  Is there a true connection between love in [...]

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The Don Imus thing brings up a lot of interesting issues, including that of the evolution of attitudes.  Public opinion and discourse is the theme with the Imus imbroglio, but I occasionally wonder about the changes in private attitudes with issues such as taste.  What would it be like to meet yourself at a much younger [...]

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Terrible, title, eh? But I speak not as a Seventies holdout but of something a bit more universal: Stubborn pursuit of the irrelevant, failing to see the obvious, getting stuck in grooves. It happens to all of us. It accompanies youth as well as ageing, and it comprises every personality type from those who seem to grind away at the same thing every day to those who seem to float from one thing to another.

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A former student of mine who’s now trying to run a literary magazine asked me for advice last weekend. He’s at a small state university with a literary magazine that’s been around briefly but only began to achieve serious purpose when he took over its management. He’s ambitious, capable, and a lover of good writing. My advice to him boiled down to the following.

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The latest issue, Black and White, is now on newsstands.

One winter evening many years ago, some friends and I were entertaining ourselves with a game of free association. We were to respond without hesitation to whatever word or phrase the questioner put to us. Instead of asking about the obvious things — favorite hobbies, best movies, happiest moments, etc. — my friend was being philosophical. To me he said, “Literature,” and my unthinking response was, “Black and white.”

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Some business analysts tend to see “massification” in publishing as having positive effects on the market. For example, they view huge companies with varied media properties as being more capable of withstanding slowdowns. They also view them as encouraging niche and small publishing, presumably because they leave a clearer field for them. What this means for literary authors is that by abandoning them publishers leave a great opportunity for others-an argument offering limited comfort either to the authors or their buyers. Also, some analysts view large publishers as the only ones capable of dealing with monopolistic retail chains-which begs the question of how the spectacle of heedless giants duking it out with other giants really benefits anybody.

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While publishers today may strenuously deny it, at heart they believe what most of their antiquated predecessors did — that their business thrives on recognizable, standardized products. Implicit in this attitude is a tangled skein of rationalizing and lost ideals, as well as a reflection of the real pressures in the current industry. Writers hear this attitude expressed so many times over their careers that sooner or later it becomes the bleak but “real truth” of publishing. It goes something like this. For convenience sake, imagine a forty-year-old male editor who’s been working for Monolith Publishing, specializing in fiction, since 1988. Monolith is now an imprint owned by a large media company based in Europe. We’re in a break room at Monolith, and he’s staring at his coffee cup with a sour look.

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In a previous issue of TMR I wrote about the publishing industry’s often repeated claim that they don’t really know anything about literary buyers — who they are, where they are, why they buy books — and that from this cloud of self-imposed ignorance they aim too many books for the lowest common denominator. Several readers have emailed or talked with me and asked me to describe how publishing has changed from its earlier years.

The short answer is that at least in a certain way, both publishing and entertainment have changed surprisingly little. [...]

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In my last blog I mentioned that the serious novel began to get new models in the 1920s.  While there has been a great variety among types of novels over the last century, what James Joyce started and what we’ve been seeing recently among some of the better-known postmodern novelists show surprising similarities. 
Joyce’s 1922 novel [...]

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For this and one or two other blogs I’m going to speculate about what might be called the slowly decreasing physicality of the novel.
For its first 150 years, the novel was a humble medium.  Novels were dramatic — often melodramatic — treatments of physical, practical struggles.  Samuel Richardson, author of the first modern novel, was [...]

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A friend asked me about my last blog regarding sex, sensationalism, and brutality in American history and politics.  Where do I get this idea that things don’t really change so much as find new dress?  I would like to answer with something dramatic (revelation in the desert, the airplane crash I survived, etc.), but alas, [...]

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Thinking about the election, I’m reminded of politics in the good old days.  The scandal mongering and cheap shots of current politicians look tame by comparison with the extremes of political rhetoric from the American Revolution through most of the nineteenth century.  Newspapers were associated with parties and causes, and slashing, inflammatory rhetoric was commonplace, [...]

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I recently read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about a computer program and a data-based fortune teller for successful music and movies. In both cases the developers claim to use not their own opinions or critical views — or even the historical versions of such opinions and views but rather to [...]

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Someone asked me recently about point of view in fiction and I rattled off the obvious descriptions of first and third person, omniscient, center of consciousness, and so on. 
It later occurred to me that while these categories are not insignificant, they might be less definitive than the attitude or approach of the narrative voice.  Regardless [...]

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People often ask me about Missouri Review’s “personalized” rejections.  Do we really mean it when we say that we’d like to see more of their work in the future? 
The short answer is yes.  Our numbers of submissions are high enough (somewhere around 15,000 a year) that we have no reason to ask for more submissions [...]

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What are you to think when one of your favorite writers puts out a clunker?
I’ve been wondering about that as I read John LeCarre’s new novel Mission Song, the story of Bruno Salvador, a translator who gets entangled in a conspiracy to take over the government of the Congo. It’s a follow-up to The Constant [...]

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In a recent NEW YORKER (Sept 13) Adam Gopnik has written an excellent review of Stephen Greenblatt’s WILL IN THE WORLD (Norton), a new speculative biography of Shakespeare. The review provides a great argument for such biographies, as well. I highly recommend it.

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One of my favorite sites for reference is Bartleby.com. The site has dictionary, thesaurus, and reference books in one place. For almost any word, there are references that include definitions, usage, quotes from poetry and novels, and encyclopedia entries. As a test I looked up the words “dusk,” “light,” “earthworm” (13 references, [...]

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The interns are gone for a month, and Evelyn, Kris, and I are diving into what we call the “raw bundles” again. I’m afraid the bundles are winning. There are already 150 stories gathered against us.
Reading any and all submissions, I am reminded again of one of the most common problems in many of the [...]

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