Authors Electric

 Alicia Sammons I worked as an editor for the better part of my too long professional career. Editing can be demanding, but I never thought of it as a particularly glamourous or creative calling. Over the years I climbed my way up from proofreader to senior editorial positions on magazine, major metropolitan newspapers, and editing for independent publisher.  I always felt in awe of writers and aspired to their magic with words, an assessment shared in popular culture. We see a lot of juicy movies about authors like The Hours and Midnight in Paris. On the other hand, editors can't get much respect even from their writers, including a few authors with whom I've worked.  Vladimir Nabokov  sneered at them as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’  Robert Gottlieb edited books of  Joseph Heller ,  John Le Carré ,  John Cheever , and  Toni Morrison . The legendary Maxwell Perkins  edited and famously mentored Lost Generation icons F. Scott Fitzgerald ...

Last month , I decided it was time I did another countdown, but this time I'm counting down the five best metafictional comics: those that deal either overtly or covertly with how stories work, that are to a greater or lesser degree "aware" of themselves as comics. I got the list right here, so let's begin. 5. Cerebus - Dave Sim (writing and art) and Gerhard (art) Cerebus is perhaps one of the biggest success stories in independent publishing. In December 1977, Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim, created what was supposed to be a satire of sword and sorcery comics. This 6,000 page saga tells the story of an aardvark named Cerebus "the Earth Pig Born" and barbarian-for-hire. He wants only to earn enough gold fighting in order to pay his bar tab until the day he meets Jaka, a dancer with whom Cerebus falls in love. He spends much of the rest of his days trying and failing to obtain her, and along the way, he becomes prime minister, pope, pariah, and pro...

Last month I started to count down my top ten books or series that have "stayed" with me (whatever that means) throughout my life . I may have bitten off more than I could reasonably swallow. It was a bit of an undertaking, and I only got through the first two. These books aren't going to read themselves, so let's cut the introductory fluff and get right to it then: 8. The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien As far as I'm concerned, these are the best covers ever bound. As a kid, I loved the Rankin/Bass cartoon version of The Hobbit . I watched it every time it came on television. This was so long before DVD's, mind you, that we didn't even have VHS yet. This is how we DVR'ed back when the world was young and dinosaurs ruled the earth. This meant that I could only watch it once a year if I were lucky, so for the weeks before it aired, I was the best behaved kid you ever saw. I'd eat all my vegetables and possibly ...

The novella. It’s the wallflower of the literary world, continually snubbed and ignored, judged to be to nobody’s taste. Like an overlooked middle child, it has neither the star appeal of its big brother, the novel, nor the simple charm of the short story. Stephen King once described the novella as “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic”, and tellingly said that even he – Stephen King , who by his own admission could probably get his laundry list into print if he wanted to – had trouble convincing a publisher of his novellas’ worth. Big spines look good on shelves By many accounts , publishers are indeed reluctant to take on novellas. I’ve heard this attributed to a very simple, and brutally commercial, reason: novellas are simply too small to have much presence in bookshops. Readers are more likely to pluck a book off the shelf if it is physically prominent, with a thick, imposing spine. Novellas are also perceived to be less valuable: if a reader is going to spend his ...

There was quite a lengthy period in the history of publishing when the short story was held in higher regard than the novel. A glance now at the collected works of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, or Vladimir Nabokov, shows the huge volume of short stories they produced alongside their novels. Authors such as Katherine Mansfield, O. Henry, “Saki”, and Sherwood Anderson published short stories exclusively, in some cases famously being unable to manage the novel form when they tried their hand at it.   Aside from being a playwright, when it came to prose, Anton Chekhov was entirely satisfied to focus his art on the perfection and development of the short story alone. In his memoir, A MOVEABLE FEAST, Hemingway makes it quite clear that he and F. Scott Fitzgerald turned to the sale of short stories to magazines whenever they urgently needed to keep the wolf from the door; Hemingway only being more stringent in his ideals than Fitzgerald by refusing to change th...