Book Marks: Writing Novels, Flower Moon, Scholastic U-Turn

"Salman Rushdie has said that if authors are only allowed to write characters that mirror themselves and their own experiences, 'the art of the novel ceases to exist'," the Guardian reports. "If we're in a world where only women can write about women and only people from India can write about people from India and only straight people can write about straight people ... then that's the death of the art."

The report doesn't elaborate further on this, and Rushdie may have more to say on the matter. "Write what you know" emerged in part from the backlash against works by authors who didn't seem to know what they're writing about because of cultural distance or sloppy research. If writers wish to explore realms beyond their lived experiences, they had better do the work or get called out. Confining what writers can write about is unrealistic and inhibits their growth.

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"Martin Scorsese's career-capping Killers of the Flower Moon likely never would have happened without David Grann, the New Yorker writer with a preternatural knack for unearthing astonishing, dramatic stories from history. But in the journey from book to film, Scorsese and Eric Roth’s script underwent dramatic changes—including a major shift in focus from an FBI investigation to the Osage of 1920s Oklahoma and the white prospectors and landowners who exploited them."

Dan Kois speaks with Grann about those changes and the film. May I suggest checking out the book as well? I reviewed it and it's great. If this isn't enough, Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's next project will be another adaptation of Grann's book, that of The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, which I have yet to get my hands on.

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"I am highly perturbed by this news with the bookfair opt-in. I don't get to opt in to be Black. I'm Black 365 days a year, 366 days when it's a leap year, and extra Black in February. So I don't get to turn on and off my Blackness." Author Tanisia Moore voices her displeasure with Scholastic's decision to sequester its book fair titles that revolve around race, sexuality, and gender into a separate catalog. Her book, I Am My Ancestors' Wildest Dream, was part of the Scholastic book fair and also included in this catalog.

Well, the backlash has compelled a U-turn by Scholastic on that policy, reports CBS News. "The 'Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice' collection will not be offered with our next season in January. As we reconsider how to make our book fairs available to all kids, we will keep in mind the needs of our educators facing local content restrictions and the children we serve."


Glad that's over with. Now...

• "In my novels, walls are real walls," author Haruki Murakami told Associated Press in an interview before receiving Spain's Princess of Asturias prize for literature in the Spanish city of Oviedo. "But of course they are also metaphoric walls at the same time. For me, walls are very meaningful things. I'm a bit claustrophobic. If I'm locked up in a cramped space I may have a mild panic. So I often think about walls." He also spoke of his theory of "novelistic intelligence", AI, and the Israel-Hamas war.
• "Unlike mega bookstore chains stocked with mainstream titles, these shops curate selections from indie presses, serving both as havens for authors and vital distribution channels. Initially, the indie publishing scene was mostly comprised of young innovators producing visually centric content like posters and postcards. Today, a diverse array of creators contributes novels, essays and travelogues, increasingly blurring the line between indie and mainstream." Indie bookstores appear to be thriving in South Korea, but there might be more to it.
• "[Toni Morrison's] situation as a black woman at a very white press ... was fraught. It was fraught within the house, where she had to contest entrenched white supremacy. It was also fraught outside the house, where her black peers might see her as a sellout. Some did." A bit about Toni Morrison's career as a trade editor at what was then Random House.
• Responding to the shelving of the award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli's Minor Detail at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, Shibli's publisher Fitzcarraldo made the e-book version of Minor Detail free to download during the fair's duration. The Bookseller also reported that BookTok creator Hana Aisha launched "a readathon on the platform to encourage users to read the novel."
• "I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous." On the 66th publication anniversary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Literary Hub presents a review of the novel by American writer and former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers that was published in the National Review in December 1957.
• "Without attempting to be comprehensive or authoritative—a fool's errand if there ever was one—I thought I would suggest just a few of my own favorites. At the very least, I prescribe these titles as antidotes to the quick and dirty ways people are communicating about the war on social media." Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic recommends some reads as a distraction from the daily doomscrolling of updates on the latest war in Gaza.
• "I was intrigued by the fact [W. Somerset Maugham] based the story on a murder trial which had taken place in Kuala Lumpur, where I was living. The trial happened more than 100 years ago today, and I just found it interesting that nobody I knew seemed to know about it." How Tan Twan Eng reimagined a century-old scandal in his novel, The House of Doors.
• British artist David Shrigley collected 6,000 copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, had them pulped, and turned them into copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Learn the reason behind the project, dubbed "Pulped Fiction" He tells CNN, "War is presented as peace. Enemies are invented for us. We're invited to think that black is white, and white is black. Day is night, and night is day. This is a book that people should read. It's still really relevant."
• "It was a sight unlike any as bibliophiles jostled their way to endless stacks and shelves of books and came out with bundles of books and perhaps one last piece of memory from the famed bookstore once described by the New York Times as 'the cosiest bookshop in the country'." After about half a century K.D. Singh's The Bookshop at 13/7 Jor Bagh Market in Delhi closes its doors for good.
• Another case of plagiarism has returned the spotlight to how publishers vet manuscripts (or not). The Financial Times "revealed that the UK shadow chancellor's new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, contains more than 20 examples of text that appears to be taken from other works without acknowledgment."