…Lionel Shriver and the Orange Prize: just to follow up on my last post, check out today’s New York Times feature on Lionel Shriver…and you can also check out this year’s Orange Prize nominees, which have just been announced.
I’m very happy to see that Lionel Shriver’s new book, The Post-Birthday World, is now on bookshelves and and receiving rave reviews.
But the literary life hasn’t always been this smooth for Shriver — after a long 20 years and no fewer than six novels, she told the BBC she was about to give up on writing when she won the 2005 Orange Prize for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of those books I always recommend to anyone who will listen — for its language, story, and the fearless way Shriver tackles our society’s biggest taboos. But I also recommend it to writers for inspiration. The manuscript was rejected first by Shriver’s own agent, then by 20 more — and after that was rejected by 30 publishers. But Shriver persisted (in an interview with the BBC, she talks about the unpopular subject matter of the book), and the book was eventually published by Counterpoint in 2003. “One of the things that is salutary about the publishing history of this book is that it’s a real word-of-mouth book,” Shriver told the BBC. “It was readers who got me here. Single, individual readers who bought the book and told their friends.”
Writers often ask me whether they should write for an audience or for themselves. My answer has always been that they should write for themselves first, and consider audience later. But perhaps writers shouldn’t concern themselves with audience at all, and stay focused on their stories, their characters, and their messages instead. Lionel Shriver has proven that sometimes it’s the audience that needs to catch up with the writer — and that it’s well worth the wait.
The New York Times ran a story last week on the Bellevue Literary Press, which will publish its first title next month. The article calls attention to Bellevue Hospital’s former reputation as a psych ward for the “criminally deranged,” which indeed sounds tough to overcome. Yet neither authors nor publishers seem worried about the past.
Bellevue Literary Press grew out of the success of the Bellevue Literary Review, founded in 2000 and described by the Washington Post as “a journal of humanity and human experience — a well-regarded magazine featuring fiction, nonfiction and poetry by Bellevue’s doctors and well-established writers.”
Yet, like most small presses, Bellevue Literary Press is all about the love, not the money. Financed by private donors, the imprint’s first four titles are medical or scientific books written for a general audience, and editorial director Erika Goldman told the Times that authors would be paid advances in the $5,000 range, adding, “We’re in it for love and art.”
Which sounds perfectly sane to me.