Granta
Spring, 2011
A quarterly, Granta organizes each of its 250-pages-plus issues around a theme. This time it's "The F Word" - not, mind you, the slang for making the beast with two backs, but rather the otherf-word: feminism. The issue features more than 20 contributions on the topic (essays, memoirs, reportage, fiction, poems, correspondence) from a pretty heavy-duty crew, including Louise Erdrich, A.S. Byatt, Lydia Davis and Edwidge Danticat.
I've read three pieces and can heartily recommend each.
Canadian-born, British-based Rachel Cusk's "Aftermath" is a moody, brooding memoir about the collapse of her marriage and its impact on her sense of self and the lives of her two daughters. The writing is knotty, astringent, with many a provocation like this: "What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values my parents ... well-meaningly bequeathed me - the cross-dressing values of my father and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite."
"A Train in Winter" by historian Caroline Moorehead details the lives and deaths of female members of the French Resistance in German concentration camps, while in "Other Women," Francine Prose ruminates on what she got (and didn't) from the six women in the consciousness-raising group she joined at university in the early 1970s.
Playboy
July, 2011
You're going to purchase this issue more for the irony than the pictures. As you know (and surely you do?), Playboy philosopher king Hugh Hefner, 85, was supposed to marry Crystal Harris, 25, this weekend only to announce a few days ago that the nuptials were off, the relationship kaput. Unfortunately, the July issue of the magazine that made Hef's fame, fortune and now-Viagra-enhanced sex life had long since gone to press, arriving on newsstands this week with his blond, former bride-to-be on the cover - and a 10-page pictorial of her nekkid self inside.
Hefner is reportedly plastering the remaining print-run with a big cover sticker reading, "Runaway Bride In This Issue!" This raises the question: Will that be the collector's edition? Or the sans-sticker version? Regardless, the text accompanying the pictorial is the same - chock full of saccharine statements that days ago were fatuously romantic, but now pathetically risible. Examples? Hefner: "The truth of the matter is we're soul mates." Harris: "I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life." Hefner: "I just couldn't imagine spending the rest of my years with anyone else." Harris: "I never thought I'd fall for a man who is Hef's age."
Bookforum
June/July/August, 2011
The British scholar John Sutherland once observed, "What defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else." Indeed, if you look at some of the novels that have sold in the gazillions in the last 50 years - The Satanic Verses, Love Story, Jaws, Ragtime, The Corrections, Valley of the Dolls, The Blind Assassin - it's hard to find common touchstones in theme, style, story. As Ruth Franklin, a senior editor at The New Republic, writes here: "The bestseller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it."
Still, there have been trends, Franklin observes. Starting in the eighties, for example, there emerged a group of writers who could regularly sell a million copies in a year - Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, among them - "then come right back the following year with a new bestseller." The phenomenon, which continued through the nineties, shows no sign of slackening. Today, the only guarantee of becoming a bestselling author is already havingbeen a bestseller à laSteel who has placed 33 books in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 since writing her first hit in 1983. With so many regulars crowding the upper reaches, "a novel by a new writer has a smaller chance of becoming a bestseller today than at any other time in history."