They say, those wizened wise and wondrous published authors, that as writers we’ll get nowhere if we don’t read. Luckily, we all read—at least those of us with common sense enough to get somewhere. As readers we all have our favorites, the books that grabbed hold of us and made us reach out to steady ourselves. There are books that have changed us, that still influence us to this day. There are books, it goes without saying, that we love.

Xenith would like to celebrate reading with a new series of articles. Part of our Reading List community column, we are now looking for any essays—personal or critical—that we can designate “Beloved Books.” Tell us about your favorites. Tell us why they’re your favorites. How have these books impacted your writing? How have these books impacted your life? Where would you be today without having read One Hundred Years of Solitude? What did you learn from reading Atlas Shrugged? It doesn’t matter what books you love. As usual, all that matters to us at Xenith is how you write about it.

That’s what we want—your literary essays, your emotionally charged testimonies, your analytical flowcharts or matrices. Remember—we’re all passionate about reading. All we ask is to see that passion so we can share it with our readers.

Submission should be sent to patrick.nathan@gmail.com with the subject: Submission – Beloved Books. We look forward to reading them.

Photo by chefranden

Photo by Friar's Balsam[/add_caption_link]

Elsewhere in the news:

You’ll find everyone all over the internet talking about Philip Roth taking the Booker International Prize. The key here, of course, being that one of the three judges immediately resigned from the committee upon hearing the news. Most definitely not a fan of Roth’s fiction, Carmen Callil told journalists, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” The Book Bench, over at The New Yorker, tries to give a little background on Callil’s rather eccentric comment.

Callil is a founder of Virago Press, a British imprint which is the largest publisher devoted to women’s writing in the world. In 1996, it published, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” a memoir by Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, which told all about their marriage and then some in scathing tones (here’s a review at the Times). In 1998, Roth published his novel “I Married a Communist,” which concerns a McCarthy-era radio star brought to ruin when his treacherous wife publishes a book exposing him as a Communist. The reaction in the British press was tortured: Roth was a genius, but score-settling didn’t flatter him. Did he hate women? Did he not? Did Bloom deserve it? Had Roth deserved it?

In what has become an immensely popular article, author Jess Row examines the pulse of the contemporary novel. Is it still beating? Find out in the Boston Review.

Today, too, in the literary world, a certain aristocracy sees its sun setting: the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers, still overwhelmingly white, if slightly less overwhelmingly male, who may be just beginning to realize that—for simple demographic reasons, if nothing else—the future does not belong to them. And so over the last decade, all the features of “Modern Fiction”—the relentless need to bifurcate; the urgent declaration of the new; the overblown, almost apocalyptic, need for a single definition, a final answer—have returned with a vengeance.

Fancy yourself a prose stylist? Over at Writer Unboxed, guest blogger Keith Cronin offers some helpful advice. Never, ever, consider using the word “verdant.”

My problem with verdant and the other words or phrases I’ve singled out is that they usually don’t ring true when I read them. They feel pretentious, as if they’ve been inserted by somebody who felt obligated to find a word less pedestrian than “green.”

Understandably disgusted at the recent closing of libraries across the country, poet Charles Simic asks us if we could really ever survive as a culture without our libraries. Read his comments in The New York Review of Books.

When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. “The greatest nation on earth,” as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

Don’t miss Flavorwire’s list of 10 Novels that Will Disturb Even the Coldest of Hearts.

Ever fallen in love with a phrase or a passage or even a symbol so deeply that you felt to get a tattoo of that very thing? Lisa Jane Persky explores the nature of the literary tattoo in the newly launched Los Angeles Review of Books (which you should follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/lareviewofbooks).

In September of last year, critic Elif Batuman published in the London Review of Books a lengthy indictment of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Just last week, having obviously stewed over the matter long enough, McGurl gave his response in a not-quite-as-lengthy essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Jumping to the defense of MFA programs, McGurl labels Batuman’s views as elitist. Then, as a kind of mediator, Laura Miller of Salon offered her opinion on the matter, which is essentially indifference.

To quote McGurl:

This is the other, complementary side of the egalitarianism of the creative writing program and its invitation to the social masses to think of themselves as potential writers. If craft means knowing your business; if it means understanding how stories work, how they are best structured to produce certain effects, what must be put in (including, possibly, lots of research about “real things in the world”) and what left out; if it means spending at least as many hours working on your writing as you expect readers to spend reading it, then there can never be enough concern for craft. Far from simply being an expression of shame, or a call to “workmanlike” mediocrity, craft is how one earns one’s pride in one’s writing.

So let’s not get discouraged. Instead let’s go back to our sentences, read them with all our painstaking care, and tinker with them some more.

In the news over the last week:

In case you hadn’t heard, a federal judge has thrown a monkey wrench into Google’s plan to digitize every book ever written. Apparently they had overlooked the concept of copyright. Google may have to wait a while longer to become the lord and savior of all the world’s information.

Citing copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.

In considering the Hollywood romanticism surrounding writer’s block, Salon author Laura Miller tries to get to the heart of the age old problem. She may have come up with a solution.

In other words, beyond a certain point, the more difficult a writing task, and the more you think it matters, the more likely you are to become blocked. This may explain why journalists with, say, two deadlines per week almost never get blocked: no individual story ever has to carry that much weight. (The paycheck helps a lot, too. Not long ago, a woman sitting next to me on a plane asked if I had a trick for getting past writer’s block, and I replied, “Yes. It’s called a mortgage.”)

Everyone has been talking about millionaire author Amanda Hocking. At 26, Hocking’s nine self-published novels have made her more of a household name than most traditionally published authors. She continues to surprise us, announcing that she will now make a move toward the traditional publishing system.

“I think a lot of authors are looking at self-publishing as a way to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later,” [publisher Matthew Shear] said. “But a publisher provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda’s books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before.”

That was what made Ms. Hocking seek a traditional publisher, she said, after months of hearing from readers who were frustrated that they couldn’t find her books in stores. She was also tired of spending time formatting her books, designing covers and hiring freelance editors — all tasks that fall to the self-publishing author.

Ever wonder if the publishing industry today is moving away from nurturing literary novelists and concentrating on the big buck sellers? Writer and critic Dale Peck thinks so, and that’s exactly why he’s helped form Mischief + Mayhem–an alternative to the big market publishers.

It’s time, said Peck, for a new kind of publishing. “Readers of the world unite,” he proclaimed, his greatcoat billowing open to reveal a red silk tie over a red T-shirt. “You have nothing to lose but the chains.”

In “celebration” of National Poetry Month, Oprah’s O Magazine announces “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Poet and critic David Orr offers his insight into Oprah’s strange relationship with literature.

The magazine also encourages a number of poets to discuss the art, although mostly in one- or two-sentence asides. Unfortunately, they’re opining on topics like “where poems come from,” and this is exactly the kind of abstract speculation that summons forth Magical Poetry Talk — comments that make poetry sound like God’s own electric Kool-Aid acid test — from even the smartest writers.

Ancient graffiti? In case you were wondering if Greeks and Romans professed their love, ridiculed their enemies, and embraced nihilism on public surfaces, they totally did.

And of course I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t share a newly published essay by the late Roberto Bolaño. Read all about his love affair with the codex in the New York Review of Books.

After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what might have been predicted, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught.

Until next week–!

You know who we should all envy? Those diligent writers in charge of The Book Bench. To be paid to scour the internet for literary news is possibly the day job I covet most. One day, perhaps–until then the news is an extra-curricular activity.

Illustration credit: Steve Powers

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

Still stuck on Michael Chabon’s abandoned Fountain City–parts of which were annotated and published in McSweeney’s Quarterly–the literary world wants to know why writers give up on novels.

Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her “Twilight” spinoff “Midnight Sun,” which she declared herself “too sad” to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, “The Temple at Thatch,” and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.)

Since every writer seems to have advice for other writers, Oliver Miller has decided to assemble his own list of rules, in the spirit of Elmore Leonard.

And also, being a poor writer sounded kind of romantic to me when I was, say, 18 years old. And being a poor writer is kind of romantic — for a while. It becomes less romantic when you’re 30 and can’t afford to buy a soda when it’s hot out, and can’t afford to have a girlfriend because that would actually involve paying to go to a restaurant or something. So. There’s that. So if you can’t handle being really really poor, then stop now.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, poet and essayist Meghan O’Rourke waxes pensive on the nature of cadence in prose–the lost art of composing a symphonic sentence.

Rhythm isn’t just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like “Moby-Dick,” which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line “Call me Richard”—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn’t sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence’s strikingly stressed first word. What’s more, “Call” and “el” chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that’s as sonorous and inviting as “Call me Richard” plainly isn’t.

Last but not least, an essay in West 86th recalls the writing habits of Roland Barthes–the physicality of putting pen to paper–and what communication means in our digital world.

I have often asked myself why I enjoy writing (manually, that is) to such a great extent that usually the pleasure of having a nice sheet of paper and a good pen in front of me (as if it were the work bench of the bricoleur) makes up for the often thankless tasks of intellectual labor. Even as I reflect on what I should write (as is happening at this very moment), I feel my hand move, turn, connect, dive, rise, and often enough, as I make my corrections, erase or even obliterate a line. This field expands until it reaches the margins, thus creating, out of seemingly functional and minuscule traces (letters), a space which is quite simply that of art. I am an artist, not because I represent an object, but more fundamentally, because, as I write, my body shudders [jouit] with the pleasure of marking itself, inscribing itself, rhythmically, on the virgin surface (virginity being the infinitely possible). . . . Writing is not only a technical activity, it is also a bodily practice of jouissance.

In the news the last few weeks:

For those following the all the drama surrounding America’s second largest brick and mortar bookseller, their filing for bankruptcy came at no surprise. Given Borders’ antagonistic history with neighborhood booksellers, for many their collapse is a mixed blessing.

“It has become increasingly clear that in light of the environment of curtailed customer spending, our ongoing discussions with publishers and other vendor-related parties, and the company’s lack of liquidity, Borders Group does not have the capital resources it needs to be a viable competitor and which are essential for it to move forward with its business strategy to reposition itself successfully for the long term,” Michael Edwards, the company president, said in a statement.

A meeting of the board of directors at Faber, March 1944. From left to right TS Eliot, Morley Kennedy, Geoffrey Faber, WJ Crawley, Miss CB Sheldon and Richard de la Mare. Photograph: Picture Post/Felix Mann and Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Has the role of the editor changed in recent years? Alex Clark of The Guardian fears that may be the case. Even so, this extraordinary article encapsulates every writer’s great need for an editor. Read it here.

He is confident that there are as many talented editors in publishing as there always have been, but notes that “the interesting thing is whether the editor has the same level of pull in a publishing house as they had 20 years ago, or whether publishing is more led by sales and marketing”. There’s a feeling, he argues, that out of sight is out of mind and, especially with authors who have had success with an earlier book or who have voracious readerships such as those often enjoyed by genre writers, it’s good to keep the shelves steadily and plentifully supplied. It is, he says, “a savage marketplace now”.

Brilliant prose stylist. Controversial author. Gifted professor. Insightful lepidopterist? Over six decades ago Vladimir Nabokov proposed a theory on the evolution of butterflies. Recently, scientists found that he was dead on.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

We’ve all heard of the Bad Sex Awards, hosted annually by The Literary Review. At Salon, writers wondered why we’re so focused on flagging what other writers have done wrong. The response of their readers was overwhelmingly encouraging. The result? The first annual Good Sex Awards. In a series of articles, four judges announced the winners one by one, then summed up their reasoning in an article on what makes a good sex scene. Read their logic here. From judge Laura Miller:

One of the ironies of desire is that it’s often more powerful when it’s denied, and in a way this is both fulfillment and languishing in a single act. I love the combination of emotional intensity and physical detail.

In a brief interview in The Paris Review, artist Lawrence Weiner waxes pensive on his relationship with Manhattan, his daily routine, and the nature of art.

There’s nothing sillier than an M.F.A. What does it mean? Did you learn anything? No. To be a master you have to learn languages and you have to have these things. Nobody gets them. I don’t think the art form is so complicated that you need a college course in order to read it. I really don’t. Art and fashion are the last two bastions where the product itself is what attracts attention; it really doesn’t much matter who made it. There’s this legitimization of something with an M.F.A. But Gaultier draws a shoe, they look at it, they put the shoe in production, it comes out, and it works. Nobody had to know anything about the person. Art is the same thing, something is built and shown, and it enters the culture. I like schools, I like people to go to school, but the purpose of the Academy is to give answers. If they don’t have an answer, they give a solution. The purpose of art is to ask questions. They’re antithetical.

In an excerpt from his upcoming book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, author Geoff Dyer reflects on what can only be described as “reader’s block.”

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

The real problem in today’s prose, says English professor Ben Yagoda, is not lol-speak or a lack of punctuation, but a sense of exercising a false formality. He calls it clunk. Read the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Standard written English is a whole other language from its spoken (and texted) counterpart, with conventions not just of punctuation but also of many shortcuts to meaning—streamlined words and phrases, ellipses (omitted word or words), idioms, figures of speech—that have developed over many years. You learn them by reading. And if you haven’t read much, when you set pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way through a dark house.

This year’s John Newberry Medal–considered by many to be the highest award in children’s literature–has been given to a writer’s first novel.

Ms. Vanderpool, the Newbery winner, said she wrote “Moon Over Manifest” over five years, beginning in 2001, stealing bits of time while raising her four children.

“I would write during nap times, during ‘Sesame Street,’ that kind of stuff,” said Ms. Vanderpool, 46, by telephone from her home in Wichita, Kan., where she was born and reared. “It was just a nice little escape, a nice hobby. Then fortunately this year it got published.”

Much has been said about publisher Alan Gribben’s new version of Huckleberry Finn that replaces every instance of the word “nigger” with the word “slave.” The most common response among readers around the world has been outrage. Author Michael Chabon, in an article in The Atlantic, offers another perspective.

I explained to [my children] that because this book was written in Huck’s own voice, and because in the time and place of its setting people of both races commonly referred to black people as “niggers,” and because there were a number of black characters, major and minor, in the book, I was going to be obliged to say, or not to say, that word, a great many times. I explained that saying the word made me extremely uncomfortable, that it was not a word I ever used…

Following the author’s suicide in 2008, newspapers, blogs, journals, and magazines have seen the rise of a new wave of scholarship: David Foster Wallace studies. Read the article here.

Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did. When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer’s papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.

International readers may already be familiar with this development, but most US news outlets seem to be ignoring it. A much dreaded sequel to The Catcher in the Rye is to be published in a multitude of European countries. After a court settlement with the Salinger estate, author Fredrick Colting is delighted to be able to publish his book anywhere outside North America. Read the article in The Guardian.

Colting said: “I believe 60 is as original and creative as Catcher. . . I’ve never had much respect for old things, just for the sake that they are old. Especially if they act as brakes, keeping things from evolving. Creativety has to move freely or it will fall flat on its ass. If it was up to me I would replace Mona Lisa with something new.

“I’ve put in very hard work creating 60, and I’ve given it my heart and soul. It’s so very far from a rip-off, like Salinger’s lawyers call it, and I think once readers get a chance to experience it, I’m sure most will agree.”

And just for fun, Vladimir Nabokov on various cover designs for Lolita.

One would think that the holidays would be a time of inactivity. Fortunately, the ivory tower never sleeps.

Junot Diaz

JD: And I spent ten years writing Oscar Wao, and I definitely didn’t spend the ten years being like, “I’m amazing! This has taken ten years, because this much genius requires a decade!” [laughter] I spent the whole time, you know, fucked up, unhappy, really miserable and convinced that I’d ruined the whole thing, and all the stuff you get when you spend a really long time lost in the desert. I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to makeup for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.

In case you haven’t heard, WikiLeaks rogue Julian Assange has signed a book deal with publishers in both the US and UK. Current estimates of the financial gains by Mr. Assange run at $1.7 million. Read the article in The New York Times.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Random House, said Monday that the book would be “a complete account of his life through the present day, including the founding of WikiLeaks and the work he has done there.” The deal, Mr. Bogaards said, was initiated by one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers in mid-December and was signed in a matter of days.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Michael Chabon recounts his experience with his failed novel, Fountain City.

The fact that the novel isn’t very interesting probably explains the whole debacle right there. Let’s just forget the whole enterprise! Mystery solved! I’d like to put on the post-modern cape and fly around the room a little bit going ta-da! but honestly the notes are there to serve as the literary equivalent of the label on a packet of silica gel that says DO NOT EAT.

The Boston Review comes through again with a lengthy indictment of Amazon.com and its bullying of the publishing industry. Because of course we needed another excuse to boycott the world’s number one book store.

Publishers who once met directly with Amazon representatives find they can no longer reach anyone at the company, even by phone. Many publishers with distributors don’t even know the name of the person who buys their books at Amazon. The relationship is almost exclusively handled by the distributor. Indeed, of the 20,000 employees at Amazon, just one is tasked full-time with working as a liaison between the company and publishers.

For those writers or literary admirers who have the twisted and tumultuous fortune of living in Los Angeles, you have the opportunity to hop over to Hollywood and see Bad Writing, the movie. Watch the trailer in The Los Angeles Times.

In his documentary “Bad Writing,” Lott presents these well-known authors with a sample of his poetry in an attempt to suss out what, exactly, makes writing bad. He’d found his early — and yes, mostly lousy — poems in a basement, and the older-and-wiser Lott struck out across the country, visiting writers and writing professors asking them what bad writing is, exactly.

The high-paid writer living in a Manhattan high rise. The cut-throat agent badgering publisher after publisher to dish out a six figure advance. Champagne release parties. Sound nothing like the writing world you know? That’s because America now has tow distinct literary cultures–the traditional business-oriented (ie: money-driven) NYC culture, and the burgeoning MFA culture. Slate Magazine‘s Chad Harbach explains.

Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ’70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

(c) The Chronicle of Higher Education

In some sense, of course, the voice in a personal essay does put one in connection with its author, more directly and closely than any other form of writing, except a personal letter. But the nature of that connection is inherently so tangled and indefinite, so variable from one essay or essayist to the next, that despite the inclination of Oates and others to talk about “authentic voice,” one cannot substantiate the connection beyond asserting that it exists.

Along with publishing the author’s new short story, The New Yorker has posted an interview with George Saunders in which he discusses the nature of darkness in stories, fate, and redemption.

I’m finding, as I get older, that I’m not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life—redemption does happen, and it’s cool when it does—but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own). It feels more and more like some sort of apologist/capitalist construct: “See, all is well, and it always was! Us scrappy humans can redeem any dang situation!” What I don’t like about this is that it implies that, when redemption doesn’t happen, it’s the unredeemed person’s fault. Whereas, to me, it seems more and more like luck/fate/karma.

When it comes to writing do you go it alone or ask your peers for advice? In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, professor Rachel Toor discusses her Writing Group of Two–an ongoing partnership with her friend in which they get together to write and help each other through the rough spots.

In the humanities, we still cling to the notion of romantic genius, toiling alone in a grotto or the stacks of a library, perpetrating academic prose. Nancy likes to point out how sad and ironic it is that often the first person who reads our drafts is the editor we submit them to.

Dog Eared Books, in San Francisco's Mission District

Litquake is an annual event, but on almost any day or night in San Francisco, there is likely to be something for the literary-inclined — a poetry reading at a bar, a book swap in a cafe or a reading in the book-lined lobby of the Rex Hotel. This is a place, after all, where dozens of fiercely independent bookstores not only survive but thrive, thanks to a city of readers who seem to view books not only as a pleasure, but as a cause.

In a recent article in Slate Magazine, Portland State University professor Paul Collins looks back to what is arguably the first how-to on writing fiction. Certain ideologies aside, the advice still rings true for today’s aspiring writers, yet it comes with that signature Victorian flair.

After warning that there are no small ideas, only small writers—but many small writers with small ideas—Cody tells would-be Victorian writers to show and don’t tell (“To say your heroine was proud and defiant is not half so effective as saying she tossed her head and stamped her foot”), to kill their darlings (“sacrifice absolutely everything of that sort”), and write what they know. Oh—and don’t quit your day job: “No man ought to make the writing of fiction his sole business.”

Matt Trueman of The Guardian reviews the latest theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby–a seven hour stage production in which “not one of Fitzgerald’s words is left out.”

When The New York Times wrote up an article on Figment–a new website dedicated to young authors and readers–I kind of had this strange feeling of familiarity.

Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.

Salman Rushdie

It’s concentration more and it is to do with developing skills of concentration and I think that is something which, well a few things I think about being a writer that you get better at with time.

Arthur Krystal of The New York Times (it’s starting to become obvious what I read) has posted an essay on the phenomenon of literary lists–catalogues in prose, poetry, and drama–and what they can tell us.

Even though this dates back to November, I was surprised to find out that I was quoted in the Reader’s Almanac–the Library of America’s blog. In a brief article on the reactions to Joseph Epstein’s commentary on T. S. Eliot and the decline of literary culture, the Library of America mentioned my own commentary, posted here at Xenith.

Not long ago, at the onset of National Novel Writing Month, Salon’s Laura Miller received a lot of flak for her article, “Better yet, don’t write that NaNo.” In a response posted in The Los Angeles Times, columnist Carolyn Kellogg called Miller’s argument “at best wrongheaded, and at worst, smallhearted.” A multitude of comments followed Kellogg’s article, labeling Miller as “mean-spirited” and “an insecure whiner.” Miller herself posted a reply, defending her position:

My point is not that NaNoWriMo contestants are bad people who do bad things and should be condemned. I don’t think that, and never wrote that. Let me reiterate: I have nothing against people wanting to write. (I will confess to being disgusted by people who want to write but don’t read, but again, I never said this was true of all NaNoWriMo contestants, only that it is often reported by writing teachers and other professionals who come into frequent contact with aspiring writers. Are there stats on this? No — neither are there stats to prove that aspiring writers read a lot. To me, it’s amazing that ANY aspiring writers admit to not reading. Yet I have met quite a few of them myself.)

What I see here is an unfortunate and age-old quagmire. Miller, like all critics, appears to have approached her article with genuine intentions. Like all of us she’s passionate about reading and wants to share that. However, like most critics, in writing her indictment of writers who don’t read she resorted to the critic’s most dexterous talent: venom. It makes for entertaining reading but unfortunately it nearly always fails to reach the addressed party, in this case the 160,000+ writers who attempted NaNo this year.

As editor of this growing literary webzine I want to use Miller’s article as a springboard. In no way do I want to inhibit a writer from writing. Write to your heart’s content. Write whatever comes to your fingertips. I do, however, want to echo the spirit of Miller’s call for readers. We all know that the best writers read. We all know that without reading there would be no writing—at least no writing worth a damn. What I’m concerned about is the passive way in which today’s readers go about reading. Literature—although elusive when it comes to defining characteristics—is not a static process. One does not create a book from nothing and cast it out back into that nothing. Literature is an interconnected network of writers and of course readers. It’s not a straight line from writer to reader but a tensile and trembling web on which all of us are flies. A writer’s task is to twitch his wings and send a vibration all throughout that web. What often goes overlooked is the task of the reader: to send that vibration back with his own shuddering wingbeat.

Things I Know:
1: The vast majority of Xenith’s contributors are or have been enrolled in some kind of higher education
2: Students read
3: Students react

Xenith could be called many things, not the least of which being an ongoing conversation. What we need from you are your nonfictions—your presence as readers. We’d love to see your book reviews, your analysis, your aspirations, your personal growth from a lifetime of reading. What are your ten most influential books and how have they affected you? What did you think of Franzen’s Freedom? Literature has always been a discourse. Too often it’s easy to think of something as final once it’s published. What we’ve forgotten is that print and web are only the beginning of a long conversation. Today we invite you to come over and chat. Xenith is not just a magazine for writers—but also dedicated to the boisterous art of reading. We all love books. If we didn’t love books we wouldn’t be here. It’s time to start talking about them.

Send articles, essays, reviews—any nonfictions—to: patrick.nathan@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.