New Reviews and Blog Posts

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Since I last blogged here, a lot of new writing by me has appeared online.

1. #OccupyGaddis

I’ve written a number of posts related to this past summer’s Big Read, #OccupyGaddis. Here’s the complete lineup (which repeat some I listed below) in chronological order:

There are also some great posts on the LARB blog by Sonia Johnson (here, here, and here) and Joseph Tabbi (here, here, and here). #OccupyGaddis was, on the whole, a tremendous experience. If you haven’t yet, read J R.

2. Reviews

I’ve also been pretty busy writing reviews over the last few months, most of them at LARB.

3. Other Blog Posts

Over at Stanford’s Arcade, I’ve posted a follow-up reflection on John Thompson’s great sociological study of the publishing industry, Merchants of Culture. It’s called “Another Publishing Field is Possible,” and starts this way:

“In order to transform publishing into a less crisis-bound, short-term-oriented system, we must end capitalism,” according to Andrew Goldstone’s – and my – friend, Colin Gillis, a member of the staff collective at the radical co-op, Rainbow Bookstore, located in Madison, WI. Ending capitalism to fix publishing: this is a tall order indeed, but the decisiveness of Colin’s claim gets us thinking in the right direction. For as I suggested in a previous Arcade post, the problems that plague trade publishing are, by John Thompson’s fascinating sociological account in Merchants of Culture, larger than any individual editor, imprint, or company. Many people of good faith – with excellent intentions and impeccable taste – work in the field, but sort-termism, the increasing emphasis on frontlists at the expense of backlists, the escalating allocation of marketing resources to unproven Big Books over myriad worthy Medium-Sized and Small Books by established authors: the forces compelling these changes are now built into the very fabric of how the Big Six do business.

You can read the rest here.