American - Novelist | June 26, 1969 -
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
Lev Grossman
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What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
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When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.
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I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.
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I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.
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Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
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I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
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I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
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My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.
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One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.
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Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
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Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.
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