Author name: Booksquare

The Happy Booker is entertaining again, and this time she’s using the good china. What else can a girl do when she learns that one her literary loves has discovered a new blog and is telling the world? Well, yes, corraling him for an interview does seem like a logical next step, and she’s done just that with Richard McCann. Though we haven’t read McCann, this alone is enough to make us shower, blow dry, brush teeth, find matching shoes, find clothes, and stand outside Vroman’s until it opens: And then there is this: Although I’m by nature a slow […]

Oh yeah, the cranky machine is running at full capacity. We may require a time out. There is, out there (there being someplace we can’t pinpoint, but it surely exists) a problem with the sales of literary fiction. Now, we do not have at our fingertips a graph of historical sales, but, we suspect, literary fiction has always sold to a lesser degree than genre fiction. If this is not true, then do not tell us as we’re going with that as our thesis. Now, readers are faced with increasing choice and limited budgets. So when we read stuff like

Something tells us we’re about to have a cranky day. We would apologize but we’re one sentence into what promised to be an interesting article (promise broken) and already we want to shoot off long diatribes to the journalist’s editor. This is how it starts, isn’t it? E-books have yet to crack the publishing industry, but that hasn’t stopped literature from tackling computer technology as a storytelling device. Well, technically, ebooks have cracked the publishing industry. Perhaps it would be better to suggest that they haven’t set the publishing industry on fire. Yet. We remain convinced that they will find

We understand exuberance — we’ve been excited about things plenty of times, but our innate sense of fiscal responsibility generally saves our checkbook from our enthusiasm (also, the husband). Perhaps it’s because we don’t look good in red. This may be why we do not publish novels. Sure, Little Brown & Company have proven themselves somewhat experienced in the publishing business. And their professional editors can spot raw talent in the same way we can spot decent Chinese food. An almost-finished novel by a first-time author? Screams “two-book, six figure” deal to us. So what that: “It’s a little tough