One Moment Please While I Geek Out

by Stephanie

Judge me as you will, but I will make no attempts to hide the fact that I am a Harry Potter fan, and have been since the beginning. The series seems to have been a benchmark for my (relatively speaking) younger years, and I have always been one of those fans who stuck with the books and subsequent franchise throughout its life. In fact, next week I will be going to the theatre (which at $13 a ticket, who does that?) to see the first installment of the final movie. I’m hoping I don’t resort to pushing a small child to get to the good seats, but I won't make any guarantees.

Anyway, with that in mind, I wanted to pass along this clever piece that examines the elements of the series that make for sound tips writers can take away and use to hone their own work. From character development to plotting to points of view, it’s interesting how one pivotal series holds within it so many building blocks to strong writing. I’m sure some won’t feel the same with regard to my admiration for the series, but I think this piece makes a strong argument in favor of Rowling’s talents, as well as driving home the importance of truly enjoying the world you create.

Touring Manhattan in literary style

by Lauren

If you love books and/or New York, I hope you’re not too busy today, because if you haven’t already seen it the New York Times Book Review has an amazing interactive map of literary Manhattan. Apparently the fine offices of DGLM are located near the site of a brisk walk in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts as well as Newland Archer’s first spotting of the Countess Ellen Olenska at what is now an NYU dorm down the street from here in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Not to mention that Chip Lambert in The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen sells some books back to the Strand bookstore just off Union Square, a New York rite of passage that many of us here at DGLM know well.

If it weren’t such a bleak and rainy day in New York, I might take a lunchtime walking tour of the literary neighborhood. It’ll have to wait for another time. In the meantime, I’ve got the Times website and if I crane my head out the window, I can almost see Countess Ellen Olenska from here.

Reading in the now

by Lauren

I came across some interesting discussion in the Guardian on the use of present tense narration in novels. Apparently Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher aren’t crazy about it and are aggravated that it seems to be on the rise—and on the Booker shortlist. I’m not unsympathetic to their distaste for the technique, but it seems to me an exaggeration to say that it “does nothing but annoy.” It often does annoy, me at least, and clearly Misters Pullman and Hensher. But it also does other things, like create a feeling of immediacy and throw the reader slightly off balance. I think it’s a gimmick like any other (second person, foreign language words) that some authors use as a shortcut and few are skilled enough to employ well, but in the right hands, it’s not deadly or even distracting. I’m on record about my love of Emma Donoghue’s Room, and it’ll be Pullman’s loss if he doesn’t read it because he doesn’t like the tense. (If he already has and didn’t love it, well, I guess I won’t be matched up with him on that dating site.)

It’s easy to say that something is overused so no one should do it, but if a technique (or idea or what have you) has value, there’s no point in everyone abandoning it. Overused implies that there is an appropriate level of use, after all. It’s also easy to criticize a book that we don’t think works and blame the technique, but really, if it doesn’t work, shouldn’t we blame the technician? Room is a highly stylized novel to be sure, but the reason I rate it and Donoghue so highly is precisely because it’s stylized (noticeably, but not, I’d argue, distractingly) yet still compelling and riveting and funny and disturbing and sad and hopeful. I’d imagine the Booker committee felt likewise, about that and the other two present tense novels on the shortlist. I’m at least willing to give Tom McCarthy the benefit of the doubt here, because I loved Remainder, his previous book, and think he’s pretty talented.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, okay?

Welcome to DGLM, Stephanie DeVita!

by Stephanie

Hi blog readers! Now that both Jane and Chasya have so kindly introduced me, it’s my turn to chime in. I guess the best way to begin is to give you a little information on my background here. I may be new to the website, but I’m not entirely new to the blog. In fact, I have actually been puttering around this office for longer than you think.

I began at Dystel & Goderich over a year ago as an intern. I was determined to find myself an internship in publishing, particularly during the latter half of my college career. I hadn’t had much luck early on, so by my third year at NYU, nothing was going to stop me. I applied and interviewed for the internship with DGLM all while living in London, where I was spending the spring semester of my junior year. Fully aware that my geographical gap could create a handicap, I knew I had to be persistent. And luckily for me, according to Lauren, I was persistent enough that it exhibited my determination, but not too persistent that it made her want to burn my application and any remaining evidence of my existence. So with that, I was offered the chance to join DGLM that summer as an intern. The semesters passed, I continued to stay with the agency, and before I knew it about a year and a half had gone by and I had graduated from NYU. Then I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity by Jane and Miriam to take over for Chasya as she looks to begin a new chapter in her life. I knew that the timing was right; I felt comfortable here, and I had spent enough time working on the less essential tasks that I had developed the desire to explore the business further and carve out my own place in it. And as clichés go, the rest is history.

In giving this blog post some thought, I remembered something Rachel had said in her welcome post: “I think the one thing I truly love about working in a literary agency is that I get to see the entire process of publishing, from a rough manuscript to a finished book on the shelves.” I might make fun of Rachel for her love of Vegemite, but her words are very true. I’m very excited to finally get the chance to dive in and take on my own work. My time at DGLM has allowed me to expose myself to an industry I have always wanted to be a part of, and now it’s allowing me to embark on a new journey in my life—one that will allow me to build the career I’ve always wanted.

The bottom line is, I’m excited to take on this new responsibility within Dystel & Goderich, because now I get to hear from you. Yes, you. I look forward to hearing your ideas, your thoughts, your opinions. You all have stories to tell. Trust me, I’ve read a lot of them. But now I’m ready to do something with them. Turn them into the books they deserve to be. There are certain subjects I’m particularly interested in reading, which you can find in my bio on our website. So let me hear from you. I can only rearrange the pens on my desk for so long….

Great writing

by Jim

A few weeks back, one of our commenters asked me a completely unanswerable question: “What is great writing?”

He may have been talking about porn, but I think Supreme Court Justice Potter Smith nailed it when he said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

For me, the phrase “great writing” brings to mind authors who can devastate you with a sentence, whose ability to find distinctive, rich, unique ways to use language are stunning in their own right. I think of people like Toni Morrison who blew my high school mind with this sentence in Song of Solomon: "When the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and airplanes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.” Morrison is one of my favorite novelists. But the phrase great writing also makes me think of someone like Ian McEwan whose prose is always gorgeous and whose books I find tedious and overworked.

Really, the only thing I can say for sure about what great writing is is that it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Some of the finest crafters of prose can’t tell a story to save their life. And some brilliant storytellers can’t make their way through a paragraph without a total dud of a sentence. Take a look at Dan Brown. I don’t think anyone sees him as the most artful writer, but he tells a great story.

Though the tendency is to think that literary fiction is about great writing and commercial fiction is about great storytelling, I think the truth is that all good books blend both. Category divisions crop up based on how the balance between the two is achieved, but what we want to find, in any category, is a book that tells a great story, in wonderful language, with rich characters, fantastic narrative momentum, and an eye for detail.

Is that so much to ask?

What about you folks? Any other writers you feel are particularly “great writers?” I’d also throw out Marilynne Robinson, Steven Millhauser, Andrew Holleran, Margaret Atwood, Colum McCann…there are so many!

These are a few of my favorite things

by Rachel

I always wonder if my personality reflects my choice in books, and last August, if you were following the DGLM blog, you’ll remember that everyone in the office put together their list of great books and made you—our readers—guess who had created them. Before working at DGLM, I actually read this series of Great Books posts and loved a lot of selections.

It’s difficult to say why I love a certain book and why I can’t get into another. I fell in love with reading Steinbeck novels when I was living in California, so I used to put my love for his writing down to geographical familiarity—Cannery Row and Salinas were places I knew about and so they came alive in his writing—but then I fell in love with Dostoevsky while living in the Midwest, and when I began reading his work there wasn’t anything familiar about his world, yet I couldn’t stop reading.

Anyway, seeing as I’m now part of the team here at DGLM, I think it’s time to give you my best books list. Scrutinize it as you will. I’m up for friendly banter on why you think my choices are terrible, mediocre or just plain brilliant.


John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Albert Camus’ The Stranger
Luke Davies’ Candy
Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Milan Kundera’s Identity
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451


After reviewing my list, it makes me wonder why I enjoy certain books. I still don’t know what it is that draws me to a particular author, or why I get into one story and not another. Years ago I certainly didn’t think John Steinbeck would be my number one writer—reading about farming and migrant laborers?  Are you kidding me? I’m still trying to find out why I love his work so much.

Do you feel at all surprised by your favorite author, or love certain books you never thought you would?

Book Clubbing at DGLM

by Rachel

 
This week, the DGLM office talked more books, as another book club meeting was held around the all-purposes back office table.

The book club is a little different to any I’ve been involved with before because, for starters, we don’t all read the same book. The DGLM book club usually involves all of us reading a different book--this time we chose novels from the great books lists that were compiled over the summer by staff and interns. Another thing that makes this book club different is that we’re not only evaluating books as readers, but as people in the publishing industry. The reports we give involve ways we would pitch the book, offering our real opinions (some in praise, some…not so much in praise), and then talking about how they performed and whether we'd have picked them out of slush.

This time around, here is what we read:

• Jane read The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken
• Miriam read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Chasya read The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• Jessica read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
• Jim read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Lauren read The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Stacey read Ordinary People by Judith Guest
• I read After All These Years by Susan Isaacs

Following the DGLM book club this week, a few of us were eager to get our hands on books others had reported on, so the idea of a book club where everyone reads a different book is especially great because it allows us to hear about books we might not have heard of or seen in bookstores, and it also introduces us to amazing new authors. I really like this concept because bookstores can sometimes be overwhelming with all those titles on display, and it can be difficult to know what or who to start reading.

  

And, believe it or not, we’ve already chosen books to read for our next book club meeting next month. This time we’ll be reading books from the New York Times Notable Books of 2009, which Jim wrote about recently. I’m excited about this because I’ll be reading from an author I’ve never heard of, and discovering new writers is a passion of mine. Have you discovered amazing authors from book clubs? 

Who's who

Alright, you've been patient while we rolled out great book lists, and now is the time for us to stand by our choices by name!

#1: Chasya

#2: Michael

#3: Jane

#4: Alex

#5: Intern Stephanie

#6: Lauren

#7: Miriam

#8: Intern Zach

#9: Jessica

#10: Jim

#11: Stacey

Then we came to the end

If any of you have been waiting to see all the lists before placing your bets, your time has come! There's an uneven lot of us, so here are the final three DGLM-ers and the books they really think you ought to be reading. Check out 1, 2, 3, and 4, read the below, and then tell us who said what, where our taste is impeccable, and where we've gone horribly astray. We'll give you the answers later this week, so get your guesses in!

DGLM-er #9:

C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia

W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials

John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman

Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair

Ian McEwan's Atonement

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal & the White

Ian Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God

Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet

Lorrie Moore's Self Help

DGLM-er #10:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

J. G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights

Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat

Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

DGLM-er #11:

Tom Perrotta's Little Children
Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House
Annie Proulx's The Shipping News
Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes
Koren Zailckas's Smashed
Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha
Donna Tartt's The Secret History
Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking
John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany
Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone
Alice Munro's Open Secrets
Judy Blume's Blubber
Torey Haden's Somebody Else's Kids
Sloane Crosely's I Was Told There'd Be Cake

The great book lists just keep on coming

New week, new lists of quality literature beloved by the staff of DGLM! Check out parts 1, 2, and 3, and then let us know who you think wrote the below, where they got it wrong, and where they got it so, so right!

DGLM-er #7:

John Cheever's The Stories of John Cheever
Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House
Italo Calvino's Difficult Loves
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
William Styron's Sophie's Choice
Graham Greene's The End of the Affair
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot
Christa Wolf's Cassandra
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
John Fowles's The Magus
Homer's The Odyssey
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth


DGLM-er #8:

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Dave Eggers's What is the What
Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns
Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game
Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Great Books, Part 3

Just in time for the weekend, here are more amazing books that we here at DGLM (well, at least one of us for each list below) stand by. Why not pick one up to read before Monday?

And if you haven't already, don't forget to check out Part 1 and Part 2!

DGLM-er #5:

Graham Greene's The Quiet American
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary
Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince
James Frey's A Million Little Pieces
Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring
Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

DGLM-er #6:

George Orwell's 1984
Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
Paul Muldoon's Quoof
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude
Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Knut Hamsun's Hunger
John Milton's Paradise Lost
Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy
Judith Guest's Ordinary People

And the book lists continue

It's time for great books challenge part 2! You can read all about part 1 here. As a reminder, we'll tell you the answers at the end, so feel free to keep guessing on the first two lists as well.

So tell us, who do you think we've got today and which books do you love and hate from these lists? Be sure to give us your lists in the comments!


DGLM-er #3:

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
Leon Uris's Exodus
James Michener's Hawaii
George Eliot's Silas Marner
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint
Anita Diamant's The Red Tent
Sue Miller's The Good Mother
Anne Rivers Siddons's Outer Banks
Susan Isaacs's After All These Years
Dominick Dunne's People Like Us
Herman Wouk's The Winds of War


DGLM-er #4:

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
André Breton's Nadja
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen
Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
George Orwell's Animal Farm
Art Spiegelman's Maus
Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature
Alan Moore's The Watchmen

Great and lovable books

Around the DGLM office, great book lists generally occasion complaints that however talented so-and-so might be, surely no one enjoys reading their work. And so we've decided to challenge ourselves--and you--with some DGLM-generated lists of books that are truly great, but also truly lovable. We decided there'd be no picking a 500 page tome we had to slog through, but begrudgingly admit is a seminal work. We've got to stand by both their quality and their enjoyability.

So over the next little while we'll be anonymously posting batches of lists generated by individuals here at DGLM, and we're challenging you, dear readers, to guess who created those lists. So in the comments tell us who you think posted each list, which of these books you love, and which you're amazed to discover anyone does! If you want to play along yourself, give us your own list in the comments.

Your choices are: Jane, Miriam, Michael, Stacey, Jim, Lauren, Chasya, Jessica, Alex, and--just to make things more challenging--our summer interns Stephanie and Zach. We'll tell you the answers once we've posted them all.


DGLM-er #1:

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End
Nicole Krauss's The History of Love
John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany
Philip Roth's American Pastoral
Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases
Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote
Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True
Art Spiegelman's Maus
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's Good Omens
Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated
Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife



DGLM-er #2:

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried
Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Donna Tartt's The Secret History
John Knowles's A Separate Peace
Robert Graysmith's Zodiac
C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
George Selden's The Cricket in Times Square