My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:

Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.

As a writer, I am inspired by the intimacy of Salinger’s relationship with the fictional Glass family, by his own particular immersion in the character of Buddy, and by the notion of his having found (or received, somehow, finally) his true material. As a reader, Franny and Zooey is brilliant to me in its portrait of the profound loyalty and understanding that exists between siblings who share “the exact same goddam freakish upbringing,” as Zooey says. I consider the long scene where Zooey is smoking in the bathtub and talking to his mother as one of the most wonderful I’ve read. But I’m by no means a Salinger buff, and I was unaware (before reading the New York Times obituary) of the critical disdain that greeted the book at the time of its publication. Apparently many—from Joan Didion to John Updike—found the Glass children insufferable and excoriated Salinger for what they saw as his self-indulgent and over-wrought devotion to them.

Janet Malcolm details and refutes these criticisms in her excellent article “Justice to Salinger” (New York Review of Books, 2001), claiming that critical antipathy toward the Glass characters in fact signals the genius of Salinger’s creations. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout the Glass stories—as well as in Catcher—Salinger presents his abnormal heroes in the context of the normal world’s dislike and fear of them. These works are fables of otherness—versions of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” However, Salinger’s design is not as easy to make out as Kafka’s. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, preternaturally good-looking. Nor is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it characteristically oscillates between the tragic and the comic. But with the possible exception of the older daughter, Boo Boo, who grew up to become a suburban wife and mother, none of the Glass children is able to live comfortably in the world. They are out of place. They might as well be large insects. The critics’ aversion points us toward their underlying freakishness, and toward Salinger’s own literary deviance and irony.

If you’re a fan of Salinger and mourning his loss, Malcolm’s article is well worth the read.

On November 17 Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest name in romance publishing, announced that it was launching a new imprint, Harlequin Horizons, in partnership with Author Solutions Inc., a self-publishing company. Under the new imprint, unknown romance writers will be able to publish their novels for a fee of $599. The books will be distributed electronically through Author Solutions, and authors will receive royalties equivalent to 50 percent of net proceeds on each copy sold.

For Harlequin the venture represents a point of entry into the burgeoning self-publishing market, as well as an avenue (potentially) for discovering new talent to publish under their traditional imprint. As reported by the New York Times, Brent Lewis, vice president of Digital and Internet at Harlequin, gave assurances that the new initiative would not in any way diminish the integrity of the Harlequin brand.

Still many were outraged, denouncing Harlequin Horizons as little more than a vanity press and a cynical money-making scheme that exploits the dreams of aspiring writers. Prominent author guilds, including Romance Writers of America (RWA), Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), and Mystery Writers of America (MWA), threatened to disassociate themselves from Harlequin. (Read their statements at Making Light.)

The heat was intense, apparently, as Harlequin moved immediately to rebrand the imprint. It’s now called DellArte Press, and any association with Harlequin has been painstakingly scrubbed from its website.

But as Ron Hogan, who has been following the unfolding story at Galley Cat, points out, the name change has done little to placate Harlequin’s critics; at the same time, it has effectively reduced DellArte to “just another rookie self-publishing imprint,” with none of the allure of being associated with the prominent Harlequin brand. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise fares after such an inauspicious beginning.

If you’re worried about the fate of the literary magazine in this hectic new era of apps and tweets, you might find solace in Electric Literature, a bold new bimonthly with a plan to capture and convert a broad and highly mobile readership to literary fiction. Founded by Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, who met in the Brooklyn College MFA program, the magazine is available on every possible platform, including paper (printed on demand), Kindle, iPhone, and audiobook. Although many literary publications have begun to offer electronic delivery in some form or another, Electric Literature may be the first to blanket the whole field.

By limiting their paper printing costs to exactly the number of copies ordered, the magazine eliminates a sizeable upfront expense as well as the losses associated with unsold copies. Such economy makes it possible for Electric Literature to act boldly in another way—by paying writers an impressive $1,000 per story. As the editors say in their mission statement, the pioneering model is designed to set a simple but compelling precedent: more access for readers, and fairness for writers.

The magazine seems to be off to a good start, thanks to some innovative marketing ideas and their success in landing such big-name writers as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, and Jim Shepard in their first two issues. With some 4,000 readers and growing, according to the New York Times, it’s generating a much-needed spark of optimism across the literary landscape.

The controversial Kindle incident of 7/17, in which a few hundred U.S. Kindle owners discovered that Amazon had mysteriously removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their e-book readers, was not just a thundering irony. Although Amazon has explained (it was a copyright infringement issue), apologized, and promised not to do it again, the episode (referred to by Thomas Claburn of Information Week and others as a “virtual book burning”) has generated heated debate about the nature of e-media, who really owns it, and the awesome—some might say scary—powers of its purveyors.

Writing for the Guardian Book Blog, Sam Jordison observed:

As this story has shown, if someone wants to stop you reading something and they have control of the device you read it from, it’s all too easy [ . . . ] It’s been tough to make books disappear in the past because they tend to be scattered so far afield. Now, it seems, words can vanish at the flick of a switch.

Jordison continued:

The question of whether it is safe or wise to blithely hand over so much of one of our most important industries and so many of our treasured freedoms to the gatekeepers of this revolutionary technology is an entirely modern one. The issue that underlies it, however, is one of the very oldest: who will guard the guards?

Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo posed similar questions about the implications of a company’s power, or a court’s mandate, to disable access to (or ban) art, literature, music, or other e-media at its discretion, noting:

Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely [ . . . ] This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we’ll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.

Ultimatley, Manjoo said (citing cyber law expert Jonathan Zittrain), the danger lies with the fact that advances in “tethered technology” (e-readers, smart phones, and other devices that we buy and physically possess, but which are subject to remote control by the companies that sell them) are out-pacing the law.

It will be interesting to see how the law catches up. In the meantime, many readers are finding that the question of whether to embrace the Kindle (or any other e-reader) has gotten a lot more philosophical.

A book worth reading, published by Grove Press. Click for more information.

I thought of this event recently when I was reading a New York Times article on BookExpo America. There was Sherman Alexie, now a famous writer, quoted about ebooks. On his plane going to the convention, he saw a woman reading a Kindle. According to article, Alexie, who thinks Kindles are elitist, “wanted to hit” the woman.

I doubt Alexie really wants to hit anyone, but like many literary people, he hates and fears digital books. For authors the fear is understandable. Ebooks are potentially threatening. But this antidigital urge seems to be part of a broader trend, another act in the man versus machine drama. An earlier scene occurred in 1987, when Wendell Berry wrote a piece in Harper’s describing his disdain for computers. Although compelling, the essay was widely criticized, especially for being sexist. Instead of using a computer, Berry said in the essay, he asked his wife to type his work.

Alexie, too, received mixed reviews from his comments. To his credit, Alexie on his website wrote about the many people who sent him e-mails supporting ebooks. Some, because of physical ailments, couldn’t read without the Kindle or similar machines. Alexie, who said he has not allowed his books to be available digitally, announced he would be meeting with “folks at Amazon and Kindle” and promised not to “beat up anybody” there.

Here, in another context, is Alexie in a provocative duel.

But before we can appreciate how bold it is to be “retro” in publishing these days, let’s remember what happened to the industry, especially in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days of infamy, when the independent institutions of New York publishing—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row, Penguin, and others—were being swallowed up by massive international media conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, CBS, and News Corporation.

Suddenly book publishers, who were accustomed to seeing profit margins between 3 and 4 percent, were expected to contend with their conglomerates’ film, cable television, and other media subsidiaries, which typically saw gains of between 12 and 15 percent. Under this enormous pressure to increase their margins, and with financial and marketing people now weighing in heavily on publishing decisions, editors became consumed by the hunt for the next blockbuster book (think Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus). Meanwhile, they could no longer “afford” to publish a title that was projected to sell fewer than 15,000 – 20,000 copies, regardless of its literary merit. In effect, the business of printing books, which had long been guided by a cultural mission to make literature and ideas available to the general public, was surrendered to the great, equalizing jaws of the market.

Publishing veteran André Schiffrin explains how market theory transformed the industry in “The Corporatization of Publishing” (The Nation, June 3, 1996) and at greater length in his memoir, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

So how does Europa reconcile its seemingly lofty cultural mission (to foster through literature the dialogue between nations and cultures) with the equally formidable task of turning literature in translation into a viable business venture in the United States? Looks like I’m still honing in on the answers . . .

Edizioni e/o began in 1980, when husband and wife founders Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri wagered that there was a market in Italy for literary works in translation from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Met with a barrage of skepticism, Ferri and Ferri nonetheless insisted that what was lacking in Italy then “was not so much a keen readership, but publishers who were willing to commit to a focused, long-range editorial vision.”

The couple forged ahead with their project and found that Italian readers were receptive to literature that offered a window into Eastern European experiences and perspectives. Over the years edizioni e/o expanded steadily, building an impressive international catalog of fiction titles and a reputation for their discerning literary taste.

Ferri and Ferri took another big gamble in 2005, betting that with Europa Editions they could cultivate American enthusiasm for works in translation from across the Atlantic. From the publication that year of their first translated title, Days of Abandonment, by the acclaimed Italian author Elena Ferrante, Europa has continued to build its literary status and its readership. The company reached profitability in 2008, scoring its first bestseller with The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a French novel by Muriel Barbery.

So what is the key to Europa’s success?  Is there really a growing U.S. market for literature in translation?  I’ll have to do some more reading…