Author Archives: Steve, i.e., him

About Steve, i.e., him

Stephen Stark is an award-winning novelist and bestselling ghostwriter. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, Poets & Writers and in many other journals. He has been a fellow and taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and won an NEA Literature Fellowship in fiction. His novel, Second Son, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1992, and a New and Noteworthy Paperback of 1994.

Synecdoche, New York

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It’s hard to recommend Synecdoche, New York, the newest film from Charlie Kaufman. Although I deeply admire Kaufman’s work, and, it should be said, I deeply admire this work, it’s not a kind of movie that leaves you with the sense of wanting to rush to the putative water cooler and go, Wow, you have to see this, as with, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich. Rather, it’s the kind of movie that you, on one hand, (or least I) cannot help feeling as though you just endured Charlie Kaufman’s two-hour nightmare. For its nonlinearity, for its elisions, for its chronological shifts, for its tenuous but nonetheless sensible (sort of) logic, it has all the trappings of a dream/nightmare.

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EBooks Mean the Ascendency of Whom or What?

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Quo Vadis the Book?

If the eBook is ascendent, who or what else is also ascendent?
The excessively simple narrative of the history of book publishing goes sort of like this: writers hired printing presses to bring their work into the world in book or other form. To protect writers from unscrupulous printers, there arose publishers who would pay the writers a fair rate and also make money. But the scruple-less roamed the land and so came literary agents to protect writers from unscrupulous publishers, and also make a buck.
And this model worked reasonably well for a while until hypertext came along and screwed up everything.

But it’s a way slo-mo earth quake, this screwing up of things that hypertext hath wrought. Continue reading →

A McGonigal Game for Books

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If you have never heard of Jane McGonigal, or even if you have, check this out:

SAVING THE WORLD THROUGH GAME DESIGN

McGonigal’s concept of alternate reality games is actually pretty fascinating.

Not long ago, I had the idea (way less interesting than hers) that it’d be a very cool thing to do to see what would happen if someone created a fictional book of fiction and then try to generate buzz for it.

This sort of almost happened when Sex and the City, the movie, came out there was a mention of a book in it. It was nonfiction, but nonetheless. (Read about it in the Times here.) And but so the mention of this book in the movie “caused real-life people to storm to their real-life online bookstores in search of” it. And it jumped from pretty much nowhere to very high on the Amazon sales list.

That book had a mention in a major motion picture, but what I’m thinking of would be way lower key. People just start talking about it. The _____ would be this great book that had everything, suspense, romance, horror, maybe some recipes for people who like that kind of stuff.

It would seem to me that there would be a web site for the book, with a cover, and blurbs, but no actual content except for the blurbs. Maybe there would be a synopsis, but it’d be better if there were not.

Someone way smarter than me would have to think up a way of tracking interest, so maybe people could “buy” the book, but in such a way as not to hurt them (i.e., they wouldn’t get charged anything and wouldn’t have to give a credit card number—maybe just a notify me when this is available kind of thing).

Narrative is narrative

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One wants to trust ones paper.

I’m probably old fashioned in the sense that I believe what I read in the paper. I grew up in a time when the newspaper and the radio new were the only sources of reliable, credible information about the world. (For whatever reason, I have always discounted television as actual news.) I was also a young adult in the Time of Reagan, so I was pretty much afraid that the world would come to an end, and, if I went camping or something, I would miss it.  

And so when I heard Malcolm Gladwell talk on This American Life about his time at The Washington Post—a paper that not only was my hometown paper but was also a significant source of income, since I had been a carrier (in those days, a paperboy, a proud moniker)—I assumed he was being pretty much entirely, though believably, facetious. Continue reading →

Eaten by Narrative

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There is something weird and utterly fascinating about the newest case of ‘literary fraud.’ Which is to say that I come at this as a consumer of narrative. Not (at least I hope to think) as a tut-tutting moralist with any sort of moralistic judgment to make.

A young woman (Margaret B. Jones/Margaret Seltzer) creates a narrative that she sells as a memoir of a not-so-privileged life. Dupes willing agent and willing publisher. She gets major review in the New York Times. She gets a big puff piece in the New York Times. Then her sister, for whatever reason, exposes her as a fraud upon seeing the latter piece.  

One can only wonder at the level of self-deception necessary to think that she’d actually pull this off. Continue reading →

Edit Me

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John Gardner, in an interview, said an editor once told him about his novel The Sunlight Dialogues, that it needed to be cut by a third. He retorted, he said, Which third?

When it was finally published, it went on to be a bestseller. I remember reading in in paperback when Gardner was recommended to me by a teacher, the novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch. It’s been a long time since I read it, but one of the things I remember about it was “the Sunlight Man” delivering long, hectoring lectures to the main character, Fred Clumly. And I remember feeling a little hectored myself, and skipping a lot of that. Continue reading →

Music. The artifact.

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One day I was in the garage (okay, the Jack Russell was peeing in the house, on the not-exactly-cheap Persian carpet, and I was digging out the cage in order to retrain him that you pee on the old Washington Post, not the carpet), and there, in front of the cage/box/whatever you call the thing, was a stack of boxes of vinyl. I had read or heard on the radio something about kids-these-days thinking that music was free, and I saw all of that old vinyl, and I got to thinking about the artifact.

People talk about electronic books vs. real books and I got to thinking about MP3 music vs. real music. Back in the olden days of record store/head shops, when it cost about $3.99 to buy an album and about $0.51 more to buy a concert ticket, I remember the whole sort of fetishistic thing of the record album. Lying on the floor in a daze and poring over the album cover for clues as to the genius of, say, Frank Zappa. Continue reading →

Oscar Wao. Wow.

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It’s hard to do anything but admire Junot Diaz’s prose, his incredibly facile use of language. That was the case with Drown, and it is certainly the case with his brief, wondrous novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I’m not entirely certain that the book holds up entirely as a novel—in some cases, it seems a bit more like interconnected short stories—but I’d rather read a flawed Diaz novel any day than a totally coherent (in the old, sticks-together sense of the word, not the makes-sense sense). Continue reading →

I’m no prophet, but I don’t think Amazon’s Kindle will do much for electronic books

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Best that I can tell, the one thing that dedicated electronic book readers have going for them is convenience. You’re traveling, for example, and you want to take half a dozen books but if you cram them all in your carry-on bag, it’ll weigh as much as college cheerleading squad. And you don’t want to pack them in your checked luggage, because then you won’t be able to get at them during your mind-numbingly dull flight.

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