Things have come to a pretty pass when publishers prefer to issue the minor works of dead authors rather the current work of living writers. But that’s what’s happening in today’s muddled publishing scene: the barrel is being scraped so hard there’s hardly any of it left. David Foster Wallace, Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut are all due for creative evisceration over the coming months as estate and editors consider what they can patch together from their respective literary cast-offs: even Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison and Donald E. Westlake are being thus disembowelled. And as for Michael Crichton – someone had the bright idea of raiding that particular dead author’s laptop for any remaining dregs – the results will be synthesised into an adventure novel about pirates in 17th-century Jamaica and a techno-thriller that HarperCollins will publish in 2010.
Is this right? Particularly when the author concerned has expressly indicated that they do not want such works to be posthumously published?
That’s just one of the gnarly issues our forthright panel grapples with tonight – consisting of Donna Ballman, Eve Harvey, Dave Bartram and special guest from New York writers’ therapist Dr. Susan O’Doherty.
Topics covered and links include:
- How a Swedish man discovered a 15cm penis tattoo on his leg
- We draft a suitable speech for poor Guy Richie to win Madonna back
- “Fromage a trois” – why intertextuality is a dreadful and fearful thing
- Are you in the viral loop? Good, neither are we
- The Kindle is now available to buy in the UK – whatever
This week’s titles for the Commissioning Meeting are:
DONNA
“The Talkative Wig”
Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, 1787-1860DR SUE
“Two New Pocket Gophers from Wyoming and Colorado”
H. Gordon MontagueEVE
“The Tale of Grunty Pig”
Arthur Scott Bailey, 1877-1949DAVE
“Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth”
Henry Lovejoy Ambler, 1843-1924
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Picture by Joe Penniston
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We’ll all be a dead author someday. Perhaps we should plan now to come back and haunt them all.