A valuable companion for aspiring writers.
A seasoned writer offers advice on “the professionalization of creativity.”
Novelist and founder of the learning collaborative The Cabins, Maum (Costalegre, 2019, etc.) mines her own experiences as an author, as well as advice and anecdotes from editors, publicists, literary agents, and other writers, to offer a sensible and brightly encouraging guide to publishing. Maum covers just about everything a first-time author needs to know: how to make time to write, learn to revise, deal with rejection, find an agent, choose a publisher, and juggle the many tasks involved in promotion. With warmth and candor, she addresses the emotional stresses and “existential ups and downs” that buffet many writers and responds to myriad questions that novice writers ask, from whether to go to book parties to whether to enroll in an MFA program. What about multiple submissions? Or self-publishing? Or deciding if an advance is fair? How crucial is it to have an agent? “It is very, very hard to get a book published,” admits the author, but getting a contract is not the end of the process: There are editorial revisions to consider, a publishing team (designer, publicist, copy editor, sales and marketing departments) to work with, blurbs to request, social media connections to make, and a publicity campaign to get rolling. Maum offers useful information about the different kinds of publishing houses, including micropresses, nonprofit independent presses, for-profit independent houses, midhouse publishers, and the Big Five. “Many writers—myself included,” Maum writes, “toggle between commercial and independent houses based on the nature of the book that’s up to bat.” Once a book is published, pressures don’t abate. For example, anticipating and reading reviews can generate "elation, doubt, despair, pervasive unease, and bolts of white-hot pride." Maum cautions writers to tamp down their expectations of having a “break out” book that sells tens of thousands of copies. Most debuts, she reveals, perform conservatively (under 5,000 copies). She also advises authors to read only professional reviews, not “the reviews of overcaffeinated strangers who just want to vent online.”
A valuable companion for aspiring writers.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-40-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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