[Link] There’s a crisis in non-fiction book sales. What’s to blame?

We’re buying 17 million fewer factual books than six years ago. Is the rise of podcasts to blame? Or publishers’ obsession with celebrities and influencers?

by Ceci Browning

Inside the world of books there are always a few things that everybody knows about but nobody can bring themselves to say out loud. Much of the present whispering is that something has gone seriously wrong with non-fiction. When did the big magisterial titles so common on late 20th century bookshelves disappear? Where did they go? Is there anything left to read for those who aren’t interested in ghostwritten celebrity memoirs or self-help manuals?

Unfortunately those fears are backed up by facts. Fiction sales might be swelling – underpinned by the rise of romantasy and a strange new demand for dragon-based love affairs – but according to Nielsen, sales of non-fiction books in 2025 were down 6 per cent compared with 2024. It was the lowest yearly total since 2017, the sorry end point of years of painfully consistent decline.

And the books that did sell well in 2024 weren’t “big ideas” titles like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or charming travelogues like Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling that elbowed their way into the charts a decade or so ago.

Read the full article: https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/what-happened-non-fiction-books-publishing-industry-trends-gd9snqwjz

[Link] Stepping Into Raymond Chandler’s Shoes Showed Me the Power of Fiction

by Denise Mina

“The Second Murderer” is the first Philip Marlowe book written by a woman. Me.

Marlowe is, of course, the most famous creation of Raymond Chandler, perhaps the most famous of American crime novelists. Reading Chandler was always a guilty pleasure of mine, his vision of 1930s Los Angeles unfolding vividly for me all the way in cold and rainy Glasgow. On the one hand, there is his glorious writing, his blue-collar heroes and the occasional profound observations about the human experience. But there’s also his liberal use of racial slurs, his portrayal of people of color and homosexuals as grotesque caricatures and the fact that his work is suffused with misogyny. It takes a strong stomach to read a story in which a woman needs a slap to calm her down.

Crime fiction was, and is, anti-feminist. That’s why I chose to write it in the first place.

Traditionally, women never had agency in crime fiction, and when I started out I wanted to try to shift the dial, casting in with a movement that already counted such lights as Sara Paretsky, Marcia Talley, Mary Wings and Val McDermid. The way I saw it, crime fiction was the new social novel, wrapped in a genre that already seemed to be reaching a wide audience of largely female readers.

The knock on commercial fiction is that it’s often written so quickly that it tends to simply mirror, for good or ill, the social mores of the time that produced it. Chandler may have been a misogynist, but he definitely lived in misogynist times, and his fiction reflects that. When values change or views become more enlightened, these kind of books tend to age poorly. Sometimes this aging-out happens quite suddenly: How tired the endless copaganda procedurals seem now; how tone-deaf the books that end with the police justifiably shooting a suspect to death. The tsunami of books featuring women with faulty memories cannot be read in the same way since the #MeToo movement or in the context of changing attitudes about sexual violence and child abuse. Overnight, yesterday’s resilient trope seems hopelessly offensive, even dangerous.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opinion/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-denise-mina.html

[Link] All Hail the Long-Suffering Cadaver

by Amor Towles

Once at the center of the murder mystery, the cadaver has become increasingly incidental to the action and now figures as little more than a prop.

For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.

Meanwhile, many of our most revered detectives have proved rather difficult to work with. They have been variously arrogant, antisocial or persnickety. Witnesses have often been skittish or defensive. Many have intentionally sowed confusion through lies of omission or commission springing from their own sins and prejudices.

But decade in and decade out, the cadaver has remembered its lines and hit its mark. This despite the fact that it has borne the brunt of a thousand humiliations. Having been subjected to that most definitive form of violence, it has had to lie undiscovered, often in a cellar or back alley, overnight. Once the police arrive, our cadaver has been poked and prodded, its pockets emptied. After being shuttled to the morgue and laid out on a slab, it has been cut open, unceremoniously. Almost from the moment the corpse is discovered, it has been an object of slander. Family, friends and acquaintances who tended to be complimentary and discreet when our victim was alive are suddenly enumerating personal failings and sharing rumors of infidelity or financial malfeasance. And all of this — the loss of life, the autopsies, the recriminations — the cadaver has suffered in silence, on our behalf.

The cadaver’s unwavering professionalism is all the more admirable given the diminishment of its standing over time. If we look back to the so-called golden age of detective fiction, in the 1920s and ’30s, when the form was reaching its apotheosis in the works of Agatha Christie, the cadaver maintained an almost enviable status. After all, it was the cadaver who set the wheels of a mystery in motion.

The stories of the era tend to begin in a relatively benign and inviting manner. A small assembly of family members or friends might gather for the weekend in a rambling country manor. The setting and circumstances are not that different from what one might expect to find in a play by Chekhov or a novel by Henry James. That is, until, with the scream of a housemaid, the cadaver is discovered. Its sudden appearance sprawled on the study floor with a knife in its back is what transforms the book in our hand, taking us from the realm of domestic drama into that of the whodunit.

But in the golden age, the cadaver didn’t simply get things going. It maintained its position at the center of the story from the moment of its discovery until the denouement. As Hercule Poirot often pointed out, it was the psychology of the victim that was paramount. In life, was the cadaver lascivious? Unscrupulous? Greedy? To understand who had most likely monkeyed with the brakes of her car or poisoned her cup of tea, one first had to understand whom she had loved and whom she had spurned; whom she had enriched and whom she had cheated.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/books/review/amor-towles-cadaver-murder-mystery.html

[Link] An Urgent Mission for Literary Translators: Bringing Ukrainian Voices to the West

Zenia Tompkins founded an agency dedicated to Ukrainian literature
in translation in 2019. Valerie Plesch for The New York Times.

by Alexandra Alter

As Russian forces breached the border with Ukraine late last month, Kate Tsurkan issued an urgent call for help on social media.

Tsurkan, a translator who lives in Chernivtsi, a city in western Ukraine, wanted to give international readers a glimpse of what ordinary Ukrainians are experiencing — and to counter President Vladimir V. Putin’s claim that Ukraine and Russia “are one people” by highlighting Ukraine’s distinct literary and linguistic heritage.

What she needed, she said, was to get Ukrainian writers published in English. She needed translators.

The response was swift and overwhelming: Messages poured in from translators and writers like Jennifer Croft, Uilleam Blacker and Tetyana Denford, and from editors who wanted to polish and publish their work. As the war escalated, so did their effort. Soon, they had a dedicated group of literary translators — who often spend years working on books for small academic presses — speed translating essays, poems and wartime dispatches.

“We need to elevate Ukrainian voices right now,” said Tsurkan, an associate director at the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation, or Tault.

Bringing nuanced and reflective writing from Ukraine and about the war to English-language audiences is a project as political as it is cultural, several translators and Ukrainian authors said.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/books/ukraine-translate-books.html

[Link] Yes, Steinbeck Wrote a Werewolf Novel. Don’t Expect to Read It.

A scholar of American literature at Stanford says it’s worth publishing. The agents representing the Steinbeck estate strongly disagree. 

by Heather Murphy

Nine years before John Steinbeck published his Pulitzer Prize-winning historical masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath,” he was working on a lighthearted detective novel featuring a werewolf.

The manuscript, “Murder at Full Moon,” was completed in 1930 but was never published. A single copy has been sitting, mostly forgotten, in an archive in Texas since 1969. It includes drawings by Steinbeck himself.

A scholar of American literature at Stanford University is pushing for the book to be published, but the agents for Steinbeck’s estate vehemently refused this week, after the effort was featured in The Guardian.

The professor, Gavin Jones, is undeterred. He dug “Murder at Full Moon” out of the archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin while working on a book about Steinbeck. “I’d love to see it published,” he said.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/books/steinbeck-werewolf-novel.html

[Link] The Meaning of Bob Dylan’s Silence

Bob Dylan at a concert in London in 2011.
Credit Samir Hussein/Getty Images

by Adam Kirsch

In the summer of 1964, Bob Dylan released his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which includes the track “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Go ’way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed,” it begins. “I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need.”

That fall, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a variation on the same tune in a public statement explaining why, despite having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would not accept it. “The writer,” he insisted, must “refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.” Mr. Dylan was talking to an imaginary lover, Sartre to an actual Swedish Academy, but the message was similar: If you love me for what I am, don’t make me be what I am not.

We don’t know whether Mr. Dylan was paying attention to l’affaire Sartre that fall 52 years ago. But now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seems to be following in Sartre’s footsteps. Indeed, Mr. Dylan has done the philosopher one better: Instead of declining the prize, he has simply declined to acknowledge its existence.

Read the full article.

[Link] Malaysians Seek Escape in Pulp Fiction as Government’s Grip Tightens

Rahman Roslan for The New York Times

By CHEN MAY YEE

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — When Anis Suhaila wants a cheap thrill, she turns to Instagram and Twitter to learn about the latest Malaysian paperback releases. But she does not buy them in ordinary bookstores here, some of which do not carry the titles she is most interested in.

Instead, she usually heads to one of the “pop up” book markets that appear occasionally, almost randomly, on the streets in Kuala Lumpur to find what she is looking for: risqué tales of crime, horror and gritty young love that are written in Malay and aimed at young Muslim Malaysians.

The writing can be patchy, but it is fresh and edgy, said Ms. Anis, 24, a manager at an education company, adding that the stories sometimes touch on “something that is relevant” to Malaysia’s political scene. She devours four books a month, she said, the most recent a tale of a boy who can see ghosts.

This new-style pulp fiction, much of it by first-time authors who got their start blogging, is the product of an independent, irreverent publishing industry that has sprung up over the past four years and has tapped into a desire for escapism among younger Malaysians as their country has become more socially conservative.

Read the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/world/malaysians-seek-escape-in-pulp-fiction-as-governments-grip-tightens.html?_r=3

RIP Carmine Infantino

Carmine Infantino — the man who SAVED BATMAN! — died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. Mr. Infantino, a celebrated comic-book artist who also drew the Flash, was 87.

His agent, J. David Spurlock, confirmed the death.

Mr. Infantino’s dynamic, avant-garde aesthetic helped usher in the “silver age” of comic books, which held sway from the mid-1950s to about 1970. He was known in particular for his long association with DC Comics, where he began as an artist, became an editor and was later the publisher.

Sleek and streamlined, Mr. Infantino’s work married comic-book art — formerly busier and baggier — to midcentury modernism. He was considered one of the industry’s finest pencilers, as the artist who first gives a story visual form is known. (An inker follows behind, filling in the penciler’s lines.)

As a cover artist Mr. Infantino was a master of motion, and on each of the blizzard of covers he drew for DC, the title character seems to spring from the page, straight toward the viewer.

He was also famed for his death-defying resuscitation of two of DC’s most terminal cases: the Flash, selling poorly at midcentury and threatened with cancellation, and Batman, similarly consigned.

Carmine Michael Infantino was born in Brooklyn on May 24, 1925. As a boy, he adored drawing and dreamed of becoming an architect, but family finances amid the Depression put that calling out of reach.

Continue reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/arts/carmine-infantino-who-revamped-batman-and-the-flash-dies-at-87.html?_r=0

An original sketch I got from Carmine years ago.
The most cherished piece in my collection.

[Link] Outlining in Reverse

by Aaron Hamburger

In my experience, one of the surest ways to kill the creative energy of a work of fiction at its inception is with an outline. The very word takes me back to fourth-grade English class, with all those confusing Roman numerals and capital letters.

During my early years as a writer I dutifully worked with the outlines of my youth. However, the longer I wrote, the more loose the structure of those outlines became. The numbers and letters gradually transformed into bulleted key words or bolded phrases, little Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs I left for myself to find and expand during revision. Later on, I wrote in stages, first blocking out the general parameters of my piece, then going back to fill in the details. It’s much the same way a figure sculptor begins by carving into a hunk of raw clay with broad strokes to determine the proportions of the limbs before going into muscles, veins and fingernails.

Over the course of my 17-year writing career, I began to give up on outlining — that is, before I write. I’ve come to prefer a more organic approach to creation, first laying out my raw material on the page, then searching for possible patterns that might emerge. But now, after I’ve completed a first draft, I compose an outline. I’ve found that this is the surest way to make sense of the work. I originally thought I was a genius for having invented reverse outlining, but I’ve since learned that many writers do this in some form or another.

Continue reading: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/outlining-in-reverse/