Thank You for Not Reading

Ugresic Dubravka, Damion Searls, Celia Hawkesworth

Description

•PROMOTIONAL COPIES: Over 250 copies will be sent to booksellers and reviewers across the country.

•STRONG MEDIA CAMPAIGN: Ugresic is a fundamental Open Letter author, and over the next few years, we will have all of her titles in our catalog. With each release, her reputation and readership grows, and this title will attract special appeal since it's been out of print for a while and pokes fun at the book industry itself.

•GIVEAWAYS: Through Open Letter's social media accounts and the Three Percent website.

•EBOOK AVAILABLE: Ebook will be mentioned on all press release materials, Open Letter website, etc.


•CULT FOLLOWING: Whether it's from Karaoke Culture being a NBCC Finalist, her receiving the Neustadt Prize (often referred to as the “American Nobel”), or because she's perennially on the list for the Nobel, Ugresic has a very strong following among readers and booksellers.

•FOUNDATIONAL OPEN LETTER AUTHOR: This is the seventh book by Ugresic that Open Letter has published, with two more forthcoming in 2022.

•BACK IN PRINT: Thank You for Not Reading was originally published by Dalkey Archive back in 2003 and has been unavailable for quite some time.

•HITS CLOSE TO HOME: A must read for anyone in the book business, as Ugresic lampoons all aspects in ways that are both incredibly funny and brutally honest.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Industries
• Popular Culture
• Essays
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Eastern
• General
• Industrie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Open Letter
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948830836
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for
Dubravka Ugresic
On the grim state of the book business, several writings have been published lately-some excellent-by editors and publishers who have seen things go from bad to worse, and who now help explain why this has happened. Dubravka Ugresic adds immeasurably to that still-modest bibliography. Thank You for Not Reading is an indispensable critique as well as an exhilarating work of prose-a brilliant meditation on the literary, cultural, and existential consequences of the global triumph of the Bottom Line. For this dazzling collection only starts with Ugresic’s sharp (and frequently hilarious) analysis of publishing, soon moving on to the far larger, deeper problem of what life is like throughout the world today. This book is something rare indeed: a work as pleasurable to read as it is edifying; as marvelously crafted, line by line, as it is wise throughout.
-Mark Crispin Miller
A brilliant, enthralling spread of storytelling and high-velocity reflections Ugresic is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.
-Susan Sontag
Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.
-Richard Eder, New York Times
Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.
-John Balaban, Washington Post
Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in the former Yugoslavia produced Utterly original, beautiful, and supremely intelligent.
-Charles Simic

Other Books by Dubravka Ugresic in English Translation
FICTION
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Fording the Stream of Consciousness
Fox
In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories
The Ministry of Pain
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
NONFICTION
American Fictionary
The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays
Europe in Sepia
Karaoke Culture
Nobody’s Home

Originally published in Dutch as Verboden te lezen! (Breda, 2001)
Copyright © 2001, 2003, 2022 by Dubravka Ugrešić
English translation copyright © 2003, 2022 by Celia Hawkesworth
First English edition, 2003
First Open Letter edition, 2022
All rights reserved
The epigraphs at the beginning of the seven sections belong to Eeyore, the unforgettable character from The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
PB: 9781948830454
EBook: 9781948830614
This project was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
-->
CONTENTS 1. Opening Los Torcedores 2. Good Morning Literary Dreams Book Proposal Agents and Scouts Low-Income Writer Long Live Socialist Realism! You Know a Craftsman by His Tools Bazaar 3. The Market Literature and Democracy Engineers of Human Souls The Writer as Literary Reference The Aura of Glamour Shares in Human Perversion Eco Among the Nudists Come Back, Cynics, All Is Forgiven! The Role of Kirk Douglas in My Life Alchemy Women, Smoking, and Literature Optimism Strengthens the Organism 4. Country Cousin A Little Red Dot How I Could Have Been Ivana Trump and Where I Went Wrong GW, the Gloomy Writer The Magnificent Buli A Short Contribution to the History of a National Literature: The Top Ten Reasons to Be a Croatian Writer 5. Life without a Tail The Writer in Exile War Is War, but Intellectuals Are Only Human Having Fun 6. Well, Goodbye House Spirits Questions to an Answer The Writer and His Future 7. Closing The Seventh Screw
Guide Table of Contents Begin Reading
I sit at my desk .
My life is grotesque .
—Joseph Brodsky


Acknowledgments
Thank You for Not Reading is the result of the inner struggle between two of the author’s creative impulses. One whispered in the author’s ear that self-respecting writers should not write about things that wise people prefer not to discuss. The second impulse dragged the author in the opposite direction: self-respecting writers should never try to be too wise. This feud was the source of many features of the book: its title, style, tone, and rhythm.
This is why Thank You for Not Reading is half fiction and half fact, or maybe a little more than half fiction. I wrote some of the essays under the mask of an East European grumbler confused by the dynamics of the global book market, hence all the quotes from Eeyore, the best-known grumbler in literary history. Although I usually tried to avoid it, sometimes the tone of the “professor of literature” managed to sneak into the essays. In other essays, the reader may feel the struggle between two intentions: the author’s ambition to take the things seriously and the fear that if she does, she’ll bore her readers. However, every time this light book was on the verge of becoming as serious as its theme deserves, the memory of a student of mine returned to warn me. When asked what makes a good book good, he answered without hesitation: “It has to sparkle!” I can’t say whether this one sparkles, but I certainly tried to meet my student’s literary standards.
This book is not objective and does not try to be. Some readers may find my unwillingness to use scholarly conventions (such as footnotes or proper bibliographical data) impolite. I have been reading, or at least leafing through, some of the scholarly and less scholarly books that deal with a similar theme. Some were written long ago, some during the time I was writing my book, and some, such as The Business of Books by André Schiffrin and Book Business by Jason Epstein, appeared in the bookstores at the same time as the first publication of my book, in Dutch. All in all, Thank You for Not Reading corresponds in one way or another with a list of authors, ideas, tendencies, magazines such as the Baffler , and books such as Conglomerates and the Media (ed. Erik Barnouw); The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts; Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman; On Television and other books by Pierre Bourdieu; The Death of Literature by Alvin Kernan; Talents and Technicians by John W. Aldridge; Does Literary Studies Have a Future? by Eugene Goodheart; Bad by Paul Fussell; Carnival Culture by James B. Twitchell; Kitsch and Art by Tomas Kulka; Modernity at Large by Arjun Appadurai; Understanding Popular Culture by John Fiske; The Future of the Book (ed. Geoffrey Nunberg); The Wake of Art and After the End of Art by Arthur C. Danto; Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury; Six Memos for the Next Millennium and The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino; Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler; A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel; One Market under God by Thomas Frank; Cynicism and Postmodernity by Timothy Bewes; The Cultures of Globalization (ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi); Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman; Representations of the Intellectual by Edward W. Said; On Grief and Reason by Joseph Brodsky, Altogether Elsewhere: Writers On Exile (ed. Marc Robinson).
This list of authors and titles was part of the Acknowledgment in the first American edition of this book. Since that time I threw up my hands and stopped following the books that have come out about the literature industry. I believe their number has grown since then. The world literary scene over the last twenty years has changed dramatically both for the worse and for the better. Publishers, editors, the authors themselves, and the media have doubled down on the brutal commercialization of literature. But also what we might call a resistance movement has arisen: small non-profit publishers, literary activists, online portals that exist thanks only to the work of volunteers and enthusiasts, including editors, collaborators, and authors. There are podcasts online in which we never learn the names of the critics because they themselves aren’t doing this for the sake of name recognition. They are ready to speak for hours about a book or literary trend, and do so with more competence and joy than do the more celebrated literary experts. All this underground literary activity-the students of literature, critics, lecturers, secondary-school teachers, academics, translators, all those who have resisted succumbing without a blink to the facile charms of market appraisal-remind me of the artistic and intellectual underground movement that existed in some Communist countries (while Communism was still around). This current literary underground also invokes the memory of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 and the eponymous film by Francois Truffaut, which depicts an underground intellectual resistance movement and its members-human books. Today we have more and more such human books, simply because there are more and more readers being manipulated by the market. The market is ruled by a consensus of desire, a “dictatorship,” exactly like one of the religion industries where one God and one canon rule, whether the canon is called the Bible, the Koran, or-Coca Cola. I am, therefore, grateful to the literary enthusiasts, first of all to Chad W. Post, who, to my great good fortune, have not bypassed me in their literary lives. To all of them I dedicate this book.
October 2021.
1.
Opening
Hallo, Eeyore, they called out cheerfully.
Ah! said Eeyore, Lost your way?


Los Torcedores
In the early 90s, I was at the opening of the annual London Book Fair. The fair was opened formally by Joan Collins. Her first novel had just come out and the famous American-British actress, newly baptized writer, and full sister of Jackie Collins, was a perfectly credible person to open a book fair. Joan Collins appeared, dressed like a quotation: in a little pink Chanel suit, with a pink pillbox hat on her head and a coquettish veil over her eyes. Hypnotized, I was swept along in the crowd of vis