Let me say off the top that I like Amazon.com. Even as a huge corporate entity, they provide a fairly even playing ground for small literary fiction presses. They are even more democratic in this regard than many independent bookstores. But today I have some criticisms to make regarding their practices of posting “Editorial Reviews.” These are the unsigned reviews that appear at the top of the review section and that are the most visible. Amazon has an agreement with Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal to post their reviews in this section. Publishers cannot opt to replace these reviews with others from equally respectable review publications. Amazon claims they are under contract to post reviews and do not have a choice in the matter. Continue reading
Author Archives: VN Alexander
Biosemiotics: Discussion with Don Favareau
Philosopher Don Favareau explains “biosemiotics,” the new paradigm for scientists and philosophers grappling with the concepts of “meaning,” “signaling,” and “coding” in biological processes–and in culture. Click here to listen to BBC radio broadcast featuring Don.
Biosemiotics is an area of science that informs my work in philosophy, as described in my forthcoming non-fiction work, The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature. But it also informs my creative writing, especially the short story collection I’m currently writing, The Narrative: and Other Stories, which focuses on how things become signs through poetic and chance associations. Continue reading
PBS Frontline on euthanasia
PBS Frontline recently featured a show about how terminally ill patients and their families face death. Medical science today can keep virtually any body “alive” for years – even after vital organs have ceased to function. It is a complex issue because – in addition to the philosophical questions about what it means to be alive Continue reading
How to write a book review
I’m the editor at an online literary fiction review called Dactyl Review. We receive a lot of emails asking for some general pointers for writing reviews. Most requests have come from conscientious readers who want to post their first review on Amazon.com, GoodReads or LibraryThing. As a supporter of literature, I liked to help the reviewing world do a good job, on Dactyl Review and elsewhere. So here’s some guidance that (I hope) will help you write the kind of review that will be useful to readers and writers alike, no matter what you think of the book. Continue reading
Writer Dorion Sagan on What Now
Dorion Sagan, a good friend of mine, science writer, thinker, novelist, was recently interviewed on Ken Rose’s radio program “What Now? Extended interviews with accomplished thinkers, writers, artists, farmers and scientists addressing the global crisis” on KOWS in California.
Click here to download the mp3. It’s a wonderful, long interview. It starts slow, but keep listening. Dorion gives a surprising answer to Rose’s question about whether or not the human is likely to survive as a species and in what form. He talks about his books The Sciences of Avatar: from Anthropology to Xenology, Notes from the Holocene, Dazzle Gradually, which he wrote with his mother Lynn Margulis, Death and Sex, which he wrote with Tyler Volk, Cooking with Jesus: From the Primal Brew to the Last Brunch, and many others. Dorion also plugged my 2003 novel, Naked Singularity. Thanks Dorion.
What is Literary Fiction?
Literary fiction is often linguistically difficult, or unusual, in the way that poetry is. It often contains unfamiliar words or supports political, ideological, religious positions that are not widely accepted. It subverts sentimentality. It makes people think.
Non-fans of literary fiction tend to complain that it sends them to the dictionary (or tries to). They claim literary fiction is guilty of affectation, a term which seems to have changed its meaning of late:
Main Entry: af·fec·ta·tion
Pronunciation: ˌa-ˌfek-ˈtā-shən
Function: noun
1 :displaying extensive knowledge acquired chiefly from books : demonstrating profound, recondite, or bookish learning
2 :speech or behavior relating to, or characteristic of poets or poetry
Review of Yellow Dog by Martin Amis
“Male violence did it.” Martin Amis has a bit of a reputation for making sweeping, declarative statements like this one that ends the first paragraph of Yellow Dog. I’ve read all of Amis’ books except Pregnant Widow and Koba the Dread (on my list, next) and I’m very familiar with the Amis conception of gender. I can make sweeping generalizations about his Men and his Women. Continue reading
Death and Sex
Death and sex are literature’s subjects, not science’s. What we care most about is what these subjects mean to us—not what they, in fact, are. When scientists attempt to enlighten us on these matters, they often fall to recounting certain metabolic processes, generally missing the point, while we readers sigh or snicker, wondering if the researcher has any experience out of the lab. This is not the case with Death and Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan. See my review in New York Journal of Books.
Indie books compared to Indie films and music
The film industry and the music industry long ago responded to technological advances that put production power in the hands of the artist. When video quality became comparable to film quality, Indie videographers could afford to make their own movies. If at first these looked a bit “low-budget,” that changed soon enough. And in 2009 the Academy Award for Best Cinematography went to a digitally-shot picture: Anthony Dod Mantle for Slumdog Millionaire. “Indie Film” is now its own genre, much in the way that “literary fiction” is a genre, whose only defining characteristics are its artfulness. Continue reading
Philip Roth: The Copulation of Clichés
Marty Shepard, blogging for The Permanent Press, reports that the NY Times has officially admitted to what we have long suspected. The Book Review is primarily interested in non-fiction. It exists for the purposes of information dissemination, not the promotion of literature. “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” says Managing Editor, Bill Keller. “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” Hence if the Times is to review a book it is more of a commitment to giving out product information that helps the consumer decide “what to buy at the airport.” And, Keller adds, as if he hadn’t said enough already, “Of course, some fiction needs to be done. We’ll do the new Updike, the new Roth. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me.”
Was anyone wondering how Philip Roth was able to publish his latest appallingly bad novel, The Humbling? Well now you know. See my review in the New York Journal of Books.