Arts Writer for Sale
posted by on December 15 at 13:46 PM
Um, I’m just going to point out that there are only three hours left in the Strangercrombie bidding and the So You Wanna Be a Writer package is only at $187.50. Gary Shteyngart, one of the, I dunno, five or six writers in America whose books are both praised to the skies by the literary establishment and bestsellers? He’s like our Amis, or our Zadie Smith, or Amis and Smith stirred together, covered in butter, and baked in a piroshki. He’ll read your short story (or 3,000 words of your novel) and give you his feedback—in writing! (Which writing itself is worth something!) Plus, a free class at Richard Hugo House, maybe Lyall Bush’s upcoming one on Joyce? Plus a gift certificate to Epilogue Books? Plus a CD of literaryish sea shanties? Plus a case of Solaris wine, to drink yourself to death with?
(You don’t know who Shteynhart is? You don’t read The New Yorker? OK, here’s the New York Times describing Shteyngart’s latest novel as “burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence.” Here is Shteyngart giving a reading and talk at The New Yorker festival two months ago. Here he is in an interview talking about the best novel he’s read in a long time—The Sopranos on HBO. “It’s amazing. It’s like Flaubert or something…except it’s obviously a television series.”)
Anyway, there is no greater gift in the world for that aspiring-writer-who-has-everything on your list. Or for yourself. And right now it’s cheap. Just sayin’.
And even cheaper is Christopher Frizzelle's Sales Support Award, currently fetching a lousy $15.50. A cheap opportunity to humiliate your favorite Books Editor at twice the price!
Shteyngart is our Amis? Our Smith? Our Smith-Amis? That the bar could and too-often fails to be set much higher in the first place, is another point entirely, but I'd say it's quite doubtful that Shteyngart's even at that level. I know you're big on Ms. Smith, Mr. Frizzelle, but I think you're affording her too much weight and merit all the same. That you're according as much now to Shteyngart just devalues it that much more. Unless it was simply hyperbole for charity's sake, which hyperbole can be excused. For the sake of charity and bland opportunism, I hope it went for much more than $15.50.
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