Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« Currently Hanging | The Army Is Gay Enough Right Now, T… »

Monday, February 2, 2009

Books Children of the Recession

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:14 PM

d03d/1233603991-scrooge-mcduck-make-it-rain.jpg

Houghton Mifflin looks like it might be circling the drain (which would leave a bunch of great authors, including Jhumpa Lahiri, without a home.) But on the brighter side, there's a great interview with Richard Nash, the absolutely charming publisher at Counterpoint/Soft Skull, about publishing in the recession. The interesting thing is that Soft Skull/Counterpoint had their best year ever last year.

There's also a question that offers some artistic hope for the next few years:

In a recent article in The Independent, Boyd Tonkin advanced the idea that an important group of British writers come on the scene during the UK's recessionary '80s. He speculated that the economic turmoil was somehow linked to the emergence of these writers—perhaps the recession helped open the field to emerging writers and allowed more innovative publishers to put out the work of talented writers who hadn't broken into the mainstream. Some of the authors he named were Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis. What do you think of this idea? Would you say that in times of a recession you would be more likely to publish an unknown but largely talented author?

This interview is part of a series of interviews about the industry that you should be paying attention to if you care about books.

Comments (2) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

If the economy affects the quality of work published then how does the political climate affect art? I've always thought that music produced during republican administrations is more passionate and that even visual art and theater seemed better during the Bush years.

Posted by Morgan on February 3, 2009 at 12:07 AM

I have a friend who works as a sort of pre-agent to aspiring writers, helping them polish their manuscripts & navigate the industry. She said she expected business to go down with the recession but instead it's increasing. Seems like writing is a bunch of people's plan B. If more people are working on their writing that could lead to new talents being discovered, like someone who never would have known they were a math genius until they were forced to quit playing sports. (Okay, I admit that last bit comes from a biography of Steven Hawking I read in a Childcraft book when I was like 12.)

Posted by Arkham on February 3, 2009 at 7:39 AM