THANK YOU FOR NOT READING PA

by UGRESIC,DUBRAVKA

• ISBN13: 9781564782984
• ISBN10: 1564782980
• Edition: 00
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2003-11-17
• Publisher: JOHN MUIR

Summary

In this collection of acerbic essays, Ugresic dissects the nature of the contemporary book industry, which she argues is so infected with the need to create and promote literature that will appeal to the masses#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;literally to everyone#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;that if Thomas Mann were writing nowadays, his books wouldn't even be published in the U.S. because they're not sexy enough. A playful and biting critique, Ugresic's essays hit on all of the major aspects of publishing: agents, subagents, and scouts, supermarket-like bookstores, Joan Collins, book fairs that have little to do with books, authors promoted because of sex appeal instead of merit, and editors trying to look like writers by having their photograph taken against a background of bookshelves. Thanks to cultural influences such as Oprah, The Today Show, and Kelly Ripa, best-seller lists have become just a modern form of socialist realism, a manifestation of a society that generally ignores literature in favor of the next big thing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Opening
Los Torcedores	p. 3
Good Morning
Literary Dreams	p. 9
Book Proposal	p. 13
Agents and Scouts	p. 17
Low-Income Writer	p. 21
Long Live Socialist Realism!	p. 25
You Know a Craftsman by His Tools	p. 29
Bazaar	p. 33
The Market
Literature and Democracy	p. 39
Engineers of Human Souls	p. 43
The Writer as Literary Reference	p. 47
The Aura of Glamour	p. 51
Shares in Human Perversion	p. 55
Eco among the Nudists	p. 59
Come Back, Cynics, All Is Forgiven!	p. 65
The Role of Kirk Douglas in My Life	p. 71
Alchemy	p. 75
Women, Smoking, and Literature	p. 81
Optimism Strengthens the Organism	p. 85
Country Cousin
A Little Red Dot	p. 93
How I Could Have Been Ivana Trump and Where I Went Wrong	p. 99
GW, the Gloomy Writer	p. 105
The Magnificent Buli	p. 111
A Short Contribution to the History of a National Literature: The Top Ten Reasons to Be a Croatian Writer	p. 115
Life without a Tail
The Writer in Exile	p. 127
War Is War, but Intellectuals Are Only Human	p. 149
Having Fun	p. 161
Well, Goodbye
House Spirits	p. 173
Questions to an Answer	p. 183
The Writer and His Future	p. 199
Closing
The Seventh Screw	p. 211
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