- Publisher Buys Novel Off Twitter—It was just a matter of time, I suppose. An author Twittered his entire book and a small publisher picked it up.
- Dara Horn discusses the role of Jewish writers in the 21st Century in a Present Tense magazine profile. I think there are many similarities here with ambitious Pentecostal writers.
"Philip Roth was first published fifty years ago — in a very different America, where being seen as a Jewish writer was a career-killer. Now it's practically a marketing asset. But I also think that most writers of Philip Roth's generation actually didn't know very much about Judaism or even Jewish culture. They were essentially writing about the second-generation immigrant experience, about assimilating into American life. My work is quite different because I've written about the content of Jewish tradition, which most of the earlier writers didn't. Most writers are fearful of being labeled because they feel it may limit their work or their audience. But I've actually been surprised by how much non-Jewish readers have taken to my books. I've spoken at churches, and I get a lot of mail from non-Jewish and even religiously Christian readers. The beauty of literature is that it becomes universal precisely through its particulars."
- Here’s What We All Dream Of—James Patterson’s $150 million Book Deal
“But Young got a bargain. Patterson's not a writer. He's a fiction (and non-fiction) factory. In 2008 he authored or co-authored seven books and in his 33-year career as a published author he's written 57. He sells an average of 20 million books per year. An estimated 170 million copies of his novels are in print worldwide. Most important: During the last two years he's earned Hachette an estimated $500 million. According to Forbes estimates, Patterson took home $60 in the last year million for the effort.”
“Detective fiction is a fiction of dreams. Not only is this no bad thing, it is precisely what makes it so indispensable.”
“Short stories can function as wonderful laboratories that allow you to try things that a novel might not support because it's very weird or very specific. You can be more uninhibited with a short story because you don't have to worry about how you're going to make something work for three hundred pages.”
Wow... the Jewish fiction writing community parallel to our in-the-making A/P lit community. The similarities jumped off the page at me. I wonder if the next generation of A/P writers will look back at us and muse about what it must've been like to brandish the pen-sword and blaze a trail for Oneness Pentecostals in the world of fiction?
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