September 26th, 2012 / 12:05 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
Seems pretty funny/dumb: people selling books to Penguin for more than they are probably worth and then being too lazy to actually write them.
Damn, really was looking forward to “Hip Hop Minister,” starring Eddie Griffin, but without the book, the movie will never happen!
the single greatest love story of all time
writer as bad investment
sounds right.
it think it’s called performance art
The Mead ‘book’ is already written, right?
makes you wonder why the journalist didn’t just collect some writings and send them in
That’s what I was wondering, too. This seems to suggest they asked for a collection of previously published work. Maybe she’s having hella trouble writing the intro.
Ha ha – maybe, or the index just won’t gel.
Her contract was signed in 2003, according to that round-up; she’s written a book’s-worth of articles and such in The New Yorker since then, hasn’t she?
I wonder if there aren’t other things going on behind/alongside the apparent writerly sloth, inconstancy, and fraud: crooked agents, trigger-happy corporate lawyers, miscommunication, and so on.
–I mean, in addition to deadbeat writers.
That’s the only one that really made me turn my head. I wonder what happened there.
I’d also be interested in hearing Cox’s side of her story. She’s on MSNBC more than once a week – close to once a day? – and she blogs for the Guardian; googling returns a pretty active past few years–she doesn’t seem lazy, anyway.
And I found this comment (at the end of the article) by Robert Gottlieb: http://observer.com/2012/09/penguin-sues-authors-for-repayment/ .
As Blake says, the spectacle of writers so publicly taking the money and running is pretty funny/dumb, but, as you ask: is that what happened in each case?