The concept of the GAN (Great American Novel) seems to have been born in the late 1860s. In an 1868 TheNation essay, Civil War veteran John William DeForest—himself an aspiring GAN-ist—described the GAN as “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence,†a work that painted “the American soul.â€
The Great American Novel: Fitzgerald, Wharton, Morrison on the search. – Slate Magazine.
Cory Doctorow focuses on author Andrew Hyde, who recently “wrote and self-published a great-looking travel book†via the usual ebook retail channels but later experienced “sticker-shock†after learning that Amazon was charging huge fees to deliver the ebook to customers.
Amazon’s total fees ate away almost a third of Hyde’s royalty: The book retails on Amazon for $9.99, and under the 70% percent royalty plan Hyde imagined he would get $7. But Amazon charges $2.58 per download to deliver the ebook, with the author’s royalty being calculated on what’s left after the delivery fee is deducted.
Charitable spending in the United States has taken on the protective coloration of American business culture. At every level, charitable grants have come more and more to resemble investment projects, with a specific, measurable return on equity in mind.
Not sure that this is a good trend.
As Constance Hale says
The playful language found in children’s books comes naturally to us when we are young.
As we mature, our delight in sounds becomes less visceral.
[W]e often lose the child’s love of chaotic vowels and knocking syllables. Even when writing about poetry, we bog down in the language of academia. Our sentences get longer as we pile up clauses and struggle to state a thesis. Then, in our professional lives, we get tangled up in bureaucratese and forget our innate ability to play with sound and sense.
“We looked at 742 books reviewed, across all genres. Of those 742, 655 were written by Caucasian authors (1 transgender writer, 437 men, and 217 women). Thirty-one were written by Africans or African Americans (21 men, 10 women), 9 were written by Hispanic authors (8 men, 1 woman), 33 by Asian, Asian-American or South Asian writers (19 men, 14 women), 8 by Middle Eastern writers (5 men, 3 women) and 6 were books written by writers whose racial background we were simply unable to identify.â€
-Roxane Gay