Book Marketing Makes Me Sick

After listening to an eight-minute interview on NPR with a novelist who has a new book out (“She gamely answered the interviewer’s questions”), Patrick Kurp found that he was left with a “mild aftertaste of disgust,” even though his personal impression of the novelist was favorable. He could imagine himself enjoying a conversation with her. Why the disgust, then? As is his literary policy, Kurp turned to another writer to tease out an answer, to elaborate the thought. In this case the writer was L. E. Sissman, who said in his “Innocent Bystander” column in the Atlantic (a precursor of the book blog) that the “serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim.” And among these is a “vow of silence, except through his work.”