Judith Krantz, Whose Tales of Sex and Shopping Sold Millions, Dies at 91. Margalit Fox from The New York Times has her obituary:

Judith Krantz, who almost single-handedly turned the sex-and-shopping genre of fiction into the stuff of high commerce, making her one of the world’s best-selling novelists if not one of the most critically acclaimed, died on Saturday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her publicist, John Tellem, confirmed the death.

Though she did not publish her first book until she was 50, Ms. Krantz reigned for decades afterward as the international queen of poolside reading. Her 10 novels — beginning with “Scruples” in 1978 and ending with “The Jewels of Tessa Kent” in 1998 — have together sold more than 85 million copies in more than 50 languages.

Most became television movies or mini-series, many of which were produced by Ms. Krantz’s husband, Steve Krantz.

What drove Ms. Krantz’s books to the tops of best seller lists time and again was a formula that she honed to glittering perfection: fevered horizontal activities combined with fevered vertical ones — the former taking place in sumptuously appointed bedrooms and five-star hotels, the latter anywhere with a cash register and astronomical price tags.

A hallmark of the formula was that it embraced sex and shopping in almost equal measure, with each recounted in modifier-laden detail.

“Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket,” Ms. Krantz writes in her second novel, “Princess Daisy” (1980). “Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years.”

Elements of Ms. Krantz’s formula had existed piecemeal in earlier fiction for women, conspicuously in the work of Jacqueline Susann , the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966) and other steamy novels of the 1960s and ’70s. But Ms. Krantz was almost certainly the first writer to combine the steam and the shopping in such opulent profusion — and to do so all the way to the bank.

Read full post in The New York Times

Katie Heaney from The Cut looks at how bestselling author, Elin Hilderbrand, became our summer must read novelist.

Elin Hilderbrand‘s book covers predominantly feature people’s feet on or near sand, plus an ambiguous title in gentle, summer-toned script — The Rumor, The Perfect Couple, Barefoot, A Summer Affair. She has written 22 best-selling novels, which have sold close to 6 million copies between them.

To borrow a phrase from #resistance Twitter, of which Hilderbrand is a vocal part: This is not normal. Over the past five years, overall book sales have been stagnant, and fiction sales have dropped 20 percent. Elin Hilderbrand is an exception. Michael Pietsch, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, which publishes Hilderbrand, tells me, “Her sales have grown with every book we’ve published, and I’ve never seen that. She has driven herself beyond the gravitational pull of the industry.”

Until now, Hilderbrand’s fictional world has been largely apolitical, in so far as it’s possible for stories about young, upper-middle-class white women who sleep with rich white men to be apolitical. Her books are real-world fantasies, starring scrappy 20- or 30-somethings with names like Blair and Claire and Melanie, who wear dresses described as “slinky” and blouses described as “diaphanous.” Hilderbrand’s protagonists are imperfect, but they are always savvy, always good at what they do. They’re saving businesses, and their boyfriends, and themselves. President Trump doesn’t exist, save for one tiny, neutral mention in Winter Solstice, in which Margaret, a just-retired famous news anchor, hopes nobody at the drug store recognizes her and asks her about him.

For these reasons, Hilderbrand has fans at every stop along the political spectrum, though she herself is liberal. She wrestles with how much of her real worldview to inject into her work, as well as her social media presence (“I find it offensive when there’s a mass shooting, and the food blogger is still putting up a recipe for guacamole”), but it doesn’t seem coincidental that her new novel, Summer of ’69 is, in part, about the civil-rights movement, and that her next book will be about a woman running for president.

Read full post The Cut

Romance writer Nicholas Sparks issued an apology on Monday for remarks he made in 2013 opposing the formation of an LGBT club at his Christian school. Gene Maddaus from Variety has the statement from Sparks’ camp:

In an email published last week by the Daily Beast, Sparks faulted Saul Benjamin, who was then the headmaster of the Epiphany School of Global Studies, for pushing an “agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted.” Sparks forbade Benjamin from allowing the LGBT club, and criticized him in harsh terms for focusing on diversity and the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

“As someone who has spent the better part of my life as a writer who understands the power of words, I regret and apologize that mine have potentially hurt young people and members of the LGBTQ community, including my friends and colleagues in that community,” Sparks said in a statement on Monday.

In the statement, Sparks said he did not intend to ban an LGBT club outright — but rather to ensure that any club was formed in accordance with the school’s procedures.

“When in one of my emails I used language such as ‘there will never be an LGBT club’ at Epiphany, I was responding heatedly to how the headmaster had gone about initiating this club — like most schools, Epiphany has procedures and policies for establishing any student club,” he said. “My concern was that if a club were to be founded, it be done in a thoughtful, transparent manner with the knowledge of faculty, students and parents — not in secret, and not in a way that felt exceptional. I only wish I had used those exact words.”

That is not what he communicated to the headmaster in 2013. His exact words were: “In thinking long and hard, with an open heart, about this topic, and after discussions with Trustees and others, I have to conclude that the [Board of Trustees] will not sanction a club or association for GLBT students, no matter what it is called.” He said that gay students would continue to be welcome at the school, and that the school would not tolerate harassment of them.

In another email, Sparks told Benjamin that the previous headmaster had worked with LGBT students and handled the issue “quietly and wonderfully.” “I expect you to do the same,” he wrote.

Read full post on Variety.

Emails from Sparks—who runs the Epiphany School, a Christian academy in North Carolina—obtained by The Daily Beast paint a damning portrait of the bestselling author. Tarpley Hitt with The Daily Beast reports:

In 2006, Nicholas Sparks, the prolific romance writer best known for The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, helped co-found a prep school in New Bern, North Carolina, called the Epiphany School of Global Studies. The idea was to start a small, faith-based academy focused on world issues with an emphasis on language-learning, regular visits to other nations, and a shared understanding that “learning about the world” was an integral part of 21st-century life. In its mission statement, the school of roughly 500 students describes itself as “anchored in the Judeo-Christian commandment to Love God and Your Neighbor as Yourself.”

But since 2014, members of the Epiphany School’s Board of Trustees, including Sparks, have been locked in a legal battle with the academy’s former headmaster and CEO, Saul Benjamin, over what the latter describes as a pattern of harassment, racism, and homophobia. “Sparks and members of the Board unapologetically marginalized, bullied, and harassed members of the School community,” Benjamin’s attorneys wrote in the complaint, “whose religious views and/or identities did not conform to their religiously driven, bigoted preconceptions.“

Sparks rejected the claims in a 29-page declaration to the court. In a statement on Twitter posted after this article first published, Sparks asserted that reporting on the headmaster’s claims was “not news” and “false,” and that some of the claims against him had been dismissed. (Sparks would not provide The Daily Beast with additional comment for this story.)

But emails obtained by The Daily Beast show the romance writer repeatedly taking issue with Benjamin’s attempts to make the school inclusive to all faiths, races, and sexualities.

In one stern message, Sparks chastised the former headmaster for “what some perceive as an agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted.” In another, he put forward a motion to ban student protest at the school, an impulse that came directly in response to two lesbian girls planning to announce their orientation during chapel. In a third, while listing complaints against Benjamin, he cites “misplaced priorities at the school level (GLBT, diversity, the beauty of other religions, as opposed to academic/curricular/global issues, Christian traditions, etc.).”

Benjamin, whose suit includes claims of defamation, also alleges Sparks spread rumors that he suffered from a mental disorder. The former headmaster told The Daily Beast he has never received any such diagnosis, but in another obtained email, the romance writer laid out a case for diagnosing him, citing forgetfulness and an “obsession” with what he characterizes as “non-relevant” issues. “While I am not a doctor–and as scary as this may sound to you–I do believe that [Benjamin] is suffering from a mental illness of some sort,” Sparks wrote in the message. “What that is–Alzheimer’s, a variance of bi-polar, something else–I have no idea.”

Sparks, a former pharmaceutical salesman-turned-love-chronicler, has published 20 novels to tremendous commercial success. In the Sparks literary universe, handsome, hard-working, and occasionally brusque men tend to encounter waifish, strong-headed women, fall passionately, chastely in love, only to have some obstacle—status, sickness, hidden histories—intervene. Tragedies are common, love usually conquers, and Christian values can often be found in between. All of Sparks’ books have become New York Times bestsellers, with more than 105 million copies sold internationally, and 75 million in the United States alone; and 11 of them have been adapted to film—each a blockbuster hit, grossing a collective three-quarters of a billion dollars. Just this year, the author announced that a musical version of The Notebook—Sparks’ most successful novel and a meditation on love outlasting Alzheimer’s (the same disease Sparks would later suggest Benjamin had)—was slotted for a Broadway run.

Read full post and see emails on The Daily Beast

Many classic children’s books beg for philosophical readings: the likes of “Charlotte’s Web” or “Are You My Mother?” are well known as complex and subterranean ruminations on death and identity and community. Had you asked Sarah Blackwood from The New Yorker, a couple of years ago, she would not have classified Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia series with this loftier group—my children delighted in the wordplay, but found the books a bit one-note. Here’s here story:

The more I read Amelia Bedelia the more unsettled I felt; I began to suspect that I wasn’t hearing all the notes. The books, with illustrations by Fritz Siebel, depict a young woman who sows domestic chaos in and around the home of her wealthy employers, a snooty older couple who have outsourced the labor of keeping their household, family, and community relations running smoothly. Each book follows a simple formula: Amelia Bedelia, a housemaid replete with apron and frilled cap, encounters various domestic imperatives: clean the house, host a party, babysit, substitute-teach. But, rather than keeping order, Amelia Bedelia creates disarray. She takes each instruction she is given with an absurd literalism. “Draw the drapes,” Mrs. Rogers tells her; Amelia Bedelia reaches for pen and paper. She “dresses the chicken,” but in lederhosen (an homage to Siebel’s Austrian childhood). When asked to “dust the furniture,” she sprinkles powder all over the living room; asked to “change the towels,” she takes scissors to them. She dirties and destroys her employers’ possessions, in other words, breaking one of the primary taboos of domestic employment. She’s a figure of rebellion: against the work that women do in the home, against the work that lower-class women do for upper-class women. Her one undeniable talent—the reason that the Rogerses keep her around—is as a pastry chef: cream puffs, tea cakes, pies, tarts. Every time the Rogerses are about to cast her aside, every time they are “angry, very angry,” she entices them back by appealing to their appetites.

As an employee who produces turmoil at work and is overseen by amiable jerks, Amelia Bedelia reminds me of Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” from 1853. “I would prefer not to” is Bartleby’s famous refrain; if he took Amelia’s job, Bartleby would neither pull the drapes from the windows nor sketch them with pen and paper but sit and stare at them with stoic despondence. Melville’s story is one of American literature’s great tales of workplace degradation, and, though it takes place in an office, it is in some ways as domestic, as intimate, as a story about a household servant—Bartleby, increasingly depressed, begins sleeping and living at his workplace. But, where Bartleby responds to degradation by withdrawing, reducing, starving himself, Amelia Bedelia produces sugary excess. Throughout her daily grind, she cheerfully acquiesces to her lot even as she subverts almost every task assigned to her. Bartleby teaches us to look for resistance in forms of ascetic refusal; Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.

Read full post on The New Yorker

Agatha Christie knew when to stop writing a detective novel. Today’s flashy adaptations over-embellish the source material. Radha Vatsal from CrimeReads investigates:

Changes need to be made in the process of adapting novels to the screen—that’s just part of what has to happen when you switch between mediums. But in our content-hungry age, if a novel is to be adapted to the small screen, and into a miniseries in particular, this often translates into stretching the original narrative to fit the required number of episodes. If a novel is to be adapted into a feature film, it often seems that something extra is thrown in to give the film the required box office punch. These decisions to add to the narrative have little to do what the original story requires in terms of length or scope, but are based on commercial considerations. We see this played out over and over again—especially in the recent adaptions of Agatha Christie novels.

In her posthumously published autobiography, Christie, who knew a thing or two about the mechanics of a successful crime novel, wrote:

Of course, there is a right length for everything. I think myself that the right length for a detective story is fifty-thousand words. I know this is considered by publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get fifty thousand words—so sixty thousand or seventy thousand are more acceptable. If your book runs to more than that I think you will usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter.

There are a couple of points worth noting here. First, that Christie’s preferred length is fifty thousand, but since publishers thinks that’s too short she’s willing to write a bit longer. (I like that she says “possibly” readers feel themselves cheated—presumably that’s what her publishers tell her, but she keeps her own council.) And if readers feel themselves cheated with fifty-thousand words, then the reason for writing longer books isn’t because the stories themselves require that length, it’s because that’s what the market (supposedly) demands. And yet, Christie is very clear that when detective stories of the type that she writes go beyond sixty or seventy thousand words, they lose something by doing so.

Read full post on CrimeReads

Julie Beck from The Atlantic interviews the editor of The New York Times Book Review on remembering books.

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

Read full post on The Atlantic