The Slush Pile: At the London Book Fair

iñiw The Slush Pile: At the London Book Fair Alain Arias-Misson The Tent Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury http://www.bloomsbury.com/ 176 pages; cloth, £12.99 What Do I Have to Do to Get a Book Published! Jo Anthony Pen Press http://www.indepublishing.com 301 pages; paper, £12.99 What Do I Have to Do to Sell a Book! Jo Anthony Pen Press http://www.indepublishing.com 373 pages; paper, £12.99 Technicolor Dreamin': The 1960's Rainbow and Beyond Karen Moller Trafford Publishing http://www.trafford.com/ 330 pages; paper, £14.00, US $24.35 The London Book Fair, or the LBF, is not about literature. It is about numbers. It is about volume. It is about the 175,000 new titles sold in the US last year—and 44 million less books sold. It is about 114,669 new titles published in the UK (a far more literate society than our own) in the first five months alone last year. In 2004 only 7,000 titles sold more than 5,000 books in one year, although 550,000 different titles were sold in the same year. So don't bring your pen to the LBF, bring your laptop or your palmcorder. Do you hearthat sickening slurp? It is at the bottom of the gigantic slush pile of manuscripts and books leaking down the drain. Not so much at the top ofthe slush pile as floating above it dove-like, not even skimming it with her toes, was the holy ghost of this LBF, Canada's most celebrated author, Margaret Atwood, with her new little book of fictional essays, The Tent. On the one hand the vernacular diction and the concrete, very ordinary image—on the other, the wholly abstract, loosey-goosey narrative, quite fantastic and driven by the sheer delectable energy of words, words pushing out other words, words suddenly fluttering in astonishing droves and gaggles, spewing out new threatening clouds of words. Always this sense of self-generating process in her writing, yet never with self-referential tics. For example, the story "Encouraging the Young": the generous nurturing attitude of, we surmise, the now aged and successful author, who wryly recognizes that she is just "a voice balloon with nothing in it" for the very young. But it's the "newly conscious young" she addresses, and from light self-mockery the tone shifts imperceptibly to razor-tongued, and finally slices through this avuncular benevolence darkly and bloodily. In another story, "Voice," the narrator speaks ofthe life of her celebrated voice, the voice she has cultivated and which has grown into a life of its own, however attached to her it may be—and now feeds on her, vampirelike. The merciless eye in this fantastic little account strikes stiletto-like to the heart of an existence . The glitter and freedom of the imagery and the always unpredictable leaps of the "story," often synaptic disjunctions from one sentence to the next, are startling. One last note regarding the title story, "The Tent." Here the speaker with great urgency describes the need to write constantly on the paper walls ofher tent as she crouches within. The writing on the walls alone protects her and those she loves from the monstrous howling without. Yetthe fragility of this barrier of words is painfully evident to her. The inevitable denouement is approaching rapidly. These little (most ofthe stories are a couple ofpages) parables of life are couched in concrete scenes but occupy metaphorical spaces that enchant and engage us. Comical and menacing by tum, their crackling wit and alien relevance place them among the most accomplished short stories written today. PS: Hype knows no bounds no doubt with the threatening slush pile looming above. But surely a writer as witty and caustic as Margaret Atwood does not need the inside jacket puff: "One of the world's most celebrated authors...." What's left? The universe? JoAnthony writes with admirable clarity about this indigestible glut of submissions, she shoots from the hip. She comes from a brand-marketing background: your book, she tells us, behaves like Pantene shampoo or Persil washing powder. Speaking of which: the grocery trade sells fifty times more...