Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Neil Gaiman Officially Taken to Court
Scarlett Pavlovich, who was a central figure in Lila Shapiro’s shattering story on Neil Gaiman, officially sued Gaiman in the Western District Court of U.S., claiming rape and human trafficking. Amanda Palmer was also accused of human trafficking in the filing. This is a civil suit not a criminal one (inidividuals of course cannot file ) criminal charges, and in civil court the standard of guilt is somewhat different. So in this example, a jury is instructed to convict if they believe “the preponderance of the evidence” shows that the accused did whatever it was they are accused of. Often this is described as a 51% chance that they did it, which is quite a bit lower than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I have now read Shapiro’s piece, and I will say that even before people are under oath and discovery and the whole machinery of the legal process gets underway, Pavolovich’s chances seem to me quite strong.
Laura Miller on the Novels of Frieda McFadden
Unlike Fourth Wing or It Ends with Us, the work of Frieda McFadden has never tempted me, even for “I wonder what in the heck this is” reasons. Nothing personal against her or the genre thriller as a category, but I just couldn’t find enough interest to pick one up. And it sounds like maybe that was the right call. Laura Miller’s examination is worth a read, but here is the part that felt the most true (?) to me:
Every time I see someone on TikTok presenting a stack of a dozen McFadden novels she’s read and offering to rank them for the viewer, I wonder how she did it. How did she not get bored by fiction whose only purpose is to trick you into being surprised at the end—fiction that gets less and less surprising the more of it you read? Unlike the clever, elaborate puzzles devised by, say, Agatha Christie, McFadden’s thrillers are so bare-bones she can’t afford much in the way of red herrings or misdirection. The good guys are the bad guys, and the bad guys are the good guys.
I am still waiting for the book/author that becomes a BookTok phenomenon that I can get excited about.
The Only Thing I Know for Sure About Book Blurbs is That Authors Hate Them
If there were some sort of publicly elected “president of books” position, you could lock down the author vote on a “no more blurbs” platform. When Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning announced a few days ago that S&S’s flagship imprint would no longer require its authors to deal in the gray-market blurb economy, it was met with, as far as I have seen, universal relief by authors. And I know enough of the arduous, humbling, and questionably-value adding process of getting other authors to say nice things about your book to get it. The stock of the blurb is down, and there is enough of a contrarian in me to wonder if now the blurb might be undervalued. For as much as authors don’t want to solicit (or provide) blurbs, I do think they can matter. Now maybe the fifth book by a well-known author doesn’t need them, but with review outlets in such short supply, finding something to put on the back of a book that might be interesting to a reader is harder than it was 25 years ago. Do 4-6 nice things by authors that a hypothetical book-browser might recognize matter? Has anyone studied this–oh wait, it’s publishing. I know the answer. They absolutely have not.