News | A BAMEless World Book Night

The notion of a “reading nation” is an unquestionably wonderful one, and making that fantasy a reality is what World Book Night is all about: celebrating “the enrichment that reading and books can bring to people’s lives” at the same time as “encouraging those who don’t already read for pleasure—an estimated 36% of adults—to get involved.”

How? Well, how else—by giving away hundreds of thousands of the things! Little wonder, then, that though it still struggles to reach some, the six-year old initiative has met with tremendous success. As Free Thought Research recently revealed, “80% of those who received a book on World Book Night had never read or read infrequently before the event, while 85% talked to others about books more, of which 47% reported an increase in the number of books they bought and 32% borrowed more from their local library.”

Thus, the announcement of the fifteen books to be distributed on the next World Book Night, on April 23rd, 2016, should have been a happy moment; a date to save. Instead, the lately-launched list—described by the organisers as “diverse” and “curated to appeal to a breadth of audiences”—has quite rightly come under fire for failing to feature a single Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) author.

In a blog post for The Bookseller, Nikesh Shukla, author and editor of Rife, dubbed World Book Night “a wonderfully charitable way of spreading your love of reading with friends and strangers alike,” but there’s a but, and it's a biggie:

Lists can do what prizes necessarily can’t—be inclusive. Prizes are effectively competitions. There’s an arbitrary standard of literary merit to be upheld. Publishers will submit subjectively to suit judges’ tastes. Lists, on the other hand, are a set of items, in this case books. World Book Night’s panels are looking for books that are “good, enjoyable, highly readable books with strong compelling narratives.” It seems problematic, thus, to not include any authors from BAME communities. 

If World Book Night is about getting that 36% of the country reading, what about the brown pound? It’s potentially a huge market, but one that will feel disenfranchised by not being visible in a high profile list such as this. For one, having BAME writers will encourage more BAME readers to become givers or to take a book, but also it’ll show that, on lists, we belong just as much as everyone else.

Saying that “some questions are too important to go unanswered,” and that this is one “we at World Book Night have been struggling with for some time,” Project Manager Rose Goddard responded to Shukla’s condemnation the next day:

World Book Night is an extraordinary industry initiative achieved through a wide coalition of authors, publishers, printers, distributors and other partners—not least the volunteer givers. However, like all charitable initiatives the funding model and submissions process which underpins it also shapes its delivery. The curation of the final books is not simply a question of choosing freely from publishers’ lists; publishers submit titles for the list and financially support the printing of the titles selected and the programme overall. Participation in the programme represents a significant monetary commitment for all of them, particularly for the smaller presses we’ve been delighted to welcome on board over the last few years. They all think very carefully about which books to suggest in the context of our drive to reach people who do not normally read for pleasure and WBN would not exist at all without the generous backing they provide. Each year we strive to strike a balance across the list. This year, despite our best efforts we have not been successful in respect of BAME writers.

In other words, World Book Night’s hands were tied.

But who by? Why, by the same, “increasingly out of touch” industry that was the subject of Spread the Word’s deeply dismaying survey of “writers from a variety of backgrounds, as well as literary agents, and mainstream and independent publishers” operating out of the UK.

In other words, as Writing the Future concluded, “despite all the hard work, good intentions and a ‘signing up’ to the principles of diversity, it seems that an old mono-culture still prevails” in publishing.

And none of this—none of this—is good enough.

Book Review | Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem

Michael Gibson has returned to the quiet Appalachian home of his forebears to take care of his grandmother. Sadie is old and sickly but she has an important story to tell about growing up poor and Melungeon (a mixed race group of mysterious origin) while bedeviled by a snake-handling uncle and empathic powers she but barely understands. 

In a field not far from the family home, however, lies an iron-bound crate within a small shack buried four feet deep under Kudzu vine. Michael somehow understands that hidden inside that crate is potentially his own death, his grandmother's death, and perhaps the deaths of everyone in the valley if he does not come to understand Sadie's story well enough.

***

Folks are rarely as forthright in life as they are in literature.

Communicating the truth of the human condition would make for some messy stories, so even the most deftly developed characters are at best partial pictures of the people they’d really be. After all, we wear different faces each day, don’t we? We wear one at work, another at home; one in the company of our mothers, another alongside our lovers.

During your life you play many parts—a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a hero, a villain. You enter people’s lives and then you exit them. You say your lines—you inspire some people, and maybe some people hate you. And then, well, you leave the stage. (p.233)

Whether you receive a round of applause when you do, or boos, is up to you.

Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem is a book about the conflicting legacies we leave which deals with death and depression and disability whilst trading in tension and frequently intolerable terror to excellent effect.

Our man Michael is almost a monster at the offing. On the back of a bad breakup he’s come back to the house in the South where he was born and raised; ostensibly to look after his ailing grandparent, but in truth he’s considering killing her—or at least letting her die. He decides against it, eventually, before settling in to suffer through some more of old Sadie’s story.

See, for some reason she’s determined to tell him about her hardships in this here hollow. About the preacher whose hellish services she was pressganged into attending as a girl, and the ungodly horrors that followed:

They’d had the most gruesome murder anybody had ever heard of and the murderer in the local jail and the deputy scared to death of angry folks taking his prisoner and her daddy almost shot the most popular moonshiner in the county and there were two big families now that didn’t know how to talk to each other and of course there was the preacher going a little crazier each day. Who walked around with a snake under his shirt curled around his chest and belly. (p.217)

Book Review | Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Boy Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman—craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

Snow is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished—exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When Bird is born, Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

***

As Granta magazine allowed last year, Helen Oyeyemi is unquestionably one of the best young British novelists in the business, and though her fiction is largely literary, she’s ever evidenced an interest in speculative elements. From the haunted house in White is for Witching to the magical realism of Mr Fox, Oyeyemi has incorporated her fascination with the fantastic into every novel to bear her name to date—up to and including her new book, Boy, Snow, Bird. Here, however, the uncanny is arrived at through character rather than narrative.

Boy, to begin with, is not your average protagonist. First things first: she’s a girl, born and raised in the Big Apple by her papa—or the rat catcher, as Boy calls him. He has “the cleanest hands you’ll ever see in your life. He’ll punch you in the kidneys, from behind, or he’ll thump the back of your head and walk away sniggering while you crawl around on the floor, stunned.” (p.6) Boy does her best to suffer the rat catcher’s casual violence in silence, but in time the usual abuse takes on a distressing tenor.

The unpredictability of his fist didn’t mean he was crazy. Far from it. Sometimes he got awfully drunk, but never to a point where he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was trying to train me. To do what, I don’t know. I never found out, because I ran away almost as soon as I turned twenty. (p.8)

The folks of Flax Hill, Massachusetts don’t go out of their way to welcome our girl into their tiny town, but Boy is undeterred by the cold shoulder they show her:

I found it easy to disregard the suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a genetic memory in me... after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be more specific, the town took on a strong flavour of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of course I knew better than to mention this to anybody. (pp.23-24)

Little by little, Boy wins the locals over. She makes a forever friend in Mia, the resident reporter, through whom she’s introduced to Arturo: a wayward widower with a gorgeous daughter. Snow is “an extraordinary-looking kid. A medieval swan maiden, only with the darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost. She was like a girl in a Technicolour tapestry,” (p.78) and though Boy eventually develop feelings for her father, she falls for the girl first.