Bestselling 'mommy porn': '50 Shades of Grey'

The novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" by E.L. James has been propelled by its e-book sales to bestseller status. Published by a small Australian press, it has had a hard time making its way to bookstores, but readers are getting it however they can. Mostly, that's been digitally.

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is about a 22-year-old college literature student, Anastasia, a virgin who falls for a 28-year-old entrepreneur, Christian Grey, who gets a sexual charge out of being in charge. It's explicitly tie-me-up, tie-me-down; sometimes a necktie is not just for tying around necks.

The New York Times calls the book "mommy porn." Jezebel, which posts some not-safe-for-work excerpts, explains that "Fifty Shades of Grey" owes a great debt to the bestselling "Twilight" series.

British author E.L. James, a former television executive, first published the book on fan fiction site ff.net as a super lengthy tome (the first book is 1200 pages, but the original also included the following two sequels) that "reimagined the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections."

If that description makes you want to gag, you probably won't be into James' book, either — but if you're a diehard member of Team Edward who's sick of Stephanie Meyer's G-rated prose, you'll be all over the story of literature student Anastasia Steele, who first meets the successful young entrepreneur Christian Grey when she interviews him for her campus magazine.

"So many readers have recommended this book to me," wrote Sarah Wendell at her well-known romance book website (adult language). "SO MANY." Wendell, an enthusiastic romance reader, didn't think much of "Fifty Shades of Grey" when she read it in November. "I found it to be melancholy and meandering, and the heroine narrator is so maudlin and wimpy I grew more and more irritated with her and with the story and had to stop," she wrote. She maintains her critical take, but adds this commentary on the book's popularity:

I have a few theories as to why this book is popular. It has a secrecy element, for example, similar to some paranormal romances and their avid fanbases. It's also not at all surprising that 50 Shades and Twilight share a few plot themes, specifically that secrecy and the temptation inherent in the world of both narratives, and the alpha male who is opulently, ridiculously wealthy, Volvos optional. Plus, Edward, as I wrote a few years ago, and in many similar ways (again, surprise surprise) Christian are both very much old-skool-style romance heroes. 50 Shades (and Twilight, obviously) are also told from the heroine's POV, a very deep, first person, detail-heavy point of view, and the narrative is also akin to reading a diary, adding to that sense of illicit secrecy ....

In Twilight, the secret world and the key to entry is the knowledge that Edward is a vampire, knowledge only Bella, and by extension the readers, initially share. In 50 Shades, the secret world focuses on sex, specifically Christian's secret room and his sexual expression through BDSM. Sex, in many senses, is the initial conflict of 50 Shades book, and is the obstacle between the characters initially as well, and thus becomes a focus. So the secrecy is layered and complex.

The secrecy of e-books may also have fed into the book's popularity. Nobody knows that you're reading a titillating BDSM book when it's on the screen of your Kindle; you could just as easily be reading about organizing closets. But when the cover is on display, everyone knows what you're up to.

Publisher Vintage Books is willing to risk the risque; last week it purchased American rights to "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its two sequels, "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed." Vintage's e-books are coming soon; paperbacks are expected to arrive in bookstores in April.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

This Sunday: Spring books preview, Anne Lamott and jazz

Spring may be more than two weeks away, but we are getting a jump on the season this Sunday with the Arts & Books section’s “Spring Arts Preview.”

Carolyn Kellogg offers a listing of the leading book events in Southern California coming up in the next three months. That list includes Jonathan Lethem, Joan Didion, Rachel Maddow with Bill Maher, John Irving and The Times' very own Book Prize ceremony and Festival of Books, April 20-22 at USC. In a separate story, Kellogg also previews some highly anticipated books coming in the spring: Think Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen and Robert Caro.

Book critic David Ulin talks to Anne Lamott about her latest memoir, which is a logical sequel to her extremely popular parenting journal "Operating Instructions." Her new book, “Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son,” connects the dots with her earlier work and moves it forward with Lamott’s new perspective as a grandmother.

Another anticipated book for the spring is “Half-Blood Blues,” Esi Edugyan’s jazz novel that was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2011 and has been released in her native Canada and finally here. Our reviewer, staff writer Chris Barton (who provides most of the jazz coverage for The Times), writes that Edugyan’s book is pitch perfect in its depiction of musicians looking for the authentic life.

More after the jump

This Sunday: Van Vechten's Renaissance, Watergate, Szymborska and more

He was a critic, a novelist, a photographer and he counted among his confidants some of the most accomplished black literary figures of his day including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson. But Carl Van Vechten’s most notable role may have been the one he played as patron to the Harlem Renaissance. “Van Vechten,” writes Lynell George in her review of “Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem Renaissance/A Portrait of Black & White” by Emily Bernard, “dedicated his life’s work to, as Hughes once put it, ‘all things Negro’ -- literature, theater, ragtime, jazz and blues -- nurturing art and alliances, but not without acrimony.” Bernard explores the question of whether his presence in this cultural movement was a gift or a curse: “[W]as he an insider or an intruder?” George’s review of this fascinating figure leads our Sunday book coverage.

Scott Martelle reviews Thomas Mallon’s new novel “Watergate,” (yes, that Watergate), and he frames the discussion by noting that to write history “the story needs only to be true” but to write a novel, “the story must be plausible -- an often more difficult thing to accomplish.” While many of us were alive and witnessed the broad outlines of the third-rate burglary that brought down a U.S. president, the novelist’s task here is to make it plausible. Does it work as fiction? 

The notion of truth and fiction are at the heart of David Ulin’s fascinating critic’s notebook on “The Lifespan of a Fact,” John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s book -- a discussion between writer and fact-checker  -- on the issue of invention in the world of literary nonfiction. Central to the discussion is an essay that D’Agata wrote about the suicide of 16-year-old Levi Presley, who jumped from the tower observation deck of Las Vegas’ Stratosphere hotel in 2002. The piece was commissioned by Harper’s, then rejected and picked up by the Believer after details in the piece could not be verified. And that’s the jumping-off point for the discussion.

Sunday: Building alternative worlds, William Gibson and 'The Lady in Gold'

Call them Philip K. Dick’s “Lessons on Building a Believable Universe.” That’s what Times Book Critic David Ulin uses as a reference in creating the framework for his review of Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage,” a novel that turns the tables on 9/11. In Ruff’s alternative universe, 9/11 is actually 11/9 and the war on terror takes place in a fundamentalist America. Planes are still going into buildings, but they are piloted by Christian terrorists and the structures they are headed for are in downtown Baghdad and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  And, of course, there is a fourth plane that crashes after its passengers attempt to retake it from the hijackers. Sound familiar? Ulin writes that this is a “terrific setup, using fiction to take events and tweak them, albeit recognizably.” Read Ulin’s review to see if this works with Dick’s thoughts on building a believable universe. The review of “The Mirage” leads our Sunday Arts & Books coverage.

Margaret Wappler reviews Canadian cyberpunk soothsayer William Gibson’s “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” which brings together some of his writings from Wired, Rolling Stone and Time Asia. Wappler writes that Gibson’s prose “crackles to life when he writes about Singapore and Japan in the '90s and early '00s.” Wappler notes how Gibson, better known for his futuristic novels, explains in his introduction that “nonfiction feels like trying to play the African thumb piano, an instrument he scarcely knows.” But the collection, nonetheless, is engaging and revelatory.

Revelatory, as well, is Claremont-McKenna professor Frederick Lynch’s review of Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America: 1960-2010,” in which Murray, whom Lynch says “made the Politically Incorrect Ten Most Wanted List 18 years ago when he co-wrote 'The Bell Curve,' provides a data-driven argument for inequality’s cultural and sociological roots [and] arrives just in time for the central political and policy debate of the 2012 elections.”

That debate, of course, concerns the widening income gap in America.

More of Sunday's pages after the jump.

This Sunday: The smartest person in the room and 'Cuckoo's Nest'

In her review of John Matteson's “The Lives of Margaret Fuller,” Laura Skandera Trombley poses an interesting question: “What must it have been like always to be the smartest person in the room without any of the privileges accorded to men?”

That's what Fuller continually had to contend with in a circle that included Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne and Horace Greeley. The newspaper editor and reformer Greeley hired her to become the New York Tribune’s first literary editor and then the paper’s first foreign correspondent. Emerson asked her to serve as editor of his transcendentalist journal the Dial. Less charitably, Poe considered her a “busybody” and an intellectual anomaly of her sex. Skandera Trombley, an eminent Twain scholar and president of Pitzer College, offers a long-overdue look at one of the more interesting intellectual figures of 19^th century America.

It’s hard to believe that 50 years have passed since Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

was first published.  And now it's back again in an anniversary, hard-cover edition with the original jacket art. Carolyn Kellogg knew the story of the book and the popularity of the movie starring Jack Nicholson and Randall Patrick McMurphy. But until now she hadn't read the book and wondered if it deserved all the hype it has received. You can find her verdict in this Sunday's coverage.

Times book critic David Ulin reviews Nathan Englander’s short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” noting that much of this work involves the “tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.”  Englander shows his range and skill, tilting “toward the magical realist or, more precisely, toward the tradition of Jewish fable writing as embodied by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem.”

More after the jump

This Sunday: Pico Iyer's Greene agenda and more

Pico Iyer and I share something in common and it isn’t writing chops. We share a fascination with Graham Greene.

Years ago, I collected as many of the nice Penguin paperback editions of Greene’s work that I could find.  I loved “The Quiet American,” "The End of the Affair" and “The Third Man” and many others. When I first traveled in Europe, I would stumble into English-language bookstores and my barometer on the quality of their selection was always based on their section of Greene's work. But I’m no expert on Greene and Iyer is -- as witnessed by his latest book “The Man Within My Head.” Our reviewer, Richard Rayner, is fascinated by both Greene and Iyer. In his lively review he notes that “The Man Within My Head” is “literary criticism disguised as autobiography, a book filled with insights, sadness, rumination and splashes of the dazzling travelogue that Iyer’s readers have come to expect.” Rayner’s piece is as much a meditation on Greene as it is on Iyer’s book and it leads our coverage this Sunday.

Book critic David Ulin found a gem in “The Fat Years,’ the first novel by Chinese writer Chan Koonchung to be translated into English. (Michael S. Duke does the honors.) The novel takes place in 2013 after the next great global economic meltdown and China is left standing as the pillar of economic and social stability. The catch here, however, is that between the economic meltdown and China’s emergence as the bastion of prosperity, it has lost a month. Ulin writes that the book “is a cunning caricature of modern China with its friction between communism and consumerism.”

Scott Martelle reviews “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State and the Birth of Liberty” by John M. Barry. Martelle writes that Williams “for those who don’t remember their colonial history, founded the European settlement that gave rise to Providence, R.I., in pursuit of the still-gestating idea that people should be able to worship God in individual freedom not as a dictum of government." It was, author Barry writes, “the first government in the world which broke church and state apart.” But Williams faced some long odds in selling his message of liberty and paid dearly for his concept. 

Long odds are also in evidence in Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel “The Odds,” which Carolyn Kellogg reviews. A marriage has hit the rocks, so the happy (not) couple head to Niagara Falls, where they spent their honeymoon, carrying with them a history of “insolvency, indecision and stupidity,” as well as a “desperate gambling plan” that, if successful, “will make everything right.”  Kellogg notes that “all of this could make for rather grim melodrama, but not in O’Nan’s hands.”

More after the jump ...

Books this week: On Dear Leader and a capricious God

 

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and he describes himself as “probably the most un-Korean person in the world.” But that wasn’t the largest obstacle to Johnson in writing “The Orphan Master’s Son,” his new novel on that most closed of societies, North Korea, and the cult of personality around its now late -- but fully-alive in the book -- leader Kim Jong Il. Times staff writer Reed Johnson, no relation to the author, profiles Adam Johnson and his book, which is getting  lot  of attention, in a piece that starts on Sunday’s Arts & Books cover. He writes: “Possibly Johnson’s greatest challenge was trying to infiltrate the inner lives of characters in a country where self-censorship and blending in with the anonymous throng are essential for survival.” Adam Johnson, who will be at Vroman’s in Pasadena on Tuesday night, visited North Korea in 2007 to gain insight after spending years researching his novel, working from a handful of books by escaped dissidents. He also cited Times staff writer Barbara Demick’s book “Nothing to Envy:   Ordinary Lives in North Korea" as being particularly helpful “because she was always focused on the human dimension.”

Shalom Auslander also writes about the human dimension, but as David L. Ulin, our book critic, notes in a review of  his new novel “Hope: A Tragedy,” Auslander’s  great subject is “God’s capriciousness,” which can be challenging to frame.  Ulin notes that what Auslander brings to the task is "willfully outrageous, [he’s] a black humorist with an Old Testament moralist’s heart." This is Auslander’s first novel after the 2005 short story collection “Beware of God,” and his 2007 memoir “Foreskin’s Lament.”

As I was reading Scott Martelle’s review of “The Partnership:  Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb," I was lamenting the lost value of bipartisanship in dealing with some of the nation’s difficult issues. The book, by former New York Times staffer Philip Taubman, records the efforts of four officials — Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry — and Sidney Drell, a Stanford physicist and nuclear expert, to curb nuclear weapons around the world. Martelle calls it a “complex book about complex subjects” but note that “Taubman does a clean job of reducing the elements to layman’s terms.”  

In her review of “The Odditorium,” a collection of stories by Melissa Pritchard,  Carolyn Kellogg notes that the “literary landscape is jammed with short stories.” They are a “glut” on the market, Kellogg writes, but she also notes that few of the authors working that parcel of the literary landscape “rise above to be seen as truly excellent.” She notes that “at her best,  Melissa Pritchard belongs in that number.”

Kenneth Turan takes a little break from the film critic’s beat to reflect on P.D. James' latest, “Death Comes to Pemberley,” which couples the formidable talents of the 91-year-old James with the Jane Austen set for murder and mayhem at the ancestral estate of Mr. Darcy of “Pride and Prejudice” fame. Fans of James and Austen seem happy with the marriage: The book is  No. 3 on this week's L.A. Times best-seller list for fiction.

The subject of suicide is not easy in the young adult market, and surviving suicide perhaps even less so. But Susan Carpenter writes that Jennifer R. Hubbard’s new book for ages 14 and up,  “Try Not to Breathe,” is a compelling and compassionate look into the motivations and rationales of teen suicide and the aftermath when it fails.”

Busy week? If so, you may have missed Patt Morrison's fine review of Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch;" Bob Drogin's take on Michael Hasting's provocative "The Operators:  The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan" and Kerry Luft's review of  "The Obamas."  And mark your calendar for Feb. 7 to see which critic will receive the Hatchet Job of the Year Award." Carolyn Kellogg  fills us in on the contestants. For you Stephen King fans, think for a moment about King Lear and then take a look at David Ulin's Reading Life  piece on King.

As always, thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, book editor

Photo: Adam Johnson in North Korea near the Pohyon Temple. Credit: Adam Johnson

 

 

The Reading Life: Thinking about Stephen King

This is part of the occasional series "The Reading Life" by book critic David L. Ulin.

On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, I spent half an hour or so discussing Stephen King with my colleague David Lazarus on Patt Morrison's KPCC-FM radio show. The news peg, such as it was, involved the decision by the New York Times to include King's new novel, "11/22/63," on its list of the 10 best books of 2011. But the bigger question had to do with King's merit as a writer, which, almost 40 years after he began to publish, remains a source of conversation, if no longer quite debate.

For the record, I didn't think much of "11/22/63"; I found it meandering and unfocused -- not to mention far too long. And yet, I also believe that, like many a genre writer, King has gotten a bad rap for much of his career, written off because he appeals to a popular audience, when in fact his work exposes, with real acuity, a lot about who we are.

Think about it: Beyond the mechanics, of plot, of horror, what King offers are domestic interactions, slices of family and civic life. He uncovers our anxieties, our worries, our obsessions -- the inner darkness we all know. That's why, for me, some of his most moving works are the most naturalistic: "The Body," "Misery" or the recent novella "A Good Marriage," which anchors his 2010 collection "Full Dark, No Stars." There, King traces a particularly human bleakness, the bleakness of an empty soul.

This is the key to his writing, that when he's on, no one is better at prying open the ordinary reality of evil, the way our nightmares emerge from our daily experience, from our fears and our frustrations, our envy and our rage. It's true even when he's writing about the supernatural; as he observed when I profiled him for The Times in 1998, "Every monster, every horrific situation, every supernatural situation can be taken in a metaphoric way, if you have an interest in normal human life. Or even abnormal human life."

This Sunday: James M. Cain minus the noir

As we look forward to 2012 with all its hope, promise and presidential politics, it seemed a good idea to also look back to a simpler time in Southern California. Or at least that’s the goal in reprinting James M. Cain’s extensive essay “Paradise”: We've included an excerpt in our Sunday print edition of Calendar’s Arts & Books section and the full text of the piece is available online.

For those who think of Cain as a writer of three great noir novels set in California -- “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce” -- his life as a journalist should be something of a revelation. In the 1920s and early '30s, he wrote articles for H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury and was an editorial writer for Walter Lippman at the New York World. For a brief time, he was managing editor of the New Yorker working for the legendary Harold Ross. The job didn’t fit, however, and after nine months he left for Paramount Studios to be a screenwriter, even though eventually he wound up, again, as a freelancer writing numerous articles for magazines and newspapers.

Cain's essay “Paradise” was the cover story of The American Mercury’s March 1933 issue. Book critic David L. Ulin also offers an introduction to our coverage of “Paradise.” I hope you’ll give “Paradise” a look: Many of his observations of Southern California seem spot on today, while others may surprise you.

Also this week Ulin reviews Tom Zoellner’s effort to make sense of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in “A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America.” Ulin and Carolyn Kellogg offer some Faces to Watch in the book world next year, and Kellogg also weighs in with a review of “Karaoke Culture,” a compelling collection of essays by Dubravka Ugresic. In her Not Just For Kids column, Susan Carpenter looks at the YA title “Cinder,” an inventive retelling of the Cinderella story. And we have our weekly bestsellers list.

Happy new year to all and thanks for reading.

 --Jon Thurber, book editor

 Photo: James M. Cain in 1946.  Credit: Associated Press 

Not just for kids: Andrea Cremer discusses 'Bloodrose'

Andrea Cremer spent years studying -- and teaching about -- slavery and sexuality before spinning her expertise into the fantastical, feminist saga of witches and werewolves known as the "Nightshade" trilogy. Her bestselling series for young adult readers concludes with "Bloodrose," to be released Jan. 3. I recently caught up with the Minnesota-based author to talk about the books and an ending that shocked even her editor.

Jacket Copy: One of the things readers relate to with "Nightshade" is the double standard applied to Calla and Ren. Ren's allowed to be a playboy, but Calla, whom he's supposed to marry, has to remain chaste. That's a double bind that doesn't only exist in fantasy but continues to thrive in the real world as we kick off 2012. Why is that idea alluring to you?

Andrea Cremer: I'm very much a feminist, and as a girl I was so needing strong young women to be heroines to me in the books I read. Eowyn in Lord of the Rings, I lived for the moment when she ripped off her helmet and said, "No living man am I!" I wanted a character with all those qualities, but the parameters of society were constantly around her telling her she couldn't do that. You're allowed to be a warrior but only to a certain extent before she would have to submit to someone else, and that someone else was always going to be a man.

JC: That brings up another idea you tackle -- society's fear of the powerful female and its desire to suppress her. Calla needs to prove she's the pack's alpha, but there are forces working against that.

AC: Sexuality and sexual awakening were key for me to explore in this book because so often the "boys will be boys" attitude is still so dominant in contemporary society. It is not considered to be the norm or even healthy for girls to be aware of their sexuality unless it's coquettish. If you're not using your sexuality to get a life mate, then you're a whore. That's really what I wanted to work against. Women who are sexually self-actualized are dangerous, but only to those people who want to control them.

JC: It makes sense that you'd explore these ideas in the context of witchcraft and warfare, which you also teach at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Why are you attracted to those subjects?

AC: The war that was waged on witches is so much about subverting female power. In the early modern period, 1500 to 1800, witchcraft was redefined from being something where magic was tied into folk medicine and could be helpful to being malicious and aligned with the devil. Warfare for me, I love weapons, so that's the geeky part of it, but it's really how multilayered warfare is. You have so many class and social components. The infantry comes from the lower and working classes and the generals and kings are elite, but they're all brought together for this machine that is war for really diverse reasons that are all tied into social, religious and cultural belief. War for me is simply a space where all the dynamics of history I'm interested in tend to converge in a really amplified and intense way.

More from the interview with Andrea Cremer -- including possible spoilers -- after the jump.