11 Powerful Ways to Market Children’s Books
How do poets write themselves into their work? It would seem a question with a predictable answer. The latter model of studied impersonality, while not dominant in the twentieth century, had powerful proponents, from Eliot and Pound onward, and it still strikes some as more intellectual, more philosophical, more serious. Not to mention more masculine. Which is where Elena Fanailova and a host of women poets before her come in. The expectation of intimacy from women poets, which was played to perfection by Russian poets from Anna Akhmatova onwards, makes all self-revelation or even its absence marked.
The narrator is a social misfit of forty who ruminates at length on his defects and his endless humiliating experiences and conflicts, for he is a Russian intellectual with great sensitivity and a particularly acute sense of the failings of the modern world and of everyone in it, especially himself. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. Once the situation has been completely and convincingly conveyed to the reader in a long outburst of fascinating, brilliant and constantly sidesplittingly-funny prose, the undergrounder proceeds to relate the two major events of the book — the goodbye party for a former school comrade whom he hates and despises of course that he has insisted on participating in to the astonishment and dismay of all the other participants and that turns out even worse and more humiliatingly than he had with his inherent pessimism foreseen himself ; and then his very unexpected, moving and quite unforgettable encounter with a certain Liza. An in-depth exploration of the psyche of a loner and a loser and an outcast and a very bitter, unhappy man, written in the flowing, powerful, and sparkling prose of one of the greatest masters of the Russian language : at the same time a masterful evocation of the dark side of the human experience and a masterpiece — no doubt THE masterpiece — of black humour. Translated by Constance Garnett for a London edition in , with some of our own footnotes [ 1 ].
Of course, this is a normal response. Now, my whole reason for existence is to help you build a career and sell more books. BUT, like all things in life, I am teaching you the principles of building an author business. The authors who get the best results learn those principles and adapt them to their own circumstances. Sometimes, more adaptations are needed than others. Eevi Jones.
