Too New and Strange

People are taking this as somehow disparaging to blogs and Internet reviews of books. It’s not. Plenty of excellent publishers regard Internet-native reviews with just as much authority as print sources, if not more in certain cases. We’ve won. We have authority in the publishing world. This is a dig against the University of Chicago Press’s editorial board.

All the same, the important thing is that U of C managed to do the right thing with A Naked Singularity. So it’s a win. There’s hope for publishing yet!

When the buzz continued to build, Stahl asked Wilson to put him in touch with the author. Susanna De La Pava gladly sent him a copy. In addition to its academic, reference, and journal publications, the press publishes only a small selection of fiction each year. Stahl’s proposal to acquire rights to an enormous novel by an unpublished writer required a certain adjustment of protocol.

Maggie Hivnor, AM’77, paperback editor in charge of acquiring reprint rights, generally consults scholarly reviews when considering a book. For A Naked Singularity, there were only online reviews. “We couldn’t go to our [editorial] board with reviews off the Internet. That would have been too new and strange.”

So she sent the book to novelist Brian Evenson and nonfiction writer Carlo Rotella, U-High’82, whose work the press has published. “And then these reviews came back,” says Hivnor. “Rave reviews: ‘Yes, yes, you should publish this!’”

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