Yay! Congratulations, Lola! “Gripping…masterful..”
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
Lola Shoneyin, Morrow, $23.99
Blind acceptance splinters a polygamous marriage in Shoneyin’s gripping debut set in modern-day Nigeria. Bolanle Alao, the newest and youngest of Baba Segi’s wives, threatens to upset the balance of power–she is educated and beautiful, though naïve about the relationship dynamics among the other three wives in the house. Raped at 15, Bolanle considers herself disgraced and unwanted until Baba Segi, an overweight, malodorous businessman welcomes her into his family, no questions asked, until it seems she cannot conceive. Like the other wives, she feels she has been saved by Baba Segi, who accepts all of them politely, but beyond brief mentions of his sexual encounters and visits to the toilet, Baba Segi is a peripheral character. When greedy Iya Segi and Iya Femi plot to run young, sweet Bolanle out of the family, the result is disaster. It is Bolanle’s unexpected submissiveness that leads her and her husband to uncover a secret that forces him to assert his control over the family. Shoneyin masterfully disentangles four distinct stories, only to subtly expose what is common among them. (July)
Be prepared: In my experience, the single most common mistake aspiring writers make is to approach agents too early. It is essential, before you start querying a literary agent, that you show you are serious about writing. That means you should have a body of work–articles in newspapers; short stories in magazines; a blog with an active readership. It also means you should take the project you’re currently working on as far as you possibly can before seeking out an agent. I frequently request a manuscript based on an intriguing query letter only to be told that the author is still working on it and will send it in a couple of months. This is fine, except I ask myself why the query went out when the manuscript was still in progress. But what’s not so fine is those cases when I’ll have read part of a submission, only to receive an email asking me to read the new revised version instead. I know that the revision process is endless and I encourage writers to revise obsessively. But once you have sent it out into the world, that, to me, is a signal that it’s polished, ready for a stranger’s (agent’s) eyes. Finally, for fiction writers, as much as I love short stories, unless that is the form you have chosen as a writer, do write a novel. Not only is it easier to sell, but, more importantly, it showcases your writing talents in a way a short story can’t. It demonstrates your ability to develop a character, maintain narrative momentum, juggle multiple plots and subplots and then bring it all to some sort of conclusion.
“In his impressive debut, Kramon takes on a number of familiar coming-of-age plots–smalltown fish-out-of-water adolescence, frustrated first love, boarding school friendships, big city escapes–and pulls it all off with flair and humor. A 14-year-old misfit in her Maryland hometown, Finny Short is sent to boarding school by her conservative parents soon after acting on a crush on mysterious boy-next-door Earl. At posh Thorndon, she finds an unlikely best friend in Judith, a beautiful heiress who thinks nothing of catching a ride in Peter Jennings’s car; together, Earl and Judith prove unexpectedly influential throughout Finny’s teenage years, as well as her passage through college. Kramon is at his best sending up Finny’s innocence by means of an endearing, Dickensian coterie of side characters like androgynous dorm matron Poplan and Earl’s father, a narcoleptic pianist who falls asleep in the middle of performances. Combining snappy dialogue, frank attention to sex, and convincingly detailed characters–eccentric and sympathetic, but not sentimental–Kramon is clearly a find.”
I’ve had conversation with several editors and publishers recently that made me scratch my head. I represent clients from all over the world and from many different cultures; it’s something I’m very proud of and feel passionate about. Plus, books about other cultures sell. So I’ve thought–until recently, when I was told that “multicultural is not working right now” and “readers are not really going for the ‘exotic’.” Before I get on my high horse and start holding forth on the merits of publishing books by authors from around the world that shine the light on different cultures, I wondered if this was true. Is “multi-culti” dead? An informal poll yielded similar responses. No, it’s not dead. But it’s no longer a fad, the way that, say, paranormal romance is a current fad. It used to be that simply having a foreign-sounding name was enough to get editors salivating. Now, a writer from Asia, Latin America or Africa is judged by the same standards as an American writer. In my mind, this is actually progress. Being “exotic” should confer no special advantage. But one editor told me that it has become, in her experience, increasingly a disadvantage — bookstores are ordering fewer copies of such books and readers are buying less. Could this really be true? What do you think?
Know who you are as a writer. Have a vision for your work. Don’t think about who the audience for your book will be until you’ve finished it. Your choice of agent, your subsequent relationship with your agent, and with your editor, will be the better for it. The role of your agent and editor is to guide you and encourage you to produce your strongest work. But unless you have a really clear sense of what you want your book to be (even if it is not quite there yet) it is easy to start second-guessing yourself when someone with a lot of experience in publishing makes suggestions about which direction your book should take. It may very well end up being the very best thing for it, but you’ll also know when you feel they’re pushing you in the wrong direction, away from the vision you have for your work. Do you know what makes you distinct as a writer? Do you have a clear sense of your voice?
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