4/4-The Art of Fielding

我非常崇拜很會寫作的人...

非常非常崇拜! 我認為很會寫作的人,一定要執著到自私程度,才會進入經典地步.甚至自私到也許是口語能力退化? 社交能力變弱? 犧牲經濟狀況後才有可能寫出堪稱經典著作. 以前在學校,有一次我讀我們學校的honor code,我覺得寫的實在太棒! 決定考試不作弊.東問西問找出作者後,發現竟然是教金融投資的老教授. 跟他聊過後,果然! 他在讀大學時不是讀金融科系,有非常良好的人文教育基礎.也因為他的關係,間接影響到我對很多意見領導者看法與想法.甚至注意有類似liberal art教育背景的人,也許在不同領域發展,都會有非常類似氣氛與想法.

所以我注意到一則冷門新聞.

By Philip Boroff

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Five months ago, Chad Harbach was
an out-of-work copy editor with an unpaid position at a literary
journal and an unpublished novel: 475 pages centering on a
baseball team at a fictional Wisconsin college.
A few weeks ago, Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown agreed
to pay about $650,000 for it, according to two people briefed on
the sale. It was one of the highest prices for a man’s first
novel on a topic appealing to a male audience, said Jon Baker, a
book scout who advises non-U.S. publishers.
Nine years in the writing, Harbach’s novel, tentatively
titled “The Art of Fielding,” sold after a two-day telephone
auction of eight publishers.
“If you don’t have a vampire, you don’t expect that kind
of money,” Baker said, referring in part to Stephenie Meyer’s
“Twilight” series. Those books were the basis of two feature
films and sold more than 50 million copies in the past two
years, according to Publishers Weekly.
Baker called Harbach a “fantastic writer,” based on the
manuscript. “He certainly took his time and made it perfect,”
Baker said. “And I hate baseball.”
A soft-spoken 34-year-old, Harbach met a reporter at the
one-room 500-square-foot Brooklyn office of n+1, a nonprofit
literary magazine he helped start in 2004. He isn’t paid as
executive editor.

Brooklyn Share

In October, he lost his part-time copy-editing gig with the
consulting firm McKinsey & Co., he said. He scraped together
rent for the Brooklyn apartment he shares with two roommates
from short-term copy editing and money borrowed from a friend.
“I wasn’t excited about finding a new job,” he said,
wearing blue jeans, a black shirt and Puma sneakers.
He grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. His father is an
accountant, his mother ran the Small World Montessori School,
for children 6 and under. He read prodigiously as a child,
starting with Roald Dahl. In high school, sports -- basketball,
golf and baseball -- temporarily trumped reading and writing as
priorities.
“What fascinates me about baseball is that although it’s a
team game, and a team becomes a kind of family, the players on
the field are each very much alone,” he said. “Your teammates
depend on you and support you, but at the moments that count
they can’t bail you out.”
David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1,088-page novel
“Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, made a strong impression.
He read it the week he graduated from Harvard, where he majored
in English. What he called the “central American novel of the
past 30 years” taught him that “you could write a beautiful
and important novel, now.”

Odd Jobs

After college, he lived around the country doing odd jobs.
He began his novel in the winter of 2000, and used early drafts
of two chapters to apply to graduate-school writing programs. He
was widely rejected, and accepted by the University of Virginia,
where he earned a master of fine arts.
“I didn’t think it would take nine years,” he said of the
novel. “There’s a fair amount of anxiety to devoting so much
time when you don’t know how it will turn out.”
He avoided full-time work so he could write. He composed in
spiral notebooks, usually taking months off when he was putting
out n+1, a thoughtful twice-a-year journal.
It has a print run of about 8,000 an issue. Among its
readers is Chris Parris-Lamb, a 28-year-old literary agent who
now represents Harbach. Parris-Lamb pitched the manuscript to
publishers before e-mailing copies.

‘Emotional Experience’

“The enthusiasm in my voice is reflected in how quickly
people read it,” Parris-Lamb said from his office on East 57th
Street. “These are busy people. I want them to drop what
they’re doing.”
Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, called
reading “The Art of Fielding” a “deeply emotional
experience.”
“The writing seems effortless but makes you care
desperately about its characters,” he said, adding that it
appealed to women in his office as well as men.
Little, Brown didn’t have the high bid, Parris-Lamb said.
Harbach wanted to work with Pietsch, the editor of “Infinite
Jest.”
Of the five n+1 founders, Harbach is the third to publish a
novel. Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision,” sold 48,000 copies,
according to Nielsen BookScan, which covers about 75 percent of
U.S. retail sales. “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” by Keith
Gessen, sold 7,000 copies.
Rights for “The Art of Fielding” have recently sold in
Japan and throughout Europe. It’s expected to be out in the U.S.
in the fourth quarter of 2011. Accustomed to living on the
cheap, Harbach said he’s in no rush to move into his own place.
But another copy-editing job isn’t in the offing.
“I haven’t thought about what I’ll do next,” he said.

:)