Trends from 2004 That You Never Knew About -- And Now You Don't Have To
By Steven Zeitchik, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 12/30/2004
You've heard endlessly about Bush-bashing, sex memoirs and how Jon Stewart reaped the benefits of our indecision. But what were the other book trends that didn't get play in 2004's year-end lists? That is, the books that you never thought of grouping into a trend. Like rockers who write. Or tell-alls that didn't tell. With this in mind, we offer the roundup for the people tired of all the other roundups. It's The Incredibles of lists--we lampoon the convention, we fall victim to the convention.
Tangled Up in...Purple Prose?: They all wanted to write really badly--and they did. At least so said some critics, who were cool to the literary musings of the many rock stars who published books this year, including Bob Dylan, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.
Immigrant Fiction: What is this, 1957? The ghost of Malamud was back with stories of the displaced in America: Hari Kunzru's Transmission, Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World and Adam Langer's very Bellow-esque Crossing California.
Mixed Hash: Everywhere you looked, memoirs were being disguised as cookbooks--or was it the other way around? Pat Conroy, Donna Brazile and Maya Angelou were among those pairing life- stories with that perfect recipe.
Codebreaking: The Da Vinci Code finally slipped down the charts, but the list of books claiming to decipher the Dan Brown hit went on longer than the lines at the Louvre--or the number of Midwestern marketing types you saw with a copy of the original at the airport.
The Lovely Embargo: Okay, it's not technically a book. But it did apply to about 4,000 of them. R.I.P., pre-pub publicity; 2004 was the year when the embargo (aka, the trend in which publishers demand that the media not devote the pages it normally in the name of sales asks for so that newsbreaking books can get more sales--and then threatens legal action when they don't fully comply) came into its own. Embargoes became so common that you have to ask if a publisher might one day make more news by not instituting one. Which leads us to...
The Non-Confessional Confessional: Bill Clinton, Paris Hilton and Pete Rose all said they'd tell all -- and then told very little. A weird year for books? You can bet on it.
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