The Cultural Agency Gets Real on Books
Chances are the National Endowment for the Arts ranks somewhere down there between, say, Sears and Pets.com on the candidate list for publishers’ future business partners. But the organization that helps fund National Poetry Month and gave Michael Cunningham a fellowship more than a decade ago has re-branded itself as a “potential partner for ventures,” in the words of NEA literature director Cliff Becker, who set forth an ambitious, partner-powered agenda for the cultural agency at the Publishers Lunch Club in New York on April 5.
Citing a loathsome “culture of deliberate obsolescence” and a “marketplace that rewards homogeneous expression over innovation,” Becker summoned publishers to lock arms with the NEA at the barricades of the culture wars. Noting that just six authors accounted for 63 of the top 100 bestselling books of the 1990s, he said commercial publishers are distressingly close to consigning mid-list fiction, literary translation, and poetry to the historical dustbin. On that note, he went on to summon the spectre of Joseph Goebbels chucking Hemingway, Zola, and Proust into the bonfires, and suggested that increasing media consolidation is putting America’s literary heritage in jeopardy.
“The endowment’s role,” said Becker, “can and should go further” to help those in the book business fight the good fight, and that includes hooking up with publishers to seed the literary community with know-how and, when possible, cold cash. The endowment has met with the book community to help build a stronger audience for contemporary literature, in light of the fact that some 20% of America’s adult population is not literate enough to read story books to their children. The NEA is also working to cross-pollinate commercial and nonprofit ventures by forming liaisons between the two publishing worlds; looking into how reading habits develop and why people select the books that they do; and launching a major program with the ALA that links libraries, writers, and audiences through readings at libraries in all 50 states, for which the NEA committed $500,000 over two years.
Becker begged those assembled to remember that the NEA’s grant programs aim to broaden audiences by supporting book fairs, reading series, and literary journals. Not to mention the Literature Fellowships, which have helped sustain 35 out of 49 National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners since 1990. All but two of those 35 winners received their fellowships before receiving the award, often 10 to 20 years earlier, Becker said. He hastened to point out that in supporting fabulous new talent, the NEA can be most beneficial to the book biz’s bottom line: “These are not writers who generally lose money for their publishers.”
