In reply

To reply to Preeta Samarasan's comments on my post earlier today:

First of all, I'm curious about the statistical methodology you use to draw your pie charts, because I'm not sure that even in today's multicultural world, more novels about or by Asian women are sold than novels about anything else.
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I will only encourage you to take a look at the big picture (which is easily available) of all books published in, say, the last ten years. You will quickly see that most books published (fiction or nonfiction, literary or genre) are not, in fact, by Asian women.

I'm sure you're right. I was judging only the books classified as "Fiction - debut" by Publishers Marketplace during September, not all the books published in the last ten years.

Who wrote most of the books published before that? ... Just white men, and occasionally -- only in exceptional cases until fairly recently -- white women. But nobody made pie charts to point this out, because it seemed right. ...

To some people, it *still* seems right... This in itself is a problem -- that white people and their numerous successes should seem normative/neutral/barely worthy of mention, but the successes of others always seem unfairly or dishonestly earned.

I accept your point. I did not mean to suggest there was anything unfair or dishonest about your work or that of others who wrote about Asian women, but I can see how it might have been taken that way, and I apologise for misleading readers.

Part of my point -- admittedly quite unclear in my original posts -- was that I thought it was remarkable that the publishing industry seemed suddenly to find this "exotic" subject -- as I termed it -- fascinating such that several of the debut fiction books sold in September were about Asian women.

Just to bring some data to this discussion, let me list all the books sold in September listed as "Fiction - debut" by Publishers Marketplace. (Here is the list with all the info that Publishers Marketplace supplies.)

Cate Kennedy's DARK ROOTS, a short story collection...

Theresa Rebeck's first novel THREE GIRLS AND THEIR BROTHER, narrated in four parts from the point of view of each of four siblings as they experience a year filled with the good, the bad and the ugly of the New York celebrity scene after the sisters are proclaimed "It Girls of the Twenty-First Century"...

Josh Kilmer-Purcell's first novel CANDY EVERYBODY WANTS, a coming of age story about a small town boy who makes it big...

Wendy Nelson Tokunaga's MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT, which follows the misadventures of a Japanese Bridget Jones who has escaped the straitjacket society of Japan to start a new life in San Francisco, only to find that her American Dream isn't all it's cracked up to be...

Randa Jarrar's A MAP OF HOME, exploring a daughter's complicated relationship with her mixed heritage parents, as well as the American immigrant experience...

Mark McNay's FRESH ... [Not described in the blurb, but subsequent research indicated it is about a Scottish chicken plant.]

Joshua Kornreich's THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS, in which a lice-ridden, eight-year-old boy kills and narrates, withholding the identity of his victim until the end of the novel...

Charles Bock's BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, about a twelve-year-old boy, and the day he disappears in the desert near Las Vegas, following the boy, his parents, best friend, and a cast of seemingly unconnected strangers (an illustrator, a stripper, a anarchist teenager, a band of street runaways) on that fateful day...

Hillary Jordan's MUDBOUND, which deals with the entwined fates of a white farming family in the Mississippi Delta and their black sharecroppers after the sons of both families return home from WWII...

Julie Buxbaum's debut novel THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, about a 29-year-old attorney who lost her mother as a teenager and finds her well-constructed life falling apart when she can't commit to the man who loves her...

Fiona Maazel's LAST LAST CHANCE, in which a family of four navigates love and recovery in an age of anxiety where the threat of a looming deadly plague hangs over them...

Preeta Samarasan's EVENING IS THE WHOLE DAY, set in post-colonial Malaysia, the story of an upper-class Malaysian-Indian family, with a mystery at its heart...

Wendy Lee's HAPPY FAMILY, about the complicated relationship between a young woman from China and the well-to-do New York couple who hire her as the nanny to their adopted Chinese daughter...

That's thirteen books. Three of them are explicitly about Asian women, not counting "A Map of Home," whose author is Arab-American.

So, three out of thirteen? Perhaps not such a big deal. But when I originally posted on this topic, it was two out of two. On Sep. 11, both of the novels sold so far in September (including Ms. Samarasan's) were about, as I put it, "exotic young Asian women."

No doubt that was a rude way to put it, but I meant to be tongue-in cheek. The graphic I posted was meant to imitate the "infographics" published in The Onion, which themselves are a satire of the infographics published in USA Today. I thought the presence of this graphic was enough to put the posting in the realm of satire.

However, even if my point was originally satiric, why did I continue posting on the topic throughout the month? Because it does seem to me that publishers are very interested -- perhaps to the exclusion of other topics -- in "exotic" topics. The article in Poets & Writers I linked to this morning captures it better than I was able to.

So my point was at least a little serious, but it's true I didn't really examine the implications of drawing attention to these books. For whether or not they constitute a trend, is there anything wrong with people writing or reading about extra-American people and cultures? No, of course there isn't. So why bring it up at all? The only explanation, as I wrote last week, is that I have some admittedly immature and silly sour grapes that my own novel -- which is set in the U.S. in 1960 and is about very American and male-centered topics -- did not sell.

Do I really think that my novel did not sell because a book like Ms. Samarasan's somehow nudged it out? No, I do not -- unless by "a book like hers" we mean a book that was much better written and more interesting than my book. I did not mean to imply that books by or about Asian women or other cultures are inherently less interesting or deserving of being published, nor did I intend to imply any comparison with my own book, except in the most self-deprecating sense that their books sold and mine didn't.

I'm also astonished by a question you seem to be asking earnestly in another post: why are people *interested* in books by Asian women, when they're not even billed as chick lit, but as literary novels? ...

I did not mean to imply that the books in question should have been classified as chick lit or in any way lesser than "literary novels." Publishers Marketplace has a separate category for chick lit (they list it as "women's/romance") and I specifically was looking at the "fiction - debut" category, which does not overlap.

Shouldn't we be glad that at least, at the very least, there's a section of the population interested in something other than navel-gazing? ... Shouldn't we encourage other interests?

Sure -- I guess so. Sometimes people read books (or watch films, etc.) about people like themselves, and sometimes they read books (etc.) about people and cultures totally unlike their own. I don't think the former activity always amounts to "navel gazing," nor does the latter always amount to (again, my term) an interest in the merely exotic. But -- and this was perhaps my original, obscure point -- sometimes it is an interest in the exotic for the sake of the exotic, as a kind of touristic impulse, and in my opinion there is something suspect about this if that's all it amounts to. I might have made this point seriously, but instead I approached it satirically. Clearly my attempt at satire failed for more than one reader.

I hope readers will buy and read Ms. Samarasan's book "Evening is the Whole Day," as well as the other books I made fun of.