In anticipation of this year’s BookExpo, New York ran a series of pages on authors, debuts and unheralded novels that should be more widely read. We were happy to see some contributors and friends pop throughout the section. J. Robert Lennon and Sam Lipsyte, who have written fantastic short stories for Playboy, were mentioned for their respective novels Mailman and Homeland. (Lipsyte appears again in his role as a writing teacher at Columbia). Other sages with connections to us, Daphne Merkin and Jason Epstein, weigh in as well. However, it’s on page 66—And the Last Word Goes To…Five Writers on How They Get By With a Little Help From Their Friends (And Playboy) by a certain Boris Kachka—where, obviously, Playboy receives the most attention. The piece covers a night of drinks and food shared by Akhil Sharma, John Wray, Gary Shteyngart, Suketu Mehta and Ray Isle as they talk about trying to survive as writers. At one point, Wray credits the worldwide book audience for talented Americans as a godsend. Then comes the following:
"Playboy is another blessing. Wray is about to write the magazine an essay about reuniting with an ex-girlfriend; Shteyngart has already done a version of that Playboy staple. "My last agent told me not to write for Playboy because it would turn off my female readers," says Mehta. "But my female readers don’t pay me seven bucks a word."
While we’re always pleased to be associated with gifted authors—a hallmark of our 50-plus-year run—it’s hard not to be rankled by the gratuitous knock: “…that Playboy staple.” Mr. Kachka, apparently ignorant of what we publish and by whom, saw the opening and took it. For god’s sake, who would believe that Playboy publishes anything but the most rote, throw-away dreck by serious writers? Never mind the fact that we are one of the last mass-market magazines to publish fiction every month (a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by ASME judges this year) and that we don’t ask writers who should know better to scribble crap on napkins as part of a gimmicky nod to literary appreciation (as did one of our competitors). Or that Shteyngart’s piece was on a break-up (assigned and secured before his front-page review in the NYT Book Review), or that Wray’s second piece for us (his first, about a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, was shelved thanks to the force of nature known as Hurricane Katrina) is actually a profile of an alluring female singer. (Apparently Wray and his subject were romantically involved; what we know is that he was in her band for a time.)
Then, the cherry on top: $7 a word. I wish. We pull in the names we do because of our audience size, and because writers feel honored to join a publishing list that in the last few months alone includes Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah.
Boris, you caught me on a bad day. Typically, this kind of toss off—admittedly, a not particularly egregious soiling of my shoes—passes without mention. Not this time.
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Comments on this entry:
I understand your vexation - the common perception for decades has been that Playboy is a vehicle for publishing second-rate material tossed off by first-rate authors, and certainly you must get tired of making the case that the magazine deserves a better reputation that that. But even if it **were** true, would it really be so bad? After all, that's still better than the second- or third-rate material by the second-rate authors that you find in most other magazines. Anyway, it is good to see that Playboy is once again taking fiction seriously enough to feel defensive about it, after the editor-less period during which fiction appeared to be on the way out entirely (involving as it does multisyllabic words, which were discouraged in the attempt to be more nearly Maxim-like).
As for your comment that "it’s hard not to be rankled by the gratuitous knock: '…that Playboy staple,'" I wouldn't worry about it. All real Playboy fans know that the magazine hasn't had staples since October 1985.