Name Change

I tried with my last novel, Trixie, to change my pen name from “Victoria N. Alexander” to the less formal “Tori Alexander.” I had hoped to stop the confusion between me and “Victoria Alexander,” a romance novelist. It didn’t work. My non-fiction book, The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature, was mistaken for Victoria Alexander’s The Perfect Mistress. My publisher called me “Trixie Alexander” a couple of times. So, Trixie will republished under the name “Victoria N. Alexander” when copies bearing the failed pen name sell out. The torialexander.com website has migrated to victorianalexander.com.

O that I had chosen “V. N. Alexander” as my pen name I would have been confused with the Vladimir Nabokov Archives or V. S. Naipaul or A. S. Byatt or assumed to be male or ….

The Biologist’s Mistress

My new non-fiction title, The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Literature, Art, and Nature, has been released by Emergent Publications. Last year, I tried to distinguish myself from popular Harlequin Romance writer Victoria Alexander by changing my novel-writing pen name to Tori Alexander.  But I kept Victoria N. Alexander for my philosophy of science work, assuming that I ran no risk of being confused with Victoria Alexander on that front. A couple of months ago, I wrote to a colleague in Denmark telling him that my new book, Biologist’s Mistress, would be released soon.  He wrote back quickly saying that he had ordered my book from Amazon, but strangely the title (by Victoria Alexander) in Denmark had been translated into the “Perfect Mistress.”

I suppose there’s no avoiding one’s Doppelgänger.

My title, by the way, references a quote attributed to 20th C geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, “Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare not be seen with her in public but cannot live without her.”

Please take a look at the book’s website www.biologistsmistress.com, and get a copy too!

Trixie ebook now available at Barnes and Noble

You can now get Trixie as an ebook for B&N Nook and Sony Reader as well as Kindle.

Naked Singularity now on Kindle

My second novel may not get quite as much attention as my other two novels (with pretty females on their covers), but Naked Singularity is my personal favorite and I’m happy to announce that it’s finally available on Kindle.  The subject is dark — euthanasia — but heavy as it is, it’s also darkly comic. Here’s a thoughtful review from poet Gerrit Henry published when the novel first appeared in 2003.

Alexander, Victoria N. Naked Singularity.The Permanent Press, 2003, Sag Harbor. 189 pp. One of the many dark beauties of Victoria N. Alexander’s new novel is that, not only is it the proverbial good read, it is also a proverbially brilliant one. Alexander–holder of a PhD–has dished up a heart-stoppingly beautiful heroine who holds similar degrees in teleology (the study of why) and she thinks, and writes, like a dream. Witness this sample from a soliloquy by Hali on death: “You had thought death would at least be romantic, but now you realize there is nothing to be thankful for–how vacuous, how colorless, how without pity, how without regard for your intentions . . . . ” This, from a piece of popular fiction, is almost asking too much in the matter of sheer, unabused style.

Fake political correctness in Amazon.com’s “Editorial Review” section

Let me say off the top that I like Amazon.com.  Even as a huge corporate entity, they provide a fairly even playing ground for small literary fiction presses.  They are even more democratic in this regard than many independent bookstores. But today I have some criticisms to make regarding their practices of posting “Editorial Reviews.” These are the unsigned reviews that appear at the top of the review section and that are the most visible.  Amazon has an agreement with Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal to post their reviews in this section. Publishers cannot opt to replace these reviews with others from equally respectable review publications. Amazon claims they  are under contract to post reviews and do not have a choice in the matter.

Midwest Book Review of Trixie

If you think they’re just a piece of meat for you to ogle, you’re doing it wrong. “Trixie” follows one stripper as she faces her life and author Victoria N. Alexander hopes to teach readers a little something about life and where it’s going, and why some women go down paths others may feel degrading. With plenty of food for thought, “Trixie” is a fine pick and will entertain as it enlightens and is highly recommended. See more reviews

Trixie is out!

I’m happy to announce that my latest novel, Trixie, is now in print.

With Trixie I have taken uncertain steps as a writer.  My previous novels were published under “Victoria N. Alexander,” the name that appears on my passport, not “Tori Alexander,” the name my family and friends use.   The reason for the switch is to “disambiguate” myself, as they say these days, from a popular writer of Romance novels named “Victoria Alexander.”  I am decidedly not a Romance writer.  If any thing Trixie is anti-Romance as my heroine is not too keen on

Biosemiotics: Discussion with Don Favareau

Philosopher Don Favareau explains “biosemiotics,” the new paradigm for  scientists and philosophers grappling with the concepts of “meaning,” “signaling,” and “coding” in biological processes–and in culture. Click here to listen to BBC radio broadcast featuring Don.

Biosemiotics is an area of science that informs my work in philosophy, as described in my forthcoming non-fiction work, The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature. But it also informs my creative writing, especially the short story collection I’m currently writing, The Narrative: and Other Stories, which focuses on how things become signs through poetic and chance associations.

Trixie, review by Kirkus

In her new novel, Trixie, Victoria N. Alexander (Naked Singularity, 2003, etc.) looks at strip clubs and the women who work in them. A pale waif with dark hair, Trixie is a stripper at the Girlie Playhouse. The narrator Pixie is also a dancer who works with Trixie and whose stripper-mother was killed. Set up as a Daisy Miller-like figure, Trixie meets equally tragic results. And thus the novel becomes Pixie’s retelling of how Trixie gets involved with Max, and of how she meets her untimely death, with

How to write a book review

I’m the editor at an online literary fiction review called Dactyl Review. We  receive a lot of  emails asking  for some general pointers for writing reviews.  Most requests have come from conscientious readers who want to post their first review on Amazon.com, GoodReads or LibraryThing.  As a supporter of literature, I liked to help the reviewing world do a good job, on Dactyl Review and elsewhere.  So here’s some guidance that (I hope) will help you write the kind of review that will be useful to readers and writers alike, no matter what you think of the book.

Writer Dorion Sagan on What Now

Dorion Sagan, a good friend of mine, science writer, thinker, novelist, was recently interviewed on Ken Rose’s radio program “What Now? Extended interviews with accomplished thinkers, writers, artists, farmers and scientists addressing the global crisis” on KOWS in California.

Click here to download the mp3. It’s a wonderful, long interview. It starts slow, but keep listening. Dorion gives a surprising answer to Rose’s question about whether or not the human is likely to survive as a species and in what form. He talks about his books The Sciences of Avatar: from Anthropology to Xenology, Notes from the Holocene, Dazzle Gradually, which he wrote with his mother Lynn Margulis, Death and Sex, which he wrote with Tyler Volk, Cooking with Jesus: From the Primal Brew to the Last Brunch, and many others. Dorion also plugged my 2003 novel, Naked Singularity. Thanks Dorion.

Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

In response to a reader who asked me to compare my novel, Trixie, to Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, I looked it up. This is what I found.

There is a long tradition of confessional “novels” about stripping by Harvard grads, clever journalists, med students, and, as Cody calls herself, otherwise “unlikely strippers.” In addition to these confessional, somewhat fictionalized memoirs–for they cannot be called novels–there is also a slew of scholarly works on the topic (for example Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers by Bernadette Barton), also undertaken by bright, clever, and adventurous women who probably didn’t mind the “research” work. Apparently, Cody’s smart-girl type is more likely to try stripping than she wants us to think.

What is Literary Fiction?

Literary fiction is often linguistically difficult, or unusual, in the way that poetry is. It often contains unfamiliar words or supports political, ideological, religious positions that are not widely accepted.  It subverts sentimentality. It makes people think.

Non-fans of literary fiction tend to complain that it sends them to the dictionary (or tries to).  They claim literary fiction is guilty of affectation, a term which seems to have changed its meaning of late:

Main Entry: af·fec·ta·tion

Pronunciation: ˌa-ˌfek-ˈtā-shən
Function: noun

1 :displaying extensive knowledge acquired chiefly from books : demonstrating profound, recondite, or bookish learning

2 :speech or behavior relating to, or characteristic of poets or poetry

Review of Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

“Male violence did it.” Martin Amis has a bit of a reputation for making sweeping, declarative statements like this one that ends the first paragraph of Yellow Dog. I’ve read all of Amis’ books except Pregnant Window and Koba the Dread (on my list, next) and I’m very familiar with the Amis conception of gender.  I can make sweeping generalizations about his Men and his Women.

Death and Sex

Death and sex are literature’s subjects, not science’s. What we care most about is what these subjects mean to us—not what they, in fact, are. When scientists attempt to enlighten us on these matters, they often fall to recounting certain metabolic processes, generally missing the point, while we readers sigh or snicker, wondering if the researcher has any experience out of the lab. This is not the case with Death and Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan. See my review in New York Journal of Books.

Indie books compared to Indie films and music

The film industry and the music industry long ago responded to technological advances that put production power in the hands of the artist. When video quality became comparable to film quality, Indie videographers could afford to make their own movies. If at first these looked a bit “low-budget,” that changed soon enough. And in 2009 the Academy Award for Best Cinematography went to a digitally-shot picture: Anthony Dod Mantle for Slumdog Millionaire. “Indie Film” is now its own genre, much in the way that “literary fiction” is a genre, whose only defining characteristics are its artfulness.

Philip Roth: The Copulation of Clichés

Marty Shepard, blogging for The Permanent Press, reports that the NY Times has officially admitted to what we have long suspected. The Book Review is primarily interested in non-fiction. It exists for the purposes of information dissemination, not the promotion of literature.  ”The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” says Managing Editor, Bill Keller. “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” Hence if the Times is to review a book it is more of a commitment to  giving out product information that helps the consumer decide “what to buy at the airport.”  And, Keller adds, as if he hadn’t said enough already, “Of course, some fiction needs to be done. We’ll do the new Updike, the new Roth. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me.”

Was anyone wondering how Philip Roth was able to publish his latest appallingly bad novel, The Humbling? Well now you know.  See my review in the New York Journal of Books.

Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

As a reviewer, there are two things you’ll want to know about me before bothering to read further. I only like literary fiction, and I only like literary fiction that’s a bit “difficult,” in one way or another, style or theme, preferably both.

A good theme for me might include controversial social issues, human paradoxes, ethical puzzles– problems to which there are no easy solutions. The concerns of unmarried 32-year-old woman and the plight of a middle-aged man whose affair is petering out are not real “problems,” in my view, nor is the temporary loss of faith in God or humanity.

Publishing is dead, long live publishing: the future of literary fiction

Do you remember in the nineties, when those enemies of progress decried the big box booksellers nudging independent stores out of business? They claimed chainstore dominance would ultimately decrease the diversity of titles sold. We might have listened. They were right. Once there were thousands of thoughtful, eccentric, and qualified people choosing which books should go on shelves, but that number shot down to just dozens, and the decisions went to people with marketing degrees, not elbow patches. But—I am first to admit it—at the time I was happy to have a cozy library-ish place to sip my espresso, and, even though there was nothing on the shelves for me other than the classics I already owned, I rationalized that I could always order the books I wanted. I sold out, I now realize. I sold my literary fiction down the river.

The Eternal Return: used hard covers verses the ephemeral e-book

Unaware, perhaps, that they no are no longer reaping rewards for their creator, used copies of my novels find their ways into online used bookstores and resell and resell. What were your chances ten years ago of walking into a second-hand bookshop and finding the obscure book you were after? Nil. Now with the Internet you are sure to find exactly what you want at a good price. I am all for recycling, in theory, but not in this particular. Neither publisher nor author gets a cut of used book sales.

Crowdsourcing literary fiction? or nichesourcing?

HarperCollins has turned to “crowdsourcing” to find material to publish. Their online site www.authonomy.com invites authors to submit their novels to be reviewed by other novelists who have also submitted their work. This is a new kind of publisher slush pile. Instead of having interns or agents sift through submissions, they are having the reading public do it for them.  This is, theoretically, a good tactic for commercial publishers since it should give them direct information about how the general public is likely to respond to  work they are considering.

The problem with this kind of approach, other than the obvious one –mediocre readers selecting for mediocrity– is that the books that have been reviewed by other writers get placed near the top of the page, so those seeking to find books to review are offered those first.  

Shelf Life: A literary award that doesn’t expire

The greatest fault of literary awards is that they, like the review industry, are largely directed at new writing. There is no reason why the “best” books should be “new” books. Whereas commercial fiction is topical, trendy, and has a very short shelf life, literary fiction is not. If an industry supporting quality writing is to succeed in this changing publishing world, it must distinguish itself from the fashion industry where being “the latest” is every thing. A new philosophy for literary fiction publishing must focus on the maturing title as well as the new one.

Smoking Hopes is now available as an Ebook

My first novel Smoking Hopes was released in hardcover by The Permanent Press in 1996.  I’ve wanted it to go to ebook for a long time now, for reasons that I’ve been writing about in my “Literary Fiction” posts. Mainly the ebook appeal involves copyright protection for authors as well as greener practices for the globe. So I was really glad to see The Permanent Press go digital.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

With all books, there is a difference between author and narrator. Sometimes the difference is slight, sometimes great. Omniscient narrators tend to reflect the author’s stance about the story more than, say, first-person narrators, which often strike poses very unlike the authors’, excepting the case of confessional “fiction” (which is not actually fictional). At first I thought Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library)‘s narrator spoke without irony, without distance being injected between his voice and the author’s feelings about the story. As I read on, I felt more and more an ironic distance between McCarthy and the narrator. I felt as if

The Names by Don DeLillo

DeLillo surely kept a journal while living in Athens and visiting various places in the Middle East and India. He noted scenes, described the climate and vegetation, philosophized on the locals then published his journal as the novel, The Names, after he added a “plot” about a cult that murderers people for the completely uninteresting reason that their initials match the initials of the place name in which they are murdered. DeLillo also added the equally uninteresting denouement in which it is

The House of Meetings by Martin Amis

The House of Meetings is a narrative delivered as a long letter from an unnamed narrator, an 86-year-old Russian man, to his step-daughter Venus, living in Chicago. He is in the midst of traveling back home after many years in the U.S. The point of his journey is to revisit a work camp in the Artic where he had been held prisoner and slave laborer in the 40s and 50s. Particularly, he wants to visit the “house of meetings,” where, late in the labor camp era, the Soviets had begun allowing some prisoners to meet briefly with their wives. The narrator’s brother, Lev, with whom he shared most of his prison years, had been able to meet with his wife Zoya there on one occasion. Something occurred during the meeting that changed Lev’s life for the worse, and

The Sea by John Banville

Don’t read this review of The Sea if you don’t want to ruin the surprise ending because I’m going to give part of it away. If you’re at all like me, you may find it preferable to know, to know more than what the jacket cover reveals, that there was a death in the narrator’s childhood that he revisits in memory as an old man. At the end of the book the narrator relates the sudden double death of twin children. And he reveals the true identity of Miss V, their former

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Black Dogs: A Novel is a skillfully written novel on an interesting and profound topic. McEwan does a wonderful job describing June, an eccentric old woman, the narrator’s mother-in-law. He also handles what could be a very artificial story device in a reasonably natural way. The idea of the book is to explore the conflicts between mystical thinking and rationality, and the narrator is interviewing and writing a memoir on his mother-in-law and father-in-law who represent those views respectively. This passage exemplifies well McEwan’s sensitivity and talent as a writer;

Walk On, Bright Boy by Charles Davis

Set in Medieval Spain, Walk On, Bright Boy is story of a boy’s first confrontation with political and religious corruption strives less for historical accuracy than for universal applicability. Written with lovely economy and sensitivity, it is reminiscent of a fable or of a young adult coming-of-age tale. At the same time, however, it is also complex in its exploration of human foibles and philosophies.