SAY you’ve just written a scene into your novel in which a character puts in her earbuds and joins Adele in belting out a few lines from her 2015 hit “Hello.” Or say you’ve written a collection of essays and want to use quotations from your favorite poets and writers to introduce each essay. Depending on how many words you use and how you display them on the page, those decisions could cost you when the book is published, in terms of both licensing fees and hours spent tracking down who owns the rights.
Writer Anjali Enjeti learned this lesson the hard way when she began seeking permission to use five brief quotations in her debut essay collection, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, due out in April from the University of Georgia Press. The Atlanta-based former attorney had read the fine print in her contract that stipulated that she, not her publisher, had to seek out and pay for the rights to use the quotations. Despite understanding the basics of U.S. copyright law, she was unprepared for how much work it took to get permission to use the five passages.
Enjeti had planned, for instance, to use lines from an essay by Indian scholar and social reformer Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, considered by many the father of India’s constitution, but after some digging Enjeti learned that the Indian government owns the rights to Ambedkar’s work. Enjeti sent a few e-mails to officials asking for permission, but when she didn’t hear back, she cut the epigraph from her book. “I just gave up,” she says. “I seriously doubted I was going to be able to go through all the red tape of a bureaucracy to get a quote for an author, so I abandoned it.”
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
