LJ Q&A: Harold Augenbraum—Into the Limelight

When founding executive director Neil Baldwin departed the National Book Foundation (NBF), sponsor of the National Book Awards, in 2003, he was replaced by Harold Augenbraum, then director of New York City's Mercantile Library and a longtime LJ reviewer. Here, Augenbraum reflects on his vision for the NBF.

What was it like to move from running a library to running the National Book Foundation?

HA: I worked at a small membership library, not even one of the big membership libraries, in midtown Manhattan. I felt like this tiny little mouse in this great monstrosity of a metropolis, with people going by and not even knowing we were there. It was a sort of semimonkish existence. Then, before I was even [at the NBF] full time, the year's National Book Awards were announced and I was tracked down on my cell phone in the St. Paul airport by a reporter from a major metropolitan daily. That was sort of symbolic of the differences of going from the directorship of a small membership library to the National Book Foundation. If I had been president of the New York Public Library, it wouldn't have been such a difference.

How did your experiences at the Mercantile Library prepare you for your current job?

It prepared me in the sense that I came from a world of literature, and so I'm familiar with the writer's side of things. I was able to walk in and say, literary education works with adults. Also, there is a lot of public speaking involved in this job, and I did a lot of public speaking at the library because I ran 100-odd literary programs a year. I was always getting up making introductions, socializing, and talking to people.

Tell us more about your literary background.

The Mercantile Library had everything from romance novels to the most esoteric novels you can imagine, and I have a Raven from the Mystery Writers of America for the work I did with our mystery collection. So I don't have an outlook that says, you should always read hoity-toity literary books, which I hope translates to the idea of reading all the genres but just reading good stuff. In fact, I think that drawing a line between literary and commercial fiction is killing fiction. I read Proust and I read Sarah Paretsky; one of my favorite writers of all time is Eric Ambler. In the long run, I hope I can use this broad experience to expand what the National Book Foundation is.

How does an organization like the National Book Foundation stay relevant in today's environment?

Like most people and most organizations in the literary community, we need to develop our own marketing. Not only must we market ourselves as an organization but we must market the product we have, which is a selection of great American books every year. We can't just expect that because we have a brand name, the National Book Awards, we are going to remain relevant; we have to figure out how to make the works we select relevant to the people out there and to expand that market.

Many libraries have long since adopted the "give 'em what they want approach" to collection development. How can they manage a "give 'em what they didn't know they wanted" approach?

There are some tried-and-true methods, for example, linking a well-known and a not-so-well-known author. There's no reason you can't also get someone who likes Scott Turow to read classic thrillers. People tend to be very shy about trying something new; as Edmund Wilson once said, "I'm a man of the Twenties, and I read the literature of the Twenties," even though he lived until the Seventies.

Can one bring readers of popular material to more literary works?

We don't know yet. Right now, I am doing as much reading as I possibly can on the changes that technology has wrought in our way of thinking, of assimilating. Many of the writers addressing this issue talk about the loss of individual voices, whether in literature or in music. Individual voices—the ones you hear in your head and see as unique in perspective and style—are no longer prized by the generations coming up. That may be a temporary reaction, but it's one of the directions in which the culture is going.

That recalls genre fiction, which works more by formula than voice.

That comes from the whole McLuhanesque idea that the medium you consume will affect the way you consume it. So that if you watch television, which is very formulaic, or read very formulaic stuff, you will continue to watch and read very formulaic stuff. To break out of that is difficult; you've got to start with the very, very young.

Then what about National Book Foundation programs involving children?

Programs like the "Pleasure of Reading" address where the next audience is going to come from, but I'm not sure that one organization can act as anything more than a catalyst. I do think that there may be ways of approaching the next generation. One is through audiobooks, and the other is through graphic novels. My colleagues will kill me when this comes out, but there are some interesting things going on. For instance, a high school teacher out in California who couldn't get a whole group of Latino kids to read gave them audiobooks—unabridged stuff. Not only did they enjoy the audiobooks more than if they had read them, but a couple of the kids were reading—that is, listening to—ten to 15 books a month. And they fell in love with literature. There's loads of anecdotal evidence that people who read graphic novels and listen to audiobooks are also big readers of regular books. And there may be some crossover, for example, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Many, many well-written novels use popular culture as their point of departure, which may be another way to get readers interested in great literature.

Is there a lesson here for upcoming authors?

I don't think you can tell people how they should write. But you can tell them to be realistic. There was an article in Poets & Writers by Johnny Temple, the founder of Akashic Books, in which he basically reproaches some writers, saying, So you sold 1000 books, so what? Did you write your book because you thought you would get rich? The lesson is that you must either accept that you might sell only a few books or do your own marketing; people aren't going to come to you. The poetry world has recognized that; Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove are out there doing events all over the place. The question is whether mainstream publishing companies will want to publish people who don't make them any money and also whether the independent book industry is going to go the way of the independent film industry.

What would it take for that to happen?

The Book Industry Study Group came out with a report about publishing companies "under the radar" that have developed many distribution techniques big publishers are just beginning to use. Is the web going to be the way people market books? Who knows? But if we don't figure out how this industry is going to survive, then it won't. I don't know whether the independent publishing industry can parallel the independent film industry, but ten or 15 years ago you would have said that independent films were dead. Now they have their own channel.

Back to the awards. Do they really matter?

I've never met an author who didn't want to get an award, because it represents some sort of recognition. Also, I don't care what people say, awards help sales. Julia Glass was unknown before she won the National Book Award (NBA); then she made a couple of best sellers lists. Lily Tuck's book went from barely four figures in print to six figures. And, of course, awards mean something to publishers or they wouldn't nominate their books in the first place. Winning the NBA shows that they have backed the right author.

How do awards matter to the public at large?

Awards have their place perhaps even more than in the old days because there are fewer reviews; as James Woods said, awards are the new reviews; they're recommendations by people who supposedly know what they are doing. Every once in a while someone will say, "I read that book that won the NBA, and it was terrible," but I love that—they read the book.

There was considerable controversy about the judging process last year. Any plans to make changes?

The nominations come from the judges, who develop a consensus about what criteria they are going to use. Sometimes, they come out with five individual really good books and sometimes a package of five. All the books last year were good books, and the accusations were over the top. Still, there's a lot of strong feeling in the literary business, and it comes out when this sort of decision is made. In the past, I've run into similar problems when doing Latino literature with the idea of canon-building, e.g., The Latino Reader; there were all these accusations before people even saw what we were going to do. Our idea was that the canon is a constantly shifting thing, and the same is true of literary awards. A whole new group of judges and a whole new group of books will come up next year.

Barbara Hoffert is Editor, LJ Book Review