Month: August 2000

The American Booksellers Association rolled out its new site to sell books from independent bookstores. “The ABA’s ‘save the indies’ plan (nearly half of such stores have disappeared since 1994 due to the rise of chain stores and online booksellers, the organization estimates) has found some adherents while others remain skeptical.” – Inside.com

— at age 91 on Monday. Accomplished novelist and revered editor at the “New Yorker” for 40 years, Maxwell honed the prose of some of this century’s finest American writers, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and Harold Brodkey among them. – CNN

• Writers are upset about Contentville, which went online July 5. The site offers “books, articles, TV transcripts and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95 each,” but “some publishers are shocked at Contentville’s chutzpa. The Village Voice says it licensed EBSCO to use content for educational and research purposes. ‘It’s outrageously unethical. Nobody ever dreamed of this. It’s just gross.'” – Feed

• — the new U.S. poet laureate. First published more than 70 years ago, Kunitz, now 95, has won almost every poetry award (including the Nobel in 1959 to the National Book Award in 1995), although he’s only published a handful of books. “I write poems only when I cannot escape them, when it is so urgent I will sacrifice everything else to do it.” A new Kunitz collection is due out next year. – NPR  [Real audio file]

Two years ago a husband/wife team published a version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in Latin. It was an unexpected hit. Now they’re back with “The Cat in the Hat.” “Of course, unless you’re fluent in the language of Cicero and Nero, it’s hard to judge the playfulness of such lines as: ‘At tunc quies est erepta!/ Tota domus est correpta/ Tum tumultu, tum fragore!’ In the original English version, those same lines, about the first appearance of the Cat, go this way: ‘And then something went bump!/ How that bump made us jump!/ We looked!’ ” – Chicago Tribune