Category: publishing

“After a four-month hiatus, and a media blackout during the long, wet summer, the literary award formerly known, from 1996 to 2012, as the Orange prize announced the restoration of its original title, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (WPF). It would be funded by a group of private benefactors led by Cherie Blair and bestselling writers Joanna Trollope and Elizabeth Buchan.”

“Forget ‘readability’; excellence this year will be defined through language and imagination. It has been, as Stothard says, ‘an exhilarating year for fiction.'”

“The Chinese people can happily let go of their literary Nobel complex–a deserving literary hero has been duly commended.”

“At $69, we thought the new Kindle eReader was cheap. … A German electronics company called Txtr has unveiled the Beagle, what is almost certainly the cheapest (if not the tiniest) E-Ink reader in the world. The Beagle weighs just 4.5 ounces; has a small 5-inch Electronic Ink screen; and costs just … 10 Euros, or about $13 U.S.”

“The report suggests one in three Canadians is a regular book buyer and purchases an average of 2.8 titles per month. While e-book sales are growing, print sales still dominate, with paperbacks representing an estimated 56.7 per cent of the market and hardcovers making up 23.6 per cent.”

“The genres have their own prizes, but the most prestigious of the awards remain the private reserve of literary fiction. Yet we live and read at a time when the lines between genre and literary fiction are being persistently rubbed away.”

“U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of New York dismissed an infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other writers’ guilds, saying the universities had a fair use defense.”

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

“While e-readers and multimedia may seem appealing, the idea of replacing an effective learning platform with a widely hyped but still unproven one is extremely dangerous.”

Alison Bechdel, Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen and others salute Matt Groening’s great print comic, recently discontinued after 35 years.