Category: publishing

Stephen Burt “is 41, a professor of English at Harvard, heir to the intellectual mantle long held by giants like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. He is also an avid science-fiction fan, the founder of a short-lived indie-pop zine, an authority on women’s basketball, the husband of Jessie Bennett, with whom he has two sons, and an unabashed cross-dresser.”

“The unusual (some might say defensive) marketing strategy is a reminder of just how much is at stake for Rowling, creator of the biggest franchise in the history of children’s literature. Worth £560 million, there is no financial imperative for her to keep on writing never mind experiment with a new genre. She must know the omens are not good.”

“This literary detective story began in the summer of 2009, when Jean-Christophe Cloutier, a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature, was working as an intern in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia. He was going through more than 50 boxes of materials belonging to Samuel Roth, a kind of literary pariah who died in 1974.” And voilà! A new book by Claude McKay.

“I decided not to write another proper book after Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere [her superb 2001 evocation of the Adriatic city] because it was the book in which I think I found my true voice, and I don’t think I’ll ever write a better one.” But she continues to work on a volume titled Allegorisings, to be published after her death.

“Officially, The Long Lost Friend is a grimoire, a book of magic … [and it] may well be the most influential and, at one time, most well known grimoire to have originated in the New World. … [Yet c]alling The Long Lost Friend a book of magic is misleading to the modern mind.”

“For consumers, this means a few bucks off their next HarperCollins e-book. And for Amazon, this means the beginning of at least two years when it will be setting the prices of many more e-books than it could in the past.”

“Eight squatters have moved into a north London library and started lending out books again.”

In an age when many of us email, message, tweet, comment, like, pin, reblog, and update more than we talk, just why is it that the books and ebooks on the shelves of Amazon are still dominated by “spoken” dialogue?

“On the one hand, you have the idea of crowdsourcing: put enough humans in a room and they’ll eventually produce something like Wikipedia. The problem is, they will also produce something like those tabloids you see in the checkout line at the grocery store.”

“After enduring weeks of unflattering attention over the firing of its editor, The Oxford American has hired a successor: Roger D. Hodge, … who was the editor of Harper’s magazine from 2006 to 2010.” Marc Smirnoff, … the literary journal’s founding editor, was fired in July in a sexual harassment scandal.