“Leaving aside its immediate aim of making the reader laugh, parody – literary parody especially – has an infinitely wider remit. … [It] is ultimately a form of literary criticism, where the judgments are arrived at by amplifying a writer’s stylistic idiosyncrasies to the point where they collapse in a wounded heap.”
Category: publishing
2012 Booker Shortlist Released
“Back in July, the Booker judges announced a wide-ranging and defiantly highbrow longlist that wasn’t afraid to ignore big names. Now we have a shortlist that, at a time of seismic change in the industry, rewards tiny publishers running on enthusiasm and strong coffee alone, and, true to form, only two well-known authors remain.”
Philip Roth Blasts Wikipedia For Failing To Correct Error
“Roth tried to tell Wikipedia about an error in the entry for his novel The Human Stain, published in 2000. But the site’s administrators initially refused to amend the entry, saying they required a second source.”
How To Fix The ‘Children Embarrassed To Read’ Problem
Kids need time, space, supportive adults, and free books in order to succeed – and oh, hey, U.K.? You’re going backward in almost all of those areas.
Attached – Psychologically – To The Gadget
“The new e-reader is not like the old one. It doesn’t have the scars of the old one – the coffee stain on the corner, the crack in the casing where I fell off my bike – and I have yet to rim it with gaffer tape to cover the logo of the Large Corporation.”
Creating The Digital Environment For A New (TV-Friendly) DIckens
Novels in the new Kindle Serials arena aren’t just cliffhanger-heavy e-books: “Authors will be able to interact with audiences as they write. They’ll read the reaction to their first segment while they’re writing their ending. They can use reactions to season one while they’re starting season two.”
Why Reader Reviews Matter
“The reader review – like Twitter, like Facebook – offers us the opportunity to parade our ignorance, to be uncritically fannish, or malicious without personal risk: but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Shocking UK Child Literacy Report
“The attention-grabbing headlines of today’s National Literacy Trust report make for dismal reading: 17% of youngsters would be embarrassed if their friends saw them reading.”
US Federal Judge Approves Settlement In E-Book Price Fixing Case
“Among other things, the agreement requires the publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster – to abandon the pricing system that they had conceived with Apple before it released its iPad tablet in 2010. The change is supposed to come within the next week.” Apple and two other publishers reject the settlement and will go to trial.
Emma Thompson Writes An (Authorized) Sequel To Potter’s Peter Rabbit
“If Frederick Warne [the publisher of the Peter Rabbit stories] had sent some official letter I would have said don’t be ridiculous, I can’t think of anything I want to do less than step into the footsteps of a genius like Potter.” But Warne sent the actress/screenwriter a package containing a half-eaten radish leaf and a letter from Peter Rabbit himself instead. She tumbled for it.