“Don’t tread too hard on the heels of the original. Take the original text as a stable thing — and have serious fun with it. Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but something more ambitious than imitation is far more honoring.”
Category: publishing
Champion Of Print Upsets Balance Of Literary Universe By Writing For iPad
“Devotees of the old-fashioned printed book who are distressed by the onrushing digital future — and there are more of them out there than you might think — cherish William H. Gass’s 1999 essay, ‘A Defense of the Book.'” Now Gass has produced a piece that’s only available on the iPad. What the living hell?
Yes, Ulysses Was More Than A Tweet
Paulo Coelho told a newspaper that Ulysses was all style, no content – and caused “great harm” to literature. Ali Smith takes him on, in stylistic (and content-rich) spades.
Bookstores That Serve An Untraditional (Art) Function
“They tend to be on the small side, and some keep irregular hours. But they can be as visually sumptuous as any traditional gallery. And they are democratic places, where the art can be (occasionally, carefully) handled and where someone with means as meager as mine can afford to build a little collection.”
(Some) Music Magazine Sales Dropping Off A Cliff
How long can music magazines in Britain last? The last six months make the outlook grim for some of the biggest names in the industry.
Passing The Torch To New, Young Book Dealers
Larry McMurtry on the Last Book Sale: “Mainly I was irritated to discover that I still had 30,000 novels to sell. Still, I had seeded the clouds and caused some freshets to sprinkle on the American book trade.”
The 19th Century’s Most Influential Novelists (According To Google PageRank)
“[A]ccording to a new method of analysing texts using a customised version of Google’s PageRank algorithm … the era’s most influential authors [writing in English] are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.”
Forget Your Shrink! Try Bibliotherapy!
Alain de Botton’s School of Life in London has a “bibliotherapy” program that “matches individuals … with a list of books hand-selected to help them through tough times. You get your reading list after an initial consultation with a bibliotherapist in which you discuss your life, your reading history, and your problems.”
A Rousing Defense Of Critics
“The sad truth about the book world is that it doesn’t need more yes-saying novelists and certainly no more yes-saying critics. We are drowning in them. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.”
What Pronouns Say About The Progress Of Women
“Using the Google Books database, the researchers examined the ratio of male pronouns (he, him, his, himself) to female ones (she, her, hers, herself) in the texts of 1.2 million books published in the U.S. between 1900 and 2008.”