Category: publishing

“Apple, the US technology giant behind the iPad and the iPhone, is understood to be looking at backing the prestigious award, which recognises novels written by women.”

“The winners for the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest” for worst opening sentence to a hypothetical novel “have been announced … The winner this year was Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, who came up with this beautiful dud: ‘As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, …'”

“The library’s former director, Marino Massimo De Caro, was arrested in May, accused of systematically despoiling the library he had been charged with keeping safe, stealing books and selling them on the open market or directly to collectors.”

W.H. Auden wrote that there are many writers “whose works are in better taste than their lives”. Yet good biography can show the frailty and even tastelessness of the author’s life and still return us to the power and originality of his or her thought.

“Fanfic is seen as the lowest point we’ve reached in the history of culture – it’s crass, sycophantic, celebrity-obsessed, naive, badly written, derivative, consumerist, unoriginal – anti-original. From this perspective it’s a disaster when a work of fanfic becomes the world’s number one bestseller and kickstarts a global trend.”

“Wholly unique and difficult to classify,” Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid “contains diverse political and philosophical themes, including Arab immigration to New York City, Arab-American relations, the politics of the Ottoman Empire, sectarianism and universal spirituality, and the experimental combination of Arabic and Western literary forms.”

“Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff.”

“Courtesy of a (literally) captive audience and a seemingly endless well of advertisers eager for travelers’ eyes and wallets, the in-flight magazine has proved remarkably resilient, undiminished even as the Internet and a poor economy have crushed lesser print products.”

LendInk, a site to help facilitate e-book loans, “has effectively been put out of business by a virtual lynch mob of authors claiming it breached their rights, even though what it was doing was perfectly legal.”

“Now 76, Mr. McMurtry, the country’s highest-profile book dealer, recently decided to whittle his [four-bookstore] enterprise down to one building, which will remain open with an inventory of about 150,000 books.”