Category: publishing

The Aleppo Codex, a thousand-year-old manuscript that is considered the most authoritative text of the Hebrew scriptures, had an odd, murky, clandestine journey from its longtime Syrian home to the Israel Museum. But along the way (and probably after it arrived in Israel), about 200 pages – 40% of the total – went missing.

James Kelman: “Obviously as a writer you have to reflect on why your work is provoking such hostility, because all you want to do is write your stories as best you can. You’re forced to reflect on, why is my work so upsetting for people? The agenda behind it is clear. They don’t want to see these people in literature. These areas of human experience [I write about] should not appear in public; we don’t want to know. We know that people are in the street, that they have no money and are maybe begging, but we don’t want to see them in literature. They should be swept under the carpet.”

“The collection includes a 1538 edition of letters by Roman philosopher Cicero and an 1827 illustrated 
edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost – one of only 50 copies.”

“For some writers, a completed book is a discrete, inviolable object. For others, the urge to reread their work with the proverbial red pen is too strong. The prose needs to be trimmed here; a transition snags there. Subsequent iterations can offer a different resolution or style.”

“If the internet is a medium of memory, what does it mean to forget a book? One of the advantages of ebooks might in fact be that they are easier to move on from, to delete, to forget, preventing us from getting bogged down in bad books and past selves.”

Kepler Books in Menlo Park, Calif., may be dying, or have died and already been saved once – but how exactly can the community come together to fix the problems of indie bookstores in ways that are “innovative” while also pleasing traditionalists? The first of a three-part series.

The second part of the series, in which 80 volunteers try to figure out how to hold off, or deal with, or something, Amazon.

The conclusion of the three-day saga.

Author Colson Whitehead: “Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, ‘Only you understand me.’ Your ideal subject should be like a stalker with limitless resources, living off the inheritance he received after the suspiciously sudden death of his father. He’s in your apartment pawing your stuff when you’re not around, using your toothbrush and cutting out all the really good synonyms from the thesaurus.”

“A new sponsor for the Orange Prize is set to be announced in September, after 18 companies expressed an interest in backing the women’s literature prize.”