Category: publishing

“Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship. And for both authors and readers, these changes may be unexpectedly salutary.” Just don’t expect Jeffrey Eugenides to agree.

“This has to be frightening to anybody in the illustrated book business. Bookstores are disappearing. Sales are moving to digital. We’ve had an iPad in the marketplace for almost two years. And we have as yet discovered no formula for success to convert a successful illustrated print book to a successful illustrated ebook.”

Farrar Straus & Giroux president Jonathan Galassi: “Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don’t think there’s a lot to worry about in this particular ‘problem’. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant? … Poetry has a vital place in society, whether it’s granted one or not.”

“Is there any comic-book character who hasn’t been to Tibet? Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Tintin, superheroes like Spy Smasher and the Green Lama – even hand-drawn U.S. sailors have battled in landlocked Tibet, lobbing grenades into Japanese tanks.”

Miral al-Tahawy was born and raised in a Bedouin village in Egypt, moved (against her family’s wishes) to Cairo and earned a Ph.D., and then came to New York. “The foreigner was the Orientalist,” she says. ‘He was there to watch us. The first time for me to live this role was in Brooklyn Heights. I was the foreigner and I watched them. I was the one doing the ethnography and I was the one drawing them.”

Armando Iannucci, no stranger to comedy himself, looks at Dickens’s own sharp, and sharply observed, humour.

“In early 2011, poets began setting their words to the sound of dubstep and electronica. Almost twelve months on, the signs are that poetronica is here to stay.”

“The first Norwegian translation of the Bible for 30 years topped the country’s book charts almost every week between its publication in October and the end of the year, selling almost 80,000 copies so far and hugely exceeding expectations.”

“An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”

“Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves” – in particular, books by local writers or of local or regional interest.