Category: publishing

“My prediction about books in the early years of the 21st century: readers, writers, and bibliophiles in general will look back on the cross-fertilisation of the digital world with the global recession, and marvel at the strange fruit that flourished in the paradise of texts.”

“When we say that we love a writer’s work,” Martin Amis recently opined, “we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it.” (He suggests as exceptions only Homer and Harper Lee.) Is Amis right?

“The Booksellers Association has called for an end to tax and business-rate concessions for charity bookshops, arguing that they represent unfair competition.”

American authors are up in arms about Amazon’s new Kindle lending library, accusing the online retailer of “boldly breaching its contracts” with publishers as it exercises its “brute economic power”.

“I have no interest in retail; I have no interest in opening a bookstore. But I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore.”

In bookstores from Santo Domingo to Santiago, a customer could find Salman Rushdie’s latest novel or the new biography of Steve Jobs. But she’d have a lot of trouble finding books by, say, Chilean authors even in neighboring Argentina, let alone Colombia or Mexico. The editor-in-chief of Random House Chile discusses the problem.

“deWitt struck book-prize gold once again this morning as his comic western The Sisters Brothers won the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.”

Stephen Mitchell, who recently published a new version of the epic, demonstrates how he went about rendering one five-line verse of Homer’s poetry into “an English that is rapid, direct and noble, as his Greek is.”

“I spent much of this weekend, as I often do this time of year, confining myself to writing and thinking about Rudyard Kipling. This may seem like a pretentious thing to be saying, but if you care about war and peace and justice and life and death, then he is an inescapable subject.”

“For centuries, people of all walks of life have carried around with them echoes of the King James Version. So to throw it out as the church hierarchy has done amounts to a savage act of deprivation … Sidelining the King James Version especially deprives our children and is therefore a notable case of child abuse.”