Category: publishing

“Almost anyone I know who owns a Kindle or similar digital device is over 40, and because they’re over 40, the same kids who begat Napster and file-sharing of rock ’n’ roll will run as far from the phenomenon as possible.”

“As a young Kenyan, I often find that the question of Kenyan identity is being hotly debated in bars, around dining tables and online. I see a real hunger in our generation to forge a new identity for ourselves – to redefine what it means to be be Kenyan. We are tired of the ignorant view that associataes Kenya only with wildlife, starving children and traditional dances.”

A ranking of the US’s creative writing programmes by the magazine Poets & Writers has infuriated a group of 190 authors and teachers, who slammed the results as “bad: methodologically specious in the extreme and quite misleading”.

“Writers from the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada are suing the universities, claiming they obtained unauthorised scans of an estimated seven million copyright-protected books from the internet giant Google.”

At the launch for It’s a Man’s World – the final title in a three-book deal with Avon, the women’s-fiction imprint of HarperCollins – Polly Courtney announced that she was breaking with the publisher for marketing her books as chick-lit, with “condescending and fluffy” covers.

“Every crossword in the Times is a collaboration between the puzzle-maker and the puzzle editor. On average, about half the clues are mine. I may edit as few as five or ten percent of the clues, or as many as 95 percent for someone who does a great puzzle but not great clues.”

Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown, established young-adult authors who have co-written a book titled Stranger, say that an “agent from a major agency… offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.”

Thanks to a Florentine bookseller in 1417, the seminal ancient Latin text on Epicureanism – a philosophy that surprisingly resembles modern secular humanism – was rediscovered and circulated among the Italian intelligentsia. This text’s ideas arguably made the entire scientific revolution conceivable.

“Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered.” Now Cairo’s literary éminences grises find themselves in a new world, pleasantly shocked by the younger generations’ courage and creativity.

“The pairing is the first in a what [HarperCollins] has dubbed a ‘major’ new series, in which it will team modern authors with Austen’s six novels, asking them to reimagine the books in a contemporary setting.”