Category: publishing

“The playful yet confusing stories [in Stein’s books for children], liable at any moment to end abruptly, change characters midstream, or pause for some unhelpful explanation, sound very much like the stories that young children tell. As an experimental writer, it turns out, Stein was performing some of the same experiments that we now know children perform as they learn to speak, to assemble narratives, and to understand the world.”

“Now that the Great Panic of 2000-2010, the world of print’s freak-out at the threat of digital, is subsiding, at least in the world of books, we can begin to discern the shape of the future and enumerate the potentially positive aspects of this historic paradigm shift.”

Through the late 20th century, “French fiction focused on creating literary forms and ‘literature for literature’s sake’ and avoided stories with the so-called nouveau roman (new novel) or honed in on the inner world of the writer. … [T]oday more French novelists are drawing inspiration from their social, economic and political surroundings in a new phenomenon observers are calling literature ‘of the real’.”

“One of the problems of the children’s book market is that adults buy books for children and so you don’t get direct feedback from sales,” says one marketing executive. So several Australian publishers are assembling groups of young people for a sort of consumer research.

“We asked five authors to describe where they most like to write to get their creative juices flowing. They want quiet. They want solitude. Often, they want a legal pad.”

An exhibition at the Folger Library surveys the book’s “material life over nearly four centuries: how it fared in the marketplace and in the hands of its owners; how copies were damaged and restored; how scholars have analyzed its text; and even how it has been stolen and recovered.”

“Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that ‘what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association’.”

“On one side, we had John McPhee against Nabokov. On the other, Martin Amis against David Foster Wallace.”

“Disgruntled poets channelled William Carlos Williams yesterday when they delivered a red wheelbarrow carrying members’ signatures to the Poetry Society, demanding its board of trustees explain what lies behind a recent spate of high-level departures.”

“[From] Alexander McCall Smith to Kathy Reichs, 26 bestselling crime writers have teamed up to create the multi-authored mystery No Rest for the Dead. Published later this week, the authors – who also include Raymond Khoury, RL Stine, Faye Kellerman, Tess Gerritsen and Jeffery Deaver – have taken it in turns to write the novel’s chapters.”