Category: publishing

“Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books and a whole series of ongoing attempts to reimagine the entire industry of writing and selling books. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity.”

“A computer scientist at Miami University has developed an augmented reality (AR) app which he hopes can facilitate and speed up the job of finding misplaced books and returning them to their rightful place.”

“What’s his secret? You can invoke a higher power for the astounding universality of his work, but that won’t do, especially for anti-Stratfordians. If I had to sell Shakespeare to a class of refuseniks I’d focus on three essentials that separate him from almost every other literary writer.”

“In a move that has turned scholarly heads, Paul Brodeur, a former investigative reporter for The New Yorker, who donated thousands of pages of his work to the library, is demanding that the papers be returned. He claims that an institution renowned for its careful stewardship of historical documents has badly mishandled his.”

“Until relatively recently a word wasn’t recognised as such until it was recorded in a proper dictionary. Now neologisms are pouring into the language like never before; our vocabulary is being reshaped by texters, tweeters, bloggers, marketeers and have-a-go contributors. Slang used to take decades to cross the Atlantic; now it takes minutes. “

“In effect the industry has called a halt to taking the money it makes from commercial writers and pumping it into underwriting their more literary cousins (while sneering at the mass market in the process). There is no question that this change in tack has already had a huge effect and to some degree a bad one.”

“Although novels routinely include a notice claiming that all their characters and incidents are fictional, non-fiction books carry no equivalent guarantees of accuracy. Unlike many newspaper or magazine articles, non-fiction is rarely checked for accuracy before publication – and when challenged, proponents often invoke more exalted definitions of truth.”

“DFW never lacked an eager audience, but he cautioned against playing to the expectations of a literary following. In death, he’s been transformed into the kind of writer that, in life, he would have found deeply suspicious. It is not at once clear how Wallace’s work has reached this level of esteem.”

“A novelist is not famous today unless internationally famous, not recognized unless recognized everywhere. Even the recognition extended to him in his home country is significantly increased if he is recognized abroad.”

“One of the hardest things about studying history, and especially the distant past, is trying to understand not just the speech, but also the mindset of the people one reads, and reads about. The people of the past are just as foreign to us in history as in historical fiction.”