“Before it was made into a hit West End play, before it was bound for Broadway, before it was set to be Steven Spielberg’s next big movie, War Horse was a slim, powerful children’s book … Published in 1982, the book was a ‘huge nonevent’ at the time, according to its author, Michael Morpurgo … ‘If sales ever reached 1,500 copies a year, I would be surprised’.”
Category: publishing
Humiliation Via Publishing Deadline: Conde Nast Traveler Top April Destination Is –
Libya. “In its April issue, [the magazine] named Libya one of the ’15 best places to see right now,’ reasoning that the ‘recent lifting of visa restrictions against Americans means that a door long shut is open again.’ The door was open on February 15 when the magazine went to press.”
Bloom Beatdown! Ron Rosenbaum Says Joyce’s Ulysses Is Wildly Overrated
“Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they’ve wasted reading it.”
Are You One Of Those Who Are Mad The OED Went OMG?
“These folks have not been paying attention. The OED has never been a “defender of the King’s (or Queen’s, or anyone’s) English.” Since its launch in the 1880s, its aim has been to record the histories and meanings of English words, whether slangy or elegant, dialectal or archaic, refined or rude.”
Why Should We Read Poetry? David Orr: Maybe We Shouldn’t
“I don’t know that people ought to bother. I think that poetry is one of those choices you make in life that’s … it’s not really susceptible to reasoning or arguments.”
A First: Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Sells A Million Digital Copies
The Stieg Larsson trilogy is selling at a clip of more than 500,000 copies a month in all formats. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which went on sale in the United States in September 2008, has sold more than 300,000 copies in hardcover.
In The Digital Age, Literary Journals Are Thriving
“Literary journals — a long-tail publishing phenomenon before the Internet made other niche offerings accessible — are thriving.”
Working The Word Of Mouth In A Socially Networked Age
“Word of mouth, a phrase that first crops up in Twelfth Night, is the holy grail of book publishing. Some of them will go to any lengths to stimulate the phenomenon. With the advent of social networking, word of mouth begins to enter the realm of science, at least in theory.”
When Everyone’s Writing Books There’s Some Serious Oversharing Going On
“The New Yorker named its list of the 20 best writers under the age of 40; of the 20, 16 graduated from an MFA program. Graduate school is no longer simply an accepted way to become a writer, it’s expected. As a critic, it’s getting hard to tell one writer from any other in his demographic, or see any more urgency in reading one book over any of the others.”
The Translator/The Translated – Like No One Else
Arthur Rimbaud and John Ashbery are radical practitioners who have divided critics and readers. Ashbery says of Rimbaud that he “resembles no one else”; the same could be said of Ashbery.