Category: publishing

“Big Idea books have been around for a long time; see The Communist Manifesto. But the Big Idea Book Club is a recent phenomenon. Its accidental founder and president in apparent perpetuity is Malcolm Gladwell. Its membership, like the membership of most powerful groups, is largely male.”

“Gandhi is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide. … The crux of the controversy seems to be the intersection of two subjects on which Indians have strong views: sexuality and Gandhi.”

“You’d think our literary culture is at a crisis point, and from here our nation will descend into illiteracy and intellectual decrepitude. Marjorie Garber, a professor of English at Harvard and author of several books about Shakespeare and literary studies, draws from hundreds of years of history to prove that literature always seems to be at a crisis point — and it always recovers.”

Wallace’s publisher “spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn’t a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace’s posthumous fame.”

“Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, ink-smudged fingers and corrective fluid. And unlike the typists of yore, these folks aren’t clacking away in solitude.”

“Organizers of the Montreal International Poetry Prize have enlisted former British poet laureate Andrew Motion to judge the inaugural edition of the Canadian-based competition.”

“What do we mean by literature today? Why study it? Is there a form of writing that is not literary?”

“The 13-strong shortlist for the Man Booker International prize has been announced. Limbering up in the race for the award, known in the publishing world as “the Olympics of literature”, are authors as diverse as Philip Roth, Philip Pullman, Anne Tyler and John le Carré .”

“Self-published author Jacqueline Howett’s online meltdown after a poor review quickly went viral, proving the internet has finally removed the line in the sand between reviewers and authors.”

“The furor was sparked by local media reports, based on early reviews out of the U.S. and U.K., some of which emphasized passages in the book suggesting Gandhi had an intimate relationship with a German man named Hermann Kallenbach.”