Category: publishing

“An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv.”

In Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ring-Bearer, “the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor … Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as ‘that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic’.”

Kirill Yeskov: “I wrote The Last Ring-Bearer … strictly for my own enjoyment and that of my friends; … It is meant for skeptics and agnostics brought up on Hemingway and brothers Strugatzky, … What’s important is that while the world of a sequel is a reproduction that adds absolutely nothing to the original, the worlds of the canonical and the apocryphal works can ideally make a ‘stereoscopic pair’ that adds ‘depth’ to the former.”

“On the face of it, you might think that this relatively new, rapidly developing art form would be exciting and fertile territory for authors. Yet while writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler and PG Wodehouse headed for California when Hollywood was at a similar stage in its development, it’s hard to imagine any big names in contemporary fiction getting involved in computers.”

“‘The Doll,’ billed as ‘a dark story of obsession and jealousy’, is the peculiar tale of a man who becomes infatuated with a woman he meets at a party. He visits her home only to discover the real object of her affection: a life-size, mechanical male doll.”

“The lack of forwarding addresses didn’t stop a group of acclaimed writers and poets from penning fan letters to their deceased literary heroes. Thirteen such missives fill the very first pages of the very first issue of The New Guard,” a new literary journal.

Can you teach writing? Americans think you can, broadly speaking. They are happy to attempt a definition of good writing. In the UK, we are a bit more sceptical

“The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately elevating its library to the third largest repository of books belonging to Jefferson after the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia.”

Inspired by Anthony Tommasini’s famous/notorious project in The New York Times to select the ten greatest composers in Western classical music history, poet and cultural critic Dean Rader will “spend the next two weeks taking suggestions, lists, nominations, and justifications for the ten greatest poets.”

“Like many readers, Mark Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.”