Category: publishing

“Publishers have been asked to submit their 2011 entries in both digital and physical form. Last year the judging panel read 138 books before choosing Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question, as the winner of the £50,000 prize.”

“The Nobel prize-winning Turkish novelist … has complained that the majority of human experience is being ignored because the literature that describes it is not written in English. And he has criticised the response of British and American literary critics to his work, saying they perceive him in narrow terms defined by his nationality.”

“When an anonymous pen-for-hire wrote a tell-all article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about his booming career writing papers for cheating undergraduate and graduate students, it caused a stir across college campuses. Now Bloomsbury USA has signed the writer … for a book about cheating in higher education.”

“Despite all the prizes and the publicity, there is a sense that poetry is losing its way; that it has not quite found the audience today that, surely, it deserves. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that poetry today never, or almost never, sells at all.”

“Toyo Shibata only started writing when she was 92; now, as she prepares to celebrate her 100th birthday, her poems are finding an eager audience in Japan … [Her] anthology, Kujikenaide [Don’t Lose Heart], has sold 1.5m copies since its publication, in late 2009.” (A poetry volume that sells 10,000 copies is considered successful in Japan.)

He was chosen from a shortlist of 10 authors including Seamus Heaney, who has won the award before.

“The adventures of a lesbian detective kept millions of Pakistanis enthralled for eight years. In weekly installments, its male writer brought to life in high Urdu and Farsi the voracious Bano, a wealthy Karachi-ite who solved crimes and trawled school buses for schoolgirls.” This week the Jaipur festival’s co-director stopped a planned reading (in English) from the series out of deference to the (presumed) “sensitivities of the audience.”

“Monday marked two years that 253 journalists and office staff were locked out of Quebec’s most popular French-language tabloid newspaper, the Journal de Montréal, and there is finally a glimmer of hope for an end to the standoff.”

“At the Jaipur Literature Festival, East meets West as it does at no other event in the book world. East and West immediately fall into heated debate about the role of the occupier in Afghanistan, and about why the most recognized South Asian writers are all expatriates from their homelands. Then West bums a smoke. East confesses to a mad crush on the writer U.S. writer Junot Diaz, who was just signing books in the courtyard.”

“While the number of independent bookstores has stabilized after years of decline, according to membership in their national trade association, the stores are still fighting some of the same forces that caused their ranks to diminish years ago. Amazon still rules online bookselling, while Barnes & Noble, the biggest of the book chains, is retooling itself for the digital age.”