Category: publishing

“Do I have to say the obvious? I feel like I’m telling a child about Santa Claus.” Ron Rosenbaum is both mystified and monumentally irked that so many intelligent people can’t keep this fact in mind.

“The survey also found that in previous generations, parents who read bedtime stories did so more regularly than their modern counterparts. Only 13% of respondents read a story to their children every night, but 75% recall being read to every night when they were kids.”

There are half a dozen English editions of The Decameron available, and the same number of Anna Karenina plus two more about to appear. (And let’s not even start on The Iliad.) Why? There are several reasons, including that it can be a good financial bet.

“No. 1: They’re still readable when the Cloud goes down. No. 2: They make great kindling. … No. 3: Push comes to shove, they’re great insulating material. You could make a little igloo out of books if you really had to. I think of them as a form of carbon sequestration – all the CO2 is tied up in books.”

“‘The most important thing to be aware of,’ says Alex Donohue of the Ladbrokes betting house, ‘is critical reception.’ Reading a Booker nominee, in other words, won’t get you nearly as far as paying attention to the reactions of other people who do.”

“Libraries were places of silence with pockets of group work and activity. In the 21st century university, they are becoming places of learning activity with pockets of silence.”

“This is a shortlist that crosses continents, that joins countries and that spans centuries. These novels are all about the strange ways in which people are brought together and the painful ways in which they are held apart.”

The 87-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird “is dropping her big bucks lawsuit against her former agent Samuel Pinkus and others she’d charged had conned her out of the copyright to her novel, widely considered one of the greatest in American history.”

The two Booker Prize winners join authors Anne Tyler and Jeanette Winterson in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which the authors will create (in prose) updated versions of Shakespeare’s plays in honor of his 400th birthday.

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: “I didn’t know if we would ever find each other, honestly. She knew I existed. I don’t even think that she knew my first name. She just knew that she had older siblings that my father had another family before she came along.”