Category: publishing

“Edwin Morgan was Scotland’s greatest living poet and the natural choice in 2004 to become the country’s first makar – its national poet laureate. In fact, the role was created for him. Finding a successor, though, is proving a little more controversial. More than three months after Morgan’s death, confusion surrounds the post and who should fill it, leaving many in the arts community perplexed.”

“I am basing these judgments on the English edition, but, if this text was the product of extensive editing, what must the unedited version have looked like?”

“The trade in heaving bosoms is the ‘fastest-growing segment of the e-reading market’, mainly, it seems, because the e-reader is the electronic equivalent of the brown paper wrapper: digital equals discreet.”

“Sustained exposure to the Internet is changing the way many readers process the written word. Texts are shorter and more flagrantly interconnected, with all kinds of secret passageways running into and out of one another. This has already changed the way we produce, read, share and digest our writing. Inevitably, it will also redefine what it means to practice book criticism.”

“The Kindle, which can store 3,500 e-books, we are told, is the new home library, vaporizing tons of paper. And why should anyone mourn — except for those who go on about the beautiful tactility of ink and paper and who seem peculiarly attached to the book as a physical object?”

“At a garage studio in Eagle Rock, Lisa Pearson is publishing books with the skill of a craftsman, framing the printed word as a work of art.”

“When I began annotating it, several years ago, I planned to go all the way through the thing, with the intention of figuring out, once and for all, what had gone wrong with it. I hoped that the experience might be useful not only for me but for millions of other failure enthusiasts and fans of ruination all around the world.”

“What if Gregor Samsa woke up to find he was not a cockroach – not ‘horrible vermin,’ as Franz Kafka wrote in The Metamorphosis, but a super-cute kitten? He will, in The Meowmorphosis, coming in May 2011 from Quirk Books.”

“Since the genre emerged, this has been the defining stance of Holocaust literature – that a work’s verisimilitude, or its truth-value, far outweighs its literary merit. The memoir, the first-person unembellished account, has long been considered the apotheosis of the form. Or even, according to some, the only acceptable form.”

“The end of subsidies and a focus on ‘impact’-led research may force literary criticism to reconnect with the public imagination.”