Category: publishing

“Tangier may be a different place from the one that accommodated Bowles, William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and so many other giants of 20th-century literature, but there’s still a tang to the place that provides an exciting sense of what inspired them. … Besides, even in 1958 Paul Bowles wrote that, in Tangier, ‘there is nothing left to spoil’.”

Amanda Craig: “We have worked in the shadow of the Amis-McEwan-Barnes-Rushdie generation, and the recession of the 1980s, and by the time we published, usually in our mid-thirties, a second wave of younger talent had risen up and overtaken us.”

“I could be wrong, but I don’t think the publishing or reviewing community operates in the way Craig describes, either. In my experience, there is, of course, a predisposition to favour established names, but there are also (among reviewers) many experts in tall-poppy syndrome, knives poised, and (among publishers) editors on the urgent search for so-called ‘new voices’.”

Hyperbole blended with a little hypocrisy cut into the celebratory mood at the 61st annual National Book Award ceremony Nov. 17 in New York.

“The November special issue of Inspire, a slick new English-language Web magazine produced by Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, aims to do more than report the news. It wants to make news, by inspiring young American Muslims to kill their neighbors.” Inspire is “calculated to appeal to American Muslims who grew up on glossy magazines like Details and GQ. It is also notable for its collegiate sense of humor.”

“Penguin Group is set to sign a joint venture with an Egypt-based publisher on Wednesday to bring its Penguin Classics to Arabic-speaking countries … [The] deal will make many of the classic Western titles, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, easily obtainable in up-to-date Arabic translations for the first time.”

Ayelet Waldman: “A ‘bore-geous’ novel is one that is packed with gorgeous, finely wrought descriptions of places and people … Bore-geousness happens when you are writing beautifully but pointlessly.”

“Even if the writer has somehow never heard of an MFA program or set foot on a college campus, it doesn’t matter, because if she’s read any American fiction of the past 60 years, or met someone who did, she’s imbibed the general idea and aesthetic. We are all MFAs now.”

“Matute is regarded as one of Spain’s best post-Civil War writers and her work often centres on the conflict. The author is only the third woman to win the award since it was created in 1975.”

London-based expats Todd Smith and Evan Jones “are on a personal mission to change the way the world sees Canadian poetry – bluntly speaking, they want to combat the notion that it’s boring and second-rate.” And with their new anthology, they’re trying to do that “without including such well-known Canadian names as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.”