Category: publishing

“From a pre-paywall readership of 20 million unique monthly users, to a base of 105,000 cumulative reader payments in the last four months, The Times has encouraged just 0.5 percent of its online audience at most to pay.”

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men “tells the story of Ayyan Mani, a middle-aged Dalit [the group once called ‘untouchables’] who works as an assistant to a brilliant Brahmin astronomer … Furious at his humble situation in life, Ayyan develops an outrageous story that his 10-year-old son is a mathematical genius – a lie which becomes increasingly elaborate and out of control.”

The novel, which tells the story of a child and his mother who live trapped in a locked room, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Donoghue takes home C$25,000 in award money, as does non-fiction winner James FitzGerald for What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest to Redeem the Past.

“An award for gay and lesbian literature will be included in the American Library Association’s annual announcement of children’s prizes, a list which features the prestigious and influential Caldecott and Newbery medals.” Says the ALA’s president, “Ours is a very inclusive profession and we represent a wide variety of viewpoints.”

The 83-year-old Nobel laureate, who was thought by many to have written his final work of long-form fiction, is “busy completing his latest novel, En agosto nos vemos” (“We’ll See Each Other in August”). He has just released a new volume of his collected speeches, titled I Didn’t Come to Give a Speech.

“There’s two sorts of problems. First of all, the media they are on, which could be tapes or old floppy disks, eight-inch floppy disks – haven’t seen a lot of those lately – deteriorate over time, and the other problem was that they become obsolete.”

“After decades in Beverly Hills and then San Francisco, the collection, from the estate of Ira and his wife, Leonore, will be moved next year to Washington, D.C. There, it will join another large archive of Gershwin memorabilia, music and documents at the Library of Congress, to which it has long been pledged.”

“For the first time, it can be revealed how the country’s most eminent writers leapt to the defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as the Government attempted to ban D.H. Lawrence’s infamous work.”

“It does seem odd that other people cannot speak their own language properly and so career (or careen as foolish folk say) like wildebeest into the crocodile-infested shallows of the latest wrong turning of the English language. This is of more than amateur interest.”

The new project at Longreads.com aims to gather the really good long-form journalism that magazines are producing and make it available in one place, ready for your iPad, Kindle or other reading device. The site even includes an estimate of how long a piece will take to read, so you can fit it into your commute.