Category: publishing

“A 1991 book by Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry has sparked an uproar in India after students at a Mumbai university burned copies and got the book removed from the syllabus.”

“What this year’s prize really shows is that prizes, like people, have a DNA of their own. The Nobel Prize in Literature would have been more illuminatingly named not after Dynamite Alfred but after his close friend, greatest hero, and ideal writer, Victor Hugo.”

“If comedy is indeed as rattling as I think it is, then you’re going to be very lucky to find three out of five people who won’t argue furiously about it. Whereas a beautifully written elegy set in Connemara is likely to disturb that panel a lot less.”

“Nobody uses large numbers of adjectives when they think, and I believe that writing which one cannot actually think can very easily look wrong on the page.”

“One radical difference between art and books is that books take time to read. You can see the greatest work of art in the world in an instant, but you cannot read a book instantly – nor would we want to.”

“Bloomsbury are to print 150,000 fresh copies of Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday. The book had sold 8,500 copies before it was announced as the winner, according to Nielsen BookScan.”

In what the AP’s reporter calls “the Great American Snub,” Jonathan Franzen’s much-discussed Freedom was not among the finalists for the 2010 fiction National Book Award. Among the titles that did make the cut are Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, and Just Kids, rock legend Patti Smith’s memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

The anglophone fiction candidates include only one title that was nominated for both of the country’s other two major book prizes (the Giller and the Writers’ Trust). Meanwhile, the GG finalists for non-fiction in English include three titles (out of five) that feature on the other two shortlists.

Laura Miller: “The most important factor in the Booker’s success is the diversity of its judges. This year’s panel included a dancer, a broadcaster and an author.” Meanwhile, the fiction Pulitzer winner is chosen by a board of journalism poo-bahs, and the National Book Award jurists are working writers, who “are rarely disinterested in their evaluations of their closest peers.”

“By killing the panel the newspapers fell into the very kind of timidity or conflict aversion that the cartoon had intended to expose. A mildly provocative image that would have slipped quickly into obscurity instead has won a second life, more powerful and ironic by its initial absence.”