Category: publishing

Authors including Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut are among those to have faced recent bans in American schools

The Underworld author has been named winner of the $25,000 (£16,000) prize, which goes to an American fiction writer whose work “possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature”.

A private company, “Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.”

“Police arrested them at the Grand Canyon for correcting the grammar on an official sign. The judge imposed a fine of $3,000 and ordered them not to speak publicly about fixing typos for a full year.”

“With backing from the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi, National Geographic Al Arabiya aims to reach readers across 15 countries from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. It will contain translated articles from the 122-year-old U.S. edition and original pieces tailored to the region.”

The e-reader app for Android devices, which updates itself automatically, divides the entire PG catalogue by category and includes a funcion for book-sharing.

The legal struggle reflects “the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament [by rescuing and publishing the author’s works instead of burning them]: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?”

Lesley McDowell: “I can’t think of another art form where the ‘practitioner’ and the critic overlap like this. … [Ironically, few] critics have anything to gain by penning a bad review. … Writers, on the other hand, have everything to gain, and that’s when the hybrid crossover becomes a problem.”

Though the paperback-original format has (in the US) usually been the province of popular genre fiction, publishers are finding it “an increasingly attractive option – perhaps the only option – for young authors with no track record, midcareer authors with a challenging track record and international authors being published for the first time in the U.S.”

A 1708 anthology includes a sexually frank little rhyme titled as “An Extempore Upon a Faggot, by Milton.” (“Faggot” meaning a stick of kindling; the poem is about aroused women.) Did the high-minded author of Paradise Lost, a minister in Cromwell’s government no less, produce such smut? Well, maybe …