Category: publishing

Rick Gekoski: “I had a shocking impulse to shout out ‘Wait! Stop! You’ve read the wrong name!’ as Ms Weston stepped forward gracefully and modestly claimed her prize. I took a long slug of my glass of wine, clapped appreciatively, and began to calculate how long I had to stay after her speech, and whether it was right of me to have stopped smoking.”

“Annabel Lyon’s [widely-praised] The Golden Mean is the story of Alexander’s childhood, told through the eyes of his tutor Aristotle. … But apparently its jacket – featuring a naked man lying on the back of an equally naked white horse – is offensive to some,” and BC Ferries has refused to carry it.

Says the grande dame of British letters of the award for female novelists, “You couldn’t found a prize for male writers. The Orange prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter – which I don’t believe in. It’s honourable to believe that – there are fine critics and writers who do – but I don’t.”

“American Airlines’ magazine lists the 10 best pizza parlors in America. United Airlines has a spread headlined ‘3 Perfect Days: Amsterdam,’ … In the seat pocket in front of you on Safi [Airways]” – a start-up Afghan airline – “you will find an article on Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles.”

“What, when writing about foreign cultures, is true, and what can be considered accurate? Here, the idea of accuracy must mean something more than an adherence to the mere facts. It must mean giving, as far as possible, an accurate reflection of the conditions under which the facts appear.”

“Social mores surrounding the act of reading alone in public may be changing along with increased popularity. Suddenly, the lone, unapproachable reader at the corner table seems less alone. Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already plugged into a conversation somewhere.”

“People have been talking about “the death of the book” for more than a decade. But recent events suggest the end may be imminent for bound-paper books as we have known them for more than 500 years. Hardbound and paperback books may never totally disappear, but they could become scary scarce — like eight-track tapes, typewriters and wooden tennis rackets.”

“Last year, 10 of the 12 books longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize were written by women — even if, granted, the eventual winner was Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. Beyond that, four of the five Governor General’s Award finalists, including winner Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing, were by women.”

A study reports that “95 percent of US authors reviewed in the publication were white, and 87 percent were male. The pool of book reviewers tended to be even less diverse.”

“Many supporters of academic publishing had high hopes for the Rice project, which was launched in 2006 with the goal of merging the quality and rigor of scholarly peer review with the convenience and low cost of digital publishing. The demise of the project led to immediate speculation about whether the Rice experience suggested difficulties for the economic model or if other factors may have been decisive.”