Category: publishing

“Against all the odds and expectations, it was the poets, like [Andrei] Voznesensky, who turned out to have had things right during the long and bitterly dark Cold War years, when many argued that accommodation to totalitarianism was the only realistic course.”

“There was a great fashion in the last century, and it’s still with us, of the unenjoyable novel. And these are the novels which win prizes, because the committee thinks, ‘Well it’s not at all enjoyable, and it isn’t funny, therefore it must be very serious.’ ”

“One implication of this emerging line of research is that each language offers a unique window on the world and, so, each time a language dies – as is occurring increasingly frequently – a unique perspective perishes with it. That goes some way to explaining why so many societies exert efforts to preserve their languages against the onslaught of globalisation.”

“The latest and greatest achievement of English is to have transcended the legacy of empire. Today its bounds are set so wide that it can truly be said to belong to the world. While its triumph continues, it is no longer coterminous with the triumph of the English-speaking peoples. Some commentators even suggest that it may now be happening at their expense.”

“Many people, regardless of age, are feeling nostalgic these days for book culture. It’s a sort of prenostalgia, really, because books are still here — but their days seem numbered. Or do they?”

“The findings suggest that certain kinds of books — on multiculturalism and the environment — dominate these reading selections. And the study, called “Beach Books,” questions whether the choices of colleges are too similar, too left-leaning and not sufficiently challenging.”

Samuel Pepys once “bought a copy of the second edition of the scientist Robert Boyle’s Origin of Formes, and charitably sent his old copy of the first edition to his brother, as if it were a pair of left-off shoes. To us, ‘first edition’ sounds like ‘diamond ring’, something inherently valuable. That is why Sotheby’s is getting excited at the prospect of auctioning 3,000 books from a secret collector in the autumn.”

Sportswriting, that’s what. “The Paris Review softball juggernaut marches on. The Vanity Fair team, who call themselves–no joke–the Veefers, put up a strong fight, but could find barely a chink in our defensive armor, and our bats warmed up in time to afford the Parisians a comfortable margin of victory.”

“The invitations to Margaret Atwood, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jonathan Safran Foer, Milan Kundera and others had already been scheduled to celebrate the nation’s book week. Book week it may be, but it is also a week that sees Israel facing international scrutiny over the deaths of nine activists attempting to bring aid to Gaza by boat.”

“It’s unclear how much of a danger digital self-publishing poses to the big publishers, who still own the industry’s big hits, whether e-book or print. Many big publishers dismiss self-published titles…. But some publishers say that online self-publishing and the entry of newcomers such as Amazon into the market could mark a sea change in publishing.”