Category: publishing

“Hula hoops hung from tree branches are the goals; the brooms are standard straw versions. The red and blue balls (bludgers and quaffles) are from the toy aisle. And the most creative modification of all: The snitch is a distance runner clad in a yellow shirt, gold leggings and a sweatband.”

“‘I thought it might be oh-so hip / to win me a professorship, / and so I thought I’d write this note / to woo, to wow, to win your vote,’ writes Robert P Lacey, a medic who says if he were to be voted in by Oxford graduates, he’d write a poem a week and post it online, and also ‘form another, smallish prize / for poetry that please my eyes’.”

“Wallace Stegner thought the ‘Great Mormon Novel’ would be written by someone who grew up in the church, left, then made it ‘part way’ back to the fold. What’s more, the very fact of a great Mormon writer might make plain to those who doubt it that one can be intellectually serious and Mormon at the same time.”

“It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.”

“The astonishing thing about political memoirs is that we keep buying them. Just as governments, however bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the outset, inevitably let us down, so politicians’ autobiographies generally turn out to be sensationally disappointing.”

“Despite being treated with contempt over the centuries, these narratives served not only to amaze and appall children but to teach them coded lessons about the realities of life.”

“Nothing is downloadable — instead a digital copy of the book pops up with an image that resembles a page. The entire book — and the entire collection — is searchable for researchers looking into subjects such as Emily Carr or Simon Fraser.”

Will the “real” Raymond Carver please stand up?

“An Egyptian author who last year won the Arabic equivalent of the Man Booker prize could be facing a five-year jail term after he was accused of insulting Christianity in his prize-winning novel. Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel (Beelzebub) is set in fifth-century Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria, and looks at the turbulent period following the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity.”

“The winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel. The French novelist – and now film director – shares the £10,000 award with translator John Cullen for the English edition of his work.”