Category: publishing

“If you’ve been moved by the spirit of spring to get outside and read a book, you’re not alone. In photos recently uploaded to Flickr, people are reading in public in all kinds of places, all over the world.”

“Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.”

“A bookseller mourned the loss of his livelihood and more than 100,000 books as firefighters continued extinguishing a three-alarm fire that engulfed the Great Northwest Bookstore on Sunday. … In Portland’s dwindling rare and used book community, some say the store has long been a major player.”

“In this time of Twitter feeds and self-designed Snapfish albums and personal YouTube channels, it’s hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing. But it was very real. By contrast, to have a book legitimately produced by a publishing house in the 20th century was not just to have copies of your work bound between smart-looking covers. It was also metaphysical.”

“Without obvious fanfare, over the past 10 to 20 years a seismic change in publishing has occurred: Poetry has become our fastest-growing literary cottage industry, relying less on legions of editors in New York and elsewhere to shape literary tastes than on the energy and inventiveness of the poets themselves.”

“In July, a judge in Manhattan’s federal court blocked the US publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye by Swedish novelist Fredrik Colting. On Friday, an appeals court sent the case back to the federal court. But in its ruling, the appeals court made it clear it expected Salinger’s trust to prevail.”

“If ‘by a fluke’ he were elected, Horovitz said he would look to open discussions about poetry up to everything which is ‘broadly poetic’, from pop music to rap and rock’n’roll, showing the overlap between poetry and music as well as the visual arts….”

“The group has doled out awards to crime and mystery novelists since 1946, but few writers collect multiple awards in major categories during the course of their careers. … Only one winner in the debut novelist category has gone on to win best novel.”

“One single author declining to attend a weekend workshop will not make much of a dent in Arizona’s economic status; it is bound to more deeply affect her own. Which is perhaps what makes it notable.”

“Among the exhibit’s highlights will be hand-corrected literary drafts, rare first editions and photographs that offer glimpses of the writer’s personal life. Also on display will be Bukowski’s manual typewriter and annotated racing forms that reveal his system for betting.”