Category: publishing

“This complex awareness of sex and emotion is what makes Shakespeare so perennially riveting: Wells studies his increasingly subtle and multifarious treatment of it through the plays, from the exuberance and freshness of Love’s Labours Lost, through the ecstasies and agonies of Antony and Cleopatra…”

“In our era, when word-blending (both commercial and recreational) is everywhere, this objection may sound quaint. Who cares where the parts of octomom, cybersquat, or Coolatta come from, or whether their ancestry is harmonious?”

“Lovers of literature have been meeting in the cafe at the Hotel Castelar in the centre of the Argentine capital for decades. Great writers of the Spanish-speaking world, among them Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Julio Cortazar, visited here. The cafe has now been chosen with 14 others, all connected with what is considered the richest period in Argentine literature, for a new city government scheme to promote reading.”

The library used to have a lot of trouble recruiting people to do the tedious, repetitive work of sorting the countless books that get sent from one branch to another. Now the NYPL has an automated conveyor, nearly 2,000 feet long, that scans a bar code on each book and sorts it. “It’s sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet.”

Andrew McGahan: “Certainly one thing that bothers me about most such stories is that they tend to be about one or two heroic individuals’ victory over the natural disaster. … Why, I’ve often wondered, can’t natural disasters be the main characters in their own right? Why can’t they be the heroes for a change, rather than the bad guys?”

“The bookmaker William Hill installed Wolf Hall as the 2-1 favourite, just as it did after an extraordinary flurry of bets on the novel followed the Booker nominations last year. The smart money, however, should perhaps go elsewhere.”

At Beirut 39, a just-concluded festival exploring the work of 39 young authors who work in Arabic, literary types from the Middle East and beyond considered such issues as repression and freedom of various sorts (political, sexual, etc.), the weight of both tradition and ’60s/’70s nationalist ideology, and the difficulties of using a classical written language to depict lives lived in dialect.

In the 18th-century lab of Joseph Priestley, “animals didn’t last long,” so the chemist’s “lab assistant, a young woman named Anna Barbauld, decided that Priestley should give his lab animals a little more respect.” She wrote “a protest poem” and “called it ‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr. Priestley, Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night.'”

“Whenever a character serves as an improved or idealized version of his or her author, as a vehicle for the author’s fantasies of power, allure, virtue or accomplishment rather than as an integral part of the story, that character is a Mary Sue.” And what do all Mary Sues have in common? “They irritate readers.”

“The university announced that so far there had been three nominations for the job: Geoffrey Hill, Paula Claire and Seán Haldane. This year’s election is a re-run after a debacle last year, when first Derek Walcott pulled out over sexual harassment allegations, and then Ruth Padel withdrew,” having “told journalists about the accusations.”