Category: publishing

The editor of Poetry magazine acknowledges that Taylor is an obscure choice: “Until the excellent selected poems, Captive Voices, was published by LSU Press last year, virtually all of Taylor’s work was out of print. Her slow production (six books in 50 years), dislike of poetry readings…, and unfashionable fidelity to narrative and clarity haven’t helped matters.”

“[W]hile the independent books sector in the UK has indeed been beset by bad news – independent bookshops closed at the rate of two a week in 2009, according to the Booksellers Association – the radical bookshops that have survived are witnessing a revival of interest, and are guardedly optimistic about their futures.”

Brick-and-mortar bookstores stake their “future not just on dead-tree books but on our need for community, for having real contact in addition to the virtual kind. … In our revved up, plugged-in world, having the chance to look someone squarely in the eye and share ideas may be the most bankable commodity of all.”

“It’s the right thing to do, and it’s priceless PR. Companies always tell us they need an educated workforce. They’re right, and much of that workforce is created in the petri dish of our libraries.”

Paul Harding’s “Tinkers got great reviews but is published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small, 3-year-old, non-profit publisher affiliated with New York University’s School of Medicine. … The last time a small publisher won the fiction Pulitzer was in 1981, for John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, released by Louisiana University Press.”

Armantrout, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2006 while she was writing her prize-winning book, “said she ‘actually was expecting to die during the second half of the book’ but she also found the act of writing consoled her.”

Peter Plagens: “NNR is based on the scientifically established dietary principle of consuming piles of non-nutritive fiber, so that the stuff can speed through your system like thousands (or tens of thousands, or millions, or whatever–I’m not too good at organic chemistry) of whisk brooms and keep your pipes slick and clean for the processing of healthful food.”

“Since 1960, the PEN Writers in Prison Committee has been campaigning for writers who have been threatened, suppressed or imprisoned for their work. The most famous include Wole Soyinka, Vaclav Havel and Salman Rushdie, who have all had to weigh their words in fear.”

“The book was found by librarians at the National Trust’s Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, where Kipling’s eldest daughter, Elsie, lived. The author wrote the inscription to his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six, said Trust officials.”

“7. The novel Primary Colors, following the presidential campaign of one Jack Stanton, became notorious for its clear inspiration from the real career of Bill Clinton. It was first published under the excitingly cloak-and-dagger byline ‘Anonymous’. Can you name the actual writer?”