Category: publishing

“Spark, who won armfuls of literary awards during her lifetime but who the Booker always eluded, is shortlisted for her story of a bored accountant whose search for adventure and sex on holiday becomes a journey to self-destruction. The Scottish novelist, biographer, poet and playwright is one of four women” on the six-author list.

Quinn “Dombrowski has come across [Regenstein Library] graffiti written in Arabic (‘a lot of it, actually’), Chinese (‘a reasonable amount’), German, Turkish, Greek, Russian and Serbian.” There are also “the graffiti she has found scrawled in dead languages; the graffiti that use the letters of multiple dead languages; and the graffiti scrawled in hieroglyphics.”

Laura Miller: “Because the competition itself is essentially meaningless, ToB is a Trojan horse. Under the guise of a sports conceit, it encourages people to read outside their comfort zones and reflect on the often knee-jerk judgments they make about books they’ve never even cracked open.”

“A wave of early retirements in the Los Angeles library department is likely to lead to Sunday closures at nine of the city’s largest libraries and shorter hours at more than 60 branches as early as mid-April. The plan, which comes up for a vote before the Board of Library Commissioners on Thursday, is just the latest sign of the city’s difficult financial position.”

“Canadian author Margaret Atwood and lndian-Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh have been awarded the Dan David Prize and will share the $1 million US award. The prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation out of Tel Aviv University and ‘recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms’.”

“Most great novelists have been brilliant at comedy as well as tragedy. And this is no less true of Jane Austen and George Eliot than it is of Tolstoy and Dickens. Recently, however, there does seem to have been a movement away from comedy in fiction, a growing feeling that, in order to be ‘serious’, novels have to be dark in tone. And, arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial ‘chicklit’ and more serious, ‘literary’ work.”

“The Perseus and Workman agreements come as Amazon.com, the largest e-book seller in the United States and the maker of the Kindle e-reader, is pressuring publishers that have not yet signed deals with Apple to refrain from doing so. With Apple’s iPad coming on the scene, Amazon is fighting to keep as much of its market lead as possible.”

“Black authors are part of the broader society’s struggles with the legacy of discrimination and exclusion, [writers and editors] said, and often need a more strategic approach to getting their work promoted, reviewed and sold. … But some in the book world worry that conference attendees end up talking mostly to themselves.”

After the beloved Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore chain closed, co-op “organizers raised money from local residents and also secured a low-interest, $35,000 loan from the village” to open in a former Schwartz location. They said that “the economy, a change in the public’s book-buying habits and strong competition from online booksellers” prevented success.

On its website, it “warned members about letters that are being sent to authors and agents by two major publishers in an effort to amend contracts regarding e-book rights. According to the post, the letters are going to authors who don’t have a stated e-book royalty rate in their contracts, or who have never granted e-book rights to their publisher.”