Category: publishing

“The potted history of the serial novel is well-documented, dating back to The Thousand and One Nights” — and, of course, Dickens. “So does the serial novel in 2009 feel anachronistic, or thoroughly modern – a way of reading literature facilitated by technology?”

“Pittsburgh City Council yesterday gave its unanimous, initial approval to a transfer of $600,000 to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, a first step in avoiding, through next year, the closure of the Lawrenceville, Hazelwood, Beechview and West End branches and the merger of the Carrick and Knoxville branches.” But that’s only half of the needed funding.

For one thing, “buying any e-book reader now is a gamble. Every model has access to a different catalog of books, some of which are restricted by copy-protection schemes. This leads to a classic early-adopter format dilemma….”

Looking for built-in audiences TV is increasingly adapting literature for the small screen.

“Reading the future and shunning possible mishaps is mankind’s oldest dream. In 16th-century Iran and Turkey, … it inspired some of the most intriguing book paintings ever. These were prompted by a peculiar literary genre, the Fal-Nameh, or Book of Omens, which took off around the 1560s and lasted at least until the early 18th century.”

“Oxfam has attempted to patch up its differences with secondhand booksellers.” A trade group “had said that Oxfam’s voluntary staff, donated stock and business-rate reductions allowed it to undercut rivals, forcing some secondhand booksellers out of business and taking trade away from others.”

“In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O’Connor’s] collection ‘The Complete Stories’ was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest’s 60-year history.” The competition was formidable: collected stories of John Cheever, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as well as Ellison’s Invisible Man and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

“The Story Museum has existed online for the past four years, holding events across Oxfordshire and running storytelling pilots in schools, but [a £2.5 million] donation enables it to start constructing a permanent home in Oxford.”

“Roth can comfort himself with the fact that a roll call of literary fiction’s great and good, from Booker winner John Banville to acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz, Goncourt winner Jonathan Littell and Whitbread winner Paul Theroux,” are also in competition this year for the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award.

“Kim Bui-Burton, president of the California Library Assn., described conditions as ‘extraordinarily difficult.’ Never lavishly funded, libraries started to falter with last year’s credit and mortgage disasters. Now, she said, they are being battered by deep state and local cuts.”