Category: publishing

So what are the literary phenomena that have defined this first decade of the 21st Century?

“People in the humanities contend that they would be impaired in their research abilities. They want more space on the campus rather than going offsite and I’m sympathetic to that. We’re going to actively look for ways to create more space on the campus, but of course that’s going to cost money.”

“It’s really a serious belief of mine that it’s risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature … the contribution made down the ages. I don’t want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us,” said Chinua Achebe, who given the label by Nadine Gordimer.

“The wartime leader had a style that was too repetitive, according to the computer being tested for the online marking of school qualifications. It rated Churchill as below average in the equivalent of an A level English exam.”

“There goes Kingsolver, inserting Nicaraguan contras into ‘Animal Dreams,’ a father-daughter story about Alzheimer’s. There she goes again, talking about Native American tribal rights, smack dab in the middle of ‘Pigs in Heaven.’ … ‘I never quite know what people mean by political,’ says Kingsolver, 54.”

“Mr. MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man chronicles the emerging crisis of conscience in a worldly priest who has been assigned to keep a lid on church-related sex scandals that are destroying the lives of the faithful in rural Cape Breton.”

“Before 1914, of those who described war, painted it and wrote poetry about it, very few had seen battle themselves. Now a generation of the literary middle class had, and found it by turns mundane, draining and horrific.”

The collection “focuses on his war poetry with manuscripts of poems such as ‘The General’ and ‘Died of Wounds’ as well as photographs and letters.”

“The Federal Government’s decision to keep import restrictions on books will ‘kill bookshops’ as online retailers such as Amazon gain the upper hand, the former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Allan Fels, has warned.” Brick-and-mortar booksellers say 3,000 jobs are at risk.

“The National Federation of the Blind planned to announce Wednesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University won’t consider big rollouts of the electronic reading device unless Amazon makes it more accessible to visually impaired students.”