Category: publishing

“A beloved city schoolteacher has been suspended by the Department of Education after giving his 11th-grade students a copy of a graphic short story about masturbation written by ‘Fight Club’ author Chuck Palahniuk.”

“So the argument goes: in going big, Waterstone’s lost its soul. It gains credence if you consider what is happening in the US” — the discount wars, that is. Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books, says: “Waterstone’s has really already done to British bookselling just the kind of things that we’re seeing in the US.”

“The Original of Laura can’t escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man’s stained cravat…. It would be ridiculous, of course, to blame the deceased for the estate sale.” Nabokov is a victim here.

“For the first time in at least a quarter century, the New York Public Library has unveiled a new logo, this one designed to work both online and in print. Consisting of a profile of a lion inside a circle … it uses bold, simple lines that evoke the style of stained-glass windows, woodcuts, or old printers’ marks.”

“According to one participant, the aim of the meetings, which culminated in a dinner Thursday evening, was for Amazon to ‘explain itself’ to the agent community,” and particularly to persuade the group of prominent New York agents that the company is “not trying to destroy publishing as we know it.”

“If I look outside my window,” the school’s headmaster says, “and I see my student reading Chaucer under a tree, it is utterly immaterial to me whether they’re doing so by way of a Kindle or by way of a paperback.” But critics, such as the president of the American Library Association, say that “the issue here is how far [the school] went.”

“Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the ‘female’ poem?”

Ben Shephard said that Andrew Motion’s poem An Equal Voice, a stitching together of the voices of several generations of shellshocked soldiers which was published in the Guardian on Saturday, draws heavily from his history of medical psychiatry A War of Nerves.

“Britain’s reputation for ‘libel tourism’ is driving American and foreign publishers to consider abandoning the sale of newspaper and magazines in Britain and may lead to them blocking access to websites, MPs have been warned.”

“Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs.” In response, one of those in-house editors took a red pen to the internal memo making said announcement.