Category: publishing

After a quarter-century housed first at a high school and later in a Soho loft building, “[o]n Friday, Poets House opens its spacious new home in Battery Park City hard by the Hudson River … Glass walls surround the entryway – in which a Calder mobile floats – and enclose the second-floor exhibition space. … The staircase is wired for sound, so when people pass, a motion sensor might trigger a spoken line from a poet like Robert Frost.”

“An author of young adult fiction whose books have provoked bans and complaints in the US for tackling controversial topics such as teenage prostitution and drug addiction has written a poem that is being used to champion the cause of banned books across America.”

“The options are proliferating quickly for readers and the authors they love. While devices like the Kindle, the Apple iPhone and the Sony Reader get much of the attention, practically any electronic device capable of displaying a few lines of text can be adapted as a reader.”

“Why so many major books now? Publishers always make a push before the holiday season, but that doesn’t account for the sudden feast this year.”

“Ladbrokes has backed Oz at 4/1 to take the 10m Swedish Krona (£815,000) prize, ahead of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar at 5/1, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo at 6/1 and American novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth at 7/1.”

“So how does one select which moments and artifacts from North America’s last 500 years deserve inclusion? With a meeting.”

“Female authors of historical fiction dominate the long list of nominees for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize – a selection that will likely silence the grumbling that followed the release of last year’s long list, when only three of the 15 nominees were women.” This year, only two of the 12 are men.

“The British Fantasy Society has now apologised for the omission” of women from its volume of interviews with horror fiction authors. The society’s chair said it was “disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into.”

“[T]he mere phrase, the Algonquin Roundtable, has been misappropriated over the years” and “sort of lost its meaning.”

“Books are not so widely read without a reason. Surely future historians will look to Brown as an index of What We Were Really Thinking, and, turning the dense and loaded pages of his books, they may well ask, This they read for fun?”