Category: publishing

“[Historical novelists] tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is.”

“The fundamental premise of The Lost Symbol is that Washington is a ‘mystical city,’ and it is this error that makes the book so maddening. … [A]nyone who has spent more than a Tourmobile ride in D.C. knows that what makes Washington interesting is its very smallness, the contrast between its grand architecture and the human machinations that take place within it.”

“Google Inc. and a group of authors and publishers are talking to the Justice Department about modifications” to the Google books settlement. The judge in the case “yesterday ordered Google and the other parties to the settlement to respond to an outpouring of viewpoints questioning the plan to create a digital book library.”

“I found that Jane Austen and I collaborated best when I used the monsters and other interpolations not to replace but to accentuate what was already there in Austen’s novel. She made Col. Brandon a bit too old for Marianne so she would have to struggle to see his goodness; all I did by giving him an octopus face was make her struggle a little harder.”

Stephen Elliott let anyone who wanted to read an advance copy of his memoir, “The Adderall Diaries,” “do so, provided they forwarded the book within a week to the next reader.” Hundreds responded, and publicity ensued — but was it worth the effort?

“The Lost Symbol was available for download via peer-to-peer sites including The Pirate Bay and Scribd.com on Wednesday morning. ‘Thank you so much! You just made my day. :)’ said one Scribd user, while another requested that the book file be sent to their email.”

“The site’s newly minted editor, Amy Hertz, a Penguin editor at large under their Dutton division, will have to balance the fortnightly magazine’s 5,000-word essays and thoughtful articles based on multiple publications with book reviews written by HuffPo readers….”

Each shirt in the new line called Novel-T “features a vaguely symbolic number on the back and an insignia on the front – a tell-tale heart or raven for Edgar Allan Poe, a patch of grass for Walt Whitman, a circle with a slash through it for Bartleby the Scrivener, who would prefer not to.”

Faced with ferocious discounting by supermarkets, online retailer the Book Depository is slashing its price for Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” “to £4.99, almost 75% off its recommended retail price of £18.99.”

“Philadelphians will have the chance to think, discuss, and argue all things Iranian, thanks to Iranian-French author Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, The Complete Persepolis, which will be announced today as the selection for the 2010 One Book, One Philadelphia.”