Category: publishing

“[J]ust as there will inevitably be casualties when yet another sinister secret society tangles with a plucky lone Harvard symbologist, so there are likely to be victims of The Lost Symbol‘s sure-fire success. Foremost among them could be all writers of adult fiction not called Dan Brown.”

“Shadows have been cast over a debate about perceptions of modern China in Germany this weekend, after Chinese authorities insisted that the exiled writer Bei Ling and investigative journalist Dai Qing be struck from the list of participants.”

“At a rough calculation, several million pounds that could have been used to irrigate an industry struggling to emerge from recession is simply being thrown away in defiance of fiscal logic. Here, after all, is a product that hundreds and thousands of people want to buy. Why not make them pay a proper price for it?”

“Sales of David Eagleman’s book of short stories about the afterlife soared by 6,000% after [British comedian] Stephen Fry raved about it on Twitter.” Fry has more than 750,000 followers.

“Having spent the past two weeks in what I might call a spiritual communion with these authors, I can assure you that [their] texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia. As such, they fit into a long literary tradition.”

Jonathan Lethem: “Each of Ballard’s 98 short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own. … [He’s] a bard of techno-anomie, of late-capitalist disaffection,  … Yet Ballard at his best never seems to load the dice against humanity. He merely rolls them.”

“One of the UK’s most adventurous independent publishers, Marion Boyars, is being forced out of business after more than 40 years by the adverse climate of today’s book trade.” The firm was “[the UK] publisher of authors including Ken Kesey, Georges Bataille, Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, Ivan Illich and Shel Silverstein.”

“Kat Meyer, a book marketer, blogger and one of the principals behind the company, said the financial structure the group had envisioned was flawed and ultimately would not work.”

“Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies, whether it’s Sebastian Faulks taking on James Bond in Devil May Care last year, or the bucketloads of Virginia Andrews novels she has ‘written’ since her death more than 20 years ago.” It’s a tricky business, say authors who’ve tried it.

A team of anthropologists found 35 versions of the fairy tale from as far afield as Africa, China (where the wolf is a tiger) and Iran (where the titular child is a boy), and, using a tree-of-life style of taxonomy, traced the story’s origins to a Greek fable from the age of Aesop.