Category: publishing

Novelist Margaret Drabble lists her top 10 British literary landscapes for a good wander. At No. 1: Stonehenge.

“Is it completely insane to try to finish a first draft of an entire novel in three weeks?” writes Dahlia Lithwick, who ordinarily covers the Supreme Court. “Is there something quintessentially chick-lit-ish about trying to do something patently impossible and overreaching? Yes! But that’s where you come in.”

The upcoming book by the author of the trilogy His Dark Materials “will provide a new account of the life of Jesus, challenging the gospels and arguing that the version in the New Testament was shaped by the apostle Paul.”

“Google said it would limit the out-of-print books it plans to make available online in order to appease European publishers, authors and other copyright holders objecting to a proposed American court settlement allowing Google to sell digital books on the Internet.”

Coming from a notoriously closed-mouthed public figure, “the publication of My Name is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic (MNICSAIAAA) is in many ways a much bigger sensation in the art world than any number of rotting cow’s heads. … It’s the format that really confounds expectations, though.”

“[P]oets are migrating to the Web and using it in entirely new ways, that almost changes the way that they think of poetry in the first place.” At the same time, they’re making it clear that tweets, texts and instant messages aren’t shallow by nature.

“Booksellers are hoping for a much-needed surge of traffic in a week with the release of not only [Dan Brown’s] ‘The Lost Symbol’ but also two other much anticipated titles”: Ted Kennedy’s memoir and Jon Krakauer’s biography of the late NFL star turned soldier, Pat Tillman.

The Man Booker Prize, whose 2009 shortlist is to be announced Tuesday, “was created as an unabashed arbiter of literary excellence. The judges’ only task is to select the finest novel of the year. By that criterion, three books stand out.”

“Five years from now, no sensible person will argue that there’s a lack of commentary or reporting about books online; the real question is, who will have the same authority and reach that newspapers have long enjoyed, and who will adhere to the standards that the best newspapers have established?”

“Readers will be able to highlight a word, a sentence or a paragraph and add notes that will be integrated as footnotes on the text. We thought this would be a great way to go deep into the text and literally argue with it sentence by sentence, collectively.”