Category: publishing

Jane Austen’s “power as a writer is inseparable from her own tantalizing delicacy. She knows exactly what to leave to the imagination. And we, with our culture of explicit candor, have a lot of trouble leaving it there. She makes us want more – and if she won’t give it to us, then we’ll just manufacture it for ourselves. … And, in the process, we’re smashing the very thing that fascinates us most about Jane Austen: her reticence.”

“A group of prominent faculty representatives from the University of California, one of Google’s earliest and closest allies in its plan to digitize books from major libraries, is the latest to raise concerns about important aspects of a high-profile class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers.” Among other things, the professors argue “that the settlement is not equally fair to all members of the author sub-class and does not fully address the needs of academic authors.”

“It’s easy to imagine, though, that [Jane Austen] might not be amused by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies … Were she alive and litigious, like the even more private and reclusive J. D. Salinger, Austen might go to court seeking to stop publication of Mr. Grahame-Smith’s best-selling book, or at least to get a piece of the royalties.” As Salinger did recently when he put a stop to Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Should that sort of sequel be protected? “Where do you draw the line between critique or parody and outright exploitation?”

“Think back to the original novel. Comic books are the only books shallow enough to go unburned, the only ones people are still allowed to read. … Surely this [graphic novel edition of Fahrenheit 451] is black humor, a resigned joke about the imminent eclipse of books on paper by images, both digital and analog. Except that it isn’t.”

“I think, in order to save the emergency situation we find ourselves in, we should be dishing out best-of compilations of our greatest poets (and not just English-language poets, either) at every street corner. Wouldn’t that be brilliant?”

“AS Byatt has launched a vigorous attack on writers who combine biography and fiction, calling it an ‘appropriation of others’ lives and privacy’. Her broadside against authors of ‘faction’, which she describes as ‘mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention’, is particularly startling given that it could be applied to her rival for this year’s Man Booker prize, Hilary Mantel, who is longlisted for her historical novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall.”

“The reasons for its enduring popularity aren’t easy to pin down. Of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpieces, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘The Godfather, Part II,’ brought a swarm of new readers, but the book had already sold millions of copies before the first film was released in 1972. Those who read the novel today in search of a greater appreciation of the movies are bound to be disappointed; it quickly becomes apparent the book’s success isn’t based on literary merit. “

“In ‘Godzilla Meets Indie Rockers’, a Talk of the Town story from June 24, 1996, [former staffer Andrew] Essex reported that Thomas Pynchon, a notorious hermit, had become a groupie of the nineties New York rock band Lotion. … It was a great story. It was also mostly untrue.”

“Novelist Jonathan Lethem says Google should be ‘congratulated’ for its effort. Lethem adds, ‘This is the moment to take a look and say, “why isn’t it as private as the world we’re being asked to leave behind, the world of physical books?”‘ … Lethem is one of several authors — including Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow — who have signed on to a campaign to pressure Google Books to offer greater privacy guarantees for its readers.”

In the recent boom years, when “the external circumstances were steadily sunny, writers looked mostly inside their characters for the energy to drive and motivate plot. But now, those of us who write women’s fiction for mass consumption must inevitably look outward again. We are not about to turn into Gaskell and Eliot. But like the great architects of the novel, we can write stories about heroines who must take on the world, not just themselves.”