Category: publishing

“Despite objections from several parents who find its language vulgar and racist, an award-winning book will be kept on the summer reading list at Antioch High School while an alternative will be offered for those who request it, officials said Monday. The book, ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’ by Sherman Alexie is a coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy who triumphs over obstacles after leaving an American Indian reservation to attend an all-white school.”

Sequoyah’s translation of the spoken Cherokee language into a written system, which he devised over a decade in the early 19th century, may be “the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing. An archaeologist and explorer of caves has now found what he thinks are the earliest known examples of the Sequoyah syllabary,” in a Kentucky cave.

“This season marks 150 years since the birth of Sholem Aleichem, whose appeal to ‘something more cheerful’ made him the most popular Yiddish writer at a time when more Jews spoke Yiddish than any other language. Known to modern audiences mostly through ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ — the Americanized musical adaptation of his stories of Tevye the Dairyman — Sholem Aleichem cast the Jews as a people who would live through laughter — or die trying.”

“A federal appellate court has reversed a lower court decision that had exonerated Simon & Schuster of breaking telecommunications law when it sent cellphone text messages to promote Stephen King’s novel ‘The Cell’ three years ago.”

“Sex writing, as we all know so well from the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Awards, is hard to do well. But for women, it now seems it’s getting even harder, thanks to recent remarks from Kate Copstick, the new publisher of the Erotic Review, who’s declared her intention to scale back on female writers in the magazine – apparently, we can’t write about sex because we don’t like it that much.”

“As banks struggle and businesses collapse, the science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds is making his own contribution to the flagging UK economy, signing an unprecedented ten-book deal with Gollancz worth £1m. Reynolds, who has published eight novels with the Orion imprint Gollancz since his 2000 debut, Revelation Space, said he was ‘amazed and thrilled’ to commit himself to the same publisher for the next decade.”

The reality is that “university presses aren’t just being hurt by the bad economy, but by changes in reader habits. While many continue to discuss the primacy of the printed book, some see grave danger for university presses holding on to the print model — with one speaker going so far as to predict a ‘death spiral’ for presses if they don’t move within the next few years to an online, free model.”

Ventura, California’s library is under threat of closure for lack of funds. “Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.”

Recently there has been “a shift away from the traditional model of book readings and for-and-against Oxford Union-style debates and towards a showier kind of speaking event, in which bookish ideas and themes are lifted off the page and into the stuff of rhetoric and performance.”

“For authors, tapping the power of place is not simply a matter of naming a town and then moving on with the story. The place is the story. Fiction is already ephemeral enough; the incidents therein never happened in the first place. What gives it gravity, what endows it with shape and mass and meaning, is its location.”