Category: publishing

“By the 1850s, newspaper stories about death were becoming more organized – and writers were striving to convey the reality of death without having to state the unpleasant truth that somebody had actually died. So readers learned of decedents who had been scathed by the wing of the destroying angel, or erased by the omnipotent author. What changed that? The Civil War.”

Louis Menand: “The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. […] Kay Boyle once published a piece arguing that ‘all creative-writing programs ought to be abolished by law.’ She taught creative writing for sixteen years at San Francisco State.”

“In a sign that the government has stepped up its antitrust investigation of a class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers, the Justice Department has issued formal requests for information to several of the parties involved.”

“The Global Language Monitor (GLM), based in Austin, [Texas,] calculated that a neologism is created on average every 98 minutes and that ‘Web 2.0’, a term for the next generation of internet applications, should be formally crowned the millionth word. … Needless to say, academics are sceptical” about the math. Even the guy pushing the million-word celebration admits the English language has already surpassed the number.

“[M]y weird theory, or one of them, is that we need to invest in print, instead of cutting away all the value of print over the web. Seems like every time a newspaper cuts its size, its investigative budget, its art, its comics, its book review (!) we give readers yet another reason to eschew print and get the equivalent on the web. So I think with books and with newspapers we need to reinvest in what all the things print does best.”

“Welcome to Tablet Magazine, ‘a new read on Jewish life.’ That’s our nifty, if somewhat inaccurate, tagline. Tablet isn’t entirely new–it’s a beefed-up, rebranded, refocused update of Nextbook.org, which from 2003 until earlier this year published a range of great writing on Jewish arts and culture.”

“Illustrator Anthony Browne, whose picture books have become famous for their brilliantly realised, surreal images of gorillas, was this morning named children’s laureate. Browne is the sixth children’s author to hold the role, and takes over from the poet Michael Rosen.”

“He’s courted controversy for more than a decade with his bestselling tales of underage sex and teenage heroin addicts, but Melvin Burgess has finally found a story too controversial for his publishers to handle: his own. The Carnegie medal-winning author, whose new novel, Nicholas Dane, tackles the subject of sexual abuse in children’s homes, has found a recently-completed teenage memoir dropped by his publisher over fears that it could provoke costly legal action.”

“Orwell’s novel is consistently acclaimed as one of the finest of the last 100 years … and it remains a consistent bestseller. Should it alter our respect for it that Orwell borrowed much of his plot, the outlines of three of his central figures, and the progress of the book’s dramatic arc from an earlier work?”

“It is, of course, entirely unreasonable to moan about reviews. In these days of shrinking books pages and tightening budgets, any coverage from the press is invaluable. Refusing to read reviews can seem precious, thin-skinned and, worst of all, arrogant, as if no critic could possibly have anything useful or constructive to say.”