Category: publishing

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot…

“Our idea is to get our works read — not to create mounds of paper. Our function has always been curatorial, to say, ‘Here’s stuff to pay attention to.’ Whether that stuff comes in electronic form or between book covers is irrelevant. We want to make books available in as many different ways as possible.”

It is not known which the millionth word will be, but those on the brink of entering the language as finalists for the one millionth English-language word include “zombie banks”, or those banks that would be defunct without government intervention; the pejorative “noob”, referring to a newcomer to a given task or community, as in “She’s a complete noob to guerrilla gardening”; and “quendy-trendy”, meaning hip or up-to-date.

“There is now an inexhaustible public appetite for meeting writers, in tents and church halls. When you stop to think about it, this is quite strange. But there it is. The public wants to spend time in proximity with poets and historians, novelists and biographers. Then get them to sign books.”

A rare copy of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses has been sold for £275,000 ($486,000) the highest price ever paid for a 20th-century first edition.

“About the same size and shape as a Moleskine notebook, in candy colors, the diaries are full of pages that have been started for people like me. Mad Libs-style, each page has a space for the date, a thought or emotion and multiple-choice prompts. And the bits and ideas that spread out on those pages are actually interesting.”

“A Rhode Island academic described as ‘America’s most original daring and scary poet’ won the 2009 Griffin Prize for international poetry at a ceremony in Toronto Wednesday night.” C.D. Wright snagged the award for her “Rising, Falling, Hovering.” “Toronto poet A.F. Moritz won the prize awarded annually to a Canadian poet for his work The Sentinel.”

“Perhaps the surprise was that there was no surprise. This year’s Orange prize for the best novel written by a woman was last night won by a writer regarded by some as one of the greatest of living novelists: Marilynne Robinson.” The jury vote was unanimous.

“On the eve of the announcement of the winner of the Orange prize, a youth panel has selected Bernardine Evaristo’s reimagining of the slave trade as their alternative champion. … The six judges – three girls and three boys, aged between 16 and 19 – read the 20 books longlisted for the overall Orange prize and selected their own shortlist of six, which was entirely different from that selected by the main prize’s judges.”

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes schools can save hundreds of millions of dollars by using free digital textbooks – an example he gave Tuesday of old-fashioned innovation ‘to stretch the taxpayer dollar.’ … Education officials, however, said Schwarzenegger might first want to go out and get a better calculator. The idea of free digital textbooks is nice, but given the associated technology costs and teacher training, they won’t save schools much money now or anytime soon. “