Category: publishing

“Nine of the 20 writers named yesterday on the Orange women’s fiction prize longlist were American, including one of the US’s literary titans: Toni Morrison. After Morrison, nominated for her 17th century slave trade novel A Mercy, the best-known are arguably Deirdre Madden for Molly Fox’s Birthday, Marilynne Robinson for Home, and Kamila Shamsie for Burnt Shadows. There was no place for writers such as Kate Grenville, Kate Atkinson, Helen Garner or Zoe Heller.”

“As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration.”

“What a relief it was to escape into another writer’s world and immerse myself in questions of language,” translator Maureen Freely writes. “But there is, perhaps, a shadow novelist in every dedicated translator. Though she must serve the text, she can recreate the author’s voice only if she gets so close to the heart of the novel that she can convince herself it briefly answers to hers.”

In a blog post discussed far and wide, Clay Shirky observes that the advent of the Web and the current crisis of journalism are basically analogous to the revolution wrought by the printing press 500 years ago. “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. […] Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

“It’s not that magazines are dying; it’s that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are… [But] the current downturn can be good for publishers. Magazines still offer an unsurpassed ability to marry literary ambitions with deep reporting, photography, and visual design.”

“Faber author R.N. Morris is serialising a slightly abridged version of his 2007 crime novel A Gentle Axe in bite-sized chunks via regular updates on Twitter. … Morris updates his Twitter account ‘a few times a day’ and followers can send him questions about the book, which he then responds to.”

“Ever get tired of reading in English? There’s something limiting — imprisoning almost — in being stuck with your native tongue all the time. … If you can read in another language, doing so gives you a break from the idioms and constructions that swirl through your head all day long.”

“More than 9,000 books are missing from the British Library, including Renaissance treatises on theology and alchemy, a medieval text on astronomy, first editions of 19th- and 20th-century novels, and a luxury edition of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday. The library believes almost all have not been stolen but rather mislaid among its 650km of shelves and 150m items – although some have not been seen in well over half a century.”

“At a time when libraries are more popular than ever, residents in cities and towns across Massachusetts risk losing many of their borrowing rights as communities consider cutting library budgets below minimum levels set by the state. That would jeopardize their certification…, triggering a double penalty: They would no longer be eligible for the state grants that round out local library budgets, and their residents would be deprived of the ability to borrow from most other public libraries.”

“Whether they are picking up ‘La Crise, et Après?’ by the French economist Jacques Attali, one of the countless translations of the American author Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ series, or ‘Jamie’s Ministry of Food,’ by the British television chef Jamie Oliver, [people] are buying books. As the recession leaves other media industries in tatters, the oldest mass medium of all is holding up surprisingly well.”