Category: publishing

“The complexity of Naomi Klein’s portrayal of the rise of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, has won its author the inaugural £50,000 Warwick prize for writing. The biennial prize, run by Warwick University, is promising to be one of the most unusual prizes on the books calendar, not least because it will tackle a different theme every two years, with ‘complexity’ chosen as its initial focus.”

“Reasoning that every lonely soul wandering through Walgreens has a story to tell, [Rachel Nalebuff] was inspired to assemble a collection of 92 short reflections by women on the subject of their first period.” The title: My Little Red Book.

“A Victorian writer jailed in Thailand for maligning the royal family in his self-published novel has denied he included the offending passage as a publicity stunt to win literary fame. Harry Nicolaides was released from prison last Friday after receiving a royal pardon and arrived back in Melbourne at the weekend. A former colleague of Nicolaides, Heath Dollar, has accused the author of including a passage in his novel, Verisimilitude, knowing it would violate Thai law.”

“[F]our decades after its mysterious disappearance, and two years after it was recovered by the FBI, the original, hand-edited manuscript of The Good Earth is about to go on display in Bucks County. Tomorrow, executives at the author’s … foundation plan to announce an agreement that will let them show the typescript beginning next Tuesday.”

A quiz.

“After pulling out of the Dubai literature festival last week, Margaret Atwood is now hoping to take part in a debate on censorship to be hosted at the festival via video link-up. … Atwood, a vice president of International PEN, withdrew from the festival after learning that [Geraldine Bedell’s novel, ‘The Gulf Between Us,’] which features a gay sheikh, had apparently been blacklisted by festival organisers.” But appearances were deceiving.

“We have all operated for the last few years with the idea that online piracy was something that publishers of Tolkien or science fiction had to worry about, but who would bother with the specialized books coming out of university presses? Now, it’s clear that many will bother.”

Simon & Schuster reported a sales decline for 2008, with publishing revenues down 3%, to $857.7 million, from $886.1 million in 2007. Digital sales jumped by more than 400%, but still accounted for less than 1% of total revenue last year.

We in the UK are on the verge of extraordinary changes in the way we read, think about narrative and define the book itself.

It depends. In some forms of writing, volume is a desired skill. But then, aren’t we a little suspicious of the literary writer who cranks out too much work?