Category: publishing

“The booksellers who put the town [Hay-on-Wye] on the map 30 years ago are angry and fearful at collapsing sales, and are pinning the blame on the festival, which began 25 years ago, on the internet, and now on each other.”

How hard can it be? Rockheaded jocks write books. TV talk show hosts write books. Dogs write books. Why not you?

Just before New Year’s, Herman Rosenblat admitted that his memoir Angel at the Fence (in which he claimed his future wife slipped him apples across the fence at Buchenwald) was false. But a screenplay had already been made of the story, and York House Press will release a novel based on that film script.

“A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. … The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.”

Random House Canada marketing VP Scott Sellers is hoping to bring some of the Manhattan event’s mojo north of the border with the new Globe and Mail Open House Festival, launching in May. Headliners include Naomi Klein, Ha Jin, Calvin Trillin, Adam Gopnik, Zoë Heller and Richard Florida.

The reviews of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem have been poor, but her publisher “is rushing out an $8 paperback of the poem on 6 February nonetheless, with a 100,000 first print run. With over two weeks to go before publication, the book is already the bestselling poetry book on Amazon.com; Alexander’s new-found celebrity has also sent another of her titles, the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, into the third spot.”

Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” “didn’t measure up,” David Ulin writes. “The intention, clearly, was to present a chorus of American voices, an expression of the way ‘[w]e encounter each other in words.’ Yet, except for a stanza evoking the struggles of black Americans, Alexander’s ‘Praise Song’ simply didn’t sing.”

“The house, complete with its miniature furniture and dolls, is one lot in a two-day auction of the private collection of antique dealer Roger Warner… The Christie’s auction, which also features a piece of lace torn from a church altar by Oliver Cromwell and a desk chair used by William Wordsworth, has attracted 150,000 visitors to the online catalogue – the highest ever for a sale.”

Michiko Kakutani: “But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.”

“Reed Exhibitions hasn’t called the whole show off yet, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely that BookExpo Canada will be happening this year. Last Friday, The Globe and Mail reported that Penguin Canada and HarperCollins Canada have joined Random House of Canada in deciding not to attend a 2009 show, and now other publishers are coming forward to say the same thing.”