Category: publishing

“When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on ’60 Minutes’ on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read ‘a new book out about F .D. R.’s first 100 days’ without specifically naming a title or author. … The publishers and authors of at least three such books that could fit Mr. Obama’s description each spent much of Monday wondering whether they had just gotten a plug from the soon-to-be leader of the free world.”

Joe Queenan broaches “the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic.” Are such reviews unethical? No. Immoral? No. But they are common. They’re also “unfair to the reader, who may be hornswoggled….”

Editors are the invisible heroes of the publishing industry, and as publishing companies cut corners, they cut editors. On the most basic level, that means more typos, grammatical errors and factual contradictions.

“When you’re the proud parents of a bookstore at risk of imminent death, you’ll try pretty much anything to give your baby a chance — including asking your customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death.” That’s the strategy at Washington, D.C.’s Vertigo Books, where the owners are worried that they could be the next indie to close.

Writing in French for the first time, former refugee Atiq Rahimi won France’s top literary prize for Syngue Sabour (Persian for “Stone of Patience”), about a woman caring for her husband, who has been paralyzed by a war wound, and telling him stories about her life that he had never heard.

Brian Schofield, who found himself shortlisted last week for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, doesn’t blame publishers or jurors for the total absence of women from the list. “But does the literary industry as a whole – agents, editors, booksellers and critics – currently offer disproportionate encouragement to aspiring male writers to produce the kind of serious-minded, bookish work that gets on shortlists, compared to young female writers? Now, I suspect, we’re on to something.”

The Miami International Book Fair, the nation’s oldest, was started 25 years ago — in part to counter Miami’s lack of reputation as a literary town.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an unlikely best-seller — it’s the first book in a trilogy of thrillers written by Stieg Larsson, a previously unknown Swedish journalist who died of a heart attack in 2004. Knopf Editor-in-Chief ‘Sonny’ Mehta, who snapped up the rights to the thrillers, says he was attracted to the ‘absolute ambition’ of the trilogy. … Still, the fact that the trilogy’s author is dead complicated things.”

“Among the nominees for this year’s National Book Award in fiction, which will be presented next Wednesday, is a book that some have complained is not exactly new: Peter Matthiessen’s ‘Shadow Country,’ published by Modern Library, which is a one-volume compilation of three novels that Mr. Matthiessen published from 1990 to 1999.” But Matthiessen does appear to have substantially rewritten the text, so some wonder what all the fuss is about.

“This skinny eighteenth century Emo kid with a penchant for self-harm and a dodgy taste in cornflower blue pantaloons still epitomises most people’s notion of what a poet should be. The stereotype may be romantically appealing, but it’s also alienating and disempowering. In a time when we have such a diverse and modern poetry scene, why does it still have such an abiding hold?” Molly Flatt has a couple of ideas about the reason – and a remedy.