Category: publishing

“Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Novels should be required reading because fiction ‘does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does,’ said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute.”

“Like many businesses across the retail sector, the publishing industry has been hit by a raft of doom and gloom in the past few weeks”: layoffs, decreased earnings, predictions of a bad holiday season. And even if books turn out to be a popular holiday gift this year, what happens in January?

“Nam Le, who was raised in Melbourne, is the second winner of the award, which is designed to encourage creative talent in writers under the age of 30 whose work has been published in the English language. Le is working in New York, where he is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and next year he will do a residency at the East Anglia University in the UK where he plans to work on his next book.”

Late last month, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Google sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print.

“Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010… Rushdie’s novel, which has been selected twice as the best-ever Booker prize winner, is widely regarded as one of the premier literary works of the latter half of the 20th century and is required reading on most university syllabuses.”

The effect of the Internet on local bookstores has been well-documented, but less talked about has been the dwindling number of brick-and-mortar sheet music vendors. “Sheet music might be a nearly $600-million-a-year business in the U.S., enjoying a largely steady 2% to 3% growth rate over the past decade, but sales at [many local stores] have fallen off the charts.”

Canada’s Writers’ Trust literary award is switching its annual announcement date from spring to fall, to better place it among the country’s more prestigious lit prizes. “Despite the risk of competing for the same precious literary oxygen already shared by the Giller and the GGs, as the Governor General’s Awards are known in the book industry… [the switch] amplifies the existing perception of the fall as the make-or-break season in the publishing year.”

“Not all University of Oxford researchers are uptight and humorless, ‘irregardless’ of what you might think. In fact, a bunch of them compiled a list of the Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English language — just because we needed one.”

“The boy-novelist who engineered a tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park and mysterious pathogens from outer space in The Andromeda Strain ha[d] become a political pamphleteer, a right-wing noodge. […] Crichton’s early novels were escapist fantasies that happened to be instructive. His political books are hectoring screeds that incidentally turn out to be thrillers.”

“Fans of the Beat generation have known for years about The Novel That Kicked It All Off, but they’ve had to wait until the death of a journalist at United Press International for it to be published. The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event…”