Category: publishing

“Drawing from handwritten notes by Bram Stoker, the horror author’s great-grandnephew is set to pen a Dracula sequel entitled Dracula: The Un-Dead. The new project is the first story authorized by the Stoker family and estate since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.”

“Gasps of surprise were heard all-round as Margaret Atwood, a past Giller winner and three-time jury member, stood next to former Ontario premier Bob Rae and revealed the names of the five nominees at a morning press conference.”

Margaret Atwood seems to have a knack for bringing out new novels just as some catclysmic event in real life makes her book seem all the more immediately relevant. So it should come as no surprise that her latest book, a non-fiction companion to a Toronto lecture series, is called “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.”

“Larry Doyle, a former television writer-producer for “The Simpsons,” was named Monday the winner of this year’s Thurber Prize for American Humor. He was cited for the novel I Love You, Beth Cooper… Previous winners include Jon Stewart, David Sedaris and Christopher Buckley.”

“Imagine living in a society where poetry was considered to be the most important art form. Where a poet could easily fill a football stadium. Where a poet’s death was the top news story for days. Where dictators would ply poets with gifts and flattery in invariably futile attempts to get them on side. Where scientists and economists and government ministers would find it unthinkable not to read poetry every day. Where everyone could recite the national poets by heart.”

Margaret Drabble, one of Britain’s leading novelists and biographers, believes her publishers are pushing her to “dumb down” her work to appeal to a larger readership.

“How capricious it all seems; the judging process is whimsical, arbitrary, wildly subjective. How, for example, is a novelist supposed to take seriously the nonsense spouted by Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy, the body that decides the Nobel Prize in literature. He seems to feel that American writing is still in kindergarten, while its European cousin is doing postdoctoral research.”

“Europe is still the center of the literary world.” American writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

“The online game extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, PJ Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel.”

“Recent research revealed that in Iceland more books are written, published and sold per person per year than anywhere else on the planet. The average Icelander reads four books per year, while one in ten will publish something in their lifetime.” So what started this reading tradition?