Category: publishing

No movie based on a Roth book has done so well. In a recent interview, Roth was asked what he thought of some of those adaptations. Not much, he answered. “I’m far from the movie world,” he says. “I just see if the people are presentable, if they have table manners, are neatly dressed. I don’t expect anything out of it.”

“Much is made, in the age of online democracy, about the probable demise of the editor – about letting the work speak for itself without mediation or hindrance. Whether the unexpurgated internet can ever produce a Kerouac or a Lowell won’t, one suspects, be known for a long time yet; and maybe editors and cyberspace aren’t incompatible.”

“A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.”

The release of the Booker shortlist is always an occasion for debate among critics and readers alike, and for good reason. “As the status of the Booker becomes ever more lofty, so the pressure on the jury grows to select the definitive book of the year… It is startling to note how many epoch-making novels never crossed the threshold of the Booker shortlist.”

“When the novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis died 100 years ago this month, his passing went little noticed outside his native Brazil. But in recent years he has been transformed from a fringe figure in the English-speaking world into a literary favorite and trendsetter, promoted by much more acclaimed writers and by critics as an unjustly neglected genius.”

“John Warner, chief creative tsar of struggling independent publisher TOW Books, is so sick of sending his books out to newspapers and magazines and television shows for review, and hearing nothing back, that he’s decided to give up on the media and send books directly to his readers.”

“Reading rates are down and Americans say they love casual living. And yet, one of the most popular rooms in big new houses is a library. Rather than being about books, their appeal is often about creating a certain ambiance. In the latest annual National Association of Home Builders consumer survey, 63% of home buyers said they wanted a library or considered one essential.”

Where did the idea that Shakespeare set his play just offshore from Massachusetts come from, then? And what is the evidence for it, if any?

In a departure from the first four years of the program, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced Tuesday that this year’s One Book, One Denver selection is the late Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man.” Previously, only books centered from living authors were chosen. Hickenlooper said of the change in criteria, “In the fifth year, we decided to be a little more adventurous” and select a “page-turner.”

“The pressures and peculiarities of the laureateship, some of which I put myself through, did have a rocky effect on my life. It was a strange mix of making me self-conscious that so few writers are made to feel because of being so public. There is an isolation in being the Poet Laureate,”