“The observations were made by George Orwell, whose copious diaries are now being published every day in blog form, exactly 70 years after they were made. The scholars behind the project say they are trying to get more attention for Orwell online and to make him more relevant to a younger generation he would have wanted to speak to.”
Category: publishing
Writers’ Conference – Somebody’s Gotta Schlep The Meals
“At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the job falls to two dozen young writers who serve as waiters for the two-week summer summit, donning aprons and name tags to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner to the 225 participants. Bread Loaf crumbs, they’re not. Most are professors, graduate students in the fine arts or prize-winning writers, chosen from 600 applicants for work-study scholarships that cover the $2,300 tuition.”
The Mini-Me – Short Writing Is In
“Short is in. Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing. Six-word memoirs. Four-word film reviews. Twelve-word novels. Mini-lit is thriving.”
Title Creep – Why Book Titles Are Getting Longer
“Colons have been a staple of academic publishers for many years. After all, no academic ever lost tenure by stinting on words. Certainly, with some published theses you get the impression that the academic assessors weighed them in the balance – literally. And their titles reflect it. Now they have colonised even popular non-fiction titles like those above, and I can testify that publishers adorned my own books with subtitles.”
Libraries – No Longer A Quiet Zone
The biggest change in libraries in recent years? Silence. Once as essential to libraries as books themselves, silence is now as elusive as that stolen copy of Lord of the Flies – except it hasn’t been pinched, it’s been driven out. Libraries, you see, are meant to be fun.”
Melbourne Lit Festival At A Crossroads
Four years ago, the Melbourne Writers Festival was in financial strife and its program was lacklustre. Although the 10-day event has clawed its way back from oblivion, a number of publishing and literary identities still consider it the poor relation to its Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane cousins.
Don’t You Want To Be A Hyphenated Author Too?
“There comes a point in the career of every author, unless unconcerned with book sales, where you have to bite the bullet, throw in the towel, judge your book by its cover, and accept the most clichéd of all clichés: the newspaper headline.”
You Can Tell A Lot From A Country’s Bestseller Lists (At Least That’s The Theory)
“Looking at the UK book market is a good way to obliterate any idea of the Brits being sophisticated, stiff-upper-lip types.” And Americans…
A Plague Of Crossword Puzzles
“Somehow crossword types think that their addiction to this sad form of mental self-abuse somehow makes them “literary.” Sorry: Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility, one that demonstrates an inability to find pleasure in reading. Otherwise, why choose the wan, sterile satisfactions of crosswords over the far more robust full-blooded pleasures of books?”
The Odd Ritual Of The Author Autograph
“It’s not clear when the humble autograph – that early trace element of the cult of celebrity – went up-market to become the signed first edition; I suspect it was the early 1970s, when literary festivals were becoming popular and Edward Heath signed so many copies of his book Sailing, bookish types sneeringly wondered how much a rare unsigned copy might fetch.”