Category: publishing

“Dreamed up in 1978 by the Diagram Group founder Bruce Robertson as a way to pass the time at a dreary Frankfurt Book Fair, the prize goes from strength to strength. Last year’s prize – awarded to If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs – received more votes than the Best of the Booker Prize, won for a second time last month by Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children.”

“Chinese publishing is still mostly in the doldrums. Nothing is selling all that well, and no one is bringing out anything new. The situation is a little like that in the United States, where many publishers are reluctant to release anything important this fall until after the presidential election. The great distraction here is the Olympics, of course, and to a certain extent the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake and related disasters in May.”

“The diaries will be published as a sort of a blog, with entries added daily, exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote them. Running from 1938 through 1942, the diaries cover the early days of World War II as well as Orwell’s travels in Morocco, where he recuperated from injuries he received in the Spanish Civil War. There’s also a lot about chicken farming.”

“Pushed by her daughter-in-law, who found the manuscript and couldn’t put it down, Lorna Page has become one of the oldest debut writers on record, with equally unusual social results. Suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales of A Dangerous Weakness, a feminist thriller set in the Alps, Page has traded her one-bedroom flat in Surrey for a big, detached country house, and invited contemporaries to move in.”

“When The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart, came out last fall, it was greeted with the generally deferential reviews expected of such an exercise in cultural authority. Almost a year later, this 700-page tome has become the flashpoint for one of the sharpest literary debates this country has ever seen.”

Plans to release a novel about Prophet Muhammad’s child bride A’isha have been scrapped by US publishers Random House over fears it could spark violence.

“These books are fairly dark, very depressing – a bit like France. There is a ‘grande malaise’, a sort of depression, in France at the moment. This is not a joyful country; when you think of France, you don’t think of a party country. The social reality in France is a real concern about the future and this is reflected in the books.”

“It’s a puzzling trend. Even the most brilliant literary work generally comes from a solitary individual sitting at a table in front of a sheet of paper or a computer, which is not exactly full of dramatic possibilities. The writer’s film seems to defy commercial logic. No matter how many of us have studied Sylvia Plath at school, it’s hard to see a drama about a suicidal poet as a box-office winner. Yet these films keep coming.”

“Why is it that our novelists, despite their best efforts, cannot write a politically informed, psychologically convincing book about Islamic terrorism?” wonders Adam Kirsch in an essay that argues that contemporary writers have yet to put forth works of fiction that give definitive shape and meaning to the post-9/11 experience.

“The most important true thing to say is this: The greatest writer in the world died the other night in his Moscow apartment. In an English-speaking world where we apply “great” to a well-diced salad, or the barely heard news that the person we’re greeting is feeling fine, the only way to reinvest it with gravitas is to outline the many ways Solzhenitsyn earned it, while countering the falsehoods that gathered about his name.”