Category: publishing

“In addition to organizing New York’s McNally Robinson intelligently–literature is arranged by region; a cozy enclave in the center of the main floor houses books on interior design, fashion, graphic design and architecture–Sarah McNally hosts several events per week with top-tier authors as well as a monthly book group and a Tuesday night political discussion; an ongoing series that she is particularly proud of brings together authors and their editors.”

“Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final book in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, a vampire/human love story aimed primarily at teenage girls that has the book industry drawing comparisons to the monster success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Within 24 hours of its release 12:01 Saturday morning, Breaking Dawn sold more than 1.3 million copies.”

Between 1990 and 1992 Lee Israel “forged some 400 letters by such literary celebrities as Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman and Edna Ferber. Dealers paid her about $100 per letter, which they in turn sold for as much as several thousand dollars.”

“It may be hard to imagine — given our current obsessions with television shows, movies, instant-messaging, Facebook and blogs — but literature was once at the center of American cultural life. And literary merit was discussed and hotly debated by critics whose essays, in Garrick Davis’s words, courted the educated public with their elegant prose.”

Wordsworth wrote a travel book? It’s true. Others on the list include the Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, “a meditation on just what it is that drives people to want to get away, even if only for a few square meters, from the hassles and history of the land they were born into.”

“What effect has capitalizing ‘I’ but not ‘you’ — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot.”

“An astonishing project is underway in Timbuktu, Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries. On the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, experts are opening an enchanted Aladdin’s Cave, filled with hundreds of thousands of ancient documents.” But the pages, written on with ink made from gallnuts, is beginning to fade. Academic institutions are racing to evaluate and save them.

Fancy hearing Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene reading to you? Here they are…

Vampire Romance may be an unusual literary genre, but it’s a big one, according to sales figures, and it has no bigger star at the moment than Stephenie Meyer. “Meyer’s fourth and final book in her Twilight vampire-romance series… was unveiled on Friday night with thousands of parties across the country to mark its officially going on sale.”

One of the novelists who’s serving as a judge for this year’s Man Booker prize says that, while she believes the long list of finalists is a strong one, she understands the frustration that always seems to follow the announcement. “The longer the list, the greater the implied insult. Don’t those judges realise how hard you have worked?”