Category: publishing

“One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry. In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became ‘difficult.’ That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions.”

“Whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again?”

“Joyce’s classical training and his encyclopaedic grasp of musical tradition are well known, but it’s anyone’s guess what he would have made of this year’s most unorthodox Bloomsday project, in which Fire Records has commissioned a virtual Who’s Who of alternative music to set to music all 36 of the poems.”

City of Books, Shanghai’s largest book store, takes up six stories, and more and more, books that first showed up on the Internet are turning up on the shelves there.

“The literary world only bestows acceptance, it seems, on those who are published through the traditional avenues. Independent and small presses get short shrift – national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won’t stock them, unless the books are about the tough lives of mill girls or histories of public house names, which can be shoved on a shelf marked ‘local interest’.”

“The Library of Congress has managed to re-create –with the help of rare-book collectors —the missing two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson’s Library.”

Atwood has published more than 25 volumes of poetry, fiction and nonfiction and won prestigious awards including Britain’s Booker Prize in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin.”

“Library patrons can now renew and reserve books from their home computers and download audio books and digital music, thanks to an $11 million technology expansion almost entirely paid for by largesse generated by the Chicago Skyway lease.”

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

A self-published book by an obscure author finds a huge audience and lands on the New York Times bestseller list after word of mouth builds…