“AM Homes became the fifth American in a row to be named winner of the £30,000 prize, formerly known as the Orange, for her sixth novel, May We Be Forgiven” – defeating the oddsmakers’ favorite, Hilary Mantel’s multiple award-winner Bring Up the Bodies.
Category: publishing
Let’s Just Admit It: Proust Is Weird
“It is likewise nearly impossible, today, to pick up Proust without preconceptions, without already knowing that you are holding a ‘great work of literature’ in your hands. Knowing that you are reading a work of genius, it is difficult to recognize that Swann’s Way is strange.”
From 1928: A Plan To Promote Reading More Books
“One of their main objects was to make books better known to the public. They realised that this must be done scientifically and methodically. The best means of doing it was to have classified lists of their customers, or potential customers, and to provide them with prospectuses of the class of books in which they had declared themselves to be interested.”
EBook Market Will Top Print By 2017
“PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that trade (consumer, not educational or academic) ebooks will drive $8.2 billion in sales by 2017 — surpassing projected print book sales, which it thinks will shrink by more than half during that period.”
German Publisher Surhkamp Enters Bankruptcy Protection
“A new chapter has been opened in the long-running fight for survival of one of Germany’s best-known literary publishers. On 27th May Suhrkamp initiated insolvency protection proceedings similar to Chapter 11, shielding it from its creditors, at a Magistrates’ Court in Berlin.”
Time Out London Delays Publishing Following Fire
“The free title, which is normally distributed across the capital on a Tuesday, … will fail to publish on time for the first time in more than 44 years, after a warehouse fire destroyed more than 200,000 copies of this week’s edition.”
The Problem With French Children’s Fiction
“A browse through the children’s section of a French bookshop will uncover beautifully illustrated, expensively produced books -including a baffling number about wolves – but to an English reader, their content rarely lives up to the creativity of the presentation, nor are they much fun to read aloud.” Yet the children’s non-fiction is excellent. Mais pourquoi?
Apple E-Book Price Fixing Trial Begins
“A three-week trial got under way before a federal judge in New York in a case pitting the Justice Department against the popular iPad and iPhone maker that could shine a light on the secretive Silicon Valley giant’s business practices. ‘Apple told publishers that Apple – and only Apple – could get prices up in their industry’,” said prosecutors in opening arguments.
Does Reading Great Literature Really Make Us Better People?
“Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities? If someone now asks you for evidence for this view, I expect you will have one or both of the following reactions. First, why would anyone need evidence for something so obviously right? Second, what kind of evidence would he want?”
Why Don’t American Critics Write More Hatchet Jobs? (Asks A Brit)
Clive James: “Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport [in Britain]. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today. Such critical violence is far less frequent in America. Any even remotely derogatory article in an American journal is called ‘negative,’ and hardly any American publication wants to be negative.”