Category: publishing

There are so many of them. Politicians seem to be obsessed with writing books about their exploits after they’ve left office. There seem to be three audiences for these books…

“Lexicographers are uploading their work to the Oxford English Dictionary online. Their revisions sit cheek-by-jowl with old entries, some of which haven’t been touched in 150 years. A chicken in the online O.E.D. is therefore “the young of the domestic fowl; its flesh,” which seems poetic and factually not bad but also ambiguous and barely idiomatic in the 21st century.

“Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter is suing book publisher Airleaf, formerly known as Bookman Marketing, for accepting payment from authors and not following through on its promises to provide book publishing, royalty reimbursement and promotional services.”

The answer is yes but a terrible one! “But the project itself is ripe for sociological study. It’s a fully and publicly documented interaction between over a thousand would-be authors, a postmodern literary critic’s orgiastic wet dream.”

“For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education… But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the ‘outside world,’ but also to the world inside the ivory tower.”

“The Pictorial Webster’s may be the most curious of the many volumes that have borne the name Webster’s over the years. The book costs $2,600, and that’s the least-expensive edition. It took the artist nearly a dozen years to create. And – perhaps most strangely for a dictionary whose entries are images – it has become an overwhelming object of desire for lexicographers.”

Iris Murdoch, William Golding and Kingsley Amis are among some of the 20th century’s foremost writers who have failed to make the shortlist. The nominees are Sir Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and J. G. Farrell. Four of them were born outside Britain.

The story of Israeli literature is as troubled and turbulent as the country’s 60-year-old history. “In a world where the struggle over meaning is felt to have the power to determine the destinies of peoples, it has most often – certainly most powerfully – acted as the nation’s conscience, shattering the rhetoric of state.”

“Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has said winning the prestigious award in 2007 had been a ‘bloody disaster’. The increased media interest in her has meant that writing a full novel was next to impossible… Lessing, 88, also said she would probably now be giving up writing novels altogether.”

“In smaller towns, newspapers have rarely paid much attention to reviewing books or much else, for that matter, using national press services when needed. That’s not likely to change. Suddenly, however, a white knight has emerged on the scene to fill that void of reviews at the hometown paper. I’m just not sure he’s riding the right horse.”