Category: publishing

Borders has lost market share both to online retailers and to discounters like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its possible sale was given mixed prospects by industry analysts.

“Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour.”

“A 1937 first edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit has been sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for £60,000 – twice what it was expected to reach… The copy of The Hobbit is inscribed to Tolkien’s friend Elaine Griffiths, who had originally helped get it published.”

Among the novelists who made the longlist for this year’s Orange Prize is Turkey’s Elif Shafak, who found herself on trial in her native country because a character in her novel “referred to the mass killings of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire – among the most disputed chapters in the country’s history – as ‘genocide’.”

Jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield intends to unveil a plan Tuesday for a multimillion-dollar library system that reflects New Orleans’ identity. It would start with a jazz-themed branch housing early recordings and reviews.

Wolf Totem was a literary sensation in China when it came out four years ago, and now it’s about to launch another giant wave in the English book world.

“Contenders include novels by some of the most celebrated women writers in English, including the 2000 Orange winner Linda Grant, for The Clothes on Their Backs; and Anne Enright, whose surprise Booker winner The Gathering also makes the list. Novels by Rose Tremain, Stella Duffy, Tessa Hadley and Deborah Moggach are also in contention.”

“Novelist A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a sexist prize, saying that she was so critical of what it stands for that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration. ‘Such a prize was never needed,’ she said, noting that many works of literature were by women.”

“Bookstores, having successfully imitated libraries, might now be emulated in turn. The Fifth Avenue library’s character could end up transformed by that commercial model. This great free library, in which generations of immigrants and aspirants had schooled themselves and found their ambitions ennobled, would be subject to ‘democratization,’ as one library official put it.”

“Tom Paulin’s new book is the latest in a series of bluffer’s guides to poetry which have recently fallen from the press, one of them, I must confess, by myself. Paulin has a passion for language and a marvellously sensitive ear for its textures and cadences. In fact, he reads so closely, slowing a poem down to a sort of surreal slow-motion, that it becomes in his hands a strange cacophony of plosive, guttural and sibilant noises.” But “you can, in short, read too closely, just as you can squash your nose up against a canvas until the painting fades to a blur.”