Category: publishing

“Australian author Sonya Hartnett is the winner of the $818,000 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature, the largest children’s book award in the world. Hartnett, 39, published her first novel, Trouble All the Way, at the age of 15 and since then has written 18 novels for children, young people and adults.”

She won the Fiction award for her novel The Great Man, a satire skewering the art world, biographers and the myth of greatness in artists.

Teenagers at a Jewish comprehensive school in London refused to sit a Shakespeare test because they believe the Bard is anti-Semitic.

“In the English departments of British universities, the professors have been strenuously denying the value of literature; these candidates for critical authority have waived their rights. It is no wonder, Rónán McDonald observes, that academic literary critics are no longer public critics, for if you abandon literary value then, in the eyes of those outside the campus boundaries, the value of the literary critic goes too.”

“Founded in 2005, The Friday Project (TFP) won much publicity for its exclusive focus on publishing material that started life in the blogosphere. High visibility, however, was not enough to sustain TFP financially” and the company is going out of business.

How “true,” are real autobiographies, written by real people, describing real events? “Beyond “setting the record straight,” none of these books was ever intended to have deeper literary or historical significance. They don’t do careful self-analysis, but neither do they add much to the bigger picture. They don’t necessarily lie, but they are intended to shape public perceptions of the author.”

Not just in sales. But in the appreciation of it. “In this age of multimedia exploitation a book doesn’t go just once. It goes many times and in many different ways – through the heads of translators, into audio or film, chipped on to metaphorical and literal plaques in the halls of fame.”

Stephen A. Schwarzman jump-starts a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own. “The project, to be announced on Tuesday, aims to transform the Central Library into a destination for book borrowing as well as research.”

“Warner Bros and Rowling argue that the publication of the Lexicon infringes Rowling’s copyright and that she has openly and repeatedly expressed her interest in publishing an encyclopedia covering all seven of the Harry Potter books, whose profits would go to charity. RDR argues that there is a long history of publishing secondary reference works and that the Lexicon falls within accepted definitions of ‘fair use’.”

“Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.”