Category: publishing

“In its heyday the Caffè San Marco was one of the fixed points on the vibrant intellectual map of Trieste, frequented by James Joyce, the writer Italo Svevo and the poet Umberto Saba. … Locals fear that either AG will decide to give up on the San Marco, or new management will be found that has a different vision for the venue.”

“What’s missing from our classrooms and our culture, Eagleton says, is discussion of the literariness of literature, of what makes a poem different from a stop sign, or a novel about grief different from the account of grief in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As an English professor might say, we’re good on content, not so good on form. We go straight for what the play says, and ignore how it says it.”

“Hundreds of jobs could go at Waterstones after the retailer launched a consultation with 560 managers as it seeks to slash costs and ‘secure the future’ of the UK’s last nationwide book chain.”

“After an author has passed through the gates and entered the Elysian pastures of canonization, is there any point in a critic rushing in and trying to drag him back out again? Once an author is a classic, can that status be revoked?”

“It seems that, even in the proliferation of new forms of writing and communication before us, the essay has become a talisman of our times. What is behind our attraction to it? Is it the essay’s therapeutic properties? Because it brings miniature joys to its writer and its reader?” Chisty Wampole suggests a different explanation.

For instance: “Videos shouldn’t be confused with book trailers. ‘The author is the brand. The title is not the brand.'”

“If you walk around with your eyes open, you’ll quickly discover that there are more monuments and memorials in this country to World War I than to any other war. So for some years after the war ended, it was terribly important to people that it and the people who fought it be remembered.”

“Traditionally, Ugandan women are the storytellers and keepers of the oral tradition but it takes a considerable leap of consciousness to become a writer.”

That’s $75 million, to states and private plaintiffs, in the lawsuit over price fixing.

“You have to learn the public criteria for what counts as excellence – you can’t just make up criteria, for fiction no less than for Scotch – and you have to practise those criteria in public, testing and adjusting them against new books and other judgments. We learn how to understand and appreciate literature through public practice.”