Category: publishing

“I’m thinking that education itself is in part to blame. Ironically, it may be responsible both for the great blossoming of our literature, and at the same time for leaving so many with the impression that literature is not for them, but the preserve of a certain educated elite. As a consequence, much of our society has become separated from its own stories.”

why do we fall about at the feet of poets whose work is just plain dull? I suspect it is fear of being labelled a cultural philistine, similar to the nation’s reluctance for robust debate about contemporary art. If it’s obscure and you don’t understand it, then it must be good.

“Those who despair at the current situation in China – the lack of appetite for serious literature, the pressures of market and censorship on writers to stop writing – should look to the writers brave enough and smart enough for these challenging times.”

Publishers are upset that Arts Council England’s funding for literature is declining under controversial new plans for the agency. But the director of Arts Council England’s literature programme says funding will actually increase…

‘Does the damned thing matter any more?’ was a question asked more than once. So does the world (the reading world) need the Man Booker Prize?

Today, libraries are more popular than ever. In part that’s because they are a prime example of what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place calls a “third place.” The first place is home, the second place is your workspace, and the third is a public space where you can simply drop in, relax, read a book or magazine, talk with other people.

“The Toronto Public Library is undergoing a modest building boom, using a successful strategy that reaches out and continues to draw in more city residents: both the established and newly arrived… On a per-capita basis, the city’s 99 branches are the busiest and most utilized by its citizenry around the globe.”

“Who ‘owns’ a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?”

“I can remember a time when people read books on the tube. True, around the release of certain films these tend to be written by Rowling or Tolkien – but you could still see people reading real books, filling their heads. The crapsheet, though, just takes the world, puts it through a crazy-colour blender, removes all the nutrients, and then spews it back in your face.”

“About 15 years ago, I think, the word ‘mainstream’ gained new currency in the discussion of poetry. As tends to be the case, the momentarily convenient term became an imprisoning category, with mainstream used to corral poets who wrote for the page rather than performance, and whose work was not self-consciously avant-garde.”