Category: publishing

Okay, we’re only eight years into the new Century. But what literature marks our current age?

“For many writers, in short, he serves as their Virgil of the New York Public Library, guiding innocents and counseling the wise alike as he leads them gently away from error and toward intellectual enlightenment.”

“If, and it’s a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. “I feel I’ve already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let’s give it 10 years.”

Since its publication, in 1923, “The Prophet” has sold more than nine million copies in its American edition alone. There are public schools named for Gibran in Brooklyn and Yonkers.

“Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link the disparate work of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut.”

“Launched in 1979 under the inspired ‘lunacy’ of Bill Buford, Granta magazine became the home of vital new writing and launched the careers of some of our greatest novelists.” Now the quarterly is celebrating 100 issues, and its rise from student publication to influential literary journal.

“Five university presses have announced a collaboration that seeks to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow more books to be released… The new system is expected to yield enough savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year.”

Israeli scientists have printed the entire Old Testament onto a silicon chip that is only 1/1000th of an inch square–tinier than a pinhead.

“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books. For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”

“The state censors all manuscripts, and not with a simple yes-or-no judgment. Rather, a single sentence or paragraph might be struck, according to the individual censor’s notion of taboo, and so most authors elect to publish instead in Beirut. Saudi Arabia has experienced the kind of bourgeois population density that makes for great novels only recently.”