Category: publishing

Uh, no. “Just to be clear: Plimpton was neither a font of brilliant social commentary nor a composer of sentences so perfect that, like P.G. Wodehouse, he elevated silliness to art. Nor did he, in his patrician modesty, ever pretend to be. He was a guy who wrote pretty good magazine stories, some of which he expanded into pretty good books.”

“Next month, the Atlantic turns 150, which is a stupendous feat. The life span of the average magazine is somewhere between that of a fruit fly and a dachshund. Magazines that live 150 years are almost as rare as humans that live 150 years. And the venerable Atlantic, which seemed old and stodgy a decade ago, is plenty vigorous these days in its new home in Washington. To celebrate, the Atlantic has published a special ‘150th anniversary issue.’ And that, alas, is where things went horribly wrong.”

The Nobel laureate spoke of the power of words to change culture. “Pamuk talked of the ‘literary globalization of the world’ and outlined the way the novelist’s imagination — when employed to evoke ‘the other, the stranger, the enemy that resonates inside each of our heads’ — can be a powerful, liberating force.”

Harry Potter high priestess JK Rowling may say that the wizard Dumbledore is gay, but should her opinion make a difference to her readers? “The question is distracting, which is why it never really emerges in the books themselves. Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should.”

“The trend of opening coffee shops inside bookstores has fallen foul of the authorities amid a general clampdown on social and intellectual freedoms. Four bookshops in Tehran this week closed their coffee shops after receiving a 72-hour ultimatum from Amaken-e Omoomi, a state body governing the retail trade.”

“A copy of J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel sold at auction Thursday for almost $41,000. The copy of the hardback first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” published in 1997 and signed “Joanne Rowling” on the back of the title page.”

“Against market trends, Dzanc Books is a small publisher poised to succeed, hiring staff and expanding quickly. And that may be because it sprouted from a blog rather than a traditional printing press, and it is certainly web-savvy.”

We tend to take Shakespeare at face value, probably just because the Bard’s work is so familiar. But a close look at, say, King Lear offers plenty of reminders that this is not an easy play to like at first reading. “Some were frustrated by its inconsistencies and contradictions… The biggest complaints, though, are stirred by the almost sadistic cruelty that pervades the text: It’s not an easy play to stomach.”

“By and large, literary writers working for Hollywood have not had great luck at it… Until Tom Perrotta came along, that is. Perrotta, whose novels Election and Little Children were made into acclaimed films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher… It’s a sign of the excitement over Perrotta’s work that the screenplay was almost done before the novel.”

The revelation by author JK Rowling that the wizard Dumbledore is gay has journalists (and, it should be said, some parents and activists groups) in a tizzy. But Rowling’s young readers seem to have taken the news in stride. Rowling herself described the revelation of Dumbledore’s sexuality as “freeing.” “He’s my character,” she asserted. “I have the right to know what I know about him and say what I say about him.”