Category: publishing

Three Orlando Weekly managers have been arrested for running ads for the adult entertainment industry. Police say the ads offer prostitution. “The Weekly’s downtown offices also were served notice on racketeering charges for contributing to the prostitution industry. Officials said that the newspaper’s advertising executives also helped escort services design ads that would cloak them from the eyes of law-enforcement officers.”

“The truth is most Americans have lost touch with the best of what poetry is: a record of some of civilization’s greatest writers–and wisest people–taking on the questions and emotions that define us. So why aren’t we reading poetry?”

“The Man Booker Prize has been criticised over the years for selecting dark, unreadable and worthy tomes unlike the winners of other more populist literary prizes. Now, in the week that Anne Enright became its 2007 winner, it is shaking off criticisms of being elitist and out of touch by taking the radical step of placing all its shortlisted novels online, available free to anyone worldwide.”

“Almost 20 years after his death, the famously lean prose of the short-story writer Raymond Carver may be about to put on a little weight. His widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, is planning to bring out a new version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the collection that made his name on its publication in 1981. It’s the latest round in a tug of war over Carver’s fiction between his second wife and Gordon Lish, the editor who launched Carver’s career.”

“Whether fiction really has lost authority in our culture is a difficult question to answer. The situation is different in Canada and the United States, for one thing. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, dealt a blow to the New York publishing industry from which it has not yet completely recovered. Literacy is also declining in that country. Owners of independent bookstores in Toronto, specializing more in high-end products, do not agree that literary fiction is on the downswing.”

Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji are among the writers in the running for this year’s edition of Canada’s Governor-General’s Literary Awards.

“If a laureate’s real purpose is to give voice to the state we are in, then Andrew Marvell was a man with a public purpose who lived in political times and who gave voice to the private impact of history in the making. Andrew Motion increasingly looks like a poet desperately in search of a purpose. And that’s not a failure of Andrew Motion’s imagination. It’s the political failure of our collective imagination.”

Irish author Anne Enright wins this year’s Man Booker Prize. “The novelist’s family saga The Gathering beat bookmakers’ favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones to be named the best novel of the past 12 months.”

“Poems – words – have power in Burma, and the military authorities realise it. International PEN, the global writer’s association, has a Writers in Prison Committee, led by Sara Whyatt, which is currently campaigning for the release of nine writers serving sentences ranging from seven to 21 years.”

Turkey has had a rough few years literary-wise. But “in terms of its position between east and west, Turkey is expected to be a significant player in the book trade. Book production in the country is currently growing at a rate of 25% a year – 32,750 books were published there last year, up from 9,491 a decade before. The number of Turkish publishers has also doubled since 2000, now standing at more than 1,700.”