Category: publishing

Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, is stepping down after 20 years and will be succeeded in one of the most influential posts in the poetry world by Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

In the 1990s, “post-communist Russians had two choices of reading: classical masters such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or pulp fiction. Boris Akunin spotted the gap. Realising, as he puts it, that every class needs a ‘literature it can read and enjoy’, he invented a new kind of detective genre set in imperial Russia.”

“As well as being popular among children learning English, the untranslated Harry Potters have seen huge demand from impatient fans who want the books as soon as they come out.
Half of Harry Potter sales were export sales. Readers don’t want to wait while it gets translated.”

Book luminaries gather at Columbia University to discuss the state of book reviews. “There was never a Golden Age of Book Reviewing…. It was always a sideshow, even at the newspapers that chose to support it.”

Robert Ludlum was a hugely successful author when he died in 2001. “By the time of his death in 2001, he had sold 210 million books – a figure only exceeded by J.K. Rowling.” But “in the years since his death, 12 new works bearing his name have hit the bookshelves and beach-towels of the world.”

“Books are a collective endeavour. The book that you hold in your hands is stuffed full of what Jerome McGann describes as ‘the dynamic social relations which always exist in literary production’. And believe me, there have been some “dynamic social relations” going on in my office in the last week or so. Producing a text for publication is dynamic, nerve-wracking and all-consuming.”

“College campuses are widely supposed to be the bastions of shaggy liberalism, but the good people managing our higher education system have sometimes behaved as if they were possessed by the spirit of Reaganomics rather than the enlightened principles of humanism. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this vexation is their treatment of university presses.”

“When Thomas Carlyle spoke of ‘the difficulties of a book, of getting it done, of reducing chaos to order’ he wasn’t kidding. Books don’t just happen. They are the result of the will to publish an individual’s writings, thoughts and ideas. It’s the backroom boys who make this happen, who – in short – get it right. And in getting it right, they erase themselves from the book.”

“The Review will launch two separate lists for paperback fiction: one for mass market titles and one for the larger, more expensive trade paperback format. The Review will continue to rank non-fiction paperbacks on one list.”

“What happens to poetry in the Digital Age? In one of the first academic works in the field, Swedish researcher Maria Engberg has studied how the ability of the computer to combine words, images, movement, and sounds is impacting both writing and reading.”