Category: publishing

“In the internet age, it is no wonder that the book is suffering, publishers and booksellers with it. And yes, writers too. Was it ever easier or better? Well, in the 1920s Virginia Woolf would have written a story, set it and had it printed. Independent-spirited, discerning booksellers would have recognised a startling new talent and begun to stock her books for similarly minded readers. How lovely and romantic – and possibly imaginary – that sounds. But is it?”

Charles Simic, the United States’ new poet laureate, is unlike his predecessors. “There is nothing of the Midwest or the Popular Front about his work, which is sponsored mainly by foreign literatures. He draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French Surrealism, to create a style like nothing else in American literature. Yet Mr. Simic’s verse remains recognizably American — not just in its grainy, hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940s film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism.”

“Like a lot of noir novels, the career of Douglas Anne Munson, a hard-boiled Los Angeles writer who once seemed like one of the city’s bright new lights, just gets murkier and more confusing the closer you look.” It remains elusive even as champions of the novelist, who used the pen name Mercedes Lambert and died in 2003, ensure that her work gets another chance at the spotlight. “‘She wrote mystery novels,’ said Michael Connelly, who never knew Munson but called her first novel, ‘El Niño,’ … a major influence on his work. ‘But she was probably the biggest mystery of all.'”

Erica Jong writes at length on the letters page of The New York Times Book Review: “Rachel Donadio’s summary of the trans-Atlantic response to Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ … caught my attention because I happened to be president of the Authors Guild when that book was published in America. What I remember most from that time was the rampant hypocrisy of the response. … It seems to me there are no shades of gray here. Suppressing a book because you disagree with its content is always a challenge to freedom of speech. “

Solomon: “What do you make of the current literary scene?” Gordon: “I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.”

Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series, announced that the seventh and final Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” sold 11.5 million copies in its first 10 days and that an original printing of 12 million has been increased to 14 million.

On the same day Charles Simic was named Poet Laureate of the United States, succeeding Donald Hall, he also received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery” of the art of poetry from the American Academy of Poets.

It’s been 40 years since author S.E. Hinton’s landmark novel of teen rebellion, The Outsiders, was first published. It wasn’t an immediate bestseller, “yet the book has now sold more than 13.4 million copies, is requisite reading in schools worldwide and Hinton receives far more fan mail than she can respond to. Truth be told, she doesn’t always feel deserving of it.”

Corporations such as BMW are commissioning and publishing books. “Writers have had patrons in the past, but I fear the day when multinational corporations sponsor academics and publishers and authors to frame things from their point of view, and manage not to slap their logos all over it like a warning. Who am I kidding? That day is already here. So what can we do about it?”

The latest Harry Potter book won’t be released in China for another three months, due to the time-consuming nature of translation, “but eager fans have posted their own translations online.” The Chinese publisher is furious, but may not have legal standing to force the unofficial translations to be removed.