Category: publishing

“Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise caused a sensation when published in English last year. Now the charge that she was anti-Semitic – despite being Jewish herself – threatens her reputation.The claims made in that passage have fuelled a trans-Atlantic row about whether the writer was indeed an anti-Semitic Jew who cosied up to some of the most unpleasant anti-Semites in 1930s France.”

The bookseller said it would concentrate on its buiness in the US. “The group said it had hired the investment bank Merrill Lynch to explore alternatives for its 71 stores in the UK. It also plans to get rid of its businesses in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The announcement follows HMV’s decision last week to close 30 of its Waterstone’s book chain.”

Borders and Barnes & Noble both report mediocre sales. “With so many mergers and acquisitions across the equity landscape, some industry analysts see the book-selling business as ripe for the picking.”

“Interesting things are happening on a variety of fronts that are changing the way books are found, read and talked about, and in almost every case for the good.”

“Such films could eventually take the place of in-store book readings, which attract fewer attendees all the time, many booksellers say. Some authors go to events and are really captivating personalities. That does not describe most of them.”

“What is it about a flesh-and-blood author that’s so fascinating? Is it that, knowing (and loving) the works, we want to know the person behind them? Or is it less the writer per se than the writer as a biographical cipher – are we less interested in their lives for their own sake than for the literary “clues” that their various histories (and, in talks, off-the-cuff remarks) might impart?”

“The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movement’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University.”

In a previouly unpublished article, Susan Sontag writes in defense of fiction in a world of fast-food media. “A great writer of fiction both creates – through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms – a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.”

“An all too predictable moralism surrounds the reading of books. There is a prescribed way of reading: one page at a time, starting from the front of the book to the back, paying close attention to every single page in order, no skipping around. But the reality is that most of us graze — read a bit, put the book down, start up again.”