Category: publishing

“Finn is the latest example of a burgeoning — and commercially successful — literary genre: works that appropriate minor characters from major fiction or drama and award them starring roles. For reasons both legal and historical, 19th century American fiction has seemed especially ripe for revision. The trend may represent a delayed reaction to the ‘new social history’ of the 1970s, in which women, minorities and working people emerged from the background to assume bigger speaking parts.”

“Elizabeth Alexander, a poet, playwright, essayist and Yale University professor, has won the first Jackson Poetry Prize, a $50,000 award given to an American poet whose work has been critically recognized but has not yet received significant public attention.”

“Banco del Libro, a nonprofit Venezuelan network that has distributed books to children for nearly half a century, is the 2007 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature. The award, which includes a cash prize of $710,000, was established by the Swedish government in 2002 and is the largest children’s book award in the world.”

“The women who so identified with Bridget Jones a decade ago have now settled down and had children. The book industry noticed – and the current glut of ‘yummy-mummy lit’ is the result.” What is ‘yummy-mummy,’ you may well ask? (You may well regret asking.) Suffice to say, attaching the “literature” tag to the unbelievably formulaic genre at all is probably stretching credulity.

The Jane Austen fan club is real, it is global, and if you question its power, just step into any bookstore and utter the word “overrated” in the general direction of a copy of “Emma.” (Then duck.) But what drives the mania? “Why can’t folks get enough of Austen’s Regency-era escapism that typically features a boy, a girl, a great love story, only a hint of sex, the great divides of class and money, plus an abundance of heaving bosoms and tight breeches?”

“A new book about the ‘father of American literature’ contends that his greater interest lay in the speculation, invention and money-making schemes that took him and his fortunes on a roller-coaster ride throughout his life.”

Some novels lend themselves to annotations. Footnotes provide information to help explain context. But some annotated efforts seem novel-length in their own right. So they really add anything to appreciating a classic text?

UK books and music chain “HMV is planning to close up to 30 of its Waterstone’s book shops, give more space to higher margin items and reduce the number of high brow books, as part of an overhaul to restore the fortunes of the struggling business.”

First printing for this summer’s final installment of the Harry Potter frnachise will be 12 million copies. “The previous Potter book, ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,’ was released in 2005 with a first printing of 10.8 million copies and sales of 6.9 million in the first 24 hours.”

“Why did Mario Vargas Llosa punch Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his rival for the title of Latin America’s foremost 20th-century novelist, in a Mexican cinema in 1976, thus beginning the longest feud in contemporary letters? Ah, now there’s a question. And it is one for which – unlike the posers in the rest of that literary litany – there may at last be a definitive answer.”