Category: publishing

“The New York literary agent Andrew Wylie, who represents such highbrow but also high-selling authors as Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, announced in Le Monde that he has signed three French writers: two novelists, Christine Angot and Philippe Djian, and a journalist, Florence Hartmann. While Mr. Wylie’s signing a new client would be no big news here, in France, he has done the equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into the traditional world of French publishing.”

“Half a dozen bizarre tomes including a guide to stray shopping trolleys and a history of a Coventry ice-cream business may win their 15 minutes of fame as contenders for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The competition, which has been run by The Bookseller magazine since 1978, invites publishers, booksellers and libraries to submit their choices of the strange and odd.”

“We have a collection of books that don’t do a very good job teaching people how to read, with a series of bogus antagonists and misleading titles. What might be the point? The better ones function as highfalutin Reader’s Digests, a way to get the pleasures and buzz of literary masterpieces in a fraction of the time required to actually read them. On the face of it, this is a kind of literary laziness…”

The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation is planning a “national home for poetry” in the city’s River North district. The new building would be home to the offices of Poetry Magazine, “a library to house the foundation’s 30,000 volumes… as well as resources and reading rooms for scholars and poetry enthusiasts, and spaces for public forums, conferences and performances.”

“Newfoundland writer Kenneth J. Harvey’s story of a man wrongfully convicted has won [Canada’s] Writers’ Trust Award for fiction and U.K.-based Dragan Todorovic has won the non-fiction prize for his heartfelt lament for Yugoslavia.”

Granta has made another list of Best Young Writers. This time young means under 35. “It used to be 40. That was one of the great perks of being a writer. You could stay young until 40: it was official; Granta said so. How we writers enjoyed mocking gymnasts – yes, you can do bendy things and win gold medals at the Olympics, but by 17 you’re already old.”

In the United Arab Emirates, poetry – along with falconry and horsemanship – is the pinnacle of manly achievement. Even the hard-headed ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, has a website featuring his verses and declaring that ‘poetry has allowed Sheikh Mohammed to express the creative, sensitive side of his nature that he has little chance to display in the political arena’. As a hobby of princes, it is an accordingly lucrative business.”

Both companies are digitizing books. “Google’s approach may allow it to create a searchable database quicker than Microsoft, but the path taken by Microsoft will be better for authors and publishers in the long term,” says a Microsoft spokesman. Why? “Microsoft will work with its partners to help them make money from the search projects.”

“We, the people, have been empowered. We can send what are basically free telegrams to people around the globe, create and distribute photographs and video at little or no cost, broadcast our ruminations through blogs, and browse many of the world’s greatest art museums and library collections — all from our own desks. Public libraries and Internet cafes around the world assure free or cheap access to those still without home computers. If that isn’t progress, if this isn’t empowerment, what is? Yet there is a catch.”

“Of the 100 bestselling paperbacks last year, more than a tenth were tales of real-life misery, and they make up six of the top 10 in theSunday Times paperback bestseller list. New figures show that the misery memoir market doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, with up to 10 new titles vying to be top of the glums each month.”