Category: publishing

A century after his birth, W.H. Auden “resists the efforts of readers to delimit him or publishers to comfortably sell him…. The poet who makes me go to his beloved OED to find out what those obscure, toothsome words mean is the same poet who demanded that the poems in his first Collected Poetry in 1945 be printed alphabetically according to the first word of each poem rather than chronologically, so as to frustrate readers’ preconceived notions about him.”

It can be ridiculously difficult for unproven authors to attract the attention of a publisher, not to mention an audience of readers. Increasingly, authors are turning to technology – specifically, the podcast – to get their name out there. The literary podcast has even become widespread enough for a dedicated download site devoted to the subgenre to spring up.

“Two leading publishers have hit on the idea of boiling down classic novels for modern audiences who are too busy/stupid to read the real thing. … HarperCollins is reducing War and Peace from almost 1,500 pages to 900. It says it will give us less war. Perhaps it has hit on the answer. Why not The Only Child Karamazov, Le Misérable, A Tale of Two Medium-Sized Towns, Limited Expectations and A Couple of Days in the Country?”

A World Book Day poll at worldbookday.com asked readers to list the ten books they can’t live without. “In the end, quality tells. People may have bought The Da Vinci Code in its millions but, when asked to name the most precious book they have read, they relegated it to 42nd place and chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.”

What should we make of the literary trend of authors inserting fictionalized versions of themselves into their novels? “Realistic fiction demands that the details of a character’s job should be as convincing as possible, and the creation of a creative writer uses research already accrued… But there is also a deeper mental explanation.”

“Yale University has awarded the $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 2007 to Wellesley College English professor Frank Bidart. A three-judge panel said Bidart’s poems — ‘eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle — venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry.'”

Newbery Award winner Susan Patron, a target of ire for using the word “scrotum” in her children’s book, says adults are correct in acknowledging the power of the written word. “Children who read widely understand more about the world; they have a foundation for making better decisions. They think, and because of that, they may even challenge their parents’ beliefs. For some, a scary idea, but isn’t a thinking child preferable to one who accepts the world at face value and has no aim to change it for the better?”

Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a child soldier might seem an awkward match for coffee and pastries. But “with Starbucks’ decision to promote and sell his book in more than 6,000 stores, the 26-year-old author has been thrust into the role of spokesman for child soldiers worldwide. He’s become an overnight celebrity, with a 10-city book tour scheduled for the coffee chain. In a life filled with some truly shocking reversals, this new chapter may be just about the last thing he ever expected.”

“Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.”

Literary critics, particularly those with blogs, have seemingly been shaken loose from the traditional need to bow and scrape at the altar of the classics. Some find this to be a positive development – after all, why should everyone have to love Chaucer? But Stephen Moss says that it amounts to the dumbing down of what should be a serious examination of literature, and shows a distinct lack of intellectual curiosity.