Category: publishing

A Paris literature professor has published an instructional manual for intelligent folks who wish to learn how to talk about books they haven’t actually read without sounding like blithering idiots. Needless to say, it’s become a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

No one was more surprised than children’s author Susan Patron when her latest book began getting yanked from library shelves because of a mention of a dog getting bit on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. But predictably, the controversy (along with the book’s prestigious Newbery Award) has Patron’s book flying off the shelves at Amazon.

“Newsroom sources at the Times expect the Sunday Book Review will be folded into a new hybrid opinion section and delivered in Saturday papers. The new section that some staffers have seen would be tabloid-sized, with the favored format apparently using dual front pages like the New York City tabs.”

“The former Harper’s editor is starting a quarterly. “His journal will examine current topics from numerous historical perspectives. With a sheaf of historical texts alongside reflection by contemporary essayists, each issue will, according the Web site Laphamsquarterly.com, open ‘the doors of history behind the events in the news’ and be a bulwark against ‘the general state of amnesia’.”

A college bans student citations of Wikipedia in research papers. It’s part of “a growing debate within journalism, the law and academia over what respect, if any, to give Wikipedia articles, written by hundreds of volunteers and subject to mistakes and sometimes deliberate falsehoods. Wikipedia itself has restricted the editing of some subjects, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said.”

“The director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, will chair the judges of the 39th Man Booker prize. He will be joined on the panel for the 2007 award by the poet Wendy Cope, the journalist and novelist Giles Foden, the biographer Ruth Scurr and the actor Imogen Stubbs.”

“Think of the great moral dilemmas of the age – terrorism, global warming, multiculturalism. The ethical climate is not set until the novelists have spoken. If someone writes brilliant prose, they must be an unimpeachable human being.” Or not…

“A file-sharing website has been ordered to reveal the names of users who posted illegal copies of JRR Tolkien’s novels online by a US court. Several of Tolkien’s works, including The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, appeared on the eSnips site last year. The site agreed to remove the documents but the author’s estate is worried that people will simply resubmit them.”

In readiness for an expected flurry of visitors to York for the centenary celebrations of Auden’s birth, local cab drivers have been trained to recite his poems to their unsuspecting passengers.

“Who reads poetry, what does it mean to ‘understand’ poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation’s mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity.” The Poetry Foundation answers back…