Category: publishing

A list of 125 top writers’ Top Tens makes the cut. “An unexceptionable list, right? Well, only until you start thinking about it. Critic Sven Birkerts, in his introductory essay, picks up on two oddities: first, only one of the works is by a woman (and she, Mary Ann Evans, used the male pen name of George Eliot); second, only one was written before the 19th century. No Homer, no Dante, no Chaucer. Also no Charles Dickens. Or Jane Austen.”

India’s literary elite have long looked to London And New York for their “scene.” “But the Booker Prize has affected the future of Indian novelists. Arundhati Roy’s Booker prize win in 1997 sparked an interest in Indian writing which has led to many new publishing houses being set up.”

Getting real sales numbers on books is almost impossible. “At a trial underway in Los Angeles pitting media mogul Philip Anschutz against author Clive Cussler. Anschutz says he bought the film rights to one of Cussler’s books because he was told it had sold 100 million copies worldwide. Because of those staggering — and bogus — figures, Anschutz maintains, he paid $10 million for the film rights. The resulting film, the 2005 ‘Sahara,’ did poorly at the box office.”

“Many years from now, when people are looking back, my first hope would be that the course of the river of American poetry would have been altered by a few degrees–or maybe more–by the Poetry Foundation. If less than that happens, but there’s something discernible enough to be called the Chicago Movement, that wouldn’t disappoint me, either. I don’t know what the Chicago Movement is. I have no idea. It’s not poets or a kind of poetry. But it implies a departure from the status quo today. If there’s an effect on the art form, I hope it would be a bigger audience and a poetry that is deriving energy from a general audience.”

Like many Indian writers before her, Kiran Desai left her country for the West. But with Indian literary culture thriving, some writers have returned, deeming the atmosphere essential to their work. “No one in India has pinpointed the next homegrown prize-winning writer, but Desai’s (non-resident Indian) win seems to confirm, rather than undermine, the place of novelists writing in India now.”

“Libraries are no longer intimidating but inviting. Where once libraries went to considerable lengths to keep people out, now they struggle to entice all kinds of people in, the young, the poor, the lame, the blind.”

“Why do we read on trains? For as many reasons as there are readers, one suspects; the public uses of a book, a newspaper or a magazine are unlimited. Obviously, they take you away from what are, unless you are making a very short and simple trip, gruelling surroundings; lumped into a confined space with a load of people you dont know, subject to delays and confusions that cant be anticipated, unable to control noise or temperature or random incidents.”

Alice Munro was cited for The View from Castle Rock. Other best-book finalists are Mark Frutkin of Ottawa for Fabrizio’s Return, Toronto-raised Claire Messud, who lives in Massachusetts, for The Emperor’s Children, Nega Mezlekia of Toronto for The Unfortunate Marriage and New Brunswick-born David Adams Richards for The Friends of Meager Fortune.

“According to figures from the American Printing House for the Blind, the country’s oldest manufacturer of educational material for blind students, today fewer than one-quarter of the blind children in this country who could potentially learn Braille actually do so. (Not all blind children can learn Braille. Many children born blind are also born with cognitive disabilities that make mastering Braille impossible.) Braille’s decline was the byproduct of a revolution in education for the blind that, for a time, made Braille seem irrelevant.” Now, Braille is in a comeback…

Robert Louis Stevenson dominates Edinburgh this month. “All this February, readers can pick up one of 25,000 free copies of the book [“Kidnapped”] from a variety of public libraries across Edinburgh, with plans afoot to leave further copies on buses and park benches and in cafes and bars. Added to this, a month-long events programme encompasses talks, readings, storytelling, drama workshops, film shows, discussions and puppetry.”