Category: publishing

“Don DeLillo, the celebrated novelist who once complained that as a young writer he ‘lacked ambition,’ has been named the first recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction,” a new lifetime achievement award.

“Alexandria and Knoxville ranked No. 1 and No. 2 on Amazon.com’s annual list of U.S. cities buying the most books, newspapers and magazines per capita from the online retailer.”

“There are American novelists, and then there are American women novelists – at least according to Wikipedia, where outrage has been building over the quiet categorisation of major names such as Harper Lee and Donna Tartt according to their gender.”

Amphetamines.

“It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That’s not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don’t correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It’s something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.”

“Writing poetry is a solitary activity. Most of the time one has zero confidence in what one is doing… Public readings assure poets that there is an audience for poetry in this country and that Americans not only can make sense of their poems, but appear to actually like them.”

“John Simpson began working at OED in 1976. The young index-card-shuffling assistant” became the man who led the transformation of the dictionary from a mammoth set of heavy printed volumes to “a vast, searchable database that tells the story of human history through a constantly expanding survey of the words we use.”

“The event aims to promote literacy in the ‘spirit of generosity, passion and mass participation’. Each volunteer will give out 20 copies of their favourite book to people in their community who do not read.”

David “Blum is the editor of Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service that is helping to promote a renaissance of novella-length journalism and fiction, known as e-shorts.”

“It has been argued that a chronic fever of distraction and fascination arrives on waves of Wi-Fi to stunt our attention spans, encouraging writers to paddle about, tweeting and liking, instead of striking out for deeper waters.”