Category: publishing

Norman Mailer has “never regarded poetic truth as truth of an inferior variety. From An American Dream and Advertisements for Myself through The Armies of the Night and Why Are We in Vietnam? through The Executioner’s Song and Marilyn he has felt free to follow the spirit and the methods of fictional inquiry to gain access to the truth of our times, in an enterprise that may be riskier than the historian’s but offers richer rewards.”

“The aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew in on his own plane. George Orwell took his pen to the battlefield and nearly died when he was shot through the neck. Arthur Koestler was locked up by Franco supporters.” A traveling exhibition examines the eyewitness journalism of the Spanish Civil War.

The British Library is having major budget problems. And for the first time in its history, the library “may have to start charging researchers for admission to its famous reading rooms. With a threat of cuts of up to seven per cent to its £100 million budget, money-saving measures are being lined up at the library, which has a collection of 150 million items.”

“In 2005 the ABA registered 90 new stores. Last year there were 97, spanning the country from tiny, two-store towns to bursting metropolises. It’s a recent shift, and one that should be heartening for famished bookworms. But it leaves one wondering, even worrying, about these novice booksellers, so new to a business where 2 percent is often considered a good margin of profit. Are they blinded by their love of books, harboring romantic dreams of earning a living? Is there even room in the cultural landscape for the independent bookstore? Is it worth the risk?”

“More than 130 independent publishers across the country were hurled into financial crisis on Dec. 29 with the bankruptcy of the parent company of Publishers Group West, the Berkeley firm that distributes books from much of the small press world… The bankruptcy hit these small presses at the worst possible time — when Publishers Group West was holding onto its sales revenues from the three months before Christmas, its most profitable time of the year.”

The publisher was responsible for the OJ book. ” ‘Because She Can’, by former Regan employee Bridie Clark, not only builds upon the tumultuous legend of Regan, fired last month amid reports of anti-Semitic remarks, but adds to what has been a surprisingly small genre. While Hollywood and the magazine world have been endlessly parodied, in such books and movies as The Player and The Devil Wears Prada, there are few takeoffs on the book world.”

“The reinvention of the ‘boys’ own adventure’ genre for the 21st century seems to have taken the media by storm. The thinking seems to be that getting boys to read is a victory in itself. No need to go any further than that. But surely what you read is every bit as important as reading itself.”

“The Last Messages tells the story of a fictitious information-technology executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages. His messages, and the replies — roughly 1,000 altogether — are listed in chronological order in the 332-page novel written by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala. The texts are rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations commonly used in regular SMS traffic.”

“Among the fiction nominees are the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), Man/Booker winner Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic), and Dave Eggers for What Is the What (McSweeney’s).”

“On a recent trip to an empty Borders I feared for my profession, not to mention the publishing industry. Nearly all the stuff in their shop is already available digitally online. And once books go too, perhaps the empty bookshops will be replaced with download “hubs” where we can buy Costalottashmucks coffee and download the latest tunes, novels and movies from the matrix while money trickles out of our bank accounts, all funnelled through our mobile phones. The real nub of the issue for me is that screens will now mediate the text.”