Category: publishing

“Nadine Gordimer — the South African writer who helped bring the world’s attention to the evils of apartheid and won the 1991 Nobel Prize for her efforts — had a bitter falling out with Ronald Suresh Roberts, the young biographer to whom she had granted extraordinary access during his five years of research. Since it appeared last year, Roberts’s biography, ‘No Cold Kitchen,’ has been the talk of literary South Africa.”

A UK author is taking a stand on behalf of independent booksellers by demanding that Amazon stop offering his book for sale on their website. “George Walker, author of Tales from an Airfield, was horrified to find that his new title was featured on the site without his permission, following good sales in bookshops.”

Peter Pan has been a staple of children’s literature for as long as anyone currently alive can remember, and the stage version of the story has been not only a popular attraction for families, but a crucial moneymaker for the UK hospital that was granted the royalties by author JM Barrie. But when the copyright to Peter Pan expired, and the royalties dried up, the hospital had to scramble. The answer? A sequel, of course.

Murder Ink, a bookstore in business for 34 years, is closing. A convergence of circumstances afflicting most independent bookstores in America, is responsible. “There are currently about 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States, not counting stores that deal only in used books… In 1993 the number stood at about 4,700.”

The New York Review Children’s Collection is in the business of resurrecting beloved kids’ books. “Reprint rights come cheaply enough, [editor Edwin] Frank says, for the New York Review to make money on reissues that sell as few as 5,000 copies. And whatever the numbers, the books’ reappearance makes booksellers and buyers happy — reversing, in a tiny but symbolic way, the odious publishing trend toward keeping books in print for shorter and shorter periods of time.”

“The right’s sleep of reason is bringing forth dark, futuristic political thrillers” — science fiction in which Chelsea Clinton is president and terrorists rule Manhattan. For conservatives, such writing is “coping behavior. It’s similar to the tricks some doctors teach young patients who are struggling with cancer or other fatal diseases: They should visualize their maladies. If they picture the tumors ravaging their bodies, they can picture their bodies fighting them off and blasting them into oblivion. Culture war fiction serves the same function.”

“In the spring of 2005, a fire at the Hotel Chelsea sent residents fleeing to the lobby. While the firefighters worked, the residents passed a bottle and told stories about life in the legendary Bohemian outpost…. When the night ended, Debbie Martin and Ed Hamilton, a couple of transplanted Kentuckians who have lived at the Chelsea for more than a decade, wanted to find a way to keep the stories and camaraderie going. And so was born ‘Living with Legends’ (hotelchelseablog.com), a hip and literate blog about life in the red-brick and black-wrought-iron behemoth on West 23rd Street.”

“Media giant News Corp. took the unusual step Monday of releasing notes of a conversation between one of its attorneys and former book publisher Judith Regan to show that she made anti-Semitic remarks that led to her firing.”

Kashmir’s few literary bookshops closed down a couple of years after a Muslim armed revolt against Indian rule broke out in the region at the end of 1989. Now they have reopened, and “the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy jostle for space with Salman Rushdie and Dan Brown bestsellers in Srinagar’s few bookshops.”

“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward.”