Category: publishing

“Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan, the publisher of a widely criticized O. J. Simpson book, after he heard reports of a heated conversation Ms. Regan had with a company lawyer on Friday that included comments that were deemed anti-Semitic.”

“The established view has been that these languages evolve independently and each is unique, whether they are based on English or Danish. But Mr. Crystal says that modern research strongly suggests that all these languages derive from a 15th-century Portuguese pidgin. As the Portuguese explored Asia, Africa and the Americas, this prototypical pidgin spread, and the syntax remained in place as words changed to adapt to other languages. But there is still evidence of that old Portuguese pidgin.”

So Judith Regan was fired after her role in OJ’s book fiasco. Still. “It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ms. Regan was fired not for her legendarily difficult personality — and not, or not just, because of her longstanding rivalry with HarperCollins’ Chief Executive Officer Jane Friedman — but for her repeated affronts to the bland conformity of New York publishing.”

“Dickens has long been recognized as a skillful and accurate chronicler of human behavior. His characters are rendered with a realist’s dedicated, unstinting eye. Physician readers of Dickens’s stories have commented on the precision with which he portrays his characters’ quirks and oddities — many of which are now recognized as disease states. Some of his most memorable characters are virtual case studies of diseases that were not described or understood until long after Dickens’s time.”

“In Australia we seem to be witnessing a disinheriting of the national mind – the alternately rapid and gradual, wilful and accidental disappearing of our literary heritage, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Explaining what has led to the disarray of literary education in this country is difficult.”

“On the book pages of North America, nothing matters more than conflict of interest. It makes editors fearful and authors bitter. Nobody complains if reviewers can’t write, know little about their subject, put their readers to sleep or absurdly overrate a book’s quality…”

Is Michael Crichton engaging in real world literary payback with one of the characters in his new book? “One of the new book’s minor characters — Mick Crowley, a Washington political columnist who rapes a baby — may be a literary dagger aimed at Michael Crowley, a Washington political reporter who wrote an unflattering article about Mr. Crichton this year.

Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter books, has not had a good year (no new Harry). “Instead of the more than £20m profits that analysts had pencilled in for this year, it admitted last night that it will make closer to £5m. In the first six months of the year it made £4m, suggesting the latter half of 2006 has been a disaster.”

“One of the most vexed questions in Homeric scholarship is how, exactly, the written texts we have emerged from the songs of illiterate bards. It is easy to imagine a series of singers wandering through the towns of archaic Greece, telling and retelling the story of Troy. But how could a poem as long as The Iliad or The Odyssey–each of which would have taken at least three days to perform–have been composed without the use of writing?”