Category: publishing

“Though most newspapers today are owned by publicly traded corporations, that’s a relatively recent development. Fifty years ago, almost all of the nation’s newspapers were privately owned, in many cases by the families that had founded them.” Now, as newspapers struggle, corporations are thinking about unloading, and there appears to be interest among private buyers.

This fall, four out of six of France’s top novel prizes went to non-French writers. So what does this mean about the state of French literature?

Parents at a school in Illinois want the school to move “a picture book about two male penguins raising a baby penguin” to a restricted section of the library. Why? “Complaining about the book’s homosexual undertones, some parents of Shiloh Elementary School students believe the book — available to be checked out of the school’s library in this 11,000-resident town 20 miles east of St. Louis — tackles topics their children aren’t ready to handle.”

“There I was, reading On Opera by the late philosopher Bernard Williams, and I was suddenly transported back to my childhood. How so? Because of the way it smelled. … How to describe why one book smells nicer than another? I could burble on about the Williams book’s hints of musk, fresh grass, and topnotes of vanilla, but you can see that I’d never make it as a wine writer. But maybe there is a secret community of book-sniffers out there who know what I mean.”

With his novel, “Johnny Come Home,” Jake Arnott inadvertently libelled a man who shares a name and other traits with a fictional character. “Where real names are involved, an author cannot hide behind that all-purpose shield: ‘any resemblance is purely coincidental’. Nor do the courts accept ignorance as a defence. If you can be shown, by using a real-life name, to have injured a real-life reputation, then you will pay. The law is right alongside the Bard: ‘He who steals my purse, steals trash. But he who steals my good name, steals all that I have.’ You’re safe, of course, if your named victim has no good name to lose.”

“In the weeks leading up to his hanging for high treason 121 years ago today, Louis Riel struck up a friendship with his jailer. This week, a poem the Métis leader wrote for Robert Gordon becomes a prized part of the archives at the University of Saskatchewan. …” Written in English “in Riel’s flowing script, the poem was apparently penned at Mr. Gordon’s request. The loose pages, now yellowed with time, are dated Oct. 27, 1885. Riel was hanged about three weeks later on Nov. 16.”

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s wife on Thursday presented the initial three volumes of the first full collection of his works to be published in Russia, a country still struggling with the legacy of the oppressive era he documented. It was a cherished moment for the aging Nobel laureate, who has been through prison camps and exile and, Natalya Solzhenitsyn said, feels the ‘draining of the life force’ as his 88th birthday approaches. He was not at the presentation and his wife did not elaborate on his health.”

“Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country’s publishing industry into crisis… The clampdown has been headed by the hardline culture minister, Mohammed Hossein Saffar Harandi, a former revolutionary guard and close ally of [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. It follows a relative thaw during the eight-year presidency of Mr Ahmadinejad’s reformist predecessor, Mohammed Khatami.”

Richard Powers’ “The Echo Maker,” a scientific tale of memory and identity in the age of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, has won the National Book Award for fiction.

Jerome Weeks is on the case: “The best spy thrillers, it seems, have told three central stories…”