Category: publishing

“To the great delight of retailers, autumn is packed with big-budget, name-brand writers, and winners have already begun to emerge, though there have been some crackups as well, and the climate has made it a particularly difficult season for lesser-known writers.”

Fabled Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart is 100 years old. “But the historic firm that is being celebrated, while still the home of Canada’s most famous writers, including Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen and Michael Ondaatje, has been reconfigured in the past six years in ways that might be causing Jack McClelland to spin in his grave.”

“Do books have to be ugly? It is a question that poses itself almost every time one walks through one of the huge American-style bookshops that are now the norm in this country, gazing with dismay at the heaps of ugly dust-wrappers and book covers.”

” ‘The real culture of America,’ ” Lawrence Ferlinghetti said after announcing the finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards, ” ‘is not corporate monoculture and television. It’s the writers, teachers, universities, libraries and librarians. That’s the mainstream culture of America.’ It’s hard to say what’s more unexpected: to hear Ferlinghetti invoke the mainstream or to see him take part in an event like this. … Still, the issue he raises — that of the mainstream and literature’s place within it, of why this stuff matters — is one readers and writers have no choice but to take on.”

With his book-tour stop at the Orange County Jail in Florida, crime writer Dennis Lehane became the latest of a dozen authors to visit a class where literature is used to teach teenage boys that, as their program coordinator put it, “they don’t have to be dirtbags.” “Ernest J. Gaines was the first author to come, in 2001, after the group read ‘A Lesson Before Dying’ (Random House), about a black youth sentenced to death. He has visited twice. Brian Jacques, author of the ‘Redwall’ series, about mice who fight off evil rats, foxes and other predators, has also visited twice, on a book tour for his publisher, Penguin, from England.”

In 1926 Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days. No one’s ever been able to explain what happened. “Several plausible theories have competed for favour over the years, but biographer Andrew Norman believes he is the first to find one that satisfies every element of the case.”

An “obscure short list of mainly first- and second-time authors” has been named as finalists for this year’s Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction.

“This year, the Academy has done the right thing, thank God, saluting a writer who, in the words of the Nobel citation, ‘has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures’. With Turkey and its record as much in the news as it was in 2005, Orhan Pamuk has become the first Turkish writer in 100 years ever to receive this supreme accolade.”

Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel win is the first for a Turkish writer. “This year’s prize, then, puts the Turkish government in the awkward position of having to celebrate a writer it only recently tried to put in jail. The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a lukewarm statement of congratulation, saying in part, ‘For years, it was our public’s expectation to see a Turkish writer awarded the Nobel literature prize’.”

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who was prosecuted last year for talking openly about the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey during World War I, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. “He has published six books in English, the first of these being The White Castle, primarily a historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but also about how stories and fictions build self-perception.”