Category: publishing

“A new and comprehensive history of the Thai modern monarchy, written by an American journalist, Paul M. Handley, and banned in Thailand, argues that in his 60-year reign King Bhumibol Adulyadej has generally exercised a preference for order over democracy. … The book’s publisher, Yale University Press, said it came under heavy pressure from the Thai government not to publish it. The director of Yale University Press, John Donatich, said the pressure included a visit to New Haven by a delegation of Thai officials, including the cabinet secretary general, Bowornsak Uwanno, and the Thai ambassador to the United States, Virasakdi Futrakul.”

“We’re trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration,” says Lux. “Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions … but poems are made things. They don’t just happen.”

Kathy O’Beirne stunned the Irish literary world when her memoir of “a life of child rape, abuse and violence that implicates nuns in the Catholic clergy as well as her late father” was released. But since publication, O’Beirne has been repeatedly accused of making the whole story up, and several of her own relatives have called the book a fraud. Now, O’Beirne believes she has the evidence to prove that her horrific story is true.

“As a moral reckoning with the Nazi past, however, Peeling the Onion is a failure – and not even an honourable one. For a writer who has built his entire reputation on his indictment of an older generation for supposedly evading responsibility, Grass shows little awareness of his own bad faith in concealing the shameful facts about himself. Though he constantly interrogates his younger self in a rhetorical manner, the older Grass does his best to avoid confronting the awful truth.”

“The amount of printed material increases exponentially, but the time available for reading remains static or, in many cases, decreases arithmetically. So once we have decided what to read, the question then becomes, How to read? And the paradoxical answer is, Much more slowly.”

There are so many pain-and-suffering memoirs out there, and enough that are of questionable veracity to create a sub-section of their own. So what proof should we require from authors who spill their hard times?

In his incendiary speech at the UN Wednesday, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez held up a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival”. Immediately the book made a huge jump in sales. Originally published in 2003, the book “had jumped into the top 10 of Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com as of Thursday afternoon.”

Last week, Canada’s $40,000 Giller Prize for Literature attempted to amp up the amount of attention it receives from press and public by announcing its first-ever “long list” of nominees. Unfortunately, they chose to release the list while a huge group of Hollywood stars was in town for Toronto’s celebrated film festival, and the Giller barely made the back pages. Moreover, some observers are asking why the Giller needs a long list at all.

“The family of a bestselling author whose vivid memoir claims to document a ‘hell’ of sexual abuse inside a Catholic institution for fallen women denounced the book as a work of fiction yesterday.”

“Can The New York Review of Books survive without its founders’ specific genius. political and literary journalism it practices? A typical Review piece runs to 4,000 or 5,000 words, is pitched to readers who often have several advanced degrees, and may contain footnotes. Its intellectual and physical heft—the “Fall Books” issue came in at 100 pages—requires the kind of attention that becomes harder and harder to sustain with every new technological gadget we hitch to our belts or curl around our ears.”