Category: publishing

“What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.”

Longtime Dallas Morning News book columnist Jerome Weeks spent his last day on the job Friday. He offers some final thoughts in his farewell column, which the paper chose not to print. “Nowhere in films or TV do characters read — other than the ‘bookish girl’ or the action hero, but only when he must desperately decipher the Sacred Inca Brain Codex for clues to foil the arch-fiend’s dastardly plot — a plot the ‘bookish girl’ could have figured out long ago. Still, for reviewers, one of the accidental delights of the job comes precisely from reading many of those books we’d normally use for attic insulation. It’s a central pleasure of art: discovery.”

The LongPen, intended to allow writers to sign books from wherever they happen to be, “famously flubbed at its much-anticipated international debut in March at the London Book Fair.” But Margaret Atwood, author and LongPen funder, intends to give it another shot on Sunday at a Toronto book fair. Not that she will be in Toronto, of course. She’ll sign books for Canadian fairgoers from Edinburgh.

“Fans of perhaps the world’s best-known cannibal won’t have to wait much longer: seven years after the publication of ‘Hannibal,’ Thomas Harris has finally delivered a new novel featuring Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer most famously memorialized on film by Anthony Hopkins. In a last-minute addition to its holiday-season list, Delacorte Press, an imprint of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, is expected to announce today that it will publish ‘Hannibal Rising’ on Dec. 5.”

“An unfinished tale by J.R.R. Tolkien has been edited by his son into a completed work and will be released next spring, the U.S. and British publishers announced Monday.”

Entrants for the new $100,000 Sobol Prize for unpublished fiction have to have an $85 fee. “The Sobol Award is seeking as many as 50,000 unpublished fiction manuscripts, but critics say the contest’s fee runs counter to industry ethical principles of not charging writers to read their work. The award was set up by tech entrepreneur Gur Shomron, who said he came up with the idea after failing to find a publisher for his novel, ‘NETfold,’ which he self-published last year.”

It’s one of the most eclectic lists in years. John Sutherland, last year’s chairman and author of How to Read a Novel, said it was a “bizarre” list that might signal a changing of the literary guard. “If you compare it with last year, the average age is five or 10 years younger. What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new.”

How do you open a successful new indy bookstore in a town where such storefronts have been closing by the dozens? Well, you could convince Garrison Keillor to be the owner. The “Prairie Home Companion” host and author has announced plans to open just such a store in St. Paul’s historic Cathedral Hill neighborhood. Rumors of Keillor’s interest in such a project had been floating around the Twin Cities for some time.

What better place for a festival celebrating the great tradition of literature than… um, Brooklyn? “Is there such a thing as a Brooklyn aesthetic? A Brooklyn voice? You could make an argument for it, though the Brooklyn voice has evolved… For more than a century Brooklyn was, for writers, a place where fractured English constituted the lingua franca.”

That’s the claim by Brit TV presenter Daisy Goodwin. Ray Connolly begs to differ: “Admittedly, men’s names don’t crop up so often on those displays of books with pink, frilly covers in Waterstone’s and Borders, but in truth the history of literature is filled with romantic stories written by men.”