“First published in November 1956, Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” has sold nearly a million copies. The 1957 obscenity trial over it helped break down barriers against free expression, forcing American society to reassess what was and wasn’t acceptable to say. Ginsberg’s ardent anti-establishment stance laid the groundwork for both the upheavals of the 1960s and the marketing juggernaut we call “youth culture” today. As “Howl” marks its 50th anniversary, then, it seems important to ask how (or whether) it continues to resonate, what it has to offer a new generation.”
Category: publishing
Canadian Book Chain Banishes Harper’s Mag From Its Racks
Canada’s largest book chain has pulled this month’s issue of Harper’s magazine off its shelves. “Indigo Books and Music took the action this week when its executives noticed that the 10-page Harper’s article, titled Drawing Blood, reproduced all 12 cartoons first published last September by Jyllands-Posten (The Morning Newspaper). The article also contains five cartoons, including one by Art Spiegelman and two by Israelis, ‘inspired’ by an Iranian newspaper’s call in February for an international Holocaust cartoon contest ‘to test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech’.”
Pages Vs. Electrons – A Battle Even Grizzly Bears Would Love
The battle is shaping up – between those who believe the literary world needs to man the ramparts and defend the printed page and the traditional structures that support it, and those who believe the electronic world will liberate knowledge. John Updike and Chris Anderson duke it out at Book Expo.
The New Yorker To Get A Digital Upgrade
Editor David Remnick “promises that by year’s end, the 81-year-old New Yorker, which didn’t regularly run full-page photographs until 1992, will dramatically upgrade its Web presence. More video, more audio, more flash media, more reader interaction. The publication is about to hire its first Web editor this month, and Remnick understands new media well enough not to drop Web-only 15,000-word anvils on the site.”
The Writing Machine
Author James Patterson was “raised in upstate New York, the son of an insurance salesman. At 19, he took a job as a night shift psychiatric aide in a Massachusetts mental hospital, a move that would set off a series of what he calls “accidents” that eventually created the phenomenon of Patterson the master marketer, the man who can write no flop. Patterson has published 35 books, 18 of which hit No. 1 on the New York Times list of bestsellers. He’s sold 100 million copies, grossing $1 billion in sales.”
Want Higher Test Scores? Buy Books
A UK study reports that increased spending on textbooks translates directly into highe test scores. That same increase is not ween with increases in technology spending. Yet, tech spending is up while book-buying is down…
Literary Success – It’s All In The Timing
“The divide between sales of literary and commercial fiction has always been vast — the 345,000 copies that Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel “Gilead” sold in hardcover and paperback is an impressive figure, but not when compared with the more than 18 million copies of “The Da Vinci Code” in print in North America, and more than 60 million worldwide. These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume.”
Big Read – A Big Chore?
So the National Endowment for the Arts is launching a big program to try to get people to read more books. But Sara Nelson wonders if the whole thing doesn’t sound too much like homework. “I can’t help wondering whether it’s the role of the NEA to be the substitute teacher, a stranger granted authority to give a reading assignment. It’s like homework. Will even the most well-meaning outreach, participation by individual communities and NEA-provided educational materials really inspire a heretofore reluctant reader to pick up the titles he shunned in high school?”
Living And Dying By The Book Superstore
Book superstore chains have been putting small bookshops out of business. “Ultimately, though, the greatest vulnerability of chains may be their muscle-bound nature. If print-on-demand technology, though still poky and faintly disreputable, ever achieves the availability and quality of traditional books, the need for overstock returns, remainders, and huge retail spaces may evaporate. Strange to say, someday superstores may be the historical curiosity that indies are now in danger of becoming.”
More Writing, Less Reading (What’s Wrong Here?)
“The creative writers in this country—those who have earned an MFA and those who haven’t—produce untold millions of poems, stories, novels, and essays. But for whom are they writing? Where is the readership to support this prodigious output? Certainly, bookstores and libraries prove that there are still readers out there. Yet Reading at Risk sounds the alarm that the practice of literary reading in America is in serious decline. How can it be that MFA programs in creative writing flourish in a country where literary reading does not?”