Category: publishing

“By the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world’s languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path.”

“You recall Lingua Franca, don’t you? Fewer and fewer do, although if you ask some of the best and brightest editors and writers at the dwindling number of serious magazines and periodicals around these days, you’ll probably find Lingua Franca in his or her past. It was a monthly magazine about the clash of ideas in literature, politics, history and philosophy, controversies that would otherwise be obscured within ivory towers, written for the educated, but not necessarily academic, reader. It soon became a much-talked-about phenomenon inside and outside academia.”

Publisher Judith Regan is moving her operations to Los Angeles next month: “New York is like a bad relationship that you can’t get out of, because you still think the sex is good. Well, I think the sex is pretty good in L.A. too!”

“On March 27, The Canadian Almanac and Directory sent a letter to what its staffers termed ‘famous Canadians in the arts, sciences, sports, government and media’ asking them to contribute essays on Canada, the land, the peoples, and so on, for the publication’s 160th edition. A week later, the 159-year-old publication’s U.S. owner, ProQuest Co. of Ann Arbor, Mich., announced that it was laying off staff at the Toronto office. Workers still in place were told to cancel those requests for essay contributions.”

Simon & Schuster is launching a publishing service for mobile phones. “The deal, which will target 18 to 34 year-olds, will allow the imprint to market a number of its current and forthcoming titles through a subscription-based service that sends text messages, excerpts, previews and cover art to cell phone users. There will be “a nominal fee” for the content, with a portion of the revenue going to S&S.”

A Vancouver gay bookstore is going to the Canadian Supreme Court to continue a fight against government bureaucrats who block books and magazines at the border.

Geraldine Brooks wins this year’s Pulitzer for fiction. “March,” Brooks’ invention of the Civil War adventures of the absent father from Louisa Alcott’s classic “Little Women,” was awarded the honor Monday.

Ohio State University decided to pick a single book that its freshmen would all read. But the project of choosing that book has unraveled. “The suggestion of one member of the book selection committee that an anti-gay book be picked angered many faculty members, some of whom have filed harassment charges against the person who nominated that book. The faculty members in turn are being accused of trying to censor a librarian — and a conservative group is threatening to sue.”

Michiko Kakutani is a critical institution. She’s been book critic at the New York Times for 25 years. “Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Kakutani doesn’t offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing.”

Samuel Beckett is getting renewed attention this year on the 100th anniversary of his birth. But the author notoriously didn’t like cult of celebrity that engulfed him. So what would he have thought of all this? “Theatergoers have laughed about how the famously reclusive author would have reacted to the sprawling festival, which by some counts is the sixth major posthumous celebration of his work. He wouldn’t have turned up at a single event, and he couldn’t have borne the hoopla element.”