Category: publishing

JM Coetzee has had his work translated into many languages. “The necessary imperfection of translation – brought about in the first place by the incapacity of any given target language to supply for each single word in the source language a corresponding single word that would cover, precisely and without overlap, the denotation of the original and its major connotations to boot – is so widely accepted that the translator becomes accustomed to aiming for the best possible translation rather than a hypothetical perfect one. But there are occasions where less than perfect translation of a key word can have serious consequences.”

“Addicts and alcoholics are desperate vulnerable people; if you’re going to offer them a way out, you’d better be certain it works. But how can you be, if you haven’t walked the path? The reader reviews for Frey’s book on Amazon contain this nugget: ‘I’ve been to four funerals in the last 12 months. One of them was a guy who dropped out of AA/NA after reading Frey’s crap – before it had been exposed as a fraud. He decided to follow Frey’s advice … He lasted about three months before he got high again. He was dead two months after that’.”

“Nan Talese was in no position to call Frey’s book ‘brutally honest’ in 2004 because that was after her conversation with the Star Tribune [which published a piece questioning the book’s accuracy]. But she didn’t tell Oprah that. Nor did she say she had no idea in 2004 that there were problems with the book, which would be an outright lie. Instead, Talese said, ‘[T]his whole experience is very sad’ and observed that you can’t ‘get inside another person’s mind.’ This last is an especially preposterous non sequitur because by 2004 you didn’t need to ‘get inside’ Frey’s mind to find out that his memoir wasn’t factual.”

Oprah’s takedown of James Frey last week on live television was a moment of high TV drama. Oprah was angry. And yet, there were questions about why she waited so long. “After the lights went down, Oprah said goodbye to Talese with a warm embrace. Publishers, who owe so much to Oprah, are hoping she’ll remember her show’s second credo: learn how to forgive.”

Shakespeare fans’ favorite parlor game seems to be trying to prove (or disprove) who the Bard really was (or wasn’t). “Neurologists tell us that our brains are hard-wired to find patterns and causation – even when they’re not there. At different levels of scholarship and skill, these books reshape new research and old chestnuts to draw their cases. But they show us nothing definitive.” And is it really that important, anyway?

Okay, so everybody’s piling on James Frey for his sins. But “amid the quite legitimate furor over author James Frey’s fibs and flourishes, amid the high-decibel debates about the murky rules of memoir and the primacy of fact, one fact has been routinely overlooked: The guy can write.”

Where were James Frey’s editors? Where are the editors, period? “Publishing has become the land of the nonreturned phone call. Editors are either in a pre-sales conference, a sales conference, a post-sales conference, or at the Frankfurt Book Fair. They have no time for editing. Greater pressure on book publishers may come, in fact, from literary journalists, if they decide to emulate the Smoking Gun instead of turning out puffy author profiles.”

After discovering that renowned children’s-book author and publisher Harriet Ziefert’s latest book, A Snake Is Totally Tail, is strikingly similar to Judi Barrett’s 1983 book of the same name, publisher Blue Apple has announced that it will not be releasing the version authored by Ziefert, originally set for release in April.

“Unlike journalists, publishers have never seen it as their purview to verify that the information in nonfiction books is true. Editors and publishers say the profit-margins in publishing don’t allow for hiring fact-checkers. Instead, they rely on authors to be honest, and on their legal staffs to avoid libels suits. But now there is a growing chorus both inside and outside the industry calling for publishers to take more steps to validate the authenticity of works that are marketed as nonfiction.”

“In all of the attention focused on James Frey and his book “A Million Little Pieces” in recent weeks, two main characters in the drama — Mr. Frey’s literary agent and the book’s editor — have largely escaped scrutiny. But [this weekend,] a number of people in the publishing business suggested it was time for Kassie Evashevski, Mr. Frey’s agent, and Sean McDonald, who edited both A Million Little Pieces and Mr. Frey’s follow-up, My Friend Leonard, to talk about their roles in selling and shaping the books.”