Category: publishing

“It has to be more than a coincidence that literary fiction is being flooded with books about adolescents. It’s been building for a while, from Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and Craig Thompson’s Blankets to last year’s Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. But this year it seems to be out of control, with another book about another awkward pre-teen crossing my doorway every day or so.”

Joan Didion, William T. Vollmann and John Updike were among the finalists announced Saturday for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The fiction nominees included Vollmann’s “Europe Central,” E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” and Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica.” Two British releases also were nominated: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” and Andrea Levy’s “Small Island.”

Bill Gates predicts it: “Within four or five years, instead of spending money on textbooks, they’ll spend a mere $400 or so buying that tablet device and the material they hook up to will all be on the wireless internet with animations, timelines and links to deep information. But they’ll be spending less than they would have on textbooks and have a dramatically better experience.”

The uproar over James Frey’s misrepresentations in his best-selling memoir is not “just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: after all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman’s 1973 book ‘Pentimento.’ It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth.”

Carol Ann Duffy wins this year’s TS Eliot Prize for poetry. The Poetry Book Society, which awards the prize, said: “This year’s TS Eliot prize highlights a (some would say) rare moment of agreement between the critics and the booksellers as to what constitutes great poetry.”

“If Bill Gates has his way, those of us who love the tactile pleasures of reading should proceed into 2006 with a degree of caution. The way we read books, and the way they are distributed globally, is about to undergo radical transformation similar to changes in the way we acquire, distribute and consume music.” But with Google and Microsoft locked in competition to be the first to digitize all the printed words that have come before, and to transform the future of publishing itself, debate is raging over what is good for the marketplacem, and what is good for the consumer.

Look at publishing industry statistics and you’d think this was a Golden Age for he book trade. “If, on this evidence, you were tempted to call this a golden age of publishing, you should first talk to the publishers. To them, the IT revolution cuts both ways. It has inspired a boom, but it also threatens to turn the book world upside down.”

Canadians take great pride in their national artists, actors, and authors, and go to great lengths to avoid being swamped by the tidal wave of American culture looming just to the south. But increasingly, Canadian readers seem to be going off the national script, buying and reading far more American titles than Canadian. Moreover, bestseller lists that have long placed Canadian titles in the top tier are now known to have somewhat suspect data-gathering operations.

Does it really matter that James Frey wrote a book falsely claiming to have been a drug-addled bad boy in his youth? Perhaps not. “There is, however, a deeper issue worth considering buried in all this pop-cultural titillation: Why are people so easily victimized by this sort of emotional con man? For some years, book publishing, television and — more recently — a growing segment of the news media have been sinking deeper and deeper into a particularly fetid sinkhole carved by two social currents that now dominate our collective lives. One is narcissism, which has turned the confessional memoir into the dominant literary genre of our age. The other is the public’s prurient interest, which creates a readership for the literature of self-absorption and supports a metastasizing culture of celebrity.”

The literary phenomenon known as “creative nonfiction” has caught on in recent years, especially among authors who are belatedly discovered to have made up parts of what were supposed to be factual books. As memoirs and other works of supposed non-fiction have risen to become the most profitable corner of the publishing industry, the line of acceptability in “sprucing up” dull old reality has been blurred. The problem may be that, unlike magazines and newspapers, publishers don’t spend a lot of time on fact-checking, and basically take an author’s word on the events related in a given manuscript.