Category: publishing

“The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.”

“The traditional Indian custom of passing down epics and village folklore from one generation to the next through storytelling is slowly dying with increasing globalisation and the all-pervasive media.”

“The wine down here has a flavor of dead cockroaches and God knows how they make it. But I wanted something, for your letter excited me. If you are the Henry Miller I know, it is a great thing for me to know how you feel about my work.”

“Indeed, says Knausgaard, we are wrong to imagine that those of the past are anything like us, for ‘our world is only one of many possible worlds.'”

“A new edition of Lawrence’s poems, many rendered unreadable by the censor’s pen, will reveal him as a brilliant war poet whose work attacking British imperialism during the first world war was barred from publication.”

“He will be part of Texas Monthly’s ever-expanding barbecue franchise — the magazine has its own dedicated barbecue Web site, a barbecue finder app for cellphones and a once-every-five-years behemoth issue that lists the state’s top 50 barbecue joints. It holds the annual BBQ Festival in Austin, which last year drew a crowd of 3,000.”

“A standoff over financial terms has prompted the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to cut back substantially on the number of titles it orders from the publishing house Simon & Schuster, raising fears among other publishers, agents and authors.”

“[The] English typists to whom the author sent his manuscript [of Things Fall Apart] in the late 1950s dismissed it ‘as a joke.’ … It’s important to remember that that manuscript, which was handwritten, was ‘the only manuscript in the entire world’.”

“Grigory Chkhartishvili, the best-selling Russian writer known for his detective novels set in imperial Russia (written under the name Boris Akunin), and for his foray into opposition politics directed against Vladimir V. Putin announced that from now on he would devote himself to writing a multivolume history of Russia.”

“It’s well-intentioned to emphasize that libraries provide materials and services without exacting immediate payment from users for each transaction. But today it is at best a mistake and at worst self-destructive to underrepresent the considerable ongoing investment that the members of a community make to have library collections, technology, personnel, and facilities available to them.”