Category: publishing

Scotland’s Aberdeen University is establishing the country’s first center dedicated to study of the novel. “It will be Britain’s first dedicated centre for the study of novels and novelists from the English-speaking world, including Scottish, Irish and American fiction, and will use as its main resource the university’s own collection of fiction, said to rival that of any university in the world.”

Giles Coren’s book Winkler has won this year’s Bad Sex Award. “The food critic’s book describes a sexual act between a man and a woman, in which she ‘she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands’. The rest of the winning passage is unprintable for a family audience. The annual award pitted Coren against writers including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton and Paul Theroux.”

It turns out that “CS Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories, with which Disney hopes to establish a blockbuster movie franchise to rival Harry Potter, was ‘absolutely opposed’ to the idea of a live action version of the stories, it has emerged. The author made clear his distaste for the idea in a hitherto unpublished letter to a BBC producer…”

“Historic recordings of poets such as Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, Betjeman and Sassoon are being made available through a new online initiative. The Poetry Archive also aims to ensure current leading English-speaking poets are recorded reading their own work for future generations. The free archive has been created by UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and recording producer Richard Carrington.”

That would be Seattle, according to a new study. “America’s Most Literate Cities 2005, a ranking based on the culture and resources for reading in the 69 largest U.S. cities, aims to rate cities not on whether their citizens can read, but whether they do.”

The prize honors the worst literary depictions of sex. Among the 11 contenders for the prize this year are some of the biggest names in literature, including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Of the four, Theroux’s offering, from Blinding Light, is arguably the most deserving of the prize…

Roger D. Hodge is being named a the new editor of Harper’s Magazine. “After being turned down for an internship in 1996, he got a call back a few days later and has remained planted at the magazine since, holding a variety of jobs, most recently serving as deputy editor.”

“The Office of Fair Trading is due to decide whether to refer Waterstone’s planned takeover of Ottakar’s bookshops to the Competition Commission. If the £96.4 million deal is given the go-ahead, Waterstone’s parent company, HMV, will control at least 23.6 per cent of the British book trade. Leading publishers and authors are making a last-ditch attempt this weekend to head off the deal, which some fear will mean too much power being concentrated.”

“Los Angeles is nearing the completion of a $317-million modernization program to build and renovate 63 branch libraries, finishing them on time and under budget. Librarians from as far away as Singapore and Sweden have come to see what the city has accomplished. This is the new face of public libraries in Los Angeles — versatile and thoroughly modern places that have fueled a 70% explosion in library usage over the last decade. It was not always so. For years, cramped and crumbling branches testified to a civic purpose sapped by riots, tax revolts and urban decay.”

“Somehow the fact that the book business has chosen to take on Google doesn’t reek of same-old same-old. It’s startling, even mildly shocking, and more than a little revealing. For no matter how the publishers’ lawsuit ultimately unfolds, it has already provided the most vivid evidence to date of a seismic shift in the business Zeitgeist: from unalloyed Googlemania to gathering Googlephobia.”