Category: publishing

Is Ben Marcus right that experimental writing is dying? He’s “justified in criticizing a publishing industry, and a culture, that often recycles the same ideas and stories while ignoring writers whose work is too unpleasant, or destabilizing, or unsympathetic to be absorbed at a glance. His list of writers who ‘interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes’ is one many readers would embrace, and his contention that The New Yorker doesn’t publish enough challenging fiction is absolutely on the mark. But ultimately he’s pantomiming a battle that, if it ever really existed, ended decades ago.”

Paper rots, even in books, and preserving documents has long bedeviled librarians. Now “conservationists are buzzing about a new technique developed by Ink Cor, a research group concerned with neutralizing the wasting effect of corrosive inks without damaging the underlying paper. The group recently completed a prototype treatment using halide salts, a colorless antioxidant that can prolong the life span of paper containing corrosive ink by a factor of 10.”

The Quill Awards were created to add some glitz to literary awards. “In its first year, the Quills didn’t come close to the Oscars in the glamour department. There were no A-list celebrities in attendance; viewers will have to settle for actors like Cattrall and Matthew Modine, who both have their own books to promote. But supporters believe that the ceremony made some progress in jazzing up publishing’s staid reputation. But it remains to be seen whether viewers will tune in — and, more broadly, what kind of influence the Quills will have on sales and the image of the book publishing industry.”

There’s a new campaign in the UK to try to stop the papers of important writers from being bought up by American institutions. “The campaign comes amid fears that the papers of Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, may go abroad. All three are understood to have been approached recently by agents acting for institutions in America. In recent years British authors whose papers have been sold abroad include the novelists Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes and Malcolm Bradbury and the playwrights David Hare and Tom Stoppard.”

“It is one of the great signposts of the modern world, the wall of magazines to be found in every newsagent, in every railway station, and in every library in Britain, but in recent years these displays have become torture racks, revealing everything that is mean and cynical about how we live. It’s hard to believe those covers were once the repository of things gracious, beautiful and imaginative.”

Major book publishers have quietly gone into the online bookselling business. “The publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin, claim to have limited retail ambitions and are simply trying to use their websites to help readers. ‘We can offer features, services and guidance that might be difficult for another retailer to provide. What we’re not going to be is competitors to Amazon or any other retailer in this area’.”

What are the 100 all-time best novels? Time magazine made a list…

The Association of American Publishers has filed a lawsuit against Google for its print-digitizing project. “The suit was filed on behalf of McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. AAP President Patricia Schroeder said that the publishers viewed legal action as a last resort and had filed suit only when Google refused to agree to making separate permissions requests for each in-copyright book it scans in the libraries of Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Michigan.”

China’s best-selling novel, The Wolf Totem, is coming to the U.S. Penguin Books has purchased the American rights to Jiang Rong’s 2004 work for $100,000, a record sum for a Chinese book. “The meticulously researched, semiautobiographical tale is built around the lives of wolves told through the eyes of a student sent to work on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. It is set during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong emptied the cities of educated youths to have them work alongside peasants and herders. Critics and readers have praised its exploration of the relationship between man and animal, accurate detail and spiritualistic questioning.”

“Strunk and White’s legendary Elements of Style was first published in 1959, and in the intervening decades, this little book on language and its proper usage has been force-fed to countless high school English students, who have read it zealously, dog-eared key pages, showered it in graphite love or else completely disregarded and forgotten it, usually at their own risk… [A]ppreciation for this slim volume takes a turn toward the whimsical and even surreal this week, as the Penguin Press publishes the first illustrated edition, featuring artwork by Maira Kalman, and the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought Elements of Style song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight [at] the New York Public Library.”