Category: publishing

“A security guard who tried to sell stolen copies of the latest Harry Potter novel has admitted theft and possessing an imitation gun.” The guard, who removed two copies of J.K. Rowling’s insanely popular book from a warehouse and later attempted to sell them to British newspapers, still denies ever pointing the gun at a reporter for the tabloid Sun, as the journalist claims.

John Banville has become the first Irish author since 1993 to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for literature, in the most closely contested judging the contest has seen in years. Banville’s novel, The Sea, just beat out Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, with the chairman of the judging panel casting the decisive vote. “Banville’s win was a neat reversal of fortune. In 1989 his novel, The Book Of Evidence, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day.”

The winner of the Booker Prize is to be announced tonight. “But it isn’t for the $91,800 cash award that grown men threaten to shoot themselves. It isn’t for the unquestionable increase in profits from sales, likely film and foreign rights. It isn’t even for the glamour, though tonight’s announcement, televised throughout the United Kingdom, is more like our Oscars than any bookish ceremony.” It’s the prestige…

New translations of classics try to make work accessible to today’s readers. “The question, though – and it’s always a question now when it comes to translating the classics – is whether it is not too friendly to accommodate the difficulties of the original. This is a matter of fiery debate in the arts nowadays.”

“Sigrid Tausing, whose family made a fortune from Tetra-Pak drinks cartons, has bought the magazine from Rea Hederman, the owner of the New York Review of Books.”

“It may be going too far to call this a ‘golden age’ for poetry, as this year’s Forward judges have done, but most of the poets jostling for these prizes do seem to be reaching for a readership beyond the seminar room. Sales of particular volumes may often be counted in the hundreds rather than thousands, but poetry does escape to what Milton called a ‘fit audience, though few’. Free, unlike novelists, to be as recondite as they wish, they have surprising taste for accessibility. It might surprise traditionalists to find a common interest in poetry’s formal polish and patterning, even rhyme and scansion. So what preoccupies the nation’s poets – aside from obtaining the university posts teaching creative writing that now sustain many of them?”

Newsweeklies are declining in circulation. Can they be saved? Ken Whyte thinks so, and he’s making major changes to Canada’s MacLean’s to try to revive it.

“Sherlock Holmes is renowned for his groundbreaking forensic technique. But crucial to Arthur Conan Doyle’s storytelling are the vivid descriptions of late Victorian and Edwardian London, indoors and out. They set the scene for the grisly goings-on in the foggy East End and the murky manoeuvrings of the better-bred in the city’s west. They contain clues to help the reader solve the crime. And they give us insight into the complex inner world Holmes the man. Doyle is a must-read for budding architects.”

CTV has picked up national broadcast of Canada’s Giller Prize for literature. “The winner this year will be announced at a black-tie gala in Toronto Nov. 8, during a one-hour telecast live on CTV Newsnet. Three repeat airings will take place on the main network – after midnight, the following afternoon and the following weekend. In the past the Giller was broadcast on CBC and CHUM’s Bravo and Book Television specialty channels.”

It’s been 50 years since Vladimir Nabokov penned Lolita, but the tale of a pedophile and his “nymphet” stepdaughter remains as baldly shocking and strangely moving as the day it was published. In fact, it’s one of the top-selling books of all time. Some scholars suggest that it is Nabokov’s unquestionably beautiful way with language that attracts us and gives his book such lasting appeal. But there may also be a darker obsession with underaged children as sex objects hiding beneath the surface of our literary interest. “How is it that a pedophile protagonist remains sympathetic enough to draw audiences? Why does this backward fairy tale — Prince Charming as a monster — endure?”