Category: publishing

Bookcrossing is founded on the idea of registering a book, then leaving it somewhere in public for someone else to find and read. The group now has 400,000 participants in 120 countries. “The founders of BookCrossing.com compare their online book club to a virus, one that has reached far-flung places carried by members who heed the philosophy: if you love a book, set it free. One selling point is that it costs nothing to join. Members include literature buffs determined to share their passion or thin out their shelves and travelers who simply love a good book — although here the books do most of the traveling.”

Has the quality of French writing declined? “This month, 633 titles will be published in French, in a ritual known as la rentrée littéraire, a publishing blitz that the reading public finds increasingly bewildering. This year’s list is double the length of that six years ago, and many titles end up unsold in the stockroom. Some hard questions are now being raised. How many of these novels are really worth reading? And why are so few of these authors known outside France? Even francophiles in the English-speaking world find it hard to list many contemporary French novelists.”

Setting a book in any city helps define the story. But New Orleans isn’t just any city; the city is a powerful character. “Gertrude Stein famously complained that when it came to Oakland, Calif., there was no “there” there. New Orleans, conversely, could be accused of having too much “there” there: It’s a city stuffed with ambience, bursting at the scenes with color and flavor and sound.”

Nearly everything about the rickety old Paris Review has been brushed off and upgraded to a shiny new standard as part of a summer-long restructuring led by Philip Gourevitch that makes the new Review seem practically … corporate. The new issue is larger than the old one, slim and elegant and more magazine-like, printed on buttery paper. Rather than featuring graphic artwork, the cover displays a sepia-toned photograph of a solemn little child in galoshes—the adorably plump Salman Rushdie as a boy in Bombay, looking serious beyond his years and cute enough to eat.”

Washington DC’s literary bookstore Chapters is 20 years old. But to make it to 21, the store is attempting a radical reinvention. “Without help — in the form of a fundraising drive that will allow it to be bought out by a nonprofit foundation — the bookstore may have trouble making it to 21. The strategy is similar to that employed by the Avalon Theatre Project, which succeeded two years ago in reopening Washington’s oldest surviving movie house by converting it to nonprofit status.”

England has won the cricket championship. But where is the cricket literature? “I cannot think of any fictional depiction of cricket – and, even as I write this sentence, I expect to be contradicted – that goes any way towards capturing the heroism, the beauty, the sheer glory that cricket is capable of conjuring in a series like the one we have just witnessed. English cricket writing is too busy observing the social niceties and oddities of the game at a local level – where it is heavenly but not always inspiring – to raise its eyes to higher things. In this it is entirely different from American literature’s treatment of baseball.”

English publisher Bloomsbury wants to buy its way into the US market, and its fortune built on Harry Potter should make it happen. “The publisher will have an estimated cash pile of £50m by the end of the year as it reaps the benefit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the teenage wizard saga. A US children’s publisher with a weighty back catalogue is a priority target but the group admitted yesterday that many potential acquisitions were demanding too high a price.”

Stephen Metcalf appeals to the Booker jury on behalf of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty.” “It is written by an exquisite writer, who has mistaken her admirable pooh-poohing of a lot of foolish publicity for a free pass to get by as an overcelebrated mediocrity. Therefore, Dear Committee, I plead with you to assist in removing the cameras and quote-mongers from Zadie Smith’s life and help prevent her from blowing up into an even larger global literary darling, prone to even more gratuitous Hamlet-like maunderings, and let the woman… develop into her appointed greatness.”

They’re on the way, with authors and publishers hard at work…

Publishers realize there are plenty of books out there that everyone knows but few have read. Is it because they’re too hard? So publishers are putting out “new editions of some of the great, often unread, works with a fresh emphasis on ‘accessibility’. Some may call it dumbing down. The books will be, well, simpler. One of the first to receive the treatment is Tolstoy’s War and Peace, republished this month by Penguin in a new, reader-friendly translation.”