Category: publishing

A leading Bengali poet has been ordered to stand trial for insulting a Hindi goddess. “In an article in Bengal’s biggest newspaper this year, Sunil Gangopadhyay was quoted as saying he was “sexually aroused” by an idol of Saraswati. Retired policeman Bhibhuti Bhusan Nandy filed a lawsuit saying the comments had hurt his religious sentiments.”

“Nearly all of the secondhand bookstores in the vicinity of Harvard University are gone. Some have relocated or become online booksellers. Others are simply out of business. Either way, the decline of secondhand bookstores represents a sad diminishment of the academic community in Cambridge, Mass., and many other university towns.”

Hollywood loves books. Always has. “Hollywood is essentially a story maw; it gobbles up narrative from any source — comic books have been big of late, ’70s TV shows have become a staple, before that magazine articles, plays, myths, legends, songs even, all had their run as big source material. But the book, the novel particularly, has been a font of movies for seemingly ever.”

Rolling Stone magazine has published what it says is Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note. “The scrawled words — perhaps the last he ever committed to paper — were written on February 16, four days before the self-described “gonzo” journalist shot himself to death at his secluded home near Aspen, Colorado, the magazine said.

Chicago’s citywide group-read project, known as “One Book, One Chicago”, is four years old, and this fall, the city’s mayor has decided that it’s time for Chicagoans to expand their literary horizons across the Atlantic. The new selection is Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, and several academic and theatrical institutions around the city will be hosting events, lectures, and performances based on the book. As usual, Chicago booksellers and libraries were tipped off about the selection ahead of time, so as to be sure that plenty of copies will be available.

One of the novelists shortlisted for the Booker Prize obviously isn’t running for Miss Congeniality. Zadie Smith, whose latest book, On Beauty, made the shortlist, has described England, where she lives (and where the Booker is based) as being filled with “stupidity” and “vulgarity.” London, in particular, is “a disgusting place,” according to Smith. On the other hand, Smith doesn’t cut herself or her colleagues any slack, either: in the same interview, she described novel-writing as “quite stupid work.”

College libraries are finding that students are abandoning libraries. “Today’s students can go through a semester, or even a year, without ever wandering into the stacks or opening a hardbound volume, and that’s a reality more and more librarians are recognizing. That circulation is down shows students aren’t simply using the Internet to check things out in digital form, but using it in lieu of checking things out at all.”

Some of the UK’s biggest heavyweight writers have failed to make this year’s Booker list. “Ian McEwan’s tale of an extraordinary day in the life of brain surgeon Henry Perowne, has widely been seen as a shoo-in for the shortlist from the date of its publication. And he was joint favourite with Julian Barnes at the longlist stage to take home the gong for the second time. Instead, he has become the shortlist’s most high-profile casualty – although with previous winners Salman Rushdie and JM Coetzee also failing to make the cut, he is in very good company.”

With the possible exception of Harper Lee, America may not have a more reclusive living author than S.E. Hinton, whose novel, The Outsiders, brought gangs, violence, and disaffected youth into the front of the country’s consciousness in 1967. Intrepid readers could discern from various sources that the author is a woman, that she was only 17 when The Outsiders was published, and that she lives in Tulsa, but little more than that. Now, for the first time, Susan Eloise Hinton is breaking her decades-long public silence to participate in the rollout of a new recut version of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of the book.

“Jane Austen’s peerless depictions of Regency England still chime with audiences across the globe. But in 2005 she is also a brand, perhaps the most profitable literary brand. Her stock is certain to rise again in the coming weeks as the new Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, hits cinemas in the UK. The UK’s multi-million pound Austen industry is gearing itself up for a busy autumn.”