Category: publishing

French author Michel Houellebecq tired to head off potential bad reviews by witholding copies of his new book from some of France’s most eminent literary critics. The critics weren’t too happy. “Now they appear to have struck back by circulating an embarrassing rap album featuring the tuneless voice of the controversial author in an apparent effort to dent his reputation as the bête noire of contemporary French writing.”

The publishing craze sudoku is sweeping America. “Three weeks ago, no sudoku books were on USA Today’s top 150 list. Now, there are six. In sudoku, the game is laid out in adjoining grids. Players must figure out which numbers to put in nine rows of nine boxes so that the numbers one through nine appear just once in each column, row and three-by-three square. The phenomenon originated in 1979, when one of the grids, titled ‘number place,’ was published in an American puzzle magazine.”

The number of attempts to remove books from America’s public libraries has jumped in the past year. “The number of books challenged last year jumped to 547, compared to 458 in 2003, with the library association estimating four to five unreported cases for each one documented. According to the ALA, a challenge is a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

Some of the hottest-selling books around these days? Books on poker. “Publishers believe the national obsession with poker is growing, and they hope to cash in. What triggered the whole poker explosion was the world poker tour on TV in 2003.”

The latest in books? Podcasting – or “podiobooks.” “Are podcast books really anything more than a trendy version of audiobooks? Since podiobooks are delivered in easy and consumable ‘chunks’, much of the ‘bookmarking’ hassle has been taken away. The ease of consumption allows you to listen to many books at one time. And Podiobooks are also free from the technology hassles of downloadable complete audio books.”

“Now that Ray Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back? To these eyes, many of Bradbury’s most garishly ‘literary’ achievements are his least impressive. When the McCarthyite gloom of Fahrenheit 451 fades, it’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick.”

Amazon’s new “search inside” feature unlocks a wealth of analysis about the texts of books. “Thanks to a sensational subsection called Fun Stats, you will know just how many words you are getting per dollar and per ounce with each book. For instance, “War & Peace” by Leo Tolstoy gives you 51,707 words per dollar, while “Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme” by Calvin Trillin delivers only 1,106 words per dollar.”

“Rushdie as a literary performer suffers, I think, from being not just an author but a cause célèbre and a free-speech martyr, thanks to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in the wake of “The Satanic Verses” (1988), a playful work that precipitated riots in India and Pakistan, and gave American and English publishers and booksellers an early taste of heightened security. The fatwa, which invited any good Muslim to kill Rushdie, was withdrawn in 1998, but a decade of living in hiding deepened this previously gregarious author’s expertise on two subjects: celebrity and human cruelty. His fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music predated the fatwa, and gives his fiction a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel.”

There’s a big industry of “who was Shakespeare” theories and books, and most of it is just conjecture and guessing. “The traditional theory that Shakespeare was Shakespeare has the passive to active acceptance of the vast majority of English professors and scholars, but it also has had its skeptics, including major authors, independent scholars, lawyers, Supreme Court justices, academics and even prominent Shakespearean actors.”

“There’s the feel-good, middle-class black mirror most vividly embodied by Ebony and Jet, and the post-modern, hyper-acquisitive “bling” aesthetic found in hip-hop magazines such as Vibe and XXL. But there’s no idea-driven publication aimed at black Americans — at least none that has achieved equivalent success. Why?”