Category: publishing

“No problem in literature, perhaps, is less instantly soluble than the question of reputations: the bewildering process by which, in the years after their deaths, one writer’s stock soars while another’s sinks into bankruptcy. The only real judge of a book, Martin Amis once remarked, is posterity.”

“Book reviews should inspire reading. They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books and avoid bad ones. They should turn you on to undiscovered authors, prompt you into finally reading the writer you have never quite got round to, and make you wonder at the world of delights that remain unread. But let’s be honest. They don’t, do they?”

Brigid Hughes, George Plimpton’s successor at The Paris Review, who was forced out of the publication earlier this year, has a new project – editor of “A Public Space”. The new publication’s “focus will be on two art forms no longer in fashion — fiction and poetry. Magazines such as Collier’s and The Atlantic Monthly once served as starting points and sustainers for poets and fiction writers, from Wallace Stevens to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but few major publications highlight such work anymore. Hughes’ contract was not renewed at The Paris Review earlier this year, amid reports that the board of directors wanted more nonfiction and a more commercial approach.”

A new David McCullough history of the American revolution is due out, and academic historians are stewing. “Instead of grumbling over the public’s middlebrow book buying tastes, the best thing academic historians can do is to try to offer them something better. A number of our own practices lead us away from engaging the public as we should. I’ve seen students entering graduate school aspiring to write like Arthur Schlesinger, only to be shunted into producing pinched, monographic studies. I’ve seen conferences full of brilliant minds unable to find an interesting presentation to attend that isn’t literally read off the page in a soporific drone. We write too much for each other—and, as we do, a public hungry for good history walks into Barnes & Noble and gets handed vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as “magisterial” or “definitive.”

“Just the name ‘subversive literature’ has a provocative, candle-under-the-bedcovers feel. In communist East Germany — perhaps the most spied-on nation in history — however, almost everything fell under that dicey rubric. Poetry about freedom? Anti-utopian sci-fi? Political satire? All blacklisted. Now, 16 years after the Soviet puppet state crumbled, two former citizens have unearthed the vanished nation’s hidden literature and — adamant that it no longer be submerged in anonymity — are pushing to get it published.”

“Typography, it turns out, is not always such dumb fun. Graphic designers, who often have fonts to sell, can be cranky about where their p’s and q’s come from, and they seem to be getting crankier by the minute. Maybe it’s because there is less and less demand for original typefaces; free fonts are easy to come by on the Web.”

Post-modernism is over. But where does the novel as a form go from here? “A novelist has to find artistic means to slow down time (Proust), to get inside a single consciousness (David Foster Wallace), and to express thought without language breaking down completely (Joyce). So the novelist still has a wide open field here. But there are so many obstacles to creating this work of art that it’s (oh, hell) mind–boggling (sorry). The novelist must make an astonishing number of judgments before a single word is written, and any of these judgments can threaten to undermine the project.”

Too many books are being published, even as sales are declining. “The number of books sold dropped by nearly 44 million between 2003 and 2004, even as the annual number of books published approaches 175,000. The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research organization, reported estimated sales of 2.295 billion books in 2004, compared to an estimated 2.339 billion the previous year. Higher prices enabled net revenues to increase 2.8 percent, to $28.6 billion, but also drove many readers, especially students, to buy used books.”

“Alan Cordle created Foetry in April 2004 after years of watching his wife, Kathleen Halme, enter poetry contests and becoming increasingly convinced that they weren’t fair. At first, it was just Mr. Cordle and his computer. But the site gained momentum and soon it was attracting hundreds of visitors each day, many of whom also believed that something was rotten about these contests. They gossiped and gathered evidence.”