Category: publishing

“There is no reason to think the printed book will be the defining literary format. I don’t want to be cautious any more. This is about changing the fundamentals. The worst that can happen is that it won’t work.”

Very, very few authors do that. And they’re all women. At least according to a Big Data textual examination of a whole lot of books.

“Fresh from winning the Costa prize and completing a Booker double, Hilary Mantel this evening added the award described as the ‘British Nobel’ – the £40,000 David Cohen – to her haul of prizes.”

“A special overseas edition of Etonnants Voyageurs, a major French literature and film festival, had landed in Brazzaville like a U.F.O., disgorging these characters into the city, along with a substantial, mostly French, press corps, and assorted international lit-fest habitués.”

When the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only literary club, gathered for their annual weekend in New York in January, few had any inkling they would soon be embroiled in a distinctly 21st-century case that might be called “The Adventure of the Social Media-Driven Copyright Debate, With Annotations on Sherlockian Sexism and the True Nature of Literary Devotion.”

It all started last month when the editor of the magazine The Monthly, John van Tiggelen, sent an e-mail (promptly leaked) to his predecessor – twentysomething whiz-kid Ben Naparstek, who had been recruited to lead the nationwide magazine insert Good Weekend – calling Naparstek a “f*cking dalek” who steals article ideas, poaches writers and underpays female contributors.

“On Friday, three of Germany’s biggest booksellers, along with its biggest media company and its biggest telecom company, debuted an e-book distribution platform and an e-reader intended to compete with Amazon, Apple, and other e-reader hardware and content providers.”

“Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world’s most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.”

An annual survey of the mix between male and female authors illustrates the stark disparity.

“Sologub’s writing wonderfully combines reality and mysticism, nobility and baseness, everyday life and the miraculous. … Silver Age poet Nikolay Gumilev (and first husband to Anna Akhmatova) used to say that while Russians didn’t memorize Sologub’s poetry, in a moment of sadness it came to mind all by itself.”