Category: publishing

Last weekend London’s Independent newspaper published a story telling of a major brakthrough in deciphering a trove of ancient texts. The story smells fishy to other papyrus researchers. “As of right now, the rest of the papyrological community is waiting to hear Dirk Obbink at Oxford either back up for disavow the claims made in the article. At the very best, the Independent’s reporters are covering some kind of new imaging breakthrough in an extremely hyperbolic fashion. And at the worst, they’re trying to make a major story out of 20-year-old news.”

The Da Vinci Code has been named book of the year at the British Book Awards. “Former US president Bill Clinton won best biography for his memoirs, and actress Hancock was named author of the year for The Two Of Us: My Life With John Thaw. “

“The Da Vinci Code is obviously not a normal novel. It is enormously long and very badly written (“Everyone in the reception area gaped in wonderment at the half-naked albino offering forth a bleeding clergyman”). It is simultaneously bombastic and bafflingly banal, full of uncontrolled, wrong-headed prose, tin-eared dialogue and crazy errors of fact. The characters are drips. And yet I stayed up half the night reading it. So what is the secret?”

“Marking a departure from the solitary life of reading and writing, about 20 independent literary bloggers announced last week that they will begin working together in hopes of drawing readers to books they feel deserve more attention, while seeking to generate more and deeper public discussions of literature. Calling themselves the Litblog Co-Op, the effort includes the sites the Elegant Variation, Moorishgirl, Rake’s Progress and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, all of which will continue to operate separately, the bloggers say.”

Six finalists have been chosen for the Orange Prize for fiction. Three Britons and three Americans will vie for the £30,000 prize, with the winner announced on 7 June in London.

Lan Samantha Chang will take over running the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in January. “Ms. Chang will teach a graduate fiction workshop, choose students for the fiction program (poetry students are chosen by the poetry faculty) and will consult on hiring, among other duties. The two-year program, which leads to a master’s in fine arts, has no specific academic course requirements. The fiction workshop, which became a full-fledged program in 1936, receives 750 applications for 25 places, and there are 450 poetry applications for 25 places.”

A critic charges in the new issue of Harper’s magazine that a major new biography of e.e. cummings has plagiarized extensively from a 25-year-old biography.

The owner of the Atlantic magazine has decided to move it from its lohg-established home in Boston to Washington DC. “It’s a Boston institution. It’s a huge disappointment . . . and I’m really sad about it. I’ve actually written an apology which I’m sending to all of the Boston staff tonight.”

Take a group of emerging writers, put them in a bar and watch the crowds roll in. “Whenever I would see a band in a bar, I’d be amazed that the place would be packed even if the band was terrible. So I started to think, what if we brought book writers and readers together in places other than bookstores. Of course, we didn’t invent this — Allen Ginsburg did this years ago in bars in New York. But we also wanted to take books to where the people are since they weren’t coming to bookstores. And we wanted to try to make writers of literature as cool as rock stars.”

Why are people so snobby about romantic fiction? “Domestic? Boring? Who would want to be dubbed romantic as well? Maybe that explains the collective identity crisis that seems to have seized the Romantic Novelists Association in its choice of shortlisted novels for its annual prize.”