Category: publishing

A previously unpublished poem by Tennessee Williams, described as having been “written out of absolute, complete despair,” has been discovered in his blue test booklet from a college course in 1937…

“Hoping to promote overlooked contemporary literary fiction, 20 literary bloggers have created Read This! Four times a year, the Litblog Co-op will share its pick with readers, with the first announcement coming May 15.” The idea is to see if coordinated focus on the same books will help promote them.

Where many authors struggle to write 1000 words a day, others crank out full novels at a super-human rate. Steven King is so prolific he even invented another persona to take credit for the overflow. A dependable high-performer can help a publisher’s bottom line. But can writing too much saturate an author’s market?

The new Lit Blog consortium is an experiment in literary sociology. “Can a group of people frustrated with prevailing trends in the publishing industry (which is constantly on the lookout for the next Da Vinci Code, as if one weren’t enough) and with mainstream media (where reviewing space shrinks constantly) win recognition for a worthy, but otherwise potentially overlooked, piece of fiction? Or, to put it another way: Do literary bloggers have any power? Considering  how many novels and short story collections they now publish, university presses may well want to monitor the results.”

“Since the late 1990s, teen chick lit — think Bridget Jones in high school — has been gaining popularity, reaping profits for publishers and booksellers, prompting established adult authors to target younger audiences and giving teens and tweens (9- to 12-year-old girls) their own heroines. Teen chick lit is still growing each year by double digits.”

Mystery novels are hot in Canada, and the genre is filling publishers’ lists. Some “40 per cent more mystery novels were published this year than the year before, and there has been a 50-per-cent increase in juvenile mysteries. And the number of nominations for the Arthur Ellis Awards, the CWC’s annual mystery prize, has spiked dramatically. This year 67 novels were submitted to the fiction category, 43 for best novel, and 24 for debut works.”

Lan Samantha Chang, a Harvard University professor and award-winning fiction author who specializes in stories of Chinese-Americans, has been named director of the nation’s most prestigious writing program, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.

Judith Regan says she’s moving her publishing and media group from Manhattan and relocating to Los Angeles. “In doing so, ReganBooks, which is part of HarperCollins, which is in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would be one of the few major book imprints to be based outside Manhattan and one of the first to leave New York for the West Coast. The move could shake up an industry that has long operated in a parochial, Manhattan-centric fashion, even as technology has made the location of a company less important.”

“A strange thing has happened in the American arts during the past quarter century. While income rose to unforeseen levels, college attendance ballooned, and access to information increased enormously, the interest young Americans showed in the arts — and especially literature — actually diminished. That individuals at a time of crucial intellectual and emotional development bypass the joys and challenges of literature is a troubling trend. If it were true that they substituted histories, biographies, or political works for literature, one might not worry. But book reading of any kind is falling as well.”

Does Google’s global reach create “the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world?” The president of the Frnech National Library believes so. “Europe, he said, should counterattack by converting its own books into digital files and by controlling the page rankings of responses to searches. His one-man campaign bore fruit. At a meeting on March 16, President Jacques Chirac of France asked Mr. Jeanneney and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web.”