Category: publishing

The appointment last week of New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch as new editor of The Paris Review seems to have quieted some critics of the magazine. “I’d never thought it would be fun to edit a huge magazine, it was never something that I aspired to. But the idea of having a small magazine, a writer’s magazine that was really about writing—I started to think about it, and I thought, I’d love to do this.”

Tour groups are flocking to the Vatican in search of the clues in Dan Brown’s murder mystery Angels and Demons. “The book uses his sculpture as clues pointing to a dastardly plot led by a secret society against the Roman Catholic Church – a threat to blow up the Vatican as the church elects a new pope. Surely this is an opportunity for [the Church] to show they are not an occult force shrouded in mystery. Dan Brown’s implication that Bernini was part of an anti-religious conspiracy has left some art historians fuming. Others though are more pragmatic.”

China may be opening up, but government censors still have a firm grip. But a recently banned novella is finding alternate means of distribution around the censors. “Publishing in China is serving both the party and the people. Here, the party comes before the people. There are several forbidden topics for publishing in China, including politics, sex, the military and state secrets.”

A previously unknown novel by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, has been discovered in the French National Library…

Cartoonist Gerhard Haderer finds himself facing jail time in Greece over his “depiction of Christ as a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis.” “Haderer did not even know that his book, The Life of Jesus, had been published in Greece until he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January charged with blasphemy. He was given a six-month suspended sentence in absentia, but if he loses his appeal next month his sentence could be increased to two years.”

“A sign of the times; it is now quite common for an ambitious writer to announce that they will prepare their new proposal and/or sample chapter in time for Frankfurt or London. Nothing here about the inspiration of the jealous muse, but everything about the expectation of a quick sale in the feverish atmosphere of the literary marketplace. In the past, one of the perils facing the success ful novelist was the risk that he or she would make the mistake of writing to satisfy the public, ‘dishing things up like short-order cooks’, as Graham Greene observed towards the end of his life. In today’s marketplace, there is more pressure than ever to come up with the literary equivalent of the Big Mac.”

Japanese cell phone users are using their phones to read books. “Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels — classics, bestsellers and some works written especially for the medium. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card. But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavour far more enjoyable than you’d imagine.”

“Officially launched on March 3rd, the New York Public Library DIgital Gallery is presently offering 275,000 images (stored on a 57-terabyte, a thousand billion bytes of data, network of servers) for public perusal and free personal use (“…individual private study, scholarship and research…”). Most of the contents of the Gallery is in the public domain, and if you can obtain your own reproduction of any image you find here, you can probably use it as you see fit. The digitized copies on the NYPL website, however, are protected by copyright, and the Library charges a usage fee if an image is used in any “nonprofit or commercial publication, broadcast, web site, exhibition, promotional material, etc” contexts.”

“Pioneered two decades ago by men whose work is banned here, a genre of politically charged fiction in Saudi Arabia is now being produced by more writers and in greater quantity than ever before. It marks an artistic advance in a society in which writers have long confronted the deadening effect of state censorship, and a milestone in a desert kingdom where most people were illiterate a generation ago. The writing reflects the rising discontent in the kingdom and across the Middle East, where young populations increasingly exposed to Western ideas are demanding more social and political freedom. By taking on the powerlessness of women, the tyranny of tribal society and the role of religion in the birthplace of Islam, the writing is slowly undermining the cultural conventions that have kept provocative fiction off bookshelves here for years.”

“In the academic world, the Chronicle of Higher Education is the newspaper of record. From stories of embattled administrators to the latest faculty appointments, its 140-plus pages have provided readers with industry news, job listings and similar information each week for nearly 40 years. Last January, three ex-employees challenged the Chronicle’s grip on academic news by going online with a free, Web-based rival, insidehighered.com… In the coming months, insidehighered.com plans a major marketing campaign that will include advertising and direct mail,” with the focus on the versatility and publication speed of the online model. The site’s founders even expect it to turn a profit in the not-too-distant future.