Category: publishing

The National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction has been awarded to Marilynne Robinson for her long-awaited second novel, Gilead, which chronicles the life of an Iowa minister. The circle’s poetry prize went to Adrienne Rich.

A lawsuit alleging that celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley used another author’s work without permission in her book about the family of President Bush has been dropped, after the plaintiff decided that he was likely to lose the case on a technicality. “Under federal law, if a copyright holder fails to register with the office before an alleged infringement takes place, the holder is limited in the damages and lawyer’s fees he can recover.” Kelley has always maintained that her use of material from the other author’s web site was legal under the “fair use” doctrine.

Most people don’t think of lexicographers as having a great deal of impact on their daily lives, but as guardians of language, the people who write dictionaries and create the rules of pronunciation and proper usage actually wield a fair amount of influence over what we say and how we say it. Now, a new generation of lexicographers has begun to reshape the language business, and they appear to be better equipped to take the reins of American English at a relatively young age than any of their predecessors. “Today’s rise of young, hip lexicographers reflects changes in the culture at large,” not the least of which is the profound impact of online culture in shaping the academic mind.

Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, published in 1903 has had an outsized influence. It is a weird and great book. “The appearance next month of a definitive English translation, published by Indiana University Press, is a major cultural event — one that is, arguably, at least several decades overdue.”

Has British poetry become “almost irrelevant, because the establishment has closed ranks against fresh ideas and forms?” So says the director of an experiment called Text Festival. “[It] has run out of steam. There’s nowhere for it to go other than becoming a mild entertainment or an anachronism.”

Picasso was a prolific writer, and once joked he would be remembered as a “Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing, and sculpture.” Now his writing has been published in English. “Picasso’s literary output has been little more than a footnote to public awareness of his artistic contribution, but ‘it’s the work of an accomplished poet. It was not trivial work. It’s part of the history of experimental poetry in the 20th century’.”

Though sales were up in its stores, Barnes & Noble has reported a decline in profits for the last quarter of 2004. “For the three months ended Jan. 29, the retailer earned $115.6 million, or $1.56 per share, compared with $130.2 million, or $1.65 per share in the year-ago period. The New York-based company also warned that profits for the first quarter and for all of 2005 will be lower than analysts expected.”

Hitler’s infamous book has unexpectedly been selling up a storm in Turkey. “The book was first published here in 1939, when Axis and Allied countries were competing for Turkey’s soul as they tried to woo it away from the neutrality it would maintain until the very end of World War II. But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the DetR bookstore chain.”

Is the Google Print Project in trouble? Three months after announcing it would put online vast numbers of books from prestigious libraries, Google is facing questions from publishers over copyright issues…

The British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) celebrated national science week and Einstein this year by holding a competition to write a “poem based around the work of the famous physicist. The competition was also open to the public, and the winners were announced today, with the adult prize going to a versified imaginary conversation with Einstein.”