Category: publishing

What’s it like to be the partner of a writer? A new book explores the handholding and psychological propping-up required. “What makes the arrangement work, or not work, and why? How does life at home contribute to the creative process? What is the cost of a masterpiece on a caring relationship? All this mollycoddling of someone who, after all, could just as easily be playing solitaire behind that closed door as writing, might sound excessive, but it’s by no means an exception.”

Is there any kind of correlation between the kinds of reader reviews a book gets on Amazon and how well it sells? Turns out yes. A researcher analyzed Amazon’s star system and found that “books high on what he called the “controversiality index” are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales.”

A London Library lover waxes eloquent about the power and personality of the library. “There are moments when a library becomes itself. The rest of the time is potential. The book collection, arranged by subject and author, latent with pleasures and instruction, is a library in Clark Kent mode. The crux where the book, the reader and the need collide like particles in an accelerator is its apotheosis, the library as Superword.”

Helen Vendler has been one of the most prominent poetry critics over the past 40 years. “Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn’t like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession. Her approach is, so to speak, rigorously untheoretical: A poem speaks to her, or it doesn’t, and the critical essay is Ms. Vendler’s preferred medium of reply.”

Members of the Book Prize jury are objecting to the appointment of John Sutherland as chairman of the jury. “He is an appalling choice, because of what happened last time round. ‘Last time round’, when Professor Sutherland was a judge in 1999, he wrote a piece for the Guardian in which he described the judging process. His analysis was thunderously denied by two fellow judges, who accused him of a ‘breach of trust’.”

The Nobel committe considered Ernest Hemingway for seven years before finally awarding him its literature prize. So what finally won him the honor? Hemingway’s 1952 novel “The Old Man and the Sea” convinced members of the Academy he had earned his place alongside other laureates for “his mastery of the art of narrative.”

Ah, the writer’s curse – writer’s block. But even worse, perhaps – procrastination. “At its worst, procrastination is a form of slow suicide, a kind of stand-off with life. Why act, when we know the end of all endeavour? Days, weeks, months creak past, but still no attempt to advance the work is made. Procrastination is surely worse than writer’s block, less involuntary: you see what you need to do, you know you can do it, and yet … and yet.”

Sex seems to have taken over the book industry. It’s on the best-seller lists, and it’s in the bookstores. “Porn has long been a multibillion-dollar industry – in its Internet and direct-to-DVD ghetto. But rarely has “aboveground” publishing been so saturated with sex. It’s the ‘porno-ization of the culture’.”

A little-known Victorian book book of science fiction published in 1892 appears to have predicted many of the technological advances that in fact happened. “Entitled Golf in the Year 2000 or What Are We Coming To, it follows the tale of avid 19th-century golfer Alexander J Gibson, who falls into a deep sleep on 24 March 1892 and wakes up Rip Van Winkle-style on 25 March 2000 to find a world transformed. Television, superfast trains, digital watches and female emancipation are all predicted in the tale, which envisages a world of leisure where golf is paramount.”

The Paris Review is not renewing the contract of editor Brigid Hughes, who succeeded George Plimpton as the magazine’s top editor last January, four months after his death. “The resignation is a stunning development for the quarterly, which current and former employees say is struggling to adapt to a formal management structure and to being overseen by a board of directors that, for the first time, is trying to influence its editorial direction.”