Category: publishing

Neal Pollack says writers have little if any voice in America these days. “Do you have any clue as to the monumental public indifference that awaits the average author on the American road? Writers get less respect in this country than people who eat live bugs on television for money! I just got off three-plus weeks on tour, and I was lucky to get an audience of 15 people–in blue states. It took everything I had just to get someone to buy a copy of my stupid book, much less bring about a permanent transformation of American politics.”

The National Book Awards went off last week. “The honors have been around since 1950 and were sponsored in part by publishers who still buy most of the $1,000-a-plate dinners at the ceremony. They were all smiles last year when rainmaker Stephen King accepted the foundation’s honorary medal for distinguished contributions to American letters. They were frowning this year when the fiction finalists were announced. Only one of them had written a book that sold more than 2,000 copies. Was this payback from the literary community for King’s recognition?”

“Occasionally you hear of a Luddite novelist who shuns computers, but the truth is that most of us would be lost without them. If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine, then, the blow to my scribbler’s vanity when I discovered a while back that computers might get along just fine without writers.”

So the Women’s Review of Books is fading into history. Was it inevitable, given the times? That’s too pat an explanation, writes former WRB senior editor Lynn Walterick. “In the post–November 2 United States—and certainly earlier––dialogue, reasonable disagreement, and discovery appear to have joined the ranks of endangered species. Difference is under siege; choice—on all fronts—has disappeared, is declining, or is shadowed by threat. This is no time to leave the line of battle for the bottom line.”

Pauline Marcil has been appointed Canada’s new poet laureate. “Marcil, 60, wants to use her new job to bring “artists in contact with the political world.” She also wants to revisit the idea of having events such as poetry and literature readings at the Parliament building.”

The New York Public Library is feeling flush, and ready to restore some of the cuts in service that have been in place since 9/11. “As part of the changes, the library’s landmark building, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, will adopt a six-day schedule next month, opening on Sundays for the first time since 1970, library officials said yesterday.”

Lily Tuck wins this year’s National Book Award with her novel The News From Paraguay. “The imagination portion in particular was evident when, in her acceptance remarks, Ms. Tuck confessed that she had never been to Paraguay and did not intend to go.”

“We tend to take it for granted, but the alphabet was a human invention. Without it, we wouldn’t read books and newspapers or write shopping lists ande-mails. We would have to rely on recitations and recordings to transmit language. But as vital and visible as the letters of the alphabet are, they usually go unappreciated.”

Miriam Toews has won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for her novel A Complicated Kindness, a “victory that surprised many, since Alice Munro’s collection Runaway won the Giller Prize last week and received a rave review from U.S. novelist Jonathan Franzen in the Sunday New York Times.”