Category: publishing

The National Endowment for the Arts is expanding and extending its writing project for military stationed overseas. “The program has been an overwhelming success. I don’t think the NEA fully appreciated the need and demand for the program when we first launched it. We have doubled the size of the program.”

Who will win this week’s Giller Prize for Canadian fiction (it will be announced this week)? Rebecca Caldwell talks with the six finalists…

This year’s shortlists for the Whitbread Prize have been announced. Finalists include The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker prize-winning novel. Past winners include Philip Pullman, Ted Hughes, Kate Atkinson and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Women’s Review of Books is publishing its final issue. It’s closing after losing money since the mid-90s. “The story sounds familiar. It involves shrinking library budgets, increasing costs for printing and postage, and changes in reading habits. The cumulative effect has been to undermine the stability of a journal that was publishing review essays by and about Kathy Acker, Raya Dunayevskaya, Marilyn Hacker, and Adrienne Rich when some of today’s “third wave” feminist scholars were in kindergarten.”

Alan Hollinghurst’s win of this year’s Booker Prize has propelled his fourth book “The Line of Beauty,” close to the top of best-seller lists and into the awareness of a vastly wider audience.

David Kipen has been reading California’s state constitution – an “imperfect transcript of a continuing 155-year constitutional convention, which shows no sign of adjourning. And there’s not a drop of poetry in it, unless you count the surreal juxtaposition of our right to fish in public waters and, on the very next page, the state’s right to execute prisoners without falling afoul of the ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ clause.” Compare this to the US Constitution, which is short and sings to its citizens…

Norman Kaye, 82, a “Las Vegas resident who’s written tunes for crooner Perry Como, is not happy the state wants a new promoter of the iambic pentameter. Kaye was torqued to learn the Nevada Arts Council recently sent out a press release seeking nominations for the post of poet laureate. The announcement does not mention the state has an existing poet laureate in Kaye, a grievous slight in my book.”

Many newspapers publish their own list of bestselling book. But the methodology of the lists is flawed, and they are not timely (data is often weeks old) “It’s a deeply unscientific — one is almost tempted to call it whimsical — compilation, which has a veneer of a certain kind of science.” So why not use the more scientific Bookscan lists?

The Miami Book Fair opens. “This year, 365 authors from 30 countries are participating in the eight-day fair that began on Sunday and runs until next Sunday on the downtown campus of Miami-Dade College and on the streets surrounding it. There will be readings in five languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese, Creole and French – and about half a million people are expected to attend. More than 30 writers were turned away because the full schedule could not accommodate them, organizers said.”

Political polarization may make for a country full of angry people, but for publishers of politically themed books, the currently inflamed passions of the U.S. voting population are nothing short of a financial windfall, as readers snatch up blatantly partisan tomes by the dozens. Of course, the predominence of such aggressively one-sided books is coming at the cost of more serious and even-handed political analysis, but as one publsher puts it, “To publish for the middle of the road right now would be suicide.”