Literary magazines come and go like the seasons, but this year, the London-based journal Granta is celebrating its 25th anniversary, a stunning display of longevity for a magazine that has systematically refused to run with the crowd. “Throughout its quarter-century of existence, Granta has thrived on contradiction. Out of those contradictions spring its strangeness — and success… It’s unusual among literary magazines for publishing more nonfiction than fiction and hardly any poetry. Although based in London, it has numerous American contributors, and more than half of its readership is American.”
Category: publishing
Why Doesn’t Poetry Make The List?
Why is it that so many who never miss the latest Pinter or David Hare or Alan Bennett in the theatre, who like to drown in Mozart or Mahler, cannot connect with poetry, particularly serious contemporary poetry?
The Great Book Rescue
In September, a catastrophic fire destroyed a historic library in Weimar. “Around 50,000 books, most of them from the 17th and 18th centuries, along with 35 paintings and the Duchess Anna Amalia’s sheet music collection were destroyed by the flames. Some 62,000 volumes that were damaged by fire and extinguishing water, each wrapped individually in cling film, were transported to Leipzig for “first aid“ – more than 40 metric tons of librarian-style emergency cases.”
Testing America’s Iran Ban
An Iranian human rights activist is suing the U.S. government for the right to work with an American literary agent in the publication of her memoirs. “[U.S.] Treasury Department regulations… impose penalties on anybody who transacts business with Iran,” but Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi says that she doesn’t want to have to submit her manuscript to Iran’s repressive mullahs for approval. U.S. law does permit “American publishers to reproduce, translate and edit ‘informational materials’ from countries subject to U.S. sanctions. But even advising an author how to structure a book ‘would be a problem.'”
Justice For All – The Passing Of A Poet
Several distinguished poets have died this year. But with American Donald Justice’s passing last summer, it is “hard not to feel that a curtain has begun to descend over an eminent generation of American poets. From this uncertain vantage point at the outset of the century, one is hard pressed to imagine who might succeed them.”
Protests Over Graham Greene Bio
The last installment of Norman Sherry’s massive biography of Graham Greene was supposed to be a victory lap for the biographer. But “members of Greene’s family are furious that Mr. Sherry – who had exclusive access to many of the author’s papers – chose to highlight Greene’s fondness for prostitutes and his sordid sexual pursuits. The new volume has received widespread praise in the United States, but critics in England have condemned its unconventional style and are livid. Mr. Sherry has interjected himself into the narrative, dropped in bits of his own poetry, even included a picture of himself riding on a donkey in Mexico as he retraced Greene’s research for the novel The Power and the Glory.”
Cheapening The Nobel Prize
How is the Nobel Prize for Literature being chosen these days? “More and more, the Nobel Prize has gone to a person who has the correct sex, geographical address, ethnic origin, and political profile—“correct” being determined by the commissars at the Swedish Academy. Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), marks a new low.”
And Now A Bedtime Story By My Favorite Celeb
Ed Koch, Madonna, John Gotti: Is there a celebrity who’s not writing a children’s book these days? The market is booming, but critics — including longtime children’s authors — point out that kids don’t care if a book was written by someone famous; what they want is a good story.
Poets Take On Publishers Weekly (And Win)
Over the summer, Publishers Weekly decided to discontinue its monthly poetry forecast. “But for many in the world of independent presses, where the bottom line is quite a bit lower than in commercial publishing, that explanation wasn’t good enough. Zaleski estimates that Publishers Weekly received approximately 150 phone calls, e-mails, and letters about the decision. The response was so great that the magazine reversed its decision and reinstituted its monthly poetry section in September.”
Book-Buying For Idealogues
There have been lots of political books in this election season. Do their sales foretell any political direction? “Informal polls taken by our store managers indicate that some 70 percent of our customers say they have no intention of reading these books; 15 percent say they will; and 15 percent are undecided. One Kansas City customer said, ‘I’m buying this book to show people where I stand.’ Another in New York said, ‘I’m buying this book because the author agrees with me’.”