Category: publishing

Radar Magazine, which put out two “test” issues last year and has been involved in a long search to find funding, has found $25 million to open. Radar aims to be a general interest magazine aimed at capturing “the interest of young, single people who live in urban areas and are tastemakers in their own right” The first issue under new ownership will appear next April, with issues to follow every other month for the rest of the year before the magazine moves to a monthly schedule in 2006.

People are still puzzling over the nominated field for the National Book Award. “Consider some of the writers who were eligible this year: Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick. And the nominees are: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Christine Schutt, Joan Silber, Lily Tuck, and Kate Walbert. All of the authors are women, and each lives here in New York City. According to the Times, only one book has sold even two thousand copies.”

Alan Hollinghurst has won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. “I hardly know where I am. My whole psychological technique for dealing with this evening was to convince myself I wasn’t going to win it.

The result was a split vote, with Hollinghurst, odds-favorite David Mitchell and Colm Tóibin’s The Master, a fictional portrait of the author Henry James, “all very close”.

The shortlist for this year’s Giller Prize is once again filled with historical novels, and almost obsessed with a rural sensibility that has dominated Canadian literature over the past few years. Philip Marchand doesn’t see anything wrong with that perspective, but “I still wondered if, in our literary culture, a work of fiction set in present-day Toronto was somehow regarded as a bit trivial. A good writer who carefully observed contemporary life always ended up sounding satirical, and to some people satire was Not Serious. Better to have these soulful looks at the past, at a way of life that was vanishing. That was real literature.”

Having lost $2 million over the last decade, the Smithsonian Institution is shutting down its publishing arm, causing an outcry from scholars who fear a void in the industry. Also of concern is that the dismantling of Smithsonian Books represents another step towards the bottom-line-first philosophy that has made Smithsonian chief Lawrence Small a controversial figure.

Fans of high-minded pop singers like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Billy Corgan like to talk of lyrics as poetry, and to celebrate their favorite performers as not only musical geniuses, but literary lights as well. But such trite assessments may be selling the art of poetry short, says Robert Everett-Green. “Rock poets who break out of their medium and into published poetry are still rare… And yet the cachet of calling oneself a poet continues, even as poetry declines as a subject of public interest.”

The sexual memoir has been gaining steam (no pun intended) as a literary form in recent years, and far from being near-porn, many of the books read like throwbacks to an age when sex was allowed to be beautiful, and not simply an animal act. “At a time when so much sexual writing aims… to demystify and de-emotionalize sex — to reduce it to a physical and hormonal process not much different from, say, scratching an itch — [the author] belongs to the old tradition of hyperbole and overwriting, the tradition of Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, which sees sex as an avenue to spirituality, to the mystical and sublime.”

The UK publisher of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Life of Pi, has capitalized on the author’s success to the tune of a “£1.1m pre-tax profit for 2003”, enough to place the once-struggling Canongate Books firmly back in the black. Canongate, which had twice been in receivership before its current run of good luck, is also the publisher for Booker winner DBC Pierre.

“Best-selling children’s novelist, GP Taylor has accidentally burnt three of his original manuscripts while clearing his house before moving. Scarborough-based Graham Taylor was turning the embers on a bonfire when he noticed what was written on them.”