Category: publishing

“Readers are eager to learn more about Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek, who was virtually unknown in the United States before the announcement that she had received the Nobel Prize for literature. Within 24 hours of Thursday’s citation by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, four of her books had jumped into the top 70 on Amazon.com’s list of best sellers.”

“Publishers from Arab countries came to the Frankfurt Book Fair as the guests of honor, seeking understanding and tolerance as well as a greater appreciation of Arab culture and literature. But several publishers, as well as the book fair itself, have attracted criticism and charges of anti-Semitism for their display of at least a dozen books with strong anti-Zionist themes.”

Google is launching a new search engine which would allow anyone to search the content of books online, and observers are saying that the move “could help touch off an important shift in the balance of power between companies that produce books and those that sell them.” The service works by searching the scanned pages of books provided to Google by publishers, and offering links to online sites where the books could be purchased. Publishers are giddy over the concept, which could allow them to eventually sell books directly to consumers, but the whole enterprise may be yet more bad news for traditional booksellers.

The shortlist for Canada’s Giller Prize is out, and the field is dominated by Random House of Canada authors. Four of six nominated authors write for Random House, with only one small-press book making the cut. The Giller comes with a CAN$25,000 cash award, and the winner will be announced November 11.

“What persuades anyone to part with more than two million dollars for a long roll of teletype paper covered in the scribbled script that would one day become On The Road? How can any old book be worth nearly half-a-million dollars when the same thing brand spanking new is sitting on the paperback classics shelf for less than $30?” Still, someone is clearly fueling the markups, and first editions remain one of the most cherished of literary collector’s items.

Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek is an artist of many varying stripes, and it may have been that self-contained diversity that attracted the Nobel Academy to her in the first place. “In her dramatic works, the academy noted, Ms. Jelinek ‘successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard simultaneously.’ She may be the first Nobel laureate in literature to have made a significant commitment to the Internet, frequently posting commentary on her own web site.”

It’s become almost a tradition for the Nobel literature recipient to be someone who wasn’t even on the critical radar screen at the moment, and so it is with Elfriede Jelinek. And yet, “Ms. Jelinek fits a more familiar pattern. She is the seventh European literature laureate in the past decade. The academy has also again shown a preference for literature with a political echo. As with several recent winners, including last year’s, J. M. Coetzee, a critic of South Africa’s apartheid government, Ms. Jelinek has used her literary work as a form of political engagement.”

“The ancient Greek Homer remains one of today’s most popular poets, topping the chart of bestselling poetry books for 2004 with online retailer Amazon. Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, which both dealt with the Trojan War, were the first and second bestsellers. His popularity has been partly put down to release of the movie Troy, starring Brad Pitt, which is based on The Iliad.”

“Acclaimed and controversial Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, whose work often explores the role of women in society, was awarded the 2004 Nobel Literature Prize, the Swedish Academy announced.”

The swastika is illegal in Germany, but at the Frankfurt Book Fair, they seem to be everywhere, emblazoned across the front of several bestselling books. “All the more curious then that a shipment of [Philip Roth’s latest] book was held up at German customs this week, apparently because of the swastika cover.”