Category: publishing

Tibor Fischer slogs his way through 126 novels that, “as a judge for this year’s Man Booker Prize, I was required to read, because it’s clear most publishers don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Taste: there’s no escape. Nevertheless, there are books that I don’t like, but I can see they are proficiently written and that others might enjoy them. Yet some entries were so execrable I reckoned they must have been submitted as a joke…”

The huge success of novels featuring a Botswanan private detective has catapulted their Scottish publisher into the major league. “With sales topping five million in English, Precious Ramotswe is fast becoming to Alexander McCall Smith what Harry Potter is to JK Rowling and Inspector Rebus is to Ian Rankin.”

It’s easy to see the allure of books such as the Da Vinci Code. But it is fiction, and “the problem with this ad hoc iconography is that readers of The Da Vinci Code may come to believe that by accepting the conventionally flimsy premises of a thriller plot, they have learned something about Leonardo and his art…”

On the campus of Brown University in a program called ArtsLit, a teacher named Kurt Wootton is using reading and performance of classic texts to teach literacy to local teenagers from struggling schools. “Like immigrants of earlier generations – the Italian stonecutter tuning his radio to opera, the Irish stevedore reciting Yeats in a tavern, the Jewish tailor viewing a Yiddish production of ‘King Lear’ – Mr. Wootton sees high culture not as the oppressor of the lowly but as an agent of their liberation.”

For what it’s worth (and we don’t suggest the cultural import), “Inside Mel’s ‘Passion,'” a March cover story, was People’s biggest newsstand hit in the first six months this year, selling more than 1.7 million copies.”

Norma Khouri now admits that she fabricated parts of her best-selling nonfiction book, “Forbidden Love,” which tells of her friendship with a Muslim woman murdered by her father for falling in love with a Christian. The author says, however, that she did not lie about the woman’s existence or her killing.

That “The 9/11 Commission Report” has become a best seller may not be solely due to its subject matter. Concerned that the American people be able to grasp its content, the book’s authors and editors paid attention to something neglected by many historians and countless writers of government reports: good, clear storytelling.

Romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises intends to woo them back, but for now many readers have strayed from the genre, irresistibly attracted to other kinds of books. “Explosive growth in the market for women’s fiction, particularly in newer genres like chick lit and women’s thrillers, has been drawing readers away from traditional romance novels, those formulaic bodice-rippers stocked with hunky heroes and love-conquers-all endings.”

With time being of the essence, a Canadian novelist intent on skewering the various George Bushes (H.W., W. and P.) turned to an online publisher, which is serializing his “Too Many Georges” online.

As the quality of Christian fiction rises, readers are following. “Moving beyond prose that reads like either a Bible study or a dime-store romance, Christian writers have started a literary renaissance by exploring serious religious themes in everything from futuristic thrillers to historical epics.”