Category: publishing

Lawrence Weschler is working on starting a new serious thoughtful non-fiction magazine – Omnivore. In the meantime, he talks about his ideals. “What he longs for is a return to the “non-Pavlovian” reading and writing experiences he enjoyed when he would come across a two-part, 40,000-word piece on surfing, say, and be swept away by the dynamic drive of the narrative, an experience that he could relive around the dinner table the following weekend because his friends would have exulted in the same article. As a writer, he mourns the cherished experiences under the halcyon days, for him anyway, when William Shawn edited The New Yorker.”

“Educators say that from first through third grades, children learn to read; from fourth grade on, they read to learn. Often left out of this discussion is whether a person can be taught to love to read and when or how that happens. In a time when statistics tell us that reading literature for pleasure is on the wane, it seems important to look at our own relationships with books.”

Norma Khouri is still maintaining her book is not a hoax, even after her publisher pulled the book from stores. “It didn’t take them [Random House] long to make up their minds. They gave her until Friday to respond to them and when she didn’t respond to them, they pulled the pin on her. They were obviously very anxious to move.”

A British reading club known as the Racketeers has been named “as recipients of the Penguin/Orange Reading Group Prize, awarded each year to the group who ‘demonstrate the most imaginative and diverse reading’ in Britain. The only all-male group among 700 entrants, their submission was entitled ‘Real Ale, Real Books, Real Men?’ and set out their mission: ‘The pub atmosphere is an integral part of our ethos. We like the noise, we like the beer, we like the idea of talking about literature in these surroundings. Other drinkers frequently express an interest in our discussions and sometimes get involved’.”

“The book world has a language all of its own. Reviewese isn’t confined to book reviewers; it pervades the literary world. A lot of it comes from book-jacket blurbs, which produce a repertoire of sentences that publishers would like to see in book reviews. This literary lingo consists of words, constructions and formulations few English speakers use, but that sound true if used about books.”

Is “place” important to novels anymore? A group of Canadian literary types sit down to debate the question: “The commodification of place is so prevalent that even non-fiction writers, such as Pico Iyer, have based their careers on it. Read between his clever phrases and glib descriptions of a city in Bolivia or a Toronto street and his point is almost always the same: We’re living in a global village now and there’s no “there” anymore.”

Random House has concluded that Norma Khouri’s “Forbidden Love,” was probably a work of fiction. “The publisher said it would permanently withdraw the book from circulation and cancel the planned publication of a second book by the author. Last month it temporarily withdrew the book pending its investigation.”

Is it true that newspapers, while “too dumb to be stylishly snarky, also do a disservice by running reviews that are ‘advertising posing as criticism’?” So what is the role of the modern book reviewer? (in the 130,000-books-a-year universe, it’s not so easy a question to answer…)

“Book reviewers, being journalists, are ephemeral. Yet literary criticism – what TS Eliot called the proper activity of the civilised mind – makes judgments which, because of their subject as well as their quality, are not diminished with time. Reviewers who develop ideas above their station ought to bring themselves down to earth with examples of a perfection to which they can barely aspire.”

New Republic critic James Wood is famously harsh on contemporary post-modernist fiction: “Part of my anxiety and unease about novels by Foster Wallace, Franzen, and others is that they have swallowed a great deal of journalism, sociology, and cultural studies, which means they are no longer doing something that’s not replaceable that another medium can’t do as well or better. . . . I am accused of being too harsh, but the critic’s job is to look at the threats, the menaces to literature.”