Category: publishing

Taking A New Look At The NYT Book Review

What will the New York Times Book Review look like under new editor Sam Tanenhaus? “It still feels like there’s an institutional history that I don’t want to necessarily disrupt. We’re responding to the cultural moment, which seems a contentious one, and trying to capture those diverse energies. We’re also trying to capture the breadth of the literary culture, the highs as well as the lows. We’re trying to do justice to commercial and mass-market books as well as the serious and rarefied works of literature that come out. We’re trying to have a balance, and trying to have a mix of voices—the established writers but also newer writers. We’re encouraging reviewers to speak in their own voice and trying to accommodate their sensibilities. We might run a very long review for one writer and also run some short punchy reviews of mass market books and mix the two together. The biggest changes will probably be in appearance and presentation, though.”

Keeping Track Of Books (Readers Too?)

Libraries have begun tagging books with high-tech tags to better keep track of their collections. “With their encased microchips, RFID tags can transmit information to devices designed to pick up the signals and interpret them. Some privacy advocates worry that a day will come when a library book’s tag could broadcast information about a patron to anyone nearby with a tag-reading device — stalkers, snoops, corporate marketers, or G-men.”

Chicago Tribune Awards Wilson Literary Prize

Playwright August Wilson has won the 2004 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize. “With these awards we hope to celebrate great literary achievement, something very important in the history of Chicago and also a part of the Tribune’s long history. In committing to these awards we also aspire to bring attention and support to a variety of local literacy efforts, in our belief that literacy and literary achievement are linked.”

The Magazines Of “Buy This”

The hot new things in magazines? New publications with stories about the products they advertise. “While some traditionalists gag at the notion of these so-called mag-a-logs, fretting that the line between advertising and journalism is already too blurry at many magazines, the publishing industry has little interest in anything else. Confronted by an advertising recovery that seems to be skipping magazines and by marketers who are demanding ever more direct access to their readership, publishers see shopping magazines as a low-risk, cheaper alternative to investing in less product-oriented titles.”

Welcome To The Library Of Unwritten Books

“An art project travelling the UK, this library is collecting stories and ideas for books people would like to write – but never have, and probably never will. Its two librarians – Sam Brown and Caroline Jupp – have collected more than 400 stories over the last two years, and are aiming for a total of 1,000. Armed with a ‘mobile recording unit’ – a converted shopping trolley – they have been eliciting stories from strangers before turning each tale into its own mini-book.”

Uk Lit… Where To Look?

“in the past half century, Anglo-Saxon literary attitudes have shifted decisively away from Europe, westwards (and southwards) to the US, Latin America and the Commonwealth. With the shift in British literary outlook away from European modernism and the successors of Sartre and Camus, our last continental icons, and towards the American postwar realists – Updike and Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Morrison – what is our position now towards continental Europe? What ought it to be, as political union expands? How to talk about it?”

The New Pulp Fiction

“For good or for bad, street lit is eating up the African American book world at the moment. Walk into the Karibu bookstore in Prince George’s Plaza and you’ll see. It used to be there were just one or two small shelves of ‘street life’ books. Now there’s a whole section… What is a street lit novel? The telltale signs usually include a shut-your-mouth title, straightforward sentences, vast amounts of drugs, sex and rap music and varying degrees of crime and punishment. An exemplary tale is a mixture of foul language, flying bullets, fast cars, a flood of drugs, fallen angels and high-priced frippery. It venerates grams over grammar, sin over syntax, excess over success.”

A New Progressive Book Club

“The 75,000-member Conservative Book Club, founded in 1964, is responsible in the past couple of years for a dozen bestsellers. Thanks to the CBC’s success, earlier this year media giants Bertelsmann Inc. and AOL Time Warner launched a right-wing book club of their own, American Compass. Yet despite the popularity of recent books by lefties like Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Tom Frank, there hasn’t been a book club for progressives.” Until now…