Category: publishing

“A scribe – who until the weekend was known to history only as Adam the scrivener – so infuriated Geoffrey Chaucer with his carelessness that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs. Now alert academic detective work has unmasked the sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature as Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.”

A poll of 500 readers last month came up with a list of “must have” books. “What has made me so relieved is that these very diverse books are practically all serious, accomplished, ambitious and original works of fiction. It takes a bit of thought to discover them, read them and respond to them. Most are contemporary, but they are not brand-new bestsellers or spin-offs from movies or TV shows. It was word of mouth, not hype, that got them on to this bookshelf.”

A British poll places Agatha Christie as the country’s most popular detective story writer. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, came second in the poll of 1,500 people, followed by the United States writer Patricia Cornwell, who was voted into third place for her novels about the forensic psychologist Kay Scarpetta.”

Azar Nafisi’s memoir ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ of life and book groups after the Iranian revolution may be a huge bestseller in the United States, but it has yet to be translated into Persian. As a result, almost no Iranians have even heard of the book. Fewer still have read it. Among those who have, however, reactions might fairly be described as mixed.”

Why aren’t we reading more, asks Carlin Romano? Our media encourages us not to. “We’re left with a general media environment in which the readerly commit a kind of cultural suicide in pursuit of the less readerly. In magazine and newspaper offices across the country, well-educated editors stuff their publications with pieces about trash movies, hip-hop hotties, reality-TV spinoffs, and ingénue profiles — then go home and read a book. As print people drive their hordes toward nonprint media, TV folks — supposedly a dimmer breed — cleverly ignore the competition, rarely acknowledging what’s in the local papers and almost never devoting a minute to a nonpresidential book.”

“When you can point the finger at televisions, and now computers, as the obvious hijackers of the reading habit, why focus on a favorite book? Because the arrival of the cat marked the moment when the traditional line between primer-reading and pleasure-reading began fading rapidly—and along with it a crucial prerequisite (as well as product) of being a real reader: a sense of privacy…”

Last week’s NEA study that reported the decline of reading in America suggested that an amazing number of people still read. “For example, if one were to ask most of my conservative friends to name the percentage of Americans who read fiction, poetry or plays, they’d likely have guessed 25% at most, not the actual 46.7%. Extrapolating its data to actual readers, the Endowment finds the number of people reading or listening to poetry in 2002 was 30 million. Thirty million! What are they reading? If only 20,000 of them read John Donne, Wallace Stevens or Yeats just for the pleasure of their company, the nation’s mental health is more certain than we imagined. Seven million read plays. That seven million Americans would read a play for pleasure is astonishing.”

John Leonard is tired of Dale Peck. “This isn’t criticism. It isn’t even performance art. It’s thuggee. However entertaining in small doses — we are none of us immune to malice, envy, schadenfreude, a prurient snuffle and a sucker punch — as a steady diet it’s worse for readers, writers and reviewers than self-abuse; it causes the kind of tone-deaf, colorblind, nerve-damaged and gum-sore literary journalism that screams ”Look at me!” The rain comes down — and the worms come out — and just what the culture doesn’t need is one more hall monitor, bounty hunter or East German border guard.”

The secretive operators of the website Foetry (www.foetry.com), a self-described “American poetry watchdog,” are out to clean up poetry. They promise, from behind a cloak of anonymity, to uncover scandals among the publishers of contemporary poetry, dishing dirt on “fraudulent `contests,”‘ as their homepage has it, “tracking the sycophants,” “naming the names,” and generally cleaning house.

At 53, Edward Jones had his first novel published. It was greated with acclaim and won a Pulitzer Prize. But though the book has been optioned for a movie and, as Time magazine says he is “on top of the world,” Jones lives a minimalist lifestyle.