Category: publishing

“It is invigorating to see adults make complex ideas available to children. But there is a less welcome, regressive trend in evidence, too – authors who hijack children’s literature to make their work more cosy.”

“English PEN, the writers’ organisation dedicated to freedom of expression and the support of persecuted writers, is caught up in an in-house row over freedom of expression.”

“You don’t have to be personally involved or angry to notice how often dead writers’ words are lifted and put in the mouths of their novelized selves today. Their lives and ideas have been borrowed, even more insidiously than they are on screen, in three novels about Henry James, one about his brother William and two about Sylvia Plath.”

The British government allocates £2 million more for public libraries. But critics aren’t happy. “The money will do nothing to restore the value of book budgets or improve drab buildings, two factors often seen as being central to libraries’ falling popularity over the past 20 years. One report forecasts they will cease to exist in a further 20 if trends continue.”

“Clinton’s My Life sold more than 400,000 copies in the United States in its first day of release, the most ever for a nonfiction book and double the believed previous record holder, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History.”

The magazine business is booming in British Columbia, and several new magazines have international aspirations. “In the past two years, more than a dozen new titles have emerged, with a particularly strong showing from a new generation of edgy arts-and-culture magazines.”

Audio versions of books usually account for 8-10 percent of a book’s sales. But Bill Clinton’s audio version is likely to double that. “My Life has a first printing of 1.5 million books. There are 350,000 copies of the audiobook. Yesterday the “My Life” CD was the No. 7 best-selling title among all books at Barnesandnoble.com and No. 8 at Amazon.com (the cassette audiobook was in the mid-20s on both sites). ‘It is accurate to say this is the largest adult audiobook release in both sheer numbers and anticipation’.”

“Eats, Shoots & Leaves” present itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off th suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.” So Louis Menand takes a blue pencil to the book and finds plenty to circle.

Literary critic Dale Peck is “not just out to piss people off. He’s on a one-man crusade to save fiction writers from their worst tendencies, and to save readers from believing the lionized postmodern likes of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon are worth the paper they’re printed on, either.”

James Joyce is more than the author of what many academic types call the greatest novel of the 20th century. He is, or so we have been told for ages, the father of the literary modernist movement. But since most modern writers don’t have a lot of use for modernism these days, is Joyce becoming similarly irrelevant? Authors Jim Lewis and Jeffrey Eugenides have some thoughts on the subject.