By any journalistic measure, the Los Angeles Times is flying high these days. One sign of its improvement are the four Pulitzers it won this year. So why is the paper cutting back and laying off staff? Is it losing money? Nope. It seems that the paper’s 26 percent profit margin – 26 percent! – isn’t high enough to keep the Tribune Company (the LAT’s owner) stock rising on Wall Street…
Category: publishing
Martel: Life After The Booker
When Yann Martel won the Booker Prize, the glare of public attention was blinding. So what comes next in the career? “I could be a one-hit wonder and that’s it. I’ll be known as, ‘Remember that guy who wrote Life of Pi, about that boy in the lifeboat with his tiger?’ You know, William Golding, his entire career suffered from the enormous success of Lord of the Flies and everything else took a long, long time.”
The Little Literary Magazine That Could
“Border Crossings” is a tiny literary and arts publication produced in Winnipeg with a staff of two. It has only 5,500 subscribers, but its reputation is huge. And now, “after 23 years of guiding readers through the maelstrom of modern arts and culture, Border Crossings has earned one of the highest honours in the Canadian magazine world: the President’s Medal conferred by the National Magazine Awards Foundation.”
Bloomsday Without Blooms?
Bloomsday, the annual June celebration of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, is always a big occasion in Dublin, where the novel takes place. This year, the 100th anniversary of the day detailed in the book, is expected to be a massive party. But a central theme of Leopold Bloom’s character is his Jewishness, and one can’t help but notice that the number of Jews in Dublin has been dwindling for decades. In fact, there are less than 2,000 left in the entire city.
An Author Ungagged
Alice Randall, the author of The Wind Done Gone (the Gone With The Wind parody which the Margaret Mitchell estate tried to stifle) hasn’t been able to talk about her battle to get the novel published, thanks to orders from her own publisher’s legal team. But Randall has a new book out, and with the controversy well behind her, she’s finally speaking out. “A lot of older black people experienced it as a black voice being silenced. It was an intellectual awakening for me that the copyright act can be used for censorship.”
Celebrating Joyce. Or Just Sitting Around Drinking. Whichever.
The fellas who make up Denver’s James Joyce Reading Society are devoted to the author’s work. But they’re also quite devoted to Guinness beer, Irish whiskey, and talking politics, so you’ll excuse them if they don’t always get around to the reading. Of course, Joyce would probably approve of such meandering loyalty, and as the 100th anniversary of the date that was the setting of Ulysses approaches, the Bloomsday revelries are set to begin not only in Denver, but in 60 countries worldwide.
Lost In Translation
Would government subsidies for publishers help more translated books to appear on American bookshelves? John O’Brien doesn’t think so: “On average, a very good novel from another country will sell fifty percent fewer copies in the United States than a rather mediocre novel written by an American… I doubt that we can expect foundations to lead the way in an effort to support translations by working with nonprofit presses; however, what would be interesting to speculate on is whether the NEA couldn’t enlist foundations in this country in a joint undertaking with government agencies in other countries to create a fund for translations that would take into account all of the publication expenses rather than just the cost of the translations.
Laziness or Xenophobia?
What has caused the dropoff in translations in the English-speaking literary world? It surely has something to do with the pervasiveness of English around the globe, but Eric Dickens fears that a “selective xenophobia” may have crept into even enlightened minds in the UK and US. “United States power and prestige prop up the English language internationally; and yet English is only the mother tongue of a relatively modest number of people worldwide. Translation obviates the necessity of people having to write badly in English when they can be writing well in their respective mother tongues.”
Levy Wins Orange Prize
“In one of the biggest literary upsets for some years, a previously low-rated novel last night scooped the £30,000 Orange prize for fiction. After a hard-fought final round, judges gave the women-only award to Andrea Levy’s Small Island, a comedy about the punctured illusions, tribulations and spry adaptability of the pioneer Windrush generation of immigrants to Britain in the early 1950s.”
Judging A Lit Prize – Exhausting
Judging a literary prize such as the Orange requires great feats of endurance from judges. “I left the meeting slightly hysterical, convinced that there was no way I would ever finish these novels – 46 in six weeks in the first batch, although I would read 71 in total – and certain that my swotty fellow judges would. So at 2am that night I realised I needed to make a schedule. Weekends were best – say, six novels – and then a couple in the week, in the odd spare evenings or on the bus. This was the exact opposite of the languorous pleasure I usually take from reading, and the intensity had consequences.”