Category: publishing

Oprah’s new book club features classics (dead authors). But her selections are making the bestseller list, and along with them, the translators. “Though Tolstoy is not around to experience the thrill of becoming an overnight sensation, the elation is beginning to sink in for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband-and-wife team whose translation of that Tolstoy classic love story was selected by Ms. Winfrey as the definitive version for the millions who watch The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

The “translation of the first five of the 24 Iliad books condenses 37,000 words to 32 lines of mobile telephone text message language, with sad and smiley faces and love hearts. In book three, a duel between Paris and Menelaus to determine possession of Helen, is reduced to: “Paris went 2 fight Menelaus. But he was wiv fright. Hector told im 2 b a man. Shame on him! Helen went 2 watch from da walls.”

Is literary criticism getting too nasty? That was the topic at BookExpo in Chicago. “It seemed debatable — at least as many people seem to think that literary critics are more often too kind, or at least too polite, than not — but that didn’t stop one prominent book critic from bashing another’s brains in, figuratively speaking, for being too negative.” Critic Carlin Romano and Dale Peck sparred, with Roman railing at length against what he called Peck’s “savagery” and “shrieking denunciations,” dismissing his work as “performance art.”

Who are the 50 people who make Chicago a great literary place? NewCityChicago made a list: “On this year’s list we have a living legend, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, a literary card shark, last year’s publishing Cinderella story, rock ‘n’ roll poets, Hef’s chronicler and more.”

“Stephen Joyce, the highly litigious grandson of Ireland’s greatest writer, James Joyce, has devoted his life to fiercely protecting his grandfather’s copyright, setting his lawyers on those foolhardy enough to take the Joyce name in vain or to reproduce Joyce’s words without consent. But now, fearful for this month’s mammoth celebrations of Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, Irish MPs yesterday rushed through emergency legislation which will prevent Mr Joyce from suing the government and the National Library over an exhibition which displays 500 pages of Joyce manuscripts.”

“The decades-old dispute over whether Tolkien’s work counts as serious literature is still alive. So are the debates over how to interpret the cultural politics of his imaginary world. But even before the author’s death, in 1973, some readers were beginning to wonder about a different set of questions: how to understand the relationship between Tolkien’s storytelling and his scholarship.”

“A hugely popular Canadian Web site that links buyers looking for rare books to 12,000 antiquarian booksellers worldwide, will announce tomorrow at Book Expo in Chicago that it is opening its Internet platform to authors, publishers and bookstores selling new books. About 20,000 books sell daily through ABEbooks.com, which also has English, French and German sites… Customers can access over 50 million titles on ABEbooks.com and the company projects that a third of its business will be in new books within three years, offering strong competition to Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca.”

The author reading seems perilously ripe for disaster. Why? “The world of letters” seems “to offer a near perfect microclimate for embarrassment and shame …. Something about the presentation of deeply private thoughts—carefully worked and honed into art over the years—to a public audience of strangers … strays perilously close to tragedy.”

“Mr. Wood is recklessly committed to literature (if he weren’t so flexible, I’d be tempted to call him a fanatic), and brave enough to risk ridicule by pushing every thought to the limit. Caution doesn’t enter into the calculation: He shows us, candidly—in prose overcrowded with metaphor, prose that palpably yearns for maximum expression—how his head and heart respond to what he reads (which is just about everything). He’s growing before our eyes. It’s perhaps his most impressive quality.”

“The mid-project death or enfeeblement of an author is one of the stranger crucibles a publisher must face. Unlike more collaborative art forms, a piece of writing bears a highly individual style, making it hard for others to complete a book without it seeming choppy or fraudulent. Nor can a company release a book’s fragment the way it might a CD; a piece of writing more than most creative efforts is an integrated whole and immune to such partialness. Yet creative legacy (if not commercial imperative) demands that a publisher find a way to get the book out–whether by hook, crook or séance.”