Category: publishing

Everyone hates cliches, but no one does anything about them. In fact, at the end of the day, most of us would have to admit, with all due respect, that we are driven round the bend on a daily basis by friends and co-workers who can’t stop tossing out overused metaphors and meaningless catchphrases. So what to do? Run right out and pick yourself up a copy of “The Dimwit’s Dictionary,” a compendium of 5,000 of the worst abuses of the English language, as well as reasonable alternatives for the more overused and irritating entries, all authored by the man who wrote the book on tired expressions. The tome may be a work in progress, but it’s almost sure to be an overnight success with language geeks.

Franz Wright won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but he’s not the first in his family to win one. His father – James Wright, who died in 1980, “won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1972; the two Wrights are believed to be the first father and son ever to win the award.”

The allegation that Vladimir Nabokov may have lifted the plot of Lolita from another author’s work has Ron Rosenbaum fascinated. “It’s not so much a scandal as a literary mystery — a mystery about the mind of one of the great artists of our era. And second, the alleged scandal turns on the question of a literary-psychological term that was new to me, but that has now become one of my favorites: ‘cryptomnesia.'” The term mean just what it sounds like: it describes an author who has read another author’s work, but completely forgotten about it, to the extent that he appropriates the plot without ever realizing that he has done so.

In an age when a fake news show (Comedy Central’s The Daily Show) serves as a more reliable news delivery vehicle than some real news networks, and when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish opinioniated hype from objective fact in the national media, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the satirical newspaper The Onion has a bit of an ongoing problem with people who take their stories seriously. The paper’s deadpan style may have something to do with it, but another factor is emerging as well: in a society so politically and culturally divided as the US seems to be at the moment, people are ready to believe anything that validates their personal point of view, no matter how absurd it may seem.

Sam Tanenhaus began work this week as the new editor of the New York Times Book Review. “Since his appointment a few weeks ago, Tanenhaus’ likes and dislikes, his authorship of a prize-winning biography of anti-Communist icon Whittaker Chambers and an uncompleted one of William F. Buckley — all but his hat size has been parsed and glossed with the earnestness of old-time Kremlinology. Literary insiders have done everything to divine his standards except, typically, to read a whole book Tanenhaus wrote on the subject in 1984.”

Some like to put down California for a lack of culture. So what to make of the fact that The New Yorker magazine now sells more copies in California than in New York? “For the six-month period that ended Dec. 31, California had a total paid circulation of 167,583, compared with New York’s 166,630. What this will do to the well-worn clichés about California is uncertain. The Atlantic Monthly also has more subscribers here than in any other state.”

Writers are constantly being humiliated. Is it their nature? Take the book tour stop: “Most frequently, though, no one shows up. Carl Hiaasen arrived for a reading in Arkansas and found a chili-cooking class and a University of Arkansas Razorbacks game scheduled in town at the same time. He ended up autographing books for the salesmen. William Trevor drove for hours to a reading and found the place empty. So he read to the cabdriver and two people who wandered in.”

Psychologist Lauren Slater’s new book “Opening Skinner’s Box” has been hailed as “a bridge the gap between academic and popular psychology,” but the experts are attacking. “Some say that she put invented quotations in her new book. Others question her methods and data in her own experiment in faking mental illness or challenge the accuracy of her description of some famous past experiments. Critics have been publicizing their accusations in book reviews on Amazon.com and other Internet sites, while professors at several schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities, have been exchanging information on their views of the book’s failings.”

There’s “America” magazine and “American” magazine, and they couldn’t be more different. “The two magazines nicely convey the dyads: rural and urban, mass and elite, red and blue. America’s America is sleek, multiracial and wonderfully coiffed. The images on the oversize, foil-edged pages are outré; in one photo essay the actress Juliette Lewis is curled up in a refrigerator, having a moment with herself. Using hip-hop as its motif the magazine roams across fashion, film and technology. It takes the reader behind the velvet ropes and assumes anyone who is reading it belongs there: America magazine defines and covers its own species. American Magazine’s America seems more like a teddy bear you can hold on your lap.”

Two Harvard scholars have launched a wide-ranging project designed to document the lives of African-Americans throughout the centuries of U.S. existence who, for one reason or another, have fallen through the historical cracks. “It is an ambitious effort to patch the spotty historical record about the men and women who, among other things, fled slavery, created art and shepherded civil rights campaigns in the shadow of giants like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”