Category: publishing

The books chosen for Scotland’s premiere tourist attraction are a scandal. “As a literary representation of Scotland, it is woeful, made worse by the far more imaginative range of books offered in the children’s section. On the evidence of Historic Scotland’s collection, Scots spend most of their time drinking and eating.”

Shelley Jackson is writing a story by tattooing one word at a time on a person. The story is a “sequence of words tattooed on the bodies of some 2,093 volunteers, several of whom are reported to have teamed up to form whole sentences. Jackson’s ‘story’, by the way, is called Skin. Who said the avant-garde was dead? At 2,093 words, her ‘story’ might possibly persuade the subeditors among us to institute a search for cuts. It certainly does invite us to ask another basic question, viz: how short can a story be, and still be considered a story?”

China has more than 500 state-owned publishing houses. As part of the country’s economic reforms, many of those publishers will be cut loose to operate as private businesses, which should revolutionize publishing in the world’s most-populated country.

A bad book fair is a horrible thing to witness, says Russell Smith, and the organizers of the Great Ontario Book Break (you’d think the acronym alone would have been a danger sign) should have seen that they were creating a bad book fair. “Events like these make one come close to despair about the state of the arts and the worth of public funding. Conservatives could easily point to a debacle like this and proclaim that the free market should just take over like a cleansing rain. This is like the sponsorship scandal on a smaller scale: advertising money squandered on a non-event.”

“For years, educators at colleges and universities have marshaled software tools to ensure that their students’ work is original. Now, tainted by scandals or leery of the Internet’s copy-enabling power, a growing number of newspapers, law firms and other businesses are using data-sifting tools that can cross-check billions of digital documents and swiftly recognize patterns in just seconds.”

“Montreal’s Blue Metropolis writers’ festival, which ended on Sunday, has ballooned into a major Canadian literary event in just six years. With a million-dollar budget, and headliners including Paul Auster, Yann Martel and Pico Iyer, the Blue Met is now an event on the scale of the International Festival of Authors in Toronto or the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival.” The festival still has a hard time drawing the superstar authors who roam the Toronto and Vancouver fests, but the lack of star power is made up for with the distinctively ‘Montreal sensibility’ of the whole event.

“David Beckham has won a special prize at the British Book Awards for his book My Side, the fastest-selling biography or autobiography of all time. Lynne Truss’ bestselling grammar guide Eats, Shoots and Leaves picked up the book of the year award, while Alexander McCall Smith was named best author.”

“A recently-discovered story by Rudyard Kipling has been published for the first time. The tale, part of the Stalky & Co saga, is called Scylla and Charybdis, and sees Stalky and his friends catch a colonel cheating on the golf course. The manuscript was uncovered by an archivist at the Haileybury and Imperial Service College in Windsor, the successor to Kipling’s old school.”

New US regulations might have prevented American publishers from editing manuscripts from countries such as Iran. But the policy has been reconsidered. “U.S. publishers would be free to edit scholarly manuscripts from Iran and some other off-limit countries without fear of running afoul of economic sanctions, the Bush administration has determined.”

Scientists who have been examining what they thought were Petrarch’s remains have discovered that the skull belongs to someone else. And they suspect it could be that of a woman. ‘This must have been robbery. It is not, frankly, a nice business’.”