Category: publishing

“The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.”

“Before cutting and serving haggis, a designated guest first addresses it, reciting Burns’ poem of appreciation for the ‘Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race.'”

“Good God they’re obscure. Many of the names are people who 18 months ago I’d never heard of.”

Freelance reporter David Axe and artist Tim Hamilton wrote a graphic novel titled Army of God about the notoriously vicious Joseph Kony. Last month, “the federal office of Foreign Assets Control confiscated the majority of Army of God‘s advance payment, claiming it was being used to fund a terrorist organization.”

“If Orwell was fighting in a war akin to the Spanish civil war in 2012, where would he be – Syria? Would he write Homage to Aleppo, perhaps? … Would he be working in a call centre rather than going down a mine?” Or might he have become a food writer – a Ruth Reichl or Michael Pollan?

“The prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation into English.”

“They can tell you about torment. They can describe long, frustrating hours sitting in dark, stinky basements and caves, pen in hand, trying to get the flow of the words just right. … In case you haven’t noticed, some of the most amusing and captivating writing in the city is being produced in the service of cheese.”

“Ten million people signed online petitions against SOPA. Eight million looked up their Congressional representatives’ contact information on Wikipedia’s directory and then went to the representatives’ Web pages, inadvertently causing them to crash from all the traffic. Three million people emailed and one hundred thousand called their members of Congress to express their opposition to SOPA.”

The director of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is “negotiating long and hard to buy Sade’s manuscript. … He has argued in front of the Commission of National Treasures to declare it provisionally a ‘national treasure’ that needs to be preserved in the library. And he is ready to pay more than $5 million to get it.”

“A traffic stop last summer led police to search 51-year-old John Mark Tillman’s Fall River home where they found more that 800 allegedly stolen artifacts, that police estimate may be valued at more than $1 million.” Among the items are a 1758 letter from James Wolfe (the British general who won the French and Indian War) and a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.