Category: publishing

At England’s University of Wolverhampton, an English course has caused an uproar. “Unpopular Texts is the paradoxically popular optional course on the third year of our English degree that has been pilloried in the press. A dark spectrum of material selected from all areas of culture has passed through its seminars. Self-evidently literary and experimental works by James Joyce, William Burroughs and DM Thomas rub shoulders with Enid Blyton’s long unavailable The Three Golliwogs. Modernist masterpieces labelled degenerate by the Nazis share exhibition space with a September 11-themed issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.” And pornography…

“The finalists for the Great Annual Literary Awards – the most lucrative night in Canada’s literary awards scene, with $133,000 distributed over nine prizes – were announced yesterday by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.”

A UK survey reveals that those asked could identify a quote from Star Wars more easily than one from Shakespeare. “When asked to complete the line ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your…’ from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, some people said swords or money rather than ears.”

There’s been a big uproar about what might be instore for the New York Times Book Review, after an online column last week quoted top editors contemplating fundamental changes in the way the section reviews books. “If people in publishing see the New York Times doing something that is changing the way they handle books, the industry will respond — because they need to get the coverage.”

The hearings drag on for freelance writers who are being sued by the trustee for the Lingua Franca bankruptcy. The trustee is going after writers for fees paid to them for stories they wrote in the last three months of the magazine’s life. But there are indications that the judge hearing the case isn’t taking the claims for payment very seriously…

If 80 percent of Canada can be considered “urban,” is there something called “urban literature?” A new publishing imprint aims at defining it. “But urban’s presence in literature is still nascent. The form’s more characteristic themes — a sense of bravado, youth, hip-hop culture, a certain hypersexuality, and often some reflection of violence — are only just creating their own hood in the literary canon.”

Books always seemed so traditional. And then came the promise of e-books, giving readers more control of how they read. But “after an initial frenzy of attention, neither hypertext nor e-books gets much ink these days. Are readers ceding control back to writers?”

A French writer has written the first novel in shorthand instant messaging language. “Phil Marso has published (on paper) an antismoking novella for teenagers called ‘Pa Sage a Taba’ (Not Wise to Smoke), composed in the jambalaya of abbreviations, slang, and neologisms that teens worldwide use to send each other text messages online and via cellphone.”

In a recently unearthed trove of writings: “Scribbles by Queen Victoria’s poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson on a publisher’s proof show he planned to cut out the most celebrated sections of The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Dale Pck was surprised by the furor that erupted over his scathing review of Dale Peck’s book last fall. But the backlash has taken its toll, he writes. “God knows the name-calling doesn’t bother me (although you’d think a clever writer wouldn’t have to resort to homophobia to defend his novel). But it does effectively destroy my ability to be read seriously, by which I mean holistically. I’m the guy who called Moody the worst writer of his generation, and the thousands of words I used to qualify that assertion have disappeared behind it.”