Category: publishing

How can an obscure Victorian-era comic novel about three snobby Britishers on a boating trip possibly become a bestseller in Africa? Well, it helps if there’s only one bookstore in the whole southern region of your country, and if that bookstore only stocks three titles, one of which is Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat. Welcome to southern Sudan, where civil war still rages, but one plucky bookseller soldiers on.

“To get a sense of how The New York Times plans to overhaul its Book Review, just consider the candidates to succeed Charles (Chip) McGrath as the section’s next editor. All have strong nonfiction or current-affairs backgrounds — in line with the newsier direction the Times’ top editors say they want to take the section when they make the much-anticipated appointment as soon as February.”

Mark Haddon has won the 2004 Whitbread Prize for his best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which chronicles the life of an autistic teenager. Haddon had been considered the favorite among the authors on the shortlist, which also included DBC Pierre and Don Paterson.

Mark Haddon is best known as a children’s author, so it’s no surprise that he would choose to write his first novel with a teenager as the central character. To hear Haddon tell it, in fact, he wasn’t entirely sure, at first, whether he was writing for adults at all. Regardless, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has become a major hit with adults and teens alike, and a movie deal is already in the works.

England’s Hesperus Press is filling an interesting niche in the publishing world, churning out short pieces of literature which have, for one reason or another, escaped notice in the ever-expanding book universe. Some of Hesperus’s releases are minor works by major authors, and some are just stuff you’ve never heard of, which the editors thought you might find interesting. “Maybe we should think of Hesperus titles as the Allen Iversons of literary history, little folks bursting with talent and suddenly able to dominate when allowed to play.”

“After a painfully slow year in the book trade, Canadian publishers are facing 2004 with cautious optimism. And, perhaps surprisingly, Indigo Books & Music is the reason. The powerful chain appears to have had a strong Christmas season, which has publishers excited. And the company, long criticized for its haphazard inventory control, is poised to introduce a new computer system that will likely solve many of the ordering and tracking problems that have plagued it in the past. Results for the crucial third quarter of Indigo’s fiscal year won’t be announced to shareholders till early February but publishers say Indigo… is sending out gratifyingly large payments.”

When The New York Times starts to talk about monkeying around with its books section, a large sector of the publishing industry sits up and takes notice. So the rumors currently circulating have to be causing some near-aneurysms, particularly among writers, editors, and readers of fiction. The Times is planning to cut way back on the number of novels it reviews, with arts editor Steven Erlanger saying that, “To be honest, there’s so much s—” in the current fiction market. Non-fiction will get the lion’s share of the focus in the future, and there will be fewer straight reviews, and more coverage of the publishing industry in general, as well as a new focus on reviewing the type of “popular” books once shunned by high-minded books sections.

ArtsJournal blogger Our Girl In Chicago is upset at some of the changes coming to the Times books section. “It’s not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by [Times executive editor] Bill Keller rankles. First there’s his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he’d say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it.”

The series is called His Dark Materials, and many observers have it pegged as the next global phenomenon of children’s fantasy literature. But there is a more adult side to Philip Pullman’s tales of fantastic adventure, and it’s bound to make many adults uncomfortable: “The books make a breathtakingly subversive attack on organized religion and on the notion of an all-powerful god. The trilogy has already been criticized by church organizations alarmed at its preference for humanism and for its depiction of a cruel fictional church that is obsessed with what it regards as the sexual purity of children but blinded by its own lust for power.”

Floyd Horowitz believes that he has located more than twenty examples of early writings by novelist Henry James, penned under various pseudonyms and previously unidentified as particularly Jamesian. But not everyone is convinced of the validity of Horowitz’s research, especially since much of it was based on computer models which scan the word selection and literary style of unidentified works, searching for subtle connections which could link the works to a particular author.