Category: publishing

Ruby lips, white teeth, crabs eating a corpse, coats full of cash – many of the elements of ,Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared first in short story form.

“The unofficial hero of Mr. Kafka’s book is Charles Hippolyte Labussière, a French government clerk who in 1794 purportedly saved hundreds of people from the guillotine by dissolving the relevant paperwork in Paris’s public baths (or, as one version of the story has it, eating it).”

Dalkey’s looking for workers, aka indentured servants, who “do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.”

“Since coming to Ireland, I’ve seen so many applications to Dalkey in which CVs list upwards of six internships, which tend to smack of ‘we looked, we evaluated, and didn’t think the person was good enough to keep’. And my 25 years of experience with interns has been very mixed.”

“Not long ago I installed myself at the Algonquin, the Midtown hotel where Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott and others once traded juniper-infused barbs, and used it as a launching pad to crisscross the island for a few days, looking to see what’s left.”

“The European Commission settled its antitrust case against Apple and four book publishing groups over e-book price fixing on Thursday, in what was described as a victory for the leading online seller, Amazon, and a setback for publishers fighting for the ability to set prices for electronic literature in the digital marketplace.”

“This is a sensational discovery. Partly because it must be seen as Andersen’s first fairytale, and partly because it shows that he was interested in the fairytale as a young man, before his authorship began.”

“The Literature Prize, set up as a rival to the Man Booker, has secured a sponsor. The sponsor’s identity has not yet been announced, although the £40,000 prize will adopt the sponsor’s name when it is revealed in February 2013.”

“Google’s offensive is not surprising. If we believe the warnings of the search engine giant, at stake is nothing less than the freedom of “my” internet. We’re all part of this fight, whether we want it or not.”

“It happens all the time in other industries: music, television and art all make use of such collaborations, so why not books?”