Category: publishing

Most employees at the big publishers aren’t exactly getting holiday bonuses this year – but, thanks to E.L. James and 50 Shades of Grey, Random House employees are smiling all the way to the bank.

“The last few components of the My Shakespeare project, surveying all Bard-related activity online, are just starting to emerge, and they cover an extraordinary breadth of formats, from online and physical artworks to new renderings and visualisations of sonnets and plays.”

“There was a reason Alan Moore’s Neonomicon was shelved in the adult section of the library in Greenville County, South Carolina: It contains adult content. And it was checked out with an adult library card – but that adult library card was in the hands of a 14-year-old girl.” Oops. (Greenville is home to the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University.)

“The Washington Post, one of the last holdouts against the trend of charging readers for online access to newspaper articles, is likely to reverse that decision in 2013, according to people familiar with the matter.”

“[It] takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you – and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. … What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.”

Philip Roth may have thrown in the towel at 79, but the AP and CBC remind of us some colleagues who remain in the game: Elmore Leonard, David Ferry (who won this year’s National Book Award for poetry), Toni Morrison … Even 97-year-old Herman Wouk has a new book out. (Oddly, they neglected to mention Alice Munro.)

“A long, shuddering gasp of relief will no doubt have been heard from the losers, as the Canadian author Nancy Huston scooped the least coveted book award of the year, the Literary Review’s Bad Sex prize, for her 14th novel, Infrared, about a woman who likes to snap her lovers in the throes of passion.”

“Launched with $34,000 in grants, Symbolia: The Tablet Magazine of Illustrated Journalism, a digital journal designed for the iPad that specializes in comics and illustrated nonfiction reports, debuts today in the app store.”

“Officially launched in August, Small Demons is the book world’s latest mind game and guilty pleasure … an encyclopedia and ‘Storyverse’ that catalogues names, places, songs, products and other categories for thousands of books.”