Category: publishing

And some writers aren’t happy about Amazon’s plans: “Not content with threatening high street bookshops and disrupting the traditional publishing model with its Kindle e-readers, the web giant has written to authors’ agents to announce its attack on another link in the chain.”

“The struggle to balance our collective and individual selves gets to the very root of what it is to be human. When the two urges come into conflict, as happens in any extramarital affair, all hell breaks lose.”

It’s Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald. “Often referred to as a member of the Generation of 1950 — writers who worked during the repressive reign of Gen. Francisco Franco — Mr. Caballero Boland wrote about the country’s social conditions.”

“The Bad Sex in Fiction Award survives by taking sex out of its literary context and holding it up to ridicule. In some cases, the books that have been shortlisted and presented with it have not even read by the judges.”

“For one, poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity. Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman once told The New York Times, ‘I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.'”

“Six short stories by six anonymous writers are competing for the first ever Costa short story prize, with the public voting [online] to decide on the eventual winner.”

“Since its textbooks are digital, CourseSmart can track how much time each student spends with each page of the book, what chapters they skip, what passages give them trouble, and so forth.”

Joan Acocella: “After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book. … But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, Huckleberry Finn.”

“This year, the mood seems to be lifting, and a lot of booksellers are feeling optimistic.”

“This is really shocking. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves.”