Category: publishing

“Far from just being nostalgic, zines offer a chance to produce content that doesn’t fit within the mainstream of architectural culture – to make something more spirited, more radical, more exploratory, and more personal. It’s open to anyone and it can be used to do absolutely anything. It’s an opportunity to work outside of an academic or professional framework at any level, and it’s as easily done by a student as by an established architect.”

“My generation has seen a transformation in the world of letters unequalled since the days of Gutenberg. What’s more, it has happened at warp speed.”

“Gran-lit” appears on the e-book scene.

“There’s flattery, seduction, and attempts to establish intimacy that you realize are a means to an end, but that if seen by others would be embarrassing and humiliating – to you.”

“Despite the obvious encroachments of the digital, we all still use so much paper to note, to register, to measure, to account for, to classify, authorise, endorse and generally to tot up, gee up and make good our lives that it would be a Joycean undertaking to provide a full history of all the paper in just one life on one day, never mind in one city on one day, or in the life of one nation.”

“France’s top literary award, the Goncourt prize, went to Jérôme Ferrari for The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, a story of a young idealist whose dreams of finding a haven in Corsica are dashed by the island’s notorious corruption and violence.”

Le Choix de l’Orient, selected from Prix Goncourt semifinalists by a jury of francophone university students from six Arab countries, went to French author Mathias Enard for Rue des Voleurs (“Street of Thieves”), the story of a Tangiers teenager who gets caught up in the Arab Spring.

“Nicolas Sarkozy, as the French head of state and even before he ascended to the role, developed an odd habit of publicly bad-mouthing Madame de Lafayette’s 1678 work, The Princess of Clèves, one of the first modern French novels, which is obligatory reading in schools across the republic.” The backlash he suffered dwarfed any reaction Bush would have gotten for dissing The Scarlet Letter.

“A newly announced e-reader called the beagle generated a lot of interest among readers, publishers and the technology-minded last month when txtr, the Berlin-based firm behind it, announced plans to sell the device for just £8 (yes, really) – that’s £61 less than the current entry-level Kindle.”

The Guadalajara Book Fair’s $150,000 FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages went to Peruvian author and journalist Alfredo Bryce Echenique. While the award was for his fiction, his “journalistic career has been tainted by allegations of plagiarism, prompting numerous calls for the writer to renounce the award” and an angry debate “that has divided writers and critics across Latin America.”