Category: words

A tweet just after Brexit passed in 2016 predicted that 2018 would have a ton of novels set against the backdrop of the vote. Well: “We may not quite have seen the ‘slew’ of novels predicted, but there have certainly been a number of significant ones, enough to have generated their own literary category – ‘Brexlit’ – with an academic book on the subject already promised.”

Amazon suddenly dropped antiquarian booksellers from the Czech Republic, South Korea, Hungary and several other countries from AbeBooks. One bookseller from California says, “The biggest e-commerce giant in the world apparently finds it too complicated to do business in Prague. … You have to wonder who’s next. We’re all vulnerable to Amazon’s capricious actions.”

The author titled his new book after Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s slogan, almost daring him to have to censor his own key words. “The reality, Ma acknowledges, is that censorship is now so all-encompassing that the novel will very probably not be allowed to exist in Chinese, even in Hong Kong, which has historically provided a toehold for work by dissident authors banned on the mainland.”

There’s a steering group made up of a wide range of people from the arts in the UK; then, the secretary of state and the prime minister will make final recommendations to the Queen from a shortlist the group provides. Whoa, what? Poet John Agard: “I’m certain that the prime minister is very familiar with the iambic pentameter. … But since poets don’t have the final say in politics, logically speaking there’s no reason why politicians should have the final say in poetry.”

Though this column doesn’t say it, it’s partly to avoid trolls. But other that that, is using an asterisk to substitute for a letter useful? Not really: “Replacing a letter with an asterisk is just pretence.”

“In a legal filing, Barnes & Noble hit back at Demos Parneros, claiming the recently fired CEO actively sabotaged a potential sale of the company earlier this year, bullied fellow executives, and sexually harassed multiple women at the company. And raising the legal stakes, lawyers for B&N have filed a counterclaim [to Parneros’s lawsuit], asking the court to order Parneros to pay damages for his alleged breach of fiduciary duties, and seeking to potentially claw back more than $1 million paid to Parneros ‘during the period of his disloyal conduct.'”

“‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’, which describes a fateful train journey, is one of a series of standalone short fiction titles being released by Faber to mark the publisher’s 90th anniversary. According to the Plath scholar Peter K Steinberg, it is completely unlike anything else she wrote before or after.”

“Booksellers have always had to contend with warding off book thieves hungry for valuable volumes. As part of its ongoing efforts to deter book crime, Raptis Rare Books in Palm Beach, Florida, is employing a new piece of technology called synthetic DNA.” Here’s how it works.

“How do we measure commercial success? There seem to me to be five measures, all important but all with shortcomings.” Richard Charkin, former head of Bloomsbury Publishing and former president of the International Publishers Association, argues that “building up cash reserves is not in itself an indication of success. What really matters, in my opinion, is the building up of publishing assets.”

Counterfeits such as James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry and Clifford Irving’s Autobiography of Howard Hughes “incubate the circumstances of their composition, weaponizing the prevailing nostalgias and channeling the anxieties of their era while providing a window into the hearts of their author. They are, in other words, literature.”