Category: words

Ward, author of Savage the Bones, The Men We Reaped and the new Sing, Unburied, Sing, says that she and George Saunders (author of the Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo) may both be writing about the spirit world right now for similar reasons: “Many people in power are attempting to rewrite the past and the present to fit their narrative. Writing about spirits is a way to counteract some of that, because the people of the past are allowed to be present in the moment and tell their own (true) stories, and often, there is a reckoning between the living and the dead.”

“Many of those surveyed reported incidents where younger, more junior colleagues were harassed by men in more senior roles. Sixty-six percent of publicists, who often work closely with authors outside the office while on promotional tours, reported harassment, with 61% of booksellers reporting abusive behaviour from customers, colleagues or visiting authors.”

What’s Zulu for the Streisand Effect? “South Africa’s small literary market has been lifted by one of the country’s largest political scandals. A new book detailing the “cancerous cabal” that has bankrolled Jacob Zuma’s presidency was bound to cause a sensation, but attempts to have the book banned have made it a rapid best-seller and possibly the country’s most bootlegged book.”

Today, Wikipedia is home to 43 million articles in 285 languages and all of these articles are written and edited by an autonomous group of international volunteers. Although the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation diligently keeps track of how editors and users interact with the site, until recently it was unclear how content production on Wikipedia was distributed among editors. According to the results of a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s editors have generated 77 percent of the site’s content.

“As the dean of libraries at a state school, I contend that the economic model for academic journal publications is broken. As scholars are handicapped by limited access to the corpus of research in their fields, scientific progress is restricted and slows, and society ultimately loses.” Patrick Burns of Colorado State University explains how things have gone wrong.

“[The book,] a historical work about shady business dealings behind the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, … [is] set to be translated in the United States under the title The Order of the Day.” The Goncourt’s cash prize is a mere €10, but it usually leads to a sharp rise in sales.

The first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha may not have been the first novel, but it was the first blockbuster. So some anonymous copycat tried to cash in with a bogus sequel. Cervantes, rightly thinking he had moral rights to the character he created responded with a sequel of his own – and he went meta, depicting the Don doing battle with his fake counterpart and visiting a print shop to find the counterfeit version of his story on the presses.

“For most of history, wild horses were regarded as food, pests or a source of new tame animals. The remaking of the wild horse as an equine noble savage is a story taking in Romanticism, extinction, theatrical melodramas and near-naked ladies. And it begins with a grudge against a man named Mazepa in the 17th-century Polish court, and a disgraced poet.”

While content and meaning are obviously valuable, they come second to emotion and execution. First, the book has to be picked up. If the design does not get you there, the fact that the cover may perfectly encapsulate the text is irrelevant. It’s what the cover feels like that matters.

“What writers don’t realise is that people don’t buy the writing, they buy the writer. Writing is not about finding your voice, but finding your persona. You can’t just cloister yourself away and expect to become famous unless you’ve a backstory of dodgy health and dying relatives as big as Emily Dickinson’s.”