Category: words

They passed on the book not out of any outrage at Milo’s flamethrowing (these are the people that publish Ann Coulter), but because they decided skipping the book was a good business decision. Katy Waldman got several of them to explain why.

“Led by Harry Potter’s newest incarnation in a West End play, Rowling’s first screenplay and titles by diet and fitness guru Joe Wicks, annual book sales in the UK rose to just over £1.59bn in 2016, from £1.51bn in the previous year, according to the annual sales roundup from data specialist Nielsen BookScan. The number of physical books sold also rose, from 190m in 2015 to 195m, in the 12 months to December 2016.”

“The people credited for expanding the readership of books in Addis are the mobile vendors. They walk around with books in their hands stacked all the way up to their neck, approaching any and everyone to buy a book of them. There are close to 1000 mobile vendors roaming the streets of Addis.”

“Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States. He is typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man. Curiously, however, although he was a lifelong scholar of the Koran and Islam, he is less frequently described as a Muslim.” Why is this, and when did it start? Rozina Ali has some answers.

“Janet Malcolm once said that the ‘pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness’ are ‘rhetorical ruses.’ This week, Pankaj Mishra and Leslie Jamison discuss whether writers can ever truly put aside their own prejudices and interpretations.”

“I’ve worked in and around publishing for almost 15 years now; I’ve met countless male writers who are socially careless or even blatantly offensive and who suffer zero professional censure for it. But women don’t often get the luxury of acting that way, not if they want their careers to grow.”

The goal behind the creation of “Chuck Finley” was to make sure certain books stayed on the shelves — books that aren’t used for a long period can be discarded and removed from the library system.

Get ready. “Publishers predict that this trickle of fictional responses to Brexit will turn into a flood by the end of 2017. ‘I suspect we will see a lot more Brexit or Trump-America books once we have all lived through whatever changes these may bring [this year],’ said Kirsty Dunseath, fiction publisher at Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.”

Creativity isn’t everything – and it isn’t confined to novels and poetry, says an academic writer. “This mass of unrecognized writing and labor is virtually unrepresented in popular culture, and academics and other workplace writers are not part of the cultural narrative around creativity.”

Well, this is somewhat depressing: “Menderies, often called book hospitals, were once common in library systems across the nation. But the digital revolution, cost-control pressures and shifting reader tastes pushed many libraries away from paper and the maintenance of fragile old classics.”