Category: words

“Playboy doing away with naked women … might sound like Vogue doing away with fashion, or Cat Fancy doing away with cats, or, frankly, Vanity Fair doing away with movie stars and badly behaving rich people. … Now that the ‘the articles’ are, indeed, the only reason to read Playboy, the question is raised: Are they, in fact, any good?”

“At issue, to the puzzlement of many observers, isn’t word-for-word plagiarism, but what looks like [Sherrilyn] Kenyon’s attempt to claim ownership of some of the most archetypal themes in popular culture… And egging Kenyon on is a legion of implacable Cassandra Clare detractors who have had it in for the YA phenom since her apprenticeship years in the notoriously toxic subculture of Harry Potter fandom.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to make your book stand out by giving it a more memorable title which didn’t seem like it was lifted from a dictionary of unusual words in a desperate attempt to sound unique?”

Masha Gessen: “Several [Russian] publishers have inquired about buying the rights to [my] biography of Putin that has done very well in another 20 or so languages, but each time, negotiations have ended with a vague, ‘Well, you must understand,’ often followed by an even vaguer ‘Maybe some day.'”

“I get paid nothing directly for the most difficult, time-consuming writing I do: peer-reviewed academic articles. In fact a journal that owned the copyright to one of my articles made me pay $400 for permission to reprint my own writing in a book of my essays.”

“At its peak sales hit around 428,000 copies a day. Twenty-five years later, the number of copies being sold on a weekday in newsagents is rather closer to 28,000.”

“The not very glamorous economic answer is that it’s a lot easier to make money selling used books. … On the whole, the problem with new books is that there’s a list price set by the publisher and a discount price that’s also set by the publisher. So, as a new bookseller, you have no control over what the book sells for or what you pay for it. With used books, if you’re smart, you find ways to get them cheap, and you decide what you price them at.”

“In a neighborhood that is wearily familiar with the closing of local fixtures (two recent blows were Sounds record store and De Robertis pastry shop), the demise of St. Mark’s Bookshop stands out as painfully, publicly prolonged — one former employee I spoke to compared it to ‘watching a puddle evaporate.'”

It’s actually going to be the rehearsal script for a Harry Potter-universe play opening in London on July 31, but that hasn’t stopped the book from hitting bestseller status based on pre-orders in the days after the announcement happened.

“My ambition is personal. I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. We’ve seen that. We’ve been succeeding since we were sneaking to learn how to read. We’ve been showing ourselves to be exceptional, and it doesn’t change anything. I understand that burden; I do not feel that burden. I feel the burden on the page when writing a story to do justice to the black people I am rendering, but I don’t necessarily believe that my successes or failure will have some greater impact on the way that people view black people.”