Category: words

“North Korea’s leaders are often thought of as ruthless, secretive autocrats but rarely as popular children’s authors. However, between issuing instructions about prison camps and the development of nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un’s father and grandfather apparently found time to write stories for the young.”

“Penguin authors Jyotirmaya Sharma and Siddharth Varadarajan have asked the publishing house to withdraw their books and pulp them. Both have emailed their demand to the under-fire publishing firm for agreeing to an out-of-court settlement with a [Hindu nationalist] group to do the same with Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History.”

“Conservative Hindu groups have been campaigning against Doniger for more than a decade, contending that she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focusses … on sex. To her detractors, what look at first like impressive scholarly credentials … are, in fact, evidence of a sinister colonialist conspiracy dominating the study of Hinduism in the West.”

“What the Great American Novel relies on as a concept is the notion that there is some unifying experience, some core or set of values, that we as Americans all share. But as our political life daily reminds us, this is not the case.”

The late author published 114 short stories in the magazine, which has made a selection of them available online.

“Banks died last June, two months after revealing he had terminal cancer. He would have been 60 on 16 February, and his publisher Little, Brown said it would mark the date next year by publishing a collection of poems by Banks and his friend and fellow science fiction author Ken MacLeod, who will edit it.”

“A letter, written to a friend in 1891, reveals how Carroll hated people finding out his real name as he felt he would be pointed out and attract the attention of strangers.”

“Indie authors are outselling the big five. That’s the entire big five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the ebook sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon,” writes Howey in his report, which has been described as “the most penetrating, ground-breaking, explosive article about publishing in memory.”

“They’re beautiful objects, whose arrangement of content, photography and paper stocks convey a different view of the world. The design and textures are an invitation to be touched, flicked, handled. Most of all, in keeping with our age of Instagram, Pinterest and social network photo sharing, the content is visually driven.”

Problem: It’s publishers, not exactly critical voices, getting in on the ground floor. “What we need is for tech-savvy critics to start BookTubing, the younger cooler sister of book-blogging.”