Category: words

“There was a time when Jay McInerney was the toast of Manhattan. He was compared to Fitzgerald. He posed for pictures with Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. He regrets the photographs now. He didn’t need the Brat Pack.” – The Scotsman

Electronic book conference begins in Washington. “Publishers at the show were looking for ways to make e-books simple to download but difficult to copy. Librarians, hoping to stretch their small budgets and offer a greater variety of e-books to their patrons, expressed alarm that the e-book technology of today may be obsolete tomorrow.” – Washington Post

Is the short story an endangered art form? A conference debates the question: “Society’s view of literature’s importance has shifted. It is no longer shameful to be ignorant of it. Teachers of literature apparently believe that one book cannot be judged as better than another, that evaluation is an impossibility – the sort of people rug dealers dream of having as merchants.” – National Post (Canada)

Salman Rushdie has moved to New York from London. “London did not spur his imagination. ‘I think it speaks for itself that, for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it.’ New York holds more promise. ‘There’s so much stuff just asking me to write it down here,’ he says.” – The Observer (UK)

• Stephen King portrays himself as a giant-killer fighting the publishing industry. “If King’s publishing history were one of enslavement and injustice, you could understand him wanting to disturb the sleep of his persecutors. But Big Publishing just happens to have published, distributed, and marketed 225-million copies of his thirty-eight books, helping to hoist him up the scale of absurdly rich American entertainers.” – Saturday Night (Canada)

This month marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of “The Wizard of Oz”. But “if you only know the story from the Judy Garland MGM movie of 1939, you’ve missed a few bricks along your yellow brick road.” – National Post (Canada)

While Napster is driving the music industry crazy, bootleggers have been making complete texts of books available for downloading. Is this a threat to publishing? – Wired

England’s Elizabeth I had a lot of drama in her life. But she was also a gifted writer, and new publication of her work argues for study of her oeuvre. “People are only beginning to realize what a good writer she was. A lot of her success in government had to do with her skill at writing. When she put people down, they stayed down.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

In 1996 Brewster Kahle launched an effort to gather up all the information on the internet. “In just three years we got bigger than the Library of Congress, the biggest library on the planet,” he says, arms outstretched, smiling. “So the question is: What do we do now?” – Feed