Category: publishing

“Academics have been scrambling to find some kind of official criterion for inclusion in this canon since at least the 1950s – Is it a literature that is made here, or set here, or addresses uniquely Canadian themes? – and they have always been curiously hidebound about it, always trying to find ways to restrict membership in this club rather than to open it up.”

“Winning the Nobel Prize was not the most important moment of Doris Lessing’s extraordinary and prolific life, and it seems as though some of her critics won’t forgive her for not pretending that it was, just as they won’t forgive her for leaving her two young children in the care of their father, in Rhodesia, so that she could pursue a different kind of life.”

“Behind the updating and revising of the OED is another, much bigger story: the inexorable growth of English itself. At a conservative estimate, 1bn people now speak it as a second or foreign language, while the 375m for whom it is a mother tongue continue to mould their own varieties in ways that the dictionary’s original compilers could never have imagined. As such, the OED finds itself in the curious position of being a national institution called upon, almost by default, to assume the role of a global one.”

“After writing more than 20 books, with major publishers behind them, I have found it increasingly difficult to get new ideas accepted. It is also frustrating as a writer to have a non-fiction book that is up-to-the-minute when “completed”, only for it to come out maybe nine months later and seem slightly dated.”

“Especially in this technical age, the tools a writer has to work with change almost daily — today the Internet, tomorrow nanobot implants for the brain. But I believe the process stays essentially the same.”

“Despite the success of sales through Amazon’s own outlets, agents said that some authors will remain reluctant to sign with the company because of the belief that they could do better if their books were sold through physical stores, as well as through online retailers such as Amazon.”

Scholar David Tod Roy hs spent four decades translating The Plum in the Golden Vase, a 3,000-page 16th-century novel with a centuries-old reputation for both social realism and breathtaking raunch. “And Mr. Roy’s scholarly colleagues are no less awe-struck at his erudition, which seemingly leaves no literary allusion or cultural detail unannotated.”

“Publishers lament that their margins are razor-thin and literary fiction doesn’t sell and the days of big advances are long gone. But guess what? They’re rolling in cash. They’re splashing it about like it’s 1989. What recession? What Twitter? What video games? They are longing, desperately longing, not just for the next sado-eccliasto-vampire pulp, but for a certain kind of old-fashioned sociopolitical Big Novel. And betting on it.”

“It isn’t particularly hard to write any of this because it’s already obvious how the writing should go. This type of writing is like driving a car to the airport; you already know how to get there, you just need to make sure you follow the rules and don’t crash along the way.”

Many writers who leave NY feel wistful nostalgia, but “Rebecca Wolff, a Manhattan native who now lives upstate, delivers an impassioned, highly entertaining diatribe that includes the line ‘New York is a giant sinking pile of crap compared to what it used to be.'”