Category: publishing

“Likability in fictional characters is a complicated matter, but it isn’t exclusively the concern of philistines and dolts.”

Philip Hensher: “When eligibility shifts from the UK, Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to English-language novels published in the UK, it is hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate. Not through excellence, necessarily, but simply through an economic super-power exerting its own literary tastes, just as the British empire imposed the idea that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived throughout its 19th-century colonies.”

Sophie Hardach: “All over London, Spanish-staffed coffee chains sit next to West Indian chicken stalls and Turkish hairdressers. Britain is becoming more like America: a magnet to migrants from all over the world. This includes migrant writers, and not ones just from former colonies. The Booker’s old criteria, then, were out of step with reality.”

“The idea of people dwelling all day with a book in their hand in a comfy chair is lovely. But I think we all know it’s not particularly financially sustainable. We can’t really pay for people to sit on our couches and read our books all day.”

“I’ve nothing against digital books but I want both. I’m being forced to make the choice and I feel that by buying a digital book I’m not supporting a bookshop, I’m not supporting the physical book and that makes me feel guilty.”

“People who read more fiction (or at least recognized the names of fiction writers) were more likely to pick the correct emotion than those who preferred non-fiction. But once the researchers took into account a series of factors, including age, gender, and the degree to which they embodied the personality dimension of openness (as determined in a separate survey), only the romance genre predicted this sort of sensitivity.”

“These are hard times for bookstores everywhere, of course. … But there is more at work here, in a city long famous as a big market for Arabic writers. Books and reading are embedded profoundly in Khartoum’s self-image and the country’s history, and there is growing worry that the collapse of book culture is a direct mirror of the country’s overall decline.”

“Reading-based social network Goodreads says reviews that focus on an author’s behavior, rather than a book’s content, don’t have a place on the site — and announced Friday that it is going to start automatically deleting those reviews.”

“My husband said go, and so did most of my friends, except one who raised the question of kidnapping. Does anyone kidnap poets? Not for money, certainly. We tried to think of all the possible swindles that this could be, and came up with none.”

“It used to be that banning a book made it hot property.” Does that still hold true? Will young people flock to books someone else’s parent wanted banned?