Category: publishing

CJ Allen: “I accept that I did plagiarise certain poems (although it was genuinely not my intention to deceive), and that I am withdrawing from the competition because of the intolerable strain of the recent, negative publicity.”

The characters who survived S.E. Hinton’s instaclassic young adult novel (& later, hit movie) “The Outsiders” would be, hm, well into late middle age by now. What might they be doing?

“Novels — especially ones featuring adventurous, pleasure seeking heroines — were looked at askance. They could tempt a woman to escape the house and explore life on her own terms — and where would it all end?”

“Those of us in the business mostly dread the release of the Scotiabank Giller Prize long list because of whom it will exclude and thus throw deep into the sludge of eternal obscurity. The recent addition of a long list, released weeks before the short list, creates, paradoxically, additional terror because now that almost every novel released in the fall makes it onto the list, the ignominy of exclusion is even more significant.”

“By a 5-2 margin, the Randolph County Board of Education voted Monday night, at its regular meeting held at Eastern Randolph High School, to remove all copies of the book from school libraries.”

“The Brothers saw themselves as faithful recorders of a living German tradition. They wanted to preserve these stories in their true and exact form. … The violence of the folktales is part of their power. The Brothers Grimm understood this fact. They wanted to tap into that power. They thought that the tales would revitalize a German people fallen on hard times.”

“The use of poetry is to value those things that are unpragmatic and unmundane. Poetry is valuable precisely because it’s not historical/political/economic–because it isn’t part of the world of cause and effect.”

“The 13 titles were selected by jurors Esi Edugyan (who won the Giller in 2011 for Half Blood Blues), Margaret Atwood and U.S. author Jonathan Lethem – from 147 submissions.”

“What makes this explosion truly remarkable is what came before: comparatively little. Before the Internet, most people rarely wrote for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.”

“What’s happening right now is, a lot of book stores are disappearing, a lot of libraries are disappearing or they’re not being funded. School libraries aren’t being funded. This is not a good thing. It used to be you could go to your drugstore, you’d find books everywhere.”