Category: publishing

The library’s new design would make a section of the historic stacks accessible to the public for the first time. Leaving the stacks empty and untouched “would be irresponsible for the library. It’s probably one of the largest indoor spaces in Manhattan. We need to use it for the public.”

The Shahnameh, newly translated into English as The Epic of the Persian Kings, has received a lavish new printing with hundreds of illustrations digitally assembled from the famous miniature paintings that adorned medieval Iranian and Middle Eastern manuscripts.

“The notion that there’s a canonical text for any Shakespeare play is a myth imposed by the institution of publishing (in which Shakespeare didn’t take part), and the mechanics of printing. A printing press, whether a 17th century press or a modern offset press, is a device that can’t react to change. It’s a device that needs a stable, settled text. We create that text, and the myth behind that text, as part of the publishing enterprise.”

Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on. She’ll try, because she has to (“Well, it’s about this friendship between these two, um, friends . . . “) all the while listening to the magic leaking out of the balloon, and she’ll hate you for it.

“I was hired in 2005 to help resuscitate the magazine’s literary tradition. My sense of mission ran high and, for my nearly seven years there, was hard to argue with. Very few magazines had room anymore for fiction or literary work then and even fewer do today. … I recited our latest contributors’ names, too, at every opportunity, and described the pieces written – A S Byatt on John Donne, Jodi Picoult on Wonder Woman, Sherman Alexie on the Indigo Girls, new fiction by Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Maile Meloy.”

“For American college students, 1990 appears to be a historical cliff beyond which it is rumored some books were once written, though no one is quite sure what. Why have US colleges decided that the best way to introduce their students to higher learning is through comic books, lite lit, and memoirs?”

The common reading book has put the classics out to pasture. What’s the deal, America?

Margaret Atwood: “In order to achieve this wonderful future in which everything’s going to be terrific, who are you going to shove into a hole in the ground?”

“Any architectural question is answered from a literary point of view and any literary issue is addressed by a spatial idea. There is no room for arbitrary moves.”