Category: publishing

The National Book Critics Circle anounce their finalists for this year’s awards. “Ninety-one-year-old Studs Terkel, the oral historian and self-described champion of the “uncelebrated,” will receive a lifetime achievement prize. Competitive nominations went to two books released by McSweeney’s, an irreverent publishing house founded by best-selling author Dave Eggers.”

Member of Parliament Chris Smith is heading up this year’s Book Prize jury, and he says he has no preconceptions about what the winner should demonstrate. “Cynics might argue that this absence of preconceptions is merely a spin on an absence of knowledge. After all, how much time does your average MP have to keep up with even a fraction of the 10,000 or so novels published each year? What sort of books does he have on his bedside table?”

“At the culmination of the so- called golden age of comics in the 1950s, an estimated 250 million to 300 million comic books sold annually, transforming this country’s popular culture and becoming one of its most important exports. Even if unit sales of new comic books are down to about a third of that level, they’re still averaging about $200 million in sales each year. Combined with classic or back-issue comics and graphic novels, total sales may be more than $700 million a year. Beyond the financial throw-weight of the industry, comics have as much or more impact on American popular culture than ever.”

“Scottish poet Don Paterson has won the prestigious TS Eliot Prize for poetry for the second time in six years. Paterson, 40, has become the first person to be awarded the Poetry Book Society honour more than once.”

One of Melbourne’s biggest bookstores is closing, and it’s hard not to feel nostalgic. “Do I protest too much? Metropolis was just another place of consumption, much like a cafe or a bar or a chemist. Let’s not get sanctimonious about a bookstore. Maybe my mother is right; maybe I am a literary snob. Maybe I should watch more TV, drink more Coke, get in touch with the mainstream. Who am I to say Acland Street, post-Metropolis, has gone to the dogs?”

Andy Kessler was wary. “I had been warned against self-publishing. You can’t get reviews, you can’t get shelf space, and you can’t get respect. One hundred thousand books are published every year, so you need an imprint to stand out from the noise. Being naive, and used to being treated like Rodney Dangerfield, I decided to publish my book anyway…”

“I’m a little agog at the number of friends and acquaintances who still respond with blank looks when I start babbling about the bounty that is Book TV, even though it celebrated its fifth anniversary last fall. There is intelligent life on television, I assure them, and its name is Book TV.”

“Dickinson’s fame has always been fed by myth. She was the virgin poetess dressed in white, the tremulous daughter who never left her father’s house, the maiden who turned to art because she was thwarted in love. Hard-working biographers notwithstanding, myth often wins out.”

A writers’ group in Edinburgh has announced plans for a fringe festival for books next summer. “They would aim to piggy-back on the growing success of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with its 550 authors and £7 tickets. They would offer slots to writers or poets, published or unpublished, and keep ticket prices low or non-existent.”

It’s been a rocky year for Poetry magazine after the magazine learned it was bequeathed $100 million. “Poetry’s first order of business was to form a foundation to satisfy IRS regulations. But later developments seemed not just to suggest growing pains but to hint at the old adage that money ruins everything. Joseph Parisi, who had edited Poetry for 20 years, was named executive director of publications and programs of the new Poetry Foundation in May 2003, but by summer’s end, he had resigned. Then the foundation filed a lawsuit against a bank in Indiana for mismanagement of two of its trusts…”