Category: publishing

“Money woes forced the [New York-based] Asian American Writers’ Workshop to close its doors last month. Public programs are canceled until at least the first week in February… Though AAWW has pulled in roughly $12,000 in individual donations since a November plea, the sum is only a fraction of what it needs. The $500,000 annual budget has been slashed nearly in half. Grants on which the group had relied, from charitable and arts foundations and from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, were denied for 2004.”

A bankruptcy trustee for the erstwhile Lingua Franca magazine puts the screws to freelance writers in an attempt to get them to give back money the magazine paid them before folding. “A dead magazine putting the squeeze on its freelancers? Insiders are lamenting this sad end to the glorious saga of Lingua Franca, which tweaked higher education and popularized what is now known as the journalism of ideas. In chilly apartments around the city, freelancers are freaking out, calling lawyer friends, and wondering how they will come up with the money.”

Elm Street, a Canadian magazine aimed at women and featuring an impressive roster of writers and a broad cultural focus, has folded after seven years of publication. The failure of yet another high-quality Canadian periodical ought to be setting off warning bells, says Andrew Cohen. “We don’t have the depth, consistency or quality of periodicals that a country of our size should, especially in critical areas such as foreign affairs. Then again, when you’re paying writers the same rate as 20 years ago, you won’t attract the best.”

“Author Kate DiCamillo has received this year’s Newbery Medal for best writing in children’s literature, for “The Tale of Despereaux,” the story of a small mouse in love with a princess.”

Longtime writer and illustrator of children’s books, Mordicai Gerstein, won the 2004 Caldecott Medal yesterday for “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,” his account of how Philippe Petit, the French aerialist, strode a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.”

The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, is broke. “The museum has not been able to raise enough funds to pay the rent because its only income is from ticket sales and private donations. This income is just enough to keep the museum running and pay the salaries of its three employees.”

Lingua Franca magazine folded a couple of years ago. But freelance writers for the magazine still got paid for the last stories they turned in. Now a bankruptcy trustee says he wants freelancers to return the money or he’ll sue to get it back. It seems the writers were “unsecured” creditors, and the money “should” have gone to secured creditors. “It certainly seems unfair. These freelancers did the work and were paid the fees that they bargained for. They delivered what was asked of them.”

Poetry seems to be getting more and more popular around America. “An incredible immediacy takes place between the poet and the audience, or even in reading a book of poetry, that doesn’t exist in other parts of our culture. In other places, we’re numbers, not individuals. This group of people will like this movie. They’re aiming this radio station at that demographic. I think there’s a great hunger in this country for a more personal art.”

“The tradition of literati who live and work in more than one language dates back to antiquity, but today we tend to think of 20th-century examples as most prominent: Joseph Conrad emigrating from Polish to English, Samuel Beckett morphing from English to French, Vladimir Nabokov ardently abandoning Russian for “Ada” (and “Lolita”) in English. More recently, Russian-born Andrei Makine, winner of many laurels for his fiction in French, and Ha Jin, the Chinese-born author who won the National Book Award for “Waiting”…

The title makes the book. Who even wants to crack the cover of a book with a dull title? So how do you come up with a winning title that will make the cash regsisters sing?