Category: publishing

Some critics are hailing the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy as a great masterpiece. But as books, the Tolkien project failed to impress literary critics of the time. “The Lord of the Rings must be one of the most comprehensively dismissed trilogies ever written. Critics have queued up since its publication nearly 50 years ago to denounce it. But JRR Tolkien’s story has outlived one generation of critics, and will certainly outlive another.”

The Providence Athenaeum library in Rhode Island is 250 years old, “a vestige of the days when America’s settlers created private lending libraries because public ones had yet to be invented.” But the Athenaeum has often spent more money than it has taken in, and “with a drop in stock market returns, the board decided to sell off the prize of its collection, a complete poster-size folio of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America,’ valued at as much as $7 million. Now the birds are at the center of a raucous battle between the people who run the library and the people who use it.”

In this season of “bests” lists, how about a “biggest” accomplishment? “Guinness World Records has certified that “Bhutan,” a photographic journey across that Himalayan country, is the world’s largest published book. It measures 5-by-7 feet when opened, and many of its dazzling photographs are full-page. The book is also among the priciest. Each hand-bound copy costs $10,000.”

“Cybersnoops, aspiring Web detectives and electronic voyeurs searching for a new kind of fix might find it in an emerging form of e-book fiction with a twist: the digital epistolary novel, or DEN. Created by Greatamericannovel.com, a DEN reveals its story line through a series of simulated e-mails, Web pages and instant messages.”

Much has been made of the political difficulties being faced by the formerly tiny Chicago-based Poetry magazine, since it was the surprise recipient of a $100 million bequest last year. Philip Marchand is a bit surprised by the tone of some of the press coverage: “According to [one] story, the gift is ‘sowing discord in the normally harmonious realm of verse.’ Normally harmonious realm of verse! Where did the reporter, Robert Frank, ever get that idea? Read some literary history, Mr. Frank. Poets have been at each other’s throats since the invention of the sonnet, and several centuries previous to that.”

Book critic Patti Thorn makes her Chrsitmas list. And what does she long for? “A good, juicy scandal. Jonathan Franzen’s tiff with Oprah was so much fun, but that was two long years ago. In 2003, the best you brought us was a few disgruntled literati upset that Stephen King was feted at the National Book Awards ceremony despite his – gasp – commercial success.”

St. Petersburg is a great writer’s city, with its sophisticated culture and cramped bustling streets. You can visit the homes of some of Russia’s great writers: Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pushkin… an what do these places tell us of their former occupants?

Literary classics are hot with readers right now, and they’re selling fast. “Baby boomer nostalgia, the rise of book clubs and a longing for ageless wisdom after 9/11 are among reasons for the trend cited by publishers, editors and authors. High profit margins for books out of copyright help, too.”

A new CD gives us writers reading their own work. “Writers who seemed beyond our reach are suddenly in our ears, revealing the often startling distance between their voices and the ones we imagine while reading — not to mention the ones that grab us from a movie screen. One of the great surprises is finding which writers actually do voices and which don’t. When A. A. Milne reads from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” his creations sound like Victorian gents — soothing, paternal Victorian gents reading a bedtime story, it’s true, but rather Victorian nonetheless.”

Writer Diran Adebayo “does for black urban Britain what Irvine Welsh did for working-class Edinburgh: his novels resonate with the slang and street idioms of the multicultural inner city. ‘I want to reach a stage where black characters can talk in a language as universal as white characters. You know, the film Titanic plays from Lagos to Delhi to London and no one has a problem taking lessons of love from it. But what would happen if you did the same thing with an all-black cast? It would be a ‘black film’, just as my books are still categorised sometimes as ‘black books’. People have a much harder time drawing an objective message from that.”