Category: publishing

Amis: (Yellow) Dog Day Afternoon

“For every writer who has ever longed to be called the best novelist writing in English — as Martin Amis frequently has — the fate of the 54-year-old author is a cautionary tale. Yellow Dog, a satire as wicked and sustained as anything he has written, has attracted mixed reviews. The kinder ones say things like, Amis at his worst is still better than the rest of us at our best. And the worst ones, especially a rabbit punch by a young novelist named Tibor Fischer, writing in The Daily Telegraph, contain comments such as the already oft-quoted (here once again): It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating’.”

Is Publishing Too Glamorous For Its Own Good?

Dubravka Ugresic laments the evolution of publishing into a marketplace that doesn’t have much attachment to the concept of culture. “In the contemporary media market, literature has acquired an aura of glamour. How has it come to be that all sorts of people —like, say, Madonna— are now rushing into the places formerly reserved for outsiders, bookworms, romantics, and losers?”

Amazon Gets Into The Cataloging Business

“The British Library and online retailer Amazon are helping the public to source and buy rare antique books. The library’s catalogue of published works is now on the Amazon website, meaning it has details of more than 2.5m books on the site. Some 1.7m of these books are pre-1970 volumes, not previously available… [However,] the British Library stressed it was only the catalogue records that would be made available, not the archived collection.”

Coady To King: Shut Up And Go Count Your Royalties

Lynn Coady was a bit perplexed by Stephen King’s recent tirade against highbrow literary culture at the National Book Awards. “He seemed unable to stop himself… asserting that the gap between ‘the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction’ must be closed. To which a bemused Joe Average can only reply: Dude, you’re a billionaire. It is not for you to gripe about egg-headed and arbitrary distinctions between high and low art. Accept your award with humble aplomb and resume laughing your way to the bank.”

Harry Potter, Part XVI: Attack Of The Clones

One significant byproduct of the wild popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been an explosion of the entire children’s fantasy genre. Not all the Harry wannabes are particularly good literature, but with publishing houses and booksellers alike determined to find the Next Big Thing in kid-lit, there’s no shortage of new books involving young wizards, dragon eggs, and supernatural detectives.

The Tiger Woods Of Short Stories

John Updike is master of the short story, writes Louis Menand. “The whole idea is to make language perform its own little supernatural act, which is to turn marks on a page into an emotion, an effect, an apparition of something that is not there, a ghost. You could say that the complexity of the machinery used to produce this is hidden beneath the surface of the writing, except that the writing is the machinery, just as sex is only bodies. The satisfaction comes from the creation of a feeling where there was no feeling, only words, or flesh, or golf balls. People like Updike, or Tiger Woods, make you aware, by what they do, that this satisfaction is possible in life, and that it can be as supreme a satisfaction as there is.”