Category: publishing

A Washington doctor is claiming that the latest installment in the Harry Potter series can cause migraine headaches and undue stress in young children attempting to plow through the book’s 870 pages. Dr. Howard Bennett says that he has treated at least three cases of severe headache brought on when kids refuse to put the book down for any reason, until they’ve completed it. “The obvious cure for this malady – that is, taking a break from reading – was rejected by two of the patients.”

A Norwegian journalist observes an Afghan family, then writes a best-selling book about them. The subject of the book is outraged, and flies to Europe to protest. “Since then, the public confrontation over “The Bookseller of Kabul” has become the talk of Norway, with televised debates galore, some newspapers jumping at the chance to run photographs of the striking blond author and more serious newspapers arguing the political correctness of first world journalists judging third world cultural traditions.”

Write a book in a month? That’s the premise of a competition in which you have to write 50,000 words (175 pages) in 30 days. “Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create.” The number of winners – writers who cross the 50,000-word finish line – has grown from six out of 20 in 1999 to more than 2,000 out of 14,000 in 2002, with 4,000 expected to qualify this year.

In America, the debate over whether newspapers have a right to kill negative book reviews in order not to offend readers and authors has been raging in recent weeks. Meanwhile, in the UK, book reviewers regularly take great delight in savaging not only the works of famous authors, but the authors themselves. (Can you imagine an American review comparing a novel to “catching your favourite uncle masturbating in the school yard,” as a British review of Martin Amis’s latest recently did?) The British approach to literary criticism might be exhausting, says Kate Taylor, but it’s exhilirating, too, and vastly preferable to the vague disinterest favored by North American critics.

The Boston-based documentary magazine known as DoubleTake ceased publication this summer, less than a year after a big-money benefit concert pumped $1 million into its coffers. A lack of direction combined with an unrealistic business plan seem to be what sunk the publication, and “if DoubleTake returns, the somewhat esoteric magazine, noted for striking photography and pieces about North Dakota farmers and descendants of the US Confederacy living in Brazil, will be reincarnated with more immediacy and mass appeal.”

As a rule, newspaper readers don’t pay a lot of attention to bylines. So a ‘byline strike,’ when it occurs, is the sort of semi-private protest which doesn’t raise many eyebrows, except within the industry. Still, when journalists at the Montreal Gazette withheld their bylines two years ago, they were ordered to reinstate them by the paper’s corporate owner, CanWest Global, and forbidden from talking to other journalists about the issue. Yesterday, a Quebec tribunal ruled that journalists have an absolute legal right to withhold their bylines, and though the ruling may go unnoticed by most Canadians, Antonio Zerbisias says that everyone who prizes independent thought should be celebrating.

Amazon’s new search function that allows browsers to search pages of thousands of books seems like a great thing. But some authors and publishers have concerns. “Authors Guild staff members had managed to view and print as many as 100 consecutive pages of several books by searching repeatedly for different terms. Recipes from some cookbooks and details from travel books were also available, meaning that users could print recipes or destination descriptions without buying the books. You don’t even have to wait for Amazon to deliver.”

Dale Peck is “a 36-year-old novelist and critic who has created a furor in the literary world by lobbing grenades in the back pages of The New Republic intended not to disparage, not to bring down a peg, but to destroy his victims – usually established writers whom Peck deems a threat to literature. To puncture the inflated reputations of these (mostly) Living White Males is a matter of the greatest urgency, Peck seems to believe, and he goes about the task with a crusader’s obsessive zeal. At the end of a Peck essay, his subjects – Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead – are wounded, their books in ruins, massacred.”

The BBC’s Big Read aims to have the public vote on their 100 favorite books of all time. But some criticize the exerciseas being “anti-literary.” “Somebody said that The Big Read was not just un-literary but anti-literary and I think that’s right. It is based on the assumption that the opinion of the public is always beyond reproach.”

For all their excellence, libraries are low in glamor. “What can a library do to compete with such events as the International Festival of Authors at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, the announcement of nominees for the Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Award, or the celebrity-cookbook author Indigo is bringing to a suburb near you? It’s possible, however, that society’s collective inability to appreciate the public library as a vital institution is the library’s fault.”