Category: publishing

The Paris Review was always a struggling literary magazine – low subscriber base and shoestring budget. But “last week’s George Plimpton tribute, a celebrity-studded gala at Cipriani on 42nd Street, raised $500,000 for the Paris Review Foundation, bringing the foundation’s endowment to about $1 million. Now literary insiders are buzzing about how what used to be a for-profit magazine that lost money every year has turned into a bustling nonprofit with a shot at long-term profitability. Meanwhile, the search for a new editor has begun.”

Margaret Atwood is nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award, adding to her Giller and Booker nominations this year. “Otherwise, there was no overlap between the Giller and the Governor General’s awards in the fiction category. Elizabeth Hay of Ottawa received a nomination for Garbo Laughs, as did Edeet Ravel of Montreal for Ten Thousand Lovers. Two expatriates are also on the list: Jean McNeil, formerly of Nova Scotia and Toronto, and now living in Britain, for Private View, and Douglas Glover, an Ontarian who resides in Wilton, N.Y., for Elle.”

It’s easy to get burned out on book festivals after awhile. The self-promotion! The over-indulgence of bad books! But: “Generally speaking, you also need to read well in order to navigate and to function efficiently inside the world of electronic media. TV doesn’t tell you how to understand TV. No medium has yet arisen that can challenge print as a medium of cultivating intelligence. And novels have a role to play in this regard, as well, because the language of a good novel is prose used to its maximum effect.”

Philip Marchand thinks that the world of Canadian literature could do with a good, healthy shot of testosterone. “I don’t know if there is any wider significance to this year’s rash of novels populated by feminized or ineffectual men. There has always been this tendency in Canadian literature, particularly French Canadian literature, but it has never seemed so blatant as now.” Regardless of the cause, Marchand finds himself pining for the strong male characters of Mordecai Richler, or at least the suave calm of Robertson Davies’ men. Is Canada in the grip of a newly metrosexual literary tradition?

The economy might be down, but book sales are up. “Preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show a large gain in bookstore sales in August, up 15.5% to $2.11 billion. The Bureau reported that bookstore sales for the first eight months of the year were up 3.3%, to $10.53 billion.”

This year’s National Book Awards finalists have been named. They are: Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire,” Marianne Wiggins’s “Evidence of Things Unseen” (Simon & Schuster), “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones, “A Ship Made of Paper,” by Scott Spencer, and “Drop City,” by T. C. Boyle.

DBC Pierre knows what it’s like to experience “90 flavours of trouble riding on his ass,” having been addicted to cocaine and run up such huge debts that he ripped off a friend to the tune of £30,000. Winning the most prestigious literary award in the country worth £50,000 will not counter the lesson of Pierre’s past 20 years: that life is “a hard bastard” and “we should count ourselves lucky for just about everything, including drawing breath.”

“It was in 1999 or so that, eking out a living as a cartoonist and graphic designer, he suddenly felt compelled to write. The catalyst was a pre-Columbine American television report about a teenage boy arrested for shooting several schoolmates.”

Ann Godoff, who was fired from Random House last year, is out with her first set of books at new employer Penguin. “The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there’ll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: ‘We’re Old World—smart and subdued.’ Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic.

D.B.C. Pierre’s Booker win seems improbable. Pierre is “the pen name of Peter Finlay, 42, a cartoonist, and a reformed gambler and drug addict. He now lives in a remote part of Ireland. The initials stand for Dirty But Clean.” He says he absorbed the dialects for his his first-ever book by watching Jerry Springer on TV.