“Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July.”
Category: publishing
Are UK Publishers Failing Readers?
Are Britain’s publishers failing their public? “The director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival has accused Britain’s publishing industry of being parochial and leaving readers largely ignorant of intellectual debate in the rest of the world.”
Releasing Books Into The Wild
“Bookcrossing has hit Manchester. On Saturday, hundreds of books will be released on to the streets of the city. Books by Martin Amis and Alex Garland will be distributed along with cookbooks and others on the history of steam locomotives in an event organised by Urbis, Manchester’s museum of the city. It is an American phenomenon that began in April 2001 and has taken off throughout the world. Almost half a million books have been “released” and there are more than 146,000 members worldwide. Books are left behind (or released into the wild). They contain a unique identity number which is registered on the website (bookcrossing.com). When someone finds one, they can register on the site and track the journey it has taken before it reached them.”
The Problem When Your Book Exceeds Expectations
David Lipsky got his book launched with plenty of buzz. His publisher was foursquare behind him. And the opening round of publicity created aa run of sales any publisher would envy. One problem? You can’t buy the book anywhere. Lipsky’s book sold out of its first printing of 40,000, and making more takes three weeks or longer. By then, will people stiull be lining up to buy it? The story shows how cautious publishers have become…
Why Literature Matters
What’s the point of literature? “Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn’t unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning.”
Remembering Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh would have been 100 this year. “His boisterously playful satires of London life between the wars remain unmatched for their technical accomplishment and wicked skewerings of the smart set. Perhaps most famous for his 1945 novel, the sadly over-rated Brideshead Revisited, Waugh had one of the longest and most prolific literary careers of any English writer of the last century, penning some 12 novels, half-a-dozen travel books, several biographies, and scores of essays and reviews.”
Is Edinburgh The Next Literature Capital?
“Edinburgh is making an audacious – and as some see it, a bare-faced grab – to become the world’s first official City of Literature.
The town in which Miss Jean Brodie admonished her “gerls” on how “one’s prime is elusive”, and where the heroin addict Renton shoplifted to feed his habit in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, is plotting to steal the honour from under the noses of London, New York, Paris, Dublin and Prague.”
Will Toronto Literary Fest Survive?
Will Toronto’s Harbourfront Reading Series survive the departure of impressario Greg Gatenby, who’s now decamped for Berlin? “It is a sad departure for the man who built Toronto’s Harbourfront Reading Series and the International Festival of Authors into the premier stop on the North American literary circuit. This is not the first time Gatenby has embarked on a dangerous game of chicken with government funding agencies, publishers and his own employers, but it may well be the last.”
The Next JK Rowling? Yikes!
Children’s book writer Louisa Young was briefly touted in the press as “the next JK Rowling.” That’s good, Young supposes, but who wants to be the next JKR? “Why would anyone want a New JK Rowling? The old one works perfectly well. I’m not sure another one is practical. Are there enough trees? Well, I blame the papers. It’s them wot want one, because JKR has become one of today’s sure-fire, never-spiked topics.”
Where Are The Comics For A New Decade?
The 70s, 80s and 90s each had their hit comics, those strips that seemed essential to their age. “Doonesbury and Bloom County—and heck, while we’re at it, let’s throw in Dilbert for the ’90s—each managed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the decade in which they were created. So what of our current decade—nearly four years old, without even a proper name to its credit (the Zeroes?). Are we still subsisting on fond memories of the long defunct Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side?”