Category: publishing

British poet laureate Andrew Motion, who is responsible for writing eulogies in the circumstances of a royal death, has “helped produce a guide to penning funeral speeches. It is estimated that funeral speeches by friends or relatives, are given at just 10% of all services.”

“Barely a week goes by without some sneering reference to chick-lit which has become all but a term of abuse. Why this should be is not clear – simple envy, perhaps, at our huge sales and concomitantly large advances. Or the belief that because these books are easy to read, they’re easy to write. They’re not. But I think there is something much deeper at work: a snobbish distaste for popular writing full stop.”

The Guardian newspaper is planning an American edition. “Its tentative form is as a weekly magazine, quite unlike any other weekly magazine that has been started in the U.S. in the past generation. Not only is it about politics, but the magazine—meant to be 60 percent derived from the Guardian itself, with the rest to come from American contributors—has a great deal of text unbroken by design elements. This is almost an extreme notion. Quite the antithesis of what virtually every publishing professional would tell you is the key to popular and profitable publishing—having less to read, not more. Even with the Guardian’s signature sans-serif face, it looks like an old-fashioned magazine. Polemical. Written. Excessive. Contentious. Even long-winded.”

Los Angeles prides itself on being a literate city. But a recent survey of America’s most literate cities places LA 54th. “To get to Los Angeles’ place on the list, in fact, you must wade past Las Vegas (tied for 13th), Newark, N.J. (18) and Wichita, Kan. (39); beyond most other major California cities, including San Francisco (5), Sacramento (25), San Diego (40) and Anaheim (53), all the way down to the bottom 10 on the list, just above Fresno. Even so — Toledo?”

What do Australians like to read? If a new poll is to be believed, fantasy rules. On a list of 110 favorite books, “J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was voted the most popular book in Australia, and there were no surprises when it came to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series being voted consecutively at number two, three, four and five. Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets was the most popular of the series, being voted Australia’s second-best read.”

Professors at Pakistan’s leading universities fear that a rising tide of fundamentalism may strip English classic books from university programs. “A review of books studied in the English courses at Punjab University in Lahore singled out several texts, including Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as containing offensive sexual connotations which were deemed ‘vulgar’.”

Fifty-four years ago George Orwel drew up a famous list of “cryto-Communists. Now the British government “has agreed to strip the final shred of secrecy from the leftwing author George and put it in the public domain. The Foreign Office is expected shortly to disgorge its copy of the document – until now held back as too sensitive. The public record office in Kew hopes to make the file openly available this summer.”

It had to happen, of course. With the Harry Potter series rocketing to the top of the list of literary blockbusters, other authors are beginning to take some nasty little swipes at Potter scribe J.K. Rowling. The latest entry in the bash-Harry sweepstakes comes from Booker Award-winning author A.S. Byatt, who calls Rowling’s work derivative, simple-minded, and composed “for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”

If A.S. Byatt expected the literary world to line up behind her following her tirade against Harry Potter, she’s still waiting. Authors and publishers have apparently chosen their side, and are calling Byatt “a snob,” “churlish,” and “jealous.” One book critic also notes that Byatt is the very same writer who threw a “hissy fit” when author Martin Amis accepted a hefty advance for his future work.

Editors of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary are considering the world of hiphop, and deciding which of the slang ought to make it in the new edition. “An unprecedented revision is underway that, finally, authoritatively, is expected to nail down those vexing questions of lexicology. To wit: What is the etymology of ‘bling-bling’? The editors are drafting a possible entry for the hip-hop slang, which usually refers to diamonds or other flashy jewelry that clinks together.”