Category: publishing

Can poetry be hip? Cool? There sure are a lot of people who want to convince that it can be. “We’ve had Poems on the Underground and the Buses, Poetry in Schools, National Poetry Day, Young Poet competitions and indeed Murray Lachlan Young (remember him, with his Byronic smouldering and his million-pound EMI deal? Ubi sunt…) – all much-needed endeavours, because poetry ought to be seen as lively and relevant. Yet for many people the idea of it remains trapped in shudder-inducing schoolday memories of interminable recitation or forced deconstruction.”

San Francisco’s iconic bookstore City Lights turns 50. “Since emerging as a center for the Beat movement, it has become a purveyor of poetry, alternative political views, hard-to-find novels and literature by Third World writers. In a retail landscape dominated by Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, City Lights remains an independent bastion of literary possibility. The soft-spoken, grandfatherly Ferlinghetti, 84, is uneasy with words like icon, even though City Lights helped launch the Beat movement by publishing Allen Ginsburg’s `Howl’ in 1956. The spry, bearded poet and publisher can only guess why the store, which he founded with Peter D. Martin, has endured. ‘We survived by creating an intellectual center, a literary meeting place’.”

Iraq, which formerly had a media tightly controlled by the government, has seen an explosion of new publications. “Dozens of daily and weekly newspapers have sprung up in the capital since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April, a raucous rush of unfettered expression that is utterly new to this country, and rare for any part of the Middle East.”

Christopher Ondaatje (brother of writer Michael) is endowing a new writing prize to be given annually to the book published in the Commonwealth or Ireland that best evokes a “sense of place.” Ondaatje: “These prizes are important if they are unique or innovative and they spur enthusiasm by writers so that they will strive for it,” Ondaatje says. “It is also good for the book business and the literary world that there is a new prize that generates interest. Finally, it is good for the Royal Society because they are doing something new for them.”

Publishers of the new Harry Potter installment are having 8.5 million pcopies printed in the US. But “as the young wizard enters adolescence in the series’ fifth book, will his original fan base follow, now that many of them are teens themselves? That is the question facing Rowling and her U.S. publisher, Scholastic, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

What were publishers thinking about at last week’s annual BookExpo? “Lower prices were on many people’s minds at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where BookExpo America, the industry’s annual national gathering, ended Sunday. Publishers and booksellers agreed that in a slow economy they needed to find ways to conform to the budgets of their customers. With hardcovers often costing $25 or higher, publishers are cutting the price of some hardcover editions and going straight to paperback.”

The Harry Potter books no longer dominate British book bestseller lists. The new champ is Philip Pullman’s prize-winning “His Dark Materials” trilogy. The set is “outselling any Potter title by more than 25% after years in which JK Rowling has towered over her market.”

“It’s becoming an interesting feature of the Orange that only two past winners have been from Britain. The rest have been either from the US or Canada. Why should this be? One answer, advanced at the Hay Festival by Hilary Mantel, a judge of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, is that the Americans and Canadians are simply more accomplished.”

“The Orange Prize was founded when no female writers made the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991.” It was needed then. But things have improved – currently 15 of 25 best-sellers in the UK were written by women. Is the Orange still necessary?

Madonna’s new children’s book is being published simultaneously “around the world on 15 September, translated into 42 languages. It is the first of five children’s morality tales planned by the singer, based on Hebrew texts she is studying from the Kabbalah religion. US publisher Callaway Editions said it would become the ‘widest simultaneous multi-language release in publishing history’.”