Category: publishing

US librarians and booksellers are organizing to protest the Patriot Act, which allows the government to access records of what books people are reading. “In an unusual display of industry solidarity, 32 groups representing a cross section of publishing-related organizations, regional booksellers associations and chain booksellers issued a statement in support of House Resolution 1157, a bill introduced by Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders that would amend section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act.”

“It may sound ridiculous, but judging by the clichéd offerings in the bookshops at the moment, much of the great romantic writing by women would never have seen the light of day if it had been submitted to today’s publishers. Manderley would have sustained minor fire damage. Rochester’s blindness would become acute hay fever. Cathy and Heathcliff would have had near-death experiences, survived, married. You get the picture. Now I’m not knocking the writers who succeed in either the chick-lit or the mummy-lit genres. However much we enjoy these books, and I do, they provide a pretty limited literary diet. Why should we be forced to endure a long summer on a selection of novels where tragedy is a sick nanny and failure is a lacklustre dinner party?”

The BBC revealed the preliminary results of its poll to find out Britain’s most-loved books. “Most of the usual suspects, and a few surprises, were on the list drawn from 7,000 titles nominated. The top 20 and the overall winner will be revealed in the autumn, after a summer of live radio and television, and online Big Read events. A poll by the BBC attracted 140,000 votes, four times as many as for the Great Britons last year. The corporation established elaborate precautions against ballot rigging and block voting, so it must be true that Jeffrey Archer’s ‘Kane and Abel’ is hugged to the nation’s heart, along with Winnie the Pooh, David Copperfield, and Jane Eyre. .”

The new literary magazing The Believer doesn’t believe in the Thumbs Up/Down approache to criticism. “This is the editorial caveat I deliver when I assign a new piece: I tell the writer that you certainly can be displeased with what you’ve read, but your essay should still be titillating and intriguing enough to make people want to go out and read the book to see who they agree with, basically. An interesting ambitious book, whatever its flaws, should still be written about in an interesting and fair way.”

Used to be that writing programs at universities turned out plenty of eager young writers who dreamed of getting a story published in the New Yorker. These days they’re still eager, but they’re increasingly cashing in with big screenplay and book contracts. “The growth of these programs is a function of the amazing number of first-book contracts and film options that are making some young writers rich. About 40 percent of the 600 to 1,000 manuscripts we receive each quarter come from students in these programs.”

“The word circulating throughout much of publishing in recent weeks was that March was one of the worst sales months in a very long time.” Preliminary figures suggest sales were down 11 percent in bookstores.

It appears that English isn’t taught very well in American schools, says a new study. “Nearly half the freshmen who entered California State University last fall ended up on the remedial English bench. Many were stunned to find themselves there. They had always made good grades in English.”

New York’s Coliseum Books wasn’t pretty or comfortable. But it was a great place to find books (and isn’t that sometimes the point?). So Coliseum was lamented when it lost its lease last year and went out of business. Now it’s reopening on 42nd Street, across from the public library. How to compete with the Barnes & Noble stores on every street corner? Well, there’ll be books you probably won’t find at B&N. And a coffee shop (the investors insisted).

The Arab world is changing fast, and Arab writers are following suit, writing more freely about subjects once considered the worst kind of taboo, and producing work which eschews the defeatist, underdog tone which has for so long been the hallmark of the region. “Despite a wave of religious conservatism in the Arab world, the young generation of Egyptian poets and novelists is seeking ways to circumvent censorship, using the Internet and satellite television to disseminate their works.” The young writers leading the charge are controversial, outspoken, and – surprise! – popular.

“Today, students who come to a campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new scholarship on the comic book and the comic strip. The scholarly part is an odd experience and, for the most part, a recent one.”