Category: publishing

JK Rowling’s lawyers have succeeded in getting two Harry Potter knockoff books removed from bookstore shelves in India. “One is an illegal Bengali translation of the first book, Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone but the other is a brand new text, starring the boy wizard but set in Calcutta.”

“Consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it. Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.”

“A new brand of literature has arisen to feed the 20-something guys’ need to read. An antithesis to Chick Lit, this hot new typology has been dubbed Dick Lit by pundits and the British press. The term implies if the penis could talk it’d tell a travelogue’s worth of tawdry tales of the places it has been. The common thread, however, is not the search for sex, but success.”

“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale June 21 with a record printing of 8.5 million copies. Priced at $29.99, it is 896 pages long, has 36 chapters and 255,000 words. The not-so-simple questions: Is ‘Phoenix,’ the most expensive children’s novel, priced too high? Will there be sticker shock? Will children read a book 896 pages long? Will libraries be able to afford enough copies in an era of budget cuts?”

“The great tradition of English poetry has become an almost exclusively academic interest. The days when every literate household contained a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury are long gone. Spenser, Sidney and Milton don’t benefit from popularity-boosting costume dramas. They demand a sort of concentration we are reluctant to give – you can’t read them in the bath or on the train. Even the more accessible Romantics, such as Coleridge and Shelley, engage us more as psychological cases than as versifiers. The idea of a poet is more alluring than the idea of a poem. We’re a cynical, materialistic lot, and we want language to be functional, not fanciful. Yet at a shallow level we consume more poetry than ever before.”

“In ‘The Language Police’, Diane Ravitch — a historian of education at New York University and the author of “Left Back,” a 2000 book about failed school reform — provides an impassioned examination of how right-wing and left-wing pressure groups have succeeded in sanitizing textbooks and tests, how educational publishers have conspired in this censorship, and how this development over the last three decades is eviscerating the teaching of literature and history. The ‘bias and sensitivity reviewers’ employed by educational publishers, she argues, ‘work with assumptions that have the inevitable effect of stripping away everything that is potentially thought-provoking and colorful from the texts that children encounter,’ and as a result, school curriculums are being reduced to ‘bland pabulum’.”

A new report says that writing is not being well-taught in American schools. “The commission’s report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge — and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools. Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the three R’s, writing is clearly the most neglected.”

Everyone, it seems wants to publish a book. “The lines for ‘How to Get an Agent,’ a panel over the weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, had been rock-concert long. And it was pretty clear from the wildly waving hands that marked the beginning of the question-answer period that these folks wanted answers.”

George Orwell “was so ahead of his time that we are only now catching up with him. The concepts of Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink and Newspeak are all his inventions, and they resonate in our time with even greater force than they did in his. So how did a crusty Englishman who was born 100 years ago, and who died in 1950, see all these horrors coming our way? Was he simply gifted with incredible foresight?”