Category: publishing

John Updike has written a poem about the 1990 theft of paintings from Boston’s Gardner Museum. Updike felt a personal connection to the theft, he said: “It happened on my birthday night, so that I felt slightly at fault in this matter.” (He has not been charged.) “It’s remained in me. My wife and I do go to the museums now and then. I have always especially loved Vermeer. And so all this especially made it meaningful to me.”

The demise of the Partisan Review doesn’t mean the magazine will be forgotten. “From its inaugural issue as an independent journal, in 1937, which included Delmore Schwartz’s short story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,’ a poem by Wallace Stevens and contributions by Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson, to its heyday in the 1940’s and 50’s, the journal published an astonishing range of landmark work. For many Americans, Partisan Review was their introduction to Abstract Expressionism, existentialism, New Criticism and the voices of talented young writers like Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag.”

The 68-year-old Partisan Review once America’s “pre-eminent journal of culture and politics,” is shutting down. “The future of the quarterly journal, which is published at Boston University, was up in the air after the death of its cofounder and editor, William Phillips, in September 2002. Its heyday had clearly passed, and some critics described it as moribund.”

The fifth Harry Potter book is due out in June. But already the internet is flooded with fakes purporting to be the real thing. “There are quite a few fakes out there. It’s a growing problem because the internet is becoming more and more prevalent. We monitor it very closely. Sometimes they have JK’s name on it which is potentially very damaging. I find that quite annoying, we’ve got to take action. Sometimes they’re pornographic which is even more annoying because a lot of the fans are kids.”

Americans have long been fascinated with Irish poetry and literature. “The latest sign of our interest is the awarding of this year’s Pulitzer Prize to Paul Muldoon, an excellent Irish poet now living in New Jersey. Why do we love the Irish so much? In large part it’s because these poets have portrayed an Ireland that seems glamorously different from our own modern, urban, technological society.”

“Nobody talks about publishing numbers because they are so unbelievably low. How many authors really make a living wage from their advances? How many books actually earn out, or pay their authors anything beyond the initial advance? And how many copies sold turn any particular book into a best-seller? Those are the questions all people interested in publishing think they want to know—and their answers are the ones publishing executives go out of their way not to reveal. A book can be on the best-seller lists for a couple of weeks and have sold 30,000 copies. Within publishing, that’s a reasonably good showing, but compared to, say, the music or movie or magazine business, where sales are measured in millions, it seems like nothing.”

Librarians across America are debating how to protect the privacy of their patrons as the government demands to see borrowing records. “There’s a huge concern in the library profession about it. The idea that you’re free to read, to think, without government looking over your shoulder is sacrosanct.”

Having destroyed Iraq’s art treasures in the museums, mobs moved on to Iraq’s libraries, destroying the country’s written history. “The National Library and Archives ­ a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq ­ were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.”

It used to be that children’s books were filled with niceness. It’s different now: “With the exception of fantasy, most books for older children eagerly embrace ‘unsuitable’ subjects: mental illness, poverty, crime, sex and drugs. Perhaps childhood is disappearing. When most information, as well as entertainment, came from the printed word, it was possible to isolate what children read from the fare on offer for adults. This came to mean the sheltering of children from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. The growth of radio, television and the internet obviously means that this isolation is now at an end; all children now have access to information that would have been automatically denied them as little as 20 years ago.”

There’s a central list of words that have become cliched and ought not to be used in good writing. “This year’s list consists almost entirely of pat phrases associated with ‘9/11’ and the ‘war on terror’, all of which are so far beyond mockery and have been so ruthlessly dissected in the (British) press that the list seems sadly unimaginative (it’s become clichéd to remark on the clichéness of the clichés). But isn’t there an unforgivable fundamentalism in proscribing certain words as ‘bad’ English and promoting others as ‘right’, even when done in jest – one that is, at best, pompously pedantic and, at worst, pernicious, given that many ‘wrong’ words originate with ethnic or cultural groups for whom they are perfectly ‘correct’?”