Category: publishing

“Roxy Girl, one of the hottest labels in girls’ fashion, makes sweetly sexy, surfer-centric sportswear along with almost everything else a beach bunny would need: hats, glasses, totes, watches, sandals. Now the firm has come up with the ultimate brand-name accessory: preteen reading with the Roxy Girl label. It’s the first time a clothing company has ventured into the literary field.”

“By definition, wars are deadly and destructive. In Western societies at least, it takes little moral courage or imaginative reach to oppose such qualities. In aiming their fire at such easy targets as the warmongers who inflict horror on the innocent, many poets invite an interrogation: Do you accept that some wars may be necessary? If so, how do you choose which ones should be fought?” A new collection of anti-war poetry spends more time on the answers than one might expect, and as a result, actually packs a political punch at a time when many mainstream artists have been cowed into keeping their pacifist sensibilities to themselves.

As a writer with three novels published by New York houses, I knew that each new book got harder to place. I was aware of the publishers’ lust for ‘new blood,’ for authors with no track record, but who were therefore full of potential, vs. those who were mid-list. That’s the category for authors whose average sales are in the 5,000- to 7,000-copy range, the book industry equivalent of a woman who is dismissed as ‘plain.’ The thinking, of course, was that vivacious and photogenic authors were more attractive to the media and more effective on book tours. For a while this worked, until every bookstore in the country had a bestselling author every other night of the week and readers looked upon the opportunity to greet their favorite author with about the same enthusiasm as for their favorite pizza topping.”

“Language bullying – or prescriptivism, as it’s more politely called – is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain wrong and cranky. Most ‘rules’ cited by bullies are highly suspect.”

Heidi Julavits has largely given up on book reviews. In an essay in the new magazine Believer, she writes: “Maybe it’s simply that book reviews have devolved to a point where they function as little more than advertising posing as criticism; the only books likely to be ratified by critical coverage are the books that promise to be ratified by the marketplace.” Critic Bob Hoover takes offense: “The newspaper book editors I know, me included, have never written or run a review of rearranged copy cribbed from a press release or looked at the best-seller list as a source of recommendations, those titles ‘ratified by the marketplace’.”

“The ‘New Yorker short story’ is no longer the hegemon it may once have been. In fact, this collection of ‘thrilling tales’ actually serves as a more effective counterbalance to an entirely new phenomenon. Call it the ‘McSweeney’s short story’ — younger and hipper and more experimental, but no less influential. In some ways, McSweeney’s has been a useful counterpoint to the mainstream publishing scene. Regardless of whether its self-referential play is to your taste, it’s the first bona fide literary movement in decades—with all the old-fashioned energy that such a term implies. But the quality of the work inside McSweeney’s has yet to live up to the promise of the magazine’s gloriously designed packaging.”

“Measured against a best seller in its first flush, sales of any classic book are piddling, of course (unless the classic has just been made into a blockbuster movie, in which case all bets are off). But the overall sales picture resembles the proverbial tortoise-and-hare scenario: As the race goes on, the classics win out. This may seem intuitive; but what’s surprising is that often the race doesn’t have to go on long at all.”

The book business is hurting in Canada. Could it partly be because book review space in newspapers is shrinking? A survey of eight major Canadian papers (including four owned by the CanWest chain) found that “in the CanWest papers, 14 per cent fewer books were reviewed last year than five years earlier. The decline at CanWest most keenly affected Canadian authors, who received half the reviews in 1997 but only 42 per cent of a smaller total last year. Books from small presses were 18 per cent of 1997 reviews at the CanWest papers, versus 11 per cent in 2002. Reviews in the other four papers rose by 17 per cent over the same period. The Star published 100 reviews over three months last year (a 1 per cent increase), the Globe & Mail published 155 (up by 2 per cent), while the Halifax Chronicle Herald tripled its reviews from 19 to 57.”

“On almost any day these days, somewhere in Chicago and its suburbs, a poet is conducting a reading. A poet in residence is opening a world of words to a class of wide-eyed 5th graders. An editor in a cluttered, cramped home office is lovingly cobbling together a poetry journal that will be seen by a tiny audience appreciative of its presence, concerned for its survival. A boisterous bar crowd is giving encouraging applause or withering hisses to contestants in a poetry slam. “That sure wasn’t the case in the ’70s or ’80s. Every once in a while, there’d be a reading, but not all that often.”

A new magazine started showing up in bookstores last week. “In lieu of a title page, there is an unsigned list of the monthly magazine’s intentions, including a ‘focus on writers and books we like’ and a nod to ‘the concept of the Inherent Good’; and an editor says they also hope to include an interview with a philosopher in every issue. On the back cover, there is only a small hint at the cool orbit in which the Believer already spins.” It’s the new McSweeney’s endeavor…