Category: publishing

Book collectors are book lovers. And book lovers love libraries, right? Uh uh. “Collectors abominate lending libraries. They are graveyards of good books. Everything a librarian does to prepare a book for lending disqualifies it as collectable. Stamps are slammed on the title page, label pockets gummed to the rear pastedown, dust wrappers discarded, covers vulcanised in plastic – or, in those days, a toffee-brown buckram tough enough to withstand acid. Restoring a library book to collectable condition is like trying to return a Kentucky Fried Chicken to the state of health where it can lay an egg.”

Should Granta’s list of best young novelists have used age as a criterion? What, after all, does youth have to do with promise when it comes to writing? “Is it pinpointing the best writers of this year alone, or attempting to predict who will cast a shadow over the literary landscape until the announcement of the next list in 2013?

Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn are married to one another, but they’re also finalists for a Whitbread Award and competing. “Perhaps the most startling thing the Frayn/Tomalin news has brought to light is the suspicion – or perhaps it’s even a schadenfreudian certainty – that writers must not get on. They are, we seem to imagine, selfish, competitive and vampiric by nature – sucking real life and friendships dry for the sake of fiction.”

It appears the state of New York is still “sanitizing” literary excerpts for its state high school regents exam. “State education officials had been doctoring the literary reading samples on state tests to make sure nothing offensive was included. It didn’t matter if it was Anton Chekhov or Isaac Bashevis Singer, state bureaucrats removed references to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity and even alcohol. ‘Jews’ and ‘gentiles’ were excised from Singer. An Annie Dillard excerpt about growing up white in a black area was purged of racial references.”

Steven Erlanger is the New York Times’ new culture editor. And he’s jumped into the job with a memo to his troops exhorting them to do better: “I’ve been impressed and gratified by some of what we’ve published in the last weeks of the year. But I’ve also been dismayed by some of the flat, careless and inelegant writing I’ve seen, some of which has gotten into the paper. What we do in the section matters. I’m concentrating now on understanding how it works before deciding how to make it better.”

Frank Rich, considered the most-feared theatre critic in New York during the 1980s when he was theatre critic at the New York Times, is moving back to the NYT culture pages. For the past eight years Rich has been writing an op-ed on the NYT editorial pages. “We plan for his column to be an anchor of the Arts & Leisure section. In addition, he will work closely with Steve Erlanger, our newly appointed cultural news editor, in planning coverage and the overall design of the culture pages.”

Gavin Menzies’ new book claiming that Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus landed is getting lots of press. But does the research hold up? “Sadly, many observers concur that accuracy matters little to publishing houses, especially when fudged facts are almost guaranteed to generate controversy, and therefore sales. ‘The publishing industry’s gullibility is boundless and its devotion to the bottom line endless, so if they can maintain their fealty to P.T. Barnum and put one over on the public, they’ll do so without losing a wink’s worth of sleep’.”

The Evening Standard’s Norman Lebrecht has won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel. “Starting at 54, even with this groundwork established, is still kind of late. There are precedents – Annie Proulx, Penelope Fitzgerald and most famously Mary Wesley. But why, if Lebrecht is capable of writing such a good novel, did it not spring from him sooner? Simple, he says. He wasn’t ready…”

“Literature has always been a poisoned chalice for filmmakers. It’s irresistible because it offers great stories and characters, but it often makes geographic demands that translate into huge budgets. Worse, it covers psychological and intellectual territory that nobody has ever really figured out how to translate into movies.” This is especially tough in a country like Canada. Though Canadian writers have scored big internationally in recent years, getting movies made of their work is especially difficult.

At a “professor-packed” session of the American Historical Association’s meeting in Chicago over the weekend, plagiarism was the hot topic. “Almost everybody thinks that something ought to be done about it, but almost nobody agrees with anybody else about just what that something ought to be. And – oh, yes – there’s also that annoying bugaboo of defining just what truly constitutes plagiarism.”