Category: publishing

A new book by a Clinton administration official who led negotiations with Switzerland, Germany, France and Austria to “get nearly $8 billion in reparations for art, unpaid insurance policies and confiscated bank accounts taken from Jews during World War II” is angering the Swiss. The objections are not so much about the content, as the cover, which “has a swastika made of gold ingots spread over the red Swiss national flag.” But author Stuart E. Eizenstat and his publisher say the design “accurately reflects what he learned during the negotiations in the late 1990s.”

Granta’s one-a-decade list of Britain’s best young novelists always creates a stir. “The list, like all literary prizes, is an attempt to bypass market imperfections, and is loved and loathed by publishers, who are inclined to dismiss it as irrelevant when they aren’t included, and to applaud its detachment and authority when they are.” This year’s list has its critics and defenders. “So were there any shoo-ins? Several judges mentioned, unsurprisingly, Zadie Smith.”

A list’s still a list. Yes there are stars from the previous Granta lists. But “the somewhat sadder message conveyed by the yellowing old photos of 1983 and 1993 is that many of these writers, while in middle age still going through the motions of publishing a novel every few years, are not what they were.”

The medieval studies professor who discovered and edited a lost manuscript by JRR Tolkien, says dealing with Tolkien’s fans was arduous over the six years it took to prepare the manuscript. “It was unfortunate that there were some obsessive fans who “whose attention one attracts by working on anything related to Tolkien. The sheer number of people who were trying to profit from Tolkien’s work was astonishing, and the problems with copyright violation and outright theft were like nothing I had ever encountered in medieval studies.”

What were 2002’s hottest UK paperback sellers? John Grisham leads the list, as expected. And there were an awful lot of manufactured celebrity books. Some 30 million paperbacks were sold in the UK in 2002, about the same as in 2001, but nearly three million down on 2001 (there was a new Harry Potter that year). Still, it’s estimated that fewer than 50 percent of Britons ever buy a book. Here’s the list of paperbacks most sold…

“The old style of Canadian biography was written mainly by academic historians and characterized by a slavish devotion to the facts, and nothing but the facts, about the subject at hand.” Boring. But a new generation of biographers has taken more of the novelist approach to their work. “Virginia Woolf said every biography should be written twice – once as fiction and once as fact. Fact is accessible but interpretation is not, and fact won’t tell you much about character and thought.”

An unpublished manuscript by JRR Tolkien has been found in a box at Oxford. “The 2000 handwritten pages include Tolkien’s translation and appraisal of ‘Beowulf’, the epic 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem of bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have inspired ‘The Lord of the Rings’.”

Hmong society has no literary tradition. “The first Hmong writing system was developed by Catholic missionaries in the 1950s. Until then, all storytelling was spoken.” So a new book collecting young Hmong writers’ work is something extraordinary.

Granta is naming its “20 Best of Young British Novelists,” an exercise it indulges in every ten years. So what’s the Grant track record? “When you look at the names on the original 1983 and follow-up 1993 lists, the hit-rate was impressive: Amis, Barker, Barnes, Boyd, McEwan, Rushdie, Swift, Tremain on the former; Banks, de Bernières, AL Kennedy, Kureishi, Phillips, Self and Winterson on the latter; with Ishiguro and Mars-Jones, by virtue of their early-flowering promise, on both.”

“So what if Vancouver has become one of the hottest venues on the North American spoken-word circuit? Is there any correlation between the groundswell of so-called ‘street poetry’ in Vancouver and the West Coast’s domination of all those august literary prizes?” Perhaps… but perhaps not. Even those who practice the art can’t agree. Some of them don’t even like one another. And they don’t like the publicity. Or even necessarily the artform. “To treat poetry as performance is crude and extremely revolting.”