Category: publishing

The American Western is such a staple of the culture, and “so taken for granted that the western novel’s centennial has passed with hardly any fanfare, and little seems planned for the 100th birthday of the film western. But academic critics are not letting the Virginian, and those who followed in his trail, slip out of town unacclaimed.

Why is it that many educated people aren’t reading books anymore? Is it because our brains have forgotten to function in longform? Not really, writes one critic. Today’s literary writers – at least those in Canada, anyway – want to write about states of being, rather than action in the real world. “I think this disconnect, more than the slow and inexorable frittering away of our collective intelligence, explains why we don’t read much any more. It’s not our brains that have turned to mush, it’s the books.”

A 93-word teaser describing the next installment of the Harry Potter series and written on a notecard by JK Rowling was sold at auction for £28,680 in London this week. “The fan site www.the.leaky.cauldron.org managed to raise £15,240 to buy the card, but were outbid by an anonymous US bidder.”

The 25 best books of the year? The Village Voice Literary Supplement has a list…

Does war really spur writers to churn out great works, as conventional wisdom holds? “Closer examination reveals precisely the opposite to be the case. The library of war writing is so vast as to be beyond the comprehension of any single reader, critic or scholar, but the amount of it that can be called literature is astonishingly small.”

Novelist Patricia Cornwell knows who Jack the Ripper was. Or she says she does. Others may disagree, (‘others’ being defined in this case as ‘every criminologist in the UK,’) but Cornwell insists that British painter Walter Sickert can be conclusively linked to the notorious killing spree in late-19th century London through letters and other written material previously dismissed as hoaxes.

Big publishers count on big blockbuster fiction to make their profits – your Tom Clancys, your John Grishams – their megasales are what puts the shine on a bookseller’s holiday season. Except this year. The big pop fiction isn’t selling like it usually does…”Crichton appears down. Clancy is down. The Turow is not making its numbers. All the big-ticket fiction has been suffering the last six to eight months.”

Of course the hundreds of small poetry publications that struggle on year after year would like a piece of the $100 million Ruth Lilly recently gave Poetry magazine. But it’s not all about the money. “They write because they love it with no expectation of making money. Even the big poets don’t make much. While novelists or even some non-fiction writers can fantasize about a possible movie contract, for poets, there’s the cold reality that winning a multi-state lottery is more likely.”

Was a time that if you were educated you read. Seriously. Now you can be educated and not have to read. “We are, as the experts like to say with a horrified sense of wonder, aliterate – able to read, and read well, but disinclined to do so. We can blame time and tiredness, changing technologies and altered priorities; still, a reluctance to read is not all that different from an inability. As Mark Twain observed, in that terribly trenchant way of his, ‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them’.”

Yes there’s the prestigious New York Times Bestseller List. And the names that appear on it are generally known to one and all. But talk to the people who are actually in the bookstores selling books, and you hear about an entirely different list… Are these the “real” bestellers?