Category: words

“Eager scholars send their precious manuscripts off to journals in the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time they will be published. Months later, their papers come back with rejection letters from editors and accompanying anonymous reviews. Those reviews are supposed to help the writer improve his or her work, but many reviews do not offer constructive criticism. Some are simply critical. Others are downright abusive.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

The book party has taken a decidedly techno turn – from the lobbies of intimate bookstore and chic restaurants onto the internet. Erotic-novelist M.J. Rose recently celebrated the launch of her latest book at an online chatroom, where champagne glasses clinked without a sound. – Salon

Steven Spielberg recently paid $2 million for a first novel by French architect Marc Levy. The book was a bestseller in France as soon as it hit the shelves last winter, yet Spielberg hadn’t even read it when he flew Levy to New York for meetings. “So doesn’t anyone object to the fact that literature can now be bought and sold at a colossal price solely on the basis of a minimal plot summary?” – The Guardian

What could possibly be gained by having 107 writers from 43 European countries spend six weeks on a train together traveling through 11 countries and 19 cities? “Reclaiming public places for literature and deciding “what Europe means,” says the organizer of this summer’s bizarre “lit. express.” – Die Welt (Berlin)

This year’s Book Expo America is beginning, and prominent among the 10,000 registered to attend is a legion of Dotcoms –  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the keynote speaker at a gathering fixed on the future. – Wired

It’s been 30 years since T.S. Eliot died, but still there hasn’t been an authorized biography – that is, one written with full access to the author’s estate.  That’s because Eliot’s “fiercely loyal” widow Valerie controls all the copyrights. “If Eliot scholars want to print quotations from the poet’s work, they have to go through her – and this, by all accounts, is not at all straightforward. If Valerie does not like a critic’s line, she may well feel disinclined to grant permissions. In some cases, her refusal could scupper a scholar’s entire project.” – New Statesman

It’s a bountiful spring for challenging American fiction. New books by Joseph Heller (posthumous) Saul Bellow (84), E.L. Doctorow (69), Philip Roth (67) and John Updike (68) are on the shelves. “Because their long-in-the-tooth novels are so creative, challenging, outrageous and well crafted, this is arguably one of the merriest seasons for American literature in decades.” – Washington Post

“At long last, Sylvia Plath’s uncensored journals are published. “Almost from the day she died, readers and scholars, faced with the huge, faceless enigma of her suicide, have been perplexed and thwarted by Plath’s mental condition. The unabridged journals and other new information, some of it reported here for the first time, lend credence to a little-noticed theory that Sylvia Plath suffered not just from some form of mental illness (probably manic depression) but also from severe PMS.” – Salon

George Orwell was not a socialist, even if he might have had the reputation as a “secular saint” of socialism. It was a reputation built on sand, argues a critic. – New Statesman

Increasingly, publishers of academic books favor removing bibliographies from the printed book and posting them on the web. It makes for shorter books and greater access to scholarly addenda online. – New York Times