Category: words

Being a book agent in the US pretty well means you have to live on the east or west coasts. Of the 250 or so most influential agents, that’s where 99 percent of them live. But one small agency in a Chicago suburb is finding its way by doing business a bit differently. – Chicago Tribune

Canada’s Al Purdy dies. “If there’s a heaven and a hell, Al has a foot in both camps as he argues first with God and then with the Devil. I think I know who’s winning the argument or, if not winning, at least breaking even in eternity. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

The old pulp ‘n paper book is fated to be short-lived. The Association of American Publishers predicts that in five years 28 million people will be using electronic devices to read books. – Washington Post

Movie critic Roger Ebert knows all the hype about e-books, but it doesn’t matter. “Let’s assume ClearType looks terrific and that Microsoft makes good on its prediction that by 2010 its e-books will weigh 8 ounces, run for 24 hours, and hold as many as a million titles. Do I want one? No. I treasure my books with a voluptuous regard.” – ZDNet

Marc-Edouard Nabe has become a sensation in France with the publication of “his ‘Intimate Journal,’ a ponderous diary, which to date runs to 3,915 pages and relates the day-to-day minutiae of his life and of those around him. While previous volumes passed largely unnoticed, the fourth and latest, entitled Kamikaze, has turned the author into a cult figure in Paris, much to the horror of the friends and family whose secrets he has betrayed.” – The Times (UK)

Why is it that people seem to find poetry difficult to read but easy to write? “The ‘easy to write’ view seems odd. No one believes it is easy to play a musical instrument. Why would anyone think the instrument of language is any easier to master?” – MSNBC

The lives of two of Britain’s most revered writers, father and son Kingsley and Martin Amis, are due to cross paths in May with the release of the father’s collected letters and the son’s long-awaited autobiography. “To have Kingsley’s chronic hatred of phonies, philistines, tight-fisted drinking companions, bullying officials, mouthy women, pompous barmen, and pretentious artists and have all his opinions raw, unconstrained by any shreds of tact, and his pungent stories about his peers unmediated by the filter of fiction, is a treat. To have the inside story on Martin Amis, the writer who has influenced more prose styles than any other in the last two decades, runs it a close second.” – The Independent (UK)

A new book documents the CIA’s “promotion of a non-Communist left” through lavish post-war funding of American intellectuals and artists. “The most disturbing revelations of the book are not so much what the CIA did as whom it persuaded-openly or under cover-to do the dirty work of propaganda.” The roster includes some decidedly unusual suspects: Stephen Spender, Mark Rothko, Mary McCarthy, Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Lowell, Peter Matthiessen, and many others. “Such people were foot soldiers in a cultural cold war. For two decades they accepted grants, travel stipends, and commissions from a wide variety of CIA front organizations designed to win the hearts and minds of intellectuals tempted by ‘neutralism.'” – Chronicle of Higher Education

The news that Chris Columbus has been chosen to direct the Harry Potter movies has some fans lamenting. “There’s nothing in [Chris Columbus’] filmography that suggests to me that he has any understanding of the inner lives and imagination of children.” – Salon

• Potter books banned from English religious school because they don’t conform with Bible’s teachings. – CBC

— were up 11 percent in 1999. – Publishers Weekly