Quote of the Week

Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. [Richard] Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.” Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?

Almost all authors hate book tours. They hate the idea of going to a city on spec, hoping the bookstore can scare enough people into coming by (usually by posting signs in the lobby) and most of all they hate the idea of a slightly indifferent audience walking by, sniffing at a book and walking away. Ouch. And it’s not just authors that hate it. Willy Loman hated it, too. So does John McCain. Book tour update: When the funnel gets flipped

Back at one of the elevated bridges, one of the site’s builders, Daryll Humphrey (“yes, the gravestone is named after me. It’s staying!”) was showing his partner and sons around the site. Thomas, 11, liked the old benches and the cinema and the writing on the schoolroom walls. And would visiting Dickens World make him want to find out more about the novelist? “No. I’m not interested in that. But I liked the people dressing up as policemen.” High time above the sewer boat ride to the slums

Good fiction is a dialogue between story and reader, to which a reader brings not only personal history but imaginative experience of other books. Judging is as much about being open to others’ readings as trying to persuade them of your own. That, at least, is the theory. As to whether it will bear the ultimate brush with reality when we decide a winner in June, the jury is still out. The literary levellers

Omigod, my respect for editors has gone through the roof. I had some sense that their weeknights and weekends were consumed by reading manuscripts on submission as well as editing upcoming books, but I had no idea how hard it would be just to balance editing one book on a series of deadlines with other work and with one’s home life. I have just the one book and it took up a dozen weekends of work: reading, rereading and then getting on the phone with Neil, going page by page, fine-tuning some dialogue here, making a character’s motivations crystal clear

But the point is that if you are a seminal author like JD Salinger, you can do whatever the hell you like. For many writers (i.e. those without seats in the literary canon) the phone is not ringing off the hook with requests to do interviews, articles and guest spots on Question Time. And for first-time authors who are simply hoping to make a career out of writing, promoting their work is Why I’ve Got To Plug My Book

One irony: Harper Perennial says it invested $2,500 in Web advertising intended to drive viewers to the book’s Web site. But Mr. Roth-Ey estimates that only 1% of those who have seen the videos came from links for which the publisher paid. Steamy Book Gets Buzz From Web

The understanding of the novelist is temporal, rather than spatial or pictural. Its medium is a rendered sense of time – time experienced as an arena of struggle or conflict or choice. All stories are about battles, struggles of one kind or another, that terminate in victory and in defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. Pay attention to the world – A final essay from Susan Sontag

Book publishers for the most part cringe from change, in part of a fear their trade will evolve into something they cannot participate in. But this community, once embraced, will allow publishers the ability to help shape what the future will hold. The digital community not attended to, is one that will work around obstacles to create a platform that meets their needs. Digital Communities

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague is described thus by its publishers: “Despite the ubiquity of stray shopping carts, little effort has been made to comprehend the complex relationship between cart and landscape. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that we have until now lacked a formalised language to describe these wayward carts in systematic detail.” There’s nothing stranger than non-fiction