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Index: Books & Publishing

The New Libertine.

Friday, 1 July 2011

Anthony Howell: Management constitutes the contemporary aristocracy. It has laid down a whole regimen dictating what can be said and what can’t, avowedly in the name of social hygiene, but in actuality it reinforces the status quo.

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· Two vicars, three daughters, three miles up the Thames to Wonderland.

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

” When they returned, Alice asked Dodgson to write out the adventures for her. He said he would try, and sat up nearly the whole night putting down the tale on paper, and adding a number of pen-and-ink illustrations; afterwards, the little volume, entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground, was often seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery.

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· Need an agent who can negotiate a sweet deal with a vanity publisher?

Monday, 20 June 2011

Big publishing is simply not set up to publish anything but books. Mid-length materials, worksheets, and other writing that might be downloaded from Amazon or directly from the author’s site are not in their repertoire. Neither do they help the author develop unpublished chapters into articles for placement in magazines.

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· Very not-close encounters with 18 million books. Plus: What does the Lit Lab have to do with lit?

Friday, 17 June 2011

You pretty much have two choices. You can read a small number of books very carefully. Or you can read lots of books “very, very not-carefully”.

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· The anxieties of attending the 2011 E-Poetry Festival.

Monday, 6 June 2011

I anticipated attending E-Poetry might bring apprehension, a type of crisis to my research — that a new slew of dynamics might be unleashed, deviating beyond contexts I consider for the genre. They did not.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Dance & Performance, Noted elsewhere, Poetry & Fiction | | Comments (0)

From the Øιλοκαλíα to Franny’s pea-green book.

Thursday, 2 June 2011

Fr Andrew Louth: ‘The influence of the Philokalia can be thought of in two rather different ways. On the one hand, we can think of what one might call the reception of the Philokalia: that is, how it was read, who read it…On the other hand, we could think of the influence of the Philokalia in another way: how has the Philokalia affected the way its readers understand the nature of the Christian life, the nature of the Church, and even, in particular, the nature of theology?’

Also filed in Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books, Theology | Tagged | Comments (1)

· George Orwell, out of the whirlpool and safe on dry land.

Thursday, 26 May 2011

Returning from one of those excursions with his little son, nephew, and niece, he had to cross the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool—one of the most dangerous whirlpools in all British waters.

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· Mrs Yeats and her husband, old and grey.

Monday, 23 May 2011

You have had no love affairs of consequence. When Yeats, a 51-year-old bachelor, once again proposes to Maud Gonne (the Irish actress and political activist with whom he’d fallen in love as a young man), she declines. When Yeats then proposes to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, she also declines; Iseult would later have an affair with Pound. A month later, when Yeats proposes to you, you accept. At 11:20 in the morning on October 20, 1917, you are married in the Harrow Road Registry Office; the witnesses are Pound and your mother.

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· Claude Shannon, reading the messages hot off the wire.

Friday, 13 May 2011

All messages, he demonstrated, could be broken down into bits, or binary digits. His theory explained how much information each character in a message conveyed and showed how to make the characters easier to send or to interpret.

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· Alasdair Paterson’s grand poetry of Byzantine governance.

Friday, 13 May 2011

Edgar Mason: While the book is unlikely to aid young emperors in their attempts to maintain power, Mr. Paterson has created something very useful for the rest of us: A way of viewing history as a thing cross-pollinated by itself – and an excellent treatise on the governing of our own, personal empires.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction, The Fortnightly Review of Books | | Comments (0)

· How Anthony Horowitz survived Jeffrey Archer.

Saturday, 7 May 2011

He’s already admitted that writing was his second choice of career after politics and it occurs to me that he views it in some ways as a business. “What a vulgar suggestion!” he exclaims and there is a sort of a smile on his lips that balances the anger in his eyes, but actually it’s a close-run thing

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· Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ – full-length at last.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Deciding that the novel as it stood contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to”, and assuring his employer Craige Lippincott that he would make the book “acceptable to the most fastidious taste”, Stoddart also removed references to Gray’s female lovers as his “mistresses”.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Excerpts & Passages, Noted elsewhere, The Fortnightly Review of Books | | Comments (0)

· The codex, in your hand, perfect-bound, in four minutes. Next?

Monday, 18 April 2011

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?

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· The literature of sports bras: a little support for the writer’s life.

Thursday, 14 April 2011

I know, I know, you’re thinking: How in the world did Marty become the go-to guy for running bras? Frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Sport & Fashion | | Comments (0)

· Event: Fawzi Karim’s ‘Plague Lands’ launch, 14 April, London.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Karim is an Iraqi poet, writer, and painter, born in Baghdad in 1945. He was educated at Baghdad University before embarking on a career as a freelance writer. He lived in Lebanon from 1969-1972 and has lived in London since 1978.

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