Diary Archive

Today’s news and links include paranormal detectives, the latest Amazon controversy, and some good new blog posts… (more…)

Last night I attended one of the most interesting dinners I’ve ever been to, and like all good experiences, it ties in with an aspect of writing.

The meal was a special event hosted by Context Travel, one of their “Out of Context” events. It took place in Rome, in Enoteca Casa Bleve, and it was a scent dinner. (more…)

The Guardian today has a good piece by Philip Pullman about the move in the publishing industry to introduce age banding on children’s books. I could explain all the reasons why that’s a bad idea, but he does it so much better, so go and read it.

You can also visit the website that Pullman has set up with a couple of other authors, and if you’re in the industry you can sign their petition. That’s here.

The BBC has an article on the virtues of typewriters.

“Have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter?” asks Frederick Forsyth. “It is very secure.”

Read it here.

The Guardian website has a great article from this week’s Observer, looking at the last ten years in British publishing. Read it here.

This week’s literary news includes the publication of an unfinished Nabokov novel, a computer game based on the life and work of the Brontës, and a bizarre mistake in a new biography (more…)

This Telegraph article, claiming to list the 50 best cult books, is causing much puffing up of chests over missed classics, and sniping at overrated ones.

With book bloggers queuing up to argue over their favourite titles, it’s worth a read. (That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend an article that seems to favour John Fowles’ awful Durrell lite The Magus—which even its own mother couldn’t love—over The Alexandria Quartet; or that thinks the UK still had rationing in 1957…)

It’s not really possible to start a new publishing house.

As a small press, if you want to be sold through the big chains, you’re going to be selling your books through a distributor, which cuts further into your rapidly diminishing profits. Amazon will buy directly from you, but they charge you for the privilege of selling to them, meaning that most of your sales will earn you no more than 40% of the cover price. So, if your book costs £6, that’s £2.40 to pay for printing, author royalties, book design, advertising, administration, delivering the books to the distributors, getting the ISBN number, sending out review copies, mortgage payments, rent when you lose your house, telephone calls to your wife’s mother, hiring a divorce lawyer, the bus fare to go and visit your children, and paying somebody to pulp the unsold copies of your books.

Charles Boyle has started a new publishing house. (more…)

Wealthier readers of this blog might be interested in this news item on the BBC website.

Of course, buying the desk won’t make you a better writer, but it will mean you’re never short of something to talk about in restaurants (more…)

Nobody knows how to spell email. You might say, ‘nobody knows how to spell e-mail,’ but you’d be wrong. Or would you?

The issue of email vs. e-mail clearly raises blood pressures across the world. At the time of writing, the spelling question is right at the top of the Wikipedia article on e-mail. Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Email Experience Council has declared the official term to be email. They’ve even got a petition (more…)

Irregardless is a word that people love to hate. In fact, many would say that it isn’t a word at all, but rather the hideous result of a collision between irrespective and regardless (more…)

Last month I finally managed to make my book lover’s pilgrimage to the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Almost—but not quite—the legendary bookshop that first published James Joyce’s Ulysses (the original shop, owned by Sylvia Beach, was at a different location and closed for good in 1941), the modern Shakespeare and Company is still a unique bookshop.

The shop is staffed at least in part by a team of enthusiasts, who work there in return for the use of one of the beds that are tucked discreetly between the bookcases. (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)

I’ve broken the habit of a lifetime by finally reading an issue of Granta in the year—although not the actual season—in which it was published. I don’t feel too bad about coming to this particular issue six months late because, presumably, it’s intended to last us for the next ten years. This is Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2007. (more…)

Lately I’ve been reading two biographies: Ian MacNiven’s 800-page monster Lawrence Durrell: a biography and the Hesperus Press edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, from their “100 Pages” series. I don’t think you have to see the title of this post—or the attractive cover image on the left—to work out which one I finished first.

Giovanni Boccaccio was still a child when his fellow-Florentine Dante died in 1321. As a result of this, there’s something quite wistful about the Life of Dante, in which Boccaccio praises Dante’s virtues and rails against his enemies (including, in several stirring chapters, the entire population of Florence). It must have been frustrating to have lived so close in both time and place to Dante and yet to have missed him. (more…)

US film maker Karen L. Mintz is in the process of making what looks like a fascinating documentary about the nation of Bhutan: Gross National Happiness, 68 Miles from Thimphu. (more…)