"Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart. Those good years are where the myths built up. Now in the last 30 years, traditional publishing and its four publishers has become a sad little echo of the thousands of publishers that came before." Full article here . One of the commentators to the above post (Steve Perry)…
courtesy of a friend:
As a child I loved the series of "Fractured Fairy Tales," animated shorts narrated by Edward Everett Horton, which appeared as part of The Bullwinkle and Rocky Show in the 1960s. Generally they were twists on known classic fairy tales, but I recently happened upon one that takes on George MacDonald's two children's books, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883). It's…
"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects . . ." More AI theft. The full story is here: "Who Is Blake Whiting?" "AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of…
A few snippets: Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. Those who agree with [Alberto] Manguel that “Unpacking books is a revelatory activity” are lonely without this crowd of paper bodies; they understand how the cover is a…
I have been reading Joseph Epstein's essays (collected in many books) for over thirty years--not always with agreement, but always with interest and illumination. His new essay "There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies", in the September 2020 issue of Commentary , is a good example. Read it here . One small observation: [There is] a new trend in publishing: accounts of the writing and publication…
I found the below by accident, bouncing around the web, but the sentiment is perfectly good. It reminds me of a book I read about 45 years ago: The Illusionless Man: Fantasies and Meditations on Disillusionment (1966) by Allen Wheelis. Wheelis (1915-2007) was a noted San Francisco psychotherapist who also wrote stories, essays and novels. Most are of a pessimistic cast, and have frequent…
A new interview with me, on "Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors," is online at the Fellowship & Fairydust site, here .
There is a new two-hour documentary titled Quintessentially Irish (2024) in which the current Lord Dunsany appears about a dozen times, discussing several things from his great grandfather to his own experience of watching a marriage scene in Braveheart being filmed by Mel Gibson at Dunsany Castle. He also discusses his re-wilding of part of the Dunsany land, and there are a number of interesting…
I would substitute "literature" for "literary fiction" in the title of this short article by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings from Persuasion , but a lot of what it says about the state of publishing in the 21st century is spot on. Witness: Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What…
Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction. The article is here at The Spectator . Below are a few snippets. It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. . . . But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem…
I recently learned that the Folio Society has published an illustrated centenary edition of The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Illustrated by Julie Dillon, and with an Introduction by Erin Morgenstern, and a reprinted introduction (from the 1999 Ballantine trade paperback edition) by Neil Gaiman. The Folio Society webpage for the book includes a 50 second video highlighting the…
A few extracts from an interesting article by Christine Smallwood, on "A Reviewer's Life: The Material Constraints of Writing Criticism Today": Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the…
George R.R. Martin has written: Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it…
"If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we…
Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal , is a sad story of the state of publishing today. "Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code.…
The Dublin Review of Books has an interesting article by Robin Wilkinson on Lord Dunsany, particularly covering The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). It is titled "Dunsany's Careless Abundance" and is available here . A snippet: In his autobiographical Patches of Sunlight (1938), Dunsany recalls the day he discovered the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in the school library, and straightway read them all,…
There is a new article up at The New Yorker , on "How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction" by Kevin Lozano. It's a kind of slanted take on a new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature , by Dan Sinykin. I haven't seen Sinykin's book yet (though I've read excerpts and reviews), but I look forward to reading it, as it gives a pretty good…
A long and very interesting essay by Adam L.G. Nevill about the future for writers and the threats of A.I. Let's say that future AI software becomes sophisticated enough to write a new novel by Tolkien. Then, surely, there will be attempts to upload and sell the myriad results of new stories "in-the-style-of" [add any popular author's name], produced by the technology and its so called "authors"…
Here's a publisher's advertisement from 1933. Why anyone would think this a good way to advertise books is beyond me.
"Our literary past is under assault. Trigger warnings are being slapped on reissued classics. Long-dead writers are being called out for offending contemporary sensibilities. And sensitivity readers are relentlessly filleting books of anything that upsets their identitarian worldview." So begins Philip Kiszely's essay "Collecting Old Books Is Now a Radical Act." It pinpoints a real problem, but…
I enjoyed this essay, "The Books That Made me" by Penelope Lively. It has some nice insights. It appeared at Unherd--the link is here . I post a few quotations from it below. Books beget books. Intertextuality, the critics like to call it. I am at the end of a writing life; I just read now. So, the process whereby reading so often became writing is over, for me. It has been an almost unconscious…
A year and a half ago, I noted the current Lord Dunsany, Randal Plunkett (the 21st Baron Dunsany), and his efforts at rewilding a portion of the Dunsany Estate. (The link is here .) I found a few video updates recently about the continuing process. A short, six-minute one, "Lord of the Wild: Rewilding Dunsany Estate", can be found here . A longer (22+ minutes) and more in-depth video, "Does…
This article by Joanne Harris is all too true. The full article is here . A few choice excerpts follow: People are being paid less than half a living wage for their creative labour. The ALCS points to this as evidence of a global trend of the “devaluing of creative labour”. I agree – we see it everywhere: in the calls to work for nothing, in the initiatives to offer unfettered free access to…
While it's nice to see a new (short) interview with Susan Cooper, it's a bit sad to see the interviewer focus mostly on the books she published fifty years or more ago, give or take. Of course those are her classic and award-winning books, but still.... Here is the link at the School Library Journal . The line from Tolkien she quotes comes from Note G in "On Fairy-stories": “Fantasy does not blur…