Tag
Publishing
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How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
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“No Words”: Refugee Camps and Empathy’s Limits
Empathy will not close the refugee camps, nor will it aid refugees. So what will?
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What Is a Book?
The “papers” of Toni Morrison can be accessed through a Princeton computer terminal. But where do these digital drafts end, and Beloved begin?
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Quizzical: Which Academic Press Are You?
We don’t judge books by their covers, but we do sort people based on which academic presses match their personality types.
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The Feminist Press at 50: An Interview with Jamia Wilson
“There was something about the resilience of an organization like this. We are the longest-running feminist publishing house in the world.”[none-for-homepage]
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Public Books Database
The Public Books Database is collecting the resources being offered for free by academic presses during the COVID-19 crisis.
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How Capitalism Changed American Literature
Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry …
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Editor 2 Editor: Greg Britton and Jennifer Crewe
Where do scholarly editors find their authors? How do they decide which …
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Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in …
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Knausgaard’s Ruthless Freedom
So here it is at last: the end of Knausgaard’s struggle. It is 1,160 pages long, divided into three parts. Part 2 consists of a long essay on Hitler. Both …
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Editor 2 Editor: Mary Francis and Gita Manaktala
How does a scholarly book differ from a dissertation, or a string of articles? What does and doesn’t change with a shift to digital publishing? What do editors do all day?
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Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications distributed at bus stops, markets, and municipal services offices.1 In 2007, I learned that 50,000 Chileans had submitted entries to the…
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Editor 2 Editor: Priya Nelson and Joe Calamia
How important to an editor is the spark one feels (or doesn’t) about a potential project? How does one identify books that are surprising, new, and relevant? And …
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Let’s Not Call Them Neo-Nazis
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest of its kind in the world, in recent years boasting more than 275,000 visitors, around 10,000 accredited journalists …
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Editor 2 Editor: Lindsay Waters and Peter J. Dougherty
What does it take for a scholarly book to reach a broad audience? What should …
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Books after the Death of the Book
Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title …
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Feeling like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on…
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Clever Man Outs Female Author: A Drama in 3 Acts
This month, we witnessed a contemporary version of a drama that we might call “The Female Author’s Disclosure.” It features the following dramatis personae: • The Heroine: a female author who decides to publish under an incognito. • The Confidantes: friends or associates who know her real identity, and are begged to maintain the…
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How to Predict a Bestseller
Literary theory is not a field that creates many bestsellers. Biographies of Shakespeare will always have a market, and now and then a work like Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae rides a wave of controversy. But literary research is hard to popularize: Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t write page-turners about narrative theory. The Bestseller Code tries to become…
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Always Already Translated
Here are some common metaphors for thinking about translation: as a ferryman (a word that derives from the Latin transferre), as a new set of garments, and as resurrection or afterlife. These formulations all assume that an original text composed in a particular language is subsequently translated into other languages. In her new book, Born…
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Genre Wars, Amazon, and the Market for Heart: Where Do We Go From Here?
In the past year in books, two conversations made a descent into debate—one about genre, and the other about Amazon—without necessarily being cast as two sides of the same story. It is a portrait of the writer c. 2015, who faces new realities, a multiverse of post-apocalypses, and a punishing numbers game. In a sense it…
