Friday, December 30, 2016

Meet The Writers Who Have Sold Not Just Millions Of Books


My personal  favourite is the man sentenced to death who, as an act of mercy, is allowed to choose how he would like to die and (of course) chooses old age. 

Can British Publishing Become More Diverse For Good?




Some authors and publishers are wary. “We have seen it all before. … A few people are championed and then people lose interest because they think the issue has been addressed. And then it all reverts back to the way it was before.”



Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising What makes things cool and makes thing fly off the shop shelves




‘Everyone Is Scared’ In Hong Kong’s Book Industry Since Those Publishers And Booksellers Were Disappeared



“Bookshops have closed. Publishers have left. Authors have stopped writing. Books have been pulped. Printers are refusing political works. Translators have grown weary of being associated with certain topics. Readers have stopped buying. And the whole industry is wondering if hard-hitting books on Chinese politics still have a future in the former British colony.”


Haskell spends more of his chapter on painting than on anything else but let’s get to literature. He says, it has “not produced men who are the equals of Streeton, Heysen or Gruner”. Interesting. I might be wrong but I’d say that now Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Eleanor Dark are at least as well-known as those three artists. Anyhow, here is his impression: Those who could write the great Australian novels, who are neither apathetic nor complacent and who correspond in some way to our Bloomsbury, are unfortunately too busy talking to accomplish more than a poem, a pamphlet or a short story. They are dissatisfied, they hate the squatter, despise the ‘dinkum Aussie’ and are well to the left of his traditional labour. Their thoughts are in Spain or Russia. They have both imagination and compassion, but there is more of bitterness in their make-up… They concentrate on the ideal of some vague revolution just as the masses concentrate on sport. 
Library of America: During his second trip, which resulted in his book America revisited, he found an improved America. LOA quotes this:
The truth is, that in New York there is room enough for Everybody, whereas in London, huge as it is, there is not sufficient room for Anybody.

The short story can’t wither and, living, can’t be tied to a plan. It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies when it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives.