OR Books will publish Gordon Lish’s Collected Fictions on April 30th. Lish, best known as Raymond Carver’s Svengali, was an editor at Knopf and Esquire, a writing workshop drill sergeant, and a merciless pruner of purple prose. His stories are sure to attract intense scrutiny; we can already hear slighted authors sharpening their red pencils in anticipation.
People still buy books! To celebrate, Publishers Weekly has named San Francisco shop City Lights Books the Bookseller of the Year.
The New Yorker's recent profile of Mayor Richard M. Daley gets the Second City wrong, writes Chicago Reader reporter Ben Joravsky.
Last year, publishing world veteran Peter Miller endured a barrage of twitter sniping and snarky blogging while presenting at the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. This year he's back, blogging about the festivities for the LA Times. There's still a hint of fanaticism in the air: "In nearly any discussion of books these days, the argument usually devolves into either/or," Miller writes, "Either the publishers get with the program or else. That 'or else' can be a monotonous drum beat at SXSWi that drowns out genuine dialog."
UbuWeb publishes the unpublishable.
Amazon recently bought Audible, but perhaps that was a bad move: the iPad, soon to descend on publishing like the angel of death, might kill audio books, too.
