Archive for May, 2008
Joseph O’Connor in Lyon
Last Friday’s (May 23rd) Le Monde des Livres is devoted almost in its entirety to the Assises internationales du roman, a new kind of literary festival which is in its second year and is devoted entirely to the novel form. This year’s event is taking place in Lyon and runs (from May 26th) until June [...]
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Synge Summer School
Some places still remain for the 2008 Synge Summer School, which will take place in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow from June 29th to July 5th. The theme is Irish theatre and the world stage.
There will be lectures, seminars and workshops on many Irish dramatists, including Brian Friel, Stewart Parker, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson – and, of [...]
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A print-on-demand publisher in the US filed a class action suit against Amazon on May 19th in response to the internet retailer’s threat to remove the “buy” buttons of publishers who refuse to sign up with its on-demand printing subsidiary BookSurge, reports Morris Rosenthal in his blog.
According to his report, the primary plaintiff in the [...]
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Forbes.com looks at “how Amazon could change publishing”.
The first major technology-enabled change in the books industry came when digital print-on-demand presses started becoming affordable, but for authors looking to gain serious readership, the big question still remains unanswered: How would they market and distribute their books?
“Enter Amazon.com,” writes entrepreneur Sramana Mitra. “Some surveys suggest [...]
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Le Monde des Livres (May 9th) reports on a fightback by France’s two biggest reference publishers, Larousse and Le Robert, against the growing domination of the market by Wikipedia. On May 13th Larousse launched its first encyclopedia on free access on the Internet. “We are putting on line the 150,000 articles of our universal encyclopedia, [...]
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Brian Lynch Reading
Novelist (The Winner of Sorrow), playwright, screenwriter and poet Brian Lynch will be reading from his work today (Wednesday) at 6.30 pm at the Dublin City Library & Archive, 138-144 Pearse Street.
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From Geert Mak’s In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century
1912: “I came across a written complaint filed by residents of the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood [of Berlin] concerning the lack of toilets. The reply from the Prussian civil servant stated that ‘an average bowel movement takes three to four minutes, including the time needed to arrange [...]
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John Gross contributes a very enthusiastic review of John Updike’s latest non-fiction collection, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, to the current edition of the New York Review of Books (May 15th).
Due Considerations contains work that has appeared in various publications since 1999, “a period”, Gross writes, “during which he turned seventy (he is now seventy-six), [...]
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Celebrating Flann O’Brien
The School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin is calling for papers for a projected volume of essays on Flann O’Brien to mark the fortieth anniversary of his death.
The volume will seek to reappraise O’Brien’s work and academic debate within the field of O’Brien studies. Aspiring contributors are asked to consider, among [...]
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Robert Solé, writing in Le Monde’s books section (Le Monde des Livres, April 25th), reviews three recent books on culture, multiculturalism, cultural diversity and “transculturalism”. The review raises many interesting questions and provokes some others.
Lluis Bonet and Emmanuel Négrier, in La fin des cultures nationales, (a book whose title – translation “The End of National [...]
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