Archive for August, 2008
Books Crisis in Japan
Experts in Japan say the publishing industry is facing a historic crisis, the Japan Times reports. More than 200 new books are published daily in the country, and the total market for books and magazines surpasses ¥2 trillion. But hundreds of bookstores nationwide shut down every year, and the market has largely been shrinking since [...]
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“It is rare,” writes Yann Plougastel in Le Monde dated tomorrow (August 29th), “for a writer to conform so little to the idea we have of what a writer should look like. With his washed-out blue eyes, broad forehead and tall stature, nimble angler’s hands and legs like a tired cowboy (?), Richard Ford … [...]
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Pankaj Mishra, writing in last Saturday’s (August 23rd) Guardian book review, is reminded while reading obituaries of Solzhenitsyn of remarks by Philip Roth about some of the differences between the situations of writers East and West towards the (provisional and temporary, it now seems) end of the Cold War.
Mishra writes: “Roth summed up the marginality [...]
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The IMRAM Irish language literature festival has just announced its 2008 programme. The theme this year is the islands and seas of Ireland and their place in the artistic imagination.
There is the Gaelic Jazz Project, fusing the ancient and the modern, moving from classic Blasket Island texts to twentieth century poetry; Béal Tuinne, Shaun Davey’s [...]
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Justin Quinn says (drb blog, Jul 16th) that I sound like “an unreconstructed Irish nationalist” – which is not, admittedly, quite the same as saying that I am one.
Whatever I may be or may be called, in the time that I have been commenting on Irish history, cultural debates and music I have called [...]
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Amazon buys AbeBooks
Amazon is buying rare and out of print books specialist AbeBooks for an undisclosed sum. The takeover, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to be completed during the fourth quarter of 2008.
AbeBooks’ website has been trading since 1996 and has 13,500 bookseller members, who pay a monthly subscription fee to list their books. [...]
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