Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 2)
This is the second part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Although it’s a bit more complicated than this, the survival strategy of commercial ...
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Latest Review: Customer Service
Our latest review is a piece I wrote about Benoit Duteurtre’s Customer Service (translated from the French by Bruce Benderson), which is part of Melville House Press’s fantastic Contemporary Art of the Novella series. It’s a pretty funny book that a lot of people will be able to relate to: The novella ...
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Customer Service
Benoit Duteurtre’s satiric novella, Customer Service, is a kind of modern quest narrative pitting a rational man against an omnipresent, almost Kafka-esque corporation too soulless to provide any genuine help to its customers when things go wrong. The novella opens with the hapless narrator leaving his cell phone in a ...
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30 Great Authors from Argentina
In one of my Frankfurt posts I mentioned the 30 Great Authors from Argentina (warning—pdf file) “brochure” that the Fundacion TyPA put together to help promote writers who had yet to be translated out of Spanish. It’s hard to describe this elegant, unique brochure (more like oversized trading cards ...
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Graphic Novels from Europe
This week, the fifth New Literature from Europe with a special focus on graphic novels: Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the literary series New Literature from Europe this year takes on the burgeoning world of graphic novels. Graphic Novels from Europe presents five days of discussions, exhibits and book signings, to ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 1)
On Friday, I was invited by Riky Stock of the German Book Office to give a presentation to GBO directors from around the world about publishing post-financial collapse. Which is a pretty big topic, and one that will probably dominate conversations post-holiday season, especially if the retail sector struggles as much as ...
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Books and the Holiday Season
This is shaping up to be a very depressing holiday season—at least in terms of retail. On Friday, the U.S. Census Bureau released some rather sobering figures, including the fact that bookstore sales dropped by 4.5% in September. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in October, the entire retail sector fell by 2.8%, the ...
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