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Comment from the book world in January 2005

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January 2005

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A defining activity

31 January 2005

'One of the great cliches of novel writing is that pleasure and happiness don't make good subjects. We are enormous compartmentalisers; we may have huge anxieties about Africa or Iraq, but at the same time be having a marvellous time, be very interested and content in our work or our private life. Some of the pleasures I wanted to get into the book were preparing a meal, hanging out with your teenage children, listening to music, having sex and playing squash. I wanted to investigate the notion of whether these thing were impossible to write about.

Another ambition of mine was to write a novel that was work-based, because too may novels seem to ignore the fact that people work: that it's a defining activity, a source of pleasure and obsession and self-esteem.'

Ian McEwan on his new novel Saturday in the Bookseller

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History is hot

24 January 2005

'History is hot. And not just because of Brad Pitt's flying thighs. There's such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can't throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar wearing the dazed expression that comes with a sudden release from the past.'

Tina Brown in the Washington Post

Making a profit in publishing

17 January 2005

'The fact is, we are in a competitive marketplace - and the market determines the price of the author. In some ways, it's a mistake to think of the advance as something that's got to be earned by royalties. The advance to the author is the cost of having that author's book. What matters in the end is whether it yields sufficient profit.

It's not widely understood that titles that fail to earn their advances can be very profitable. Sales in the past few years have been incredibly buoyant. They generate a lot of revenue, which can more than compensate for an unearned.'

Malcolm Edwards, group publisher the Orion Group in the Bookseller

'Being an agent is a wonderful job'

10 January 2005

'Being an agent is a wonderful job and I really believe in it. I've found my metier. The mentality of agenting per se is very macho and the women who are successful agents have very strong personalities. It's a selling job, let's not be grand about it, but you have to have a firm belief in what you're doing and it's much more difficult than you think. You have to bring in an awful lot just to wash your face, notwithstanding the vagaries of the industry. Still, in spite of what some might say, I do think we agents are generally in agreement with publishers, and I'd hope and ensure that they would cherish my clients just as much as I do.'

Ali Gunn, literary agent at Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing, London, in Publishing News

'Dead letters on the dead page'

3 January 2005

'I feel there is an opportunity for this really magical, symbolic contact between people separated by time and space, that you can get with the written word, that you can't get any other way.

There is no way, really, for someone to make a movie all by himself or herself, that will then be distributed and enjoyed by completely solitary individuals. I think the magic of these dead letters on the dead page is that once you surmount the difficulty of deciphering those characters, there is no boundary.

I feel closer to Kafka and Tolstoy than I do to Steven Spielberg, and I think there's nothing Spielberg could do to make me feel otherwise.'

Jonathan Franzen, author of the The Corrections, on the BBC