Category: literary life

You can write an op-ed today that runs tomorrow, set up a Web site that sells toys in a day or two, get a million signatures and recall a governor in a couple of months. But for some reason, it takes two years to get a book published.

Andy Kessler rails about the amount of time it took him to get his book published, and what he did about it. His is a tale that is becoming increasingly common, it seems: an author self-publishes, sells copies through word-of-mouth and round-the-clock self-promotion, and then finally someone buys the paperback rights. But that still won’t make the paperback version come out any faster.

I’d love to hang out a bit longer today, but can’t as I have to update my resume and start looking for a job. All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my sabbatical. E-mail me if you know of any leads in Portland.

The original scroll manuscript for On The Road will be touring the United States for the next three years. It won’t be on the left coast till 2006.

John Updike reviews Hanif Kureishi’s new novel, The Body, in which an older writer has his mind transplanted into the supple, younger body of a Los Angeles man of 25.

Perhaps no novel can do justice to the ancient and still popular concept of leaving our bodies, which are both our enablers and our prisons. Our relation to our bodies lies deeper than circumstance, undemonstrable and irrefutable, along with the sensation that there is a relation, of one thing to something else, though materialist science tells us that out of our bodies we are nothing.

The review was generally positive, though.

The Little Prince is going to be made into a movie by the same folks who made Chicken Run. Here’s hoping that Mel Gibson won’t be doing the

There is life after Book. In fact, this article has a list of book-related magazines. (Requires registration.)