Thursday, August 15, 2019

A Quick Overview of the "Big Five" Publishers

As most people are by now aware, we are down to a "big five," along with a number of smaller presses. The latter, of course, get far less attention from booksellers, reviewers, and traditional marketing/promotion outlets (e.g., radio talk shows), but they remain part of the "traditional publishing" route, as opposed to the self-publishing options (digital and hard copy via Amazon, Ingram/LightningSource, Lulu, et al.). 

The "big five" are the following: Penguin Random House (Penguin, Dutton, Putnam, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday, Crown, etc.), Simon & Schuster ( S&S itself, plus Poseidon, Pocket, et al.), HarperCollins (which includes also Harlequin and others), Macmillan (along with St. Martin's Press and more familiar houses), and Hachette (Little, Brown & Company and other imprints). Details about these are explained in this marvelous graphic: http://almossawi.com/big-five-publishers/.

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Another interview published: Anais Chen (baroque violin)

This "news" is actually rather dated by now, but Stay Thirsty Magazine published "A Conversation With Violinist Anais Chen" several months ago. She is a remarkable talent, and I very much enjoyed chatting with her! Here's the link: https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/p/chen-conversation.html

Monday, April 29, 2019

Is This the Last Word on Literary Fraud?

The following article ran in the BBC News on 26 April 2019. Of course, some of the gender-fluid pronouns render the text somewhat problematic. For example: << Knoop says not: they claim to be naive about what they were doing. “At the time I don’t know if I understood it as being performance art,” they say, though they admits that “performance is very adrenalising and it becomes a thing where you go out and look for that feeling." >>

Yes, you read that correctly. It's political correctness vis-a-vis gender identification, although only selectively, even within the same sentence[!]; "they admits," since "they" is [presumably??] singular, but the preceding verb is conjugated as plural within the same sentence: "they say"!

Notwithstanding my editorial reservationsI think the last paragraph offers a great summary of the "literary" world today. Here's the link: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190424-revisiting-jt-leroy-americas-greatest-literary-scam?ocid=global_culture_rss&ocid=global_bbccom_email_26042019_culture.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

Fiction, Alternate Personalities, and Related Topics

I have recently stumbled across some interesting entries on the blog of Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D. The first (19 February 2019) asks, "Do Fiction Writers Have Alternate Personalities," and cites a study by Marjorie Taylor: http://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/. The same site also has a five-part series (through 20 February 2019) on Aldous Huxley's "Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind." 
*****
On a related and not altogether dissimilar note, I have had dreams in iambic pentameter. Indeed, the entire story-line of my one-act version of Hamlet came to me in that manner, along with some of the verse. Perhaps more intriguing is the vast amount of musical material that his been similarly "dictated" to me during dreams. Of course, I do not believe this is a manifestation of multiple personality disorder. . . .