The book industry needs to get its act together. Pitched battles between publishers and librarians are not going to help anyone survive the digital revolution. A case in point is the “Boycott HarperCollins” petition posted on the social activism website Change.org.
The email I got yesterday introduces librarian Andy Woodworth, who is using Change.org to help “lead the charge in a fight against NewsCorp":
“See, more and more libraries are beginning to buy e-books… But publishing giant HarperCollins (owned by NewsCorp) is trying to force libraries to only buy e-books that literally self-destruct after the 26th reader in an attempt to maximize profits."
Change.org is hoping for 100,000 signatures. By 9 a.m. this morning, over 50,000 had signed.
Linda Leith
.ll.
The Shenzhen Economic Daily was preparing a 3-page feature on the publication of Shenzheners, the first of the Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei's books to appear in English, and I was asked to write about why LLP chose to publish the collection. What follows is the text I wrote, which Yiwei then translated into Chinese.
Hermes and the Infant Dionysos
One is always tempted to go naked in Greece: heat and history seem to demand it, and Irving Layton probably did, even though in the first Olympic games athletes wore protective jock straps, nudes on vases notwithstanding.
Shirley Hazzard's book has the effect of sending us back to the novels of Greene and of Hazzard herself, but that has more do with the quality of her writing than with any literary genre. It also has something to do with her love of her subject.
![McCord Museum](https://<a href="http//www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/VIEW-23291/" title="More information about this image"><img src="https://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/ObjView/v23291.jpg" width="385" height="305" alt="Photograph | Sherbrooke St. from roof of Ritz Carlton, Montreal, QC, 1925 | VIEW-23291" /></a>){kind=link}