Non-US

From Publishing Perspectives:

A report from the Russian Book Chamber and its statistics division has indicated that in the pandemic year 2020, the publishing market fell by 20 percent.
In units, this represents a decline of 83.7 million titles in Russia. The overall turnover of published books and associated content fell by 19 percent last year, the report says, from some 435.1 million copies in 2019 to 351.4 million copies.

Hardest hit was the religious book sector, which reported a 34.5-percent downturn, to 4.7 million copies. Scientific literature slipped 11 percent, to 6.7 million copies.

Counter to patterns in some markets–in which children’s book sales made a robust showing–books for children and youth declined in Russia by a substantive 18 percent, to 78.1 million copies.

. . . .

Irina Bogat, director of the independent Zakharov publishing house, has a particularly bleak take on the situation and the outlook for what’s to come. She tells Publishing Perspectives, “Fewer and fewer people are buying books in Russia. This is the mayor reason for the current situation in the market, which was significantly hit by the pandemic.

“So in 2020, the market declined and the publishers–those not already bankrupt–were faced with 20-percent drops in their sales.

“Many people have lost their jobs because of the pandemic and they don’t have money to buy books.

“The price of paper and other materials has increased more than 30 percent in just the last three months, which is a record. And at the same time, the exchange rate between the ruble and the euro has been getting worse.

“As a result of this, books have become a luxury item in Russia. We do not expect any restoration or growth this year.”

. . . .

Alexander Nemirov, head of marketing at the Moscow-based Algoritm publishing house, says that while the pandemic has severely affected book publishing in Russia, the trend in the market was headed downward ahead of the outbreaks of the novel coronavirus.

“Book production began to lose momentum long before the pandemic,” Nemirov says.

“Books are no longer a source of information, but just an intelligent habit or a beautiful gift. Therefore, many publishers prefer to reduce their production, personalizing books for certain niche groups.

“That in turn leads to higher costs for printing, while bookstores increase their margins. All these factors lead to fierce competition.

“For example, we recently came across the fact that some publishers abuse online stores,” with bogus negative reviews of their competitors’ titles.

According to Nemirov, while sales of ebooks continue to grow, their growth is insignificant amid falling print sales. Nemirov says he believes there are no reasons to anticipate growth or development of the book publishing sector in the second half of 2021 or in early 2022.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Guardian:

It’s 1996 in a perfectly ordinary suburb just north of Heathrow airport. A teenage boy and his sister are on their way to the optician. Walking under a railway bridge, they pass a man who slows down and gives the boy a stare “as startling as scalding water”. He can’t stop thinking about it all through the appointment, and when they emerge – though surely the man won’t still be there? – they walk a different way back to the bus stop, just in case. When the bus arrives, they climb to the top deck, and as it turns the corner, the boy peers out. The man is still there, and smiles as he catches sight of them, before opening his coat wide to reveal a colourful patchwork of swastikas sewn into the lining: red, white, black, purple.

The boy is Musa Okwonga, and he goes to school at Eton College, just the other side of the M25. Over there racism may not announce itself with swastikas, but it’s a constant background hum, with something of the same menace as the man in the coat: just when you think you’ve evaded it, surprise! Here’s a moment to chill you to the bone, like when a fellow pupil boasts about the fact that his ancestor was a slaver.

Nevertheless, Okwonga thrives at the school, which he set his heart on after being dazzled by a documentary he saw as a child. He wins a scholarship and aged 13 becomes a boarder, putting on the school’s distinctive morning suit every day: “The greatest proof of my status is my uniform. It consists of a black tailcoat, a black waistcoat under which I wear a white shirt with a starched collar and thin white cotton tie, a pair of black pinstriped trousers and black shoes.”

. . . .

He becomes a model student, almost to a fault. But he’s carrying around a double burden of responsibility: first to his father, who was killed amid political violence in Uganda when he was four, and his widowed mother, who works hard as a doctor to pay his fees. Then there’s the second, crushing weight imposed by society’s expectations of young black men and the mostly white environment of the school. “I think it is unlikely that many of my contemporaries,” Okwonga writes, “have had a close black friend, and so I don’t want to conform to any of the stereotypes they might have about black people. I resolve never to get drunk around any of them, never to get stoned in their company. I don’t even risk getting a haircut that I might enjoy.” Much of his time, then, is spent conducting himself with “a military level of self-restraint”, although he admits “it is unclear whether my classmates either notice or care”.

Okwonga tries to make sense of the pressures, absurdities and rewards of his schooldays in his latest book, One of Them: An Eton College Memoir. He talks to me over Zoom from his flat in Berlin, where he has lived for the past six years. As well as being a poet and writer, he presents a successful football podcast, and a big red professional microphone juts into shot. His conversation is more laidback than his prose, which can have the disconcerting quality of feeling both buttoned-up and incredibly raw. I ask why he wanted to write about Eton now, more than two decades after he left.

. . . .

Okwonga describes the gallery of busts in the 17th-century building known as “Upper School” on the sprawling campus outside Windsor (he writes: “No one here ever tells us out loud that we Etonians are natural leaders: that is what the architecture is for”). Prime ministers from Walpole to Earl Grey to Gladstone are immortalised in marble. The prospect of Cameron and Johnson joining them one day makes him queasy. The school smooths the path to power, but seems to evade responsibility for how it is wielded.

. . . .

He thinks there are serious questions to be asked about the charitable status of private schools on the basis of public benefit, given their role in the reproduction of a conservative establishment that tends to strip the public realm of resources. But mostly he wants to start a series of conversations that have largely been avoided. In the book he writes, “I keep reflecting on what Eton doesn’t talk about”, from the part it played in the creation and maintenance of empire, to the function it serves today. He tells me: “The school explicitly prides itself on leadership, right? But if you’re not creating the kind of leaders that are moving the world forward – that’s the most pressing conversation to have, I think.” Of private schooling in general, he asks: “As a structure, as a system, is it serving our society best? I don’t believe it is. And I say that as someone that’s benefited hugely from that world.”

. . . .

Okwonga started thinking about school again when he was invited to his 20-year reunion. It was the prompt for a fairly unforgiving bout of introspection. He was embarrassed at how his penurious life as a single writer nudging 40 compared with his fellow alumni, by then wealthy executives with houses and families. In his autobiographical novella, In the End It Was All About Love, published earlier this year, the protagonist says: “There is not a week when you do not look in the hallway mirror and think, my God, what have I done.” But unlike in the Talking Heads song, there is no beautiful house or large automobile in sight.

When I ask him what psychological marks Eton left on him, Okwonga says: “You’re taught to compete all the time. And once you leave a world where you can readily compete against others, you kind of turn that competition inward. So you’re pushing yourself constantly, you’re just brutal with yourself. And sometimes things don’t feel satisfying unless they’re difficult.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

PG is not competent to comment on the benefits and detriments of expensive British public schools.

However, he has to admit that the Guardian review makes him think this may be a book whose conclusions were foreordained before the author even thought of writing it.

Though this is from the Guardian, PG could imagine the same type of review of the same type of book about the same US subject from The New York Time.

From The Guardian:

Cecilia Knapp

“I came to poetry by accident, through a workshop at Camden’s Roundhouse. I was 18 at the time, had no money, and was living alone in London. Poetry had not been in my life before. I was awful when I started. But I was so thirsty to get better.

I’m working on my first collection now. I lost my mum at a young age, so a lot of the collection looks at how that might impact a young woman. And I lost my older brother to suicide in 2012. He had a long battle with addiction, and also his sexuality, and I was a carer for him for a really long time. A lot of the poems in the book that I’m working on are looking at his life. I’ve always used writing as a way to figure things out: not necessarily to find answers, more to ask questions about them.

When young people see a poem or film on YouTube or social media, it gets rid of that preconception that poetry has to be this isolated, solitary act of opening a book and reading something old fashioned. I love reading poetry myself, and I believe that young people can, too, but they can also love spoken word or performance poetry, poetry on film or poetry with music.

I’ve worked with young people for almost a decade now, and I’ve experienced first-hand the impact poetry can have on them – something happens when you let yourself be free and creative, it is magic. It’s really empowering for young people to be told that what they have to say is important and valid. We need young voices contributing to the canon, because they usually reflect what’s really going on in the world a lot of the time.

Someone who I use as a springboard for young people is Danez Smith, a non-binary African American poet who talks a lot about race, class, sexuality and gender in their collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie.

Roger Robinson’s book A Portable Paradise responded so amazingly to the injustice of Grenfell, as did Jay Bernard’s book Surge. There are so many amazing writers at the moment.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Publishing Perspectives:

As we continue to receive assessments from various international markets of coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic impact in 2020, Tiia Strandén at the Finnish Literature Exchange, FILI,  has provided Publishing Perspectives with a report from the Finnish book market.

. . . .

“While sales of printed books increased by just 2 percent” in Finland, the report tells us, “demand for audiobooks and ebooks was far greater, leading to an overall increase in trade book sales of 12 percent over 2019 figures.”

Audiobooks did particularly well, even over what’s described as strong growth for several years prior to the pathogen’s outbreaks.

In 2020, audiobook sales in Finland “more than doubled,” the report says. “While many Finns commuted less than before as they switched to working from home, they also focused on exercise and spending time outdoors, which provided more opportunities to listen to audiobooks,” per the report’s text. This brought audio up to “nearly a fifth of trade book sales” last year.

What the FILI information says was “most surprising of all in 2020” was a “whopping 84-percent increase in ebook sales. “Ebooks made up only a small share of the total market,” the report clarifies, and a smaller share than audiobooks, “but that growth far outstripped their previous year-over-year increase of 32 percent.”

One dynamic behind the advances in ebooks in Finland is thought to have been an expansion of subscription book and audio services. And the entry point—not surprisingly in the audio-friendly Nordic markets—was on the audio side. “While people usually sign up for these services in order to access audiobooks,” the report points out, “ebook libraries are included for the same fee. The ease of swapping between audiobooks and ebooks helps to diversify usage across formats.”

All of this added up to something of a leveling effect between fiction and nonfiction. “Among printed books,” the report says, “nonfiction represents a larger segment than fiction. In audio and ebook formats, however, fiction is bigger, and the gap grew even further in 2020, as sales of fiction ebooks and audiobooks increased more than sales of nonfiction in the same formats.

“Sales of printed fiction titles increased by 11 percent last year, while sales of printed nonfiction decreased by 6 percent.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

ON FEBRUARY 9, 2013, the works of writer Akram Aylisli were publicly burned in Azerbaijan because his writing upset the Azerbaijani government. Aylisli watched his books burn via the internet, an experience he describes in a 2018 essay excerpted in this very magazine. Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev stripped Aylisli of the title of “People’s Writer” and his presidential pension; his wife and son were fired from their jobs, and he received death threats. In 2014, Aylisli was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by supporters from several countries. In March 2016, he was invited to address a literary festival in Venice, Incroci di civiltà; however, the 79-year-old writer was detained at the Baku airport, and trumped-up legal charges were filed against him. Those charges are still pending.

. . . .

MARK LIPOVETSKY: In March 2016, you were slated to deliver a speech at a literary festival in Venice, but could not attend because you were denied permission to leave Azerbaijan. You later published the remarks you’d planned to give. At the start of the speech, you write, “Now we are all defenseless before these inconceivably cruel times. There are periods in history when nothing can fill the emptiness of the human heart: not religion, not science, not literature.” Do you feel the same way now, and what does it mean to be a writer in such times?

AKRAM AYLISLI: I’d like to first of all clarify the circumstances of my situation that not everyone understands completely. They made me sign an agreement not to travel, so I don’t have the right to leave the confines of Baku. What’s more, the prosecutor’s office confiscated my proof of identity. Without that proof, a person has no actual rights — can’t take part in elections or anything. The prosecutor’s office was supposed to investigate my case within a year, according to Azerbaijani law. But to this day, the case that was opened in March 2016 hasn’t been reviewed. They simply aren’t processing it. This all weighs very, very heavily on me psychologically, and all of it puts pressure on me. But I think some people are starting to overcome the anxiety they felt about the fact that part of Azerbaijan’s land was, let us say, under the control of Armenia. They’ve calmed down a bit, and I think [laughs] that calm will in some way make a difference in my life. They’ll calm down and finally say: “So what about this guy? How much can we really cut him off from society? This kind of thing isn’t good for him.” I think this will all pass. I’m sure of it.

In terms of how I live in this difficult time, it seems to me that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what situation a writer lives in, he lives in his own world. For example, I didn’t feel the loss of what was taken from me very deeply, and I wasn’t depressed because I never remembered myself being free. I never felt that: not in school, not at university, not at work. I felt myself to be a little bit free only at my work table, my writing desk. They couldn’t take that away from me. It can’t be taken away from any writer. I live now through literature. It’s possible to live through literature — there’s a lot of air there. More, maybe, than there is even in the street, especially during a pandemic.

From your trilogy Farewell, Aylis, which of these novels — Yemen, Stone Dreams, and A Fantastical Traffic Jam — is the most important for you?

If I think about it, Stone Dreams. I wrote Stone Dreams for Azerbaijanis, not Armenians. I wrote it out of the desire that not all of the bridges between our peoples would be burned. So that there would not be this deep alienation, particularly in terms of culture. We are, after all, a Turkic people, but in point of fact we are people of the Caucasus. Our mentality is of the Caucasus — not Turkish, not Central Asian, specifically of the Caucasus. I wrote Stone Dreams out of the desire to bring people closer, so that people wouldn’t think that we have to revile one another, that we have to kill one another.

Who has supported you? Are there writers, cultural figures, who supported you in Russia and Azerbaijan?

In general, the Russian intelligentsia defended me a great deal — Andrei Bitov, Viktor Yerofeyev. That level of writer — important writers — really defended me. A few Russian journalists, also. In Azerbaijan, my support mainly came from young writers. Among them, many people understood things as I understand them, and in the way people will someday understand.

How can we, readers living all over the world, help you?

You’re already helping me. We’re sitting here, today I’m looking at you, at such good-hearted people. That joy is enough for me, if only for a few days. Sometimes you suddenly remember such good moments, and that helps you live. I don’t know how exactly readers can help. Many organizations wanted to help me. In Norway, they even proposed an excellent situation so that I could move there. I didn’t go, because someday these people will understand that I love Azerbaijan more than they do. I think there are individuals among the Azerbaijani people who know that I love Azerbaijan more than the authorities do. It’s dangerous to say so [laughs], but it’s necessary.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

PG thinks its a good idea for him and others who live in liberal Western democracies to reflect on those who do not from time to time. Such an exercise helps to avoid feelings of entitlement and nurture feelings of gratitude, at least for PG.

From Words without Borders:

The condition of the patient just delivered to the trauma department of one of the major Baku hospitals was very serious.

They took the patient, who was lying unconscious on the gurney, along the very middle of the half-lit hospital corridor that stretched the length of the whole floor to the operating room, which was located in the other wing of the building. There were two women in white lab coats and two men, also in lab coats. The surgeon himself walked beside the gurney, a spare, silver-haired man of middling height, distinguished from his colleagues by his reserve, the compelling sternness of his face, and the particular cleanliness of his lab coat.

If there was anything unusual or seemingly incongruous in this ordinary scene of hospital life, it was the tragic humor in the appearance and behavior of the person who’d brought the patient to the clinic. That small, fidgety man of fifty-five to sixty whose small face was not at all in harmony with his enormous, round belly ran around the doctor constantly repeating the same thing over and over.

“Doctor, my dear Doctor, they killed him! Such a man, in broad daylight, they beat him, destroyed him. It’s those yerazy, Doctor, yerazy. Five or six of those yerazy-boys who fled from Armenia! Those sons of bitches, those refugees simply don’t respect people, Doctor, my dear Doctor. They don’t recognize artists or poets or writers. Just call someone an Armenian—and that’s it! Then they slam him to the ground and trample him like wild animals. They tear him to pieces, and no one dares get involved. I told them: ‘Don’t beat him,’ I said, ‘That man’s not Armenian, he’s one of us, a son of our people, the pride and conscience of the nation.’ But who listens? They didn’t even let me tell them my name. They kicked me so hard in the side that I almost died there, too. Right here, Doctor, in the right side. It still hurts badly now.”

The doctor didn’t really understand what the man who’d brought the patient was saying. Maybe he didn’t want to understand. Maybe he wasn’t even listening to what that fussy, funny man who’d knotted a yellow tie over a brown checked shirt was babbling without pause. However, an observant person might have noticed that the doctor from time to time smiled into his moustache. And not because every word, every gesture of the man who’d brought the patient rose to comedy. But, rather, because the light-haired man lying on the gurney was slender and remarkably tall. And it’s possible that the contrast in appearance between these two reminded the doctor of the very saddest pages of the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

When they reached the doors of the operating room, one of the men wearing a white lab coat blocked the path of the funny man in the yellow tie.

“Let him in,” said the doctor. “It seems he has something to say. Let him have his say.”

Although the operating room was considerably smaller than the corridor, all the same it turned out to be a spacious room with a high ceiling and gigantic windows. The operating table standing directly in the center resembled the linen-covered gurney on which they conveyed the patient. The two men in white lab coats delivering the gurney that bore the patient lifted him, laid him on the table, glanced at the doctor for permission, and silently left the operating room.

“Peroxide!” said the surgeon loudly to the nurses, rolling up the sleeves of his lab coat. “Bring it here, wipe off his face.” Looking at the patient covered in blood, he muttered an oath, and turning to the man’s companion, he asked, “Who did this to him?”

“I already told you, Doctor: yerazy. Those bastard refugees arriving from Armenia. It wasn’t enough to smash his face. They also knocked him to the ground like wild animals and began beating him in the stomach. It’s a good thing, Doctor, that I arrived in time. I went out this morning to get some air in the city. I’m coming down from that cursed place they call the Parapet when I see five or six mustachioed scoundrels beating up a man at the edge of the fountain. And people just standing by and watching in silence . . .” Then he suddenly hesitated. His lips continued to move, but the words, it seems, died in his throat.

“There’s no more peroxide, Doctor,” said one of the nurses in an apologetic voice, as quietly as possible. (One of them was elderly, the other quite young.)

“There should be some alcohol,” said the surgeon without hope.

“No, Doctor. Everything we had was used up yesterday.”

“Fine, clean him with water. Don’t use too much manganese.” The doctor washed his hands with soap at the sink standing in the corner of the room and then went up and stood in front of the operating table. “Take everything off of him. Leave only his underwear.”

The patient—his face, nose, chin, the collar of his orange wool shirt, the lapels of his bluish jacket covered in scarlet blood—was lying so calmly on the operating table that it was as if his most evil enemy rather than he himself had been beaten up in the aforementioned Parapet Square. He was sleeping deeply, although frequent, harsh moans escaped from his chest. Not only did he sleep but, apparently, also dreamed, and it seemed that his dreams gave him great satisfaction.

While the women washed the dried blood off the patient’s face, the doctor checked his pulse. When the nurses had stripped the patient, he began to examine him attentively, as if compiling a report for himself or dictating to someone.

“Put two stitches in his lower lip. No fractures noted in the area of the jaw. Two dislocations in the left hand at the elbow and wrist. Two fingers dislocated on the right hand: the thumb and middle finger. Severe muscle trauma in the left leg. A fractured kneecap in the right leg. No serious anomalies noted in the back, rib cage, or spine. No skull fractures observed.” The doctor fell silent and again cursed angrily. “A concussion!” He said this loudly for some reason and in Russian, then pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers, slowly wiped the sweat from his brow, and added in Russian, “A brutal beating!”

After every word the doctor said, the face of the man who’d brought the patient reflected all his feelings, all his pain and suffering. With difficulty, he held himself together, so as not to burst out sobbing. When the doctor had finished his exam, the man’s self-possession was also at an end. He wept violently, like an aggrieved child.

The eyes of one of the women in the white lab coats standing beside the operating table (the younger one) filled with tears. The elderly nurse was also upset and shook her head woefully. And the doctor was very sorry for the man. He began to calm him.

“There, there, this isn’t good . . . It’s nothing terrible. In fifteen days your friend will be like new, I’ll make a beauty out of him.” Lowering his head, he thought a bit and then again lifted his head and asked cautiously, “So, you say this man is Armenian?”

The eyes of our comic hero bulged in surprise.

“Really, you don’t know him?! You don’t know Sadai Sadygly? The pride of Azerbaijani theater! Our number one artist! You really don’t know this great master, Doctor? You haven’t even seen him on television? You’ve even seen me on television more than once, Doctor. Maybe you just don’t remember—Nuvarish Karabakhly, a well-known actor of comic roles. Maybe you don’t know me. I’m not offended by that. But there’s no one who doesn’t know Sadai Sadygly. You see, no one else in the world has played Hamlet, Othello, Aidyn, and Kefli Iskender like he has.”

Link to the rest at Words Without Borders

From Publishing Perspectives:

As Publishing Perspectives readers will remember, the 38th Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri program, a “School of Booksellers,” was held at the end of last month in a digital format rather than in its customary venue at Venice’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini in the former San Giorgio Monastery.

Titled “The State of the Book in Europe,” the event on January 29 drew as many as 1,200 attendees from many parts of the world, an unusual chance for many to get a look at this normally much more exclusive symposium.

. . . .

Host Nana Lohrengel, secretary-general of the Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri Foundation, opened the day and handed off to the foundation’s chief, Achille Mauri. He described what’s normally the boat ride to “the most beautiful island in the world–Palladio and Brunelleschi’s San Giorgio Maggiore—with “a breakfast of warm pastries” and “a drink of Grignolino,” the red varietal of the Piedmont, “by the labyrinth early in the morning.”

One of the most gracious comments of the entire day came in this brief welcome from Achille Mauri when he explained the special value of the symposium’s traditional, opulent setting. “Luxury,” he said, “is so therapeutic. Zoom can’t compete with that experience.”

. . . .

As the early lockdowns hit, bookseller Linzalone says “We succeeded by drawing not only on our internal resources but also by using the Libri da Asporto service [a book delivery company] in the beginning. That allowed us to keep selling at a level we never expected,” even while applying for supplemental small-business support.

“We realized it was possible and we kept selling, not just in the store but also by visiting the customers at home.”

He adds with a smile, “I wouldn’t call it clandestine selling, but we were literally selling books in the street.”

. . . .

And while the top-line news there was that the Italian book industry saw sales grow by some 2.4 percent last year, Prometeia’s Tantazzi does warn in his new presentation that “It’s virtually impossible to say how 2021 is going to pan out.”

Levi, speaking for AIE, makes the interesting point in his comments that in 2020, while fiction accounted for a third of the market, foreign fiction fared slightly better than Italian fiction. And yet, as has been reflected in many world markets, “The biggest increase during the pandemic year was seen in specialist nonfiction—law, management, literary criticism.”

What may be contrary to many other markets’ experience is the fall tracked in Italy’s children’s book sales in 2020. But Levi notes that this decline had been underway for several years prior to the pandemic.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG loved the quintessentially Italian observation that “Luxury is so therapeutic.”

He’s not certain exactly when he and Mrs. PG will be able to corral the funds and energy for a long flight to Italy, but Venice and Florence are certainly powerful incentives to do so.

From Publishing Perspectives:

The annual conference produced by Beijing OpenBook—familiar to our readers for its research in our China bestsellers series—this year has reflected, predictably, on the instability of a unique year.
Titled “Crisis and Changes,” the 2020 report on China’s book market was released in a lengthy broadcast with more than 19,000 viewers at the time and at least 25,000 more following its original airing.

. . . .

(F)or the first time since OpenBook began its tracking in 2001, it saw China’s huge book market take a step back. Growth charts showed a -5.08-percent downturn in 2020, especially striking by comparison to 2019’s rise of 14.4 percent.

. . . .

Our colleague Rainy Liu at OpenBook points out that between 2015 and 2019, the Chinese retail market had been growing at more than 10 percent annually, making the 2020 retreat felt especially sharp.

Echoing what we hear from many of the world markets we cover, online retail channels saw a jump of 7.27 percent in book sales, amounting to 76.7 billion yuan RMB (US$11.8 billion), while physical bookstores experienced a plunge of -33.8 percent.

Indeed, the Chinese digital retail channels, while landing in positive rather than negative territory, did see their growth rate struggle, which in fact does not follow the pattern seen in some world markets in which digital retail surged under lockdown pressures on print.

. . . .

One early observation during 2020 from OpenBook was that the “super-size” bookstores in the sprawling Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities of China were experiencing the most daunting downturns in business under pandemic pressure.

. . . .

And in terms of what was being read, the normally robust self-help nonfiction category was seen to suffer most heavily, with a 33.2-percent dive in sales, year-over-year.

While children’s books and school study books saw positive growth, engineering and technology, computer science, medical, economics and management, education, agriculture, and natural sciences went into negative territory in 2020.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Public Books:

We begin, as usual, with a dead body. In April 2020 an 84-year-old Swedish woman died in the happily unsuspicious circumstances of old age. Her name was Maj Sjöwall. But to readers of a certain dark bent, she was “the godmother of Nordic noir,” beloved for her creation of a new kind of detective novel. With her partner Per Wahlöö (who died in 1975), Sjöwall wrote the 10-volume Martin Beck series: a set of novels, published between 1965 and 1975, that attempted to map the whole of Swedish society through the ostensibly conservative form of the police procedural.

These were crime novels that dared to be boring. The protagonist Martin Beck—unlike the cynical demigod detectives of American hard-boiled noir—suffered from constant colds, worked on a team rather than alone, and spent most of his time on the job combing through stacks of paper. Patiently realist and sociologically astute, the Martin Beck books presented crime as emanating not from individual pathology but from rips in Sweden’s tightly stitched social fabric. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Beck series laid the foundations for one of contemporary literature’s most dominant popular forms: the Scandinavian crime novel.

The Martin Beck books were thoughtful works of art disguised as mass entertainment. In the novels, political critique drew warmth from lovable characters; passages of austere description heightened suspense. This marriage of the realistic and the thrilling, the political and the popular, turns out to have been a fragile achievement. Much has changed since Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s idealistic beginnings. The Scandinavian crime novel has all but abandoned the artistic and political aspirations that once served as the genre’s bedrock.

When “Nordic noir” exploded onto the global literary scene around the time of the financial crisis, the genre did so not in the mode of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s realism but in a new key of ultraviolence. In the atmosphere of ambient unrest that accompanied the plunging markets, an inked-up, chain-smoking hacker named Lisbeth Salander burst into world literature, her face piercings glinting. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) inaugurated a hunger among readers for tales featuring torture chambers, comeuppance against rapists, and snowy landscapes drenched in gore. Publishers, too, smelled blood. A wave of translations ensued, primarily from Sweden but quickly encompassing writers from Norway, Denmark, and (less so) Iceland and Finland.

. . . .

The time has come to ask what lies ahead for Scandinavian noir, and whether Sjöwall’s passing marks the end of an era. Since its origins in the 1960s, the genre’s visibility and violence have increased. Yet its excellence has faded, and its commercial success seems to be falling off. No great artistic practitioner of Nordic noir has emerged since Henning Mankell, whose 1990s-era series following the moody, introspective policeman Kurt Wallander offers both intelligent rumination on Swedish national identity and a complex portrait of the protagonist’s troubled interior. As for sales, Larsson has come to look like an anomalously titanic figure, with more than 100 million copies of his Salander books sold worldwide. Jo Nesbø, the most successful living author in this genre, has by comparison sold about 40 million copies across more than a dozen novels—spectacular numbers on the order of Mankell, but trending downward; Nesbø’s latest installment, Knife (2019), has sold just over 30,000 print copies in the United States since coming out a year and a half ago.

A mystery of our own, then. Is the Scandinavian crime novel alive and well, at large in some modest disguise—flinging chum and straining at the ropes on a fishing vessel beyond the fjords? Or is it lying dead, tongue swollen, behind a locked door? And if the latter: Who killed Nordic noir?

Link to the rest at Public Books

From The Bookseller:

Aged 15 I got a Christmas job at my local bookshop in Battersea so I could save to go interrailing. My parents’ bookshelves were brimming with mostly Black writers: Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, Terry McMillan, and I was surrounded by ‘consciousness’ (as we then called ‘woke’). I was yet to read European works in translation, and the bookshop opened up to me the rest of Europe and its myriad cities, cultures, languages and complex histories.

I started with French literature and read Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Perec, Georges Bataille. From there, I explored more of the continent, José Saramago, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi. Reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Likeness of Being was haunting and powerful. Kundera confronts readers with questions of exile, identity, belonging and selfhood.

I discovered John Berger, who, although not exiled, was a cultural émigré from Britain to France and his work introduced me to artists, writers and thinkers across Europe. Reading his Once in Europa opened me up to Russian literature and I was that 23-year-old girl in pubs reading Nabokov and Dostoevsky at the table whilst everyone chatted around me. I felt like I was a character in a Mike Leigh film and a total cliché, but I found my first true love and didn’t business what anyone else thought. A few years later when John and I met we became friends and he encouraged me to move to Europe and fulfil my potential. 

From Russia, I went back to Bohemia and discovered the fantastical mind of Franz Kafka. Amerika, which inspired an incredible piece by German artist Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End to Franz Kafka’s Amerika, which I saw at the Tate Modern in 2005. I’d never thought Germany, with its complicated history, as a place that I would find compelling, but after seeing that piece I became curious.

A year later I went to Berlin for the first time and visited an institution called The Literatur Haus in Charlottenburg: a grand villa where the sole purpose is to connect readers with writing and literature. There are eleven Literature Houses across Germany and a European network of cities including Oslo, Copenhagen and Prague, yet not one in Britain. Literature Houses offer a deeper cultural exchange that is very different to libraries. These buildings stand tall as a beacon of the importance of narratives and storytelling. I understood that German culture, Gutenberg to Goethe and beyond, was built on the basis that, without literature, nothing else can be formed. I was hooked. Heading back to London, I enrolled in classes at the Goethe Institute and they helped me to discover the works of Hans Fallada, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, W.G. Sebald and Stefan Zweig.

What was so striking to me about the literature from the continent was that it seemed to be concerned with progress, difference and change. Outside of Shakespeare, English classics always felt so stuffy to me and obsessed with maintaining the status quo and birth rights. Where forbidden love and class was the order for the day in Britain, central European literature was concerned with surviving regimes and emphasised hard work and humility. Southern European literature seemed full of creativity and bold new ideas, centring humanity. 

It seemed to me that continental European literature reflected the region’s turmoil and revolutions, while Britain maintained elite ruling classes and divided rule from the playbook from the Age of Empire.

Looking towards the publishing industry, where Europe’s biggest nations publish up to 42% in translation, Britain merely publishes 5%. The continent has always been interested in listening, thinking about and understanding the lives of others.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

From The Wall Street Journal:

In a song of 1938, Noël Coward wrote:

The stately homes of England

How beautiful they stand,

To prove the upper classes

Have still the upper hand.

Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt

And frequently mortgaged to the hilt

Is inclined to take the gilt

Off the gingerbread

Hannah Rothschild’s new comic novel “House of Trelawney” is about an ancestral home in Cornwall where the gilt has definitely come off. Trelawney Castle, situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean, has belonged to the same noble family for 800 years. “The castle was their three-dimensional calling card, the physical embodiment of their wealth and influence,” writes Ms. Rothschild. “Each Earl added an extension until it was declared the grandest, if not the finest, stately home in the county of Cornwall.”

It sounds wonderful. It’s not. The novel opens in 2008, and the castle has fallen into “chaos and decrepitude.” The bungling and ineptitude of the last eight dissolute earls, “along with two world wars, the Wall Street Crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes” has eaten up the estate. There were once medieval oak woods, meadows and waterfalls on the 500,000 acres known as “Trelawneyshire.” Now ponds have silted up, hedges are bedraggled, and arches are covered with vines. Inside the castle, which has a room for each day of the year, empty squares discolor walls where great paintings once hung. In the rooms “the huge side tables were covered in a layer of dust and detritus, and a grand piano sat in a pool of water.” And the decay is accelerating: “Occasionally a great crash of avalanching plaster could be heard falling like a tree in a faraway wood.”

In 1988 the 24th Earl of Trelawney, now aged 85, handed the pile to his feckless son and heir, Kitto. His oldest and smartest child, Blaze, couldn’t inherit because she was female. Such were Britain’s archaic rules of primogeniture. With no funds left for its upkeep Kitto, like many an earl or duke before him, was forced to marry for money. Jane, his dowdy bride, possessed a fortune. But, inevitably, Jane’s money ran out. So did the heating and hot water. Now she is martyr to the cause, the house “skivvy,” feeding her aging parents-in-law and three teenage children cut-price mince (ground beef). She delivers pots of hot water to the freezing elderly earl and countess who reside upstairs in a fantasy world peopled with imaginary housemaids and butlers. They still change into formal clothes (now rather shabby) for dinner.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From Publishing Perspectives:

The London-based founder of Nogaam Publishing, Azadeh Parsapour, has messaged the news media today (December 8) that the fifth edition of the Tehran Book Fair Uncensored is running through Sunday (December 13).

Under normal circumstances outside of a coronavirus pandemic, this event is held in the spring and moves from one city and country to the next, hosted by a network of independent publishers of literature-in-exile, if you will.

The Tehran Book Fair Uncensored was founded in 2016 by Iran’s Parsapour. She’s the winner of the Association of American Publisher’s 2018 Freedom to Publish award for her work in producing the writings of banned, blacklisted, or exiled Iranian authors. Parsapour also has been shortlisted three times for the International Publishers Association’s Prix Voltaire shortlist, which rewards courage “in upholding the freedom to publish and in enabling others to exercise their right to freedom of expression.”

That network of independent publishers of Persian-language literature (Farsi) this year has created the first digital edition of the fair.

. . . .

“Now 12 publishers of Persian books from different parts of the world have joined us for this big event.  More than 30 programs are being held through December 13, on our Instagram, Facebook, and Zoom platforms.” Those programs include book launches, interviews, and discussions.

An advantage of the online program, she notes, is that “Iranians inside the country can also participate in all of our programs and connect with exiled authors and translators.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From the BBC:

Navtej Sarna had a highly distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service. There were stints as ambassador to both London and Washington DC.

But before that he spent a short time with the Indian industrial conglomerate Tata. He recalls the final paper of the entrance exams, which he sat in 1980. Applicants were required to select one essay to write from various options supplied.

“I looked unhappily at this list of rather involved economic and business topics,” he says, “all of which I knew I might struggle with. And then I was saved by the last one: ‘A Wodehouse a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’. So that’s what I wrote about and it got me the job.”

It might seem odd that 40 years ago a massive South Asian business concern would assume job applicants might still be familiar with such utterly English works.

In fact Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) became an Indian favourite even as quite a young writer – though he never went there and he barely mentions India in 71 of his novels or in his many short stories. Yet he was read there avidly and his most popular books still sell in English-language bookshops.

. . . .

Sarna says being taught in schools in India where the teaching is all in English his first reading in the 1960s wasn’t so different from that of British children a few years before – Enid Blyton, Jennings and Billy Bunter.

“But I began to outgrow them and then I discovered Wodehouse. It wasn’t difficult because my father had at least 40 of his books – I just fell in love with his characters and humour and especially with the way he used words. I think that may be his appeal for English-speaking Indians – his delight in the English language.

“We had old Penguin paperbacks and some of the original hardback copies published in London by Herbert Jenkins like Uncle Fred in the Springtime. We read them so much as a family that we had to go into the market in Dehradun and ask to get them rebound – they were falling apart.

“Although the English left after independence (in 1947) there was still a close intellectual linkage with India’s English-speaking administrative and professional class. The fondness for Wodehouse was part of that.

“I think one must admit that the world has changed and people under 40 now are perhaps less likely to read him in India. They exist in a world of iPhones and Netflix and social media – perhaps Wodehouse is too much from a different time.”

. . . .

Another long-standing fan of Wodehouse is Sushmita Sen Gupta. She lives in Delhi but has been a member of the UK Wodehouse Society almost since it began. She agrees with Sarna that younger Indians now have less time for the gentle comedies of Plum Wodehouse, as he was known. (Indian fans refer to themselves as plummies.)

“But the positive news is that in other ways the internet helps we plummies too. India is a vast country with a vast population so it used to be that fans could only discuss their Wodehouse addiction with their family or a few friends,” she says.

“Now we have online groups and even in lockdown we’ve been keeping our Wodehouse discussions going online.”

. . . .

Sarna thinks an overlap remains between British humour and the humour enjoyed by Indians who grew up speaking English at home and in school.

“I know people sometimes say the world Wodehouse described hasn’t existed for many years. As I grew up, I think I realised that his world had perhaps never existed at all,” he says.

“But for instance, families such as mine would play the board game Monopoly and we would see street names such as Piccadilly and Pall Mall – it all seemed part of the same world as Wodehouse with its clubs and the bobbies in their helmets and the red London buses.

“There are generations of Indians who grew up with an affection for those things. Later on in life you realise that much water has flown. But it doesn’t change the fact that a book like The Code of the Woosters is an absolute classic with sheer joy in his use of language.”

Link to the rest at BBC

PG notes the OP contains several photos of PG at various ages.

From The Bookseller:

Last month, 58 writers, journalists and artists signed a letter in the Sunday Times in support of JK Rowling, condemning the ‘onslaught of abuse’ she has received regarding her views on sex, gender and trans rights. Signatories included Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan and Lionel Shriver. Three days later, more than 200 writers, agents, editors and publishers published a statement in support of trans and non-binary people and their rights in a message of ‘love and solidarity’. Signatories included Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman and Nikesh Shukla. The worrying implication in the timing of their statement appears to be that any public support for JK Rowling is perceived to be an attack on the transgender community. The magazine Mslexia dropped the author Amanda Craig as a competition judge following her signing the Sunday Times letter, because of views ‘that threaten to undermine Mslexia’s climate of welcome and inclusivity’.

All writers and publishers should be speaking out in support of JK Rowling, no matter where they stand on the transgender issue: whether they believe like Jeanette Winterson and fellow signatories that ‘transwomen are women’ or, like JK Rowling, that ‘if sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased’. The treatment of Rowling is an attempt to censor, by intimidation as well as by discrediting her opinions as hate speech and discrimination. While it may not, fortunately, be possible to silence one of the most successful writers in the world, there are others whose livelihoods are at risk for daring to voice similar views. Anyone in the business of publishing or writing should defend Rowling’s right to express her opinions in support of the principle of freedom of expression. It is the principle that enables every writer and publisher who signed the statement in support of the trans and non-binary community to do their work – and also to sign such a statement.

We are currently witnessing a dangerous flight from that principle. It is group rights that now trump a precious universal right. The idea of tolerating views that you may disagree with or find offensive has been abandoned. That act of toleration, however uncomfortable, is essential for safeguarding an open society where ideas can be freely expressed, challenged and tested. Freedom of expression has always been one of the most vulnerable of all human rights, partly because it is not absolute, and it has taken decades to push the boundaries, often through the creativity and courage of writers, artists and publishers.

The current trend towards conformity risks creating a bland and fearful culture, and we can already see the damage: from the cancelling of the Philip Guston exhibition last month by four museums, including Tate Modern, to Hachette’s decision to drop Woody Allen’s memoir earlier this year. All these institutions, no doubt, will consider their decisions to be enlightened, wishing not to cause offence to vulnerable groups. But the right to freedom of expression includes the protection of speech that may offend, shock or disturb. If you close it down, then you also limit the ability of minorities to speak out.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Nothing to do with books, but PG had never heard of Fanny Cradock before.

From The Paris Review:

On the evening of November 11, 1976, the BBC broadcast the third episode of The Big Time, which followed members of the public as they tested themselves in high-pressure situations. It was what we’d term today a reality TV-style show, and that week was the turn of Mrs. Gwen Troake, a middle-aged woman from rural Devon in southwest England, who was being given the chance to design and cook a special banquet at the world-famous Dorchester Hotel in London. Troake, an amiable, soft-spoken lady any audience would root for, was assigned the most demanding mentor the production team could muster: Fanny Cradock, an extraordinary character who was the face and voice of cooking on British television  from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and was once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.”

Cradock built an entertainment brand on her putative brilliance in the kitchen, but also her superciliousness, hectoring her husband, mistreating her colleagues, and patronizing her audience, the great British public, whom she regarded to be gastronomic philistines. Evidently, this included Gwen Troake, the amateur cook on The Big Time. As Troake ran through what she was planning to serve at the banquet—a seafood cocktail, followed by duck, and rounded off with a rum and coffee cream pudding—Cradock rolled her eyes, gulped, and grimaced in a pantomime of disgust and disbelief at the overbearing richness of the menu, at one point blowing her cheeks out as though she were about to be physically sick. When Troake revealed that the duck would be served with a blackberry jam, Cradock could stomach no more and unleashed what she thought was the ultimate insult. “All these jams,” she said, “they are so English.”  Despite being stereotypically English in so many ways, in her mind the only really good English—or, indeed, British—food was really just French food by a different name. “The English have never had a cuisine. There’s nothing English. Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy.”

She was probably wrong about Yorkshire pudding, but she definitely had a point, both about the heaviness of Troake’s menu, and the sorry state of her nation’s cuisine. In the postwar decades of Cradock’s great success, amidst heated debates about what it meant to be British in a post-imperial world, British food was an international laughingstock. It was fitting, then, that Cradock herself seemed to be in a perpetual identity crisis. Her personality was as peculiar as many of her famous recipes, and nobody was quite sure which of the stories she told about herself were true, and whether, despite her constant talk of refined French food, she was half as accomplished in the kitchen as she claimed to be. In the words of somebody who knew her well, “She wasn’t real … she didn’t know who she was. She made herself up as she went along.”

Link to the rest at The Paris Review