The Prose Factory by DJ Taylor review – beware the suggestion that literary life isn’t what it used to be

The truth about book prizes, why Amazon is like an old-fashioned library and how much famous writers really earned from their journalism …Periodically, signs go up saying that Grub Street is closed to through traffic. Observers speculate that the street is being redeveloped as gentrification forces the former inhabitants to move out, or else that the closure may be due to the expansion of the neighbouring university’s English department. Older heads are shaken in what had been the local pub but is now a coffee’n’crafts shop: there used to be more life in the place, they mourn, when bohemian writers could dash off a review against the clock to pay for their round. Even if Grub Street is eventually reopened, it will never be the same again, and anyway it will probably have been renamed “Creatives Crescent”.Such cliches and exaggerations are characteristic of this genre of lament. Like most keening for the good old days, these threnodies are not pieces of dispassionate historical analysis: they are attempts to compensate for so much that is disagreeable about one’s own time by inventing a more or less idealised version of the past. Still, it is worth wondering why “Grub Street” should be the form taken by paradise lost in this case. After all, the street originally so named in London (it was real before it was metaphorical) came to be the home of that kind of “grub” defined by the OED as “a person of mean abilities; a dull industrious drudge; a literary hack”. Even allowing... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2016-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]

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[ The Bookseller | 2014-09-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Digital Printing for Every Stage in a Book’s Life

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-09-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-09-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Never-before-published section of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is available for reading

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[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-09-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-09-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Gallimard's Amis rejection 'for literary reasons'

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[ The Bookseller | 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Lost chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory published

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[ The Guardian | 2014-08-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Sydney Morning Herald | 2014-08-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Engadget | 2014-08-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-08-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-08-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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How a Book Fair Forever Changed US/Soviet Literary Relations

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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-08-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ PC World | 2014-08-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Fast Company | 2014-08-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-08-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-08-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Reviews of New and Forthcoming Religion and Spirituality Books, August 13, 2014

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