literature

When Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature this week, the British literary betting agent Ladbrokes couldn't have been more pleased. Ladbrokes had given the Peruvian author slim odds of winning the prize, so when Vargas Llosa won, Ladbrokes avoided a massive payout.

When Nielsen Business Media announced last week it was shutting down book-publishing trade magazine Kirkus Reviews, industry observers could declare a winner to an age-old rivalry: Publishers Weekly. Not that PW hasn't had its problems. The 136-year-old magazine, published by Reed Elsevier's (ENL)...

As I wrote recently, America's charities are going bust at a terrible rate in these recessionary times. But another non-profit sector is ailing and in need of help as well: The arts.Theater companies, groups that perform for underprivileged people, and opera companies, have been forced to shutter,...

An article by Mokoto Rich in the New York Times recently covered the booming industry of self-publishing books. As traditional publishing houses scramble for an increasingly smaller reading public and suffer from the effects of the re/depression, many writers unable to sell their manuscripts are...

More people are reading fiction for the first time in 26 years, and some of that increase may be due to the recession. The National Endowment for the Arts reported in a report released Monday that for the first time since 1982, when the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting such data, the proportion...