How to use this Page

I love ghost stories. And I mean ghost stories, rather than horror stories. If truth be known I am the world’s most squeamish person. I really do hate the sight of blood, which is the only reason why I haven’t seen Sweeney Todd yet. Anyway, enough of my foibles. I have been looking for an excuse for posting an excerpt from our book Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story, by Peter Marshall, for ages, but so far haven’t been able to come up with one. So, today I am posting it for no other reason than I really loved this book of literary detective work, and I hope you will too. Enjoy!

(more…)

Share This

Jeff Prucher, editor of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, has kindly guest blogged for us this week. Below, learn how science fiction has conceived of a crime, which has never been committed.

There have been a number of news reports in recent months that reveal a dark underside to the word of organ transplants. In one case, corpses were illegally purchased from funeral directors, and usable tissues were resold to be used in transplants. In another: (more…)

Share This

By Kirsty OUP-UK

Just a short post from the UK this morning, but one that should really get you thinking. Our book How Novels Work, which is no stranger to us at OUPblog (as you can see here and here), is now coming out in paperback. To celebrate this, author John Mullan put together a few booky brainteasers, and here they are. The answers can be found here - but no cheating!

(more…)

Share This

This legal look at Sweeney Todd is by Oxford Law Division Editorial Assistant Michelle Lipinski.

The legend of Sweeney Todd has been trimmed and altered with the passage of time. The characters have also changed and their narratives fleshed-out. One point, though, remaining fairly static in the legend is the presence of lawmakers and legal defenders – starting with the creation of Sweeney Todd in The String of Pearls: A Romance, and all the way up to director Tim Burton’s newest cinematic installment based upon Sondheim’s musical adaptation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (more…)

Share This

It’s not everyday I have an author who has written about blogs agree to post on the OUPblog! Today,  David D. Perlmutter, a professor in the KU School of Journalism & Mass Communications, and author of Blogwars, lets us know how truly bizarre it is to transition from penning a book to penning a blog post.  Be on the lookout for Blogwars which examines the rapidly burgeoning phenomenon of blogs and questions the degree to which blog influence–or fail to influence–American political life.

I begin my new OUP book Blogwars by claiming, only half facetiously, that there are good reasons not to write a book on blogs. New stuff is happening so fast, that it’s hard to keep up.

But that is the point: A blogger’s work is never done, nor, I hope, is that of a student of blogs. Bloggers cannot coast or rest on their laurels; their readers will abandon them or, worse, ask why they are failing them. Blogs are always unfinished, their work always to be continued, revised, and extended later. Books are supposed to be different. In a sense all books are orphans. Only in some screwball comedy movie is it possible for an author to change his mind and run into bookstores and add new material. (more…)

Share This

Entries are invited for the 16th annual Tom Howard/John H. Reid Short Story Contest (US). First prize US$2000. Seeks short stories, essays and other works of prose, 5000 words max. Winning entries published online. Entry fee: US$12. Deadline: March 31, 2008. More details...

By Kirsty OUP-UK

By the time you read this post I will be off on holiday for a few days of rest and relaxation. One of the books I’m intending to pick up during my time off is Sioned Davies’s translation of The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh medieval tales, which OUP published last year. With this in mind, I thought I would today bring you a short extract from Davies’s introduction to the text. Here, she talks about The Mabinogion in relation to the oral tradition of story-telling.

(more…)

Share This

Every once in a while I get a blog piece from an author that I am so excited about I am compelled to post it immediately, today’s piece fits that bill. Philip Pullman, best known as the author of The Golden Compass, which is in theaters now, also wrote the introduction to the Oxford edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Today, it is my great honor to post Pullman’s thoughts on Milton in 2008.  Enjoy!

Four hundred years after the birth of John Milton, he still lives, his example still inspires, his words still echo. Paradise Lost is played on the stage, is sung to music, is choreographed for a ballet; it is an audiobook, it is the subject of countless theses and dissertations, and on the very morning that I’m writing this, an invitation arrives to the private view of an exhibition of paintings and prints called The Fall of the Rebel Angels, whose iconography is unmistakable. (more…)

Share This

On January 3, 1992 J. R. R. Tolkien, author of some of the most beloved fantasy books in history, was born. To celebrate his birthday I decided to learn a bit more about him. Oxford Reference Online led me to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature which contained this great biography. Check it out below. And no, I am not yet counting the days until The Hobbit movie is released!

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1892–1973), British scholar of Anglo- Saxon and medieval literature and writer of fantasy fiction, most notably The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The enormous success of the latter novel has been decisive in establishing fantasy fiction as a popular literary genre that straddles the boundary between children’s and adults’ literature. Although few of his works were written expressly for children, most are accessible to teenagers and young adults, undoubtedly the largest group among his readers. (more…)

Share This

Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. In the post below he looks at the fall of newspapers.

In her end-of-the-year column, The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, reviewed some dismal statistics: since she started in her job in 2005, the Post’s daily circulation has declined by 45,000. At the same time, the Post’s web site registered a 15% increase in viewers. A decade earlier, when the Post first launched its online news service, publisher Donald Graham summed up the imperative in three words: “classifieds, classifieds, classifieds,” but the drift toward news on the Internet has drained away larger retail advertising as well. Newspapers across the country have reported similar slumps in circulation and advertising revenue. (more…)

Share This

Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about the many incarnations of the tale. Today Mack looks at Sondheim’s version. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

Stephen Sondheim first came across the Todd story on a visit to London in 1973, when he saw Christopher Bond’s version on stage. Bond had made the story darker and less melodramatic than previous versions, in which Todd was portrayed as an increasingly paranoid homicidal maniac, who murdered simply out of greed. Bond was the first dramatist to provide Todd with a convincing, well thought-out, and fully integrated ‘back story’. At the beginning of the play, Todd’s anger is explained: it is directed exclusively at the local judge and beadle who together, many years before, had destroyed his career, transported him for life as a convicted felon, and (he believes) killed his beloved wife. Todd’s aim is revenge, pure and simple. Only after his initial attempts to do away with the judge and beadle are frustrated does he come to the conclusion that ‘the work’s its own reward’, and decides that until he has another shot at his enemies he will ‘practice on less honoured throats’. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Stephanie O’Cain is an Exhibits Coordinator at NYU Press.

For over five years, Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body has been the book I return to when I need to renew my sense of admiration for the human body and condition. Winterson gives no hint as to the narrator’s gender in this torrid love affair, forcing the reader to cast aside any preconceived notions about love, loss and redemption and instead focus simply on the complexities of relationships. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Greg Galant is the publisher and CEO of Newsgroper.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is my favorite book, even if weighted on a per page basis. This 1,336 page biography of Robert Moses is an insightful portrayal of power and New York. Caro contends that Moses was the most powerful non-elected official in American history who built modern day New York – for better or worse. (more…)

Share This

Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about Dickens’s Influence. Today Mack looks the many incarnations of the tale. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

It wasn’t long before dramatists saw the potential of the Sweeney Todd story. In the same month that the final episode of the serialized novel was published in The People’s Periodical in March 1847, the first theatrical version appeared on stage under the story’s original title, The String of Pearls. Written by George Dibdin Pitt, it was the first version to use the catchphrase now most associated with Todd – ‘I’ll polish him off’. This was soon followed by another stage version in around 1865, under the title Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: or, the String of Pearls by Frederick Hazleton. Meanwhile various other versions of the story were appearing in print, often either hugely swollen or greatly abridged, all using Sweeney Todd as the title. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Erin Cox, Book Publishing Director for The New Yorker, avid reader and lover of books.

Wow, to pick just one is actually quite hard. So, I’m going to actually list a few. Some old, some new.

Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins is a book that I’ve long mentioned I would like to read, but never actually had. One stormy afternoon this fall, I finished a book and thought, okay, now is the time. I started reading and didn’t look up until the room was so dark I couldn’t see anything. I spent the next two evenings ditching plans and reading into the night. I had to see what happened to Fos and Opal and Flash, the main characters of the book, who live in Tennessee post-World War I and are all enchanted by light in all its many forms. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Dylan Moulton is an Associate Marketing Manager at Palgrave Macmillan.

The book that stuck with me this year was Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. With so much attention directed to the environment lately, it’s a thought experiment with teeth. The imagery of a human impact on the earth – that millions of years from now Manhattan could be a lush forest while the only evidence of human beings may lie in degraded plastics – not only lingered but sparked conversation.

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Noa Wheeler is an assistant editor at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.

I have never finished reading my favorite book. This may sound incongruous, but the truth is that any time I “finish” Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words, I simply start it again. For many years, I have always been somewhere in the process of reading this quietly brilliant book. Sartre’s memoir is one of paradox: a dreamer’s stream of consciousness with an underlying strength, a distant narrative voice which ultimately paints an intimate self-portrait. (more…)

Share This

By Kirsty OUP-UK

While Rebecca has been quizzing the publishing world of New York, I have been hounding people a little closer to home: the staff of OUP here in Oxford. Here is what we’ve been reading on this side of the Pond in 2007…

Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Head of Publicity
Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Richard Deakin. As an outdoors girl this journey through the woods and forests of both this country and abroad evokes a sense of being at one with nature in all its grandeur. I loved the book and could read it over and over each time discovering something new. (more…)

Share This

Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about the unknown author of Sweeney Todd. Today Mack looks at Dickens’s influence. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

The original publisher of Sweeney Todd, Edward Lloyd, in whose journal The People’s Periodical and Family Library first appeared in 1846-7, had begun his career a decade earlier, publishing plagiarisms of the hugely popular work of Charles Dickens. His products included such well-disguised works as Oliver Twiss and Nikelas Nickelberry. The author of Sweeney Todd also borrowed from Dickens, if a little more subtly than Lloyd.
(more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Jaime Morganstern is an associate publicist at Planned Television Arts.

I remember asking my mom one day for a book she could recommend to me, preferably by an author with a few other books I would also enjoy. She handed me Love Story by Erich Segal. Little did I know that this would become my favorite book and I would soon read all the author’s other novels. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Bethany Heitman is an Associate Editor at Cosmopolitan Magazine.

I first read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood about ten years ago. I’ve since reread it about a half dozen times. The true story of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and how they brutally murdered a family in Kansas is chilling enough on its own. But it’s the brilliant and revolutionary way in which Capote pens this tale that makes it my favorite. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Mark Sarvas runs the literary blog The Elegant Variation. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Threepenny Review and others. His debut novel, HARRY, REVISED, will be released by Bloomsbury in the spring.

I absolutely loved David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk. Within a few pages I was completely caught up, and found my pleasure never dimmed as I read this bracingly intelligent novel which recounts the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and the Indian prodigy of the title, Srinivasa Ramanujan. It’s an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, and encompasses a World War. Leavitt’s prose is consistently gorgeous, and his control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times. And yet, for all its breadth, it remains firmly rooted in the interior lives of its two fascinating protagonists and affords us a glimpse at the costs of genius. A remarkable, affecting novel.

Share This

Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about cannibalism. Today Mack questions who the author of Sweeney Todd was. This post first appeared on Powell’s.

If you ask that question today, the answer you’re most likely to receive is ‘Stephen Sondheim’. That’s not sot surprising, since Sondheim’s musical version of the story, first staged in 1979, and now about to hit movie theatres in a Tim Burton-directed film version, has done most to popularize the legend in modern times. In fact no one knows who wrote the original story on which the Sondheim ‘musical thriller’ – and every other stage and screen adaptation – is ultimately based. (more…)

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Andrew DeSio is the Director of Publicity at Princeton University Press.

If I had to pick a favorite book I’d go with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Raoul Duke’s romp, along with his trusty attorney Dr. Gonzo, through the desert in search of that unattainable state of euphoria, all the while experiencing American culture at its best and worst, is as pertinent now as it was in 1972.

Thompson is known for his heroic drug binges but his choppy yet flowing prose is often overlooked by his dirty deeds. The fact that he can remember so vividly his exploits in the book while being under the influence is testament to his great mind. He’s one of America’s eminent satirists and humorists, and will be sorely missed.

Share This

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Lauren Cerand is an independent public relations representative and consultant in New York. She writes about art, politics and style at LuxLotus.com.

When Oxford University Press asked me to recommend a holiday book pick, I was thrilled. For one thing, the blog is a daily must-read for me, and like the best sort of party, it’s a pleasure just to be asked. And although I feel as though I can’t wait to read the new catalog of OUP offerings, I’ve left it on my front table because the cover’s so pretty it makes me smile whenever I walk in the door. As an independent publicist, I spend my days, nights, and almost every waking moment helping worthy books and cultural projects reach their intended, ideal audiences. I feel like my friends at Oxford University Press share a similar enthusiasm for their endeavors, and that’s one reason we’re pals. (more…)

Share This