Literary fiction

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning genius behind such indelible American novels as Suttree, Blood Meridian, and The Road, along with his most accessible work, The Border Trilogy, has died in Santa Fe at age 89.

Novelist Philip Roth "discovered" his own books as he wrote them. "I don't know anything in the beginning, which makes it great fun to write ..." he told Fresh Air in 2006. "You begin every book as an amateur. ... Gradually, by writing sentence after sentence, the book, as it were, reveals itself to you. ... Each and every sentence is a revelation."

The CEO of Penguin Random House on trends in publishing

Markus Dohle is the global Chief Executive Officer of Penguin Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher. Additionally, he is Chairman of the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies and serves on the PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. Excerpts from an email interview:  Read more

Arts Council England has pledged to engage with more bookshops, fund more writers and lobby the government to provide tax relief to independent publishers following a report finding that "the general trend for literary fiction is a negative one".  Read more

I need to apologise - this is another piece on the death of the novel. On the death of the novel, but also on a fractured, stupefied publishing industry. More than that, it's a piece on the decline in the public's investment in literature as a cultural phenomenon.  Read more