In urban-renewal projects, a conspicuous high rise is now regarded as one of the most effective ways to make the middle of nowhere feel like somewhere. If we are to see this fiction in all of its power, we need to change the categories we use to think about southern literature. Wherever a historic building once stood but was destroyed, a more or less exact replacement now seems to be called for. Twelve years ago David Childs designed a vast new project for New York's Columbus Circle. But the version he redesigned which is now being built differs substantially.
Academic publishing is in dismal shape.
Squeezed by the rising cost of science journals, libraries have been buying fewer academic monographs. In the early 1990s, in response to dwindling library demand, the number of new titles began to decline. So Princeton professor Robert Darnton has decided to do something about it. He has become a true believer in the Internet's potential to transform academic publishing - by helping university presses publish more monographs and maybe even by enabling scholars to produce better history. Now the new generation of writers have in many ways broken away from the magic realism that characterizes much of Mr. Rushdie's work.