John Derbyshire: The decline of a great newspaper, the Daily Telegraph

John Derbyshire writes:

The Telegraph, like everything else, has now been captured by the left, a fact this week’s editions illustrated twice over. They also offered some unusually revealing insights into the bizarro world of Cultural Marxism.

His fellow Taki’s contributor, Ann Sterlinger writes, meanwhile:

I doubt readers here will be surprised to hear that John Derbyshire’s long-neglected second novel, Fire From The Sun, is the best modern fiction I’ve read in some time.

Derbyshire saw modest success with his first published novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream back in 1996. But that was a novel of ordinary length, 273 print pages. When he tried to shop the sweeping, 382,715-word Fire from the Sun around as a follow-up, he was told he wasn’t quite famous enough for anyone to gamble on his doorstopper. His adventures in self-publishing, beginning in 2001, have resulted in a fair amount of languishing.

This, I suspect, is in part because he didn’t turn the book from a ridiculously priced $100 print-on-demand version into a $5.99 Kindle book till 2012, the same year he became a pariah.