Author: Douglas McLennan

For 40 years, the FBI had author Graham Greene under surveillance, according to documents recently obtained by The Guardian newspaper. US officials went to “extraordinary lengths” to track Greene, believing he was anti-American. ” ‘Unsurprisingly, Greene’s views on the United States government policies and actions are not flattering,’ a cable to Washington said after the novelist gave an interview about Latin America in 1984.”

: By early next year, “all 100-plus imprints and the more than 1,000 employees of Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher” will be moved out of the various office buildings and into a new 48-story skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. “The new $300 million building will fulfill chief executive Peter Olson’s grand vision of a unified company under a single roof: one big happy family, with German parent Bertelsmann as patriarch.” But “for many publishing people, there’s a visceral resistance to the idea of lumping dozens of book-publishing cultures—from the fusty highbrow aura of Knopf to the mass-market commercialism of Bantam Dell—into one midtown conglomerate monstrosity.”

“If you do the maths, it’s obviously impossible to read them all,” says a judge of the 1999 Booker Prize. “The convention is to lie, but no one puts it that way because they are too genteel. There’s a certain kind of phoniness, but everyone’s too good-mannered to point out the obvious.”

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections sold more than 2 million copies last year. James Wolcott thinks that for that reason and many others, Franzen should stop whining. “Franzen’s book presents the portrait of a man who can’t leave being alone well enough alone. For someone who repeatedly strikes a Garbo pose in print, he puts a lot of low-key effort into refining his identity.”