“In its first significant foray into publishing, Amazon has acquired world English rights to a self-published novel by a midwestern teenager called Legacy. The acquisition is the first for the e-tailer’s newly launched publishing banner, AmazonEncore. … Jeff Belle, v-p of books at Amazon, said the new publishing program, while focused on self-published books with promise, could also target out-of-print titles from major houses.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Holden Caulfield, The Nursing-Home Years
“A former gravedigger and debut novelist has penned a sequel to J D Salinger’s seminal work The Catcher in the Rye which is due to be released next month. Swedish/American travel writer, John David California, wrote 60 Years Later Coming Through the Rye after a becoming ‘captivated’ by the story of Holden Caulfield.”
Low-Income Kids Locked Out Of Museums For The Summer
“Consider this: When the Chicago Public Schools year ends June 12, elementary students will not be able to visit for free the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, the Museum of Science and Industry — because none offer free days until September.” At other museums, admission for kids is free, but “they can’t go unaccompanied and special exhibitions can require tickets.”
Oprah Apologizes To Memoir Faker James Frey
“She’d had an epiphany of sorts while meditating that morning. It was time to apologize for what she put him through on that fateful day. She explained that her uncharacteristically harsh evisceration of him was coming, unfairly, from her own ego and sense of having been personally betrayed–a redemptive moment fitting, you might say, of The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
No, Voters, You Do Not Have To See Billy Elliot Three Times
“Tony Award voters have to see only one of the three boys rotating in the title role of ‘Billy Elliot: The Musical’ before voting on their joint nomination for leading actor in a musical, according to a memo from the Tony Awards administration committee. The memo … has led some voters privately to question the appropriateness of casting ballots to honor all three ‘Billy’ actors if the voters have not seen all three of them perform.”
A Good Night At The Auction House (Context Is Everything)
“Unlike Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday, where bidding was thin and buyers reluctant, Christie’s auction of postwar and contemporary art … was a buoyant hour and a half during which record prices were set for recognized artists like David Hockney.” Then again, the evening’s total was $93.7 million, down from $348.2 million a year ago.
Obama’s NEA Surprise Is Greeted With Delight
The nomination of Broadway producer Rocco Landesman to lead the NEA “was immediately read as a way to re-energize the agency” and comes at a time when “the economic turmoil has hit the nonprofit arts world extremely hard. Landesman’s reputation as a fighter, if not always a diplomatic one, pleased arts supporters in very different worlds.”
Why Newspapers Aren’t Interviewing Elizabeth Edwards
“Elizabeth Edwards has been willing to talk about most anything in interviews about her new memoir that details her husband John’s affair, but only under one condition: Interviewers must agree not to mention the name of the other woman in their broadcasts or stories. … No newspaper has agreed to the restriction so far, according to David Drake, Edwards’s publicist.”
For Landesman, Big Expectations (And Questions, Too)
“Can a leader of the commercial theater shift to a job with a nonprofit constituency? And can someone used to being the boss — and a notably outspoken one in a world that often speaks in not-for-attribution, backstage whispers — be politic and diplomatic heading a government agency that answers to the Oval Office and Capitol Hill?”
Sans Rocco, Who’ll Be Public Face Of Broadway Business?
“Ever since the November death of Gerald Schoenfeld, the theater owner and the longtime public face of Broadway to New Yorkers and their mayors, governors and lawmakers, many people in the theater world thought one of his peers, Rocco Landesman, would succeed him as the next ambassador for Broadway.” With Landesman most likely NEA-bound, Broadway has to look elsewhere for that leadership.