Category: publishing

“Two Shanghai-based young Iranians are defying the Tehran regime with a reworked version of [Marjane Satrapi’s] award-winning graphic novel Persepolis, telling the story of Iran’s bloody post-election uprising. … In Persepolis 2.0, Satrapi’s black-and-white drawings are reshuffled – with her blessing – to tell of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed victory, the mass protests that shook the country and the crackdown by Tehran.”

“[Dan] Brown, who has sold more than 81m copies of The Da Vinci Code worldwide, has been revealed as the most donated author to Oxfam’s 700 high street shops. With just four books to his name … Brown did well to see off competition from John Grisham, author of more than 20 and the second-most likely writer to be ditched in a charity shop by readers.”

“What is Bella’s favourite book? If you said Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, then give yourself a point. I, too, will give myself a point for knowing this, although I confess I cheated: I haven’t read Twilight or any of its sequels, nor have I seen the film, and I don’t have the faintest clue who Bella is. I do know what her favourite read is, though, because a cover for a new edition of Wuthering Heights tells me so.”

“When the [Google books] settlement was announced last October, Google and the groups representing authors and publishers who had originally sued the company hailed the agreement as a public good.” But lately, objections to it have been snowballing, and the Justice Department has launched an antitrust probe. Now a prominent Washington lawyer, who’s also an author, “plans to file a sweeping opposition to the settlement on Wednesday.”

“[I]f you go to the Brooklyn Public Library seeking a copy of ‘Tintin au Congo,’ Hergé’s second book in a series, prepare to make an appointment and wait days to see the book. ‘It’s not for the public,’ a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it. The book, published 79 years ago,” has been “held under lock and key” since 2007, after “a patron objected, as others have, to the way Africans are depicted in the book.”

“[M]ore than 800 knitting enthusiasts are currently involved in knitting and crocheting individual letters to create the world’s first giant knitted poem as part of the centenary celebrations for the Poetry Society, with the as-yet secret poem set to be unveiled at the beginning of October. … With letters – average size 12 inches square, although ‘W’ takes up more room than ‘I’ – flooding in to the Poetry Society’s post room daily, the finished product is likely to take up a fair bit of space.”

Alain de Botton – who “bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” according to a Heathrow spokeswoman – is spending this week in Terminal 5, “seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer [with his] typing appear[ing] in real time on a screen behind him.” His observations will be condensed into a short book to appear next month. The idea seems to be to get the wider world saying something, anything, about the London air hub other than that it’s a crowded, chaotic mess.

“It was a raunchy, troubling and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon devoured by a legion of medical students, interns, residents and doctors. It introduced characters like ‘Fat Man’ – the all-knowing but crude senior resident – and medical slang like Gomer, for Get Out of My Emergency Room.”

“The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism … that is spreading across our culture. … Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.”

“Reader’s Digest — an American media icon of the 20th century, thanks to its inspiring, safe-for-family-reading articles and folksy, cornpone humor — is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Parent company Reader’s Digest Association has had trouble since going private in 2007, cutting costs and trying to stay relevant in the post-ironic, niche-driven 21st-century media landscape, a place [that] can be tough sledding for an earnest, general-interest magazine.”