Category: publishing

“A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $317,200 in an Internet auction. The previous owner had bought it for less than a buck.”

Her publishers have described it as “the first book about Jane Austen to dissect the industry around her”, hailing it as “a completely original approach to one of Britain’s most enduring popular novelists” Yet according to Prof Sutherland, far from breaking new ground, Jane’s Fame is in fact similar to an academic study, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, from Aeschylus to Bollywood, that she published in 2005 after 10 years of research.

“Only two years ago, what seemed like the whole bookish world applauded Harper’s firing of Judith Regan; the firebrand editor was too crass, too vulgar, too independent to work inside the system — and perhaps worst of all, her books were gross, unseemly, politically incorrect. Now, two years later, we’re may be witnessing Regan Redux, in the unlikely person of Neil Strauss. A thirtysomething onetime pop culture reporter for the New York Times, Strauss appears to be nothing like his muse. Except that he is a master of the kind of high-low books that were her hallmark.”

The late Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, one of this year’s literary sensations, took the fiction prize, while The Forever War, NY Times correspondent Dexter Filkins’s examination of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, took nonfiction honors. In a first, the poetry award was split two ways, between August Kleinzahler and Juan Felipe Herrera.

The CEO of HMH’s corporate parent said that the four unsolicited offers received “weren’t giving us the kind of value we could deliver in the foreseeable future by growing the business ourselves.” The division “publishes consumer books from Curious George to Phillip Roth novels to the Peterson Field Guides to birds.”

“Back in 1952 a team of scientists was desperate to test the capabilities of Mark One ‘Baby’, the computer built at Manchester University. One of them, Christopher Strachey, devised a quirky software programme by entering hundreds of romantic verbs and nouns into the new machine. He then sat back as Mark One ‘Baby’ trawled the literary database to create a stream of light-hearted verse.”

“[O]ne surprise bestseller of the economic Armageddon is a decades-old science fiction novel about an imaginary economic Armageddon – popular now, its fans insist, because the collapse of civilisation it describes is on the verge of coming true. Sales of Ayn Rand’s 1957 book Atlas Shrugged – a hymn in praise of radical individualism, extreme self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism – are surging as the crisis deepens, according to TitleZ, a service that tracks sales trends on Amazon.”

“The two most important positions in the British poetry establishment are about to be filled – and it looks likely, for the first time ever, that both incumbents will be women. An announcement is expected in the next few weeks on the poet laureate to succeed Andrew Motion when he steps down in May. That same month, an election will be held to find a replacement for Christopher Ricks as the Oxford professor of poetry – a position held, variously, by Matthew Arnold, WH Auden and Seamus Heaney.”

“Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million… Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, in the United States this fall.”

“US president Barack Obama leads the nominations for this year’s British Book Awards by making the shortlist for both author and biography of the year. Obama’s political tract, The Audacity of Hope, and his life story, Dreams from My Father, became UK bestsellers during his 2008 run for office. … Obama’s rivals for author of the year include American [Stephenie] Meyer.”