Category: publishing

“A film production company has sued Laura Albert for fraud, saying that a contract signed with JT Leroy to make a feature film of ‘Sarah’ should be null and void, for the simple reason that JT Leroy does not exist.”

“Reproducing like bacteria, a new literary genre has wholly infected the bestseller charts. As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of similarly grinding childhood misery. In the hardback chart, meanwhile, Abandoned, Anya Peters’s account of a childhood of rejection that culminated with her living in a car, has overtaken the recent hit Wasted, in which Mark Johnson describes the childhood beatings that led to his heroin addiction at 11.”

Is it possible that those in the cultural sphere want the public to love them a bit too much? Or, put more directly, do we risk alienating those who merely see the arts and literature as a pleasant diversion with unceasing paeans to the glory of cultural engagement? It’s an important question: “If literature is to survive beyond the next few years, assailed as it is by the triple whammy of brutal economics, shrinking attention spans and unrelenting competition from less demanding pastimes, it will survive as much because of book likers as book lovers.”

“Once a novelty, book videos are increasingly common and, publishers say, essential. Hyperion Books, HarperCollins and Penguin Group (USA) are among those using them. Powell’s Books, a leading independent store based in Portland, Ore., plans its own series of films.”

“Norwegian author Per Petterson was awarded the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on Thursday, in competition with writers like Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Safran Foer and Salman Rushdie… The prize for 100,000 euros ($133,000), the largest and most international prize of its kind for a single work of fiction published in English, was awarded by an international jury.”

“Achebe is best known for his 1958 debut novel Things Fall Apart, which sold more than 10 million copies. The 76-year-old, who was paralysed from the waist down after a car accident in 1990, beat writers including Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie to the honour.”

As newspapers decrease their quantity of book reviews, book bloggers grow ever more vocal. “In one sense, the democratization of discourse about books is a good thing, and should lead to a widening of our intellectual horizons. The more people there are out there reading, making discoveries, and advocating for their favorite books, the better. But book bloggers have also brought another, less salutary influence to bear on literary culture: a powerful resentment. … As anyone who reads literary blogs can attest, hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.”

“A serious writer would be foolhardy indeed to present a modern aristocrat as a complex central protagonist. The upper classes are considered no more than cardboard cut-outs: one-dimensional, braying inbreds sitting grandly on their green acres and writing love letters to General Pinochet.”

Daniel Menaker, executive editor in chief of the Random House, is leaving the publisher. “The move seemed to be an indication that Random House was shrugging off the sophisticated literary fiction that Mr. Menaker had nurtured. But Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, insisted that the direction of the imprint would not change.”

“Although excerpts from high-profile books routinely appear in national magazines, some publishers have been having second thoughts about the strategy. Frequently, an excerpt can offer a lift to a book’s sales, but there is always the risk that it might offer too much, thus stealing thunder (and revenue) from the book.”