Category: publishing

“Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere ‘padding’, but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions. The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads ‘in half the time’, will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.”

Michael Ondaatje is a successful writer, by any measure. But he finds writing more difficult with each book. “It always gets harder. You think if you can make one table you can make a second table, but it’s completely different every time. You really do feel, ‘That’s it’.”

“The Web site Reality TV Magazine, among others, recently reported that the writer’s equivalent of American Idol will begin airing on British TV in July. According to the site, writers will pitch their book ideas to a panel of judges; the winner will land a publishing contract.”

“The story of Potter has all along been a story of its fans, and, like everything else about Potter, the fan websites are in a special class, for their size, and for their influence. The Potter sites have long advanced from the slow pace, simple texts and dull backgrounds of the early years, and now have all the latest accessories: blogs, podcasts, audio and video. They no longer just comment on the news, but participate. Rowling has praised the sites by name, granted them rare interviews, even used one site, the Harry Potter Lexicon, to check facts.”

“If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. … (T)he time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.”

In France, “The tumult of October and November 2005 — three weeks of car burnings, street clashes and arrests sparked by the accidental deaths of two youths — have piqued interest in ‘les banlieues,’ or metropolitan suburbs, and helped some young French-Arab authors to get their works in print.”

“Nearly 34 years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, his publisher has set a big U.S. press run of 250,000 copies for a new novel.” Coming out Tuesday, “The Children of Húrin” has been assembled by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s work. “The result is entirely in the elder Mr. Tolkien’s words, with only minor grammatical changes in things such as verb tense….”

“Novelists Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan were among 15 nominees announced Thursday for the second Booker International Prize for fiction. … While the original Booker is given for a novel, the international prize recognizes a body of work.”

“The estate of Nicole Brown Simpson is seeking a court order for permission to bid on the book rights to O.J. Simpson’s ‘If I Did It’ at a sheriff’s auction Tuesday in Sacramento. … (T)he estate wants the judge in the case to allow it to take a portion of the $33.5-million civil judgment won from O.J. Simpson and use it as a ‘credit bid’ on the book,” the goal being “to ‘make sure this book is never published.’ “

“When Alex Heard tenderly busted David Sedaris in the New Republic last month for adulterating his nonfiction with many imagined settings, scenes, and dialogue, I expected journalists and others to rebuke the best-selling humorist. As for Sedaris, I expected him to acknowledge that he had erred by making up stuff, but those days were behind him. I was wrong.”