Category: publishing

Jonathan Lethem “will option his new novel ‘You Don’t Love Me Yet’ on May 15 to a filmmaker who agrees to give him 2 percent of the movie’s budget as a fee. … In an unprecedented move, Lethem wants the filmmaker to release ‘ancillary’ rights — such as the right to distribute the novel on the Internet or make a stage play based on it — to the public domain five years after the film’s debut.”

“In recent years, excavations in Israel established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people. Archaeologists have now found that not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate….”

What books do Britons buy most and never finish? “A survey out today of the books Britons own but do not finish shows a surprising lack of appetite for many of the nation’s most popular titles.”

“The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage. So what? They’re doing what they love. But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.”

“PEN, the international organization of writers and editors, is expected to name Francine Prose the new president of its American Center when U.S. members gather March 19 for their annual meeting. She would succeed historian Ron Chernow, who declined to seek re-election, citing personal reasons.”

“Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.”

“The Castle in the Forest is Mailer’s first novel for a decade, and the work of a writer in his eighties. Traces of competitiveness have been observed in his personality from time to time, and it seems likely he is determined to outdo Saul Bellow’s late-career triumph, Ravelstein, in length and ambition – perhaps also to cram in more compacted information about beekeeping than Philip Roth managed when writing about glove-making in American Pastoral. The book is highly impressive for long stretches, but its flaws are perverse and even preposterous.”

Stephen Kind is so prolific, he even wrote under a pseudonym when his own name gltted the market. Now he’s channeling some of that creativeenergy into writing comic books. “I’m a big fan of the medium. A different way to tell stories is always exciting. It’s like being a kid with a chemistry set.”

Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,” a narrative of global discovery and displacement that has already won the Man Booker Prize, received another literary honor Thursday night: the National Book Critics Circle fiction award.