Category: publishing

Booksellers are relieved that the OJ book has been canceled. It put them in an awkward spot. Three-hundred tousand copies were printed; they’ll be destroyed. And Judith Regan, responsible for publishing it?

Peter Behrens has won this year’s Governor General’s Award for fiction. The Law of Dreams is a “tale of a young man’s journey to the New World during the Irish potato famine. Behrens, a Montreal-born screenwriter who lives most of the year in Maine, is a first-time novelist and author of the short story collection Night Driving.”

Rupert Murdoch and Judith Regan have backed away from O.J. Simpson’s blood-soaked book and TV special, but let’s not be too quick to hand out the gold stars. “Like Mr. Simpson himself, they were hoping to have it both ways. The conceit of selling Mr. Simpson’s hypothetical guilt is despicable, as is Ms. Regan’s argument that this was her way of eliciting his ‘confession’ and giving herself closure for her own history as a victim of abuse. Even the American obsession with ‘closure’ as a therapeutic concept can’t begin to justify ‘If I Did It.’ “

“Perhaps only someone from Britain could genuinely believe that a personal ad beginning, ‘Baste me in butter and call me Slappy,’ might lead to romance with an actual, nonincarcerated person. But in the strange alternate universe that is the personals column in the London Review of Books, a fetish for even the naughtiest dairy product is considered a perfectly reasonable basis for a relationship. Rejecting the earnest self-promotion of most personal ads, the correspondents in the London Review column tend instead to present themselves as idiosyncratic, even actively repellent.”

Bookstores in the US are mixed about whether they will stock OJ Simpson’s confession book. “The book, due to be published on November 30 by ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, has drawn a firestorm of criticism from members of the publishing community, media commentators, and relatives of the victims.”

Borders says it will sell O.J. Simpson’s new book. A spokesman says the company expects the widely condemned new book to have “strong sales,” but will donate profits to charity.

“There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together – and more.”

The market for poetry in Canda is tiny. Miniscule. So do prizes for poetry help sales at all?

“The cancellation comes after as many as a dozen Fox affiliate stations refused to air the show, which was scheduled to run during so-called sweeps, the period when Nielsen Media Research collects viewer data used to set local TV advertising rates. ReganBooks paid Simpson an advance of $3.5 million, according to Newsweek magazine.”

“Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country’s publishing industry into crisis.”