Category: publishing

Celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley is being sued by an Alabama writer who claims that she plagiarized parts of her recent book on the Bush family from an article he wrote for a web site. Kelley’s publisher doesn’t deny that parts of the article were reproduced verbatim in the book, but claims that “it was not protected by copyright, was of minimal scope, did not damage Mr. Wilson and was covered under the legal doctrine of ‘fair use.'”

Is Gutenberg wrongly attributed with having produced the first book in moveable type? A printing expert says that “the 15th-century German printer used stamps rather than the movable type he is said to have invented between 1452 and 1455.”

The long list of nominees for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award has been released, and some big names are on it. Former Booker prizewinners DBC Pierre, Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, J M Coetzee, Graham Swift and Peter Carey are nominated, as are Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown and Whitbread winner Mark Haddon. The Dublin prize comes with €100,000, making it the second largest literary award in the world.

“Created in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, the 11-year-old prize honours novels or short story collections. Previous winners have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Rohinton Mistry and M.G. Vassanji, who was a jury member this year.”

“If, as some people believe, every single person has a novel inside himself, then a lot of people have been wasting a lot of time doing a lot of things other than writing.” The organizer of the unexpectedly popular National Novel Writing Month, which encourages amateur Dostoyevskys everywhere to crank out a full-length work in just 30 days, has a new treatise to promote, focusing on – you guessed it – “a pragmatic, populist approach to fiction writing.” Can great art actually result from this? Maybe not, but the point isn’t perfection, it’s encouraging the creative process in a society which has increasingly discarded it.

“Esopus magazine is a thing of lavish, eccentric beauty, less flipped through than stared at, forcing readers to reconcile their expectations of what a magazine is with the strange artifact in their laps… But pull back the cover of Esopus and you will find only Tod Lippy, designer, editor, conjurer. Just Tod Lippy, with his one d and his conceit that he can make the magazine he wants and that people will give him $10 for each one and that then he can make another one. With a circulation of 5,000 and a twice-a-year schedule – it came out of nowhere in 2003 – it is not so much a magazine as a cult that meets semiannually.”

Thousands of Americans are flocking to places in Europe written about in The Da Vinci Code. “Wherever we walk with this book, we get a lot of looks. In France, there is a lot of resentment that — ‘This is what brought you to France?’ — it’s not enough that (France) contains the most beautiful art and gorgeous gardens and historical monuments, but, a book? A novel?”

Barbara Cartland spent many of her 99 years writing. And she wrote so much, much of it has yet to be published. “Four years after her death, two new Cartland novels trickled on to the market yesterday. And there are 158 more to come, at the rate of one a month – enough to satisfy her admirers for about 13 years.”

The Goncourt prize, France’s most prestigious literary prize, has been awarded to Laurent Gaudé for The Sun of the Scortas.

Why is this year’s National Book Awards shortlist so narrowly defined (in almost every way)? Caryn James writes that “by trying to strong-arm readers’ taste, the judges are guaranteeing that their prize remains marginal. A National Book Award doesn’t vault a writer into the upper reaches of American literature, as the Pulitzer Prize often does, and narrow-minded nominations like these help explain why.”