Category: publishing

When Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi went to publish her memoirs in the US she discovered that “doing so would be illegal, under a trade embargo intended to punish repressive governments such as the regime in Tehran that once sent her to jail. Last week, Ms. Ebadi and her American literary agency, the Strothman Agency of Boston, sued the Treasury Department, which enforces the sanctions, in Manhattan federal district court. The suit says the regulations ignore congressional directives to exempt information and creative works from the trade sanctions, and more broadly violate the First Amendment rights of Americans to read what they wish.”

Toronto’s 25th International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront ends the weekend with increased attendance under a new director…

“For the uninitiated, the best way of describing the London Review of Books, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, is that it is to words what Slow Food is to cooking.”

Some critics blasted the National Book Awards’ shortlist for being too obscure. Like including Christine Schutt, whose book sold only 100 copies (or is it 1099 copies?). But what’s a writer got to do to pay dues?…

As the American election gets close to resolution, “many independent, Chicago-area booksellers are yanking the most partisan books out of their store windows and off their most visible shelves. The reason? It’s just not worth the grief.” Too many customers were complaining. “I don’t remember this four years ago. I think everybody feels the stakes are higher this year on both sides.”

Used-book sellers have found whole new markets on Amazon. But lately they’ve been complaining that the Amazon site has been plagued with technical problems. “The mood right now is you just can’t depend on Amazon anymore, and you have to go to other venues. It’s just so many things.”

Wal-Mart has returned about 3,500 copies of George Carlin’s new book, saying it hadn’t ordered it. The publisher begs to disagree (since he will take a loss on the books). “Publishing sources say it’s unlikely that Wal-Mart — known to skip books that might be deemed politically or religiously provocative — would have ordered the book in the first place. But it’s also unlikely that the books would have been shipped from the warehouse by accident. The most likely scenario is that someone ordered them, and then thought better of it. Retailers can return any unsold books to the publisher or distributor, at any time, at the publisher’s expense.”

When an author wins the Booker Prize, as Alan Hollinghurst just did, publishers more or less expect a sales bonanza. But awards are no guarantee of public acclaim, and there’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done to meet those high sales expectations. Hollinghurst is discovering that, for the recipient of the Booker, the work has only just begun. Job one: divest the literary press of the notion that he is a “gay writer” and that his book is a breakthrough work of “gay fiction.”

Of the writers shortlisted for Canada’s 2004 Governor General’s awards, one is going for her fourth win. “Alice Munro, who has won Governor General’s awards in 1968, 1978 and 1986, was shortlisted once again in the fiction category for Runaway, her 10th story collection, when the finalists were announced yesterday.”

With U.S. forces embroiled in Iraq, thousands of people in Philadelphia will be reading and discussing a novel about the Vietnam War, written by a Vietnam veteran. Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is this winter’s timely choice for the One Book, One Philadelphia program.