Category: publishing

For a high-school dropout, children’s author Stuart Hill was garnering an awful lot of attention from the intellectual set last week. “His book was at the centre of a bidding frenzy last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when 20 European publishing houses fought for its rights. It has already been bought by Scholastic, which publishes J K Rowling’s work in the US, and a film rights deal is in discussion.” Why all the fuss? Hill seems to be the consensus choice of publishers as the “next big thing” in kidlit, and everyone wants a piece.

The finalists have been announced for the National Book Awards, with a big surprise leading the non-fiction list: The report to the nation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been praised as being eminently readable by the standards of government documents, and which has been a bestseller since being released several months ago. On the fiction side, the big news is who didn’t make the cut, notably novelists Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. Also, for the first time ever, all the fiction finalists are women.

The Scottish city of Edinburgh will shortly be named “City of Literature” by the United Nations’ cultural group, UNESCO. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns all spent time living and/or writing in the city. A host of current UK literary stars had backed Edinburgh’s push for the designation, which could have a significant financial impact for the city.

“It goes against nearly every stereotype about Rupert Murdoch, the conservative-leaning media baron who owns Fox News and The New York Post: a publishing imprint he owns has, in fact, released a new book titled, ‘Unfit Commander: Texans for Truth Take On George W. Bush,’ which takes a decidedly critical view of Mr. Bush’s presidency. But ReganBooks, the publisher, and Judith Regan, its impresario, conform to few stereotypes – unless, that is, they involve making money. … In politics, at least, ReganBooks goes both ways.”

In a survey of 31 prominent American novelists, Kerry supporters, unsurprisingly, vastly outnumbered Bush supporters. Still, the writers’ choices differed. “Authors cited a range of reasons, from a vote for Kerry ‘because I have a brain and so does he’ (Amy Tan), to a vote for Bush because ‘we’re at war, and electing a president who is committed to losing it seems to be the most foolish thing we could do’ (Orson Scott Card).”

The “reader reviews” on Amazon.com have become a genre unto themselves, with some amateur critics posting thousands of the things. But authors tend to hate the self-styled literary judges, who think nothing of savaging an author’s character as well as her work, and this month, Anne Rice had had enough. The popular author has seen her two latest books trashed extensively on Amazon, and in response, has posted a 1,200-word defense of her latest effort, and given the critics a taste of their own medicine, accusing them of “[using] the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies.”

“The Booker Prize, currently under fire for concentrating on fashionable and quirky writers, will this week attempt to regain its reputation for high seriousness with the launch of the ‘super Booker’, a worldwide search for the living greats of fiction. While the winners of the main prize, due to be announced next week, must come from Britain or the Commonwealth, the new £60,000 competition will be open to all comers.” The top contenders for the first ‘Super Booker’, which will be given not for any individual book but for a lifetime of literary achievement, are V.S. Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Updike.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, where cigar smoke hangs heavy in the hotel lobby and no one would think of passing an evening without getting blind drunk, trends are emerging, visible to anyone willing to throw himself fully into the spirit of the thing. Trend #1: Every book released this year must have the word “code” in the title if it expects to have any kind of commercial success. Trend #2: Shrill, ultra-partisan rants masquerading as intellectual treatises are selling like hotcakes to a polarized society eager to make themselves feel better about the world by reading political pablum with which they already agree.

The cover of Philip Roth’s new novel, The Plot Against America, has run up against the German government’s ban on any display of the swastika. The cover features a black stenciled swastika superimposed over a U.S. postage stamp. A shipment of the book was held up by customs at the German border last week, and the publisher announced that a new cover would be printed for the German market, with the swastika replaced by a black ‘X’.

Certainly, great writers deserve wide recognition, but does the Nobel Prize for Literature really come close to delivering such immortality? “Even the most erudite among us will have a hard time naming a single book by a great chunk of past laureates. How about that Sigrid Undset (1928)? Who could ever forget her, right? Or how about Par Lagerkvist (1951)? Or Jaroslav Seifert (1984)? Got those names tattooed on the brain, don’t you?” Even if you see the Nobel’s mission as bringing attention to unjustly neglected authors, the prize could be considered a failure in that regard as well.