Category: publishing

Major booksellers in the UK have delayed plans to stop printing the prices of books on their covers. “Authors and their agents fear the move would intensify the price cutting war between chain stores over a small number of bestsellers, marginalise most other books and drive down the already low income of writers.”

“Television book clubs have scaled back from their headiest days a couple of years ago, but even brief on-air segments now have flourishing afterlives online. The “Oprah” site is by far the richest, but “Today” and “Good Morning America” also have online extensions of their book clubs, where readers can find substantial excerpts from books along with interviews and online chats with authors. These sites create an endless loop between television and the Web.”

Sam Tanenhaus has been named editor of the New York Times Book Review. “Before joining Vanity Fair in 1999, Tanenhaus was an assistant editor for the Times’ Op-Ed pages. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography “Whittaker Chambers” (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial. The book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography. Tanenhaus has a master’s degree in English literature from Yale University.”

Martin Amis is a certified literary star. But his latest book was a critical failure and a dud in the bookstore. And now? Amis is without publisher, and available…

“Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern humankind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science fiction, has ‘thinned.’ This sense of thinning—of there having passed a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet—has haunted the telling of stories from the beginning.”

Some school districts are now using “simplified” language versions of Shakespeare to teach the Bard. “It’s nice because all those ancient words aren’t there. It is a cool story — what with people making plans to kill one another. It can be difficult because everyone has strange names, but at least it isn’t using any of those old words anymore.”

Salman Rushdie has been named the new president of PEN, the international writers organization. “Rushdie, who was officially named on Monday to serve a two-year term, succeeds Joe Conarroe, a former president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the former head of the Modern Language Association.”

“A fierce and foul-mouthed tirade by Ernest Hemingway against his literary rivals has surfaced after nearly 80 years and is expected to fetch up to £30,000 at auction.”

The civic reading programs that seem to be springing up all across America have a suspicious ring of junior high to them, writes Patti Thorn: “Reading is personal; do we really want to follow a crowd in our march to literacy?” But there does seem to be some merit to the idea of encouraging average folks to dissect the plot of a community-read book the way we all used to hash over the latest episode of Seinfeld, and the book Denver has chosen for its citywide read is uniquely positioned to promote not only literacy, but community as well.

The book, ‘The Glorious Appearing,’ by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, has already sold 1.9 million copies even before it goes on official sale March 30. That makes it one of the top-selling books of the year. “The advance sales indicate that as well as a major subject of discussion in church groups and in the news media. The series is based on Dr. LaHaye’s reading of the Book of Revelation in the Bible.”