The Factory SeriesDerek Raymond
RotisStephane Reynaud
A trial date has been set in the patent infringement lawsuit being brought against Amazon.com by Pinpoint Incorporated, which alleges, as a Pinpoint press release explains, that “Amazon.com’s personalization technology and its product recommendations infringe Pinpoint’s U.S. Patents Nos. 5,758,257 and 6,088,722.” The trial will…
The tumult over Greg Gatenby‘s attempt to sell off the books he got autographed during his years running the International Readings at Harbourfront Centre continues (see yesterday’s MobyLives news digest). As Rebecca Caldwell reports in a Globe & Mail story, Gatenby held a “testy” press…
The Japanese publisher Bungeishunju will destroy 120,000 copies of one of its books as part of an agreement reached with four South Korean actors whose unauthorized photos appeared in the book. Later that day, as a brief Japan Today article reports, Bungeishunju announced it had…
A new book about Dylan Thomas says it wasn’t drinking that did him in—it was “a bungling doctor.” As Fiona MacGregor reports in a story for The Scotsman, the authors of Dylan Remembered, 1935-1953, David Thomas and Dr Simon Barton say that the poet’s personal…
It was one of the great academic scandals of the 1990s: in January 1999, when Rhetoric professor Judith Butler won Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest, organized by Arts and Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton, she was the subject of ridicule in numerous articles from…
A bizarre situation depicted in Zadie Smith‘s 2000 bestseller White Teeth has come true: In a “paternity suit that not even DNA testing can solve,” David Smith reports in an Observer story, a “five-year-old boy may never know his father’s identity because his mother claims…
The former head of one of Canada’s premier writing festivals, the International Festival of Authors, is coming under questioning for his plan to sell a book collection that includes over 25,000 autographed first editions, collected during his tenure running the festival. As a CBC News…
A Russian publisher who gained attention for publishing Adolf Hitler‘s Mein Kampf in Russia has been given a one-year sentence by a court in Moscow for “inciting ethnic hatred” for including a “number” of anti-Semitic articles in a magazine he publishes called Rusich. According to…
Arthur Hailey, whose mega-selling 1968 novel Airport, followed up by Hotel, shot the high school dropout to international fame, died in his sleep last Wednesday at his home in the Bahamas. He was 84. As a New York Times obituary by Michelle O’Donnell notes, “Critics…
Corlies “Cork” Smith, the Viking editor who discovered Thomas Pynchon and Tillie Olsen, and edited numerous major writers from Muriel Spark and William Trevor to Calvin Trillin and Jimmy Breslin, died last week at his home in Manhattan of emphysema. As a New York Times…
Noel Perrin, the scholar and essayist who wrote articles for the New Yorker and books about the pleasures of the rural life, died last week at his home in Thetford Center, Vermont. Perrin, suffered from the degenerative neurological disorder Shy-Drager syndrome, was 77. As a…
Larry Brown, the author who became a writer after being a fireman in Oxford, Mississippi for nearly twenty years, died of an apparent heart attack last week at the age of 53. As an Associated Press wire story notes, Brown “wrote about the often rough,…
The reviews have been awful, but novelist Gore Vidal is sticking up for the movie Alexander anyway. As a Reuters wire story reports, Vidal says Oliver Stone‘s $160 million opus is “barrier breaking” because it presents Alexander as a bisexual. The film, says Vidal, is…
The Nevada Arts Council decided it was time to “put a real poet in the honorary, unpaid post” of Nevada Poet Laureate. However, as a Los Angeles Times story by Sam Howe Verhovek reports, there was one little glitch: the man who has held the…
Psychiatric clinical nurse Laurie Barkin observes that “Iris Chang illuminated the lives of many people, but in the process, she lost the light of life within herself. Like the firefighters at ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks, she sifted through the remains of tragedy…
Although all the reports, such as this wire story from The Dallas Business Journal, follow corporate press releases so closely that they are riddled with too much jargon to be comprehensible, it seems Barnes & Nobel will be partnering with the SBC Communications company and…
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, on “the lower level of the Westside’s Cottonwood Mall, in a small storefront next to J.C. Penney, an enterprising band of writers and publishers is opening its own cooperative” after meeting during a New Mexican book convention and realizing that “one…
A new movie based on the Raymond Carver story “So Much Water, So Close to Home” is to star American actress Laura Linney and be called Jindabyne. As an Agence France Press story explains, the story is “set in Australia” and “it tells the story…
A “preservation order” has been issued in England to protect the house where Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien lived and worked in while writing his famous fantasy series. According to a Reuters wire story, Tolkien lived in the house at 20 Northmoor Road…
In an essay submitted to the New York Times before the death of her uncle, Joseph Dantica, while in the custody of US Immigration and the Department of Homeland Security (see yesterday’s MobyLives news digest), Edwidge Danticat talks about her family’s hopes for life in…
Were this year’s controversial choices for the National Book Awards “payback from the literary community for Stephen King‘s recognition” at last year’s award ceremony? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover poses the question in his most recent column. Plus, he says, “While this controversy will…
“French scientists and historians are trying to unravel the secrets behind a cache of documents hidden nearly two centuries ago inside one of Paris’s best-known equestrian statues,” reports an Agence France Press wire story. “The documents were found when the bronze statue of King Henri…
The recent publication in Russia of a collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s early work, The Path, has “confirmed his status as a living classic,” says Victor Sonkin in this Moscow Times review. “The collection reveals sides of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and memoirist little known before,”…
“William Faulkner has, by now, become a classic, one of those rare authors who never goes out of style, in part because he enjoys an exalted place on the syllabus of any self-respecting class in American literature,” obsserves Jay Parini. All of which “fascinates” Parini…
As a member of the U.K.’s famed special forces, the SAS, Andy McNab “shot dead a member of the IRA” at the age of 19 and, before the first Gulf War, “led an SAS patrol behind Iraqi lines” in a daring mission that became the…
In Great Britain, the second Pop Lit Idol is getting underway, according to a BBC News wire story. Aspirants must submit “up to 10,000 words from the opening chapters of their novels and a synopsis,” a shortlist will be selectd, and five finalists will read…
The late Iris Chang was “eulogized in simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and Nanjing, China” on Friday. The acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, who committed suicide on November 9, “felt other people’s suffering so intensely,…
A visit to the former home of Pablo Neruda by US First Lady Laura Bush has angered some in Chile, who considered it “a sleight [sic] to his Communist past.” As an Agence France Press wire story explains, the Nobel laureate, who died in 1973…
In business since 1879, the bookstore at Oxford University, Blackwell’s, is one of the most respected — and beloved — bookstores in the world, and the flagship for a family-owned chain of 61 stores. But the news on Friday that the owners are “considering selling…
“We are so used to standing at the white cliffs (or at the port of New York) and waving to English-speaking writers as they set off for France to sign up for the avant garde — Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, HD, Beckett, and after the second…