In her column for The Book Standard, Jessa Crispin comments on Dave Eggers‘ recent criticism of Neal Pollack and Eggers’ statement in that criticism that everyone can write a book and “Anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world…
“To judge from two recent novels, Ian McEwan‘s Saturday and Vendela Vida‘s And Now You Can Go, it might be easier to save your bacon with a neatly deployed rondeau than anyone ever suspected,” observes David Orr. “In each book, an impending act of violence…
“That folks can pick up a gadget approximately the size of a cigarette lighter at their local library, programmed with a current bestseller for their listening pleasure, is the realization of countless sci-fi movies and Philip K. Dick novels,” and, says Rachel Deahl, “The future…
It’s gone decrepit with age, damaged terribly over the years by monsoons and earthquakes, it’s hundreds of miles from the nearest city, and armed gangs of robbers and kidnappers openly roam the nearby highways, but authorities in India say that by the end of the…
Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, is reportedly shopping a proposal for a memoir about her “life as a military daughter, the death of her son, the 2004 campaign and her recent struggle with breast cancer,” according to a PW Daily report…
“The recent death of 33-year-old Tristan Egolf, a novelist cursed with promise at an early age, has given rise to a literary detective story,” says Alex Beam. In his Boston Globe column, Beam observes that “Obituaries published last month failed to name Egolf’s birth father,…
One of the Northeast’s major book wholesalers, Koen Book Distributors, may be on the verge of bankruptcy. As Judith Rosen reports in a PW Daily story, the company, headquartered in Moorestown, New Jersey, has suffered, as have all distributors, from “low margins, high returns and…
“I’ve just come back from a book tour in America,” says Hillel Halkin in a Jerusalem Post commentary. “It’s called a ‘book tour,’ it turns out, because of all the airplane flights and hotel rooms that have to be booked for it.” But as he…
Last Friday in Moscow the winner of one of the country’s leading book prizes, the National Bestseller Prize, was announced in “a lavish ceremony in St. Petersburg’s Astoria Hotel.” Mikhail Shishkin‘s novel, Maidenhair won the prize known as “the least literary and the most oriented…
In 1943, after Faber & Faber published an anthology of Welsh poems, 25-year-old Scottish poet Maurice Lindsay wrote to T.S. Eliot in his position as Faber’s director of publishing and told him he should publish an anthology of Scottish poems. To Lindsay’s shock, Eliot invited…
“Over the past decade, Iran’s best-selling fiction lists have become dominated by women, an unprecedented development abetted by recent upheavals in Iranian society,” observes Nazila Fathi in a New York Times report. There are about as many women writing as men, says Fathi, “But the…
According to an InsideHigherEd.com report, Indiana University law professor William C. Bradford has “riled up plenty of people in Indiana,” and Bradford himself says he’s heard he won’t get tenure and is “being punished for his unorthodox views” — especially, he says, for not supporting…
A leaked confidential report from the French government says about 30,000 19th and 20th century books, including some 2,000 “precious” books — rare books of great value — have been reported missing from the collection of the National Library of France, and the “disappearances could…
Shelby Foote, the writer famed for his writings about the Civil War who became even more of a celebrity when he appeared in Ken Burns‘ PBS documentary about the war, has died of undisclosed causes in Memphis, Tennessee at age 88. As an Associated Press…
In England, “A Sikh couple had to abandon their wedding when a group of protesters raided the Slough hotel where the event was being held and seized a holy book,” reports a BBC News wire story. The report says a “40-strong group” of Sikh protestors…
Another angle on the attack by Ed Klein against Hillary Clinton that got little attention amongst all the right wing commentators knocking Klein last week comes from Tina Brown, who, in her Washington Post column, speculates that “Maybe it’s a secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action…
The literary estate of Antoine de Saint-Exupery has “won a cybersquatting case to evict a Virgin Islands operator whose Web Site sells memorabilia linked to the creator of The Little Prince,” reports a Reuters wire story. The case to return antoinedesaintexupery.com, and saintexupery.com. back to…
When word leaked last week (in a Women’s Wear Daily report) that Steve Florio, the former longtime CEO of the Condé Nast magazine empire, was shopping a book proposal, “it set off a scrum in Manhattan publishing circles,” says David Carr in a New York…
The novel supposedly written by Saddam Hussein, Get Out of Here, Damned One (see last week’s MobyLives news digest), has been banned from publication in Jordan “on the grounds that it could harm relations with its eastern neighbor,” according to an Agence France Presse wire…
“I think it’s a first,” says Andre Schiffrin, longtime head of Pantheon Books and founder of the New Press. He’s talking about Alan Dershowitz‘s effort to get California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to block publication of a University of California Press book that is critical of…
“The Paris literary scene was shaken yesterday when the government’s anti-corruption watchdog warned that France’s most prestigious book prizes were wide open to corruption,” according to a Guardian report by Jon Henley. Henley says, “France’s major literary awards such as the Prix Femina, the Prix…
In Scotland to accept the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, “Albanian dissident and author Ismail Kadare said Monday that his small victories in smuggling work out of his homeland inspired him to continue writing in the face of oppression.” As an Associated Press wire story…
A Candian Heritage study has “found a discrepancy between the self-declared preferred leisure activities of Canadians and the actual hours spent in pursuit of them.” As Caroline Alphonso reports in a Globe & Mail story, while “reading shares first place with television as a favoured…
Readers of the New York Times no doubt noticed the stunning saturation coverage of a New York appearance by Billy Graham that appeared in the newspaper for most of the last week. The coverage included at least two articles a day about Graham, usually on…
Bookseller Robert Gray, buyer for the major Northeastern independent the Northshire Bookstore in Mancehster, Vermont, was struck by the recent Zogby poll that said “Online bookseller Amazon.com is more popular with Americans than local independent bookstores.” In a moving commentary on his Fresh Eyes blog,…
Judith Regan‘s has become famous for the fact that her HarperCollins imprint ReganBooks has had an extraordinary series of bestselling books. But when news broke last year that she had conducted an affair with former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik in an apartment…
Novelist Andrew McGahan has won Australia’s most lucrative literary prize, the $42,000 Miles Franklin Award, for his book The White Earth, “which is about a young boy’s experience growing up in rural Queensland.” An unattributed report from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the judges cited…
The Google Print project continues to alarm librarians and publishers not just in the U.S., but in Europe and elsewhere as well, according to articles in some foreign newspapers this weekend. In France, for example, several methods are being enacted to fight what the French…
L. Patrick Gray, the Nixon appointee who ran the FBI immediately after the death of J. Edgar Hoover — and thus, during the height of the Watergate scandal — says he believes his number two at the Bureau, W. Mark Felt, “became the anonymous source…
“A love poem written 2,600 years ago by Sappho, the greatest female poet of ancient Greece, was published on Friday for the first time” since it was rediscovered as part of the “papyrus wrapped around an Egyptian mummy” last year, reports a Reuters wire story…
