A frost is coming to publishing. And while the much ballyhooed death of the industry this is not, the ecosystem to which our book makers are accustomed is about to be unmistakably disrupted. At hand is the twilight of an era most did not expect to miss, but will.
For now, the Read More
David Letterman might just have summed up last week when he said, “You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, this doesn’t smell right." Felix Gillette and John Koblin track the billion little pieces in our new A.D.D. news cycle. PLUS: Pumping McCain.
After initially turning down his offer and sending their book proposal out to other publishers in hopes of getting a higher advance, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean—of The New York Times and Vanity Fair, respectively—have agreed to write their account of the crisis on Wall Street for Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio, the business imprint of Read More
A federal appeals court today overturned a New York U.S. District Court ruling from 2006 that gave John Steinbeck’s son and granddaughter the rights to 10 of his books.
Reuters reports that the appeals court determined that Penguin Group should own the copyrights to Mr. Steinbeck’s early works, including The Grapes Read More
Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Group USA, paid over $350,000 for the rights to a book by Peter Elkind about the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Mr. Elkind, who wrote a cover story about Mr. Spitzer for Fortune in 2005, will be collaborating with Read More
Romance novelist Cassie Edwards, who has recently come under fire for copying material from reference books and articles and using it in her books, seems to have lost the unqualified support of her publisher, Signet Books, who just last week were saying with confidence that Ms. Edwards had "done nothing wrong."
Now, Read More
The Associated Press’s Hillel Italie got in touch with romance literature’s queen bee Nora Roberts yesterday and asked her what she thinks of the plagiarism accusations that have been hurled in recent days at Cassie Edwards, “the world’s most prolific and popular author of Native American historical romance.”
Ms. Edwards, who, Read More
Penguin imprint Berkley Prime Crime has extended author Madelyn Alt’s book contract, signing her up to write two additional installments of her Bewitching Mystery series. Ms. Alt has written four of them to date; the third one, Hex Marks the Spot, came out earlier this month, and the next one, according to her editor Read More
What do you do for a second act when your first novel spent more than a year on the best-seller list, won you a National Book Award and was made into a big-budget Hollywood movie starring Nicole Kidman? It’s hard to feel sorry for Charles Frazier (there are more than four million copies of Cold Read More
Freddy and Fredericka, by Mark Helprin. The Penguin Press, 553
pages, $27.95.
Where
do you go, after 58 years of life, when you’ve graduated from Harvard and
Oxford, written four critically adored novels and three story collections—not
to mention three children’s books—won the Prix de Rome, been called a literary
Read More
