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(07/20/09 1:13am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>NEW YORK – Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of “Angela’s Ashes,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning “epic of woe” about his impoverished Irish childhood, died Sunday of cancer.McCourt, who was 78, had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer and the cause of his death, said his publisher, Scribner. He died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character — the kind who might turn up in a New York novel — singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother Malachy and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind, and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner. With a first printing of just 25,000, “Angela’s Ashes” was an instant favorite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.“F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I’ve proven him wrong,” McCourt later explained. “And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools.”The book has been published in 25 languages and 30 countries.McCourt, a native of New York, was good company in the classroom and at the bar, but few had such a burden to unload. His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale; McCourt’s father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt’s seven siblings died, and he nearly perished from typhoid fever.“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” was McCourt’s unforgettable opening. “People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”The book was a long Irish wake, “an epic of woe,” McCourt called it, finding laughter and lyricism in life’s very worst. Although some in Ireland complained that McCourt had revealed too much (and revealed a little too well), “Angela’s Ashes” became a million seller, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie of the same name, starring Emily Watson as the title character, McCourt’s mother.Author Peter Matthiessen, who became friendly with McCourt after “Angela’s Ashes” came out, said he was “stunned” when he read it.“I remember thinking, ‘Where did this guy come from?” Matthiessen said. “His book was so good, and it came out of nowhere.”The white-haired, sad-eyed, always quotable McCourt, his Irish accent still thick despite decades in the U.S., became a regular at parties, readings, conferences and other gatherings, so much the eager late-life celebrity that he later compared himself to a “dancing clown, available to everybody.” His friend and fellow memoirist Mary Karr once kidded him that her idea of a rare book was an unsigned copy of “Angela’s Ashes.”McCourt told The Associated Press in 2005 he wasn’t prepared for fame.“After teaching, I was getting all this attention,” he said. “They actually looked at me — people I had known for years — and they were friendly and they looked me in a different way. And I was thinking, ‘All those years I was a teacher, why didn’t you look at me like that then?’”But the part of it he liked best, he said, was hearing “from all those kids who were in my classes.”“At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn’t just talking through my hat,” he said.Much of his teaching was spent in the English department at the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he defied the advice of his colleagues and shared his personal stories with the class; he slapped a student with a magazine and took on another known to have a black belt in karate.After “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt continued his story, to strong but diminished sales and reviews, in “’Tis,” which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in “Teacher Man.” McCourt also wrote a children’s story, “Angela and the Baby Jesus,” released in 2007.More than 10 million copies of his books have been sold in North America alone, said Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.“We have been privileged to publish his books, which have touched, and will continue to touch, millions of readers in myriad positive and meaningful ways,” Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy said in a statement.McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt, from his first marriage.His brother Malachy McCourt is an actor, commentator and singer who wrote two memoirs and, in 2006, ran for New York governor as the Green Party candidate. At least one of his former students, Susan Gilman, became a writer.McCourt will be cremated, his brother said. A memorial service is planned for September.
(03/03/08 5:40am)
NEW YORK – As he prepared a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, author Peter Ackroyd read through more than 20 volumes of Poe’s work and filled two file cabinet drawers with notes – more information than the most devoted fan could absorb in a lifetime.\nIt was all for a book that will run less than 200 pages, that can be read within a few hours.\n“It’s like writing an essay, rather than a biography,” said Ackroyd, who has written an 800-page book about London and 500 pages about Shakespeare. \n“It’s an exercise, in style as much as in substance,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to capture the broad strokes of a life, a career, a world, in ways which are probably impossible in a large-scale biography.”\nIt is a showcase for the art of brevity.\nIn the decade since James Atlas revived the form with his “Penguin Lives” series, at least 10 publishers have started their own lines of short, nonfiction books, on subjects ranging from scientists to presidents to mythology. Although the advances are low – and sales often to match – short books have attracted such best sellers and prize winners as novelists Jane Smiley and Larry McMurtry, essayists Christopher Hitchens and Bill Bryson, and historians Robert Dallek and Sean Wilentz.\n“I like this trend. It’s fine, old-fashioned, self-improving, middlebrow literature,” said humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who wrote a brief work on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” for Grove/Atlantic’s “The Books That Changed the World” series.\nThe nonfiction sketch dates back at least to Plutarch and has been upheld over time by John Aubrey in the 17th century and Lytton Strachey in the early 20th century. But never, Atlas and others say, have so many publishers been in on the trend at the same time, even if opinions differ on why there is a trend.\n“I imagine a highly educated, reading public, readers of The New York Review of Books, readers of The New Yorker, readers of The New York Times Book Review,” said Atlas, who currently edits the Eminent Lives series at HarperCollins. “There is an audience I know empirically exists out there of several hundred thousand readers who have a dedication to the idea of being educated, in the highest sense.”\n“It’s not a gigantic commitment to read one of those books,” said Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin. “It’s not like picking up ‘The Looming Tower’ or ‘The Coldest Winter.’ You can educate yourself about something in a short period of time.”\nAckroyd has his own personal line with Doubleday: “Ackroyd’s Lives,” a planned 10-book series for which works on Chaucer, Sir Isaac Newton and J.M.W. Turner already have been written. The Canongate Myth Series, short books on mythology, expects contributions from Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Donna Tartt and several others.\nGraywolf Press has started “The Art of” series, edited by award-winning fiction writer Charles Baxter, who contributed a work on “The Art of Subtext.” At Palgrave/MacMillan, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark is overseeing a series of short military biographies, including books on Stonewall Jackson, Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur.\n“They’re written in a very direct style, for the general public, to make these stories more accessible,” Clark said. “They’re the kinds of books you can pick up at an airport and finish in four to five hours and if readers are really interested, they’ll seek out longer, more scholarly books.”\nIf the ideal reader is an educated self-improver, the ideal writer is versatile, prolific and provocative, such as Garry Wills, who has written short books on James Madison (for the Times Books series on American presidents), Saint Augustine (for Penguin Lives) and Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello (for National Geographic’s “Directions” series).\nOther favorite short-form authors include Francine Prose, who has written short works on Caravaggio (for HarperCollins’ Eminent Lives) and gluttony (for an Oxford University Press series on the seven deadly sins); Paul Johnson, books on Napoleon and the Renaissance; and Karen Armstrong, works on Buddhism and Islam.\nWith advances of $100,000 at best, the art isn’t only in writing the book, but in finding the writer. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. urged Bill Clinton to write a short biography of Abraham Lincoln for Times Books, but could only promise prestige, not the former president’s multimillion-dollar market price. Atlas recalls asking for Henry Kissinger on another project, only to be told his starting price was $2 million, “several zeros over my limit.”\nBut sometimes a little pleading works. For Eminent Lives, Atlas tried to lure essayist, travel writer and linguist Bill Bryson to write a short book on Shakespeare. Bryson, author of such best sellers as “A Walk in the Woods” and “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” ended up writing one that came out last year.
(10/29/07 12:14am)
NEW YORK – Barry H. Landau, a presidential collector and connoisseur, is the kind of guy one may not notice in the pictures with celebrities. He is 59 and has been in the company of presidents for nearly 50 years. He is tall and bearded, with a home full of history and a head crammed with names, like boxes in an overstuffed closet ready to tumble out.\nHe is at work on a trilogy of books about political pomp and protocol. The first is “The President’s Table,” a 200-plus year sampling of White House cuisine, to be followed by a history of inaugurations, then a volume on presidential style.\n“We couldn’t get it all into one book,” Landau said with \na laugh.\nEnter his midtown Manhattan high-rise and you might think the Smithsonian Institution had opened a new wing. The walls are covered with vintage black and white etchings of 19th-century inaugurations. A cabinet holds presidential mugs, plates, goblets and a skeleton key that fits right into the front door of the White House, or did during the administration of John Adams.\nFor “The President’s Table,” Landau relies upon scholarship and souvenirs. The book, which features blurbs from Kissinger, Wallace and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (given shortly before the historian’s death last winter), is a coffee table work summarizing each administration, what it served and what it ate.\nFood, like handwriting or fingerprints, is inevitably personal. George Washington’s meals were highly formal, often silent, with men only allowed at the table. Abraham Lincoln had simple tastes – a typical lunch was an apple and a glass of milk – while William Howard Taft’s were expansive, so much so that the already ample president gained 55 pounds his first year in office.\nThe illustrations include a dinner invitation from George Washington, a menu insert signed by Mark Twain at the request of President Benjamin Harrison and an invitation and reply card for Greta Garbo to a luncheon honoring Franklin Roosevelt.\nAnd each item comes with a story, such as the time Landau was looking through a bookstore’s “miscellaneous” bin and found a menu from a trip President Hoover took to Costa Rica. Most would keep on browsing, but Landau was fascinated, for history’s sake (Hoover’s trip was among the first by a president to that part of the world) and for trivia’s sake.\n“The President’s Table” will be released Tuesday.
(10/23/07 12:18am)
NEW YORK – With author J.K. Rowling’s revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.\nThe British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader’s question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight.\n“You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,” Dumbledore says in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in Rowling’s record-breaking fantasy series.\nThe news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall, the last stop on Rowling’s brief U.S. tour, and set off thousands of e-mails on Potter fan Web sites around the world. Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive.\n“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, Webmaster of the fan site http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”\nIn Rowling’s fantasy series, Gellert Grindelwald was a dark wizard of great power who terrorized people much in the same way Harry’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort, was to do a generation later. Readers hear of him in the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in a reference to how Dumbledore defeated him. In “Deathly Hallows,” readers learn they once had been best friends.\n“Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life,” Rowling writes. “However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?”\nAs a young man, Dumbledore, brilliant and powerful, had been forced to return home to look after his mentally ill younger sister and younger brother. It was a task he admits to Harry that he resented, because it derailed the bright future he had been looking forward to.\nThen Grindelwald, described by Rowling as “golden-haired, merry-faced,” arrived after having been expelled from his own school. Grindelwald’s aunt, Bathilda Bagshot, says of their meeting: “The boys took to each other at once.” In a letter to Grindelwald, Dumbledore discusses the pair’s plans for gaining wizard dominance: “(I)f you had not been expelled we would never have met.”\nPotter readers had speculated about Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past.\n“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said Friday of Dumbledore’s feelings about Grindelwald, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”\nDumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”
(08/31/07 1:56am)
LOWELL, Mass. – Manya Callahan, manager of the Barnes & Noble Downtown store, sees them all the time, young and old, looking for books by Lowell’s most famous citizen.\n“They’re usually wearing backpacks and they kind of have a sense of adventure about them,” she says. “They walk inside, looking kind of nervous, then go up to me and ask if I have anything by Jack Kerouac.”\nNearly 40 years after his death, and a half century after the release of his most famous novel, “On the Road,” Kerouac remains an author who inspires motion. Students still re-enact his rambling, improvised trips across the country. Baby boomers retrace their own youthful journeys. Tourists seek out Kerouac landmarks, like this mill town the author left as a teenager but to which he always returned.\nSome celebrities are ignored, or shunned, by their hometowns, but Kerouac’s name is easily found in Lowell, with its red brick buildings, winding canals and cobblestone streets. You can start at the Visitors Center where Kerouac walking tours are offered and maps handed out, noting such attractions as his actual birthplace and a favorite bar.\nKerouac has his own park, shaded by weeping willow trees and centered by a circle of granite columns inscribed with excerpts from “On the Road” and other works. A few miles south, at the Edson Cemetery, his marker is ever adorned with stray tributes. Recent leavings include cigarettes, a bandanna, black flip flops and a note, stabbed into the bare ground by a pencil, that reads, “The only people for me are the mad ones. Here’s to you Jack!”\nHelen Bassett, 16 and a resident of Eastbourne, England, was a recent visitor to Lowell. She read “On the Road” last year and was immediately drawn to Kerouac’s musical, conversational prose, so much more accessible, she says, than the classics she’s assigned \nat school.\nWhen Bassett and her father decided to travel to Boston this summer, they arranged a side trip to Lowell, where Helen enjoyed a Kerouac exhibit at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, went to the Kerouac park and bought four Kerouac books and a poster at Barnes & Noble.\n“I really related to ‘On the Road,’” says Helen, who is urging her friends to read it. “I’ve always wanted to move abroad; I never thought I would stay in the same place.”\nKerouac’s novel takes readers all over the country, from New York City and New Orleans to Chicago and Denver and San Francisco, all stops on the wild and fictionalized adventures of Kerouac and buddy Neal Cassady, renamed Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.\nKerouac, not known as a friend of the businessman in his own time, has become especially good for Lowell’s economy. With the decline of the mills, tourism and the arts have become important attractions. Lowell City Manager Bernard Lynch says that when he’s trying to bring new jobs into town, Kerouac is a good name to drop.\n“I won’t say that he’s our only selling point, but when we meet with a business or meet with developers looking to build housing, one of our big selling points is the culture of the city, and Kerouac is part of that,” Lynch says.\nAt Lowell’s Barnes & Noble, Kerouac T-shirts can be seen in the window and his books have their own special place, a shelf of titles to the left of the cashier. Manya Callahan says she sometimes plays a wicked joke on those who look for Kerouac under “K” in the fiction section.\n“I tell them that we don’t carry any Kerouac books,” she says with a laugh. “You should see the looks on their faces.”
(02/05/07 1:21am)
NEW YORK -- It's months away from being on bookshelves, but fans can't get enough of the seventh -- and final -- Harry Potter book, no matter the cost.\nNot only is "Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows" topping the charts of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, a deluxe edition, priced at $65, is No. 2, outselling the "You" diet book, Sen. Barack Obama's book and an Oprah Winfrey-endorsed memoir by Sidney Poitier.\nPublicist Kyle Good of Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series, said Saturday that a similar deluxe edition of Potter 6, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," had sold around 100,000 copies.\nThe deluxe "Half-Blood Prince," according to Scholastic, includes a 32-page insert of art and illustrations, a "custom-designed slipcase," and a "full-cloth case book, blind-stamped on front and back cover, foil stamped on spine."\nBarnes & Noble.com shoppers can get a bit of a break on the deluxe "Deathly Hallows," which the superstore was offering for a mere $45.50. The regular edition has a list price of $34.99, although Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com were selling it for $18.89. Wal-Mart had it at $17.27.\nMany stores said they don't make money on the Potter books, but hope instead that customers will make additional purchases.\nRowling announced Thursday that "Deathly Hallows" would come out July 21. The previous six books have sold more than 325 million copies in 64 languages and broken countless sales records. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," published in 2005, had an announced first U.S. printing of 10.8 million copies and sold 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours.
(09/01/06 2:52am)
From Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" to Jonathan Safran Foer's novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," the taboo against taking on the attacks is long gone, at least among writers and filmmakers. Nothing in fiction has compared to the power of a real plane crashing into a real building yet, and audiences seem torn between the desire to know more about 9/11 and the fear of being reminded too closely.\nTanya Palmer, literary manager of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, says there is a "tension between wanting the art to be relevant but also a pressure from the audience ... to not always be showing them what's happening in the news."\nReaders so far have preferred the facts. Novels such as Foer's "Extremely Loud" or Jay McInerney's "The Good Life" haven't approached the popularity of the millionselling "The 9/11 Commission Report" or of the recent graphic adaptation. Another current bestseller is Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," an in-depth investigation of events leading up to the attacks that has more than 100,000 copies in print.\n"Readers definitely have turned to nonfiction books about 9/11," says Ann Close, a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, which publishes Wright and McInerney. "I think people are desperately trying to figure out what happened and what's going on there, and nonfiction seems to give people a better shot at that than fiction."\nJonathan Burnham, publisher at HarperCollins, recalls a 9/11 novel he released when he was the head of Miramax Books: Frederic Beigbeder's "Windows on the World," a book that sold "modestly" despite strong reviews. Burnham found the experience "instructive" in knowing what kind of fiction readers seek.\n"I still think it's extremely hard for people to look at 9/11 fully in the face," Burnham says. "So much of the anxiety and concern is projected in other directions, like toward 'The Da Vinci Code' and other conspiracy thrillers."\nHollywood remains squeamish about Sept. 11 projects, partly because of the long lead time involved in bringing movies to the big screen and partly because studios figure most movie-goers are not looking for reminders of the terrorist attacks.\nThe first two film dramatizations arrived this year. Paul Greengrass' "United 93" was a meticulous docudrama about the hijacked flight whose passengers fought back against their captors, their plane crashing in rural Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. "World Trade Center" starred Nicolas Cage in the story of two Port Authority police officers who were among the last of a handful of survivors pulled alive from the rubble of the fallen towers.\nBoth movies were well received by critics and did respectable business, but their box-office receipts were modest enough to confirm suspicions that many people were not ready to relive Sept. 11 in theaters -- and may never be ready.\n"I don't think there's any shame in the amount of box office those films did. They both performed solidly given the subject matter," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.\n"But if you're looking to greenlight a movie, you don't look at a movie based on Sept. 11 and say, 'This is going to be a huge blockbuster hit.' Sept. 11 movies are not about box office. If you're going to make them, you have to keep the budgets in line, and they better be pretty solid movies."\nStudios remain in a holding pattern, with no other major Sept. 11 projects expected soon. Audiences remain as escapist as ever, packing theaters for "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Cars" and "X-Men: The Last Stand," while the two Sept. 11 films drew comparatively small crowds.\nIndependent-minded filmmakers and documentary directors likely will remain the key chroniclers of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. In the year following the attacks, there was a rush of smaller projects, including "The Guys," based on the play about a firefighter preparing eulogies for colleagues killed in the attacks, and "September 11," an anthology of short films whose directors included Sean Penn, Mira Nair and Ken Loach.\n"These movies aren't really developed at a marketing meeting. It's more a creative choice on the part of filmmakers willing to tackle this emotional subject," Dergarabedian says. "I don't think there's anyone sitting there saying, 'We've got to make a 9/11 film.' It's more about visionary filmmakers. That's how those films get made. If Oliver Stone says he wants to do a World Trade Center movie, who's going to say no?"\nThe events of 9/11 have touched TV drama in only limited and occasional ways.\nThe fallout from terrorism ushered in by that day perhaps contributed to the "under-siege atmosphere" of many subsequent series, such as "Lost," and furnished a narrative touch point for other TV shows: an episode of "Law & Order" dealt with victim remains at ground zero, and the hero of "CSI: New York" is haunted by the loss of his wife in the attacks.\nPerhaps the series most directly inspired by 9/11 is the FX network drama "Rescue Me." Set in a Manhattan firehouse, it focuses on the professional and personal pressures weighing down on this team of New York's Bravest -- all of whom continue to bear the loss of comrades in 9/11 rescue and recovery efforts.\nSince Sept. 11, the biggest change in the theater business has been in consumer-buying patterns, changes that the industry saw immediately after the terror attacks and that now have become a permanent part of the landscape. Audiences are buying tickets much closer to the date of the performances.\n"I remember right after 9/11 it was a source of stress for a lot of theater companies because you would go into a week where it didn't seem like you had that many tickets sold, and then you would come out of the week and you were OK," says Harold Wolpert, managing director of the nonprofit Roundabout Theatre Company. "It used to be people bought tickets far in advance.\n"It's possible that 9/11 accelerated what may have been a trend that would have developed anyway," Wolpert says. "It's changed how you advertise, for example. Theater companies and commercial Broadway shows now send out direct-mail much closer to the opening of a production than they used to. If you send it too far in advance, people just don't focus on it"
(08/24/06 4:57am)
NEW YORK -- Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin and former Vice President Al Gore were among the nominees announced Tuesday for the second annual Quills Awards.\nCaroline Kennedy will receive a Platinum Quill Award honoring her "commitment to providing support for education and literacy in New York." The Quills will also acknowledge the 50th anniversary of "Profiles in Courage," for which her father, then Sen. John F. Kennedy, received the Pulitzer Prize.\nA Corporate Literacy Award will be presented to Target for its "numerous and pro-active literacy and book programs." The awards will be handed out at an Oct. 10 ceremony, hosted by NBC anchor Lester Holt, at the American Museum of Natural History. Admission will range from $1,000 for a single ticket to $75,000 for a "Platinum Sponsorship."\nStarting Tuesday and through Sept. 30, voters can make their picks online at www.quillsvote.com and at www.quills.msnbc.com.\nKing was nominated in the science fiction/fantasy/horror category for his novel, "Cell." Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," her biography of Abraham Lincoln, was cited in history/current events/politics, as was Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the companion to the documentary of the same name about global warming.\nThe Quills, billed as a combination of "populist sensibility" and "Hollywood-style glitz," were started last year by NBC Universal Television Stations and Reed Business Information, which issues Variety and Publishers Weekly. Ninety-five nominees in 19 categories, from general fiction to cooking, were chosen by thousands of booksellers and librarians and were required to meet one of several possible criteria, such as an appearance on the best seller list of Borders Group, Inc. or a starred review in Publishers Weekly.\nThere are no cash prizes.\nSo far the Quills have inspired more discussion within the industry than among the public.
(04/26/06 3:31am)
NEW YORK - Teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan has acknowledged taking material from fellow novelist Megan McCafferty but says the borrowing was an accident. McCafferty's publisher doesn't believe her.\n"We think there are simply too many instances of 'borrowing' for this to have been unintentional," Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said lawyers for the two publishers have been in discussion.\nViswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and her agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, did not immediately return calls from the AP seeking comment.\nViswanathan, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, was just 17 when she signed a reported six-figure, two-book deal with Little, Brown. Her first novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," came out in March to widespread publicity. DreamWorks has already acquired film rights.\nBut readers of McCafferty who had read Viswanathan spotted similarities to McCafferty's books, which include "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," and alerted McCafferty, who in turn notified her publisher. Examples of questionable passages were published Sunday on the Web site of the Harvard Crimson.\nViswanathan issued a statement Monday apologizing for her borrowings, saying that she was a "huge fan" of McCafferty and "wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She promised to revise her book, a process Little, Brown says has already started.\nViswanathan's novel tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen from New Jersey who earns straight A's in high school but who gets rejected from Harvard because she forgot to have a social life. Opal's father concocts a plan code-named HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life) to get her past the admissions office.\nMcCafferty's books follow a heroine named Jessica, a New Jersey girl who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend. \nIn a recent interview with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., Viswanathan was asked about books that might have influenced her novel. "Nothing I read gave me the inspiration," she responded.\nOn Tuesday, Crown issued a statement saying that Viswanathan's apology was "deeply troubling and disingenuous."\n"We have documented more than 40 passages from Kaavya Viswanathan's recent publication ... that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books. This extensive taking from Ms. McCafferty's books is nothing less than an act of literary identity theft."\nLittle, Brown gave Viswanathan's novel a first printing of 100,000, the publisher said. According to Crown, McCafferty's books have more than 400,000 copies in print, and her third novel, "Charmed Thirds," was released two weeks ago.\n"This has been an enormous distraction for Megan," Ross said. "It's been a very, very difficult and devastating couple of weeks for her"
(02/13/06 4:35am)
NEW YORK -- Peter Benchley, whose novel "Jaws" terrorized millions of swimmers even as the author himself became an advocate for the conservation of sharks, has died at age 65, his widow said Sunday.\nWendy Benchley, married to the author for 41 years, said he died Saturday night at their home in Princeton, N.J. The cause of death, she said, was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and fatal scarring of the lungs.\nThanks to Benchley's 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie of the same name, the simple act of ocean swimming became synonymous with fatal horror, of still water followed by ominous, pumping music, then teeth, blood and panic.\n"Spielberg certainly made the most superb movie; Peter was very pleased," Wendy Benchley told The Associated Press.\n"But Peter kept telling people the book was fiction, it was a novel, and that he no more took responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia."\nBenchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of author Nathaniel Benchley, was born in New York City in 1940. He attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, then graduated from Harvard University in 1961. He worked at The Washington Post and Newsweek and spent two years as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, writing some "difficult" speeches about the Vietnam War, Wendy Benchley said.\nThe author's interest in sharks was lifelong, beginning with childhood visits to Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and heightening in the mid-1960s when he read about a fisherman catching a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island, the setting for his novel.\n"I thought to myself, 'What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?'" he recalled. \nBenchley didn't start the novel until 1971 because he was too busy working with his day jobs.\n"There was no particular influence. My idea was to tell my first novel as a sort of long story ... just to see if I could do it. I had been a freelance writer since I was 16, and I sold things to various magazines and newspapers whenever I could."\nWhile Peter Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for "Jaws," and authored several other novels, including "The Deep" and "The Island," Wendy Benchley said he was especially proud of his conservation work. He served on the National Council of Environmental Defense, was host of numerous television wildlife programs, gave speeches around the world and wrote articles for National Geographic and other publications.\n"He cared very much about sharks. He spent most of his life trying to explain to people that if you are in the ocean, you're in the shark's territory, so it behooves you to take precautions," Wendy Benchley said.\nThe author did not abide by the mayhem his book evoked. In fact, he was quite at ease around sharks, his widow said. She recalled a trip to Guadeloupe, Mexico last year for their 40th wedding anniversary, when the two went into the water in a special cage.\n"They put bait in the water and sharks swim around and play games," she said. "We were thrilled, excited. We'd been around sharks for so long."\nBesides his wife, Peter Benchley is survived by three children and five grandchildren. A small family service will take place next week in Princeton, Wendy Benchley said.
(01/18/06 4:47am)
NEW YORK -- Another Oprah book club pick has raised the issue of fact vs. fiction.\nBarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com both said Tuesday that they were making changes to certify Elie Wiesel's "Night" as nonfiction. BarnesandNoble.com is removing the book from its fiction list, while Amazon.com is also changing the categorization of "Night" and revising an editorial description to make clear that it does not consider the book a novel.\n"We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible," said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com.\nWiesel did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment.\nOn Monday, Winfrey announced that Wiesel's classic account of his family's placement in the Auschwitz death camp was her latest choice. "Night" quickly topped the best seller list on Amazon.com, displacing Winfrey's previous selection, James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces."\nFrey's story of substance abuse has been widely disputed, with the author acknowledging that he had embellished parts of the book, as reported by the investigative Web site, The Smoking Gun. Frey and Winfrey have defended "A Million Little Pieces," saying any factual problems were transcended by the book's emotional power.\nNo such allegations are being made about "Night," but there has long been confusion over how to label it. While Wiesel and his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, call it a memoir, "Night" is frequently listed as fiction on course syllabuses and was called a novel in a 1983 New York Times review of a Wiesel biography. "Night" is described in an Amazon.com editorial review as "technically a novel," albeit so close to Wiesel's life that "it's generally -- and not inaccurately -- read as an autobiography."\nWiesel first wrote the book in the 1950s in Yiddish, then translated it into French. Hill & Wang, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux now owns, published the original English-language edition in 1960. Wiesel's wife, Marion Wiesel, has translated the current English version.\nAmazon.com has been categorizing the new edition of "Night" under "literature and fiction," but is switching the book to "biographies and memoirs," blaming the problem on its "data source."\n"Amazon.com's data source for the Oprah's Book Club edition of `Night' inaccurately classified the book as fiction," said Strand, who declined to offer details.\nMeanwhile, Amazon's editorial description of an earlier edition, published by Bantam in the 1980s, is being edited "to make it explicitly clear that `Night' is nonfiction," Strand said. The Bantam version, which is already classified under "biographies and memoirs," was No. 3 on Amazon.com as of Tuesday afternoon.\nStrand described such changes as "unusual," but not rare.\nAlso Tuesday, "Night" topped both the "biography" and "fiction" best seller lists on BarnesandNoble.com. Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Carolyn Brown says "some initial data that was supplied to us" classified the book as fiction and was now "being corrected."\n"'Night' is not a fiction title and we are in the process of updating our database so that the title is not classified as such," Brown says.\nStrand says that Amazon's changes were based on an internal review. Barnes & Noble's announcement was in response to an inquiry from The Associated Press.\nOn Winfrey's Web site, a description of the book notes that "although some facts vary slightly from his own personal and familial history, `Night' should be considered an autobiography." Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, considers Wiesel's book a memoir, but says it's often labeled fiction because of the book's sophisticated narrative style, which resembles a novel.\nKaren Hall, who has taught a course on the "literature of trauma" at Syracuse University, calls "Night" a "trauma narrative" and says such books are unavoidably subjective. She regards the book as a novel and plans to keep doing so.\n"For me, then, `Night' is 100 percent true in its call to readers to remember the Holocaust, listen to and learn from its survivors, and never to allow such an event to take place again," says Hall, now an assistant professor at Ithaca College.\n"That Wiesel would prefer it to be called a memoir doesn't impact my understanding of the text, as once it has left the author's desk, it is the reader's to work with"
(09/14/05 4:36am)
NEW YORK -- Seventy years after it was rushed into print, a history book beloved by readers of all ages around the world is finally coming out in English.\nE.H. Gombrich, the scholar best known for his classic, "The Story of Art," was a 26-year-old scholar in 1935 when a British publisher asked for his opinion of a children's history book, which was supposed to be translated into Gombrich's native German.\nGombrich was bored by the text, and thought he could do better. The publisher, Walter Neurath, took him on, but on one condition: Gombrich had just six weeks to finish the job.\nUnemployed at the time, he worked hard on his tour of the ages through the eyes of a child: He set a goal of doing a chapter a day, read passages aloud to his wife, Ilse, and tapped into the narrative voice he had recently developed when he tried to explain his doctoral thesis to the daughter of family friends.\nWhat seemed like a rush job was treated by reviewers and the general public as an admirable, accessible summary. "A Little History of the World" was an instant success and has been translated into 18 languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.\nBut for decades there was no English translation, even though Gombrich spent much of his life in London and wrote his other books in English. During those years, he was busy with other projects and thought "A Little History" more of interest to European readers. Only late in life did he get around to the English text.\nHe died in 2001, at age 92, and left an unfinished manuscript.\n"That book was always part of what he called his split personality," says his granddaughter and literary executor, Leonie Gombrich.\n"On one hand he had this persona as a serious scholar. Yet, here's this book, where it's him pretending that he's talking to a child. It was a sort of secret delight, this kind of hidden life."\nWorking with translator Caroline Mustill, Leonie Gombrich completed and edited the text, which comes out this fall from the Yale University Press with a first printing of 25,000 each in the United States and England, a high number for an academic publisher. It was an admittedly humbling task, but one made easier, she says, by her grandfather's talent and character.\nBorn in Vienna in 1909, Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was a teacher at Oxford University and at the University of London and director of London's Warburg Institute. But "A Little History" was written for the untenured ear, suggesting a grown-up placing his hand on a child's shoulder and explaining the facts of life.\n"A Little History" is fewer than 300 pages and its 40 chapters move quickly from Earth's formation to the Cold War era, touching upon ancient Greece and Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, technology and world wars.\nThe book is meant to inform and to raise questions. The Nazis banned "A Little History" because they thought it was too pacifist; Gombrich questions the meaning of war, and champions what he calls the principles of the Enlightenment: "tolerance, reason and humanity."\nGombrich attempts to address the violence of history without unduly upsetting his readers. "If I wished, I could write many more chapters on the wars between the Catholics and the Protestants," he writes of the 17th-century religious conflicts. "But I won't."\nHe likens the fall of the Roman Empire to a horrific summer storm, "especially spectacular in the mountains," and introduces the "Dark Ages" by imagining a black sky brightened by stars - his metaphor for the rise of Christianity and the belief that "all were equal" in God's eyes.\n"A Little History" is a story of progress contending with, and, hopefully, overcoming our darker selves. \nAs he revised the book over the years, he remained convinced that life could get better, even after the Holocaust, which he calls "such a painful step backwards" and all the more reason "for us to respect and tolerate each other."\nBut his granddaughter doesn't know what he believed at the end of his life. The historian, who had been ill in his latter years, died just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.\n"He had this tremendous faith in the civilizing forces, in the power of ideas, that there would always be people who carry on with the Enlightenment," Leonie Gombrich says.\n"But he was incredibly depressed by the attacks. After 9-11, he stopped work and never went back"
(09/02/05 4:37am)
NEW YORK - Attempts to have library books removed from shelves increased by more than 20 percent in 2004 during the previous year, according to a new survey by the American Library Association.\nThree books with gay themes, including Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," were among the works most criticized.\n"It all stems from a fearfulness of well-meaning people," says Michael Gorman, president of the library association. "We believe in parental responsibility, and that you should take care of what your children are reading. But it's not your responsibility to tell a whole class of kids what they should read."\nThe number of books challenged last year jumped to 547, compared to 458 in 2003, with the library association estimating four to five unreported cases for each one documented. According to the ALA, a challenge is "a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness."\nNational organizations such as the American Family Association have been involved with library challenges, but far more complaints come from individual parents and patrons, according to the ALA.\nThe ALA study was to be released Friday in anticipation of the 25th annual Banned Books Week, which runs Sept. 24 to Oct. 1 and is co-sponsored by the ALA, the American Booksellers Association and others. Gorman acknowledged that few books are actually banned, adding that Banned Books Week is a "catchy name."\nRobert Cormier's classic "The Chocolate War" topped the 2004 list of challenged books, cited for sexual content, violence and language. It was followed by Walter Myers' "Fallen Angels," a young adult novel set in Harlem and Vietnam and criticized for racism, language and violence.\nNo. 3, Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America," has been widely disputed, even by its original publisher. First released in 2000, the book challenges the idea that the United States has always been a gun-oriented culture and was awarded the Bancroft Prize for history. But questions about Bellesiles' scholarship led publisher Alfred A. Knopf to drop the book and Bancroft officials to withdraw the prize.\n"If you're a freedom-to-read person, pulling a book like that one is not that different from any book that might have fake scholarship," Gorman says. "No matter how wrong a book might be, people should have access to it. It's a slippery slope once you start removing books like that."\nAlso high on the ALA list were Angelou's memoir and two other books with gay content, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," by Stephen Chbosky and "King & King," by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland.\nThe numbers for 2004 were the highest since 2000, but still well below the peak from a decade ago, when more than 700 books were challenged.\n"A lot of people were worried that challenges would go up under President Bush, but the highest numbers were during the Clinton administration," Gorman says. "I think that came from resentment among conservatives that Bill Clinton was president. You had the whole thing about gays in the military. You had people who believed that somehow Clinton was not a legitimate president."\nGorman said the majority of challenges happen at school libraries, although a recent incident involved the general public branches in Denver. Prompted by complaints of pornographic and violent content, the Denver system canceled its subscription to four Spanish-language adult comic books.\n"It's a perpetual problem, and it attacks fundamental American liberties -- the attempt to impose one's own positions on society as a whole," Gorman says.
(04/06/05 5:05am)
NEW YORK -- Academy Award-winning screenplay writer John Patrick Shanley and the nation's poet laureate, Ted Kooser, were among the winners Monday of Pulitzer Prizes in the arts. Marilynne Robinson received the fiction award for "Gilead," her first novel in more than 20 years.\n"It's such a private thing to write a book, and when I'm writing I can't think about whether it will appeal to other people," said Robinson, a teacher at the celebrated University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, speaking breathlessly on her cell phone as she walked across campus. "But it's such a profound treat that people do find it meaningful."\nRobinson, who debuted in 1981 with the acclaimed "Housekeeping," already had won the National Book Critics Circle prize for "Gilead," a contemporary epistle of a dying Iowa preacher looking back on his life and the lives of his ancestors.\nHer win also continues a remarkable streak for her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which for seven out of the past eight years has released a novel that received either the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award. Those books include Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" and Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire."\nShanley, whose screenplay for "Moonstruck" won an Oscar in 1988, received the drama Pulitzer for "Doubt," his Broadway debut. \n"I have been trawling around for a long time before they let me come up out of the muck," the 54-year-old Shanley, who has been a playwright for 25 years, said with a laugh.\n"Doubt," set in the Bronx in 1964, tells the story of an authoritarian nun and her confrontations with a well-liked parish priest she suspects of molesting a male student. The playwright said the play was born out of his interest in the Catholic school world.\n"I went to a church in the Bronx in 1964. It was a such a specific world that has now vanished, a world involving the Sisters of Charity, who dressed in black robes and black bonnets," he said. "More recently, the world around me started to remind me in certain key ways of this time -- of people of conviction and people who weren't certain at odds with each other -- and their power struggle."\nDavid Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, received the prize for history for "Washington's Crossing," a finalist last fall for the National Book Award. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan won in the biography category for "de Kooning: An American Master." Stevens and Swan were about to work on their taxes with their accountant when they got the news.\n"We're very happy and surprised," Stevens said. "We think of the Pulitzer as a prize that ordinarily goes to generals and statesmen. We're very happy it sometimes goes to a painter, musician or writer."\nKooser won in poetry for "Delights and Shadows," making him the rare sitting laureate to receive such an award. Kooser, who lives in Garland, Neb., is a retired insurance executive who was named to his current position last August. He has written 10 collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in a number of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Hudson Review and Prairie Schooner.\n"It's something every poet dreams of," Kooser said of the Pulitzer in a statement released by the University of Nebraska. "There are so many gifted poets in this country and so many marvelous collections published each year. That mine has been selected is a great honor."\nSteve Coll collected his second Pulitzer, winning in general nonfiction for "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001." In 1990, while serving as South Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post, he captured a Pulitzer for explanatory journalism. The author of four books, he is now an associate editor at the Post.\n"I have a bottle (of champagne) here. I haven't opened it yet," he said.\nColl said he decided to write the book after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because he felt "those who lived through it when it was an obscure story really ought to try and put in perspective."\nThe music award went to Steven Stucky for "Second Concerto for Orchestra." Stucky, a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for "Concerto for Orchestra" finally won the honor Monday with the perhaps fittingly named "Second Concerto for Orchestra," which the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered March 12, 2004.\nWhen asked for his reaction by The Associated Press, Stucky described it as relief.\n"It is nice to get it over with," Stucky chuckled. "I've flirted with it a couple of times"
(01/13/05 5:36am)
NEW YORK -- Malcolm Gladwell, whose best seller "The Tipping Point" explored how minor events can lead to momentous changes, got the idea for his next project simply by letting his hair grow long.\n"I started getting speeding tickets for the first time in my life and getting pulled aside for security at airports," recalls the 41-year-old Gladwell, who also cites a time a couple of years ago when New York police stopped and questioned him because he supposedly resembled a rape suspect.\n"I decided at that point that I wanted to write a book about first impressions," says Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker.\nHis new work, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," has just been published by Little, Brown & Co.\nLike "The Tipping Point," Gladwell's current book is a study of small things with great consequences, in this case snap decisions that can prove uncannily correct or tragically wrong. In "Blink," which has a first printing of 250,000, Gladwell details the importance of instincts in a wide range of professions.\n"I wanted to get people thinking about how we make decisions," Gladwell said, whose previous book has 800,000 copies in print and has been cited by everybody from former President Clinton to Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. "We think what's on the surface is all we need to know when, in fact, there's so much going on under the surface that we don't know about."\nThe J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles had agreed to purchase the kouros after an extensive investigation. Stanley V. Margolis, a geologist from the University of California at Davis, concluded that the statue was at least hundreds, if not thousands of years old, based on the presence of calcite, a mineral that could only exist after a centuries-long aging process.\nFederico Zeri, one of the museum's trustees, looked at the kouros and immediately sensed something wrong, something about the statue's fingernails. Evelyn Harrison, an expert on Greek culture, was unsettled, but couldn't say why. Thomas Hoving, former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, took a look and the first word that came into his head was "fresh," as in new.\nThe Getty subsequently discovered that documents vouching for the kouros were fake and that the calcite could have been produced in a couple of months. While the statue remains in the museum's permanent collection, the catalog includes a cautionary notation about its origins: "About 530 B.C., or modern forgery."\nThe experts who had felt an "intuitive repulsion," as one detractor called it, had good reason.\n"In the first two seconds of looking in a single glance," Gladwell writes, "they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months."\nThe art of thinking quickly is known among psychologists as "thin-slicing," in which the mind processes a great deal of information in a short time. What makes some of us better "thin slicers" than others? A major reason, Gladwell says, is experience the more you know coming into a situation, the more likely you can make a fast and reasoned judgment. As an artist or athlete might say, the more you practice, the better you improvise.\n"Spontaneity is an important concept in the book," Gladwell says. "You can be spontaneous on the basketball court pass, dribble, shoot but that comes about after an enormous amount of practice and discipline. To me, this suggests that spontaneity and structure are two sides of the same coin"
(09/24/04 5:20am)
NEW YORK -- Jennifer Weiner, author of the best-selling novels "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes," likes to spend three to four hours a day working on fiction. When she's done, time and family permitting, she updates her online journal.\n"When I went on my first book tour (in 2001), I began keeping a Web diary, and every day I would write about the latest indignity I suffered," she says. "And I found I really enjoyed doing it. It's a way for me to keep in touch with my readers."\nBlogging has caught on with everyone from high school students to journalists, and Weiner, Neil Gaiman and Claire Cook are among a growing number of authors who no longer confine private thoughts to private papers. Instead, they post weekly or even daily dispatches on the Internet that range from tour diaries to family updates.\nAuthor blogs are also the latest reminder of how times have changed since writers simply wrote their books and let the publishers -- and the work itself -- speak for them. Now, many authors arrange their own tours, maintain Web sites, send e-mail newsletters and, in the case of Weiner and others, offer ongoing personal commentary.\n"There are 300 channels of cable, there's the Internet," Weiner says. "I think it was a wonderful time when you could be like J.D. Salinger and publish something and hole yourself up in New Hampshire. But we have to realize we sell a product in the marketplace and the marketplace has a lot of competition."\nAuthor blogs often have a light, conversational tone, much like postcards or telephone calls. Weiner might confide she's doing laundry, or report that her baby daughter can now flip over from back to stomach. Gaiman, author of the "Sandman" comic book series, interweaves reader comments with his own responses.\nOn Cook's blog, the author includes photos and commentary from a writer's conference she attended last summer, highlights from a recent tour and reviews of her latest novel, "Multiple Choice," about a mother and daughter going to college at the same time.\n"I don't want to give too much information. I'm not into full disclosure. But it's a still a great way to let readers feel like they're part of your life," says Cook, who has also written "Ready to Fall" and "Must Love Dogs."\nWriters who don't keep blogs often cite lack of interest or lack of time.\n"No," says author A.M. Homes, when asked if she would start a blog. "Without a doubt. No. I'm too busy writing to do a blog."\nEven those who have worked extensively with the Internet have resisted. Fiction writer Robert Olen Butler, who once composed a short story online in real time, says he can't bring himself to maintain an online journal.\n"I don't write nonfiction," says Butler, whose story collection, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. "I am so against writing nonfiction that it makes me physically ill. I admire people who do it, and I love to read it, but I don't even like to write long e-mails."\nPublishers, too, are divided. At Viking Penguin, which publishes Cook, executive editor Pamela Dorman says she encourages blogs "as a very targeted and effective way to increase word of mouth." However, she adds that it's too soon to know if blogs help sales. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where one prominent author, Shirley Hazzard, doesn't even own an answering machine, president Jonathan Galassi says he doesn't pay much attention to blogs.\n"Maybe we're behind the times," says Galassi, who publishes such award-winning authors as Hazzard, Susan Sontag and Jonathan Franzen. "I just think there are too many words out there already. I hope our writers will be spending their time writing their books, not their blogs."\n"In general, blogs don't make a lot of sense for literary fiction authors," Dorman says. "Their audience is more accustomed to seeking information through reviews and traditional media."\nM.J. Rose, a novelist whose books include "The Halo Effect" and "Lip Service," says she has mixed feelings about online journals. A leading advocate of writers using the Internet, she wonders how many new readers blogs attract and thinks a blog should reflect personal passion, not professional calculation.\n"A blog can't be a promotional tool first. It has to be rooted in a subject the author cares about, is interested in, and has something to say about," she wrote in her own blog, which started in August and focuses on the marketing of books.\n"This blog is about marketing, not because I don't have passion for my own fiction -- I do -- you can't write novels without it -- but I don't have a burning desire to describe my writing life. I live it -- I don't want to write about it"
(09/03/03 5:04am)
At the start of Sara Paretsky's new novel, "Blacklist," private eye V.I. Warshawski recalls her feelings right after terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.\n"I'd been numbed and fearful as everyone else in America," Paretsky writes. "I only had half a mind for my work ... You need to be able to concentrate in front of a computer for long hours, and concentration wasn't something I was good at."\nBut just as Warshawski gathers herself for the next case, one that links the pursuit of Communists in the McCarthy era to the pursuit of terrorists today, Paretsky and others are getting on with their work in a post-Sept. 11 world.\nTwo years later, what was sudden and unthinkable is gradually spreading and settling into history. The wave of commemorative books and tribute songs is gone, but the attacks color an increasing number of novels and films and other narratives.\nPlaywright Alexandra Gersten-Vassileros, co-author of "Omnium Gatherum," which takes place a few weeks after Sept. 11, says both the attacks and what she saw as the simplistic media coverage compelled her to write.\n"The day itself shocked me out of my typically entitled American experience and I felt much more joined to the world than I had been before," she says. "That and the polemics of the arguments that we kept watching on television, I think sort of screamed a play in our ears."\nReferences to Sept. 11 appear both in literary novels such as Pat Barker's "Double Vision," the story of two British journalists based in New York after the attacks, and in more commercial novels such as Tom Clancy's latest, "The Teeth of the Tiger," which imagines an alliance between drug and terrorist networks.\nArtists have to keep in touch not just with the times, but with time itself. A few years ago, a writer or a filmmaker telling a contemporary story didn't have to think a lot about the exact year; 1993 doesn't seem terribly different from 1995. But a plot set in 2002 has a very different meaning from one set in 2000.\n"I'm working on a book set over the past few years and when I was trying to lay out a timeline for a book last spring I did try to think of subtle ways to refer to the event without having it dominate my fictional world," says Jonathan Franzen, author of the award-winning best seller "The Corrections."\nHollywood has mostly avoided Sept. 11, with studios figuring there's nothing to gain by raising such a subject in big-budget escapist flicks. DreamWorks did recently option film rights to "The Kite Runner," a novel by Khaled Hosseini set in contemporary Afghanistan.\nA few independent productions have taken on the event. Spike Lee's "The 25th Hour," about a drug dealer's last day of freedom before prison, included scenes of the trade center cleanup. "The Guys," starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia in the story of an editor and fire captain writing eulogies for rescuers killed in the trade center collapse, came out in limited release last spring.\nThe French-produced "11'09"01" _ retitled "September 11" for U.S. release _ presents 11 short films reacting to the terrorist attacks from such directors as Sean Penn, Mira Nair, Ken Loach and Claude LeLouch. Some of the shorts have drawn criticism as anti-American, but the project managed to find a U.S. distributor and is now touring art house cinemas.\n"The Barbarian Invasions," the tale of a terminally ill man reuniting with family and friends, won the screenwriting prize for Canadian director Denys Arcand at this year's Cannes Film Festival and opens at U.S. theaters in November.\nArcand uses a clip of the trade center attacks to introduce a historian's comparison of the United States to the Roman Empire as it faced encroachment by invading hordes.\nViewers at Cannes and in Quebec, where the film already has played theaters, took the Sept. 11 footage in stride, but a test audience in New York City was riled when the fiery image of the trade center appeared on screen, Arcand said.\n"This shocked them greatly. They had a strong emotional reaction. They felt this shot shouldn't be in the film," Arcand said. "They felt it was exploitive, which it's not in my case, because it's not a commercial film. In fact, that shot is probably a bad commercial strategy, but it says something important to society and the film."\nThe shot of the Sept. 11 attacks is remaining in the U.S. release, Arcand said. New York audiences will encounter more references to Sept. 11 in two off-Broadway plays opening this fall.\n"Omnium Gatherum," by Theresa Rebeck and Gersten-Vassilaros, concerns a dinner party given a few weeks after Sept. 11. Craig Wright's "Certain Tragic Events" is set in Minneapolis on Sept. 12, and concerns a blind date and whether the couple should proceed with it; the woman's sister worked in the World Trade Center and hasn't been heard from.\nMusicians seem more focused on Iraq over the past year than on Sept. 11, with such protest songs as Merle Haggard's "That's the News" and pro-war anthems such as Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten." But Sleater-Kinney's "One Beat" is an album of grief (and protest) from a rock band based in Washington state, thousands of miles from ground zero.\nIn "Faraway," Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker recalls nursing her baby when the phone rings and someone tells her to turn on the television. "And the heart is hit in a city faraway, but it feels so close," she sings. "I look to the sky and ask it not to rain on my family tonight."\nOn Sept. 7, Showtime was to air "DC 9/11," a docudrama about the attacks based on interviews with President Bush and senior advisers. Timothy Bottoms stars as Bush and Lawrence Pressman portrays Vice President Dick Cheney.\nThe producers of NBC's "Law & Order" and its two spinoffs waited a while before producing Sept. 11-related stories. In one script last year, a murderer tried to dupe authorities into believing his victims had been killed in the terrorist attacks.\nWith Hollywood in the process of mapping out stories for the season that begins this fall, Sept. 11 hasn't come up yet, said Peter Jankowski, executive producer for the three series.\n"It hasn't really factored in to any of our storytelling this year, which is not to say we're not aware of it," Jankowski said. "Obviously, we shoot in the shadow of what was the World Trade Center."\nThe two-part series finale of CBS' "Without a Trace" in May involved a kidnapping committed by a World Trade Center widower bitter about the compensation for his wife's death.\nIt's hard not to touch upon the impact of Sept. 11 in dramas because so much has changed, such as the routinely long lines and thorough security checks at airports, said Jonathan Littman, the executive producer for Jerry Bruckheimer Television, which makes "Without a Trace" and the "CSI" series.\n"There's no question it's a fabric of our life now," he said. "There's not a single person in America who hasn't been affected by it"
(07/28/03 12:51am)
NEW YORK -- This should be a great time for the book world.\n"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" has set sales records. Hillary Clinton's memoirs, "Living History," has sold more than 1 million copies. Other recent successes include Oprah Winfrey's book club pick, "East of Eden," and Walter Isaacson's "Benjamin Franklin."\nBut instead of celebrating, publishers have been cutting. Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of the Potter books, announced in May that 400 employees had been fired worldwide and said that in mid-July there would be additional spending reductions. Simon & Schuster, which released the Clinton and Isaacson books, announced this week that 75 employees would be laid off.\n"... the fact remains that our industry continues to be challenged by any number of issues, including the most prolonged period of depressed sales in memory," Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos wrote in a companywide e-mail.\nFor publishing people, the value of books like "Living History" and "Order of the Phoenix" isn't only in the splash, but in the ripples. The industry had hoped the Potter boom would carry over to other titles, but most report either modest increases or none at all. Once the boom receded, fundamental problems remained: a slow economy, a distracted public.\n"It's not a brand new day," said Laurie Brown, a vice president for sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers. "I would guess you'll find universally cautious positions on sales figures and marketing budgets."\n"It's harder for books to catch on," said Gary Fisketjon, a longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf.\n"I think the slump probably started in the (2000) presidential election that wouldn't end. And that spring (2001) was the dot.com crash. Then you have Sept. 11 and a constant war footing ever since. People are just preoccupied in all sorts of ways."\nBig sales don't necessarily mean big profits, especially if everyone is expecting a hit. With Clinton receiving an $8 million advance, Simon & Schuster needed hundreds of thousands of sales to make money on the book. And Amazon.com, anticipating tremendous competition for the Potter book, offered a 40 percent discount on the $29.99 suggested price.\nThe result: Despite more than 1 million sales worldwide, the online retailer announced it essentially broke even with "Order of the Phoenix."\nWith more than 100,000 titles annually released in the United States, the industry doesn't sustain itself on high-profile books alone. It also needs steady sales of older titles and surprise hits like Alice Sebold's million-selling novel, "The Lovely Bones."\nSebold's book, published a year ago, was the literary event of 2002 and cost a fraction of the Clinton book to produce. But more than halfway into 2003, no new literary novel has had any significant impact, despite books from Robert Stone, Norman Rush, Don DeLillo and Jane Smiley.\n"The fiction market in general has been very sluggish," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "I don't think there has been a book this year that really took the world by storm. That's what it takes, something that lights people up."\nPublishers are already experimenting with cutting hardcover prices, or skipping hardcover altogether and releasing books in cheaper paperback editions. Hyperion Books this fall will publish Lisa Kusel's story collection, "Other Fish in the Sea," as a paperback. For an illustrated edition of the best-selling "Seabiscuit," now a movie, Random House reduced the price from $35 to $29.95.\nIn his company e-mail, Simon & Schuster's Romanos speculated that the decline was long-term, wondering if "book buyers will actually return in the same numbers" even after the economy recovers. Other publishing officials are at best cautious about the next few months.\nWhile sales should be strong for the memoirs of former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Toni Morrison's new novel, "Love," no fall releases are likely to sell in numbers approaching Potter.\n"I have as strong a list of books coming out over the next few months as I've had in a long time, but I'm not 100 percent confident it's going to translate into sales," says Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.\n"I've been talking to the agent of one of my more important authors, a solid literary novelist. I had to tell the agent that I couldn't pay his client as much as I did before. It's a hard conversation to have"
(06/02/03 12:33am)
LOS ANGELES -- Thousands of books were on display this past weekend at BookExpo America, with the next "Harry Potter" novel and the memoirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez among the favorites at the Los Angeles Convention Center.\nBut one subject, on the minds of so many at last year's publishing convention, is now rarely mentioned: Sept. 11.\nDozens of books came out last year to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the vast majority quickly vanished from memory, and publishers said they see no reason to expect a better response for the second anniversary.\n"The feeling I get from booksellers is that they had enough," said Roger Williams, vice president and director of sales at Simon & Schuster.\n"Some worthy books have been written and will be written, but for now what new is there to say?" said Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Doubleday/Broadway. "I'm sure someone will come out with a magisterial history, but that will take a long time to write."\nA handful of books related to Sept. 11 will come out this fall, but publishers insist they not be called "Sept. 11 books." Random House, for instance, is publishing Gail Sheehy's "Middletown, America," the story of a New Jersey community where several Sept. 11 victims lived. But sales director Janet Cooke said "Middletown" should not be compared to many of the books that came out last year.\n"I hate to think of the Sheehy book that way," Cook said. "To me a Sept. 11 book is a big, bulky book of photographs, commemorating the day itself. 'Middletown' is a look at the grieving process."\nRandom House is also publishing Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11." Henry Holt will release "City in the Sky," a history of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton. Simon & Schuster will have a paperback edition of Steven Brill's "After: How America Confronted the Sept. 12 Era."\n"It's not a Sept. 11 book, it's a Sept. 12 book," Alice Mayhew, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, said with a laugh. "No one wants to call their book a Sept. 11 book, because those books didn't work."\nSome fiction writers will refer to the attacks. Countless novels were in progress at the time, and many authors ended up altering the texts -- or making a conscious effort not to change them. Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" is a novel set in Afghanistan that was amended slightly after Sept. 11.\nBut David Guterson, author of the best-selling novel "Snow Falling on Cedars," said he was determined to complete his current book, "Our Lady of the Forest," as originally planned.\n"In fiction, your mind goes to a certain place and that wasn't happening after Sept. 11," said Guterson, whose book tells of a migrant mushroom worker in Washington state, far removed in every way from the events of Sept. 11. "So I stopped writing for nine months. It took me that long just to clear my head"
(05/22/03 12:52am)
NEW YORK -- The success of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and other conservative authors has led the publishing industry to turn more to the right.\nThe operators of the Book-of-the-Month Club announced Tuesday that they are forming a new club, as yet unnamed, devoted to works with a conservative point of view. Within the past month, Penguin Putnam and the Crown Publishing Group have started conservative imprints.\n"We don't think we've done enough in this area. We have featured conservative authors like Bill Bennett, but we've never presented them in a coherent way," said Mel Parker, senior vice president and editorial director of Bookspan, which runs the Book-of-the-Month Club and several other clubs.\nBookspan is co-owned by Bertelsmann AG and AOL Time Warner Inc., and its new club is scheduled to begin by early next year. Brad Miner, a former literary editor with the conservative National Review, will serve as editor.\nMiner should have plenty of material. Penguin and Crown, a division of Random House, Inc., each plan to publish about 15 conservative books a year. Regnery Publishing, a conservative press based in Washington, D.C., puts out between 25-30.\nThe new imprints represent a shift in publishing tradition, but not a break. While New York publishing people are often politically liberal, they do welcome best sellers from both sides.\nCrown is publisher of both "Slander," Coulter's best-selling attack on liberals, and David Brock's "Blinded by the Right," a best-selling attack on conservatives, Coulter included. HarperCollins released both Sean Hannity's right-wing "Let Freedom Ring" and Michael Moore's left-wing "Stupid White Men." Around the same time Penguin announced its conservative imprint, it signed up a book co-authored by liberal commentator Eric Alterman and liberal activist Mark Green.\n"I've been in publishing since 1975, and publishers have put out a very broad spectrum of opinions throughout my career," said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's conservative imprint. "But the range of conservative opinion was often forced into the margins. Only now is it finding its way back into the mainstream."\nThe rise of conservative books in New York publishing could prove both vindicating and troublesome for Regnery and its sister organization, the Conservative Book Club, which was formed in 1964 and says it has a membership of more than 80,000.\nRegnery has long prided itself on publishing best sellers the New York community ignored, including Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," which accused the television networks of favoring liberals, and Coulter's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," which called for President Clinton's impeachment. Now, Regnery faces increasing competition from companies able to pay more.