Well, here’s the RA news for this week. We’re getting into the Fall publishing season now, so expect lots more in the coming weeks.
J. K. Rowling was sighted in Edinburgh working on a new book. Ian Rankin, her neighbor, told a reporter at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that his wife had spotted Rowling writing away in a cafe, and that she is working on a crime novel.
Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus series, also stirred up another controversy at the Festival when he said that many of the writers of the most graphic crime fiction these days are women, and many are lesbians. Val McDermid was spitting mad. Rankin says he was misquoted, and McDermid later said they are still friends, and that she was angry at the media for how they reported the story. Rankin, she said, danced at her wedding (to a woman).
O. J. Simpson’s book will be published after all (in October) by Beaufort Books. An “untraditional” publisher. The rights were obtained by the family of Ronald Goldman, but Nicole Brown, sister of Denise Brown, whose death O. J. Simpson described in the original book called If I Did It, has called for a boycott. More here.
On September 5, Penguin will publish the 50th anniversary edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This edition, with the subtitle “The Original Scroll,” is a word-for-word duplication of the original, with deleted scenes restored, and with the names of the real people instead of the pseudonyms that Kerouac used. While Kerouac reportedly typed his manuscript single-spaced on eight pages of large tracing paper, which he later taped into a scroll, the Penguin edition will be in standard book format, which is good news for library shelvers!
Both Min Jin Lee and A. S. Byatt recently wrote tributes to Middlemarch by George Eliot. Min Jin Lee (author of Free Food for Millionaires) says it is her favorite novel. She likes it because it is “about a community and how its citizens live through their desires and errors.” A. S. Byatt says it is possible to argue that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel.
Jennifer Weiner has some amazing examples of paperback publishers trivializing some serious women’s books by giving them chick lit covers. I mean Allegra Goodman’s Intuition? Carolyn Parkhurst’s Lost and Found?
And speaking of chick lit, Anna David, author of Party Girl, didn’t think there was anything wrong with this label. She was so happy to get her book published that she didn’t think it mattered. But now she says she gets it: The term “chick lit” is never a compliment. “I wrote a book about the most important and profound experience I’d ever had—getting and staying sober—and it’s being categorized among books about wearing Manolo Blahniks while trying to land a guy?”
With Karl Rove’s resignation from the White House comes the inevitable speculation about whether he’ll shop a book. Jonathan Karp, publisher of the Twelve imprint from Hachette, sums it up this way: “Any publisher would be concerned that this would be a partisan, boilerplate, self-serving book,” Karp says, “and that’s a risk with any book from a former administration official. The question is whether he’ll write a candid, forthcoming, interesting book. And if he does, he’s very well-suited to write a useful first-draft of history.”
Speaking of first-drafts of history, someone once said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. But Jack Shafer in the New York Times in his review of Robert Novak’s The Prince of Darkness, says that Novak’s work was the first rough draft of journalism. Some interesting revelations in the book, though: Novak admits that he had a drinking problem, as well as a gambling problem, and that he often gave politicians the choice of being either a target or a source. He admits that he knowingly voted twice for Eisenhower, and that he was “used” by Richard Nixon and Jeb Magruder tricked him into publishing a story to their own ends. He’s surprised this didn’t happen more often. Huh. Maybe it did. Valerie Plame anyone?
Wuthering Heights was picked as the top romantic novel in a recent poll. Here are the top 20.
Oh…and here’s a must-buy. You can never have enough baby name books: Sci-Fi Baby Names: 500 Out-of-This-World Baby Names from Anakin to Zardoz by Robert Schnakenberg.
More next week!
The Rowling sighting turned out to be a “red herring” – see article in Monday’s Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2152722,00.html
Wow! I am going to go out and look for Sci-Fi Baby Names: 500 Out-of-This-World Baby Names from Anakin to Zardoz by Robert Schnakenberg. My daughter is actually named out of a science fiction novel as is the daughter of a dear friend. LOL. I’ve gotta see this one.