Category: publishing

Troupe told a colleague last week that “he decided to step down after the university decided to suspend him for a year without pay or benefits.” Troupe told reporters that he is a person who faces up to his mistakes, but while some of Troupe’s supporters were angry that the university didn’t stick up for the poet, others seemed relieved that the affair is over. “I am relieved he chose to do the honorable thing by resigning. He’s a great poet, but he needs to be a great poet somewhere else.”

“This month, two prominent magazines have published dishy articles about nefarious doings at other prominent magazines: Vanity Fair covers the absurd rise and pathetic fall of Rosie, while GQ covers the reign of terror unleashed by a despotic honcho at the magazines published by the mega-conglomerate now known as AOL Time Warner.” Navel gazing? Maybe. Schadenfreude? Sure. But it’s worked for television for years, so corporate types may be banking that it’ll sell copies.

Why are so many of the most popular female characters among American readers so… well… British? From Bridget Jones to Kate Reddy to Hermione Granger, there seems to be something about the UK’s women that’s attracting their colonial counterparts. “[Writer Allison] Pearson believes the British gift for pessimism and irony has served her — and her countrymen — well in print. She says, ‘ ‘Bridget Jones’ and Nick Hornby’s books and mine have extreme irony in common. And irony isn’t the normal American mode.'”

For 40 years, the FBI had author Graham Greene under surveillance, according to documents recently obtained by The Guardian newspaper. US officials went to “extraordinary lengths” to track Greene, believing he was anti-American. ” ‘Unsurprisingly, Greene’s views on the United States government policies and actions are not flattering,’ a cable to Washington said after the novelist gave an interview about Latin America in 1984.”

: By early next year, “all 100-plus imprints and the more than 1,000 employees of Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher” will be moved out of the various office buildings and into a new 48-story skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. “The new $300 million building will fulfill chief executive Peter Olson’s grand vision of a unified company under a single roof: one big happy family, with German parent Bertelsmann as patriarch.” But “for many publishing people, there’s a visceral resistance to the idea of lumping dozens of book-publishing cultures—from the fusty highbrow aura of Knopf to the mass-market commercialism of Bantam Dell—into one midtown conglomerate monstrosity.”

“If you do the maths, it’s obviously impossible to read them all,” says a judge of the 1999 Booker Prize. “The convention is to lie, but no one puts it that way because they are too genteel. There’s a certain kind of phoniness, but everyone’s too good-mannered to point out the obvious.”

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections sold more than 2 million copies last year. James Wolcott thinks that for that reason and many others, Franzen should stop whining. “Franzen’s book presents the portrait of a man who can’t leave being alone well enough alone. For someone who repeatedly strikes a Garbo pose in print, he puts a lot of low-key effort into refining his identity.”

“Fan fiction” is “a potent underground genre” where fans of fictional pop culture figures weave new stories from their own imaginations. “Cult TV series such as Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Star Trek inspire wild tangents of fancy and fornication” and the internet has given the genre a serious following.

“For countless authors, movies have proved a fatal temptation, savaging great novels from The Naked and the Dead to Portnoy’s Complaint, and corrupting F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who lived out their Hollywood years in drunken decline.” But in recent years, prominent writers have been finding success on the screen, “both by carefully choosing those who would adapt their books and by participating in the filmmaking process themselves.”

Alexandre Dumas is one of the most popular French novelists of all time. But he’s not been officially honored. That changes this week when his remains are moved to the Pantheon in Paris. “He will then be laid to rest alongside other French literary greats such as Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.”