Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conspire to deny Fletcher Robinson recognition for devising the plot and supplying much of the local detail for “Hound of the Baskervilles,” one of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest adventures? A new book makes the charge and also “claims to have found circumstantial evidence that Conan Doyle may have murdered his former friend when he became worried that the deception might be exposed.” – Sunday Times (UK)
Category: words
EGGERS SUED BY FORMER AGENT
Author Dave Eggers, author of the bestselling memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is being sued by his former agent. The suit contends that Eggers “broke his contract to pay a 15 percent commission on sales of the book and any future sale of movie rights. (Eggers has been maintaining that he is not interested in a movie deal.)” – Inside.com
THE AGITATION OF COGITATION
Muddy, brilliantly insightful, and often wildly impenetrable, 18th-century German philosopher Hegel has been called the “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” But after spending hundreds of hours of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Philosophy of Nature, what do you really have to show for it? A new biography examines the difficulties of reading in a Hegelian world. – The New Criterion
MARKET TIMING
Summer vacation is over and in France publishers are ready. In this 2-3-week period at the beginning of September 557 new books are due to be published to coincide with the annual back-to-work. “Editors, booksellers and critics agree that the market cannot absorb the flood of new books, that many are doomed to sink even before they appear. But the tradition goes on: since 1991, the wave of fiction has grown by 50 percent, with a new record being set this year.” – New York Times
THE “CHORUS EFFECT” —
— in publishing is a well-known phenomenon, when a rash of books on the same theme are released at the same time. This month’s coincidence? “Veteran writers who are bombarding the bookshops with tomes on how British culture is going down the tubes.” – The Guardian
PRIZED POETRY
A new prize for poetry, worth $80,000 (CDN) annually is created in Canada. “The Griffin Poetry Prize will rank as one of the most valuable literary awards to originate in Canada and certainly the Canadian English-Canadian prize with the most international scope.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
OLD SCORES
Jane Campion won an Oscar in 1993 for her original screenplay “The Piano.” But should she have? “The fine print in the recently published Oxford Companion to Australian Film suggests otherwise. In its entry for The Piano, the volume notes that the film was in fact ‘based on the novel, The Story of a New Zealand River, by Jane Mander,’ though the book was ‘uncredited.’ It’s a bold and controversial charge, and one that has stirred up a considerable storm Down Under.” – Lingua Franca
ATTACKING ONE OF OUR OWN
- The New York Times Book Review ran a scathing review of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s new book over the weekend. Canadians are taking it personally. “[The Times Book Review is] fairly erratic and tends to be very much tied into the New York publishing scene. There’s sort of a decision that somebody’s going to be praised and important at one point and a decision that somebody’s going to be taken down a peg at another. Generally, they don’t exert pressure on their reviewers, but they may have said, ‘Great it’s time somebody did this.’ It’s hard to know exactly what the politics are.” – National Post (Canada)
VIRTUAL FAIR
For decades the Frankfurt Book Fair has been the place where anything of import in the book publishing business gets discussed and largely decided. But this year the fair (and publishers) are setting up e-alternatives. “This 52nd Frankfurt will be confronting a virtual fair that (or so the ads tell us) is replacing face-to-face, buttonholing meetings by clicks. It shouldn’t be necessary for publishers and agents to sit in bars and hotel lobbies till the wee hours, to carry manuscripts back to hotel rooms, to field midnight messages and 6 a.m. wake-up calls. Or will it? – Publishers Weekly
KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT
The Chinese government has cracked down on Taiwanese book publishers at a mainland book exhibition; in addition to warning one publisher not to speak to the mass media about lack of Beijing’s lack of freedom of speech, they have also stuck labels saying “Don’t violate the one China policy” on Taiwanese books. – China Times (Taiwan)