Notes: Book Club Bonanza; Bookstore Basketball
Cool idea of the day: on March 25 at 7 p.m., R.J.
Julia Booksellers, Madison, Conn., will hold a Book Club Bonanza for
members of book clubs. At the party, the store will discuss the results
of a survey it is taking of book club members of their clubs' top
books. As Roxanne Coady wrote in a store e-mail asking members to write
in with picks, "No need to have your book club reach a consensus--just
think about the books that kept your group talking late into the night
(hopefully with wine and just a little bit of gossip)."
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Best basketball book ever? Foul: The Connie Hawkins Story by David Wolf. In other basketball book news, GalleyCat reported that Stephanie Anderson, manager of Word bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., "has created a literary basketball league, running pale, computer-bound, and shy writers up and down the chain-link courts of Brooklyn." A great jump shot is not enough, however, because "if you want to join the league, you have to pass a literary test first."
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Love the aroma of old books? New Yorker's Book Bench blog showcased CB I Hate Perfume in Brooklyn, N.Y., which sells In the Library, "a perfume inspired by the proprietor Christopher Brosius's love of books and his inability to pass a secondhand bookshop without stopping in."
According to the company, the perfume is "supposed to evoke a first-edition English novel via 'Russian and Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth, and a hint of wood polish.' "
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Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, $25.99 9780061650758/0061650757), has been named Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Jones, who is founder and president of Green For All, possesses "a unique ability to inspire people of all colors, classes and generations to uplift vulnerable people, while protecting our vulnerable planet."
Publisher Mark Tauber called The Green Collar Economy "a book we all believed in from the start, and it has been both exciting and rewarding to see Van and his message embraced by so many. All of us here at HarperOne are proud that the work and ideas that were presented in The Green Collar Economy will continue in Washington, D.C."
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Two "previously unseen manuscripts" have been discovered among the papers left behind by Roberto Bolaño after his death, according to the Guardian, which reported that the novels are titled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer. The documents may also include a sixth section of Bolaño's 2666.
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One part of the book world is apparently recession-proof. The Time Traveler’s Wife author Audrey Niffenegger sold the rights to her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, to Scribner for "close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations," the New York Times reported.
Scribner outbid "several large New York publishing houses, as well as the original hardcover publisher of The Time Traveler’s Wife, MacAdam/Cage." The novel is scheduled for release at the end of September.
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A Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled that Clive Cussler must pay $13.9 million in legal fees to the production company that made the film version of his novel, Sahara. According to the Associated Press (via the New York Times), Cussler had sued Crusader Entertainment in 2004, claiming that he "was not permitted final approval on the script as his contract mandated, which resulted in the box office failure of the film." Crusader countersued, arguing that it had "overpaid for the rights to Mr. Cussler’s work because he had overstated the sales of his novels. In 2007 a jury delivered a split decision."
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The immense success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series has given the publishing industry a vampire-inspired sales bump, according to USA Today, which observed that "new and established writers are jumping on the bandwagon with novels featuring everything from vampire finishing schools to the young, beautiful vampire glitterati of New York."
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Wonder what antique e-book stores will look like in the future? The New York Times technology blog featured a peek at a store that "would only sell e-books that are more than two weeks old--adamantly not selling new e-books. . . . The store would be located in a converted old house with a creaky front door. As you walked in, you would know right away that you're in an antique e-book store. . . . In the front window of the store would be two antique e-book-loving cats."
You get the idea.
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Daniel Smetanka has joined Phoenix Books & Audio as managing editor. He was formerly executive editor at Ballantine/Random House and earlier was an international literary scout and a publishing consultant to Amblin/Dreamworks and the Kennedy/Marshall Company.
Judith Abarbanelis has joined Phoenix Books & Audio as marketing manager. She is a formerly marketing director for the National Lampoon and is an author and ghostwriter.
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Tone Deaf in Bangkok (and Other Places) by Janet Brown, photographs by Nana Chen (ThingsAsian Press/IPS, $12.95 trade paper, 9781934159125/1934159123, April 2009)
London-born and Oxford-educated, Zoe Heller acquired her M.A. from Columbia University in 1988. After graduate school, she returned to England, where she worked briefly in publishing, then as a journalist, book reviewer and feature writer for various British newspapers. In the 1990s, she moved to New York and began chronicling her experiences as a single woman in the Big Apple. In 2000, she published a darkly comic novel entitled Everything You Know. Although it was savaged by the British press (a sour grapes-induced snubbing and drubbing Heller admits still stings), the book received enthusiastic reviews in the U.S. She followed that with What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal. The Believers, her third novel, was published on March 3 by HarperCollins.