Archives for October 2006

Indies: Celebration and Struggle Menlo Park-based independent Kepler’s celebrated the one-year anniversary of the store’s rescue by local investors and about 2,000 supporting members over the weekend. But the Mercury news reports, “In spite of the community outpouring, store owner Clark Kepler said sales are about the same as they were when the store closed last year and he expects to break even in the coming year.” To the north in Salem, Oregon, Jackson’s Books will close at the end of the year, following years of sales declines. SJ Mercury News Salem paper Dreaming Bigger PC Advisor magazine reports that […]

Schaden Freud Thriller The swing-for-the-fences commercial fiction game unfortunately produces more expensive misses than hits, and today’s WSJ offers one of those classic chronicles of a book that didn’t make it. Today’s focus is Jed Rubenfeld’s INTERPRETATION OF MURDER, though it’s easy to list other novels this year that have shared the same fate (including those from bloggers, a descendant of Jesus, and a brain tumor survivor). These stories always work better when there is some answer for why the book didn’t work in the marketplace the way the publisher, booksellers and press thought it would, but of course that […]

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The Next Book on Bush Former presidential advisor on faith-based initiatives David Kuo’s book TEMPTING FAITH: An Inside Story of Political Seduction is the latest to be “obtained” by the press in advance of its Monday laydown. This time it was MSNBC’s “Countdown” show, which had Keith Olbermann reading excerpts on air starting on Wednesday. While the show has continued to cover the book, the Free Press actually managed to get MSNBC to suspend large portions of the posted transcript of that epispode. A note reads: “At request of the publisher, MSNBC has temporarily removed the portions of Wednesday’s Countdown […]

Orhan Pamuk Wins Nobel The Turkish writer, published in the US by Vintage/Knopf, was cited by the Swedish Academy as one “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” The AP says the news “drew mixed reactions in Turkey, where the Turkish novelist is both a source of pride for placing Turkish literature on the world map and regarded as a traitor by staunch nationalists.” Here in the US Pamuk will reap significant publicity, since he’s currently in New York and teaching at Columbia. Knopf […]

It’s An Honor Just to be Covering First came the Booker announcement, with Kiran Desai winning for THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS, which the judges called “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.” At 35, she’s the youngest women ever to win the award. In accepting, she honored her mother Anita, nominated three times for the Booker: “The debt I owe to my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness.” Richard Charkin plays with […]