On the one hand, when a book like Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World or Jonathan Mahler’s The Challenge is published with juicy details or inadvertently timed to a breaking story, it gets them a great deal of attention and keeps them in the news cycle. But as the Observer’s Leon Neyfakh discovers, the other hand contains a double-edged sword – one where the meat of the book can get lost underneath a news break’s tidal wave. “Copies may sell, of course. But the seriousness of the project, and the commitment of the undertaking, will be forever eclipsed.“ Take […]
Swift Boat Author Back with Anti-Obama Book
Four years after Unfit for Command helped derail John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, Jerome Corsi returns with Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, which will debut at the top of the New York Times Non-Fiction hardcover bestseller list this weekend. So naturally the NYT’s Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman are paying attention to the book, published by S&S’s Threshold imprint, as the latest example of “an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks.” They also hone in on of the paper’s favorite subjects, the lack of time for proper fact checking prior to publication. In this […]
Dual Bonobo Cover Mystery Solved
For those who might have wondered why the covers of two recently published books by Francis Levy and Susan Squire featured the same photograph of amorous bonobos, the Observer has your answer. Turns out the photo, featured in a New Yorker article by Ian Parker, was taken by primatologist Frans de Waal – and when both Squire and Levy saw the photo, both asked permission to use it. “I received emails about this cover from both authors or publishers in the same week,” de Waal. “I am not a photo agency, but a busy scientist, so [I] don’t keep very […]
Plumly's Keats Obsession
The Washington Post’s Bob Thompson has a long profile of Stanley Plumly and his new book Posthumous Keats, three decades in the making and survivor of a publisher switch, an ended marriage and doubts he wouldn’t finish. Thompson writes: “He sometimes felt like Sisyphus, watching the damn rock roll endlessly back down the hill. But there were other times, Plumly says, when communing with the author of “Ode to a Nightingale” made him feel ‘at least twice alive.'”WaPo
Censorship Cry Against Muslim Writers Award
Max Malik was one of five writers shortlisted for the Muslim Writers Award (and last year’s winner) but he claims in the Telegraph that the book The Butterfly Hunter “was never given to the judges to read” to appease parts of the Muslim community. He said: “My creative effort is being treated as if it is somehow unclean and unworthy. Clearly, the Muslim Writers Awards has decided that the novel is so unpalatable for them that it needs to be buried.” Imran Akram, chief executive of the 2008 awards, countered: “Dr Malik’s submission was certainly one of the best we […]
Dylan Thomas Diary for Sale
A diary offering a rare insight into both sides of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s infamously rocky marriage to Caitlin McNamara is up for sale, one of 40 pieces being sold for £250,000 on behalf of a New York-based collector by London antiquarian bookseller Rick Gekoski. Gekoski said of the diary, written by Mrs. Thomas: “It was a tumultuous marriage, of that there is no doubt, but what this collection has is both sides of it. It is very raw and emotional. Sometimes she says ‘Oh my God, I wish I’d never married him’ and at other times she wishes she […]