The July pick for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club is Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace (featured in both our Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer anthology and our January Buzz Books Editors Panel.) Also making news is Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, said to be have been approached by “multiple suitors” in recent months, the WSJ reports, including Apple. The company has hired bankers to explore a sale as a result of that interest, and those bankers (aka “people close to the situation”) suggest to the paper that “the company could be valued at as much $1 billion in a deal.” Apparently the […]
Authors
Simon & Schuster Wins Libel Case, But Supreme Court Minority Wants to Overturn “Actual Malice” Standard
The Supreme Court let stand a verdict in favor of publisher Simon & Schuster and author Guy Lawson’s Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History (the basis of the movie War Dogs). Albanian Shkelzen Berisha had sued for defamation, but lower courts found he was a public figure with respect to stories about Albanian weapons-trafficking, and did not meet the high bar of showing that the author acted with “actual malice” in any alleged errors. That is the standard set in the significant 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times […]
Controveries: Cohen’s Book Has New Publisher, Title
Richard Cohen’s work of history, cancelled in May by Random House due to “the publisher’s sensitivities” over how he represented the roles of Black people and African Americans, has a new publisher — along with a new title. Simon & Schuster will publish the book, retitled Making History, in May 2022, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson has rescheduled their edition as well. Cohen tells the Guardian the added material “has improved the book” and says of the new title, “I actually think it’s better than The History Makers.” The title change came after a cease and desist letter from Julieanna Richardson, […]
What’s In A Name?….
Simon & Schuster ceo Jonathan Karp said in his latest Word According to Karp video that John Bolton had a different title in mind for his book last summer: “The original title of the book, Ambassador Bolton wanted to call it A Hard Pounding, which was actually a quote from the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo.” (Our copy-editing department notes the remark was made during the battle, while the Duke’s troops awaited the arrival of their Prussian allies, hence the full quote, “Hard pounding this, gentlemen, but we will see who can pound the longest.”) Karp adds, […]
ALA Conference Continues With Wilkerson
The ALA Annual Conference continued over the weekend, with author Isabel Wilkerson speaking on Sunday afternoon as part of the President’s Program. Wilkerson’s remarks centered on race in America and her book Caste, as well as touching on a variety of topics from the legacy of slavery to social iniquities made even more apparent by COVID-19. “We often speak of slavery as a sad, dark chapter in our country’s history,” she said. “When in fact it is the foundation of our country’s social, political and economic order.” She emphasized the importance of libraries, noting that they’re vital for filling in […]
Hilderbrand to Retire from Fiction Writing in 2024
Elin Hilderbrand tells the AP that she plans to retire from writing novels in 2024, indicating that she wants to stop while her work is in demand. “A lot of people will follow a writer for a long time and then inevitably they will turn out a book that is not as good as the others,” Hilderbrand told the AP last month. “I’ve always said to myself, ‘I will not do that. I will make each book better and better or different in some way.’ I feel myself coming to my natural end of my material.” While Hilderbrand will definitely […]