The bizarre case between Clive Cussler and Crusader Entertainment (now Bristol Bay Productions) continues, with a California Court of Appeals ruling once again having both sides claiming victory, at least for now. The court overturned a prior order that Cussler pay Crusader $5 million for breach of contract. But they rejected Cussler’s contention that he was still owed $8.5 million by Crusader for rights to a book of his that was never adapted into a movie. Attorneys for both sides said they won, though Cussler’s lawyer Bert Fields wins the award for best convoluted phrasing, contending that “Crusader was barred […]
Authors
A Miscellaneous Day: Isaacson and Jobs?; A James Cameron Novel?; Patterson Comics; and More
The NYT says Walter Isaacson is working on an authorized biography of Steve Jobs, based on “two people briefed on the project.” Producer Jon Landau told MTV News that James Cameron wants to write an Avatar prequel. “Jim wants to write a novel that is a big epic that fills in a lot of things…. It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with.” We’ll see. USA Today says that James Patterson has a […]
Mueller's Nobel Acceptance Speech
The Nobel organization has posted the full text of literature laureate Herta Mueller’s acceptance speech, delivered yesterday in Stockholm (translated by Philip Boehm). “I wish I could utter a sentence for all those whom dictatorships deprive of dignity every day, up to and including the present,” Mueller said in her closing. One excerpt, about how the Romanian dictatorship motivated to her write when speaking was not sufficient: “Still, what can’t be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand. The mouth is skipped over. I talked a great deal during […]
Judge Dismisses Meyer Infringement Cast
In a California Federal Court, Judge Otis D. Wright II carefully read and compared Stephenie Meyer’s BREAKING DAWN and Jordan Scott’s THE NOCTURNE and dismissed Scott’s case alleging copyright infringement. As Judge Wright summarized, “plaintiff simply argues that the works are similar in three particular respects: the marriage sequence, consummation of the marriage on a beach, and the childbirth.” In comparing the works, he finds that “the plots and themes in the subject books have little in common,” “the settings and characters in the two works are vastly different,” oh and also, “the characters are similarly different.” While both books […]
The Risks of Experiments: Distribution of Moody's Twitter Story Surprises Readers
Experimentation is how you learn but sometimes the lessons are tough ones. Long-form narrative may not belong on Twitter and after this week’s tweeting of a short story by Rick Moody through Electric Literature, we may not have to think about it for a while. Encouraged by the start-up quarterly whose “mission is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture,” Moody wrote the story specifically for Twitter “and used it as a source of creative inspiration” according to a release from EL. He comments “it really was […]
People
Former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt director of field sales Paul Von Drasek has joined Capstone Publishers, which publishes children’s books for the educational market. He will lead the company’s planned expansion into the retail market. At Thomas Nelson, Russ Schwartz has been promoted to director, Christian independent retail sales, taking over from the recently-promoted Tom Knight. In the UK, Natalie Jerome was promoted to publishing director at Harper Non-Fiction, and Anna Valentine was promoted to senior commissioning editor. Author Colleen McCullough is due to have brain surgery in January in an effort to alleviate her trigeminal neuralgia, “an illness nicknamed the […]