A Spanish translation of one of Tintin’s most famous tales, The Blue Lotus, by Antonio Altarriba has been withdrawn from bookshops after pressure from Hergé’s estate. Arriba had updated the comic to show Tintin in his 30s and having something of a midlife crisis, with plenty of graphic sex scenes. The estate claimed the Altarriba version of this particular tale, which was published to cash in on last year’s 100th anniversary of Remi’s birth, “perverted the essence of the personality” of Tintin, putting pressure on the publishers of The Pink Lotus, Edicions de Ponent, and its distributors to ensure it […]
International News
Vietnam Has Translation Woes, Too
The dearth of translated works is not just an American problem. Thanh Nien News profiles 28-year-old Cao Viet Dung, a “prolific” translator of works by Milan Kundera, Thomas Friedman, Michel Houellebecq, and Paul Auster. He bemoans Vietnam’s “chaotic reading culture in which people rush to read worthless books while ignoring worthwhile ones.” Dung is also critical of the 50-plus state-owned publishers in Vietnam, as published novels “lack high-quality content and have been sloppily edited” and censorship has led to many books being withdrawn from circulation after publication.Thanh Nien News
"Lost" Sir Walter Scott Works to Be Published
Even though Sir Walter Scott’s final two novels, The Siege Of Malta and the incomplete Bizarro, were kept under wraps by his family for fear of sullying his literary reputation (the author had suffered three strokes by then), University of Edinburgh Press has published them, corrected and in a single volume, leading to accusations of “grave robbing.” Paul Scott, who published a book based on Scott’s journals, was surprised to learn their wishes had been overturned, said: “Scott’s health deteriorated quite markedly and you can see that from his journal. It starts off as a very intelligent, very well written […]
Short Story Anthology Ignites Yet Another CanLit Debate
It took almost a year before The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories ignited debate, but now that it has it’s provoked another round of discussion in the ongoing Canadian literature culture wars. In response to anthology editor Jane Urquhart’s selections for the anthology and her admission in the book’s introduction of a “nagging suspicion that perhaps I was not the person best suited to the task,” two literary magazines – The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries – have joined forces to celebrate a Salon des Refusés, featuring stories by 20 writers (10 in each magazine) not included […]
Coffee and Crime at Starbucks in Germany
Shelf Awareness points to how Starbucks is promoting books outside of the United States. In cooperation with Diogenes Verlag, Starbucks is putting on a Mystery Festival Coffee & Crime program that consists of 11 readings in nine cities featuring six mystery authors and an audiobook narrator (reading Georges Simenon books). Another 125 German Starbucks will feature a “reference library” of works by the authors and information about the readings. The difference? German Starbucks stores will not be selling any of the Diogenes titles, instead advising customers to visit their local bookstores. Schweizer Buchhandel (via Shelf Awareness)
Nielsen Wants ISBNs for Each eFormat
In their role as exclusive UK ISBN registrar, Nielsen Book has issued a statement indicating they will exclude from their database titles that use a single ISBN to represent all e-book forms of a particular. In other words they are rejecting that practice that is currently favored by most large publishers, requiring the assignment of a different ISBN to each different electronic edition of the same title. As quoted from the statement in the Bookseller, Nielsen notes that “we acknowledge that [publishers'[ e-book initiatives to date may not have required per-format identification…. We believe that hardwiring bibliographic and identification practice […]