It took a dizzying set of manipulations to produce today’s NYT story about Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book about Rupert Murdoch, which treats Murdoch’s path to an early look like a leak harmful to national security. The essence: Murdoch obtained an early copy of the book, and objected: “I have just read four or five chapters of your book,” he wrote to Wolff. “It contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact which I will be happy to point out to you if we could meet. Otherwise I will have no option other than to speak to Random House.” The NYT says […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
Bolano's Other Publisher
As Andrew Wylie prepares to take over the Roberto Bolano estate and sell newly “discovered” works (per the story we cited earlier), the Observer visits with New Directions editor-in-chief Barbara Epler, who first published Bolano in the US. She originally acquired BY NIGHT IN CHILE from Christopher MacLehose at Harvill Press, along with two other books–and then went on to acquire rights to all but the “major” works, Savage Detectives and the forthcoming 2666 from agent Carmen Balcells. In all New Directions controls “seven short novels, two books of short stories, an essay collection and a volume of poetry called […]
Walesa Autobiography Rejects Agent Charge
In his just released autobiography, former Polish president Lech Walesa vigorously denies charges that he collaborated with the country’s secret policy for two years and informed on shipyard workers. “I want everything to be known, precisely,” Walesa writes. The AP says that, “In the book, he writes that, following his arrest in December 1970, authorities offered to release him from prison if he signed some documents. ‘I did not think long. I did not even read them,’ Walesa writes. ‘I signed a number of papers on leaving the arrest, which was a standard procedure. … I remember there were many […]
Another Nobel Tie-In
Norton will have a “greatly expanded and revised edition” of recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics Paul Krugman’s 1999 book THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS AND THE CRISIS OF 2008 ready to publish in early December 2008. The original book looked at economic crises in Asia and Latin America, but the new edition “will show how depression economics has come to America” and indicate “the steps that must be taken to contain the crisis and turn around a world economy sliding into a deep recession.” A paperback version of his most recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal, […]
Koontz Memoir Coming
As often happens, one of the bigger deal announcements comes not from the book fair but from the US. USA Today got the first look at the official press release (a glimpse had leaked through our foreign deal reports last month) that Dean Koontz will write a memoir, A BIT LITTLE LIFE: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, publishing next summer from Hyperion. It’s the first in a two-book nonfiction deal for world English rights at Hyperion with editor Brenda Copeland. Koontz says: “I wanted to write not just another dog story like Marley & Me — and, by the […]
New Pynchon Novel
Following internet rumors, the LAT says that Penguin Press has confirmed that they will publish a new novel by Thomas Pynchon in August 2009.LAT