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 […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
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
Keep Knitting
Putnam has announced that Kate Jacobs’ The Friday Night Knitting Club has over 1 million copies in print after 38 straight weeks on the NYT trade paperback fiction list, with a sequel volume KNIT TWO now setfor publication on November 25. It was just about a year ago that Jacobs’ former agent Barbara Zitwer announced that she would take over the series and write two sequels for Grand Central. At the time, Zitwer told us, “I wanted to create a series and to write the sequels and keep the series growing and Kate very much wanted to write something new […]
Will Buffett Book SNOWBALL?
A little like Warner’s launch of Jack Welch’s first book right after 9/11, Bantam faces uncertainty as their expensive authorized biography of legendary investor Warren Buffett releases next Monday in the midst of what Buffett himself calls an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Will current conditions make readers hungrier than ever for insights into one of the greatest investors ever, or leave them with no appetite for personal details about one of the world’s richest men? Time magazine appears to have had the first official look at the book, which they say “reveals that in his personal life, the Oracle of Omaha […]