Ron SUskind’s just-released THE WAY OF THE WORLD charges that the White House instructed the CIA to “forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein,” Politico reports, “designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.” The book says: “The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
'Breaking Dawn' Breaking Records
Hachette Book Group estimates that they sold 1.3 million copies of Stephenie Meyer’s BREAKING DAWN on Saturday. The company added a 500,000-copy reprint prior to publication, for 3.7 million copies in print. Borders announced that its stores and web site sold over 250,000 copies on opening day–“nearly 10 times what the retailer’s first-day sales were for Eclipse, the third book in the series.”Borders release
Rushdie Takes the Bait; Threatens to Sue
File it under smart people who do dumb things. Instead of ignoring, or laughing off, the book ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE by Ron Evans, who guarded Rushdie when he was in hiding, the knighted author is threatening to sue–which doesn’t really invalidate the book’s assertions. Rushdie tells the Guardian, “He is portraying me as mean, nasty, tight-fisted, arrogant and extremely unpleasant. In my humble opinion I am none of those things.” He gives them paragraphs of quotes and denials, culminating in this: “This is not a free speech issue, this is libel – there is a difference between those two […]
Italian Publisher Overspends to Bring Bestseller to US
The IHT reports on Italian publisher Baldini Castoldi Dalai’s efforts to put out an English translation of Giorgio Faletti’s 2002 book I KILL, “an Italian thriller about a serial killer on a murder spree in Monaco [that] has been translated into two dozen languages and sold five million copies worldwide.” The IHT adds, “For Italian novels, even best sellers at home, the situation is particularly difficult. A few, like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, have managed to break through. But Susanna Tamaro’s Follow Your Heart, the biggest selling Italian postwar novel, with more than 14 million copies sold, according to its […]
Bear Stearns Book Due Next Month
Brick Tower Press has generated finance world media for their just-announced BEAR TRAP, written by an anonymous senior director at Bear Stearns and marketer Andrew Spencer at Creative Management Group. The book is due September 22 and they say the author will reveal his identity at the time. It’s promoted as “describ[ing] what happened within Bear’s walls and on the trading floor that resulted in the most sensational financial crisis of our times. He recounts in detail the chain of events that led to the downward spiral-from both Bear’s point-of-view and from the overall world financial marketplace’s.” But Fox News’s […]
Trade Version of Rowling's "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" Coming
J K Rowling’s TALES OF BEEDLE THE BARD–the book of wizarding folk tales referred to in the Deathly Hallows se she wrote by hand and illustrated herself, producing only seven copies, one which was bought at auction by Amazon for $4 million–will be issued in a trade edition after all, on December 4. Rowling will also add “notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore, which appear by generous permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters’ Archive.” Amazon will produce up to 100,000 facsimile “collector’s editions” (at $100/50 pounds) and Scholastic and Bloomsbury will print and distribute trade editions–all on behalf of the Children’s High […]