The Santa Barbara Independent has a long piece on Selden Edwards in advance of the release of his debut novel THE LITTLE BOOK on August 14. The paper says “the buzz in the publishing world is that this impeccably crafted and suspenseful tale of a world-famous American rock star who wakes up one day in Vienna, Austria, in 1897, will be the hottest fiction title of the fall.” Edwards began the book back in 1974 “and submitted the first of many final drafts as part of the requirements for a master’s degree at Stanford…. More than six supposedly final drafts […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
Suskind Book Says White House Ordered Forgery
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 […]
'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 […]