Dutch crime writer Janwillem van de Wetering, 77, died on July 4, 2008, following a struggle with cancer. Best-known for his Amsterdam Cops series, Soho Press will be reissuing all 14 of van de Wetering’s Soho Crime novels in paperback, beginning this fall. Chicago Tribune book critic from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s Joseph Coates Jr., 75, died of lung cancer last week.Tribune
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Charkin the Blog Book
Exact Editions learns via a permissions request that: “In September 2008 Pan Macmillan will publish Charkin Blog: the Archive, by Richard Charkin, an edited print-on-demand version of the blog he published while chairman of the company.”Exact Editions blog
Softplay Buys Kidsbooks
Privately-owned Chicago-based Softplay, a marketer of interactive books and related toys, has purchased Boston children’s book publisher Kidsbooks, on undisclosed terms. Playthings
Sittenfeld's Provocative "American Wife"
Radar has excerpts from Curtis Sittenfeld’s forthcoming novel AMERICAN WIFE, “a thinly veiled novel based on Laura Bush’s life that is sure to send the White House into a fury” as it “mingles real facts and incidents with the author’s imaginative, fanciful, sometimes sexually charged musings. The result is a masterful highbrow-lowbrow mash-up that satisfies as ass-kicking literary fiction and juicy gossip simultaneously.” A number of short excerpts are posted. Radar
Holtzbrinck and Thalia Eye Weltbild Acquisition
Germany’s newspapers FAZ and Handelsblatt report that both Holztbrinck and the Thalia book chain are interested in bidding to buy the Weltbild publishing group. Holtzbrinck and Thalia currently own Netherlands-based online book distributor bol.com and publisher Droemer Knaur together. Thomson reports, “Weltbild said over the weekend that it wants to change and expand its structure but that there are no plans to break up nor sell its units.” Holtzbrinck deputy md Jochen Gutbrod acknowledged his company’s potential interest; Thalia did not comment. Thomson Financial
Ishmael Beah's Statement
Ishamel Beah’s Statement For months I told Bob Lloyd and The Australians reporter, Shelley Gare, through my publisher, my agent, and my adoptive mother, that unfortunately they were wrong, that the man they claimed was my father was not my father, and that my mother and brothers were not alive, as Lloyd claimed. Last week, when The Australiansent reporters to my home in Sierra Leone, they were forced to acknowledge that this has been a hoax. Now The Australians reporters are trying to raise questions about the dates in my book, A Long Way Gone, regarding when the war came […]