Graham to Granta and More Personnel News Canongate managing director David Graham will take over as managing director of Granta Publications this summer, overseeing the book and magazine units as well as Portobello Books (also backed by Granta owner Sigrid Rausing). Rausing comments: “We are thrilled that David is joining us. Together with Ian Jack, who is now Editor-in-Chief of Books as well as the magazine, he will oversee the return of fiction to the Granta list, alongside the impressive non-fiction list built up by George Miller and Sara Holloway. At Portobello he will free up Philip Gwyn Jones to […]

Atlas’ New World, CDS’s New Services Atlas Books is expanding their world beyond their series co-venture approach to publishing (with co-published lines at both Harper and Norton) to a new publishing partnership with online magazine Slate, distributed by Perseus’s CDS.   The line launches in June as Slate celebrates its tenth anniversary with a compilation volume THE BEST OF SLATE, followed in the fall by Henry Blodget’s THE WALL STREET SELF-DEFENSE MANUAL: The Intelligent Layperson’s Guide to Investing and BACKSTABBERS, CRAZED GENIUSES, ANIMALS WE HATE: Slate Writers Tell It Like It Is, a collection of the site’s “Assessment” columns.   […]

GBL To Begin Talks on Taking Bertelsmann Public At the annual meeting of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, Albert Frere announced that the company “has decided to exercise its right to request that Bertelsmann launch an initial public offering.” He added, “In accordance with our agreement, discussions with Bertelsmann on the IPO are expected to begin next month.” Guardian Passages Crown has revised and merged the two internal working documents cited exclusively here yesterday in a new numbered document that quotes 45 passages of varying lengths from Megan McCafferty’s novels accompanied by what are characterized as “alleged infringing passage(s) from Viswanathan’s novel.” […]

Nice Girls Don’t Copy Author Kaavya Viswanathan had this to say in a statement from Little, Brown yesterday: “When I was in high school, I read and loved two wonderful novels by Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, which spoke to me in a way few other books did. Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and passages in these books. “While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn’t aware […]

How Opal Mehta’s Author Got Accused of Plagiarism The Harvard Crimson says that sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life “contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty — the 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts and the 2003 novel Second Helpings.” McCafferty’s agent Joanna Pulcini says she first learned of the similarities in an e-mail from a fan. Viswanathan told the paper, “No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about.” Meanwhile, Harvard professor Werner Sollors provides the au courant academic euphemism, saying “some strong […]

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