Entries Tagged as 'Books I Won't Be Reading'

S&S proposal on reversion rights minor problem compared to HANNIBAL RISING

Random House | Books | Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

ABOUT THIS BOOK

HE IS ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING CHARACTERS
IN ALL OF LITERATURE.

AT LAST THE EVOLUTION OF HIS EVIL
IS REVEALED.

Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.

All the people who are getting exercised about the Simon & Schuster POD rights controversy would do better to direct their attention in this direction. To my mind, the popularity of books like this, that simply glorify evil, is a far more serious problem than a trifling Kabuki play about eminently negotiable rights.

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Villain: Vernon Winfrey Joins Oprah’s Book Club

Dad’s book is no Oprah pick

It could be a chilly Father’s Day for Oprah Winfrey ’s dad.

The talk queen tells us she’s “shocked” and “disappointed” that she had to hear it from the Daily News that her 74-year-old pop, Vernon, is writing a book about her.

Winfrey said she laughed recently when “one of my assistants said, ‘The Daily News is calling. They say they heard your father is writing a book about you.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. I can assure them it’s not true.’

“But then my sister said, ‘I think you should call your father.’ I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, ‘I meant to tell you I’ve been working on it.’ ”

Winfrey, 53, confided, “I was upset. I won’t say ‘devastated,’ but I was stunned.”

“The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey,” she added. “The last person.”

Oprah was 14 and pregnant when she left her mother’s home in Milwaukee to live with her father in Nashville. Her baby died weeks after he was born. She has said before that she’s grateful to her father for helping her go on, for teaching her discipline and the importance of education.

Nevertheless, Vernon, who plans to call his book, “Things Unspoken,” was quoted as saying he should have been tougher on her, because Oprah was “out of hand and an unruly child.”

“I have a good relationship with him,” Oprah told us Sunday, when she received the Elie Wiesel Foundation Humanitarian Award at the Waldorf. Though she hasn’t seen Vernon since he accompanied her on a trip to Africa a few months ago,
she said, “We talk, we talk, we talk.”

That’s why “I would have preferred to have known my father was working on this. It would have been a nice gesture, a courtesy,” she said.

OK, Vern: you’re the dad. No matter how famous she gets, it’s your job to protect your daughter.

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Books I Won’t Be Reading: Ollie North’s Eight-Book Deal

Ollie North Signs Eight-Book Deal - 5/15/2007 - Publishers Weekly

With 2007 marking the 20th anniversary of the Iran-Contra hearings, one of those proceedings best-known figures, Oliver North, has signed a multibook deal with the Christian house B&H Publishing Group. The contract calls for North to do four fiction titles plus four nonfiction titles based on his Fox News Channel show, War Stories. North will co-write the novels with Austin Boyd, a former navy pilot and published author.

What?

I know his books will sell because he has a TV show, and my wife still remembers him as that handsome clean-cut guy who made Congress look stupid.

Argh.

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Virginia Tech book by VT prof — too early!

Plume Gets Virginia Tech Account - 4/30/2007 - Publishers Weekly

n one of the first deals related to the Virginia Tech shootings, Plume’s Cherise Davis has bought world rights to Roland Lazenby’s April 16: Heartbreak in Blacksburg from agent Matthew Carnicelli. Lazenby, a journalism professor at Virginia Tech, will use the perspective of students on campus, in particular his own journalism students who helped supply the mainstream media with information via their student-run Web site planetblacksburg.com, to provide context for the events and describe the recovery and resilience of the campus community. Three of Lazenby’s students will coauthor the book and a portion of the proceeds will be given to the victims’ fund at Virginia Tech and to support journalism education at the university. Plume will publish this summer.


Bzzzt.

Too early, prof. Smells bad.

I actually have some unique perspective to add here, as I am already familiar with Lazenby’s work: I collect books about basketball and Lazenby is the author of several rather pedestrian ones. He’s not likely to come up with a deeply insightful book about the VT shootings.

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Judith Regan used the “J” word

Guess I won’t be reading anything new from Judith Regan’s house for a while. She’s going to be in the publishing industry’s Siberia for a while. Maybe a few months. ;-)

Fired Editor’s Remarks Said to Have Provoked Murdoch - New York Times

The conversation with Mr. Jackson on Friday afternoon was described by sources as heated and confrontational, even for the famously forceful Ms. Regan. Ms. Regan’s alleged comments, which came in the midst of a tense conversation in which she berated Mr. Jackson, were directed at him and Ms. Friedman, who are Jewish, as well as toward other Jews, one of the sources said.

That source would not say specifically what Ms. Regan is alleged to have said, but characterized the comments as offensive and inappropriate, but not a hateful tirade. Still, the source said, it was enough to prompt Mr. Murdoch to dismiss her.

Right on.

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Hannibal Rising: What a Bunch of Hooey

What a bunch of hooey. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was a good book, but the second book, HANNIBAL, that made Lecter a hero and turned Clarice Starling evil, was simply disgusting and evil. Don’t bother with this trash.

Bantam Dell Publishing Group: Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

HANNIBAL RISING
Written by Thomas Harris

Fiction - Suspense | Delacorte Press Hardcover
December 2006 | $27.95 | 978-0-385-33941-4 (0-385-33941-0)

HE IS ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING CHARACTERS
IN ALL OF LITERATURE.

AT LAST THE EVOLUTION OF HIS EVIL
IS REVEALED.

Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.

He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.

Hannibal’s uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle’s beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.

Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France.

But Hannibal’s demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn.

He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death’s prodigy.

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Now on to THE SOLOMON KEY!

The secret’s out: `Da Vinci’ mania fading - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK - It couldn’t last forever, right? Simmered by three years of lawsuits, religious debates and conspiracy theories, brought to a boil in May by the Hollywood movie, the craze for all things “Da Vinci Code” is finally fading, publishers and booksellers agree.

“I would definitely say it’s slowing down,” Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley says. “Once everybody got past the movie, the whole thing peaked.”

No more “Da Vinci” spinoffs. Yay!

I saw this coming two years ago when I published THE SOLOMON KEY AND BEYOND.

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Guide to Google Book Search Browse Views

Inside Google Book Search: From the mail bag: four book views

Searching around on Book Search, you’ll see that we display books in different ways depending on the specific copyright status of each title. Given the status, we range from making the entire text of public domain books available to showing either small snippets or simply bibliographic details about in-copyright books. For books that authors and publishers have submitted to us, you can see a limited preview of the pages.

The four ways you’ll see books in Google Book Search

A useful list is available at the link.

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How Opal Got Her Book Signed

And here’s the missing piece of the puzzle: how Opal got her book signed.

A Passage to Harvard

It was, unsurprisingly, IvyWise [college admissions company] founder Katherine Cohen (Brown ‘89; Yale PhD ‘97) who got Viswanathan into the book-writing business. Cohen (author, “Rock Hard Apps: How to Write a Killer College Application”) wondered why Viswanathan hadn’t listed her novel-in-progress on her résumé. You can almost see her application-glazed eyes lighting up: Okay, here’s our pitch: “Not just another high school newspaper editor-in-chief, Indian American science nerd!”

Which is where the next round of packaging comes in. Cohen sent Viswanathan’s work to her own agent, who hooked up the teenager with Alloy Entertainment, a book packager (yes, this is really a business) that specializes in churning out teen-lit like so many Moschino miniskirts. Deeming her original concept too dark, Alloy “helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book,” according to the company president.

It’s no excuse, but with all this third-party positioning, is it any wonder that a person — especially a teenage person — could forget (or ignore) the fact that some of the writing in her book is not actually hers?

Implausible Blurb 1,032,437

Nando Parrado: author interview - Orion Publishing Group

Nando Parrado is one of those rare humans. Spend five minutes with him and you feel the weight of the day fall off your shoulders and realise that it isn’t good to be alive, it is bloody marvellous. Parrado knows this more than most. On Friday, 13th October 1972 the 19-year-old Uruguayan was flying to Chile with his rugby team when their plane smashed into the frozen Andes. What followed was 72 days of hell, as the handful of survivors [was] forced to eat the flesh of their dead to avoid starvation before Parrado and fellow survivors Roberto Canesso and Antonio Vizinti embarked on a heroic trek across the treacherous mountains that led to their rescue. The nightmare was made into the 1993 film Alive! adapted from Piers Paul Reid’s eponymous book. Now Parrado has written the only first-hand account of what happened in that remote place.

I must be picky, but I find it a little difficult to feel quite the same glowing enthusiasm for meeting this guy … what if he’s hungry?

In fairness, I love reading survival stories, and this sounds like a corker.

SlushPile.net » Cover Designs For Books That Don’t Exist

SlushPile.net » Cover Designs For Books That Don’t Exist

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Some will see this as an excellent idea for generating the all-important buzz for your book project. Others will this as yet another example of just how far publishing has turned it’s head from literature towards the omnipotent product. Either way, I have to admit this is a pretty damn cool book jacket.

Jared Paul Stern, the embattled New York Post gossip writer accused of trying to extort billionaire Ron Burkle, doesn’t have a book deal. He doesn’t have an agent. And he doesn’t have any details of the book yet. But, as fishbowlNY reports, he’s got a cool Chip Kidd designed book cover.

A writer once told me about a drunken lunch he shared with a powerful magazine editor. This was back in the golden days, when magazines still bothered to publish short stories and when writers could be considered part of a “stable.” Over the course of a three-hour, booze soaked lunch (another bygone from a past age), The Editor devised a short story title. The Editor then dispatched The Writer to create a story to fit the unusual and memorable title.

So, if in the past, a title could come before the work, then maybe it makes sense in today’s visual age to have a cover before the book.


Or not.

Viswanathan book deal: the real deal

Viswanathan book deal raises more questions - The Boston Globe

”They are not paying out that much money to a 17-year-old with no track record,” said Boston literary agent Doe Coover. ”They are paying it to this organization which has had huge hits aimed at a similar audience.” And some wondered who is looking out for the creator of the work.

”If they [Alloy] get co-copyright, 50-50 of the money and 15 percent for the agent, that’s not a great deal for the author,” said John Taylor Williams, a Boston agent and publishing lawyer.