News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
September 2007
Shakespeare may have opined “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” but it is the steady slew of crime-fiction writers who hail from the region that should be credited with doing a bang-up job of keeping the sentiment alive and well. By far the most popular genre in Scandinavia, psychological thrillers and suspense-filled novels [...]
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International buzz is building over Mizé, the Portuguese novel by Ricardo Adolfo that appeared last year from Dom Quixote. Berlin Verlag recently nabbed German rights and in a hush hush deal, film rights were just sold to a major film company, so far nameless. Rumor has it the location will be changed from Lisbon to [...]
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It’s July and publishing folk the world over have settled back down now that the spring trifecta of book fairs—London, Bologna, BEA—has passed. The jury’s still out on which one––including Frankfurt of course––wins the rights race, and, as usual, there’s been plenty of speculation. But as big book fair chatter continues, another conversation is ramping [...]
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Sylvia Plath, Puberty, & A Slowly Setting Midnight Sun Combining the quirky prose of Paul Auster and the eccentricity of The World According to Garp, Dutch author Tommy Wieringa’s latest novel, Joe Speedboat (De Bezige Bij), injects the classic Bildungsroman with postmodern absurdity. The eponymous protagonist, a fourteen year-old bomb expert, airplane builder, and kinetic [...]
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February 2006
When Bridget Jones stumbled into the global spotlight in 1998, readers immediately identified with the bumbling thirty-something who recorded a year of her life in sentence fragments, cigarettes, and calories, making Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary not only a mega international success, but also a genre-spawning sensation. While European readers have been devouring Cecelia Ahern [...]
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October 2005
Desperately Seeking Sister, Swede Picks Up Speed A Genealogical Guessing Game A bevy of menacing women is tearing through the list in Argentina as Marisa Grinstein profiles fourteen femmes fatales who lay to waste the stereotype of the prim and proper lady in LadyKillers. Cheated out of their destiny and left bitter with baggage, each [...]
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“Due to fixed book prices, we Germans have 25 spaghetti cookbooks, and you poor Americans only have three,” jokes Christian Sprang, lawyer for Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers). Even though US publishers might quibble, there’s no doubt that book pricing methods are controversial around the world, and will probably [...]
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Back by popular demand, Australia’s second annual Books Alive promotion — a two-week, federally-funded, book-buying bonanza — kicked off last month as Australian Minister for the Arts and Sport Rod Kemp officially pronounced the campaign’s motto: “lose yourself in a book and find yourself in a bookstore.” During the two week period ending August 15, [...]
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May 2004
Road Rage Hits Spain, the Devil Deals in Sweden, and a Burglary Stumps Denmark A minor fender bender on a Monday morning leads a frazzled female executive named Sonsoles to hop out of her convertible and let loose with a string of insults and profanities that would make even the most grizzled truck driver blush [...]
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October 2003
The New Czech Comet Legatova Aloft, Sabach Soused in the Czech Republic, Plus Russia’s Own ‘Magic Mountain’ Streaking across the firmament on her way to the #1 spot in the Czech Republic this month, 84-year-old Kveta Legatova is a “new meteor in the Czech literary skies” who burst on the scene at the age of [...]
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