Surreality Bites Warlocks Roam Poland, Italy’s Spinster/Warrior, And Potter-philia Sweeps Russia If contemporary world history isn’t surreal enough for you, dive into the willful wickedness of Andrej Sapkowski’s latest genre-bending novel, Narrenturm (it roughly translates from the German as Asylum). Freely warping the historical and the fantastic, this Polish bestseller follows the relatives of a…Continue Reading
“We will never be the same,” ran the popular refrain after 9/11, and as we continue to unpack that sentiment in the various parts of our lives, it seems a fitting enough epigram for the state of book publishing nearly four months into the post-terror twilight. Something has changed, all right. But across the industry…Continue Reading
By now the rise of books about the Mideast and the fall of just about everything else has been well documented by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Many reasons have been cited: the abrupt cancellation of tours; the general lack of promotion and concurrent lack of reader attention; the economy; and fear, any…Continue Reading
Calendar Publishing Clocks Another Year. But Is There Life After ‘The Far Side’? The Far Side Off-the-Wall Calendar, Gary Larson’s page-a-day phenomenon that has been the number one selling boxed calendar for more than a decade, is history. “He decided that 17 years was enough,” says Michael Nonbello, VP for Andrews McMeel Publishing. “Larson wanted…Continue Reading
What to say? Eloise gets larger and larger, and the blimp in her likeness lofting about the foyer of the Javits Center will probably be trundled out at the next Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As for the rest of the Licensing 2001 International show, except for the endless licensing and marketing of dead movie stars,…Continue Reading
PEOPLE As announced previously, Bill Shinker will join Penguin Putnam as SVP and Publisher of an as yet unnamed imprint, on Sept. 4. He was most recently at Free Press, where he had been Publisher from August 2000 to his resignation at the beginning of April. Ken Wright, formerly at Holt Reference, has been named…Continue Reading
Wine Dark Seas Aegean Fables, France Between the Sheets, and Sweden Says ‘Pippi, Move Over’ A veritable odyssey of titles appears this month on the bestseller list from Greece, at the top of which is The Three Widows by Dora Yiannakopoulou, which traces the lives and friendships of three women who become friends after the…Continue Reading
The Streets of London Cumming Goes Undercover, More Fodder for Potter, and Delahunt Reaches for the Orange With all eyes focusing intently on the latest deals from the London Book Fair, we thought we’d swivel the periscope toward what’s hitting the stores this summer in the UK. For starters, Charles Cumming’s A Spy By Nature…Continue Reading
Advance publicity for this year’s Toy Fair generated all the thrill of a wet blanket, with announcements rolling in from industry giants Mattel and Hasbro that their presence at the 98-year-old show will be significantly notched down in 2002. As talk of “downsizing” and “retrenching” swirled in the press, we were also treated to the…Continue Reading
Time Regained Eco Back in Italy, Dahl Redux in Spain, and Harry Potter Everywhere Else Umberto Eco is at it again. Romance, that is. His fourth such novel to date — featuring the picaresque adventures of the title character, Baudolino — has hit the stands in Italy, and we’re told its pages are bursting with…Continue Reading
