News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
While the rest of the world suffers the economic squeeze, the government-run Chinese publishing industry has counterintuitively managed to cultivate opportunity for expansion both for local entrepreneurs and international publishers. Talk of less state interference and mounting interest from foreign markets is encouraging some publishers to brave the censors, fears of piracy, and the cultural [...]
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February 2007
The young German über-poet, Silke Scheuermann, makes her novelistic debut this month with The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (Schoeffling). Much as in her successful short story collection, Rich Girls (2005, also Schoeffling), Scheuermann employs her poetic facility to good effect as she renders the confusion and frustration her generation faces as it attempts to [...]
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February 2002
The phrase “market volatility” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re publishing books in Israel. As part of PT’s continuing look at the book business overseas, Efrat Lev, Foreign Rights Director of the Harris/Elon Literary Agency in Jerusalem, profiles the Israeli market and parses the nation’s current bestseller list. Reports from New York indicate [...]
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October 2001
Black-tie shebangs are thick on the calendar this time of year, with publishers scurrying from one award ceremony to the next, buoyed along by the hope of slapping those “Winner!” stickers on their authors’ books — or at least hoping to have a good meal and a quick exit from the fête du jour. September [...]
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Bohemian Dreams Hitler the Artiste, Simon’s Parisian Sandstorm, And Germany Gets Its ‘Wenderoman’ The vagaries of history are the subject of a new novel by noted French playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, who in On Behalf of Another sets his noggin on fire over this world-historical mindbender: What would have happened if Adolf Hitler had been accepted [...]
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February 2000
Apocalypse Now Amnesia Hits Spain, Horror Bloodies France, and Pokémon Ravages Australia Perhaps in compensation for the underwhelming arrival of Y2K, this month’s bestsellers have registered a potent desire for all those missed connections, fatal errors, and world-historical upheavals we were so tantalizingly promised. In Spain, Nativel Preciado’s The Narcissist plunges into the abyss of [...]
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