AMS Bankruptcy Fallout
Written byPosted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under AMS Bankruptcy
- The official press release from AMS.
- The Seattlest’s Jeremy Barker focuses on the effect on Seattle presses.
- Matt Wagner suggests that consolidation may not be good for small presses, even if PGW’s huge volume allowed for independent presses to get into big-box stores.
- Sarah points to the Canadian impact.
- At The Beat, comics publisher Actionopolis/Komikwerks offers a response. Shannon Eric Denton and Patrick Coyle relay their attorney’s thoughts: AMS is looking for a buyer, but that a “fresh start” will enable any new company not to take on the debt. So they may be more attractive now than they were before the bankruptcy filing.
- Dean Haspiel: “BOTTOM LINE: in order to succeed, the author has to become the publisher and the publicist and, sometimes, the printer, too.”
- Time Out New York is looking into the story.
- At the Engine, Heidi MacDonald asks people how the AMS bankruptcy will affect them. Among some of the highlights: Warren Ellis insists that HarperCollins will not get the advance back for his second novel and Comic Relief owner Rory Root pointed out, as Soft Skull’s Richard Nash suggested in the first AMS post here, that pennies on the dollar is the likeliest prospect for the creditors.
- Colleen Doran suggests that Dark Horse was expecting big money from Frank Miller’s 300. [UPDATE: In the interests of accuracy, it remains uncertain what degree of output Dark Horse had with AMS, but hopefully we'll have more information on this soon.]
- Unrelated to all of this, but perhaps indicative of the current publishing climate is the Independent Press Association ceasing operations. (Thanks, Dan Wickett, for the link.)
Comments
Leave a Reply
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
