The big stories from Publishers Weekly today, closely related to the AMS bankruptcy, is Perseus’s surprise purchase of Avalon. Avalon was PGW’s largest client and is headed by Charlie Winton, who was one of PGW’s co-founders. Perseus CEO David Steinberger claims that he’s developing a plan with Winton to assume distribution for the remainder of PGW clients. Well, “developing a plan” is all fine and dandy. But with PGW’s largest client moving to an entirely new distributor, this doesn’t bode well for the now limping PGW or the indie publishers left in the lurch. In fact, the cynical folks at Radio Free PGW have already penned a PGW obituary.
Matthew Tiffany has the scoop on Twin Peaks, Season 2: April 10, 2007, six discs, twenty-two episodes. This will be of great comfort as I spend most of my spare time sobbing as I do my taxes at the last minute. In fact, what this DVD release needs is a marketing tie-in for April 15. What better way to put tax time in perspective than dancing midgets, deaf FBI bureau chiefs, and one-armed men?
A.I. Bezzerides, who wrote the great overlooked film noir Thieves’ Highway (thankfully now available through Criterion after many years of being unavailable in any video format), has passed away.
HarperCollins has doled out a shitload of money for Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. A million dollar advance and a $300,000 marketing budget. Is there any way that this 916-page epic will make its money back?
Rake on “fatherhood writing”: “Somehow, we’re suffering from a spate of fellows who’ve struggled to the conclusion that parenthood is a mixed blessing, yet are dumb enough to think that this isn’t common knowledge, and, unfortunately, maintain just enough intelligence and dexterity to bang away at a computer keyboard. This is a highly dangerous mixture of persistent and stupid, found generally in drug mules, sportswriters at mid-market newspapers, traders of Dave Matthews Band live boots, and dudes who hang barbells from their junk in-between acts at Ozzfest.”
Now we’ll never know exactly how and where to score Scooby snacks, or precisely what substances these delicacies were laced with. Only Iwao Takamoto knew the answer.
Need to step behind the beady curtain and get your Gatsby fix? Yardley and Sarvas are your well-hung men.
For those who have expressed horror that Bat Segundo would get involved with Nina Hartley, rest assured that we’ll be classing up the joint in a few days. Keep watching the airwaves.
One would presume that the Judith Regan story was as dead as the dodo, but not for Kimberly Maul, who, dredging for desperate controversy, reports that a temp claims Regan didn’t make the crazed anti-Semitic remarks on the phone. Right. Because we all know that temps are the most indispensable and highly regarded employees in the office. And we all know that this temp followed Regan everywhere during her one week of employment. Come on, Ms. Maul, it ain’t that slow a news day.
Jerome Weeks responds to recent arts coverage changes at the Dallas Morning News, observing, “The problem for newspaper arts coverage has little to do with editors’ fears of cultural ignorance or what readers want. The problem has to do with the fact that local arts (and book publishing) do not generate much ad revenue. That might explain why the only critic that the DaMN is currently replacing with someone actually in town is — the restaurant critic. Restaurants provide ad revenue.” I’m not sure if I entirely buy this. Are we to assume that arts coverage readers don’t eat or purchase products aside from books?
50 Cent has set himself a new goal: “the top of the literary world.” So does this mean that we’ll see an alliance between Nas, Jadakiss and Norman Mailer? We haven’t seen a literary feud for a while and I suspect that 50 might be just the man to get one going again, gangsta style.
Dan Green offers a contrarian take on Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.
There can be no better barometer for how little literary figures matter than the Seattle Timesyear-end death list, which overlooks Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino. Butler’s exclusion is particularly egregious, given that she lived in Seattle. Way to go, team!
Now open for Wikipedia-like catastrophes of the first order: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Remember kids, only you can decide history, only to find your careful ruminations reverted ten minutes later.
Ship lit? Okay, I get it. We’re going to see twelve trend pieces in the Gray Lady on “____ lit” before the end of winter. But given certain realities, that promising essay on “tit lit” ain’t happening anytime soon. (via Brockman)
Preposterous revisionism going down in libraries. Sorry, Maud, but I can’t stay out of this either. Rabid, raccoon-eyed, baby carrot-chomping librarians scare the fuck out of me too. But, man, does righteous indignation about books get the job done sometimes.
The Times: “Educated people are not supposed to believe in ghosts. This has done nothing to diminish their popularity, at least in fiction.” (via Kenyon Review)
The San Francisco Chronicle offers a list of 2006 deaths, with many authors and journalists. Conspicuously absent are the great talents Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino, demonstrating that you can win a MacArthur Genius Grant or radically influence experimental fiction and still not earn so much as a sentence from the mainstream media.
CNN: “A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.” No global warming, eh? (via Michelle Richmond)