A Russian publisher has stooped to a new low: it added “fake quotes from fake newspapers on the cover of a … novel released this summer.” That’s not all, either. Apparently the publishers are trying to bill the book as a “Swedish” crime novel even though it was actually written by a Russian under a pseudonym.
Who Can You Trust Anymore?
Tuesday New Release Day: Harbach, Hitchens, Tuck, Farah, Solomon, Barry, Krauss
A big haul of new books this week. At the top of the list is Chad Harbach’s much anticipated debut, The Art of Fielding. Also new this week: the new Christopher Hitchens collection Arguably, Lily Tuck’s I Married You for Happiness, Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones, and Anna Solomon’s debut The Little Bride. Sebastian Barry’s Booker long-listed On Canaan’s Side is now available in the U.S. And Great House by Nicole Krauss is now out in paperback.
Living and Translating is Wearing Me Out
The premier English-language translator of modern Chinese fiction, Howard Goldblatt, says flatly that Western audiences don’t read Chinese books. However, with last year’s Nobel Prize win for Mo Yan (and the rave review his novel Pow! received in the Times), Goldblatt and other scholars are hoping that could change.
Tastemaker
How do you make the jump from editing a food magazine to writing novels? It’s a tricky change to make, but Ruth Reichl did it, as she explains to Marnie Hanel in an interview in the Times. (Her first novel came out last week.)
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Epic Fail Gets Epic Press
We’re thrilled by the early buzz surrounding Epic Fail, our first Millions Original eBook. You can learn more about the project courtesy of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Teleread. Of course, you could learn even more about the project by purchasing a copy of the book.
Raising Hell
“When you read these books—I suggest perusing them, martini in hand, while your children (or better your friends’ children, for whom you are babysitting) run around shrieking—you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have.” Dan Kois on Shirley Jackson’s two memoirs on parenting.
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Do Not Pass Go.
Christopher Ketcham takes Harper’s readers through the “antimonopolist history” of Monopoly, “the world’s most popular board game.”
Some Links
E-paper continues to get press. The New York Times talks up the technology’s potential for newspapers. See also: The digital future of the book.MetaxuCafe is covering the Pen World Voices Festival.Sara Gran, much praised for her book Dope and her blog has a new edition of her book, Come Closer, coming out.
During the period in which Portugal was under Salazar’s dictatorship, which of course included censorship of books and press, portuguese author Dinis Machado wrote three noir crime novels under the pseudonym Dennis McShade (notice how he played with his own name), pretending to be an american author. The books claimed to have been translated by Dinis Machado himself, who was called by the censor agents regarding this american. He was able to convince them that the books were harmless, and they were published. The set is in America, but you can identify some metaphors regarding the dictatorship in Portugal.
This kind of pretending games can be fun. Though this story is not related to the one you are talking about, I thought it would show you how this pretending games can be subversive. And by the way, the three novels by Dennis McShade are incredibly good. He was, of course, a reader of Chandler and Hammett.
Well, I have to wonder if the fake quotes from the fake reader are any more authentic than the hyperbolic blurbs from ostensibly “real” readers….