Category Archives: Publishing

Unseen work by Proust announced as ‘thunderclap’ by French publisher

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The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’

For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.

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Amazon.com and ‘Big Five’ publishers accused of ebook price-fixing

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Class action lawsuit filed in US claims the houses have colluded with the online giant to keep prices artificially high

Amazon.com and the “Big Five” publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster – have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago.

The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers “co-conspirators”. It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as “Most Favored Nations” (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com.

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Oxford Dictionaries amends ‘sexist’ definitions of the word ‘woman’

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Publisher labels ‘bitch’ as offensive but fails to satisfy some equality campaigners

Oxford University Press has updated its dictionaries’ definitions of the word “woman” following an extensive review triggered by equality campaigners.

Among the updates to Oxford Dictionaries’ definitions is the acknowledgement that a woman can be “a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover”, rather than only a man’s.

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Harry Potter publisher says Covid has weaved magic over book sales

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After shaky start in lockdown, Bloomsbury sales soar as people pick books over box sets

The Harry Potter publisher, Bloomsbury, has reported its most profitable first half in more than a decade, after a nation tiring of box sets fuelled a lockdown boom in book sales.

The company furloughed staff as the coronavirus crisis forced the publishing industry to shut down, but has seen a remarkable change in fortune as the pandemic has persisted.

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Most diverse Booker prize shortlist ever as Hilary Mantel misses out

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With no room for Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debuts

Hilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.

With four writers of colour among its six authors, the shortlist, announced on Tuesday, is the most diverse line-up in the prize’s history. Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award.

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Munroe Bergdorf receives landmark book deal for trans manifesto

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Model and activist signs six-figure contract to publish Transitional, ‘a manifesto for how I see society changing for the better, bringing us all closer’

The first book by Munroe Bergdorf, a manifesto on gender by the black transgender activist and model, has been bought for a six-figure sum after a bidding war between 11 publishers.

Bergdorf’s Transitional will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Exploring six different facets of human experience – adolescence, sexuality, gender, relationships, identity and race – the book will draw on Bergdorf’s own experiences, including growing up in a mixed-race family, going to an all-boys school and starting her transition at the age of 24. In it, she will argue that transition is an experience every person faces in every phase in life, “and that only by recognising this can we understand times of change”.

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Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future

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As the travel publisher closes its Melbourne and London offices, a former guidebook writer asks what’s next for an industry in crisis

Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. However, the famous guidebooks will continue to be published, though they are temporarily on hold.

As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.

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‘You’ve bollixed up my book’: letter reveals Hemingway’s fury at being censored

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The author threatened to ditch his British publisher, and likened him to a vicar, after his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ expressions were cleaned up

The hard-drinking, hot-tempered American writer Ernest Hemingway was furious when he discovered that the language for the English edition of his latest book had been cleaned up, a previously unpublished letter reveals. “I will make my own bloody decisions as to what I write and what I do not write,” he raged to his British publisher, adding that he did not want the book to be “bollixed up”.

The fury within the lines of the letter would have left Jonathan Cape in no doubt of Hemingway’s feelings about editorial changes to his 1932 nonfiction book about bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon. That those changes were made without his knowledge or permission left him all the more outraged.

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Woody Allen: ‘I would welcome Dylan Farrow back with open arms’

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Director says in new memoir that not raising his adopted daughter after abuse allegations – which he denies – was ‘one of the saddest things’ of his life

Woody Allen has written that he “would welcome Dylan [Farrow] with open arms if she’d ever want to reach out”, in his recently published memoir Apropos of Nothing.

In extracts published in the New York Times, Allen writes: “One of the saddest things of my life was that I was deprived of the years of raising Dylan and could only dream about showing her Manhattan and the joys of Paris and Rome. To this day, Soon-Yi [Previn] and I would welcome Dylan with open arms if she’d ever want to reach out to us as Moses [Farrow] did, but so far that’s still only a dream.”

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Woody Allen memoir published in US after protest stops first attempt

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The controversial film director’s autobiography Apropos of Nothing had been dropped by its original publisher

Woody Allen’s memoir, dropped by its original publisher after widespread criticism, has found a new home.

The 400-page book, still called Apropos of Nothing, was released on Monday by Arcade Publishing.

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Amazon bans sale of most editions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf

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Ban, which also includes other Nazi propaganda books, follows decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities

Amazon has banned the sale of most editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda books from its store following decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities.

Booksellers were informed in recent days that they would no longer be allowed to sell a number of Nazi-authored books on the website including Hitler’s autobiographical screed and children’s books designed to spread antisemitic ideas among children.

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Stephen King attacks axing of Woody Allen book

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Writer ‘uneasy’ over US publisher’s decision to drop director’s memoir

Author Stephen King has hit out at publisher Hachette over its decision to drop publication of Woody Allen’s memoir after a protest from his son, the author Ronan Farrow, prompted a walkout of staff at the publishing group’s New York office last Thursday.

“The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy,” King, the horror writer, said on Twitter. “It’s not him; I don’t give a damn about Mr Allen. It’s who gets muzzled next that worries me.”

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Ronan Farrow condemns his publisher over Woody Allen memoir

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Writer known for #MeToo investigations – whose sister says Allen abused her – suggests he can no longer work with Hachette

Ronan Farrow has distanced himself from the publisher of his latest book after the company announced plans to publish a memoir by his father, Woody Allen, saying the move “shows a lack of ethics and compassion for victims of sexual abuse”.

The journalist, best known for his groundbreaking investigations into claims of sexual abuse and misconduct against powerful men, issued a scathing statement in response to Hachette’s announcement on Monday that it would release Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, on 7 April.

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Edward Snowden’s profits from memoir must go to US government, judge rules

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Court says state is entitled to any profits from Permanent Record because its publication breached non-disclosure agreements

Edward Snowden is not entitled to the profits from his memoir Permanent Record, and any money made must go to the US government, a judge has ruled.

Permanent Record, in which Snowden recounts how he came to the decision to leak the top secret documents revealing government plans for mass surveillance, was published in September. Shortly afterwards, the US government filed a civil lawsuit contending that publication was “in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA)”, and that the release of the book without pre-publication review by the agencies was “in violation of his express obligations”. Snowden’s lawyers had argued that if the author had believed that the government would review his book in good faith, he would have submitted it for review.

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Naomi Wolf faces ‘new questions’ as US publisher postpones latest book

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had said it would stand by Outrages after row in UK over its historical accuracy, but has now recalled copies from stores

Naomi Wolf’s US publisher has postponed the release of her new book and is recalling copies from booksellers, saying that new questions have arisen over the book’s content.

Outrages, which argues that the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 led to a turn against consensual sex between men and an increase in executions for sodomy, was published in the UK on 20 May. Wolf has already acknowledged that the book contains two errors, after an on-air challenge on BBC Radio 3 during which the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet told her that she had misunderstood the term “death recorded” in historical records as signifying an execution. In fact it denotes the opposite, Sweet pointed out, highlighting that a teenager she said had been “actually executed for sodomy” in 1859 was paroled two years after being convicted. Wolf said last month that she had thanked Sweet for highlighting the mistakes, and was correcting future editions.

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Novelist Pat Barker hits out at ‘fashionable’ diversity schemes

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Prize-winning author says she distrusts post-Brexit interest in regional and working-class voices

The Man Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker says she “distrusts” London publishing’s recent burst in diversity initiatives, calling the rise in interest in regional and working-class voices a “fashionable” move motivated by fear after the Brexit referendum.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Sunday, the Durham author said she had observed an increased appetite for authors based outside London, or from working-class and minority ethnic backgrounds, over the last three years.

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Man Booker International prize: Jokha Alharthi wins for Celestial Bodies

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First female Omani novelist to be translated into English shares £50,000 prize with translator Marilyn Booth – the first time an Arabic book has won

Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, has won the Man Booker International prize for her novel Celestial Bodies.

Alharthi, the £50,000 award’s first winner to write in Arabic, shares the prize equally with her translator, American academic Marilyn Booth. Celestial Bodies is set in the Omani village of al-Awafi and follows the stories of three sisters: Mayya, who marries into a rich family after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries for duty; and Khawla, waiting for a man who has emigrated to Canada.

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Barcelona school removes 200 sexist children’s books

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Other schools look to follow after Tàber school takes out one-third of its collection, deeming the books ‘highly stereotypical and sexist’

Several schools across Barcelona are considering purging their libraries of stereotypical and sexist children’s books, after one removed around 200 titles, including Little Red Riding Hood and the story of the legend of Saint George, from its library.

The Tàber school’s infant library of around 600 children’s books was reviewed by the Associació Espai i Lleure as part of a project that aims to highlight hidden sexist content. The group reviewed the characters in each book, whether or not they speak and what roles they perform, finding that 30% of the books were highly sexist, had strong stereotypes and were, in its opinion, of no pedagogical value.

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‘White privilege is used by women against black men as a tool of oppression’

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Young black men have long been expected to submit to being exoticised by white women – and when they don’t, they are often punished. One writer calls for an honest discussion

I’m going to talk about something that, until now, I have largely kept to myself. It’s odd, as I consider myself a writer of extreme honesty, and I try to carry that over into real life. And yet, even now, I’m hesitating, and I realise to some degree I have procrastinated even more than usual about the thinking, and writing, of this. The committing of a hidden life event to the written word. That’s always a scary act.

I used to wonder if my reluctance was driven by shame, or simply my incredulity at what took place all those years ago. Now, I think that it is those things mostly, but also a hell of a lot more. Over the last few years, particularly in the recent crosswinds of our racial and cultural political climate, this life event bubbled to the surface of my memory, never quite boiling over. I’ve talked about it to a few of my close male friends, but that’s it. I almost never mention it to women.

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Report: Facebook Gave AI Control Of A Crucial Personal Data Collection Tool

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Facebook ceded control of a critical pillar of the company's personal data collection tools to artificial intelligence after it became too large for employees to manage, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The Silicon Valley company began forming data partnerships with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo.