And...they're off!

The race is on between Little, Brown and Alfred A. Knopf. According to Editor & Publisher, both houses have moved up publication of forthcoming biographies of Hillary Clinton so that the books will appear on the same day.
(AP)
Last week, Knopf announced that Carl Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," originally scheduled for August, would appear June 19. This week, Little, Brown decided to go head- to- head with Knopf by scrapping its own August publication plans for "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton" by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., both New York Times reporters. That book is now set to come out on June 19 as well.




Your move, Knopf.

— Nick Owchar 5/03/07

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Blurring the lines?

The publication date of Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (Riverhead, 372 pp., $25.95) may be three weeks away, but if you want a taste, you can visit Amazon.com. Yesterday, the online bookseller announced that it had cut a deal to offer readers an exclusive download previewing the novel, as well as a podcast interview with the author. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is set in Hosseini's native Afghanistan, much like his first novel, "The Kite Runner," which became a publishing phenomenon when it appeared in 2003 -- a bestseller in hardcover and paperback with more than 4 million copies in print, and a staple of book clubs nationwide.
The Hosseini deal is just the latest instance of Amazon.com reinventing itself in the face of a rapidly changing online culture. Already, the bookseller is offering a series called Amazon Shorts, featuring self-contained exclusive works in which writers like Jim Crace, Melissa Fay Greene and David McCullough explore some signature themes. (Go to the Amazon books page and scroll down the far left column to "More to Discover" to see the Amazon Shorts collection.)

Yet if all this makes for terrific marketing, it also raises tricky questions about the boundaries between publishers, booksellers and consumers. That's only heightened by Amazon's decision to release early copies of "A Thousand Splendid Suns" to its Top 100 Reviewers, "a collection of Amazon.com's leading customer reviewers, in order to share this book with new and previous fans of his work." Setting aside the idea of a select group of customers getting preferential treatment, it's discomforting to see readers treated like advance scouts in a publicity juggernaut. Who, exactly, is working whom here? And what does it say about how publishers and booksellers view their audience?

— David L. Ulin 5/02/07

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A gift outright

Since they left Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1972, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie, a painter, have lived and worked in a cottage near Glanmore in the Wicklow Hills south of Dublin. On Saturday night, the couple returned the favor of local generosity by donating manuscripts and paintings to a local auction intended to raise money to convert an abandoned police station into an arts center for the nearby village of Ashford.
Seamus Heaney (AFP)
The poet donated eight items in all, but the evening's star attraction was a lot consisting of three handwritten working drafts and a holograph copy of Heaney's "Glanmore Sonnet VII," which he wrote shortly after moving into the area. Irish manuscript collector Liam O'Leary beat out an unidentified telephone bidder from Belfast and purchased the drafts for just under $37,000.

One of the event's organizers, Noel Keyes, told the Irish Times that Heaney "has a great sense of community about him. There are few others of his type who would donate documents as important as this. It's very generous."

— Tim Rutten 4/30/07

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California writers among 2007 Guggenheim Fellows

Among the recipients of this year's Guggenheim fellowships are several California fiction writers and poets: Oakland's Daniel Alarcón ("Lost City Radio"), now a visiting writer at Mills College; Christopher Buckley ("Sleepwalk") of UC Riverside; and Steve Erickson, a novelist ("Our Ecstatic Days") and instructor at California Institute of the Arts.
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