Novelist John Updike died yesterday at age 76 of lung cancer. Hillel Italie of the AP describes him as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire,” best known for his four ‘Rabbit’ novels.
Also in the Boston Globe [...]
Tom Shone, in Intelligent Life’s Summer 2008 issue, laments bestsellers lists in the UK and the U.S. The NYT bestsellers list looks pretty erudite compared with the UK’s top sellers, which consist mostly of books by celebrities and reality-show has-beens, until we realise that the NYT shunted off the self-help and advice books to another [...]
While the book is selling like hotcakes, 007 fans are not feeling the love. About Devil May Care, the “new Bond” book written by Sebastian Faulks “in the style of” series creator and writer Ian Fleming (who died in 1964), Bond fans are saying:
“Anyone who thinks this style re-creates Fleming, or is evocative of Fleming, [...]
The latest book to be tapped for movie stardom: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist — “currently at number six on The New York Times bestseller list, 20 years after its first publication” — will be made into a film, directed by Laurence Fishburne and produced by Harvey Weinstein. It’s “the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd [...]
Booktrade announced today that UK newspaper The Times will serialise Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel, The Front, “in its entirety prior to UK publication” on 15 May 2008, starting with the first of ten daily instalments this Monday. The book, the second to feature Massachusetts State Investigator Win Garano and only 208 pages, won’t be released [...]
The Reader’s Advisor lists “sure-to-sell” books due out this week.
Fiction titles include Susan Wittig Albert’s latest China Bayles crime novel, Nightshade; Nevada Barr’s latest Anna Pigeon crime novel, Winter Study; Dorothy Cannell’s Goodbye, Ms. Chips, latest in the Ellie Haskell series; Barbara Delinsky’s Suddenly; Eric Jerome Dickey’s Pleasure; Karen Robards’ romantic thriller Guilty; and the [...]
Don’t forget to check out the weekly RA Rundown at The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog. (If you add the weblog to your RSS aggregator, you won’t have to remember.) Here’s this week’s, with news of Wally Lamb’s first new novel in 10 years, problems for print encyclopedias, and of course mashups of the hottest books [...]