AUTHORS and book publishers have secured significant backing from the ALP in their campaign against a Productivity Commission plan to reduce prices by removing restrictions on imports of books printed overseas.
Labor's national conference resolved yesterday that the Federal Government should give priority to preserving the economic and cultural viability of Australian literature and book publishing.
Under the resolution, an ALP working group - which is likely to include printers' union officials - will prepare a report to be considered by cabinet ministers when they decide the Government's response to the commission's proposals.
The proposals would remove restrictions on "parallel imports'' of books published overseas. The commission says this would benefit consumers by reducing prices of books.
Authors, local publishers and small booksellers say the plan would make it unviable to publish Australian literature.
But the commission says that if the aim is to support local literature, this should be done by direct grants rather than by import restrictions that increase the prices of all books.
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national president Julius Roe said the decision to establish an ALP working group would ensure ministers listened to party members' concerns.
The judges for the 2009 Man Booker Prize have announced today, the longlist of 13 titles - or the Man Booker Dozen.
The longlist includes Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, who is one of only two novelists to have won the Booker Prize twice with Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999.
The longlist also features The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, winner of the Booker Prize in 1990 with Possession.
William Trevor, previously shortlisted four times for the annual prize, is longlisted for his new novel Love and Summer.
Sarah Waters and Colm Toibin, who have both been twice-shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, have made the 2009 longlist with their latest novels. Hilary Mantel was previously longlisted for the prize.
'The five Man Booker judges have settled on thirteen novels as the longlist for this year's prize. We believe it to be one of the strongest lists in recent memory, with two former winners, four past-shortlisted writers, three first-time novelists and a span of styles and themes that make this an outstandingly rich fictional mix.'
Chaired by broadcaster and author James Naughtie, the 2009 judges are Lucasta Miller, biographer and critic; Michael Prodger, Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph; Professor John Mullan, academic, journalist and broadcaster and Sue Perkins, comedian, journalist and broadcaster.
A total of 132 books, 11 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the 'Man Booker Dozen' longlist of 13 books.
Not too long ago, had someone mentioned the phrases Team Edward or Team Jacob, nobody would have had a clue what was being talked about. However, in the wake of the pop juggernaut that is The Twilight Saga -- especially the film versions -- fans of the series know exactly which team they are on, whether Edward's, Robert Pattinson, or Jacob's, Taylor Lautner.
Taylor Daniel Lautner was born on February 11, 1992 in Holland, Michigan, to Daniel and Deborah Lautner. His ancestry includes Dutch, German, and French (also some distant Native American: Ottowa and Potawatomi). Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan (along with a younger sister, Makena), Taylor showed a passion for karate at a very young age. At age 6, Taylor was training at Fabiano's Karate School -- by age 7, he was winning tournaments. Seven-time world karate champion Mike Chat invited young Taylor to train with him, and by the time he was 8, Taylor was asked to represent America in the World Karate Association -- there he became the Junior World Forms and Weapons champion, winning three gold medals. By the time he turned 11, Taylor was ranked #1 in the world for NASKA's Black Belt Open Forms. By 12, he won the Junior World Championships.
While he was still in single digits, Taylor showed an interest in acting that rivaled his passion for martial arts. Taylor's parents were so encouraging regarding this, they frequently commuted between Grand Rapids and Los Angeles, so that the ambitious and talented boy could audition for acting roles. By the time Taylor turned 10, the family made the difficult decision to relocate to southern California, so that Taylor could do so on a regular basis.
TAYLOR LAUTNER AS JACOB BLACK IN TWILIGHT
In 2001, at the age of 9, Taylor made his acting debut in the telefilm Shadow Fury. More work soon followed as Taylor was cast in small roles on the television series My Wife and Kids, Summerland, and The Bernie Mac Show. Also during this time, Taylor was hired for voiceover work on such cartoons as What's New, Scooby Doo?, Danny Phantom, Duck Dodgers, and He's a Bully, Charlie Brown (Taylor voiced the bully).
Then, in 2005, director Robert Rodriguez hired Taylor to play one of the titular characters in his kids film, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. The film received terrible reviews, but it did get Taylor some much needed exposure. That same year he was cast in a supporting role in Cheaper By The Dozen 2, costarring Steve Martin and Tom Welling.
By 2008, Taylor played Christian Slater's son in the short-lived TV series My Own Worst Enemy.
But Taylor's biggest break was when he was cast as Jacob Black in the 2008 film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. The $37 million production went on to earn over $382 million at the worldwide box office, and birthed a phenomenon. When principal photography for Twilight had wrapped, Taylor, knowing that his character in the sequel was dramatically more ripped and buff, immediately set about transforming himself. By the time the second movie, New Moon, was being cast, there was some talk about recasting the role simply because Taylor was so young and his build was so slight. Yet Taylor, having sprouted a few inches taller and gaining 30 pounds of muscle, wowed the producers and casting agents with his new form. Taylor will be reprising his role in New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010). No official word yet on Breaking Dawn.
In his free time, Taylor enjoys playing football and baseball (though not vampire baseball), and is close friends with his Twilight costars Kristen Stewart and Nikki Reed. In addition to acting, he aspires to be a director and screenwriter.
TAYLOR LAUTNER
Taylor Lautner Quotes:
On why people should watch Twilight:"Jacob's hot."
Regarding Jacob's angry werewolf side: "[That] is not like me in real life -- I'm like Jacob's Native American side. I'm very friendly, outgoing, energetic and easy to talk to. But playing the werewolf side, where he's holding all this anger and stuff inside him, that'd be very different for me. I love to challenge myself as an actor."
From Interview Magazine regarding Twilight's fanbase: "They are very intense, but it's cool that they're so dedicated and so passionate. They're the reason we're here doing this sequel. So I'm thankful for the fans. I like meeting them. But, yeah, they're pretty intense. Sometimes it becomes a little overwhelming."
From Interview Magazine regarding his feelings about fan worship: "I don't even know. I don't know if it's really hit me yet. They're just passionate for the series and for the characters, and we're just lucky enough to be a part of this. I don't think it has much to do with me personally; it's more because I'm playing the beloved Jacob Black."
From Interview Magazine regarding his relationship with his costars: "The whole cast is really close. It would be difficult for our characters if we weren't. It's a love triangle, and we need to understand each other. So the fact that we're close and can talk things through in rehearsals, and if we're out at dinner, we'll just randomly start talking about the scene we're shooting the next day ... If we weren't able to do those things, I don't know where we'd be
An angel without wings soars again in this imaginative sequel.
IN 2000 Elizabeth Knox not quite single-handedly (she workshopped with Milton and Bram Stoker) wrestled angels from the sissified grasp of greeting cards and ladylike scribblers. She did this by creating Xas, an angel who fell in love with a mortal - a vintner - one evening in 1827, became unchaste and forfeited his wings. The Vintner's Luck made a sensational splash in the literary pool because it was one of the most original novels of 2000 and those who were taken with it have never forgotten Xas.
After a series of unrelated and disappointing novels, Knox has now obliged with a sequel to The Vintner's Luck. The title is ironic: The Angel's Cut. Angels, besides being eternal and never forgetting anything, never age, so Xas - a century after the story of The Vintner's Luck - still looks exactly as he did then: that is, dazzling.
The mutilated angel is now a stunt flyer (what else?) in Los Angeles. It is 1929 and, despite the Depression, every backblock is turning into a movie studio. Aeroplanes and movies are the newest fads, so the young and talented converge, along with the phoneys and hangers-on. There are two significant characters besides the entrancing Xas: Conrad Cole, a bisexual movie mogul with a talent for aeronautical design, and Flora McLeod, a brilliant, burnt (literally) film editor. With a too-large, too-uninteresting minor cast fighting it out for headshots in the crowd scenes, The Angel's Cut has an identical problem to The Vintner's Luck. Then there is a background cast of inferior quality - human set design. The portrait of Cole is almost direct biography of the neurotic, narcissistic Howard Hughes and interesting in the detailing of his progression into total madness. What is puzzling is why Xas would fall in love with a man like this.
Knox has literary skills quite as refulgent as her angel. Her language and imagination have a violent sensuality and physicality, formed as much in vampire comics as Paradise Lost. Xas is a fantastic creature soaring through that liminal space between mortal and immortal. He is also, most wittily, the bargaining chip between the king of heaven and the king of hell and Xas deals with both Lucifer and God on equal terms as he tries to teach mortals the idea of virtue by his own practical example. Knox - wry if not cynical - makes hell far more entertaining than heaven. For the interested, hell may be reached through salt mines somewhere in the former USSR.
Xas also has a phenomenal eroticism and the tension between his angelic purity and his mortal drives - between his intimate knowledge of both heaven and hell - give him a depth of character and scope of interest so massive that there is no energy left for other characters.
Knox has great gifts. She is witty, has superb insider jokes, she is learned, she has astonishing physical lyricism and at her best her language has a rare weight and texture - but her imagination is too discursive and her plotting is weak. Maybe her natural bent is for poetry and trying to turn herself into a novelist is against the grain?
Reading this novel scrambles the brain much in the same way as looking at pages and pages of intricately scribbled cartoons scrambles it. Each detail shows skill and interest and often brilliance but the connectivity is faulty and forced.
This failing was obvious in the novels between The Vintner's Luck and this. Readers were avid for more of Knox's writing but each new work proved disappointing. The Vintner's Luck looked as if it might have been the stand-alone novel in a prolific writer's oeuvre because the character of Xas was so charged that he carried the novel. Fortunately, Xas took up most of the story, because readers were bored by any wonky sub-plot and impatient to get back to Xas.
In The Angel's Cut, Xas is fascinating and powerful when he interacts with his kind rather than the mortals. It will be interesting to see how the magnetic young French actor Gaspard Ulliel will work as Xas in the about-to-be-released film of The Vintner's Luck.
Finally, though, for those enthralled by Xas, nothing else matters but the vivid scenes created around his character. For these readers - and I am one - it is enough. Almost.
When YA fantasy author Justine Larbalestier gave her fans a first look at the American cover for Liar, back in April, she was understandably excited: "This cover was so well received by sales and marketing at Bloomsbury that for the first time in my career a cover for one of my books became the image used for the front of the catalogue," she blogged. "Apparently all the big booksellers went crazy for it. My agent says it was a huge hit in Bologna. And at TLA many librarians and teenagers told me they adore this cover."
The love, however, is not universal. Earlier this week, an unnamed "outraged, nauseous, [and] flabbergasted" children's book editor blogging at Editorial Anonymous took issue with the cover, noting that Liar is about a young girl who is "black, with very short hair, and is mistaken for a boy early on in the book by teachers and fellow students," which is pretty much the exact opposite of the model who has wound up on the dust jacket. "I wish I could say I can't imagine what they were thinking," this anonymous editor writes, "but in fact I do have a guess. I just can't imagine why they thought no one would notice." (We've inset the original Australian cover of the novel for comparison.)
As Alicia, a YA librarian blogger, frames the question: "Did the publishers not want to put a black girl on the cover for fear of not selling enough books to their white customers? Or is the cover supposed to be what Micah really looks like, and her description in the book is just another of her lies?"
To address these complaints, Larbalestier has written a new blog post, revealing that she fought that cover every step of the way: "I never wanted a girl's face on the cover," she says. "Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that's what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah. I strongly objected to all of them. I lost."
"No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black," she says of the earlier cover for the book. "No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because 'my teens would find the cover insulting.' Both responses are heart breaking." But, she continues, she's not alone in finding her fiction "white-washed" by her publisher:
"Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA?they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section?and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all."
"Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people?" she asks. "That's not a very sustainable model if true... I hope that the debate that's arisen because of this cover will widen to encompass the whole industry. I hope it gets every publishing house thinking about how incredibly important representation is and that they are in a position to break down these assumptions." Starting, perhaps, with a new cover for the paperback edition featuring "someone who looks like Micah on the front."
The popular young adult novel Tomorrow: When The War Began by Australian author John Marsden is being made into a movie, to be filmed in NSW.
Pre-production of the film will begin in weeks, with filming to start later in the year.
The book is the first in a series of seven which follows teenage girl Ellie Linton and her friends during the invasion and occupation of Australia by an unnamed force.
Australian screenwriter Stuart Beattie will make his directorial debut on the film, having previously written for Australia and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.
NSW Premier Nathan Rees said the film would create 200 jobs and bring in about $60 million for the state's economy.
Production will be based at Fox Studios and much of the film will be shot in the Hunter Valley.
The film will be produced by Ambience Entertainment and distributed nationally by Paramount Pictures.
"This is a big tick for NSW and especially the Hunter region," Mr Rees said in a statement.
"Securing this movie will also ensure that our skilled film crew are kept working in NSW."
With seven books in the series, there was also the potential for future films to be made down the track, he said.
Wednesday's announcement follows confirmation in April that the big-budget film adaptation of the comic book superhero Green Lantern will be shot in Sydney.
And in May, the NSW government announced that post-production for Australian director Peter Weir's new film The Way Back will be done in Sydney.
Mr Rees said this was proof the new package of screen industry incentives announced in the wake of his NSW Jobs Summit earlier this year was working.
EVEN before the unexpected announcement last month, Michael Thomas had enjoyed a run of good luck with Man Gone Down, his first novel. Published in 2007, it had strong reviews, was named on several "10 best books" lists that year, including that of The New York Times Book Review, and is in its fourth printing in the US, with 65,000 copies sent out to bookshops.
But short of being selected for Oprah's book club, winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award may be the best thing that could happen to a new voice such as Thomas. The prize is worth €100,000 ($180,000) and coincides with publication of Man Gone Down in Britain and Australia. The announcement immediately generated inquiries from foreign publishing houses.
"I kind of wrote that in a fit," Thomas, 41, who teaches literature and creative writing at the City University of New York's Hunter College, says of the novel. "I had a bunch of jobs. I was teaching four classes a semester and two or three in the summer, and working construction and coaching soccer and baseball and trying to build my house. I don't think it is something I could replicate."
Man Gone Down focuses on four increasingly desperate days in the life of an unnamed black narrator living in Brooklyn whose marriage seems to be falling apart. Brilliant and troubled, he is on the eve of his 35th birthday but is broke, struggling not to lapse back into alcoholism and burdened by the knowledge he has fallen short of the promise he seemed to show as a younger man.
Thomas acknowledges certain surface similarities to the character he has created. He, too, grew up in Boston, dropped out of college and scuffled. He is a black man married to a white woman with three children - two boys and a girl, whose first initials correspond to those of the narrator's children - and has a best friend who is white.
"I was a weird kid, a black kid living in public housing in the wealthiest city east of the Mississippi, who looked at least on the surface to be normal or even cool, even though my head was somewhere else most of the time," he says. "But I don't think either of us is pessimistic about race," he adds, speaking of himself and his fictional character.
In its award citation, the five-member Impac Dublin jury called Thomas "a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight". It described Man Gone Down as a "drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalised America" and said it "shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalised by race and social circumstance".
The Impac Dublin award is often described as the largest and most international literary prize in the world after the Nobel. It is open to fiction written in any language, with nominations made by libraries; in the 2009 competition, 157 libraries in 41 countries offered 146 candidates. The prize, first awarded in 1996 to David Malouf for Remembering Babylon (the only Australian winner), was established by the Dublin city government and is financed by Impac, the multinational business consulting company.
British bookies have a history of taking bets on literary competitions and they clearly saw Man Gone Down as a long shot in this particular horse race, placing it seventh among eight finalists. The odds-on favorite was Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, followed closely by The Reluctant Fundamentalist, written by Mohsin Hamid, a Londoner who was born in Pakistan and studied in the US.
In fact, the single nomination for Man Gone Down came not from an American library but from the National Library Service of Barbados. The two most frequent nominations from American libraries were Diaz's novel and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
"When a Pulitzer is on the list, the odds get stacked immediately," said James Ryan, an Irish novelist and professor of creative writing who was on the prize jury. "But what arrested my attention with Michael Thomas was his pacing, that he was right in there with his story and his voice from the word go. He's cutting-edge fiction, right up there."
Despite the accolades, Thomas seems wary about embracing his good fortune. He wonders whether his triumph should be attributed solely to the merits of his novel or whether other, non-literary motives may also have been in play.
"My role now is some noble savage," he says. "Some person who has risen to grace from some sort of strange beginnings." Or as he put it at another point in our interview at a coffee shop near his Brooklyn home, "If you don't have a physical deformity and are of above average intelligence and are black or from any marginalised minority, you become a poster boy for uplift."
Thomas says he worries in particular that he might inadvertently have become a symbol of the global wave of optimism that has accompanied the election of Barack Obama, even though his novel was published before Obama became a candidate. When he travelled to Ireland last month to receive the prize, he says, people kept suggesting to him that "Everything is fine now, isn't it?" - which is not his view.
"They are being peddled something over there, a kind of really lovely narrative of how this country has suddenly morphed into a utopia for all people," he says.
From the time his manuscript started circulating among publishers, Thomas says, he was told that it was "difficult" and he accumulated a long list of rejection slips before Grove/Atlantic took a chance.
If "difficult" means unapologetically literary, Thomas pleads guilty as charged. Man Gone Down is rife with quotations from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and references to F.Scott Fitzgerald and Moby-Dick mingle with allusions to the work of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry.
The novel's title reflects Thomas's broad interests and erudition. Though it contains echoes of the blues - a musical form that Thomas says "always made sense to me because it operates from a well of sorrow but not despair" - the title actually comes from a passage in which the narrator compares himself to Beowulf trying to make his way across "an ocean of memory" that is "deep, almost frozen and swimming with monsters".
At the moment, Thomas is finishing a memoir that he describes as a history of "four generations of Thomas men, and the Red Sox and Boston and New York". After that, he envisions three novels that already "are quite clear in my head". Winning the Impac Dublin prize should make that process easier - or at least he hopes so.
"It lowers the stress of chasing money around and provides some time," he says. "I can pay off whatever credit card debt I have and get off this high wire for a couple of years and then start over again. As a friend told me, there is no down side to this: 'You can't find one, even you."'
"Every opportunity I've had, I've either spurned or shunned or squandered through whatever kind of chip I've had, or rage or suspicion," he adds. "Whatever I feel, this is a new opportunity to be a part of things, and my way of being a part of things is writing. That's my covenant."
Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of woe about his impoverished Irish childhood, died on Sunday of cancer at age 78.
McCourt had been gravely ill with meningitis and recently was treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. He died at a Manhattan hospice, his brother Malachy McCourt said.
Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character - the kind who might turn up in a New York novel - singing songs and telling stories with his younger brother and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.
But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner.
With a first printing of just 25,000, Angela's Ashes was an instant favourite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
"F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven him wrong,'' McCourt later explained. "And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools.''
A native of New York, McCourt was good company in the classroom and at the bar, but few had such a burden to unload. His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick. Simply surviving his childhood was a tale; McCourt's father was an alcoholic who drank up the little money his family had. Three of McCourt's seven siblings died, and he nearly perished from typhoid fever.
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,'' was McCourt's unforgettable opening.
"People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.''
The book was a long Irish wake, "an epic of woe'', McCourt called it, finding laughter and lyricism in life's very worst. Although some in Ireland complained that McCourt had revealed too much (and revealed a little too well), Angela's Ashes became a million seller, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie of the same name, starring Emily Watson as the title character, McCourt's mother.
The white-haired, sad-eyed, always quotable McCourt, his Irish accent still thick despite decades in the US, became a regular at parties, readings, conferences and other gatherings, so much the eager late-life celebrity that he later compared himself to a "dancing clown, available to everybody''.
"I wasn't prepared for it,'' McCourt told The Associated Press in 2005.
"After teaching, I was getting all this attention. They actually looked at me - people I had known for years - and they were friendly and they looked me in a different way. And I was thinking, 'All those years I was a teacher, why didn't you look at me like that then?``'
But the part of it he liked best, he said, was hearing "from all those kids who were in my classes''.
"At least they knew that when I talked about writing I wasn't just talking through my hat,'' he said.
Much of his teaching was spent in the English department at the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he defied the advice of his colleagues and shared his personal stories with the class; he slapped a student with a magazine and took on another known to have a black belt in karate.
After Angela's Ashes, McCourt continued his story, to strong but diminished sales and reviews, in 'Tis, which told of his return to New York in the 1940s, and in Teacher Man. McCourt also wrote a children's story, Angela and the Baby Jesus, released in 2007.
McCourt was married twice and had a daughter, Maggie McCourt, from his first marriage.
His brother Malachy McCourt is an actor, commentator and singer who wrote two memoirs and, in 2006, ran for New York governor as the Green Party candidate. At least one of Frank McCourt's former students, Susan Gilman, became a writer.
When Bob Carr recently stated that the best selling Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer was dearer to buy in Australian because of restrictive PIR's he was wrong. The PIR's don't apply to the Twilight series because they were not published in Australia within 30 days of them being released in the US. Any Australian book seller can legally buy and resell the entire Twilight series from any international publisher at any price. Why didn't this happen? it did. its only that the Australian booksellers that were sourcing this series from US publishers didn't pass on the discount to Australian consumers. And you think the removal will lead to cheaper book. All they will lead to is larger profits for the major retailers.
CEO of Dymocks, Don Grover has claimed that Tim Winton's Miles Franklin Award-winning novel was more than 30% cheaper to buy from a UK website than from Australian bookshops because of Australia's book copyright rules.
"Mr Grover quotes the UK website price for Breath as equivalent to A$14.70, including delivery, and compares this with an Australian recommended retail price of $25. What he fails to mention is that the same title is for sale in Australia at BigW for $16.21, which minus GST (there is no VAT on books in the UK), is a few cents more than the UK website price. BigW is a member, with Dymocks, of the so-called Coalition for Cheaper Books.
Surely you have to ask yourself why the CEO of Dymocks and Bob Carr, who by the way is on the Dymocks board, would use missleading comments to support their argument for the removal of PIR's? The fact is that the two statements they offer as fact are wrong. Breath is available to buy in Australia for roughly the same price as The book depository sells and ships for and you don't have to wait for it to be delivered. Walk in and pick it up off the shelf at BigW. Simple!
As for Twilight, contrary to what Bob Carr says, there are no PIR in place for this book because it was not published in Australia withing 30 day of it being released in the US so if the coalition for cheaper books argument that the removal of PIR's will reduce the price of books, why then is this book not cheaper? Because their assertions are simply wrong!
I'm not sure if you're aware of the term 'remainders'. These are books that either have not sold or have been returned to the publisher as unwanted or excess stock. Due to economies of scale, US publishers will generally print in large runs. Once the excess stock becomes 'remainders' they no longer atract royalties for the author. Lets look at Tim Wintons Breath again. PIR's do exist for this title so as it stands, Australian bricks & mortar bookshops are obliged to sell the Australian version of this book. Without PIR's in place, excess stock, or 'remainders' from US publishers would flood the Australian market substituting sales of the Australian version without any royalties for the author. If thats not bad enough the language would be American english and not australian english. Fawcets for taps etc.
As it stands, Australian book buyers are under no obligation to buy their books from Australian retailers. Anyone can jump online and buy any book from any supplier in any country. Pir's make absolutely no difference what-so-ever when it comes to where you buy your books.
New Zealand is the ONLY western country to remove PIR's. The US, UK and Canada all have PIR's in place to protect their publishing industries and their interlectual copyright.
The New Zealand Society of Authors made submissions to the Productivity Commission asking them not to abolish PIRs because of their own experience of the resultant devastation to the industry. Since PIRs were abolished, book distribution warehouses in NZ have closed down. Publishers and independent booksellers have gone out of business and new authors have struggled to get published.
Even the Productivity Commission agrees that there is no guarantee that prices will come down - and there is no obligation on the retailer to pass any discounts on. In fact, evidence suggests that the reverse will happen if PIRs are abolished - and that prices will go up.
300 jobs at a printing facility in central Victoria would be lost almost imediately. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Publishing houses, printers, retailers, distribution companies.etc. etc. etc. thousands of jobs gone for what? MAYBE cheaper books? a very big MAYBE!
While teritorial copyright has absolutely no negative impact on Australian consumers but protects Australian authors, publishers, retailers and distributors I will continue to advocate for their retention.
Amazon Deletes Copies Of Animal Farm And 1984 From Thousands Of Kindles
In George Orwell's '1984', government censors erase news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the 'memory hole'.
On Friday, it was '1984' and another Orwell book, 'Animal Farm', that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online noise, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them. When we were notified by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices and refunded customers.
Amazon acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. 'We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices.
Digital Books bought for the Kindle are sent over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronise electronic books between devices and apparently make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of '1984' from its American publisher was still available on the Kindle but there was no such version of 'Animal Farm'.
Those who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. 'Of all the books to recall, said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of '1984' for 99 cents last month. 'I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.'
An engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of '1984' appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. 'If this Kindle breaks, I won't buy a new one, that's for sure, he said.
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.
Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindledoes not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a 'permanent copy of the applicable digital content.'
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer¡¯s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
'It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,' said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. 'As a Kindle owner, I'm frustrated. I can't lend people books and I can't sell books that I've already read, and now it turns out that I can't even count on still having my books tomorrow.'
A 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading '1984' on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. 'They didn't just take a book back, they stole my work,' he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. While the copyright on '1984' will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries.
Aussie author Peter Fitzsimons shares the story of latest book
He's written 19 books, speaks four languages and writes a weekly column for a major newspaper. And now author Peter Fitzsimons is on a whirlwind tour to discuss his latest book.
Fitzsimons' latest offering is about the great Australian aviator, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, one of that country's most loved heroes.
"Kingsford Smith was the first one to fly across the Pacific Ocean flew from San Francisco to Hawaii, to Fiji to Brisbane, and when he got to Sydney Airport there were 300,000 people to greet him," Fitzsimons says.
New Zealand got a taste of Sir Charles in 1928 when he piloted the first ever crossing of the Tasman.
The Southern Cross took off from Sydney on September 10, battling appalling conditions before landing at Wigrim Aerodrome.
"It was extraordinary, it was a very difficult thing to do," Fitzsimons says. "The winds were strong, the storms were strong and there was a lot of lightning. You were above shipping lanes that weren't that busy and it was really something to cross the Tasman."
LITTLE-KNOWN Aussie actor Xavier Samuel is headed for the big time after landing a role in one of the hottest movie franchises around - Twilight.
Samuel has been cast in Eclipse, the third film in the Twilight series based on the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, his management company Shanahan Management said.
He will play Riley, a good-looking college student and newborn vampire, who joins villain Victoria's plot to murder Bella (Kristen Stewart).
Eclipse follows Bella as she tries to choose between two loves: the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) and werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner).
The first movie, Twilight, has made $US382 million ($A475 million) worldwide since it was released in November last year, and the second film New Moon is due in cinemas this November.
Eclipse is due to start filming in Vancouver, Canada next month and is due for release in June 2010.
Samuel has starred in Australian films like 2:37, Newcastle and September, but Eclipse will be his first US film.
He is currently in Los Angeles but will return to Australia later this month for the premiere of his new film The Loved Ones at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
REMOVING PARALLEL IMPORTS ON BOOKS - THE REAL STORY!
Dee White, published Australian childrens author, has some interesting thoughts on the abolition of parallel import restrictions.
The Parallel Import Restrictions currently in place prevent overseas publishers from flooding our market with cheap imports of Australian books. These books are likely to be of inferior quality and would result in little or no income for Australian publishers, authors and printers. USA and UK are currently protected markets so if they want to publish books by Australian authors they purchase the rights from the Australian Publisher and author who receive income from the overseas sales.
In Louise Adlers article in the 'The Australian' she writes "There is no evidence in the Productivity Commission's recent report to support the assertion that the abolition of territorial copyright will deliver cheaper books to Australian consumers. In NZ, the world leader in the abolition of territorial copyright, book prices have not been reduced. However, local publishing is in decline, most big publishers have withdrawn from that market and book distribution moved to Australia. In the past month Dymocks, of the Coalition of Booksellers for Greater Profits and More Margin, closed two of its NZ stores. This week Whitcoulls, NZ's biggest bookshops, moved its buying offices to Melbourne. Hardly indicators of a healthy and vibrant book industry".
For those of you who can't get enough Edward and Bella, EW can announce that Yen Press will be publishing Twilight in graphic-novel form, publication date still to be determined. Though Korean artist Young Kim is creating the art, Stephenie Meyer herself is deeply immersed in the project, reviewing every panel.
Take a close look at the biology-class sketch we've obtained (that's an empty dialogue bubble between their heads, if you're wondering). What's interesting to me is that it doesn't look simply like an artist's rendering of Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson. In fact, the characters seem to be an amalgam of Meyer's literary imagination and the actors' actual looks. The description of Edward from biology class: "His dazzling face was friendly; open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were cautious." And Bella: "I was ivory-skinned .. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete." To me, this graphic-novel Bella seems much closer to me to Meyer's book than to Stewart's sultry portrayal. The Edward shown is closer to Pattinson, but not a real duplicate; there's something very winning in the sketch that I don't see in Pattinson's all-too-perfect tousled bronze locks and piercing eyes.
The Latest Jane Austen Mashup: 'Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters'
Like some monster stitched together in a mad scientist's laboratory, another Jane Austen novel is about to be grafted to a classic horror milieu in hopes of creating a best seller. It has been reported that Quirk Books would follow its unexpected hit "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" with a new title, "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters," to be published on Sept. 15.
"Zombies," written by Seth Grahame-Smith, combined about 85 percent of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" text with a tale of undead flesh eaters. The new book, to be written by Ben H. Winters, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures.
Jason Rekulak, a Quirk Books editor, said that the book would take inspiration from everything from "Jules Verne novels to 'Lost' to 'Jaws' to 'Spongebob SquarePants.' " Mr. Grahame-Smith, meanwhile, signed a two-book deal with Grand Central Press that includes a new book called "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."
Watch the trailer for "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" below:
A moving memoir about fathers and sons, filled with great characters, plenty of hilarity and some quiet tears.
'Baz and my culinary tastes had, like virtually everything in our lives, moved in different directions. He was a meat and three veg kind of bloke. Me, well, I didn't know what kind of bloke I was.'
Sean's dad, Baz, believes in making the most of the good things in life - beer, races and footy. Sean is a studious, birdwatching kind of guy. When Sean's mum, Di, starts treatment for cancer, it is cooking, of all things, that brings father and son together. Baz starts whipping up Japanese fish parcels and braised lamb shanks with polenta to tempt Di's flagging post-chemo appetite and Sean is impressed.
When Baz gets the bad news that a lifetime of drinking and smoking has caught up with him, it's suddenly Sean's turn in the kitchen . . .
As much about the changing landscape of Australian male culture as it is about losing loved ones, Cooking with Baz will make you laugh and get a lump in your throat, often at the same time. And you'll think about what 'family' really means.
About Sean Dooley.
Sean Dooley is a Melbourne author who works as a television comedy writer. He has a weekly spot with 3RRR Breakfasters and is a regular contrubutor to The Age and ABC radio where he talks about birds, environmental issues, sport and, well, anything really. His greatest claim to fame is that in 2002 he broke the Australian birdwatching record for seeing the most species in one year. He then wrote about it in The Big Twitch, thereby outing himself as a nerd. He's part of the writing team for the ABC's hugely successful Spicks and Specks. Sean is married to Eleanor and they have a one-year-old daughter, Edie.
When Nick Earls decided to adapt his latest novel for the stage - while writing it - he had no idea he'd end up playing rock star as well. Kylie Northover reports.
BRISBANE-BASED author Nick Earls has already proven himself a prolific novelist, but with his latest work, The True Story of Butterfish, he set himself a bigger challenge than he's accustomed to ? writing the work as a novel and a play simultaneously.
The book, about a burnt-out Aussie rock star who returns home to Brisbane to assess his future, was released last week, while the play is in production at the Brisbane Powerhouse, and will premiere on October 1.
So, what exactly was he thinking?
"I know; I'm not sure," says Earls, who is in Melbourne this week to launch the book. "It's not the usual way to go. Four of my novels have been adapted into plays by other people, which is the easy way to do it; take no responsibility and just turn up on opening night and grab as much of the glory as possible. But this time, early on, I thought I'd write the play as well. I always thought it could work both ways, and it was great exploring the different ways, and each medium fed into the other."
Earls, who has written 11 other books (including five young-adult titles), is often referred to as the "Australian Nick Hornby". He sets most of his books in Brisbane, giving the city a strong local voice, in much the same way as legendary Brisbane band the Go-Betweens did in their music. In fact, Earls credits the band with inspiring him to start writing, and his second novel, Bachelor Kisses, was named after one of their songs.
The central character of Butterfish is a former rock idol called Curtis Holland, who retreats to the suburbs after his band's demise. He sets himself up in a home studio and befriends his neighbours, one of whom helps him with his latest musical project.
Songs and songwriting are an integral part of the story and, while they're relatively easy to fudge in the context of a novel, Earls soon realised that for a stage adaptation he would need actual, real-life songs. So he called upon his musical heroes. Former Go-Betweens singer Robert Forster and bass player Adele Pickvance are providing the music for the stage adaptation. It's something he could once only have dreamt about.
"Those guys were heroes of mine, and the fact they came from Brisbane and took their stuff everywhere made me think, back when there were no writers in Brisbane and it was a place people left, that it was possible," Earls says. "There they were with an album called Spring Hill Fair and I lived five minutes away from there, and I thought: 'You can do it, and you can take it anywhere.' It was very motivating for me. So of course it's amazing 25 years after that album came out to have Robert writing a song connected with my novel. Amazing."
Initially, Earls met Pickvance to get some idea of how a home studio would work, and it was she, he says, who suggested Forster get involved.
"It was Adele's idea to get Robert to write one song, and then she suggested she and I write the other one," Earls says.
So now he's an author, a playwright and a songwriter?
"I know, it's mad! I'm not starring in the play, though," Earls says with a laugh. "While it looks as though I don't know my limits, I assume I've got some."
In the novel, the central character is working on a song for a band called the Splades. That was the song Robert Forster wrote, though he changed the song's name. "Adele contacted me to say Robert had read the book and written the song, but that he'd changed the title," explains Earls. "The book was going to the printer that day. I had to call my editor and ask them to change every reference in the novel! I put the phone down thinking: "Would I ever have imagined that Robert Forster could change something in my novel the day it's supposed to be printed?"'
Butterfish the play will star Underbelly's Myles Pollard and Nathaniel Dean, and will feature the music of the fictional band the Splades in each performance. "When people hear the song, the lead vocal will sound suspiciously like Robert Forster, and on backing vocals and bass we've got Adele Pickvance, and on drums we've got Alana Skyring from the Grates," says Earls. "It's an excellent band ? I can't believe I've done this thing that created this band, albeit in a studio once, but we'll have the song on stage very night."
The First Tuesday books for August are up on our First Tuesday page.
A rollicking family epic like no other, in Middlesex, Jeff Eugenides follows three generations of the Stephanides family from 1920s Greece to Detroit in the mid to late 20th century to contemporary Berlin.
Jack Reacher, faces his most implacable enemy yet in the new thriller by the double number 1 bestseller Lee Child .
Two great expose's on one of the worlds most talked about entertainer.
Not 2 week after the death of the 'King Of Pop' comes two great books detailing the life and times of Michael Jackson.
Michael Heatley brings us a pictorial tribute to Jackson, while Ian Halperin offers up a warts and all 'tell all' book divulging never before released details of the life of Michael Jackson.
Pre-Order yours now!
Unmasked - The Final Years of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin - 9781847377951
Renowned biographer and investigative journalist Ian Halperin has claimed that Michael Jackson was gay.
Halperin, who provoked outrage in December last year when he predicted that Jackson had six months to live, says he has proof that the 'King of Pop' was gay, and that he will release the details in his new book, Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, to be published this month.
Michael Jackson - Life of a Legend by Michael Heatley - 9780755360536
Michael Jackson was one of those rare human beings who can truly be described as a legend. As with Elvis and John Lennon, everyone will remember where they were when they heard about the death of Michael Jackson. He was just fifty when he died, yet had become a superstar by the time he was eleven, ensuring his music was part of the fabric of everyone's life.
M. J. HYLAND writes unflinchingly, with scalpel-sharp finesse. Her first two novels - How The Light Gets In (from a song by Leonard Cohen) and Carry Me Down (shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize) - displayed a talent for delving into darkness. Her riveting follow-up, This Is How - its title as cryptic as the murderer Patrick Oxtoby who possesses its haunted pages - is her finest novel yet.
Of Irish parents but born in London, Hyland was ferried to Australia aged two, then back to Dublin and then, at the whim of her drunkard father, back to Melbourne, where she grew up from 11. She comes from everywhere and nowhere. "Australian-ish" is the appellation conferred by one newspaper. Does she care?
"Where writers are from is one of the world's mostboring topics," she says. "All of the arbitrary things - where we are born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about." She sighs. "Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!"
She chose "M. J." - not Maria - because it doesn't give much away, so "that I am first and foremost a person and not a sex". Why not pick a number? "You mean like a prisoner?" She pauses, then she laughs. She knows exactly, without hesitation, how diabolical she'd be. "I'd be 666. The Omen, remember it? I was born on June 6, 1968. I used to lie that I was born in '66. I was the devil. So, yeah, I know my number already."
Living in Manchester - "trapped in limbo between the suburbs and inner-city" - where she shares her accommodation with Eddie the cat ("Jet black. I don't like him. He's a compromise; I really wanted a dog"), she teaches a class in creative writing, alongside her colleague Martin Amis, at the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University.
Amis, she says, is easy to work with and one of the best raconteurs she's met. "He's never boring, and surprisingly good and kind and civil and friendly. I've just finished reading The Second Plane and I think it's some of the best nonfiction I've ever read."
Creative writing, however you cut it, is slippery business. Novels betray the hand that writes them. Paradoxically, writer interviews are mug shots, presenting the face, the demeanour, the pose that the author concocts for the occasion. "So you're the mug and I'm the shot," she jokes. Touche!
She is signally upbeat, vivacious and smart. Look at the picture on her website - she's clearly in charge, amused, formidably alive, groomed and delineated, using the distraction of the photogenic image to take us in, in every way.
"I get into all sorts of trouble with my publicists and with newspapers because I won't do photographs," she says. "So I knew I'd have to deal with it - get my hair cut, get my make-up straight, get dressed in something nice. You can see in the photographs that I didn't iron my shirt."
She confesses at once to being messy: "I couldn't give a flying f---." She'd much rather prop herself up in bed, in a nest of pillows, and write her novels, moving words around in search of the perfect fit.
She endured a famously awful childhood, which she made famous in an article for the London Review Of Books in 2004. It comes across as the childhood from hell. What was the worst of it? I ask.
"I don't want to talk about it," she says. "I already have done . . . I don't blame you for wanting that dirt, because it's fascinating. People love reading that shit. I very stupidly wrote that big thing for the London Review Of Books, thinking it's going to come out when my first novel's published. It was the worst thing I've ever done and my biggest regret."
She believes it "opened a can of worms; created a monster which I'll never be able to rid myself of. It's my fault."
The piece is both powerful and utterly moving, terse yet insightful in equal measure; it weighed her suffering, sifted the past. Yet it does not define her.
"I have been obscenely lucky," she maintains. "I've got most of the things I've asked for and done well at the things I've wanted to succeed at."
She thinks she might have looked after her health a little better. "And yet I can't even say I wish I was a non-smoker, because some of the closest friends I've made are because I once scabbed a cigarette off them." She laughs. "And there are maybe a couple of people I shouldn't have bonked."
Apart from that, she sounds stratospherically on the up, which is contradicted a little later when she blurts out that she lives "in a kind of subdued terror - but I smile a lot. That might surprise people." What she fears, she says, is death - "I just can't bind to the idea" - and "writing a novel that's predictable", an absurdly long odds bet.
So far her writing career has been astral, although the sales of her books haven't matched their critical plaudits.
This Is How is deceptively simple. Its inspiration was "the Paul Arrowsmith interview", cited in Tony Parker's Life After Life: Interviews With 12 Murderers. Hyland was riveted.
"The raw elements really appealed to me. The murderer lived in a lodging house and went to his neighbour's room in the middle of the night and there he killed him. And then there was Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick with its gratuitous act of violence - a book that was really important to me. I was fascinated. I wanted to try my hand."
She describes This Is How as "largely quotidian and banal. Day-to-day stuff" set by the seaside. That's where the murder takes place - a shocking, unprovoked act that both heightens and purges the novel's accruing rack of suspense.
Isn't she worried that she's giving away too much plot? "I don't have a problem," she says. "Helen Garner wrote a great blurb for the cover of this novel, which said: 'Hyland's examination of this murderer's soul is a tour de force' etc, etc.
"Canongate [the novel's British publisher] then made Garner take 'murderer' out." You sense Hyland's definite disapproval. "I did a reading at Hay-on-Wye and began by saying 'This is the story of a murder . . . ' It must be declared. If this novel's grip on the reader is so tenuous as to be ruined by them knowing there'll be a murder, then it's failed."
The novel is its own best advocate. Oxtoby, on the doorstep of the lodgings, armed with his toolkit, begins, from page one, to give you the shivers, to suck the oxygen, atom by atom, from the page. His voice is pregnant with layers of suggestion, Pinteresque, dissolving through Camus into Kafka, becoming Hyland unalloyed.
Oxtoby carries the book and narrates it. You scan his words, as though screening an X-ray, trying to notice the give-away flaw that's already embedded in his inescapable fate. The novel's weakness is that Oxtoby, though he's not in the least narcissistic, doesn't paint an in-depth picture of the novel's supporting players.
"One of the things I'm not doing well yet are the smaller parts," Hyland says. "I've so much to learn . . . I've tried to give them enough dimension . . . but maybe they've not got quite enough pulse." And then she pauses. "All my eggs were in one bastard."
I laugh. I'm supposed to. But this is a quip she has used before. "It was spur of the moment the first time I used it, and then it was edited to 'basket' - I had to campaign to have it restored."
The "bastard" in question doesn't think much of what he describes as "stupid creative writing workshops", something Hyland has attended and latterly teaches. Could she persuade him? "I think they're grand," she says. "What's the fuss about? All the complaining?"
For four intense minutes we bat back and forth the pros and cons. Her bottom line is: "Look, what harm does it do?" Then she rattles off a salvo of neon-lit names - writers who've famously taken workshops: Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver. She might have added M. J. Hyland. What did she learn?
"My teachers were good. Prepared to give away their secrets." For example? A long hesitation ensues. "Right . . . OK, I can't . . . There isn't one." In frustration - but rather good- humouredly - she adds: "I need to learn to tell nice, brief lies when doing interviews."
Hyland's bolder, more troubled childhood self would have cooked up a passable fib in the blink of an eye. "I was unstoppable," she acknowledges. "I'd rationalise it as proof of the size and depth of my imagination. It all wore off by the time I was 20."
Yet "lying" is part of the writer's craft, surely fundamental to making fiction? "Yes, it's the art of persuasive lying. The writer shouldn't be in the room. Writerly writing and showing off I can't abide. Writing fiction and telling lies are interrelated."
This Is How is a prime example of the art - and of the writer staying firmly in the background while bringing the world into blazing focus on the page and achieving what Hyland calls "the ultimate lie - that I know another mind!"
"Patrick Oxtoby is awfully ordinary," she says. "Yet there's no such thing as ordinary."
She pauses again but this time not for effect, then adds: "And it takes a novel to prove that."
James Frey and Co-Writer Sell Series to HarperCollins
A week after submitting a young adult novel anonymously to editors, James Frey, the notorious author of "A Million Little Pieces," and a writing partner, Jobie Hughes, have sold North American rights to "I Am Number Four" to HarperCollins Children's Books.
Harper, another imprint of HarperCollins, published Mr. Frey's adult novel, "Bright Shiny Morning," last year.
Eric Simonoff, a literary agent with William Morris Endeavor who represented Mr. Frey and Mr. Hughes in the deal, said the pair had also sold three subsequent books in a planned series.
Mr. Frey, who was caught embellishing details in "A Million Little Pieces," his memoir of drug addiction and recovery, conceived the idea of what is proposed as a six-book series. Mr. Hughes, a recent graduate of the creative writing program at Columbia, is writing most of the text.
Last week, DreamWorks Studios bought film rights to the series, with Michael Bay, the director of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," signed on to produce and possibly direct the first installment.
Mr. Simonoff originally pitched the book as a collaboration between an unnamed New York Times best-selling author and an up-and-coming writer. He sent the manuscript of the first book in the series, about a group of alien teenagers who hide on earth after their planet is attacked by hostile invaders, to several editors at large New York publishing houses last week.
Many of them did not know that Mr. Frey was one of the authors until news of his identity was revealed in press reports last week.
Two years ago, Harper reportedly bought "Bright Shiny Morning," Mr. Frey's novel about Los Angeles, for $1 million. A source familiar with the deal for "I Am Number Four" said HarperCollins paid less than seven figures for the four books.
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, "Bright Shiny Morning," which was published in hardcover last year, has sold 71,000 copies in hardcover and 10,000 in paperback.
The love, however, is not universal. Earlier this week, an unnamed "outraged, nauseous, [and] flabbergasted" children's book editor blogging at Editorial Anonymous took issue with the cover, noting that Liar is about a young girl who is "black, with very short hair, and is mistaken for a boy early on in the book by teachers and fellow students," which is pretty much the exact opposite of the model who has wound up on the dust jacket. "I wish I could say I can't imagine what they were thinking," this anonymous editor writes, "but in fact I do have a guess. I just can't imagine why they thought no one would notice." (We've inset the original Australian cover of the novel for comparison.)
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