Join me tonight at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco for a conversation with Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes, The Whole World Over, and I See You Everywhere. The event begins at 8:00. Details here.
Booknotes
L’annee brouillard, Sophie Aslanides’s translation of The Year of Fog, is back on the bestseller lists in France, according to Online Star. The Turkish publication reports on the top ten bestselling books in several countries (scroll down to see French list). Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is number one in England.
Jose Saramago quits blogging
The AFP reports that Nobel prize-winning author Jose Saramago, known for his haunting novel Blindness, will say goodbye to the blog that he began writing last September. Why? He needs to finish his novel. Saramago was 85 when he started the blog with a love letter to Lisbon. In his last blog entry, Saramago writes: “It has always been convenient that goodbyes be brief…Goodbye therefore. Until another day? I sincerely don’t think so. I have started another book and want to dedicate all my time to it,” he wrote in his final blog entry. Good advice for all of...
Google Books, The New Rumpelstiltskin
There’s a new Rumpelstiltskin in town, but he’s not going after the miller’s daughter. This Rumpelstiltskin has set his sights on authors, who, according to critics, may unwittingly spin him buckets full of gold. Judging from the panic issuing from home offices and cafes across the country, you’d think he was trying to steal our firstborn. I’m talking about Google Books, and a deal negotiated between the Internet giant and the Authors Guild: the Google Books Settlement. Maggie Shiels of the BBC writes today about the late but noisy outcry from Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon, who protest the settlement...
Breaking through the fog in France
An article in the French newspaper Le Figaro today on the biggest successes of the summer quotes Laurence Deschamps, the president of the major French retailer Fnac, on the state of book sales. Deschamps says that numbers are up from last year, and two books in particular are breaking records: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and The Year of Fog (L’annee brouillard, translated by the wonderful Sophie Aslanides). I happen to be reading A Mercy right now–very slowly, taking in a bit day by day–it’s a beautiful, heartbreaking book, a story told with subtlety and a great respect for the...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
