What happened to Harper Lee’s long lost crime novel?
The headline says it all—Harper Lee once wrote (or at least tried to write) a crime novel. Or at least attempted to. In the recently released Furious Hours, the immaculate… Read more »
Canada’s largest bookstore chain makes a foray into the U.S.
We are bearing witness to the rise of the bookstore as “cultural department store.” You’ve seen this phenomenon: in the age of Amazon, bookstores, especially the bigger chains, cannot thrive on selling books alone,… Read more »
Lawsuits all the way down: the bizarre afterlife of To Kill a Mockingbird continues
According to reporting by Alexandra Alter and Michael Paulson for The New York Times, dozens of community theater productions of Christopher Sergel’s 1990 stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill… Read more »
PRH “shutters” progressive imprint Spiegel & Grau
First reported by Rachel Deahl for Publishers Weekly, Penguin Random House announced last Friday its imprint Spiegel & Grau “is being shuttered” after 14 years of publishing such bestselling authors as… Read more »
Random House and Crown merge under PRH’s continued consolidation efforts
Announced last Friday morning, two of Penguin Random House’s (PRH) most successful publishing groups, Crown Publishing Group and Random House, are merging. For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter reports… Read more »
M.I.T. clears Junot Díaz of misconduct amid objections
M.I.T. has joined the Boston Review in clearing Junot Díaz of allegations of sexual misconduct, Alexandra Alter reports for the New York Times. Both institutions will keep the author on their staff—as… Read more »
New types of deals between Audible and authors might mean trouble for publishers
The expanding audiobook market feels a bit like the wild west. It shouldn’t, really — audiobooks have been around for a while, and I thought we had agreed that they… Read more »
Macmillan is on course to have two million-copy-sellers in one year
As we noted earlier this week, James Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty had an historic opening weeks of sales, with more than 600,000 units sold across all formats, and more than… Read more »
Bestseller-wise, it doesn’t really matter if a book is pro- or anti-Trump
Last week, we wrote about Jennifer Calfas’s maybe-not-so-obvious finding that Donald Trump is the “surprising thing” that the top three bestselling books this year have in common. Ryan Teague Beckwith… Read more »
Go Sue a Watchman: Scott Rudin files countersuit against the estate of Harper Lee
Michael Paulson and Alexandra Alter have reported for the New York Times that Rudinplay, the stage production company of reported misanthrope/racist Scott Rudin, is filing a federal countersuit against the estate… Read more »