from The NY Observer

Reed It and Weep: Legendary Lou, Velvet Underground Singer, Greets Groupies at Book Signing with Schnabel

By Joe Pompeo

Lou Reed, legendary frontman of the Velvet Underground, and Julian Schnabel, noted artist and filmmaker, were sitting at a rustic wooden table inside the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea on the evening of Thursday, June 25.

The two longtime friends were there for a book-signing and cocktail party celebrating the forthcoming release of Berlin, a new collection of photographs taken during Mr. Schnabel’s filming of a tour Mr. Reed did in 2007 to revive his classic 1973 album and rock opera of the same name.

One by one, enamored fans approached the duo with copies of the book and other memorabilia—vintage concert posters, black-and-white photographs, Velvet Underground LPs—that they wanted Mr. Reed, dressed in a saggy black sweater and black jeans, and Mr. Schnabel, wearing loose white pajamas, the top half of which were unbuttoned just enough to reveal a thick swath of chest hair, to autograph with shiny silver markers.

[ click to continue reading at The Observer ]

Click on the picture below to visit The Book Seer, enter the title + author of the last book you read, and let The Book Seer be your librarian.

from Shelf-Awareness

Rat Press: Hollywood Director Moonlights as Publisher

By day Brett Ratner is a Hollywood producer, director and photographer. At night, he moonlights as the publisher of Rat Press. “It’s a one-man operation,” he said. “I do everything, basically,” including editing books in his bedroom.

Rat Press had its beginnings nearly a decade ago when Ratner published Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends by Mark Helfrich. Several years later he wrote a book of his own, Hillhaven Lodge: The Photo Booth Pictures, with powerHouse Books. Ratner has now re-launched Rat Press, creating a new logo and signing on with Perseus Distribution. The company aims to publish works “from the most prolific individuals in film” that consumers “never have the opportunity to see in a theater” and in a variety of formats. Titles will include biographies, interviews, novels, scripts, photos and artwork.

“Brett is a passionate book lover, and he’s done a wonderful job of bringing the film and book industries together,” said Tyson Cornell, director of marketing and publicity at Book Soup in Los Angeles. Ratner, whose big-screen work includes directing X-Men: The Last Stand and the film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novelRed Dragon, acknowledges that “there is definitely a synergy” between the book and movie markets and envisions a wide readership for the books. “They call movies that reach many audiences four quadrant movies,” he said. “These are four quadrant books” that will appeal to film students, movie buffs, pop culture enthusiasts and those who like reading historical books and biographies.

[ click to continue reading at Shelf-Awareness.com ]

[ click to visit Rat Press ]

from The New York Times

A Literary Legend Fights for a Local Library

Ethan Pines for The New York Times

“I don’t believe in colleges and universities,” Ray Bradbury, 88, said. “I believe in libraries.”

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

VENTURA, Calif. — When you are pushing 90, have written scores of famous novels, short stories and screenplays, and have fulfilled the goal of taking a simulated ride to Mars, what’s left?

“Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine and I’d like to spend more time with her,” said Ray Bradbury, peering up from behind an old television tray in his den.

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

A Yahoo spokeswoman said it was impossible to verify Mr. Bradbury’s account without more details.

Mr. Bradbury has long been known for his clear memory of some of life’s events, and that remains the case, he said. “I have total recall,” he said. “I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

He also recalled watching the film “Pumping Iron,” which features Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building days, and how his personal recommendation of the film for an Academy Award helped spark Mr. Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood career. He remembers lining his four daughters’ cribs with Golden Books when they were tiny. And he remembers meeting Ms. Derek on a train in France years ago.

“She said, ‘Mr. Bradbury.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said: ‘I love you! My name is Bo Derek.’ ”

Ms. Derek’s spokeswoman, Rona Menashe, said the story was true. She said her client would like to see some more of Mr. Bradbury, too.

Mr. Bradbury’s wife, Maggie, to whom he was married for over five decades, died in 2003. He turns 89 in August.

He can still be found regularly at the Los Angeles Public Library branch in Koreatown, which he visited often as a teenager.

“The children ask me, ‘How can I live forever, too?’ ” he said. “I tell them do what you love and love what you do. That’s the story on my life.”

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Bruce Sterling’s BEYOND THE BEYOND @ WIRED.com

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

• By Bruce Sterling

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

[ click to continue reading at WIRED.com ]

from Coudal Partners via MediaBistro

A QUICK CONTEST FROM WHERE WE DO OUR BEST THINKING

Booking Bands

The walls in the washroom at our studio are all chalkboards. It was Susan’s idea and after she spent a weekend painting them up, not much happened. An occasional drawing or joke was added, a visiting courier might leave a crude message or one of Jim’s kids would draw a puppy or write something unintelligible. Lately, however, we’ve taken to using that forum for a series of wordplay games and the current one is pretty fun. The idea is to mash up the name of a book with the name of a band.

Here’s a few of our examples to get you started:

The Things They Might Be Giants Carried*
The Who Moved My Cheese*
The Old Man and The Sea and Cake*
Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory*
Catch 182*
Horton Hears a Hoobastank*
Of Mice and Men at Work*
Bare Naked Lunch Ladies*
The Agony and the XTC*

JAMES FREY? WASN’T HE IN THE EAGLES?

A Million Little Pixies (Aaron Kelly)
A Million Little Feat Pieces (Jim Sheeran)
A Million Little Richards (Brian Braiker)
A Million Little Peaches and Herb (Robert Hofheimer)
My Friend Lynrd Skynrd (Daniel Pink)
My Friend Leonard Cohen (Jamie Stolarski)

(I am TOTALLY dismayed that no one got “A Marillion Little Pieces*” or “My Friend Len”)

Charles Dickens’ not-so-slim pickens

The Pickwick pAperchAse (Cy Culpin)
Nickolas Nickelback (Joshua Johnson)
Oliver Twisted Sister (Joshua Johnson)
Nicholas Nickelbee Gees (Jim Sheeran)
A Christmas Carole King (Tracie Bedell)
A Christmas Carole King Lear (John Upchurch)
A Christmas Carol Channing (Meredith Payne)
David Gray Copperfield (Troy Kukes)
Bleak Housemartins (Tom Ward)
A Tale of Two Bay City Rollers (Tim Carvell)
A Tale of U2 Cities (Jessica Sheeran)
Great White Expectations (John Boeckmann)

[ click to read full list at coudal.com or MediaBistro ]

from The LA Times

Susan Farley / For The Times

COLUMN ONE

The typist’s tale of ‘Last Tycoon’

Years after ‘Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary got to witness the second act of an author who didn’t believe in them.

By David L. Ulin
June 8, 2009

All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty’s Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary.

It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing and dictation skills. She’d been in Southern California for a little more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. “Everybody said, ‘You’re a furrier? What are you doing in Southern California?’ ” Ring remembers. “But he knew the studios used furs. Because then the actresses used to be dressed to the gills.”

[ click to continue at LATimes.com ]

from The Guardian UK

First edition of Ulysses sells for record £275,000

Well-preserved copy of James Joyce’s 1922 classic had been unread, except for the racy bits

• Mark Brown, arts correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 June 2009 16.49 BST
• Article history

A first edition copy of the book Ulysees by James Joyce, on sale at Antiquarian Book Fair, Olympia, London. Photograph: Martin Argles/Guardian

If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of theJames Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.

The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.

Ulysses, hailed by some as a modernist masterpiece, follows the events of one day and is one of those novels that people often never quite get round to finishing, or in many cases starting.

Joyce’s vast novel was met with bafflement and anger when it was first published in 1922 with one reviewer complaining that it “appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine”.

The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.

This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.

[ click to read at The Guardian ]

from CNN

Lawsuit targets ‘rip-off’ of ‘Catcher in the Rye’

By Doug Gross, CNN

(CNN) – Reclusive author J.D. Salinger has emerged, at least in the pages of court documents, to try to stop a novel that presents Holden Caulfield, the disaffected teen hero of his classic “The Catcher in the Rye,” as an old man.

J.D. Salinger has stayed out of the public eye for most of the past half century.
Lawyers for Salinger filed suit in federal court this week to stop the publication, sale and advertisement of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” a novel written by an author calling himself J.D. California and published by a Swedish company that advertises joke books and a “sexual dictionary” on its Web site.

“The Sequel infringes Salinger’s copyright rights in both his novel and the character Holden Caulfield, who is the narrator and essence of that novel,” said the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in New York.

Published in 1951, “The Catcher in the Rye” is an iconic take on teen alienation that is consistently listed among the greatest English-language novels ever written.

Salinger, 90, who has famously lived the life of a recluse in New Hampshire for most of the past half-century, last published in 1965. With the exception of a 1949 movie based on one of his early short stories, he has never authorized adaptations of any of his work, even turning down an overture from director Steven Spielberg to make “Catcher” into a movie.

“There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there,” the court filing quotes Salinger as saying in 1980. “Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”

The filing refers to the new book’s author as “John Doe,” saying that the name John David California probably is made up.

[ click to continue reading at CNN.com ]

from The Guardian UK

Could the behaviour of poets be any less poetic?

These pigtail-pulling dons may be fun to watch, but academics desperately need more of a sense of proportion

Zoe WilliamsTuesday 26 May 2009 16.30 BSTIn the incredibly unlikely event that you’ve missed the contretemps between Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott, here are its results so far: neither poet is going to be Oxford’s chair of poetry, a post which only the New York Times  has so far been vulgar enough to point out is “a matter of prestige, not money … [drawing] a salary of barely $11,000 a year”.Walcott pulled out when allegations of past sexual harassment were made against him; Padel landed the job, then stepped down when it was revealed that she’d disseminated the allegations.Unavoidably, I suppose, sexual politics have tainted an already pretty seamy affair, with a feminist contingent arguing that Padel wouldn’t have been hounded out if she were a man. I don’t buy it, myself. The delight of the story is the incongruity. You have these two people held, as poets, to represent the highest in human sensibility, and as ­academics, the most advanced in maturity and sophistication, and they’re pulling each other’s pigtails. Padel could be male or female, Walcott’s original offence could be sex or shoplifting, and it would still be funny to watch.But you can’t watch a fight without choosing a side, and with so many accusations that the Chair itself has been brought into disrepute, which of them was it? Which one of these hellcats has made off with Oxford’s poetic repute?[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from Sign On Radio

Writer’s Roundtable

Whether you are a casual listener looking for an entertaining hour of radio or a serious writer seeking a weekly workshop, this show is for you.

Each week, Writer’s Roundtable Radio Show offers exclusive insight to all aspects of the writing industry. Literary marketer and publicist Antoinette Kuritz talks with successful writers, agents, editors, book designers, ghost writers, reviewers, writing coaches, read & critique group leaders — anyone and everyone who can inspire writers in the art, craft, and business of writing.

From writing tips and story secrets from your favorite NY Times bestselling authors to publishing advice from top-flight agents and acquisitions editors from prestigious publishers around the country, Writer’s Roundtable offers its listeners a unique opportunity to listen, learn, and participate. Tune in every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. on SignOnRadio.com.

NY Times Bestselling Author James Frey - Download

NY Times best selling author James Frey on fiction vs. memoir, finding voice, writing style, building a career and more…

[ click to listen at SignOnRadio.com ]

visit BookSoup.com and buy some stuff

from the New York Times

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive

Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball team cards, circa 1953-56. More Photos >

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: May 15, 2009

Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

[ click to read at the NYT ]

from Shelf-Awareness

Birth of the Cool: Minnesota

I know, Miles,
you didn’t have rural southern Minnesota
in mind when you
blew your classic mute
on your Birth of the Cool
sessions in New York, circa 1949.
But it’s the way the paper-thin
ice forms on the edge of the lake
today in late October:
meeting at the cold, dark water’s edge
–still open and free
though not for long–
with the ripples of these short, choppy
muted notes of yours
blown just out of reach
this cool windy autumn morning.

excerpted from Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse by Philip Bryant

[ click to read at Shelf-Awareness.com - about 2/3 scroll down the page ]

from the Dracula Feed at Blogspot

Dracula Begins

Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have. Please subscribe to the RSS feed so that you don’t miss any installments!

[ click to sign up for the Dracula feed ]

from The LA Times

Marilyn French dies at 79; author of feminist classic ‘The Women’s Room’

The 1977 novel, which captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society’s traditional conceptions of their role, sold 20 million copies.

By Elaine Woo
May 5, 2009

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist scholar whose provocative 1977 novel “The Women’s Room” captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society’s traditional conceptions of their roles, died Saturday at a hospital in New York City. She was 79.

Although it received mixed reviews, “The Women’s Room” became a feminist classic, selling more than 20 million copies in two dozen languages with a story that spoke powerfully to women seeking liberation from societal norms in the latter quarter of the 20th century. It traced the evolution of Mira, a repressed suburban housewife in the 1950s who divorces her brutish husband in the 1960s, goes to Harvard and finds friendship with other women seeking to redefine their lives in the midst of sweeping social change.

“It came at the right moment,” said Feminist Press founder Florence Howe, who knew French for 30 years. “It said to women you just have to stop being oppressed, you have to stand up and fight for yourself. Women heard that. Women recognized themselves.”

The novel’s most-quoted line — “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are,” spoken by the protagonist after the near-rape of her daughter — was often erroneously attributed to French herself, giving critics what they thought was proof of the author’s man-hating rage. The accusation infuriated French. “What I am opposed to,” she told the London Times a few years ago, “is the notion that men are superior to me.”

[ click to read full piece at LATimes.com ]

Amazing this has not happened yet in all of British history. Amazing. -Editor

from the UK Guardian

Carol Ann Duffy becomes first female poet laureate

Duffy takes poetry’s most prestigious job, succeeding Andrew Motion, as a standard-bearer for women poets

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 10.02 BST
• Article history

‘I look on it as recognition of the great women poets we now have writing’ … Carol Ann Duffy. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Four hundred years of male domination came to an end today with the election of Carol Ann Duffy as poet laureate. Duffy, the widely-tipped favourite for the post, only agreed to accept the post ahead of poets Simon Armitage and Roger McGough because “they hadn’t had a woman”.

Speaking on Woman’s Hour this morning on Radio 4, she revealed that she had thought “long and hard” about accepting the offer.

“The decision was purely because they hadn’t had a woman,” she said. “I look on it as recognition of the great women poets we now have writing, like Alice Oswald.”

[ click to read complete article at The Guardian ]

from the LA Times

‘Who Is Mark Twain?’

Previous uncollected stories and essays drawn mostly from his papers and correspondence show why he is so beloved.

By Tim Rutten
April 22, 2009

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.

Twain’s death of heart disease at the age of 74 came as such a blow to the country that it evoked an expression of official White House regret from President William Howard Taft: “Mark Twain gave pleasure — real intellectual enjoyment — to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. . . . His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.”

Ernest Hemingway famously argued that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ” though even he conceded that the great novel’s disastrous final section is “just cheating.” (To this critic’s mind, a canonical case also can be made for Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Confidence-Man.” Still, what other 19th century American novel so controversial in its own time — though for different reasons — remains so today?)

William Faulkner, to whom praise of other novelists did not come easily, called Twain the “first truly American writer” and said he “wrote the first American sentences.”

[ click to continue reading at The LA Times ]

from National Public Radio

And The Pulitzer For Forgotten Fiction Goes To… 

Here’s a list of Pulitzer novels we’ve forgotten. Add your own forgotten fiction in the comment field below — or tell us what we’ve missed.

Our Unscientific List Of Least-Known Fiction Winners

• His Family by Ernest Poole, 1918
• Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield, 1927
• Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, 1929
• Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge, 1930
• Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, 1931
• The Store by T.S. Stribling, 1933
• Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, 1934
• Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson, 1935
• Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis, 1936
• In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow, 1942
• Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin, 1944
• Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, 1949
• The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, 1950
• The Town by Conrad Richter, 1951
• The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor, 1959
• The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, 1962
• Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, 1978

[ click to read at NPR.org ]

from Newsweek

The End of Verse?

A recent NEA report finds fiction reading on the rise, while readership of poetry has dropped significantly. Is an art form dying?

Marc Bain

Newsweek Web Exclusive

In January, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled “Reading on the Rise,” announcing that the number of American adults reading fiction had increased for the first time since the NEA began tracking reading habits in 1982. According to the report, 50.2 percent of adults had read a work of fiction in the previous year, compared with just 46.7 percent in 2002. The results were greeted with a mixture of excitement and caution by education experts. Some saw them as the long-awaited reversal of the trend toward a dumber, TV-obsessed United States; others, more wary, called them a statistical blip. Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country’s many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S.

[ click to continue reading at Newsweek.com ]

from the Los Angeles Times

HECTOR TOBAR:

Outpost of literature feeds the body and the mind

Stefano Paltera, For The Times

Sandra Romero of Mama’s Hot Tamales offered space to Librería Hispanoamérica in hopes that they can help one another survive the economic downturn.

Hector Tobar, March 24, 2009

Somewhere up in poet heaven, Roque Dalton is a happy man.

Just across the street from MacArthur Park, the town square of Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, a tiny storefront has an entire shelf dedicated to the works of the Salvadoran writer, who died in 1975.

Dalton’s poems celebrate the tenacity of Salvadorans and their diaspora across the Americas. If his books had eyes, they could look through the store’s glass window and see his countrymen hawking snow cones and tacos outside.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lives inside the Librería Hispanoamérica too. His “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” is a popular item there, as is the work of another Nobel laureate, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias.

Spotting great literature in the shadow of the park’s aging palm trees, in a corner of the city once infamous for the sale of crack cocaine and sex, felt at first like stumbling upon a mirage.

One of the local alcoholics thought so too. First, he wandered over from the park’s lawns and skeptically inspected the freshly swept sidewalks in front of the bookstore. Then, persuaded they were real, he stepped inside.

“Señora, you’ve earned a spot in heaven,” he told owner Aura Quezada. “Because in this place where everyone opens liquor stores, you have opened a bookstore.”

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]

from Bartleby.com

The Elements of Style

William Strunk, Jr.

Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.

from the Times Online

Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide

[ click to continue reading at the TimesOnline ]

from The Hollywood Reporter

Eric Simonoff joins WMA’s book division

Ex-Janklow & Nesbit lit agent wil serve as senior vp

By Borys Kit

March 12, 2009, 10:14 PM ET

In a move that significantly bolsters its book business, WMA has brought Eric Simonoff on board as senior vp of the agency’s book division.

Simonoff — a literary agent and co-director of Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where he worked since 1991 — has a roster that includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, 17 New York Times best-selling authors and 14 New Yorker contributors.

Among those that Simonoff is bringing with him are Pulitzer Prize winners Jhumpa Lahiri (”Unaccustomed Earth”) and Stacy Schiff (”Cleopatra”) and best-selling authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (”The Monster of Florence”), Bill O’Reilly (”A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity”), Norah Vincent (”Self Made Man”), Ben Mezrich (”21: Bringing Down the House”) and James Frey (”Bright Shiny Morning”).
The move is quite a catch for WMA, which not only hopes to keep expanding its book department but will explore opportunities for Simonoff’s clients across its many divisions.

[ click to read at THR ]