Friday, June 5, 2009

Phony Baloney on Rye

J.D. Salinger has emerged from self-imposed obscurity to sue everyone involved in publishing 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, an unauthorized sequel to his classic The Catcher in the Rye. Can you imagine how that filing reads?

"With regard to the following:
The book;
The author;
The author's pseudonym;
The agent;
The publisher;
The editor;
The copyeditor;
The distributor;
The guy who did the cover art
the Plaintiff contends that they're all a bunch of goddam phonies."

Over on my other blog, Classics Rock!, I've got a roundup of songs that reference The Catcher in the Rye (by Green Day, Guns N' Roses, and many others) that somehow dodged the Salinger litigation bullet.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

No Argument Here

William Scheckel, who shared a Fox & Friends segment with me a couple of months ago, is working on a book. I don't mean he's squinting at someone else's turgid prose, struggling to get to the end of a chapter before he nods off. I mean he's writing a book of his own.

He's done a lot of writing in the course of his marketing career, and much of it has been published--unfortunately, under other people's names. Now he's finished with secret identities. He's taking a stab at writing his own book, using his own name, from scratch. And he's decided to make that process transparent by chronicling his progress in a blog called Writing in the Sun. The name has a double meaning: Metaphorically it shows that he's putting this writing adventure out there for everyone to see; literally it means that he's writing the book and the blog from "a comfortable deck chair on our sunny welcome-mat of a front yard." It'll be interesting to see if he changes the name of the blog when he moves indoors next fall.

Apparently the book is about arguing. I'll be checking back to learn additional details as he reveals more in future posts. I hope you'll check it out too, because I encouraged him in this venture (see his first post) and if it doesn't work out, I'm going to hear from him. I'd really rather not get caught up in an argument with a guy who's writing a book about arguing. Next thing you know I'll be a case study. Good luck, William!

Monday, June 1, 2009

Book: The Sequel

Perseus Books pulled off an amazing feat at BEA over the weekend. Last week I posted about their "Book: The Sequel" promotion, in which readers were invited to submit the first line of an imagined sequel to a famous book. The deadline was last Thursday, and over the next 48 hours they edited, designed, and published a collection of the best submissions.

Book: The Sequel is available for pre-order on Amazon and other online retailers, and will be in bookstores June 15th. A preview of the book is available online, and they're still accepting submissions for the web site.

I'm happy to say at least one of my submissions made it to the finished book:

The President was pleased with his new education bill, in which students with good grades would be swept to Heaven in The Rapture, while poor performers would be kept back to repeat a grade and suffer eternal damnation.
--from No Child Left Behind (sequel to Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins)

Incidentally, all proceeds from this book benefit The National Book Foundation.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Practically Live from BEA

Another Publishers Weekly blog post from BookExpo America, which technically went up yesterday evening. . .

Friday, May 29, 2009

Live from BEA

Here's my first post on the Publishers Weekly blog, live from BookExpo America. Stanley Bing makes a return appearance!