From Jane Austen to Dave Eggers
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
You wouldn’t have thought a book about six people in a book club who like Jane Austen would have “cinematic” written all over it, but after the surprise best-selling run of Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Jane Austen Club,” Hollywood has take note. Sony Pictures Entertainment and veteran producer and former studio boss John Calley have optioned rights.
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Retired insurance company vice president and University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Ted Kooser will succeed Louise Gluck as U.S. poet laureate. Librarian of Congress James Billington comments, “Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the first poet laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways.”
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Publisher W.W. Norton has reprinted another 300,000 of its authorized edition of “The 9/11 Commission Report,” bringing the total to over a million, and says that its sales have exceeded 500,000 copies. It has yet to declare that it is profiting enough to make a donation to charity.
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Author-on-the-run Norma Khouri just barely met her Australian publisher’s deadline for submitting evidence to back up the life she portrayed in her memoir “Forbidden Love,” though the documents were quickly returned to her lawyer for translation and further explanation of what they represent. Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald has already found a source that says photocopied passport pages supplied are taken from her husband’s Greek passport, not the Jordanian passport Ms. Khouri said she travels on.
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C-SPAN founder and CEO Brian Lamb, host of the cable network’s “Booknotes” program, announced that the program will end on December 5 after airing 800 interviews with authors. Rather than pass the baton to a new leader, Mr. Lamb will host a new, broader interview program in the same time slot.
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The ever-busy Dave Eggers is the center of activity again this month. Knopf is publishing “Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s, Humor Category” in paperback, his journal’s first trade book collection, just as Mr. Eggers is releasing the short-story collection “How We Are Hungry” through his Mc-Sweeney’s Books. Earlier this summer, the Eggers-backed 826NYC writing lab opened in Brooklyn, where a series of fundraising “Seminars for Adult Aspiring Writers” began this week.
