paper trail

Jul 6, 2012 @ 00:01:00 am

Slavoj Zizek

Oxford University Press has been fined 1.9 million pounds after it was revealed that two of the publisher’s subsidiaries bribed Kenyan and Tanzanian government officials to secure contracts for school textbooks in those countries.

After a "heated auction," Ecco has won the rights to a memoir by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. The book, tentativey scheduled to be released in 2014, "explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the '70s and '80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work."

Instead of italics, Faulkner originally wanted to print each of the various narrative threads in The Sound and the Fury in different colors—an option that wasn’t available when the book came out in 1929. This August, the English publisher Folio is honoring the late writer’s wishes, and putting out a new edition of the novel with each timeline set in shades of blue, green, yellow, and purple. The book won’t come cheap, though: according to HTMLGiant, it will cost $345.

“The Word for Snow,” Don DeLillo’s previously unpublished one-act play about global warming, will receive its international debut at the London literature festival next week.

For those wondering about the implications of the discovery of the Higgs boson—the so-called “God particle”—Slavoj Zizek has some thoughts.

Details (and a cover image) have emerged about J.K. Rowling’s next novel: Casual Vacancy, a “big novel about a small town.” The book weighs in at 512 pages, and is about tensions following the death of a local government official in the fictional town of Pagford, England. The book is scheduled to come out in the U.S. in late September.

The Deadline website reports that HBO is planning a TV movie on Fox chief Roger Ailes, which will draw from a forthcoming book about the GOP-friendly network by political writer Gabriel Sherman. The book, which is rumored to be titled The Loudest Voice in the Room: An Inside Account of the Rise of Fox News, is slated to come out with Random House next summer.

Turkish author Elif Shafak was accused of plagiarism last year after critics flagged several striking similarities between her novel Iskender and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Now, Shafak is back under the plagiarism spotlight thanks to the cover of her new novel, Semspare. Many have noted the resemblance between the book’s cover—an image of umbrellas suspended in the street above a historic neighborhood—and an installation by artists Rafael Legidos Ibane and Mario Berna Box. Speaking to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, Shafak denied allegations.