Occupy Wall Street: The Book

Photo: OR Books

By: Joe Coscarelli

Progressive publishing house OR Books will release a 200-page first draft of a history entitled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America as soon as December 17, using volunteers from the movement’s Education and Empowerment Committee, and including work by both “sympathetic writers and people who are active in the occupation,” OR co-founder Colin Robinson told New York. The book’s release date will mark the protest’s three-month anniversary — assuming it survives the onset of winter. By then, the demonstrations will have already have been the subject of an MTV special and plenty of news coverage, but Robinson hopes his “interventionist book” will provide the most extensive chronicling so far. “Although you can’t deliver definitive opinions at the moment or set out a course of action, you can record the details of what has happened so far in Zuccotti Park,” he said.

The publisher — whose anti-Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge wound up a New York Times bestseller — will release Occupying Wall Street as a print-on-demand product and independent e-book, with all profits going back to the occupation.

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Once upon a lawsuit . . .

(DEREK RUTTAN, The London Free Press)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS: London author accuses major publisher of stealing from his book

By JOE BELANGER

David Carruthers always believed he had the chops to become a great children’s author.

What he never counted on was having a book he’d written used as the basis for another book with a similar name, characters and images, and having to sue the world’s largest publisher of children’s books, the same company that rejected his book three times.

That’s what Carruthers alleges in a $2.5-million lawsuit against Scholastic Canada, Scholastic UK and author/illustrator Catherine Vase of London, England, whom he accuses of stealing from his book The Bird That Wanted to Fly.

Vase is the author and illustrator of the successful Scholastic book The Penguin Who Wanted to Fly, published a decade after Carruthers published his book.

The main character in both books is a penguin that has a polar bear friend. Other similarities between the books include the front and back covers.

And, Carruthers said, Scholastic rejected his book on three occasions, the first time in 1995 before he decided to publish it using his own money.

He said when he first saw the other book, he was “dumbfounded.”

“I was at a London day care last January and there was this book, The Penguin Who Wanted to Fly, and I was totally dumbfounded,” Carruthers said Monday in an interview at his lawyer Phillip Millar’s office.

“There were so many similarities that I took it to the lawyer. A picture says a thousand words. Well, this book says a whole novel. Scholastic is a great company and I really can’t figure out how they can reject someone three times and then publish a book like this.”

Allegations contained in the lawsuit have not been proven in court.

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Keep smiling… the world is doing fine, say American authors

Jesse Richards, author of The Secret Peace, believes that everything is getting better and better.

A series of new books argues that all the essential statistics show the world is making progress, materially and ethically.

By Paul Harris

A rash of optimistic books is being published in the US, as authors do their best to lift the gloom created by a news agenda dominated by world recession, wars, floods and famine.

The latest to appear is The Secret Peace by Jesse Richards, with its controversial theory on the modern human condition: the world is a nice place and getting better. When the Observer met Richards last week, he remained steadfast in his lonely insistence on a state of optimism when it comes to the human race’s progress. “It is easy to relate to a short-term disaster. It is harder to understand larger, long-term statistics. But they show that we really are better off, and getting better and better,” he said.

Richards’s book is full of ideas and numbers that sustain his thesis. Global life expectancy, for example, is now 68 years and rising. Mobile phones – once the preserve of wealthy yuppies – are now owned by 40% of Africans, connecting an entire continent to the rest of the world. Despite the world’s conflicts, the number of people killed in wars has been dropping for decades.

Only 70 or so years ago – the span of a single lifetime – the world was still dominated by huge colonial empires. Now independent countries have emerged, with more and more of them becoming democracies. Infant mortality rates are down and still falling. “We are progressing ethically, we are progressing morally and just becoming a better species,” Richards said.

Another example of a recently published book with an optimistic message is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, which examines global statistics on violence, both criminal and that which springs from warfare. The pattern is clear, Pinker argues. When it comes to war deaths, rape, murder and domestic violence, all the trend lines are headed downwards to a more peaceful future.

In another book, Winning The War On War, American University professor Joshua Goldstein argues that global conflicts are causing fewer and fewer deaths. A third recent book on war, The Human Security Report, shows average annual battle deaths have dropped from 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s to less than 1,000 now.

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How to write fiction: Clare Conville and Francis Bickmore on getting published

Getting your book published

Getting your book published is all about timing and tenacity. If you’re serious about transforming your novel into a commodity.

By Clare Conville and Francis Bickmore

In the words of Louise Welsh: “Writing is no job for grown-ups. We do it because not doing it makes us feel worse.” Before you put yourself through the commitment and challenges of trying to make money from writing, ask yourself why you write and whether your work is really for sale.

The old adage that everybody has a book in them may be true, but of the tens of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishers and agents every year, only a handful get picked up, and then an even smaller proportion get published. Is yours the sort of book you can imagine you or anyone you know picking up and buying? Or is it more for your own satisfaction, enjoyment, therapy? Publication is not necessarily the only worthwhile outcome.

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Sense and Sensibility

		Buy This On this day in 1811 Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published. Early reviewers found it to be “a genteel, well-written novel” as far as “domestic literature” went, and “just long enough to interest without fatiguing.” Virginia Woolf would take a different view: “Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.” ...read more

Jeanette Winterson: all about my mother

Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, July 1945. Photograph: Courtesy Jeanette Winterson/Jonathan Cape

When her mother burnt her treasured hidden store of paperbacks, Jeanette Winterson decided the time had come to start writing herself. She looks back on how her loveless upbringing led to her becoming a writer.

For most of my life I’ve been a bare-knuckle fighter. The one who wins is the one who hits the hardest. I was beaten as a child and I learned early never to cry. If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school.

We always walked. We had no car and no bus money. For me, the average was five miles a day: two miles for the round trip to school; three miles for the round trip to church. Church was every night except Thursdays.

I wrote about some of these things in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and when it was published, my mother sent me a furious note in her immaculate copperplate handwriting demanding a phone call.

We hadn’t seen each other for several years. I had left Oxford, was scraping together a life, and had written Oranges young – I was 25 when it was published. I went to a phone box – I had no phone. She went to a phone box – she had no phone. I dialled the Accrington code and number as instructed, and there she was – who needs Skype? I could see her through her voice, her form solidifying in front of me as she talked.

She was a big woman, tallish and weighing around 20 stone. Surgical stockings, flat sandals, a Crimplene dress and a nylon headscarf. She would have done her face powder (keep yourself nice), but not lipstick (fast and loose).

She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her. But that day she was borne up on the shoulders of her own outrage. She said, “It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book in a false name.”

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How to write fiction: Roderick Gordon on publishing your own novel

Illustration: Jirayu Koo

With digital printing and online publishing tools, it’s never been easier to publish your own novel. Roderick Gordon shares his story and offers advice to debut novelists.

So you’ve climbed that lonely mountain and written the book you always knew was in you. But what do you do next? Shove a few chapters and a synopsis in a manila envelope with a carefully composed letter and wing it off to potential publishers and agents? Then wait to hear until someone finally yanks it from the slush pile and all your hopes and dreams come crashing down as a rejection letter drops through your letter box?

Not for me that game. I’d had enough disappointment in my life at the hands of others when I was made redundant after nearly two decades of working in the City. I think I was probably still recovering from burnout when I hooked up with an old friend from university, Brian Williams. Together, we wrote the sort of book that had lit up our imaginations when we were young – full of baddies, adventure and new worlds. Looking back I must have been out of my mind. With two sons in private school, a full-time nanny and an eye-watering mortgage, I should have been trying to find another job, and quick. But I didn’t, because the book we’d called The Highfield Mole had become an obsession for both of us.

I talked to Brian about publishing it ourselves and he loved the idea. We’d have complete control over the process, from the editing to the design of the finished item. And the way we wanted it to look was vitally important to us. Our book wasn’t just a good story, it was going to be an art object.

But I had no idea what it was going to cost. I found numerous “vanity publishers” online: you pay them to print your book for you, selecting one of their picture postcard covers, and you end up with something barely fit for the bargain bins in one of those remaindered bookshops. Then there were the subsidised presses who could produce a more bespoke item, but Brian and I didn’t want our book to go out under one of their anodyne imprints. (This was 2004, so releasing an ebook wasn’t a consideration.)

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Ranking Sherlock Holmes Stories? Elementary

 

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, tapped to write The House of Silk, the first authorized Sherlock Holmes adventure since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s death 81 years ago, shares favorite Holmes stories with us.

I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was 16. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created not just a great detective but an entire world. Just think: fog, hansom cabs, gaslight, Stradivarius, liquid cocaine… and before you even get to Baker Street you know exactly where you are.

When I was asked to write The House of Silk, I reread the entire canon and promptly fell in love with them all over again, and if I have one hope for my book, it’s that it will introduce a new generation of readers to these wonderful stories. Here are my five favorites.

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Audible Launches Neil Gaiman Presents

Neil Gaiman Presents

By Adam Boretz

Audible yesterday announced the launch of Neil Gaiman Presents, a bespoke line of audiobooks personally selected by author and audiobook buff Neil Gaiman and produced on the Audiobook Creation Exchange.

Gaiman has chosen some of his favorite works of fiction and nonfiction and — keeping their specific attributes for audio in mind — personally supervised the casting for each audiobook to ensure that the author’s work is performed by that ideal narrator.

The full list of titles comprising the Neil Gaiman Presents label at launch is listed as follows:

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Philip K. Dick Estate Files Suit

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

 

Are those who made “The Adjustment Bureau,” based on Philip K. Dick’s story about fate and attempts to change it, trying to alter the past? Mr. Dick’s heirs say they are.In a lawsuit filed here Thursday, Mr. Dick’s estate charged Media Rights Capital and others involved with “The Adjustment Bureau,” which starred Matt Damon, with trying to avoid at least $500,000 in bonus payments by declaring Mr. Dick’s original story, “Adjustment Team,” to have been in the public domain. But, the suit says, they did so only after having repeatedly paid fees under purchase agreements for the story, and after tapping the Dick estate for promotional help.

Released by Universal Pictures in March, “The Adjustment Bureau” took in about $128 million at the worldwide box office, according to Boxofficemojo.com. The movie was openly based on a story written by Dick in 1953.

According to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court here, George Nolfi, the film’s writer and director, first took an option on the story in 2001, then repeatedly renewed it. A month after the movie was released, however, Media Rights Capital, which financed the film, told the estate it had discovered the story to be in the public domain, partly as a result of its publication in 1954 in a magazine called Orbit.

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