Judging A Book
Penguin and the Chinese connection and books on demand
The Penguin Group has become the first publisher to offer an international book deal to a Chinese fiction author by paying $100,000 for the rights to Jiang Rong's The Wolf Totem. Set in Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it is the story of a student's interaction with wolves on the Mongolian plains where has been sent in the lunatic re-education program of Chairman Mao. It has been the book of the summer in China, where it has sold over one million copies. Which is pretty depressing when one thinks of the size of the population in comparison to that of the UK, where two or three books a year approach the magical million mark. The debut work by Beijing professor, The Wolf Totem has been a bestseller for months. Penguin are celebrating their 70th anniversary at the moment – you may have seen the book collecting their "classic covers" being hyped earlier in the summer. We here mostly remember Penguin books from our childhood because they all seemed to be the same length. In recent times, editors seem to have been slacking off as books, like movies get longer and longer. Penguin have now teamed up with the Guardian to offer readers the chance to take the cover photographs for one of four of their books: Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White or Hunter S Thompson's Hells Angels. For those of you who can see past the obvious drink and drugs pictures for the latter to a genuinely original and appropriate shot, details are on the Guardian's website: www.guardian.co.uk.
Terror in Lunar Park
Village has a pretty good idea what Bret Easton Ellis would put on the cover of one of these books were he to enter the Penguin competition – himself. You only have to look behind the studied cool of the stencilled slip cover of his new book Lunar Park to find a moody, black and white photograph of a slightly gone-to-seed Ellis. The book is a post-modern horror story of a famous writer whose attempts at going clean and straight are literally haunted by a dead father, characters from his previous novels and a puppet bird. To hide the sub-Stephen King plot, Ellis has cleverly made the writer in the story himself and dares us to differentiate fact from fiction. One can only wonder what author Jay McInerney feels of this clever mixture of fact and fiction which prevents the book from flagging. In American Psycho, characters from McInerney's Story of My Life were tortured by the anti-hero Patrick Bateman. In Lunar Park McInerney himself appears, a drunk coke-sniffing wing man for the fictional Ellis. Like all his work it remains interesting but seems a victory for style over substance. Several papers recently covered John Sutherland's recent essay on what books people buy to look hip and cool. Sutherland, the Booker Prize chairman suggested Lunar Park as the epitome of current cool, if only for carrying rather than reading. There must be some truth in his thesis since the patriarch of Irish cool, John Kelly was to be seen reading it on a recent Cork to Dublin flight.
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Killed in his Cell
Keeping the column sequential this week, you may recall our coverage of the auction on eBay to have your name feature in one of 18 forthcoming books by authors like Grisham or Turow. Not all bids are completed but $25,000 was paid by a Floridian woman to have her brother's name used in Stephen King's new zombie thriller Cell. An all-American King hero is unlikely to be named after Mr Huizenga so expect him to be ritually dismembered by the zombies controlled by mobile phones when the book appears next year.
Books on Demand
Would you buy a book from a vending machine? A couple of Limerick men are betting yes as they patent their machines and launch them on Shannonside this week. They foresee a world of airport lounges, train platforms and hospital lobbies where specially designed machines will offer bestsellers, biographies and situation specific books when traditional book sales points are closed or unavailable. We're not convinced of the market but salute the ingenuity in adapting an already existing European idea and making it their own. Will the choice on offer (only 25 books are available per site) be enough? Do enough people leave home without something to read? Maybe the future will be a place where She's Just not Into You or Men are from Mars are offered from walls once selling only fake scents or condoms ribbed for your pleasure.