Sonny Mehta, Uneasy King of Knopf
Ten weeks out of an intensive care unit, Sonny Mehta could be found in Bemel-mans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, hunting for cashews in a silver bowl. He asked for a glass of Côtes du Rhône and popped a...
View ArticleSt. Martin’s Loses Editor Over Bush Book Flap
By sunrise on Oct. 26, the losses were already steep for St. Martin's Press and its Thomas Dunne Books imprint. By then, the house had lost 90,000 books' worth of sunk costs and a good deal of face...
View ArticleRandom House Homeless! Office Space Vanishes!
If you were wondering what might send the world's third-largest media conglomerate into a swivet, look out the window: There's a 7 percent vacancy rate in midtown Manhattan, and Bertelsmann A.G., the...
View ArticleLolita’s Newest Creator Tries To Pluck Her From the Porn Heap
"My Lolita does not speak in Nabokov's language," said Pia Pera. It was 4 P.M. on a Friday, about the time one's blood sugar faints away, and Ms. Pera was at New York University's Casa Italiana...
View ArticleTimes Editor’s Flashy Book Proposal Lands $850,000 Deal
If you want to be a millionaire, you could sit down with Regis Philbin and sweat it out under weird lights while a studio audience weighs in on whether a morel belongs to the mushroom family. Or you...
View ArticleI Made Dave Eggers Angry
On Feb. 17, I ventured out to Snooky's Restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to see about Dave Eggers. For weeks, the press had been tracking Mr. Eggers and his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering...
View ArticleSusan Sontag Gets Jumpy; Pat Conroy Gets Left Out
In case it's unclear, Susan Sontag really is against interpretation. Of her own life, that is. She has risen in protest again, this time of W.W. Norton's unauthorized biography of her. Farrar, Straus...
View ArticleRenata Adler’s Newest Enemy; Pass the Popcorn and Classics
If John J. Sirica Jr. has his way, a little bit of Renata Adler's memoir Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker might be gone sometime soon. On Valentine's Day, the son of the late Watergate judge faxed...
View ArticleSalman Rushdie’s 1001 Manhattan Nights
On a recent Sunday evening at Babbo restaurant, a literary agent regarded a plate of beef-cheek ravioli. Waiters crisscrossed the room with orders of pasta. The restaurant was full. The city was quiet....
View ArticleBuy This Book! Buy the Store! Shopping Will Set You Free
An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America , by Gary Cross. Columbia University Press, 320 pages, $27.50. So here we are in the middle of a campaign race, and what is likely to...
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Writer Lost on Mt. Rainier Driven by Sense of Mission
Democratic Presidential hopeful Bill Bradley was one of the last people to see Joe Wood before the 34-year-old New York-based writer and book editor went up Mount Rainier on July 8 and didn’t come...
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In a Smelly Summer, Our Team of Noses Sniffs Up the City
The second day of August brought a blue sky and a fine breeze to the southern edge of Central Park, and with it the pedestrians came. Some admired freshly penned likenesses by street artists. Others...
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Updike on Golf, Germans, Tina; Brooks Hansen Visits Napoleon
It was a Friday, so John Updike of Beverly Farms, Mass., had passed the day on the greens at the Myopia Hunt Club in nearby South Hamilton where the Herbert Corey Leeds Memorial Tournament was under...
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Andrew Wylie’s China Policy; How to Get a Great Biography
Literary agent Andrew Wylie, he of the highbrow client list, fiercely practices the art of the advance. Regularly, Mr. Wylie wins six-digit advances for non-best-selling literary authors. But he’s also...
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Simon & Schuster Mulls Future in Viacom-CBS Media Kingdom
It’s not every day that the publisher of All the President’s Men takes a back seat to a Great America theme park, but Sept. 7 was such a day for Simon & Schuster. That was when New Yorkers found a...
View ArticleBarnes & Noble Furtively Slips Between the Covers
Over the next month or so, something unprecedented will happen in the publishing world. A book published by Barnes & Noble Inc., the restless giant of book retailing, will be reviewed in the...
View ArticleTheroux Vulgar Over Vidia ; Knopf, House of Minot?
Would you pay $150 for what might very well be an original Paul Theroux handwriting scrawl of the phrase “Fuck you”? The fact that a Massachusetts rare book dealer just sold the above curiosity-bundled...
View ArticleRecognizing Gaddis Uptown; Writer Reviews Own Book
If the memorial tribute to William Gaddis held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on May 6 was going to be anything like the writer’s books, it would have been long and somewhat daunting....
View ArticleFederal Antitrust Official Has Some Nice Bertelsmann Birthday Cake
Judging by the turnout for his 46th-birthday party, Bertelsmann A.G.’s chief executive, Thomas Middelhoff, has successfully tunneled his way into America’s media landscape. What a strange, brief trip...
View ArticleSnitcher in the Rye: Salinger’s Daughter to Publish a Memoir
Its arrival has been as secretive as that time Holden hid in Phoebe’s closet. In the fall of 2000, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., plans to publish a memoir by J.D. Salinger’s...
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