Spies at the Library
Published September 22nd, 2010 | 
Just like I tend to crave certain foods at various times, I find I also have special craving for different kinds of literature at semi-regular intervals. For much of the last two months I’ve been going back to reading 19th century English novels (Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Martin Chuzzlewit, etc.). Today, however, I woke up with an entirely different craving: Spy fiction. Maybe it’s all the spy-type stuff dominating the new TV season, but I just have to read some spy stories. Yes, that’s right, I’m planning a trip to the library today to see if I can grab up a few spy novel. Intrigue, spy gear, assassination plots — what’s not to love about that? I wonder if they have any Matt Helm in the stacks?
John Grisham Flip-Flops on EBooks
Published March 16th, 2010 | John Grisham — bestselling author of legal thrillers.
John Grisham — household name.
John Grisham — hater of eBooks, who lamented in the past that eBooks would eventually kill his golden goose. On this, he has as much credibility as a vitamin salesman peddling the “best joint supplements” to the elderly.
Well, now Grisham has changed his tune somewhat with news that his publisher, Knopf-Doubleday, a division of Random House, is making his entire library of novels available as eBooks. Saying, “I’m probably going to be all right, but the aspiring writers are going to have a very hard time getting published.”
Yeah, John, guess what? It was already hard for aspiring writers to get published by the big mainstream publishers before the arrival of eBooks. The only difference now is that aspiring writers have an alternative to traditional publishing.
But, I do appreciate how far you’ve come in such a short time. Allowing your older books to be released in eBook formats is mighty big of you considering that just a year ago, you thought is would be the beginning of armageddon for the eBook market to grow. So, kudos to you, John Grisham. Maybe you can write a new thriller about your ordeal. Call it, The Publisher.
J.D. Salinger Dead at 91
Published January 29th, 2010 | 
One of the last great literary heavyweights of the last century, died the other day, of natural causes. J. D. Salinger, the notoriously reclusive literary legend who hadn’t published anything since 1965 and had rarely been seen since the 70’s passed away at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire at the ripe old age of 91. Although, Salinger had published a few stories in the 1940’s and had struck-up a friendship with Ernest Hemingway while serving in the Second World War, it wasn’t until the publication of his most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, that Salinger earned his place in American literature.
Salinger began writing short stories while in high school, and published a number of stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker. After the publication of Catcher, Salinger became at once a popular, influential and controversial writer. Since it’s publication, the famous novel has sold around 65 million copies, averaging 250000 copies per year. Salinger followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Although many film producers pursued the possibility of translating Catcher in the Rye for the big screen, Salinger refused to allow it due to an early bad experience with a screen adaptation of one of his short stories. Salinger was also famous for pursuing legal action to block unauthorized adaptations and derivative works base on his writing.
