Judith Regan sues News Corp.

Judith Regan, former president of HarperCollins’ ReganBooks division who was fired last year following her controversial plan to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, is suing HarperCollins’ parent company, News Corp., for $100 million for defamation.

Bloomberg Press reports that Regan’s complaint, filed yesterday, alleges that News Corp. made her a scapegoat for the O.J. Simpson fiasco, fired her without cause, and fabricated stories to discredit her.

Murdoch personally approved the Simpson book and suggested paying $1 million for the project, Regan claims in her suit. When the controversy erupted over the project, the defendants planted false stories in the press to discredit her, Regan said, including one allegation that she was fired because she made anti-Semitic comments and had claimed to be the victim of a “Jewish cabal” in the book industry.

Regan also claims that News Corp. “tried to destroy her reputation because she has information about former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik that would be harmful to ex-New York Mayor Giuliani and his presidential campaign.”

While not specifying what information she has about Kerik, who she claims had a “personal relationship” with her, Regan said that an unidentified News Corp. executive told her to withhold information and documents from investigators in their probe of the former police commissioner.

Kerik, who was appointed to the post by then-New York City Mayor Giuliani, was indicted Nov. 9 by a federal grand jury on charges of tax evasion, conspiracy and lying to the White House. He pleaded guilty last year to state charges that he accepted thousands of dollars in gifts while in office.

Kerik turned down a 2004 offer by President George W. Bush to run the Homeland Security Department, a post Giuliani recommended him for, after it was disclosed that Kerik failed to pay taxes for a nanny that worked for him.

It will be up to the court to determine what the truth is and if there are some innocent victims here, but the phrase ‘nest of vipers’ keeps coming to mind. Quillblog does not envy the judge in this case.

Kindersley school reverses ban on book

According to a release from Sono Nis Press, author Nikki Tate was relieved to learn that Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, which had previously banned her children’s book Trouble on Tarragon Island, has reversed its decision and “un-banned” it after a new school principal re-evaluated the content.

Sono Nis told Q&Q Omni this summer that the book had been deemed a problem because it contains a scene of bullying and because the bullying includes words that may be offensive to women.

Tate’s book, the third in her Tarragon Island series about protagonist Heather Blake, depicts a battle in Blake’s B.C. community over clear-cut logging. Blake’s grandmother joins an anti-logging activist group, and poses naked with them for a calendar, embarrassing her granddaughter. At the beginning of the book’s first chapter, several boys in Blake’s school taunt her about her grandmother’s breasts, calling them “bazoongas” and cupping melon-shaped areas around their chests.

The scene, Tate told Q&Q Omni, “sets up the central conflict of the book, which is asking the question, ‘when you step outside the rules of society … what is the impact on your community and on your family?’” Tate said the description shows the pain experienced by Heather as a result of the bullying. “It’s pretty obvious these kids aren’t being held up as an example of fine behaviour,” she said.

Elizabeth School administrators now seem to have come around to seeing it that way too.

Trouble on Tarragon Island has been nominated for a Diamond Willow Award in Saskatchewan, and Tate is participating in a TD Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in the province this month. As a part of the tour, she had planned to give away copies of her book to elementary students in Kindersley, and she says she will still go ahead with the give-away now that the ban has been reversed. She will sign copies of the book and chat with students at an informal event at the Kindersley Mall on Nov. 19.

Have your say: day jobs for authors

Q&Q is doing some informal research on the best day jobs for authors. What jobs provide the most flexible schedules to accommodate creative writing? What jobs provide the best raw material or inspiration for fiction?

So, this is a call-out to authors: please comment and tell us about your best day job ever, then stay tuned for our report.

The perils of politicians publishing poetry

The Guardian‘s Stuart Jeffries has nothing good to say about British MP Boris Johnson’s debut book of poetry The Perils of the Pushy Parents (HarperCollins), but in the book’s defence, it could be said that it at least inspired a thoroughly entertaining review.

This year, an estimated 170,000 books will be published and, if I suggest that this is only the 169,999th least worth reading, that is only because I am hedging my bets. A worse book might appear this year. It is a possibility.

The pushy parents in question are the Albacores, who rail against their children’s desire to watch television.

When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: “He’d zap the programme off and holler/ ‘Go and read some Emile Zola.’”

As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition – just see if it isn’t). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes.

In an attempt to destroy the television and video-game console, the parents accidentally brain each other, and Jeffries offers this example of Johnson’s verse:

Behold them, reader, and despair:
their lolling eyes, their glassy stare,
this formerly dynamic pair
In a double-seat wheelchair.

Despair is the word. But enough about me. There is worse to come. The runaway wheelchair plunges over a cliff (as it will). But Molly and Jim (along with a taxi driver called Reg, who will be played by Ray Winstone – Johnson and his family will play the other leading roles) save their parents by forming a dangling human chain over the cliff – something they learned from watching Hollywood movies On The Telly.

There’s more to enjoy in Jeffries’ full review, but here’s one last parting shot:

Some charge that Johnson (alleged MP, purported journo, father of four) spreads himself too thinly. That is not the problem. He spreads himself too thickly, larding his unworthy crust with things that make it even more indigestible. By which I mean, he not only writes duff verse, he illustrates it too with inept drawings.

How much is that author in the window?

One advantage of being a musician-turned-author is that when you launch your book, you can turn back into a musician to gather and entertain a crowd. That’s what Dave Bidini will be doing in the front window of Pages Books & Magazines in Toronto on Saturday.

The performance/launch is particularly apt for Bidini’s new book Around the World in 57 Gigs (McClelland & Stewart), which is an account of his post-Rheostatics-breakup solo tour that took him as far as England, Finland, Russia, China, Sierra Leone, and Ghana.

The performance will be accompanied by a marathon reading of the entire book. No word on whether Bidini or any of the band will be dressed as elves to compete with Christmas window displays.

The Scotiabank Giller Light bash

CanLit fans and publishing types who are not attending the Scotiabank Giller Prize ceremony will have two other opportunities to get together, eat, drink, and merrily debate which book should win. The Scotiabank Giller Light bash – the ceremony’s younger and less formally dressed sister – will again be thrown in both Toronto and Winnipeg this year.

Attendees can watch the official ceremony on the big screen. The event in Winnipeg is put on by McNally Robinson Booksellers at the Grant Park store and includes a dinner. In Toronto, singer Kyle Riabko will be entertaining at Steam Whistle Brewing’s Roundhouse. Proceeds from the $25 tickets go to support the cross-country literacy programs of Frontier College.

Sins of omission

One of Slate‘s features for its fall fiction week is a reprise of a “gravest literary omissions” survey it conducted a few years ago – critics’ confessions of the most important books they had never read. This year, however, contemporary writers, including Margaret Atwood, were surveyed. Entertaining reading that should make you feel better about your own list of missed books…

From Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!:

I haven’t read the Bible, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu, or any of the Greek tragedies, though I was a palace guard in a college production of Oedipus, and my father used to call me Oedipus when I was a small boy and he witnessed me kissing my mother. He also would cry out “Oedipus!” when he beckoned me to the dinner table. At the time, I didn’t know who Oedipus was and assumed that my father’s nickname for me was Yiddish for “good boy,” since the occasional Yiddish word, such as tsures (misfortune), was often heard in my household.

From Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway:

Of course, I never got through Finnegans Wake—that’s the one everyone feels ready to confess to—but what’s my excuse when it comes to Paradise Lost? Parade’s End? The Waves? Tristram Shandy? Beloved? Then there are whole stretches of work by writers whom I claim to hugely admire—Henry James, Jane Austen, Hart Crane—whose work I keep peering over at and intending to read. And what about those writers of whose work I’ve read almost nothing? Jean Rhys? John Donne? Gertrude Stein? Orhan Pamuk? And then there are all of the books that haven’t even come to mind yet. This is depressing. I’m going back to bed.

The Pull of Pullman

English writer Philip Pullman kicked off the Particles of Narrative children’s literature symposium on Friday by speaking to an audience of about 400 in the University of Toronto’s Earth Sciences auditorium. The audience was a lively cross-section of all ages, including children’s authors, teachers, librarians, university students and professors, Trinity alumni, and a few keen teens. After his talk on the symposium’s theme of examining the elemental particles of story, Pullman patiently signed books for a long line of fans that stretched out of the auditorium and seemed to include half the audience.

The next day, about 175 people gathered in the George Ignatieff Theatre to hear six speakers, among them Kenneth Oppel, Sarah Ellis, Tim Wynne-Jones, and American author Megan Whalen Turner. At the day’s end, Pullman joined the six on a panel that took thoughtful questions from both the audience and from one another. In response to a question from an audience member, Pullman said he’d always thought Lord of the Rings was “trivial” because “no one changes,” but that C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series was, on the other hand, a “serious work” because “it grapples with moral issues” but in a narrow Christian way that he dislikes intensely – a view that drew applause from some in the crowd.

U of T children’s literature professor and frequent Q&Q reviewer Deirdre Baker, herself the author of the YA novel Becca at Sea, organized the conference.

Jailhouse library shelved

Joe Fiorito writes in The Toronto Star about a maddening situation at Toronto’s Don Jail. For years, Darlene Soares volunteered her time to work as a librarian at the jail – soliciting donations of books, amassing more than 2,000, and encouraging the inmates to read.

Given that many of the men in the slammer are illiterate, anything that can be done to improve their reading skills while they are captive is a good thing.

Or so you’d think.

The people who run the jail took Darlene’s room away from her a while ago; she found this out, not from jail officials, but from a maintenance man who told her she would have to move the prison library into a glorified broom closet, perhaps 6 metres long and a mere 100 centimetres wide. Darlene is claustrophobic.

Officials eventually said they wanted to use the library room to store protective vests.

Guards tried to intervene; they offered a variety of alternatives, and asked to be present when the issue was discussed in management meetings. They were ignored.

Darlene said there is an empty room built for the use of prison psychologists; it was never used and remains unused.

She quit.

“It was so disrespectful.”

She sent some of the books to shelters. The remainder have been dumped in the broom closet. A few books still circulate among the men. Darlene said, “I’ve cried oceans. I’ll never volunteer again.”

Fiorito writes that no one at the jail was available to comment. And as if the fact that the jail shut down the library isn’t outrageous enough, the fact that the room for the prison psychologists is never used, tells you a lot about what’s wrong with the correctional system. Why do we spend so much money locking people up and so little helping them rehabilitate?

Finance minister makes a pricing example of Harry Potter

The publishing industry is once again the unhappy poster child for the difference between U.S. and Canadian retail prices, but this time the complaint is coming not from consumers or booksellers but from federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. The Globe and Mail reports that the minister used a copy of Hary Potter and the Deathly Hallows as a prop at a news conference on Tuesday. Flaherty says he paid 20% more at an Ottawa store than the price listed at a Washington D.C. store he visited last weekend.

The Potter prop flap capped a campaign by Mr. Flaherty to insert himself into the national debate about whether retailers are doing enough to cut prices now that the loonie is trading above par with the U.S. dollar.

Although he has sworn off any threat of government action, such as price controls, Mr. Flaherty met with retailers yesterday in hopes of persuading them to voluntarily cut prices.

Standing against a backdrop that proclaimed he was “Standing Up for Consumers,” he said prices are coming down, but not fast enough, and warned that Canadians will cross-border shop if domestic prices don’t reflect the stronger purchasing power of the loonie.

“There should not be large discrepancies between similar products just because they are sold on different sides of the border,” he said.

Retailers said they think they succeeded in convincing Mr. Flaherty that prices may not drop to the exact same level as U.S. prices because of higher costs faced in Canada.

The Globe story also pointed out that if Flaherty had shopped around he could have bought the book at Ottawa bookstore Collected Works, which is currently selling books at the U.S. sticker price. Costco and Amazon.ca’s prices (heavily discounted from the list) were even cheaper than the price in the Washington store.

The Montreal Gazette has also run a story on the issue which quoted Penguin Canada’s Yvonne Hunter about efforts by publishers to reduce prices, as well as Edmonton bookseller Steve Budnarchuk, representing the booksellers’ perspective. “Like Penguin, Budnarchuk said he and other retailers ‘are taking losses to show customers we’re not insensitive to them.’”

For more on the issue from Q&Q Omni, click here.