Bookmarks: Frank McCourt, Yann Martel, Tom Wolfe, Harry Potter, and more

Some book-related links:

• Frank McCourt dies at 78.
• Yann Martel’s new novel gets a U.S. deal.
• Tom Wolfe says, “To the moon, America, to the moon…”
• Harry Potter books “very Talmudic.”
• What’s wrong with the Hugo shortlist?
• Leave Hemmingway aloooooone!!!
• Five laws of the novelist.

Harry Potter and the … Adventures of Willy the Wizard?

When you’re richer than the Queen, you’re bound to attract some money-hunting crazies. J.K. Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury  are rejecting “unfounded, unsubstantiated, and untrue” plagiarism claims from the estate of author Adrian Jacobs, which has filed a lawsuit accusing Rowling of borrowing ideas for her Harry Potter series.

The lawsuit claims that the fourth novel in Rowling’s series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) copied elements from Jacobs’ 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard – No. 1 Livid Land. According to the suit, some of these similar elements include a wizard competition and wizards using trains as a mode of transportation. From the CBC:

“Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest, which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures,” the suit says.

In its defense, Bloomsbury described Jacobs’ book as “a very insubstantial booklet running 36 pages, which had a very limited distribution. The central character of Willy The Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school.” A statement released yesterday also added that Rowling “had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy The Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series.”

Tintin, The Hobbit and Goosebumps: coming soon to a theatre near you: UPDATED

The imminent end of the Harry Potter film franchise – the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II is scheduled for release in 2011 – has Hollywood types scurrying to secure other family friendly literary properties to fill the looming void . Steven Spielberg is working on a film version of the popular Tintin books, and Peter Jackson Guillermo del Toro is directing an adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Other YA fare currently on Hollywood’s radar include R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series of ’tween horror stories and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

The Times reports:

All the movie studios are hunting for existing properties with tested concepts — at least as books — that can be turned into films, though none exist on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” with its more than 400 million copies in print and vast cultural footprint.

But the films must hit a sweet spot that is deceptively difficult to find: They can’t skew too young or too old. And the marketing must clearly tell parents what to expect, studio executives say.

That elusive crossover appeal is what the studios most crave according to Alan Horn of Warner Bros., also quoted in the Times article: “There’s an attraction to having global interest and appeal to as many quadrants as possible, male and female, young and old.”

Quillblog isn’t sure which is more distressing: the ongoing infantalization of our culture, or the fact that, as audiences, we’re now being slotted into “quadrants.”

There’s no word yet about an adaptation of One True Bear, which might make for an interesting property should Eli Roth ever decide to branch out into children’s movies.

UPDATE: Quillblog’s nerd-o-meter apparently failed with the above post. It has been pointed out that Guillermo del Toro is directing the film version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson is producing. Quillblog regrets the error.

Arrr! J.K. Rowling and John Grisham fall victim to pirates

Two of the planet’s bestselling authors, J.K. “I’ll kick Stephenie Meyer’s ass” Rowling and John Grisham, are among several authors whose books have apparently been illegally uploaded to a San Francisco-based website that promotes itself as “YouTube for books.” Scribd.com was launched by a couple of twentysomething Harvard students, and has since become an attraction for a reported 55 million visitors each month. While the site boasts a number of legal uses – the Obama campaign used it to upload policy material and thereby sidestep media filters – it now looks to have succumbed to the “Napster effect,” whereby copyrighted works are uploaded without permission and distributed for free.

An article in The Times online reports:

A search of Scribd by The Times yesterday found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s most recent novel World Without End among many bestselling titles, raising fears that the piracy affecting the music industry may have spread to books.

When presented with a list of links to various Harry Potter books, Neil Blair, J. K. Rowling’s lawyer at the Christopher Little literary agency, said that Scribd did not have permission “and what you have identified are infringing listings which we were aware of and actioning”.

The online culture of disseminating information online for free (Quillblog finds it interesting that the word “crib” appears in Scribd’s name) has also been taken on recently by The Globe and Mail‘s Peter Scowen. Scowen writes that the culture of “free” threatens the traditional means by which authors and other content creators earn their living, which seems irrefutable, but it’s open to debate as to whether the solution is to rage against the machine or try to adapt traditional methods of doing business to the new reality.

Scowen’s specific target is the upcoming Book Summit, “Giving It Away: Books, Business, and the Culture of Free.” The conference, sponsored by Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council, is an opportunity for publishers, writers, booksellers, and other interested parties to “learn about the opportunities, the pitfalls, the marketing techniques, the delivery methods, the creators, the readers” that can be tapped by properly utilizing the “culture of free.” The cost of the summit is $145.

Take that, Stephenie Meyer!

It may not star the young wizard from Hogwarts, but J.K. Rowling’s latest book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, has become the fastest-selling title of 2008. According to Reuters (by way of the National Post):

Since it was released on December 4, The Tales of Beedle the Bard has also become the top selling book of 2008 on both sides of the Atlantic, topping the USA Today and Daily Telegraph charts and raising 4.2 million pounds ($6.5 million) for charity.

Proceeds from sales of the book, which has a global print run of eight million copies, will go to the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG), a charity for vulnerable children in Eastern Europe co-founded by Rowling.

The book does have a Potter connection, having been mentioned briefly in the series finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Rowling is now the world’s richest author, beating out Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and Conrad Black.

The search for the next J.K. Rowling

In The Independent, Nicholas Tucker writes that the search is on for a J.K Rowling for the new generation.

He says currently published children’s writers won’t hit the mark (not even Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series, which he says “is too deliberately skewed towards female readers to count as truly universal bestsellers in the way the Harry Potter stories were”), since they have already established themselves in a niche within the kids’ books genre, and says that someone new will have to fulfill the changing demands of kid lit in a way that is almost universally appealing to readers.

In her time Enid Blyton managed this by inventing heroic child characters who always get everything right just when in real life the balance at home and school was moving from adult domination towards children gaining more power. Roald Dahl, another huge commercial success, pushed this tendency further forward into overt fantasy, adding an extra measure of mischievous subversion. Rowling herself continued in this vein – has there ever been a parental couple more worthy of disrespect than Harry’s foster parents Mr and Mrs Dursley? She also located her endlessly resourceful child hero in fantasy land. The chances are that the next best-selling children’s author will do the same thing.

Court ruling doesn’t faze author of Harry Potter encyclopedia

You’ve got to hand it to Steven Vander Ark: the guy’s got chutzpah. In September, a Manhattan judge ruled against Vander Ark in a lawsuit launched by mega-selling author J.K. Rowling over a proposed Harry Potter encyclopedia, which Vander Ark was set to publish. The encyclopedia was a print version of the author’s … er … encyclopedic fan website. The judge in the case ruled that publication of the book would do irreparable harm to Rowling as a writer (read: it might cost her money in lost earnings). The book was permanently blocked from publication, and the judge awarded Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment $6,750 in statutory damages, which is probably the amount that Rowling lays down for lunch these days.

It appears, however, that Vander Ark is uncowed. Notwithstanding the September court ruling, the CBC is now reporting that plans to publish the encylcopedia, albeit in a modified form, are going ahead. The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials will appear on January 12, 2009. The book is to be published by RDR Books.

“We learned a lot at the trial about what was acceptable, what would follow the fair use guidelines,” said the 50-year-old Vander Ark, a former school librarian.

“That was not clear before. There was no law on the books that made it clear what was acceptable and what wasn’t,” he added, saying he spent five or six months revising his book – originally slated for release in November 2007.

“Coming out of the trial, I had a much better idea of what should go into the book.”

One can safely assume that Vander Ark is not referring to stills of Daniel Radcliffe’s full-frontal nudity in the recent Broadway production of Equus – this probably stretches the definition of “related materials” – but the only indication of what the revised volume might contain comes from RDR publisher Roger Rapoport, who is quoted  as saying the new version features “a lot more critical commentary, which means more analysis.”

No word yet as to whether Rowling, who once upon a time praised Vander Ark’s site for its comprehensiveness, will take further legal action, or whether she’ll just go ahead and unleash the Dementors on his ass.

Bookmarks: J.K. Rowling’s latest tome

• Beedlemania: J.K. Rowling’s first post-Potter title hits stores. (The Guardian’s Alison Flood live blogs it here)
• Sam Leith, the venerable literary editor at The Telegraph, is informed of his “redundancy”
• Just add water? Viking unleashes the first instant paperback
• An appreciation of Jan Tschichold, the designer behind the iconic Penguin paperback
• The library of Oscar Wilde
• Luxury in an era of belt-tightening: the $75 book

Depressed economy not all bad news for publishers

The economic turmoil in global financial markets is making a lot of folks depressed (ha!), but it apparently hasn’t stopped one mega-publisher from handing out generous bonuses to staff. The same week that Houghton Mifflin announced it was temporarily suspending new manuscript acquisitions, Hachette Book Group revealed its holiday munificence. As Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times:

As first reported by Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, Hachette is giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee in the company, in addition to the regular bonuses for which staff members are eligible.

Hachette, which recently opened a Canadian office, can afford to throw a little money around. Its Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing units publish superstar authors James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series has begun to outsell even J.K. Rowling.

Houghton Mifflin, on the other hand, publishes writers like Philip Roth and Günter Grass. It can claim literary superiority, but clearly doesn’t have the same clout at the cash register. In times of economic hardship, teen vampires are a better draw than Pulitzer Prize-winners.

J.K Rowling wins lawsuit; no HP Lexicon to be published

Harry Potter really is the boy who lived – on and on, in lawsuits pitting J.K. Rowling against a now former fan.

In the latest Rowling-related news, a federal judge blocked publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, citing that it would cause Rowling “irreparable injury” as a writer.

Steven Vander Ark, who operates the Harry Potter Lexicon website, planned to publish the reference guide through Michigan publishing house RDR Books. In 2007, Rowling sued RDR to halt publication of the Lexicon through Vander Ark’s website. Rowling and her publisher were awarded $6,750 in statutory damages.

While the HP Lexicon may be blocked, Vander Ark is already planning his next project — a memoir entitled In Search of Harry Potter, which will chronicle his travels to locations similar to those described in Rowling’s novels. No word on whether he will travel via Floo network or Nimbus 2000.