Salman Rushdie to write Showtime drama

Salman Rushdie is writing a script for U.S. TV network Showtime (Dexter, Nurse Jackie).

According to the Guardian, Rushdie’s Next People will “explore the U.S. at a time of rapid change, taking in politics, sex, religion, science and technology, with Rushdie writing the first script and executive producing the series with UK-based production company Working Title TV.”

This is Rushdie’s first TV writing gig, but he certainly isn’t the first novelist to produce original content for television. When developing his writing team for Baltimore cop drama The Wire, show creator David Simon — who often described the acclaimed television show as a novel — sought the assistance of authors like George Pelecanos and Richard Price.

Competing network HBO has also announced that husband-wife novelist duo Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys) and Ayelet Waidman (Bad Mother) are working together on a bizarre-sounding drama called Hogoblin about con men and magicians who battle Nazis during the Second World War.

Daily book biz round-up: Amazon rips off Kindle users; snogging Salman; and more

Today’s book news:

• Scandal! Amazon charging Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg titles
• Sex! British media personality sues Sunday Times for writing that she “snogged” Salman Rushdie
• Passion! Nabokov’s love letters to be published in English next year
• Madness! “Writers Needed” spam drives Twitter users crazy
• Rednecks! Glenn Beck book event to be simulcast in 537 American movie theatres

Random House lands globe-spanning deal for Salman Rushdie memoir

In a massive deal arranged by formerly blacklisted agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, Random House has acquired a new memoir by Salman Rushdie for publication in each of its global territories. The memoir, which touches on Rushdie’s years in hiding while under a fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini, will be published in 2012 by Knopf Canada, as well as by Random House imprints in more than a dozen territories in six continents.

According to a company press release, the deal, which includes print, audio, and e-book rights, is “one of the most far-reaching multi-national and multi-language book-publishing deals by one publisher.” The book will appear simultaneously in English in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, India, and South Africa; in German in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; and in Spanish in Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, and Uruguay.

Daily book biz round-up: book thrown at Obama; Kindle Singles; and more

Today’s book news:

• Paperback thrown at Obama
• Adam Gopnik wonders what literary prizes are for
• Amazon launches Kindle Singles (not to be confused with Kraft Singles)
• Salman Rushdie to write memoir about years in hiding
• Orange Prize organizers drop award for new writers
• Emma Donoghue’s Room bookshelf

Bookmarks: Amazon pays off kid, Auster and Rushdie support Polanski, and more…

• The new October writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto is former Eye Weekly arts editor and new poet,  Damien Rogers

• It’s happened to every author – you plan a reading and two people show up. Author Tao Lin shows us how to take it like a champ

• Short stories sent straight to your cell phone

• Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie have signed the petition to free Polanski.  Salon.com keeps perspective.

• Today’s Amazon irony alert: Amazon settles with student for breaking into his Kindle, and stealing his e-copy of 1984
  

• Cory Doctorow and Richard Nash discuss the future of the novel

• Dionne Brand is Toronto’s  new poet laureate

Empathy, wit, and rage towards Mr. Million Sales

To finish off Dan Brown Week – doesn’t have quite the ring of Shark Week does it? – here’s a roundup of some Lost Symbol brouhaha for your reading (dis?)pleasure.

CBC pop culture columnist Sarah Liss reads The Lost Symbol in a single twelve-hour sitting:

Sometimes, Dan Brown, loosely adapting Anthropology 101 texts for fiction just doesn’t work. Also, why do I get the sense you’ve never been tattooed – or met a gender-variant person? Also: “transgendering” is not a verb.

The National Post blog gives us a quote-fest of big names talking about Dan Brown’s success, including this one from Salman Rushdie:

“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code, a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”

Guardian blogger Jean Hannah Edelstein confesses that she doesn’t hate Dan Brown – she feels empathy:

I would thus be willing to wager all of the income I have ever made from writing fiction (nothing, but the sentiment is there) that sometimes, even as he wallows in his piles of money, Dan Brown wonders why he’ll never be able to write exactly as well as he wishes he could; why while being one of the world’s most financially successful writers, literary acclaim eludes him; why no one ever says, “actually, there’s a sentence on page 344 when Langdon says something rather profound and eloquent”. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we just cannot help the way that we write, and sometimes, it is just a bit crap.

Might our communal antipathy towards Brown in fact be a displacement of the energy that fuels the oft-unspoken but pervasive anxiety that the even attainment of longed-for commercial success is no guarantee that we are actually any good at writing? And yet would we keep writing at all if we didn’t still have a shred of hope, deep down, that it might be possible that we might be brilliant? We are all Dan Brown. Except for the staggering wealth.

Salman Rushdie: still banned, still a ladies’ man

Given that the Man Booker shortlist has just been announced, and talk of the Bookers often brings to mind author Salman Rushdie, it’d be interesting to know what he’s up to these days.

Well, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is, as columnist Nilanjana S. Roy notes in India’s Business Standard, Rushdie’s notorious 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is still banned in that country:

How practical is the lifting of the ban on the Verses today? The fear expressed by ministry officials in 1988 was not that the book itself was inflammatory — it was that passages from the book might be misused by other forces. You might want to ask the Indian state whether it has learned nothing of how to protect itself against these other forces in the last 20 years.

One aim of lifting the ban would be, eventually, to put The Satanic Verses back into stores, and let people make up their own minds on the book — through indifference, through their interest, through debate or dissent. It is possible that, if a legal action was successful and the ban was lifted, publishers and bookshops would still be wary of publishing or carrying the books.

But overturning the ban would be the first step to doing something we haven’t done so far, that is bigger than any one book or any one author — protecting our right as Indians to free speech. What happened 21 years ago pushed us in the direction of becoming more fearful, more regressive; and surely two decades is enough time for us to undo this old injustice.

It’s astonishing that this ban still stands. But lest you think Quillblog is all about political ideals and high-mindedness, we have to pass on that there’s some good news in Rushdie-land, according to Britain’s The Daily Mail:

When he is seen in public, a beautiful woman is normally never far away.

And Salman Rushdie’s appearance at the Venice Film Festival was no exception.

The controversial author, 61, was spotted at the opening of the film Francesca with Canadian-born former model Carolann Javicoli.

The pair cosied up around the pool of the exclusive Hotel De Bains at a party after the event and happily posed for pictures.

That would be the married Canadian-born former model Carolann Javicoli. Hey, just because you’ve been sentenced to death by a bellicose theocracy, doesn’t mean you can’t be mackin’.

Movies made from books suck: Salman Rushdie

“Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity.” That helpful declarative statement opens Salman Rushdie’s recent meditation on film adaptations of works of literature, which he finds generally poor. (He does admit to admiring John Huston’s adaptations of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Joyce’s “The Dead,” along with certain works by the Polish director Wojciech Has and the Indian director Satyajit Ray.)

Rushdie’s piece was apparently prompted by last week’s Oscar gala, where, you might remember, literary adaptations cleaned up. Rushdie claims that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is “not really an adaptation” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, but rather an original creation of screenwriter Eric Roth (the same man who was responsible for what in this Quillblogger’s estimation is an execrable adaptation of an execrable novel called Forrest Gump, which also did quite well at the Oscars).

Rushdie saves his greatest vitriol – and his best rhetoric – for a precision takedown of the overrated Slumdog Millionaire and Q&A, the uninspiring novel on which it is based:

The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup’s novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

Rushdie deserves applause for publicly saying what this Quillblogger has been hearing muttered in private for some time about a film that no one seems willing to admit isn’t very good. Herd instinct can be a terrible thing; thankfully Rushdie has never been one to go in for it.

Here’s hoping that the upcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s own Midnight’s Children doesn’t have him eating crow.

Canadian director tackles Midnight’s Children

The Indian-born Canadian film director Deepa Mehta is set to adapt Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece Midnight’s Children, which was twice selected as the best-ever Booker Prize winner.

The Guardian reports:

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.

Apparently, the two have been friends since meeting at the New York premiere of Water, the final movie in Mehta’s Elements trilogy, for which she is best known. The plan for the collaboration was hatched over dinner at Mehta’s Toronto home, when Rushdie was in town for a recent round of publicity.

As of yet, no studio has signed on to finance the famously unfilmable novel. But Mehta seems unfazed when it comes to tackling 650 pages of magic realist-steeped allegory.

“War and Peace has 1,000 pages and they made a movie of that,” she said, adding, “The great thing about film is that it can compress in a few images what takes 40 pages in a book to describe.”

Publisher of controversial Mohammed novel firebombed

As previously noted on Quillblog, publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina was canceled by Random House U.S. due to the possibility that it might offend Muslims and perhaps initiate attacks by those at the radical end of the faith. It was a dumb move – to pre-emptively censor oneself – but one dumb move always engenders another, and now the offices of the book’s U.K. publisher have been firebombed. And it gets worse.

From The Telegraph:

Hardline clerics said that further attacks would be “inevitable” if publication of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, goes ahead as planned next month.

Police moved in to arrest three men moments after a fire broke out at the London home and office of Martin Rynja in the early hours of Saturday.

The attack came days after Mr Rynja’s company, Gibson Square, bought the rights to the book by the American writer Sherry Jones, which has already been likened to Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Islam’s radical fringe has clearly decided once again  that the “dangerous Muslim” stereotype is better propagated from within. They’re like the drunken frat boys at a party who are determined to wreck it for everyone, or the former child stars who keep getting pulled over high on meth.