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 be this week's most rousing topic at the water cooler? 1) Gee, I miss Bill Bradley. 2) Will Ralph Nader be Read MoreWhen fans of Harry Potter think back to the year 2000, they might remember it as the year of the big secret. For that was the year the media world serendipitously cast the fourth installment of the seven-part series as the Manhattan Project of the book publishing world.
But, according to insiders, the secrecy was less Read MoreOn 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. It was the kind of peaceful, comfortable night that has been falling over Manhattan for quite some time now.
Suddenly, the conversational hum Read MoreIf 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 Simon & Schuster Trade Division editor-in-chief Michael Korda requesting the removal of certain passages about his Read More
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 & Giroux president and founder Roger Straus has written to Norton editor in chief Starling Lawrence on Ms. Sontag's behalf, to express concern Read MoreOn 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 Genius . I was intrigued. I knew Mr. Eggers was 29, well connected and edited a quirky literary magazine, called Read More
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 could write a disaster book. Just find a tragedy, round up a cast of surviving characters, nab Read More
"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 Zerilli-Marimò, on West 12th Street, for an "espresso talk." The subject was her new novel, Lo's Diary , a Read MoreIf 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 $16.4 billion German-based behemoth, is feeling the strain. They may know how to partner up with everyone from venture capitalists to Web geeks Read More
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 after it was revealed a few days earlier that J.H. Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son: George W. Read More
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 cashew. Mr. Mehta, the editor in chief and president of Alfred A. Knopf Inc., and president Read More
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 new media superpower, spawned by Viacom Inc. and the CBS Corporation and wriggling into the Read More
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 known for geographic advances-into England, Spain and Japan-and now it looks like he might be in for a windfall of cultural currency.
At the end of Read MoreIt 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 way. "Golf takes all your time but gives you little back except a sunburn and sore feet," said the Read More
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 down. Mr. Bradley was in Seattle for the Unity '99 Journalism Conference, a gathering of 6,000 black, Hispanic, Asian and Native Read More
