paper trail

Aug 15, 2013 @ 12:14:00 am

Amazon Publishing is launching a new biography series called Icons, which will “will focus on canonical figures in the culture, both historical and contemporary,” and will be “written by a range of celebrated authors.” They just announced the first titles in the series, and out of ten books—including ones on Lucian Freud, David Lynch, and Ernest Hemingway—only one, on Hannah Arendt, will be about a woman.

In an interview this week, the editor of V.C. Andrews’s incest thriller Flowers in the Attic, about a pair of twins trapped in an attic by their mother, let slip that the novel is based on a true story.

A cookbook by Andy Warhol called Wild Raspberries (after the Ingmar Bergman film) is going on sale at Christie’s auction house this week for $30,000. The book is for “those who don’t cook” and includes recipes for meals like Gefilte of Fighting Fish, Baked Hawaii, and Seared Roebuck.

Dave Eggers has a new novel coming out in October with Knopf, and he's only announcing it this week. The book is about a woman, Mae Holland, who works for "The Circle"—the title of the book, and also “the world’s most powerful Internet company.” The organization, “run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal e-mails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.” Of course, at this faux-Google, things aren’t as pleasant as they initially seem.

In other big book-release news, the Haruki Murakami novel that’s been selling a million copies a week in Japan, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage, will come out in English next year with Knopf.

Sergio de la Pava has won PEN’s Robert W. Bingham Prize for his debut novel, A Naked Singularity. De la Pava, a Manhattan public defender, self-published the 700-page novel several years ago, and it was re-released last year with the University of Chicago press. The book will be coming out in the UK this year, and de la Pava recently sold the film rights.