The Authors Guild has issued a statement that opposes the sale of Simon & Schuster to Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House. The sale, which was announced last week, would create a publishing giant that, the Guild notes, “would account for approximately 50% of all trade books published, creating a huge imbalance in the U.S. publishing industry.” The letter goes on to point out: “Less competition would make it even more difficult for agents and authors to negotiate for better deals, or for the Authors Guild to help secure changes to standard publishing contracts—because authors, even best-selling authors, wouldn’t have many options, making it harder to walk away.” Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp (the owner of HarperCollins), which also made a bid on Simon and Shuster, said in a statement: “There is clearly no market logic to a bid of that size—only anti-market logic. Bertelsmann is not just buying a book publisher, but buying market dominance as a book behemoth. Distributors, retailers, authors and readers would be paying for this proposed deal for a very long time to come.” At The Atlantic, Franklin Foer notes: “On paper, this merger is deplorable and should be blocked.” But, he notes, “the merger is not the gravest danger to the publishing business. The deal is transpiring in a larger context—and that context is Amazon.”
The New Yorker has published an excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s forthcoming novel, No One Is Talking About This.
Twelve Books has purchased Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Years of Tragedy, Scandal, and Triumph.
Brian Dillon reviews Peter Salmon’s new biography of Jacques Derrida, An Event, Perhaps. Of the literary theorist’s college days, Dillon notes: “He was a serial mucker-up of exams, and when he eventually got into the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris, he produced a thesis of which his mentor Louis Althusser said: ‘I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure.’ (Althusser passed it on to Michel Foucault, who declared it deserved either an A or an F.)”
Virtual book events: tomorrow (Tuesday) at 3 PM EST, Leslie Jamison (Make It Scream, Make It Burn) will talk with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Susan Sontag. You can RSVP here. On Thursday evening at 5:30 EST, Joshua Cohen, Lydia Millet, Tom McCarthy, and Dustin Illingworth will discuss William Gaddis’s novels The Recognitions and JR, which have just been reissued by New York Review Books. You can register to attend here.
