Greg Mortenson

Mortenson (pictured, via) wrote about a 1993 visit to the village of Korphe in his memoir, Three Cups of Tea. In the email, Darsney wrote that during the 1993 climb up K2 mountain Mortenson had gotten lost but returned half-a-day later. He theorizes that it’s plausible Mortenson may have been in Korphe during that time.

Here’s an excerpt from Darsney’s email: “If Jon Krakauer and some of Greg’s detractors had taken the time to have three or more cups of tea with Greg and others—instead of one cup of tea with a select few who would discredit him—they would have found some minor problems and transgressions. But to the extent to call it all ‘lies’ and ‘fraud’? No way. They would have come to very different conclusions. It takes a lot longer than one journalistic research cycle to have three cups of tea with someone.”

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The report examined three particular issues: (1) Did Mortenson first visit the village of Korphe after a mountain climbing trip as he wrote in his memoir, Three Cups of Tea? (2) Was Mortenson captured by the Taliban as he alleged in his follow-up Stones into Schools? (3) Is the CAI carrying out its charitable mission with the money it collects from philanthropists and donors? According to several sources who were interviewed, the answer is “no” to all three questions.

Former CAI donor Jon Krakauer called Mortenson’s first meeting with Korphe villages “a beautiful story” and “a lie.” Mansur Khan Mahsud denied that the Taliban kidnapped the author.  Mahsud appears in a photograph from the alleged kidnapping, but works as the research director of a respected Islamabad think tank.

continued…

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Marable served as professor of history and political science at Columbia University. According to The Root, he had been working on the biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention for a decade. Penguin Group (USA) released it today and currently holds the #4 spot on Amazon’s biography & memoirs’ bestsellers list.

His widow, Leith Mullings Marable, shared these thoughts: “I think he would want to be remembered for having contributed to the black freedom struggle. He would want to be remembered for being both a scholar and an activist and as someone who saw the two as not being separated. He believed that both [callings] went together and enhanced each other.”

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Landis served as an editor at Hyperion Books/Voice for almost five years. Prior to this, she held positions in editorial and marketing at Penguin Group (USA).

At Hyperion Books/Voice, Landis edited several novels including The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil. Some of the memoirs she has edited include Perfection by Julie Metzmoir and Just Who Will You Be? by Maria Shriver.

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So imagine my surprise at checking the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list dated September 2nd and seeing Irish crime writer Tana French‘s debut novel IN THE WOODS sneak in just under the wire, landing at #35 on the extended list. The book was published by Viking on May 17. It had, at least to the best of my knowledge, not been given extra co-op nor garnered some major media attention. Could this be a case of pure word-of-mouth, where readers who genuinely liked the book recommended it enthusiastically to their friends in chain-reaction fashion propelled a first novel to the bestseller lists months after its release date?

Yes and no, as French’s editor Kendra Harpster said in an email late yesterday afternoon. ” I do think that word of mouth has played a part here,” she said. “Nearly everyone I mention the book to, even non-publishing people, have heard something about it, which is definitely unusual for a first novel by a non-American.” But Harpster also pointed to a recent mention on NPR by Librarian to the Stars Nancy Pearl and more importantly, to the book’s selection by Barnes & Noble for its Discover New Voices program, which put it into their store promotions beginning early August and running through the end of October. So in the end, media and co-op did play a major role for IN THE WOODS, but that can happen to many books – and still not enough copies will sell to get that “NYT bestseller” tag.

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Though we at GalleyCat have taken issue from time to time – okay, often – with Henry Alford‘s contributions at the New York Times Book Review, I must say up front that I quite enjoyed his recent piece on how publishers take a perfectly neutral or negative review and mine it for any and all positive words in order to fashion a blurb out of it. Take what happened to Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman, who was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier‘s novel THIRTEEN MOONS that included a one-word quotation – “Genius” – attributed to Time. Grossman was confused, Alford reports, because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

Alford continues with many more examples (including one from his own reviewing past, when Little, Brown transformed his “tour-de-farce” about David Sedaris‘s NAKED into “tour-de-force) and explanations from the publishing world. “We get tempted and we get desperate,” Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said. “We publish over 100 books a year. I know we make mistakes. But we try to obey the rules.” To him, that means not changing the wording or the meaning of reviews. Paul Slovak, the publisher of Viking, says part of what keeps the house honest is the desire to maintain “good relationships” with book reviewers. “Michiko Kakutani wouldn’t be happy if we pulled two words of praise out of a negative review,” he said, referring to the chief book critic of The New York Times.

And as for what happened to Grossman, I am sooooo not buying Random House associate publisher Tom Perry‘s denial of any misblurbing. “We were being very short and punchy,” he said. “We have limited space.” Sure, see that pig overhead? Its flight patterns don’t like misappropriated blurbs, either…

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The New York Times’ Motoko Rich reports on how people feel about Leslie Bennetts‘ THE FEMININE MISTAKE and other hot-button books that address the core question of whether women should stay at home with their children or work. And the surprising – or perhaps not so surprising – conclusion is that there’s a lot of chatter that doesn’t translate into sales. “There is a lot of discussion out there about this issue and that’s why we’re having these books,” said Nancy Sheppard, vice president of marketing at Viking, which last year published GET TO WORK: A MANIFESTO FOR WOMEN OF THE WORLD by Linda R. Hirshman. “But it’s mostly just a discussion.”

Rich points to low Bookscan numbers for Hirshman, Sylvia Hewlett and Caitlin Flanagan as particularly striking because these books cover a topic that raises fierce passions, as anyone who has spent time on a playground or near an office water cooler knows. But that may get at the heart of why women are not buying books about these subjects. “I always felt it was something that women didn’t want to look at too closely,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, who was editor in chief at Talk Miramax Books when Hewlett’s book was published five years ago. “It was a problem that touched very complicated feelings, so while they read a magazine article or watched a segment on ‘Oprah,’ they didn’t want to read a whole book about it because it was such a difficult subject.”

And then there’s the question of time. “I’m home-schooling, I have three children, and my reading time is limited,” said Heather Cushman-Dowdee of Los Angeles. With many of the mommy books, she said, “I think I get their points through the articles that they’re writing without needing to delve in.” Declining to buy the books, she said, is a way to “protect your sanity a little bit.”

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FICTION: Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD (Knopf)

HISTORY: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, THE RACE BEAT (Knopf)

BIOGRAPHY: Debby Applegate, THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA (Doubleday)

GENERAL NONFICTION: Lawrence Wright, THE LOOMING TOWER (Knopf)

POETRY: Natasha Trethewey, NATIVE GUARD (Houghton Mifflin)

The upshot is that some of the smaller university presses should be proud, the big winners were Knopf, FSG and the Penguin Press – and about the only prize Cormac McCarthy hasn’t earned is beatification, but who knows, that may follow in due course…

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More fun is when the piece gets into how much money was offered. Allyn and Viking declined to release how much the book deal was worth, although Fox’s literary agent, Jan Miller, told the AP that it was “a VERY nice deal.” Ah, but is that in Publishers Marketplace parlance, or some other scale we’re supposed to know about?

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When I arrived a few minutes early to Housing Works for the National Book Critics Circle‘s annual bash to announce their award finalists, I figured – like most parties – there would be a few stragglers and the food & drink stations wouldn’t even be fully set up yet. Guess again. Already packed, within ten minutes the bookstore was fully SRO, and it was impossible to move a square inch without bumping into one notable critic after another. Amy Bloom (left, pictured with independent publicist Kimberly Burns and PW’s Charlotte Abbott) was on hand to announce the fiction finalists, which was met with the usual mix of positive responses and grumbling undertone. Francine Duplessis Gray, in announcing the memoir/autobiography category, remarked that this category honored those with a penchant for self-indulgence, while Eliot Weinberger cracked that the criticism category was “the most prestigious for the most contentious.” The greatest round of applause was reserved for Alison Bechdel‘s FUN HOME, one of two books (the other Michael Pollan‘s AN OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA) voted onto the shortlist by the membership.

Among the many, many literati making the scene were Lizzie Skurnick (who’s recently been hired on by New York Magazine), the Complete Review‘s Michael Orthofer, Viking publisher Paul Slovak, Soft Skull‘s Richard Nash, Eat the Press’s Rachel Sklar, Emily Gordon, Poets & Writers‘ Doug Diesenhaus, and former Balakian winner Scott McLemee, on hand to announce Steven G. Kellman as the category’s newest honoree.

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Dempsey, who starts at Hudson Street Press on January 29, feels he’s “really lucky to be going there just as [the imprint] really begins to take off,” he said earlier today by email. “Laureen did a fabulous job of establishing the imprint; and I’m looking forward to building on what she started: simply put, finding authors who are promotable and passionate about their subjects and making the books just as good as they can be (I believe strongly that good books find lots of eager readers). I’ve always loved finding projects that mix both elements — great on the stump, great on the page.”

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