Book News: Chuck Palahniuk Working On ‘Fight Club’ Sequel

  • Chuck Palahniuk says he is working on a sequel to Fight Club, his 1996 cult novel about underground fighting matches. The sequel, which will be a “dark and messy” graphic novel series, doesn’t yet have a publisher. Palahniuk wrote in a message to his fan page: “It will likely be a series of books that update the story ten years after the seeming end of Tyler Durden. Nowadays, Tyler is telling the story, lurking inside Jack, and ready to launch a come-back. Jack is oblivious. Marla is bored. Their marriage has run aground on the rocky coastline of middle-aged suburban boredom. It’s only when their little boy disappears, kidnapped by Tyler, that Jack is dragged back into the world of Mayhem.”
  • James Lasdun writes about how, as a young man working at a publishing house, he turned down a manuscript written by “Jane Somers” — who unbeknownst to him was actually the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing writing under a pseudonym. Lasdun says: “None of my bosses ever criticized me for my report, but occasionally at parties people would say, in scandalized tones, “Weren’t you the reader who….” I was arrogant enough to shrug it off, but I must have felt stung at some level because, consciously or not, I reacted by setting up an untraversable barricade in my mind against Doris Lessing. I wouldn’t — couldn’t — go near her work from then on.”
  • Stephen Hawking’s new memoir, My Brief History, is due out Sept. 10. According to Publisher’s Weekly, it is the first book that Hawking, who has a motor neuron disease, wrote unaided, thanks to technological advances.
  • James Surowiecki argues in The New Yorker that Barnes & Noble may not be as doomed as we all think it is: “[T]he hastily written obituaries left out some important facts. To begin with, B. & N.’s retail business still makes good money, and, though its sales fell last year, its profits actually rose.”
  • Jonathan Galassi, the publisher and president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reflects on changes at the legendary publishing house: “Yes, the contemporary publishing environment is very different: disappearing bookstores, inimical trading “partners,” and a still-consolidating industry (the new Penguin Random House is set to publish more than 15,000 books next year worldwide) in a ‘mature,’ i.e., declining, market. There are too many books and readers with too little time to read, and too much competition for anything with a chance of exciting their wavering interest. Everything is different — except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.”
Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
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Book News: Chuck Palahniuk Working On ‘Fight Club’ Sequel

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