Rowling Revisits Cormoran Strike

J.K. Rowling's next Cormoran Strike book is called The Silkworm
and is due out in June.

Readers may recall that the first Strike novel The Cuckoo's Calling was released under the pen name Robert Galbraith but she was outed by a publisher. Apparently she is still using the pen name!

Via Snitchseeker

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives--meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...
A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, THE SILKWORM is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

J.K. Rowling Admits Writing The Cuckoo's Calling

J.K. Rowling has pulled a fast one on the publishing world - having her crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. I don't recall seeing this book on any of the Summer Lists in my previous post.

We know Rowling loves a good joke, and this one is worthy of the Weasley Twins. The cover reminds me of Dumbledore on Privet Drive turning out the street lights. The name of her detective, Cormoran Strike, sounds suspiciously like Severus Snape!

I guess you should order soon if you want Galbraith's name on the cover! The price has come down on Amazon from $20 to $16.90 just in the past 24 hours - if you want the real paper book that is. On Kindle it's $9.99.



NY Daily News

A detective novel secretly written by J.K. Rowling surged to the top of bestseller lists on Monday after the true identity of the author was revealed, embarrassing some publishers who had rejected the manuscript.
Rowling, whose Harry Potter series made her Britain's best-selling author, posed as a retired military policeman called Robert Galbraith to write "The Cuckoo's Calling", only to see her cover blown at the weekend by a Sunday newspaper.
The novel had only sold 1,500 hardback copies since being published in April. But by Monday it had raced to the top of Amazon.co.uk's best-selling list, leaving high street and online book merchants unable to slake demand.
"For a title that isn't even in our top 5,000 to shoot to number one so quickly is almost unheard of," Darren Hardy, books manager at Amazon.co.uk, told Reuters by email.
Hardy said this meteoric rise in sales meant "The Cuckoo's Calling" has established itself as a contender to become one of the biggest-selling books of the summer.

Editor Admits Rejecting Secret Novel

Kate Mills, fiction editor at Orion Publishing, came forward to admit that she had unwittingly turned down the new Rowling work, and suggested that colleagues at other publishers had done the same.
She told The Independent: “I thought it was well-written but quiet. It didn’t stand out for me and new crime novels are hard to launch right now.” Asked if she regretted revealing she had passed on the book, Ms Mills said: “No, it’s out there. You’ve got to love a book to take it on. It wasn’t for me.”
. . . The Cuckoo’s Calling follows private investigator Cormoran Strike, who is brought in to investigate when a model falls to her death from a Mayfair balcony. It received praise from crime writers including Ms McDermid, Mark Billingham and Alex Gray.
Ms McDermid said she was “gobsmacked” to find out the truth, bursting out laughing on Saturday when she was told. “It never crossed my mind at all. Nobody had any suspicion. The fake biog is very plausible.”
Ms McDermid had even asked for Robert Galbraith to join her Theakstons Crime New Blood panel, only to be told he would be away on holiday for the summer.

From Forbes

Once more, J.K. Rowling has a hit on her hands, as Robert Galbraith follows Richard Bachman with ‘cancer of the pseudonym’ and ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ becomes a best-seller.
An interesting experiment has been unfortunately curtailed, and we’ll never know just how successful Galbraith’s detective series would have been. Now that the true author has been outed, the series is going to be a guaranteed hit. But it was already on course to do just that. As a debut novel the 1500 hardback copies shipped, with around 500 sales, was an impressive number given the circumstances of a saturated genre, a debut author, and little marketing spend behind the title. Rowling more than likely had another hit series on her head as Galbraith, and it would have been delightful to get to book three or four in the series, a potential movie deal in place, Patterson Joseph cast as Cormoran Strike, and then do the reveal.

New BBC Series: Death Comes to Pemberly by P.D. James

The BBC is making a mini-series from the P.D. James Pride and Prejudice sequel Death Comes to Pemberley. Pemberly, of course, is the vast estate owned by the Darcy family.

WETA Blog: Watch Out Jane Austen Fans

The BBC has ordered a three-part adaptation of the novel Death Comes to Pemberley, a Pride and Prejudice sequel written by P.D. James, which tells the story of Austen’s famous couple six years into their marriage. But the question everyone wants to know is – who’s playing Mr. Darcy this time?

Answer: It’s Matthew Rhys. You may have seen him on ABC’s Brother’s and Sisters, the Masterpiece adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood or FX’s The Americans. And he’s aware of the inevitable Firth comparisons headed his way.

“Exciting as it is, one of the challenges of a part such as Darcy are the comparisons that will be drawn to those who've institutionalised him in the past,” Rhys said. "The beauty of 'Pemberley' is that it is an entirely new and different Darcy 6 years on. And also, I don't have to appear from a lake in a white shirt and breeches.”



Rhys will be joined by The Bletchley Circle’s Anna Maxwell as Lizzie, and Birdsong’s Matthew Goode is set to play the nefarious Wickham. The official synopsis says that the series will “combine classic period drama with a highly suspenseful and brilliantly crafted murder mystery plot,” apparently involving the murder of a friend of Wickham’s. Casting for the rest of the novel's major characters hasn't been announced yet, so we'll have to wait and see if any more recognizable faces will be part of this project.

Rowling's New Middle-Class Characters are not Magical, but Monstrous

pic: happiness-in-a-box

J. K. Rowling is starting her publicity push as her new book The Casual Vacancy comes out on September 27, which is next Thursday.


The Casual Vacancy Hardcover from Amazon
The Casual Vacancy for Kindle on Amazon
The Casual Vacancy Audo Book on Amazon

Guardian UK has an in-depth article about Rowling's views on just about everything, including the book. I find it very interesting that a book about small-town politics is timed perfectly to coincide with the elections in the U.S. right now, where the vast majority of Rowling fans happen to live. No real surprise though, LOL.

Some excerpts:

Rowling: "Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea," she laughs. Having dreamed up Potter on a train, "This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know."

. . . "I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society," Rowling says. "We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?" But it requires obliviousness to the horrors suffered by a family such as the Weedons, and the book satirises the ignorance of elites who assume to know what's best for everyone else."

. . . "We're a phenomenally snobby society," Rowling nods, "and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny." The book is so funny I was halfway through before noticing that every character is, to a varying degree, monstrous.

. . . Whodunnits are her literary guilty pleasure – "I love a good Dorothy L Sayers" – but then again, she doesn't really feel guilty about that: "There's no shame in a Dorothy." She hasn't read Fifty Shades Of Grey, "because I promised my editor I wouldn't." She doesn't look as if she feels she's missing out. "Not wildly," she agrees drily.

~~~

Reporter Decca Aitkenhead: I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling's Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen.

. . . When I tell her I loved the book, her arms shoot up in celebration. "Oh my God! I'm so happy! That's so amazing to hear. Thank you so much! You've made me incredibly happy. Oh my God!" Anyone listening would take her for a debut author, meeting her first ever fan.

~~~

J.K.Rowling on her personal life:

Rowling grew up near the Forest of Dean in a community not unlike Pagford. "And this was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn't a particularly happy time in my life. In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it."
Her mother, a school lab technician, was diagnosed with MS when Rowling was 15. "But it wasn't just that – although that did colour it a lot. I just don't think I was very good at being young."

. . . fame has had its upsides; meeting Barack Obama and the legendary Democrat speechwriter Bob Shrum were the two greatest starstruck moments of her life.

. . . Having always longed to be a writer, she now found herself in charge of a business empire stretching all the way to Hollywood, as the Harry Potter films began smashing box office records. "And it's a real bore. Should I be more diplomatic? Oh, I don't care. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing. That sounds hideously ungrateful because it's made me an awful lot of money, and I'm very grateful for that. But it's not something that interests me, and there have been lots of opportunities to do things that make more money, and I've said no."

Hmmm . . . I'll be glad to take some money and power off her hands so she can have more time to write. LOL

But what about the book? If you don't wish to see SPOILERS then skip the following excerpt from Decca Aitkenhead's synopsis:

The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with "authenticity" develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons.

Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers' secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy.

Pagford will be appallingly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in a West Country village, but its clever comedy can also be read as a parable about national politics.

Rowling in New York at Lincoln Center in October

J.K. Rowling will be center-stage at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City on October 16.

For those who purchase tickets, which will be available beginning September 10, Little, Brown and Company announced, they will get a free copy of Rowling's first post-Harry Potter book, that the author will also sign. Jo will be joined by author Ann Patchett during the conversation, and will also be answering audience questions.

Please note that this will be her ONLY public appearance in the U.S. to promote the book.

Tickets: $43 if purchased online, $44 if purchased via phone, $37 if purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office
Ticket Information Here

The Casual Vacancy Hardcover from Amazon
The Casual Vacancy for Kindle on Amazon
The Casual Vacancy Audo Book on Amazon

Edward Gorey Exhibit at Columbia University

Andrew Alpern has been collecting Edward Gorey's books, artwork, and other "ephemera" for 40 years, and he was a friend of the writer. Now he has donated 700 items to Columbia University where they are staging a show to honor Gorey.

From the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Gorey Preserved

Kempner Gallery
March 5 - July 27, 2012

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library presents a major exhibition of works by the idiosyncratic illustrator, designer, and writer, Edward Gorey (1925-2000). The exhibition draws from the large and important collection of Gorey's works donated to the Columbia University Libraries by noted architectural historian Andrew Alpern in 2010.



The extensive collection, which contains over 700 items, includes nearly every edition of every work published by Gorey, in addition to illustrations for dust jackets and magazines, etchings, posters, and design ephemera. By any measure, this is a major gathering of Gorey's work.

The exhibition also includes original, limited edition etchings, posters, books written and illustrated by Gorey, books written by others but illustrated by Gorey, books whose cover art was created by Gorey, foreign translations of Gorey books, postcards and Christmas cards, theater-related materials, Dracula-related materials, LP record jackets and CD cover art, Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet-related items, various stuffed creatures, photographs of Gorey, and a fur parka that he owned.

During the panel discussion, Alpern also contributed some of his memories to fill out Gorey’s personal side. He described Gorey’s effortless and encyclopedic knowledge of books and movies, his “low-key” charm, and his distinctive fashion (fur coat, scarf, big beard, high-top sneakers). He remembered a particular visit to Gorey’s home in Cape Cod when they drove around in Gorey’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the license plate that read OGDRED—from another pseudonym, Ogdred Weary.



Alpern took issue with several obituaries of that described Gorey as “macabre”; while some of Gorey’s art was dark, he said, the man was anything but. Alpern remembered him this way: “Friendly, outgoing, often outrageous, enthusiastic, with a voice that soared and swooped all over the octaves, and expressive hands and fingers that reinforced his words with elaborate gestures, and heavy, clanking rings. Edward was nothing if not instantly noticeable, with a distinctively odd appearance, and equally odd attitudes and ideas: perhaps the quintessential New Yorker in that regard.”