Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel

Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world.

After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in the United States this fall. The book is a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.

- Motoko Rich, The New York Times

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The New Scrooge

Are there lemonade stands that donate more to charity than Amazon.com?

With Amazon.com's recent announcement of profits of $645 million on revenues of $19.17 billion last year, the company isn't just surviving the recession—it's pounding its rivals into the dust. So it's cakes and ale all around for charitable beneficiaries of the Seattle giant's largesse, right?

Sure—if they're buying.

While Amazon.com is famously cheap in its prices, it's also become infamously cheap to the community it lives in. The tacit silence over Amazon's stinginess was first broken in a 2007 complaint on a Publishers Weekly blog by a rival Seattle bricks-and-mortar bookseller. When Paul Constant, books editor at the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger, followed up on the post last year, he hit a stone wall: "[Amazon.com] has refused to return repeated e-mails and calls from The Stranger about the company's seemingly nonexistent contributions to the Seattle arts scene," he wrote at the time. "Internet searches for any sign of philanthropy on behalf of the company prove fruitless."

- By Paul Collins, Slate.com

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Dinner Companions

Alone in London last spring, I took Grégoire Bouillier’s short book “The Mystery Guest” to my favorite restaurant, propping it up over my baba ghanouj, chorizo and tortilla. I slurped mansaf soup between page turns and crumbled bits of yogurt pistachio cake into the book’s gutters, simultaneously finishing my meal and the story. It was a lovely date. A week later, at the Hay Festival, a literary gathering in Hay-on-Wye, the writer A. A. Gill was asked who his ideal dinner companion would be. His reply: “One of the great joys is to go to a restaurant you can’t afford and sit and eat with a book.” This led me to wonder whom other authors were taking to dinner, so I asked a few of my favorites.

- Leanne Shapton, The New York Times

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Introducing The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller Lists

Comics have finally joined the mainstream. Anticipation for the live-action film version of “Watchmen,” the dark and violent superhero opus that saw its birth in comic books and arrives in theaters on Friday, has built to a nationwide boil. And today The Times introduces three separate lists of the best-selling graphic books in the country: hardcover, softcover, and manga. We’ll update those lists weekly in this space, and offer a few observations along the way.

- George Gene Gustines, The New York Times

Read the list here.

You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe

For the past 20 years or so, popular-science books have attempted to explain to an incredulous public the latest preposterous theories concocted by scientists to explain mystifying stuff such as quarks, God particles, matter being in two places at the same time, or nowhere at all, electrons on the far side of the universe that seem to know what you're up to, cats that are simultaneously alive and dead, or neither, and so on. Reading these noble attempts to get the message across - in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, or Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers - you occasionally note a tone of slight impatience from the author when the really tricky stuff comes along. “Look, you dummies, it just is, ok?”

- The Sunday Times review by Rod Liddle

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It's Our Right To Kiss Where We Like

Mills & Boon came out in protest today against Virgin's ban on public displays of affection in UK station. Read about Virgin's stunt here.

“Romantic embraces and passionate kisses are a vital part of life and should never be discouraged. We believe that attempting to restrict passion to certain times or areas is a denial of the human right to express love” says M&B spokeswoman Sarah Ritherdon.

The Virgin move outraged Cheshire travellers who are denied the right to kiss goodbye to their loved ones.

Outraged commuter at Warrington Bank Quay Station said: “There’s enough doom and gloom around at the moment, why are Virgin trying to impose more misery?”

If you're outraged by the breach of our fundamental right to kiss in public, change your facebook profile picture to the poster shown here and spread the word!

- Nigel Warburton, The School of Life

Book of the Week: Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

Charlotte Roche is a literary phenomenon. In April last year she was the first German author to top Amazon's monthly bestseller list, outselling stellar talents such as Khaled Hosseini. Her debut novel, Wetlands, has sold half a million copies at home and is so sexually explicit that people are said to have fainted at readings.
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- Joan Smith, Time Online