Hachette Job

“Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.

     The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks. [...]
     Generally, most popular books are available from Amazon within two days. [...]
     'We have been asked legitimate questions about why many of our books are at present marked out of stock with relatively long estimated shipping times on the Amazon website, in contrast to immediate availability on other websites and in stores,' said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette spokeswoman. 'We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly.'
     But, she added, 'Amazon is holding minimal stock' and restocking some of Hachette’s books 'slowly, causing "available 2-4 weeks" messages.'
     For at least a decade, Amazon has not been shy about throwing its weight around with publishers, demanding bigger discounts and more time to pay its bills. When a publisher balked, it would withdraw the house’s titles from its recommendation algorithms.
     ‘Typically, it was about 30 days before they’d come back and say, “Ouch, how do we make this work?”’ an Amazon buyer told the journalist Brad Stone in his book about the company, The Everything Store.”
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times
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"Happiness is a warm gun..." — Lennon–McCartney

"Sometime in late 1968, Charles Manson was listening to 'The Beatles,' to use the proper name of what’s most often called the White Album, and decided that 'Helter Skelter,' an upbeat rocker about a roller coaster at an English amusement park, was a call to black insurrection in America, to be set off by the brutal murders of an actress, a hairdresser, a coffee heiress, and several other innocents.
     The question that this horrible incident has always provoked was not just: How could anyone have thought anything so murderously insane? It was also: Why was Charles Manson listening with such hallucinative intensity to an album whose other highlights were John Lennon’s delicate bossa-nova ballad to his mother Julia, Paul McCartney’s lyrical invocation of Noël Coward, and George Harrison’s mystical celebration of the varieties in a box of English chocolates[…]
     These questions come to mind in reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s heavily hyped biography Salinger (Simon & Schuster), not least because, in one of the most bizarre sections of a bizarre book, they themselves raise the issue of murder-by-bad-reading, in connection with the murder (fearful symmetry!) of the Beatles’ John Lennon by Mark Chapman, who happened to have hallucinated a motive within The Catcher in the Rye. Shields and Salerno’s own peculiar view of Salinger forces them to insist that Chapman was not just a crazy hallucinant, but in his own misguided way an insightful reader, responding to the 'huge amount of psychic violence in the book.'”
– Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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Salinger-like, & more...

"When someone uses the term 'instant classic,' I typically want to grab him and ask, 'So this is, what, like the new Great Expectations? You sure about that?' But David Gilbert’s novel & Sons, seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak, made me reconsider my stance on such a label.

     & Sons feels deeply familiar, as though it existed for decades and I was just slow to find it.
     Revolving around a New York writer of J. D. Salinger-like fame and reclusiveness, & Sons is about fathers and sons and the complications and competitions between them, all set within the world of East Coast preppy privilege. It has a twist with a tantalizing hint of science fiction and a devastatingly poignant ending. This is the book I’d most like to lug from one beach to another for the rest of summer, if only I hadn’t torn through it in two very happy days this spring.
     The main character is 79-year-old A. N. Dyer, 'unknowable' to his adoring public despite having been a literary celebrity since the publication some 50 years ago of Ampersand, his debut novel set at a prep school modeled on Phillips Exeter Academy (where virtually every major character in & Sons went or goes to school). Ampersand was a literary sensation along the lines of The Catcher in the Rye although, unlike Salinger, A.N. Dyer — or Andrew as he’s known — never vanished from the publishing world and produced many novels after Ampersand. Andrew is beloved, but not at all interested in being beloved; sometimes he wishes he’d gone into advertising."
— Mary Pois, OPB
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