Reuters reports that Indian author Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to his novel, A Suitable Boy. A Suitable Boy sold over a million copies. Seth calls the upcoming novel a “jump sequel” because young Lata, the central character in A Suitable Boy, is 75-80 years old in A Suitable Girl.

In A Suitable Boy, the central character is the young and rebellious Lata whose mother attempts to find her a husband.



The family saga is played out in post-independence India, and examines the traditions and political and religious upheavals of the time.



In A Suitable Girl, Lata is 75-80 years old and looking for a wife for her grandson, “whether he is thinking about it or not,” Seth said.



“That allows me in a sense to bring a entire lot of post-independence history to bear on the novel. It allows me to live in the present.

Fans of the first novel will be waiting a while for the sequel. The book has a target release date of 2013, which will be 20 years after A Suitable Boy was published. The BBC, New York Times and Times of India also have stories about Vikram Seth’s sequel.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

A federal district court judge in Manhattan has ruled that a Swedish author may not publish a sequel to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in the United States. Salinger had sued to halt publication of the book on the grounds that it infringes on his copyright to the original novel. The author tried to argue it was a parody, but the judge wasn’t buying it, saying that the sequel mirrors the original and lacks parody or critique that might be allowed under federal copyright law.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts issued her written ruling in Manhattan after considering arguments in a lawsuit brought by the 90-year-old reclusive author against the publishers of “60 Years Later: Coming Thcoarse the Rye.”
Batts said Swedish author Fredrik Colting had “taken well more from ‘Catcher,’ in both substance and style, than is necessary for the alleged transformative purpose of criticizing Salinger and his attitudes and behaviour.”



She said Colting’s claim that he also wrote the book to critically examine Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield, was “problematic and lacking in credibility.”
She also rejected arguments that the depiction of a character in Colting’s book to represent Caulfield 60 years later was a parody. She said in a footnote that Colting and his publishers made no indication before the lawsuit was filed that the book was meant as a parody or critique of Salinger’s work.



“Quite to the contrary, the original jacket of ‘60 Years’ states that it is ‘… a marvelous sequel to one of our most beloved classics,”‘ the judge said. “It is simply not credible for defendant Colting to assert now that this primary purpose was to critique Salinger and his persona.”

The book has alalert been published in England. Today’s ruling is temporary and will hold until a full trial is held on the merits of the case. But the fact that the judge granted a preliminary injunction against publication shows that the judge believes Salinger will win at trial.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Disgraced politician John Edwards is about to get hit with a tell all book by his former aide, Andrew Young. Young pretended to be the father of John Edwards’ love child with Rielle Hunter, but now he’s not covering for Edwards anymore.

A man who was one of former Senator John Edwards’s closest aides has a discount to write a book claiming that Mr. Edwards said he “would be taken care of for life” in return for falsely claiming he was the father of the baby carried by Mr. Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter.



The aide, Andrew Young, sold his book proposal to St. Martin’s Press for an undisclosed price late last week. In his proposal, Mr. Young quotes Mr. Edwards, a Democrat who was his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2004 and ran for president last year, as begging him to confess to fathering Ms. Hunter’s baby.


*****


Federal prosecutors are investigating whether any of Mr. Edwards’s campaign money was improperly used with regard to his affair or efforts to keep it from becoming public. Mr. Young wrote that he had been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had been subpoenaed to speak before a grand jury.


*****


Mr. Edwards denied being the father after admitting the affair last summer, and there is yet to be DNA testing. A spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards’s legal team, Joyce Fitzpatrick, said Mr. Edwards had not seen the book proposal, and she would not comment on it. A lawyer for Ms. Hunter, Robert J. Gordon, said he no longer represented her.



Mr. Young’s proposal states that he was writing the book because he had become disillusioned with Mr. Edwards’s behavior and recklessness, which he said included participating in the production of a sex tape with Ms. Hunter that Mr. Young later discovered.

Yes, that’s right. There’s a John Edwards sex tape floating around. All we can say is….ewwwwww.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

People reports that Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali has a book coming out that tells the story of her life so far. She’s only nine but she has experienced two very different worlds: the slums of Mumbai and Hollywood.

July 16 will find her book, Slumdog Dreaming, simulatenously released in the U.S. and U.K. Publisher Transworld, says, besides recounting Oscar night, Ali will tell her story of “playing marbles with her friends beside the sewers of Garib Nagar in Mumbai, to dancing along to the Bollywood films she and her family watch on their old television set.



“Rubina brings alive a world of wastelands and rat-infested shanty dwellings, and shows us her home, a wooden shack with a tarpaulin roof, where she grew up with her beloved father and siblings,” says the statement.

The People article says Slumdog Dreaming hits stores in the U.S. and U.K. on July 16th. However, the Amazon.com listing says September 8th, so it may have been pushed back.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog