The Year in Publishing: January 2008

An Australian newspaper questioned Ishmael Beah‘s veracity, suggesting that the memoirist tinkered with the chronology of his experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in the bestselling A Long Way Gone. Beah denied the allegations; the newspaper pressed its allegations, but Beah stood by his story.
Tom Wolfe changed publishers, ending a decades-spanning relationship with Farrar Straus Giroux to rejoin his longtime editor, Pat Strachan, at Little, Brown.
Missy Chase Lapine sued Jessica Seinfeld for stealing her techniques to trick kids into eating vegetables; the federal lawsuit also accused Jerry Seinfeld of repeatedly defaming Lapine on national television.
Romance novelist Cassie Edwards was caught putting other writer’s words into her novels and passing them off as her own creation. Signet initially dismissed the allegations, but as more evidence emerged, not to mention the outrage among romance readers, the imprint’s leadership admitted they ought to conduct a serious investigation. Three months later, convinced of Edwards’s perfidy, Signet cut her loose.
Judith Regan settled her lawsuit against HarperCollins.
Ursula K. Le Guin published an essay in Harper’s arguing that reading was never that popular to begin with, which is pretty much what Steve Jobs was saying right around the same time. Le Guin added that “publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism.”