Love and Politics in the Air As Frankfurt Opens

by Steven Zeitchik, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/19/2005

With organizers talking about a need to steer the Frankfurt Book Fair away from entertainment and more toward politics, the world's largest book convention opened today with word of a possible deal from an entertainer par excellence.

Sources say Courtney Love is on the verge of signing with FSG for her memoir, which will contain heretofore-unseen photos of the musician, late husband Kurt Cobain and their child Francis. The book, titled The Love Diaries, will follow in the rough footsteps of Cobain's Journals, the headline-grabbing memoir-cum-draftbook. Love will supply some original text about their life together. Book is on submission but still unsold in the U.K. and could go at the fair, with agent Vigliano Associates confirming it's still taking meetings with publishers on it. Other countries are expected to follow.

FSG has become a surprising player in the genre of rockers reinvented as writers, largely through the efforts of editor Denise Oswald. (The house earlier this year published the poetry of former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.)

On the fiction side, it is also, strangely, an FSG author named Courtney nabbing Frankfurt attention. Agent Sandy Djikstra was scoring buzz for Courtney Brkic, a Whiting winner, with a Croatia-set novel called The Sun in Another Sky. Farrar, which published the author's earlier collection as well as a memoir about the Balkans, holds an option and is expected to pick it up. Granta will be offered U.K. rights, and as we went to press Djistrka said she will be going to auction in the Netherlands and possibly other territories.

The Balkans is a fitting subject for a fair that new director Jurgen Boos and other organizers say need to get more political. In his opening speech, Boos named politics as a "pillar" of the fair, and press director Holger Ehling later said "We need to re-politicize the fair" by bringing in more authors of that ilk. Ehling added, by the way, that exhibitor attendance was up 6% this year, with heady attendance and separate meeting areas for Korea, this year's guest country.

At the rights center, some of that Korean interest seemed to be spilling over, as new agenting outfit Global Literary awaited word from several U.S. houses on Kim Hoon's historical novel The Song of a Sword. The book was a bestseller in Korea and will soon be out in France and Spain.

And also in the great-timing department, agent Ira Silverberg--who has two NBA fiction nominees--has a spanking-new, and smartly-assembled, sell-sheet pairing both of said authors, Rene Steinke and Chris Sorrentino. Silverberg says he's bracing for plenty of foreign action on their books, Holy Skirts and Trance.

On the show floor, the usual big contingents were out in force, from Harper to Time Warner (which threw a fete last night that was kind of a Larry Kirshbaum send-off and a David Young welcome) to Random to B&N Books. At a spiffy Google booth, talk continued unabated--and undisturbed by the lawsuit(s) going on 3,500 miles away, though company-sponsored educational programs over the next few days could tell the tale.

Finally, at the all-important Frankfurter Hof, the biggest rumor thus far --no doubt of great interest if you're sitting in your office in the U.S. right now--is that the storied Saturday night bacchanal traditionally co-sponsored by the likes of Jamie Byng, Morgan Entrekin and Charlie Winton won't be held this year, for reasons unknown. We'll stay on it, but all we can say is that Courtney Love, at least, would be disappointed.