Indie News
by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 3/6/2006
Nice Play, Sourcebooks
Beginning this month, the Chicago-based Sourcebooks will expand its presence in the U.K. with an ambitious packaging of plays by one William Shakespeare. Romeo & Juliet and Othello will be first in the series of plays to be released over the next few seasons. Each will comprise text, glossary, essays, production and performance notes, costume and set design sketches, as well as an audio CD featuring recordings from notable Shakespeare performances both historical and current. Sourcebooks has teamed with Manning Partnership of Bath, England, for sales and distribution of the Shakespeare and other Sourcebooks projects selected for the U.K., which will include gift titles, parenting books and some fiction. In another initiative, Sourcebooks recently partnered with the British Library for The Essential Shakespeare Live, a treasury of live Shakespeare recordings, set for release in North America in April.
—Michael Coffey
'Manly' Book Club Grabs Women, Too
Most book clubs not only appeal to women, but meet on a day and at a time that is more suited to soccer moms than dads. To remedy that, Rob Stahl, general books manager at Colgate Bookstore in Hamilton, N.Y., and the father of two young children, set up a Sunday afternoon book club to fill the void now that the football season is over. He took an informal poll at the store and found that men would rather not go out on a weekday evening, when many book clubs meet, once they get home from work.
It turns out that a lot of women feel the same way. The 46 members of the Hamilton Book and Movie Club are about evenly split between the sexes, according to Stahl, who is serving as moderator. The club has free screenings of movies based on books at the Hamilton Movie Theater, followed by a discussion of the book at the bookstore. Book club members are given a card that enables them to attend the film and get a 10% discount on the purchase of the book.
The first two book-and-movie selections are Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist— and the 1988 film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis (who won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress)—and Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest—and Milos Forman's 1975 film, which won all five Oscars for picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay.
—Judith Rosen
