Drum roll please…. The novelist who has published the most novels in a single year and is the third-best-selling fiction author of all time (estimated 1 billion copies sold) is:
English romance novelist Barbara Cartland! She wrote 723 novels which were translated into 38 languages! Discover Barbara on BookGorilla
Dorian Lynskey from LitFub on how the message of a book can change Radically Over Time: “Everybody wanted Orwell’s ghost on their side.”
On November 2, 1950, Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Britain’s Labour government, accused his opponents in the Conservative Party of “what the late George Orwell in his book, which honourable members may or may not have read, entitled ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ called ‘doublespeak.’” Orwell’s final novel had been out for 17 months and Gaitskell was confident that at least some of his fellow MPs had already read it. Many had, including former prime minister Winston Churchill, who told a colleague that it was “a very remarkable book.” Propelled by the unexpected success of Orwell’s anti-Stalinist fable Animal Farm, published four years earlier, 1984 landed in the world with a bang and it has been exploding ever since.
The most notable thing about Gaitskell’s statement, however, is that doublespeak doesn’t appear in the novel: he was misremembering the concept of doublethink. Nonetheless, it entered the political lexicon during the 1950s, alongside Big Brother, Newspeak, the Thought Police, Orwellian, and so on, and those words have never gone away. In fact, the novel is more famous for its language than its characters or plot. By pinning down the political phenomena of the 1930s and 40s with dramatic, futuristic terminology, the ailing author secured cultural immortality.
Journalists are magpies for novelty, especially shiny semantic baubles that they can use to brighten up political prose. References to popular works of fiction tend to tarnish into clichés, like Game of Thrones analogies now, but Orwell’s neologisms have retained their luster for 70 years because they have entered that small, exclusive zone that lies beyond cliché: the place where words become so embedded in the language that they are no longer read as references. Such words as thoughtcrime, unperson, and memory hole require no explanation. Twenty years ago, the creators of the television show Big Brother attempted to deny any relationship to Orwell’s character, as if the concept of an invisible, all-seeing authority figure with that name were as authorless as a folk song. (Lawyers for Orwell’s copyright-holders lucratively disagreed.)
Search Twitter for phrases from 1984, and you’ll find that they are rarely qualified by a mention of “the late George Orwell.” You will also find that some of them appear in contexts that bear little resemblance to the author’s original definitions. Orwell’s Thought Police, for example, were based on the Stalinist practice of persecuting citizens for things they hadn’t yet said or done. It’s unlikely that he would have enjoyed seeing the term applied to a twitter-storm following a contentious remark.
More an essayist than a novelist, much though he wished otherwise, Orwell thought the message of 1984 was obvious: it was a satirical attack on the totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler, and on the potential for totalitarian thought to take root in democracies. Just weeks after publication, however, he felt compelled to issue two clarifying statements to the press after reading reviews which interpreted the book as a condemnation of all forms of socialism, including the Labour Party, of which he was supporter.
Orwell’s publisher Fredric Warburg concluded that the statements “didn’t do two pennorth of good.” Readers continued to see what they wanted to see.
Emily Temple from LitHub hunted around to find out how many copies the below books sold in the twelve months following their publications.
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë
Published in 1846
Copies sold: 2
The eldest of the three Bronte sisters, Charlotte is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which was published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Bronte’s works were revolutionary for their time, reflecting a truthfulness about love and relationships that was not common in Victorian-era England. While Jane Eyre was, and continues to be, her most popular work, Charlotte Bronte published numerous works during her short life, including juvenilia, poetry, and the novels Shirley and Villette. Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, outliving both of her sisters, Anne and Emily. Collectively, the Bronte sisters novels are considered literary standards that continue to influence modern writers.
by James Joyce
Published in 1914
Copies sold: 379
Although James Joyce began these stories of Dublin life in 1904, when he was 22, and had completed them by the end of 1907, they remained unpublished until 1914 — victims of Edwardian squeamishness. Their vivid, tightly focused observations of the life of Dublin’s poorer classes, their unconventional themes, coarse language, and mention of actual people and places made publishers of the day reluctant to undertake sponsorship.
by Elie Weisel
Published in 1960
Copies sold: 1,046
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.
by Aldous Huxley
Published in 1932
Copies sold: 15,000
Aldous Huxley’s profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.
by Charles Dickens
Published in 1843
Copies sold: 15,000
Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to show him the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, Scrooge learns to love Christmas and the people all around him.
Read full post on LitHub
Judith Krantz, Whose Tales of Sex and Shopping Sold Millions, Dies at 91. Margalit Fox from The New York Times has her obituary:
Judith Krantz, who almost single-handedly turned the sex-and-shopping genre of fiction into the stuff of high commerce, making her one of the world’s best-selling novelists if not one of the most critically acclaimed, died on Saturday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her publicist, John Tellem, confirmed the death.
Though she did not publish her first book until she was 50, Ms. Krantz reigned for decades afterward as the international queen of poolside reading. Her 10 novels — beginning with “Scruples” in 1978 and ending with “The Jewels of Tessa Kent” in 1998 — have together sold more than 85 million copies in more than 50 languages.
Most became television movies or mini-series, many of which were produced by Ms. Krantz’s husband, Steve Krantz.
What drove Ms. Krantz’s books to the tops of best seller lists time and again was a formula that she honed to glittering perfection: fevered horizontal activities combined with fevered vertical ones — the former taking place in sumptuously appointed bedrooms and five-star hotels, the latter anywhere with a cash register and astronomical price tags.
A hallmark of the formula was that it embraced sex and shopping in almost equal measure, with each recounted in modifier-laden detail.
“Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket,” Ms. Krantz writes in her second novel, “Princess Daisy” (1980). “Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years.”
Elements of Ms. Krantz’s formula had existed piecemeal in earlier fiction for women, conspicuously in the work of Jacqueline Susann , the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966) and other steamy novels of the 1960s and ’70s. But Ms. Krantz was almost certainly the first writer to combine the steam and the shopping in such opulent profusion — and to do so all the way to the bank.
Read full post in The New York Times
Katie Heaney from The Cut looks at how bestselling author, Elin Hilderbrand, became our summer must read novelist.
Elin Hilderbrand‘s book covers predominantly feature people’s feet on or near sand, plus an ambiguous title in gentle, summer-toned script — The Rumor, The Perfect Couple, Barefoot, A Summer Affair. She has written 22 best-selling novels, which have sold close to 6 million copies between them.
To borrow a phrase from #resistance Twitter, of which Hilderbrand is a vocal part: This is not normal. Over the past five years, overall book sales have been stagnant, and fiction sales have dropped 20 percent. Elin Hilderbrand is an exception. Michael Pietsch, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, which publishes Hilderbrand, tells me, “Her sales have grown with every book we’ve published, and I’ve never seen that. She has driven herself beyond the gravitational pull of the industry.”
Until now, Hilderbrand’s fictional world has been largely apolitical, in so far as it’s possible for stories about young, upper-middle-class white women who sleep with rich white men to be apolitical. Her books are real-world fantasies, starring scrappy 20- or 30-somethings with names like Blair and Claire and Melanie, who wear dresses described as “slinky” and blouses described as “diaphanous.” Hilderbrand’s protagonists are imperfect, but they are always savvy, always good at what they do. They’re saving businesses, and their boyfriends, and themselves. President Trump doesn’t exist, save for one tiny, neutral mention in Winter Solstice, in which Margaret, a just-retired famous news anchor, hopes nobody at the drug store recognizes her and asks her about him.
For these reasons, Hilderbrand has fans at every stop along the political spectrum, though she herself is liberal. She wrestles with how much of her real worldview to inject into her work, as well as her social media presence (“I find it offensive when there’s a mass shooting, and the food blogger is still putting up a recipe for guacamole”), but it doesn’t seem coincidental that her new novel, Summer of ’69 is, in part, about the civil-rights movement, and that her next book will be about a woman running for president.
Read full post The Cut
Romance writer Nicholas Sparks issued an apology on Monday for remarks he made in 2013 opposing the formation of an LGBT club at his Christian school. Gene Maddaus from Variety has the statement from Sparks’ camp:
In an email published last week by the Daily Beast, Sparks faulted Saul Benjamin, who was then the headmaster of the Epiphany School of Global Studies, for pushing an “agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted.” Sparks forbade Benjamin from allowing the LGBT club, and criticized him in harsh terms for focusing on diversity and the school’s anti-discrimination policy.
“As someone who has spent the better part of my life as a writer who understands the power of words, I regret and apologize that mine have potentially hurt young people and members of the LGBTQ community, including my friends and colleagues in that community,” Sparks said in a statement on Monday.
In the statement, Sparks said he did not intend to ban an LGBT club outright — but rather to ensure that any club was formed in accordance with the school’s procedures.
“When in one of my emails I used language such as ‘there will never be an LGBT club’ at Epiphany, I was responding heatedly to how the headmaster had gone about initiating this club — like most schools, Epiphany has procedures and policies for establishing any student club,” he said. “My concern was that if a club were to be founded, it be done in a thoughtful, transparent manner with the knowledge of faculty, students and parents — not in secret, and not in a way that felt exceptional. I only wish I had used those exact words.”
That is not what he communicated to the headmaster in 2013. His exact words were: “In thinking long and hard, with an open heart, about this topic, and after discussions with Trustees and others, I have to conclude that the [Board of Trustees] will not sanction a club or association for GLBT students, no matter what it is called.” He said that gay students would continue to be welcome at the school, and that the school would not tolerate harassment of them.
In another email, Sparks told Benjamin that the previous headmaster had worked with LGBT students and handled the issue “quietly and wonderfully.” “I expect you to do the same,” he wrote.
Read full post on Variety.
Emails from Sparks—who runs the Epiphany School, a Christian academy in North Carolina—obtained by The Daily Beast paint a damning portrait of the bestselling author. Tarpley Hitt with The Daily Beast reports:
In 2006, Nicholas Sparks, the prolific romance writer best known for The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, helped co-found a prep school in New Bern, North Carolina, called the Epiphany School of Global Studies. The idea was to start a small, faith-based academy focused on world issues with an emphasis on language-learning, regular visits to other nations, and a shared understanding that “learning about the world” was an integral part of 21st-century life. In its mission statement, the school of roughly 500 students describes itself as “anchored in the Judeo-Christian commandment to Love God and Your Neighbor as Yourself.”
But since 2014, members of the Epiphany School’s Board of Trustees, including Sparks, have been locked in a legal battle with the academy’s former headmaster and CEO, Saul Benjamin, over what the latter describes as a pattern of harassment, racism, and homophobia. “Sparks and members of the Board unapologetically marginalized, bullied, and harassed members of the School community,” Benjamin’s attorneys wrote in the complaint, “whose religious views and/or identities did not conform to their religiously driven, bigoted preconceptions.“
Sparks rejected the claims in a 29-page declaration to the court. In a statement on Twitter posted after this article first published, Sparks asserted that reporting on the headmaster’s claims was “not news” and “false,” and that some of the claims against him had been dismissed. (Sparks would not provide The Daily Beast with additional comment for this story.)
But emails obtained by The Daily Beast show the romance writer repeatedly taking issue with Benjamin’s attempts to make the school inclusive to all faiths, races, and sexualities.
In one stern message, Sparks chastised the former headmaster for “what some perceive as an agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted.” In another, he put forward a motion to ban student protest at the school, an impulse that came directly in response to two lesbian girls planning to announce their orientation during chapel. In a third, while listing complaints against Benjamin, he cites “misplaced priorities at the school level (GLBT, diversity, the beauty of other religions, as opposed to academic/curricular/global issues, Christian traditions, etc.).”
Benjamin, whose suit includes claims of defamation, also alleges Sparks spread rumors that he suffered from a mental disorder. The former headmaster told The Daily Beast he has never received any such diagnosis, but in another obtained email, the romance writer laid out a case for diagnosing him, citing forgetfulness and an “obsession” with what he characterizes as “non-relevant” issues. “While I am not a doctor–and as scary as this may sound to you–I do believe that [Benjamin] is suffering from a mental illness of some sort,” Sparks wrote in the message. “What that is–Alzheimer’s, a variance of bi-polar, something else–I have no idea.”
Sparks, a former pharmaceutical salesman-turned-love-chronicler, has published 20 novels to tremendous commercial success. In the Sparks literary universe, handsome, hard-working, and occasionally brusque men tend to encounter waifish, strong-headed women, fall passionately, chastely in love, only to have some obstacle—status, sickness, hidden histories—intervene. Tragedies are common, love usually conquers, and Christian values can often be found in between. All of Sparks’ books have become New York Times bestsellers, with more than 105 million copies sold internationally, and 75 million in the United States alone; and 11 of them have been adapted to film—each a blockbuster hit, grossing a collective three-quarters of a billion dollars. Just this year, the author announced that a musical version of The Notebook—Sparks’ most successful novel and a meditation on love outlasting Alzheimer’s (the same disease Sparks would later suggest Benjamin had)—was slotted for a Broadway run.
Read full post and see emails on The Daily Beast
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