Newtonville Books Community Blog

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK – Philip Roth says he’s done with Nathan Zuckerman. But is Nathan done with Philip Roth? “Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman,” the headline from Time magazine reads. Roth, the story declares, “has exhausted the possibilities of his character,” the fictional adventurer of “The Ghost Writer,” “The Anatomy Lesson” and other novels.

That was 1983. Nearly 25 years and several more Zuckerman books later, Roth says he’s really finished with his most enduring protagonist. “Exit Ghost,” in which Zuckerman confronts old age and the decline of his powers, is, the author insists, the final word on the imaginary novelist with the Roth-like career.

“I think so,” Roth says when asked if Nathan is gone.

Think so?

“I KNOW so,” he responds, with a laugh. “I mean this to be conclusive, because that was my intention, and, as far as I know, my intentions are honorable.”

From the beginning, like a rebellious child, Nathan has never turned out as planned. Roth first thought of Zuckerman back in the 1970s, when he frequently visited Eastern Europe and became a champion of such Communist bloc dissidents as Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima.

An idea arose for a novel: to juxtapose the fates of a Western writer and an Eastern writer. Roth wrote a first draft, 200-300 pages. It wasn’t working.

“I thought, `No no no no, this was too much stuff for too little space.’ So I took it apart, and first I wrote `The Ghost Writer’ (published in 1979) and finally worked my way down to `The Prague Orgy,’” he says, referring to the first and fourth of his Zuckerman books, the first four of which were just reissued by the Library of America.

Like Roth, Nathan is a New Jersey native famous for a scandalous novel (“Portnoy’s Complaint” for Roth, “Carnovsky” for Nathan). Both are Jewish liberals born in the 1930s (Nathan is 71, Roth 74). Their affinity is so strong that when Roth wrote a memoir, “The Facts,” Nathan was given the final word, urging his creator not to publish the book.

“You are far better off writing about me than `accurately’ reporting your own life,” Nathan advises.

The appeal of Nathan, Roth explains, is that “certain characters give you room to do certain things.” You couldn’t blame Nathan for wishing that someone else had the honors: He has suffered writer’s block, impotency and the scorn of his family. In the mid-1990s, Roth kicked Nathan upstairs, restricting him to the status of “listener” in “American Pastoral,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize and centered on the brother of one of Nathan’s high school classmates.

“What happened with `American Pastoral’ was that I decided to give him (Nathan) prostate cancer,” says Roth, interviewed recently at the offices of his agent, Andrew Wylie.

“At the time I was thinking about writing the book, it seemed every third friend of mine had come down with this blight, and there were so many men struggling with this thing and it was so awful. And I thought, `Well, I will make him a member of his generation.”

After minor roles for Nathan in “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain,” Roth “thought it was over” again for his character. But as he began work on a novel about a man being treated for the effects of prostate surgery, he realized that man was Nathan, and the book became “Exit Ghost.”

In “The Facts,” Nathan lectures Roth on the perils of mixing life and literature. “My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times,” Roth’s character observes, “you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you is a walking text.”

Numerous books include close parallels to his own life, from his marriage to actress Claire Bloom, whom he eventually divorced, to his childhood in Newark. Roth not only dismisses as “irrelevant” any similarities, but denies even the intention of making readers believe they’re reading about him, even in books that feature a character named “Philip Roth.”

“When you’re writing, you’re throwing it all in your dream machine,” he says, “And you’re throwing whatever is handy and what is useful to you. And by the time when I’m finished writing the book, I don’t know whether something is drawn from life or not. It’s been remade.”

Compared to other Roth characters, including Peter Tarnapol (“My Life as a Man”) and “Philip Roth” (“Operation Shylock,” “The Plot Against America”), Zuckerman is actually the farthest from the author, who was adored by his parents and consistently produces a novel a year.

In “Exit Ghost,” Roth allows Nathan to write his own escape, or at least lets readers believe it’s Nathan wanting out. Nathan has met a young woman with whom he becomes infatuated. Unable to seduce her in real life, (the novel’s “real life”), he instead tries to write a fictional conquest, fails again and runs.

“Thus, with only a moment’s more insanity on his part — a moment’s more insanity on his part — a moment of insane excitement — he throws everything into his bag … and gets out as fast as he can,” Roth-Nathan writes.

Nathan has left, “for good.” And Roth’s well into another novel, without him.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070927/ap_en_ot/books_philip_roth;_ylt=Alk7bGbJz._5qdN_v5MUpbZREhkF

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer Sat Sep 29, 5:34 AM ET

TULSA, Okla. – Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots.

Tulsa native S.E. Hinton, a cult figure for 40 years since the publication of “The Outsiders,” knows the difference between the wild and the well-kept lawn. Her million-selling book not only helped establish the young adult novel but remains a classic story of gangs at knife’s edge.

Once a teen sensation who wrote her most famous book while still in high school, Hinton is now 59, a dry-witted, sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and sneakers for a recent interview. As a child, she dreamed of writing a book she wanted to read, a novel that told the truth about how kids think. Forty years later, a lot of young people still think she succeeded.

“I get letters from all over the world, saying, `It changed my life.’ Who am I to change somebody’s life? It’s not me. It’s in the book,” she says. “If people want to find me, they can. They’ll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.”

Hinton drove around Tulsa with a reporter on a recent afternoon, pointing out the estates of former oil barons, an overpass where young people were routinely beaten up and the movie theater mentioned at the beginning of “The Outsiders.” She is devoted to Tulsa, with it’s “bumps, booms and busts,” the luck of an oil economy. The restaurants are great — eating out is a favorite pastime — there’s room to ride her horses and people not only “like her, but also leave her alone.”

A 40th anniversary edition of “The Outsiders” has just been published and Hinton, who would rather write than talk about writing, also sat and chatted in the library of Will Rogers High School, the very room where she worked on parts of her novel.

“I was exhilarated,” she recalls about that time. “I remember the buzz, the feeling like you’re burning up.”

As a student, Hinton once received a “D” in creative writing, but she is now an honored alumna of Will Rogers, her picture displayed behind a glass case to the right of the library, along with such other notables as musician David Gates and singer Anita Bryant. Hinton rarely goes to the high school, but students apparently still like her books enough to steal them, according to librarian Carrie Fleharty.

“I can’t keep them on the shelves,” she says with a laugh. “The kids keep taking them out and `forgetting’ to bring them back.”

“The Outsiders” is the raw, but hopeful story of rival gangs that features narrator Ponyboy Curtis, the bookish greaser who can quote Robert Frost; macho Dallas Winston, blue eyes “blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the whole world”; and little Johnny Cade, a “dark puppy that has been kicked too many times.”

“I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows,” Hinton wrote in the novel. “Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better.”

Tulsa has changed in many ways since Hinton’s childhood, with oil giving way to aircraft parts and health care as major industries. But gangs are still a problem, school and police officials agree, and the weapons a lot deadlier than the switchblades carried by the teens in Hinton’s book.

“We have a significant gang presence and a set of issues we have to deal with, but that’s part of what resonates with the kids about her book,” says Will Rogers principal Kevin Burr. “We try to get the kids to understand that they’re not that different from each other or from kids who grew up in a different era.”

Forty years ago, the battles were fought between the upper class “Socs” (pronounced “soashes”) and the lower class — and lowercase — “greasers,” gangs so bitter that they entered the school through separate doors. Susan Eloise Hinton, daughter of a salesman and a factory worker, was neither a “greaser” nor a “Soc,” but more at home with the greasers, who lived in her neighborhood.

“I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly,” she says. “I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.”

She had been writing stories for much of her life, including a couple of “pretty bad” novels before getting started on “The Outsiders,” inspired after a friend of hers was beaten up on his way home from the movies.

Her novel is known to millions, but Hinton’s original audience was herself. She had long felt that popular culture offered nothing to remind of her own life, not such novels as “The Catcher in the Rye” (Holden Caufield needs a “good spanking,” she says with a laugh), not the movies or even rock ‘n’ rollers like Elvis Presley, a favorite of the greasers.

She started at age 15 and spent a year and a half working on the book, saying that the hardest part was knowing when to stop. Having taught herself to type because she couldn’t read her own handwriting, she typed out the first draft, 40 pages, single-spaced.

Hinton didn’t even think of publishing the book until the mother of one of her friends read the manuscript and liked it enough to contact an agent based in New York. Viking signed her up, for “a small advance,” and with a suggestion that she call herself S.E. in print, so male critics wouldn’t be turned off by a woman writer.

“The Outsiders” was published in 1967, but greeted more as a curiosity than a breakthrough. “Can sincerity overcome cliches?” began a brief New York Times review by Thomas Fleming. “In this book by a now 17-year-old author, it almost does the trick.”

“It was overemotional, over the top, melodramatic,” Hinton acknowledges. “But its vices were its virtues, because kids feel that way.”

Hinton’s first royalty check was $10, she says, and at one point “The Outsiders” was in danger of going out of print. But librarians and teachers made it a best seller, and a landmark, a turning point in how literature was presented to students.

“Before `The Outsiders,’ textbooks were used for English classes. I remember going to American Library Association conferences and they were clamoring for something different. We realized there was a real market for books such as `The Outsiders,’” says Ron Beuhl, a longtime friend of Hinton’s who worked with her in the 1970s when he was a publisher at Dell and specialized in young adult paperbacks.

For Hinton, fame at any speed was too sudden. She suffered from writer’s block, needing three years to complete her next novel, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” another story of street life in Tulsa that included Ponyboy as a minor character. Other novels, also in and around Tulsa, include “Tex,” “Rumble Fish” and “Taming the Star Runner.”

Hinton has been married since 1970 to her college sweetheart, mathematician and computer scientist David Inhofe (“He doesn’t read and I can’t add,” she jokes), and they have a son, Nick, now in his 20s. Hinton may be a sage to many adolescents, but even the author of “The Outsiders” was not spared the disapproval of her own teenager.

“It was so strange because the three of us were so compatible, going to restaurants and falling out of our chairs, laughing,” she recalls. “When he became a teenager, I was dumbfounded by the hostility. It was like someone shut off the light switch. I was really hurt. You had to walk on tippy-toes.”

Her career has been equally influential and inconsistent. There was a seven-year gap in the 1980s and 1990s as she raised her young son. Before that, in her 20s, she tried teaching, but quickly gave up. She became too attached to the students and reasoned, “I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few, and go nuts.”

According to Viking, a division of Penguin Group USA, “The Outsiders” has sold more than 13 million copies and still sells more than 500,000 a year. Even Hinton says her book is dated in some ways (no hard drugs or AK-47s), but it’s standard reading at Will Rogers, including in the classroom of Kim Piper, a 9th grade English teacher.

“There’s a lot of poverty at Will Rogers, a lot of broken families,” Piper says. “So kids here can especially identify with Ponyboy and his group. It’s what kids that age are thinking about, when they feel kind of isolated from everybody else.”

“(`The Outsiders’ is) an extremely outrageous and amazing book,” says one ninth-grader at Will Rogers, Esteban Rivero. “It talks about how youngsters live and how they can get all caught up in their friends and cliques. This book has taught me so many things about life.”

Inevitably, Piper also shows her students the movie version of “The Outsiders.” Francis Ford Coppola‘s adaptation, released in 1983 and reissued in 2005, features an uncanny ensemble of young performers who soon became stars: Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio and in a minor role, Tom Cruise.

“I was a mother to all of them, and I wouldn’t take any guff from any of them. If one of them acted up, I’d crack the whip and say, `I’m going to cut your lines,’” recalls Hinton, who worked with Coppola on the script and was on the set daily while filming took place in Tulsa. “They were these goofy teenage boys, no adult guidance, no nothing. They wore me out.”

Macchio, who played Johnny Cade in the film, is typical of many Hinton fans. He was 12 when he read the book and had never before made it through a novel. But “The Outsiders” got to him, in part because it was narrated by a teenager, not an adult, and in part because he saw so much of himself in Johnny.

“The characters were so well described you had really definite pictures of these guys,” Macchio says. “Johnny was always a character I felt looked like me. I was always the skinniest kid in school. I knew what it felt like to be the runt of the group. I was never the fastest or the strongest or the smartest or the coolest.”

Hinton still dreams about her old characters, and says it would be a “piece of cake” to bring back Ponyboy, but “I couldn’t capture the intensity. It would be a letdown.” Instead, she’s working on a “paranormal suspense” story and prefers history books to children’s stories. One fictional genre she knows enough about to despise: “chick lit.”

“It’s just another version of `Mary Jane goes to the prom,’” she says. “It’s all about the boys.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070929/ap_en_ce/books_s_e__hinton;_ylt=AnwCe34vmn_djAPP5o4sQhlREhkF

The National Book Foundation announced their first “5 Under 35″ honorees–”selected by a previous National Book Award Finalist or Winner as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting and is among the best of a new generation of writers”:

Kirstin Allio, author of Garner (Coffee House Press, 2005)

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books, 2007)

Asali Solomon, Get Down: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (Viking Press, 2007)

Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero (Harcourt, 2006)

A Calculated Approach
For ‘Eat, Pray, Love’;
Memoir Strikes a Nerve

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
September 14, 2007; Page A1

When Pearson PLC’s Viking imprint published Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” early last year, it printed 30,000 copies — only 5,000 more than the total U.S. hardcover sales of her previous release. “We had high hopes, but we didn’t put it out in best-seller numbers,” says Viking Publisher Paul Slovak.

The title — a chatty recounting of the author’s divorce, spiritual search and self-redemption as she traveled the world — was the fourth for Ms. Gilbert, a former writer at GQ magazine. Although her work was well-reviewed, Ms. Gilbert was considered a mid-list author, talented but not a proven seller.

Then a strange thing happened: The paperback edition of “Eat, Pray, Love,” published in January, quickly gained must-read status. Women everywhere, it seemed — on trains, planes and exotic beaches — were suddenly entranced, making it this summer’s break-out publishing hit. The book has had a 32-week run on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list, where it currently occupies the No. 1 position. Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights for actress Julia Roberts. The author says a sequel is already in the works.

“I was hooked on page one,” says Barbara Gattermeir, a grandmother in Kansas City., Mo., who inhaled the paperback in two days. “I’ve since recommended it to a lot of people, and they’ve all called, said they loved it, and that they’d given it to somebody else.”

The book’s transformation from respectable-selling hardcover to paperback sensation was no accident. It came about after a series of calculated moves from Viking’s sister Penguin paperback line, where executives worked to interpret sales patterns and create a marketing blitz to attract individual readers as well as book clubs.

Penguin’s approach shows how publishers, which typically don’t conduct market research, are becoming increasingly adept at hand-picking certain titles for stardom. It also underscores the pressure for publishing houses to deliver books that can get a big second wind from a paperback release — even if hardcover sales don’t exactly explode.

The vast majority of books face a tough reality. New releases that fail to take off in the first couple of weeks — when publishers often pay to place copies on stores’ front tables — are relegated to the back shelves.

“The usual reflex is to give a book two weeks in the sun and then move on,” says Bob Miller, president of Walt Disney Co.’s Hyperion book division. This rule of thumb, however, doesn’t apply to books with break-out potential.

“These titles require a different mind-set, the realization that by staying on them you can build something bigger than you’d see with the normal best-seller pattern,” says Mr. Miller.

In the case of “Eat, Pray, Love,” executives at Penguin paid close attention to the hardcover’s early reception. It was excerpted in Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine and landed a favorable cover article in the New York Times Book Review — both big plums for any author.

Hundreds of readers were emailing Ms. Gilbert to tell her how much her story had affected them — and to share their own intimate experiences. Instead of evaporating, hardcover sales surprisingly gained momentum in late spring both at major chains and large independent bookstores.

The title surfaced on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list at No. 12 for the issue dated March 19, and then fell to No. 15 the following week. On March 21, Ms. Gilbert appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and the book again hit the list for another week.

Ms. Gilbert, 38 years old, says she was pleased with her progress, but figured the book had seen its best days. “I was so happy with everything that happened,” she says. “I was more than satisfied. And then I thought that was it. It should have been over. But it wasn’t.”

Poring over sales data, Penguin executives saw that stores were reordering at unusual rates. Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation’s largest book retailer, continued to sell 400 to 500 hardcover copies through the end of the year. The book had “legs.” The trend suggested that the memoir was generating word-of-mouth publicity, believed by many to be the single most important factor in creating a major best seller.

“What you’re looking for are books that didn’t just ship and die,” says Kathryn Court, publisher of Penguin Books. Hardcovers, in other words, that have already “seeded the audience.” Ms. Court makes a point of sitting in on Viking’s promotion and strategy sessions, where she looks for titles that have reordered well and whose sales are growing week to week.

In fall 2006, Ms. Court began to put a plan in motion. First, she decided that the hardcover dust jacket — with its script lettering rendered in pasta, prayer beads and flowers — was so appealing that she would use it again for the paperback. Penguin then threw all of its sales and marketing muscle behind the paperback release, set for Jan. 30, 2007.

Each month Penguin publishes 15 to 20 fancy “trade” paperbacks — high-quality editions that are larger in format and easier to read than their cheaper, mass-market cousins. But it only really lends its weight to one or two. As a sign of its commitment, Penguin ordered a first printing of 170,000 paperbacks for “Eat, Pray, Love” — more copies than the book had sold in hardcover, and very large for a nonfiction title. Price, too, was significant. The hardcover cost $24.95, while the trade paperback would be much more affordable, at $15.

Next, Ms. Court stoked interest throughout the publishing house itself. She asked every member of Penguin’s sales and marketing team to read the book, including those who sell to the country’s largest chains. She wanted to spark the sort of enthusiasm that becomes infectious among store buyers — a tough crowd that is inundated with new books every week. “You’ve got to translate that excitement to people on the outside,” Ms. Court says.

Upon its debut, Penguin made certain the paperback would have high visibility in stores, promoting “Eat, Pray, Love” with freestanding 12-copy floor displays. That was a show of confidence among retailers, who reserve such prime, paid real estate for books with huge promise.

Penguin also invested in ads. In addition to targeting usual suspects like the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker magazine, it bought space in Yoga Journal — a nod to the book’s spiritual sensibility. The publishers’ sales and marketing team focused on the book’s progress in weekly meetings. The goal was to create so much buzz that the book would quickly become a New York Times best seller — which it did.

“A lot of the reason that these big paperbacks have sold so many copies is that we’re like a dog with a bone,” says Ms. Court. “We don’t give up.”

Selling Ms. Gilbert, the author, was just as crucial. Unlike many writers who don’t like touring and are uncomfortable in front of crowds, Ms. Gilbert has a sunny, upbeat personality that plays well on television and in personal appearances. Notes Ms. Court: “When the writer of a book is attractive, generous, and funny, booksellers end up rooting for her.”

It helped that Ms. Gilbert had built a following from her prior books. Her debut novel, “Stern Men,” a love story published in 2000 and set against the backdrop of lobster fishing in Maine, was chosen as a Discover Great New Writers selection at Barnes & Noble.

“We have a history,” says Edward Ash-Milby, who buys biographies and memoirs for Barnes & Noble, which quickly emerged as one of Ms. Gilbert’s most enthusiastic supporters.

Ms. Gilbert, who had toured at the hardcover launch of “Eat, Pray, Love,” hit the road again in support of her paperback, visiting more than 20 cities through early summer. The itinerary included a West Coast trip in June where she appeared at bookstores in Pasadena, Malibu and San Jose.

The author gained book-club traction. Her memoir was the No. 3 Book Sense Reading Group Pick for spring/summer 2007, which meant many of the independent bookstore members of the American Booksellers Association recommended it to their customers.

Such kudos are key to winning over retailers like the Tattered Cover. Based in the greater Denver area, it has three locations and sells to more than 100 book clubs. It also sends out a bimonthly email newsletter to 3,000 club members. Five years ago the retailer serviced only half as many clubs.

“It all feeds word of mouth, and that’s what takes you from 5,000 copies to 50,000 copies to 500,000 copies,” says Ms. Court. “We can’t make people love a book.”

Penguin is particularly adept at spinning gold from paperback titles. In addition to Ms. Gilbert’s memoir, it published Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Secret Life of Bees” in 2003 and last summer’s smash hit “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” by Kim Edwards. Both novels were strong sellers in hardcover but exploded as paperbacks with more than three million copies each in print.

The $15 U.S. paperback edition of “Eat, Pray, Love” will generate about $15 million in sales for the publisher if it sells two million copies, a number that now seems conservative. On average, a successful nonfiction paperback may sell 50,000 copies in a year, translating to less than $400,000 in sales.

Ms. Gilbert’s experience shows what a big influence fancy trade paperbacks are having on an industry that prices its mass-market paperbacks at about $7.99. Back in the 1970s, those smaller, rack-sized paperbacks were the blockbusters of the business, led by such best sellers as William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” (11 million copies sold); Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” (more than nine million copies), and Sidney Sheldon’s “The Other Side of Midnight” (six million copies plus).

“One of the mantras of publishing economics of the 1970s and early 1980s was that mass-market paperbacks could achieve 10 times the sales of a hardcover,” says Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Bertlesmann AG’s Random House Inc. Then retailers started discounting hardcover titles, and the smaller, cheaper paperbacks lost ground.

Laurence Kirshbaum, a book agent who heads up LJK Literary Management in New York, estimates that the current ratio between hardcover and paperback sales is one to one — mostly because so many hardcover books are so steeply discounted. “These days the bulk of the people who are interested in a book buy it in hardcover; that’s what makes titles such as ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ so exceptional,” says Mr. Kirshbaum. “They are throwbacks to the days when paperbacks sold huge multiples of the hardcover.”

Reading tastes, too, have changed. Virtually all of the hottest recent paperbacks have flourished largely because they appeal to women — buyers who account for 60% to 70% of U.S. book sales. Among the hits are Jeannette Walls’s memoir of her difficult childhood, “The Glass Castle,” which now has 1.7 million fancy paperbacks in print, and Azar Nafisi’s memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” which is selling at about the same level. Lisa See’s novel “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” has topped 1.1 million. None were hardcover blockbusters.

“These books connect with readers because they are about lives that are being transformed, or lives that are being saved,” says Patrick Nolan, director of trade paperback sales for the Penguin Group.

Ms. Gilbert’s story seemed tailor-made for a female audience. Although she appeared to have everything a successful woman could want, Ms. Gilbert experienced a premature midlife crisis in her late 20s, crying on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. To the dismay of her husband, she announced she was leaving him and wanted a divorce.

Then she found her “soul mate,” only to discover that they had different emotional needs and couldn’t build a life together. Finally, she decided to put everything behind her and get as far away as possible. She says her misery led to “prayer and a conversation with God that I wanted to take to the highest level.” Although her plans were uncertain, she knew she wanted to learn Italian, meditate at her guru’s temple in India and spend time with a healer in Bali.

It helps when a book has a happy ending, as it gives readers hope. Ms. Gilbert eventually finds love in the arms of a divorced Brazilian businessman whom she met in Bali. There was a hitch: If they wanted to live together in the U.S., they would need to get married — something they both had sworn never to do again.

That romantic saga is the subject of her next book. The first printing will be considerably larger than 30,000 copies.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118972984449527200.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone

By Stuart Kemp

LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) – The U.K. release of Ben Affleck‘s directing debut, “Gone Baby Gone,” has been put on hold because of similarities to the real-life case of Madeleine McCann, who went missing in May in Portugal.

The drama was scheduled to makes its U.K. premiere next month at the London Film Festival, but it was withdrawn by the local distribution arm of Walt Disney Co.

“We have been closely following the case and have decided to delay the release of the film in the U.K.,” said a spokeswoman for Buena Vista International U.K.

The festival’s artistic director, Sandra Hebron, said the withdrawal was done for “the right reasons.”

Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), the film tells the story of two private investigators hunting for an abducted 4-year-old girl in the seamiest side of Boston‘s underworld. Its North American release is set for October 19.

The McCann case has been dominating news programming and headlines not just in the U.K. but also around the world — particularly because the parents of the missing toddler have been named by Portuguese police as prime suspects. According to news reports, the McCann parents, who led an international public relations campaign appealing for the return of the missing child, could be charged in connection with the disappearance at any time by Portuguese authorities. They recently returned home to the U.K., but they could be required to return to Portugal. Their daughter went missing from a holiday hotel bedroom when the parents were out to dinner during a vacation in Portugal.

The festival kicks off October 17 with Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg‘s London-set Russian gangster film “Eastern Promises,” and closes November 1 with Wes Anderson‘s brotherly surreal romp “The Darjeeling Limited.”

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter