The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Latin America's most prominent living novelist, has been hospitalized in Mexico City for a lung and urinary tract infection, Mexican health officials told The Associated Press. Author of masterpieces such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." The AP notes that Marquez's books "have outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible." The 87-year-old writer nicknamed "Gabo" suffers from dementia, according to his brother, and has battled lymphatic cancer. Marquez's son Gonzalo told the news service there was no medical emergency, and that he expected his father to leave the hospital next week. Marquez was born in Colombia in 1927 and has lived in Mexico for the past three decades.
A lost book by historian Will Durant, who died in 1981, will be published in December by Simon & Schuster. It was found last year in his granddaughter's attic. Durant and his wife, Ariel, won a Pulitzer Prize for their sweeping 11-volume world history series, The Story of Civilization. In a press release, Simon & Schuster described Durant's final book, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War and God, as "his most personal work, a culmination of the wisdom, lessons, and personal opinions Durant formed during his 60+ years researching philosophies, religions, arts, sciences, and civilizations of the world."
Anne Tyler's 20th novel, set in Baltimore, will be published by Knopf in the spring of 2015, according to a press release from the publisher. Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for her novel Breathing Lessons. According to the release, "Her new novel begins in 1994 and slowly unwinds through three generations of the Whitshank family, revolving primarily around Red, a construction worker, his wife, Abby, a social worker, and their four children. The novel opens when Abby and Red receive a call from their only son, who has phoned with important news. Then, suddenly, the phone goes dead."
Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in many years, The Buried Giant, will be released by U.K. publisher Faber & Faber, The Guardianreports. There's no word yet on an American publisher. Ishiguro is known for his novelsNever Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Faber & Faber says, vaguely, that The Buried Giant is about "lost memories, love, revenge and war."
In an op-ed, Cara Hoffman writes about the harm done when women are left out of combat stories: "I can't help but think women soldiers would be afforded the respect they deserve if their experiences were reflected in literature, film and art, if people could see their struggles, their resilience, their grief represented. They would be made visible if we could read stories that would allow us to understand that women kill in combat and lose friends and long to see their children and partners at home." (Hoffman's new book, Be Safe I Love You, is about a female veteran.)
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