Bibliofile

Season’s Gleanings
Like the weather, book seasons have gone topsy-turvy this year. We had all the year’s major releases—Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Patrick French—bunched up in the unseasonal month of April. And while October-November is usually reserved for the year’s biggest—or most prestigious—releases, this time round it’s been unusually quiet, as if our publishers ran out of wind in the first half of the year. The star of the high season turns out to be Cherie Blair, whose autobiography, Speaking for Myself, is being "launched" in Delhi many months after its release. And we’ll have to wait till the end of November for the megabook of the year—Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. Nilekani will be on a six-city promo, starting with Delhi on November 24.

At Random
Is Random House India jinxed or what? When they finally found a New Zealander, Michael Moynahan, to head their headless India operation, HarperCollins has lured him back as CEO of their Australia and New Zealand operations. And this, when the meltdown has frozen shifts and moves worldwide.

Raisin’ Cain
Novelist Ross Raisin’s book will hardly go down as a novel with the most original title. But Raisin’s God’s Own Country, now on the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize along with Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, could perhaps teach Hindi writer Krishna Sobti that titles don’t really matter. Sobti’s 25-year-old lawsuit on a copycat title is still dragging on, long after Amrita Pritam, the writer she accused of stealing her title, died.