Below is a roundup of links to some of the news stories and book reviews related to law and the arts that caught my attention this week.
Penguin is reported to be delaying publication of an English translation of Zhang Ling’s award-winning Chinese novel Gold Mountain Blues “until it is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.” Chinese bloggers have alleged plagiarism of the work of such authors as Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, and Sky Lee; Zhang categorically denies the allegations. (Toronto Star)
A class-action suit for consumer fraud has been filed against Jimmy Carter and his publisher Simon & Schuster claiming that his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, “was falsely marketed as an accurate account of peace negotiations in the Middle East.” The fraud case arising from James Frey’s mostly fabricated memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is cited as a precedent. Simon & Schuster reject any parallel, pronouncing the suit to be “frivolous, without merit,” and “a chilling attack on free speech.” (NYT, The Faculty Lounge)
H.B. Fenn, Canada’s largest book distributor, has filed for bankruptcy protection in “the latest example of what has become ceaseless turmoil in Canada’s most vulnerable cultural industry.” Critics decry government inaction. Kim McArthur, of McArthur & Company Publishing, asks: “Why are they screaming about some Australians wanting to buy a potash company when there’s not a peep about the thing they’re meant to be protecting – Canadian publishers and Canadian authors?” (Globe & Mail)
A study commissioned by NBC Universal finds that music piracy is on the decline. Matt Rosoff draws the conclusion that, not only are people not buying, they “don’t care about music enough” to steal it either. (SFGate)
Artist Jeff Koons has “backed down in an intellectual property dispute over balloon dog-shaped bookends” manufactured by Toronto company Imm-Living and sold by San Francisco gallery Park Life. (NYT)
A U.S. District Court Judge has dismissed “a lawsuit accusing Christie’s auction house of failing to recognize a valuable drawing by Leonardo da Vinci and selling it for a fraction of its true worth.” (Reuters, Clancco)
Producers of The Hurt Locker seek to have a war veteran’s defamation suit against the film dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP statute as an attempt to stifle free speech. (Reuters)
Kirk Makin reports on “the latest in a series of court rulings” in a family battle over the estate of millionaire John Kaptyn, “written last week by an irate judge who compared the Kaptyns to Charles Dickens’s feuding Jarndyce clan, from the novel Bleak House.” (Globe & Mail)
One of fifteen unpublished Dashiell Hammett stories, only recently unearthed by editor Andrew Gulli in a Texas archive, is to be published in The Strand this month. Apparently not all of the stories are in Hammett’s classic hard-boiled style though, which makes the find all the more exciting to some. “We have discovered that he was a far more versatile writer than he ever gets credit for,” Gulli said. (The Guardian)
A joint investigative report titled Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America highlights the gulf between the reality of forensic investigation, and representations of it in detective novels and on television crime dramas. (NPR, Law & Humanities Blog)
Susannah Meadows has effusive praise for The Death Instinct, Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld’s “tremendous follow-up to his 2006 novel, The Interpretation of Murder.” (NYT)
David Orr’s perusal of Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, a new anthology edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford, prompts a broad-ranging and thought-provoking consideration of law, literature, and interdisciplinarity. (Poetry Magazine)
Nancy F. Koehn pronounces Ben Tarnoff’s Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters a “rollicking good read” that “shows how three con men were able to thrive in America’s early days because of a weak central government, an often-chaotic banking system, a turbulent economy and an entrepreneurial populace.” (NYT)
Roger Hutchinson finds John Macleod’s None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis to be “an absorbing account of malice and mischief in the 19th-century Hebrides.” (Scotsman)
Emily Temple displays and discusses “a series of cohesive covers for Schocken’s (part of Pantheon) backlist of Kafka books” designed by Peter Mendelsund which “will begin appearing on paperbacks early this summer.” I’ve posted a few of my favourites above. (Flavorwire)
