Word: ago
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Take Joni Evans, publisher of adult trade books at Random House. Two years ago, when she worked in a top editing job at rival Simon & Schuster, Evans was so determined to keep author Mario Puzo in her literary camp that she offered him a $3 million advance for his next book, sight unseen. A competitor outbid her by $1 million, so she matched the offer. "When I have to have it, I have to have it," she explains. The Godfather author, who jumped to Random House when Evans moved there in late 1987, is expected to deliver his pricey manuscript...
Less than four years ago, the publishing world gasped at the $5 million advance that William Morrow and Avon Books paid for hard-cover and soft-cover rights to James Clavell's Whirlwind. That record-breaking sum has since been equaled or topped repeatedly. Horror writer Stephen King was reportedly promised between $30 million and $40 million for his next four thrillers, to be published by Viking Penguin and New American Library. Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books shelled out $10.1 million for the next five novels from suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark. Warner Books paid Southern historical novelist Alexandra Ripley...
...books of story spinners like Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz are usually reliable bets, a more striking measure of the risky bidding war is the six-figure contracts that publishers are dangling in front of unknown authors or those who would have been considered hopelessly academic not long ago. Sometimes these eye-popping deals are based on a one-page proposal sent over a fax machine, or even on no proposal at all. Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, who received an advance of about $20,000 from Random House for his surprise 1988 best seller, The Rise and Fall...
...once sidelined for resisting his economic reforms. Analysts in Beijing feared that Deng had cast his lot with this ideologically rigid Gang of Elders, as the group was dubbed. Such fears were buttressed by renewed government denunciations of "bourgeois liberalization," the phrase that presaged a conservative crackdown two years ago. Some Chinese found a good deal of irony in the awkward situation. "The 80-year-olds," commented one wag, "are calling meetings of 70-year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds should retire...
Meanwhile, students holding out on the square knew that their numbers were dwindling and that their protest was turning into a minor sidelight to a power struggle. A few days ago, in a flash of their earlier exuberance, they erected a "Goddess of Democracy" at the northern end of the square. The 30-ft.-high sculpture, fashioned from plaster-covered Styrofoam and bearing a marked resemblance to the Statue of Liberty, drew contemptuous comments from the government -- and admiration from thousands of onlookers...