Word: best
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With these tectonic shifts, the business has abandoned its pretenses of collegiality and moved closer in structure and style to Hollywood, where an oligarchy of half a dozen companies hustles for hits. Says Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and a best-selling novelist himself, on the subject of big advances: "It's like stars in the movie business. If you want Cher for your movie, by God, you've got to pay Cher...
...many editors, a major concern is that the chain-bookstore outlets, which give little space on their increasingly crowded shelves to titles without mass appeal, will eventually reduce the publishing industry's incentive to bring out worthy books if they don't seem headed for the best-seller lists. Random House editor Jason Epstein, for one, has undertaken on his own to produce a bookstore in the form of a mail-order catalog that will contain about 200 categories of books and more than 40,000 titles, each accompanied by a short explanation. The $24.95 catalog, the size...
Publishers are hoping the bull market for writers will reverse itself, making authors and their agents humble again. Most of all, they talk nostalgically of the days when writers remained faithful and when publishers were not obsessed with best sellers and did not have to worry, in the words of Random House's Epstein, about "getting Faulkner on TV." Pointing to a promising first novel on his desk, he muses, "This just turned up the way these things do. But if the book is a success, we may never publish him again. His price may be too high...
Chamorro has long been the best-known woman in Nicaragua, and the family whose name she bears has been one of the country's wealthiest and most powerful for generations. "I am a symbol, I know that," she says. She is also an anomaly: an influential woman in a macho society, albeit one that claims to have eradicated sexism. What probably makes her most dangerous to the regime, however, is the fact that she can -- and regularly does -- act with the courage of those who have nothing left to lose...
...city cannot even afford new bulbs for its traffic lights. Parking meters work, but nobody feeds them because there is no money to hire meter maids. Garbage collection stopped for several months after the city fell $262,000 behind in payments to its trash contractor, and remains sporadic at best. Residents routinely dump garbage in vacant lots or abandoned buildings. As fast as buildings are boarded up to stop looting and dumping, thieves steal the plywood. Bob's Board-Up Service in St. Louis no longer accepts jobs in East St. Louis because customers there don't pay their bills...