New catalogue.

Open Letter has a new catalogue, this one for Summer 2012. [PDF via Open Letter]

The books, in release order, are:

• Children in Reindeer Woods, by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (April 2012)
• My First Suicide, by Jerzy Pilch (May 2012)
• The Planets, by Sergio Chejfec (June 2012)
• The Future Is Not Ours, new Latin American fiction edited by Diego Trelles Paz (July 2012)
• The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein (September 2012)

At first glance, I’m intrigued by the Jerzy Pilch and the Benjamin Stein. I might consider the Chejfec.

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The curious case of Quentin Rowan.

This came to me a bit late, but I’ve been reading up on the whole Quentin Rowan scandal. This post over at Melville House offers a kind of a good summary of where things are right now. [via Melville House]

It offers something of a quick and dirty nutshell-description in the opening lines:

The story of bookseller, poet, and plagiarist Quentin Rowan, who wrote the heavily plagiarized spy thriller Assassin of Secrets under the pseudonym Q.R. Markham, keeps getting stranger—after Rowan apologized for his deeds earlier in the week, he was back, yesterday, apologizing again after new literary thefts were discovered.

Jeremy Duns, who reviewed the book for Kirkus before this thing exploded, has a very illuminating (and sad) post on it over at his page. [via The Debrief]

Finally, at Three Percent, there has been a quite enjoyable podcast focussed mainly on this affair. [via Three Percent]

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