(video)Paris, France (GenevaLunch) - Three mistakes, but not plagiarism, were at fault, says French newscaster Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, famously known in France as PPDA, in the case of problems with his new Hemingway book. Some files became confused, then he did not actually read the proofs the editor sent him and which he signed off on, and finally, he never opened the book before autographing pre-publication copies that were sent off.
His new book, Hemingway, la vie jusqu’à l’excès, was scheduled to come out 17 January but publication was delayed to 26 January after the magazine L’Express accused him of copying then editing about 100 pages from an earlier book on Hemingway.
Peter Griffin in 1985 published the first of two volumes on the American writer. Griffin died in 2002. His work was translated into French and one of the disputes today centres around the rights to the French version and PPDA’s use of the text.
Poivre d’Arvor appears in a show that will be aired Friday on French television, saying that the problem was due to three mistakes (see video below). It’s not yet clear what the final version of the book, due out Thursday, includes or doesn’t include.
PPDA has, since early January, said little to explain how he came to include such a large chunk of someone else’s book, although he did tell French reporters that he had used Griffin’s work as part of his research.
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Jacques Chessex (photo: ©2009 Ellen Wallace)
Yverdon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A man widely considered to be one of Switzerland’s greatest writers, the unassuming Jacques Chessex who was the first non-French winner of the prestigious Goncourt literary prize, died Friday night in Yverdon just after a public presentation in the town’s library, surrounded by the books that were his great love. He collapsed when his heart gave out and died shortly afterwards. Chessex, age 75, was the author of 31 books, most of them slim but incisive novels famous for their eloquent language. They often described the world around him, in French-speaking Switzerland, but captured the threads of human relations that run deeper than local stories: “Explorer of the human soul in all its complexity,” were the words Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz used to describe him.
US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle filed their income taxes, which show him earning $2.6 million in 2008 from the sale of his two autobiographical non-fiction books, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father. The couple also earned about $200,000 in salaries and had a small amount of investment income. They paid $855,000 in federal taxes and gave $172,050 to charity, reports the Washington Post.
