The Hong Kong International Literary Festival winds up today, but there is still time to mingle with the literati. Check out The Planner on page 10 or go to
www.festival.org.hk for details of the programme, or just head to the Fringe Club in Central between 9am and 5.30pm, to hear from authors including Yann Martel (Life Of Pi), Rani Manicka (The Rice Mother), Peter Hessler (Rivertown), Andrew Marshall (The Trouser People) and Karl Taro Greenfeld (Standard Deviations), who are among those involved in sessions on the final day. Undercover will bring you all the gossip from the festival next week.
As part of the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong's 40th-anniversary celebrations, the hotel has produced a cookbook featuring 40 favourite recipes from its seven restaurants and bars. The Mandarin's team of chefs, headed by executive chef Rudolph Blattler, worked with local food writer Nell Nelson to ensure the recipes are suitable for smaller kitchens. The tome will be sell for HK$180 at the Mandarin's book kiosk from the end of this month.
The Writers' Circle Rectangular Table dinner will be held on Thursday at the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Come along and meet other members, eat, drink, discuss the literary festival and the new Wild East magazine, which has sparked plenty of e-mail discussion because none of the contributors to the first issue were women. Outrageous! Perhaps Hong Kong's literary women were too busy reading festival authors' books to write anything this time around. The event is for Writers' Circle members only, though you can join on the night. Contact Lawrence Gray at
[email protected] for details.
With an audience of millions in more than 80 countries, the Thames Television series Minder was one of Britain's top television programmes of the 1980s, and turned such expressions as 'a nice little earner' and ''er, indoors' into catchphrases across the country. Now a Hong Kong-based academic, Brian Hawkins, has written the definitive guide to the series, The Phenomenon That Was . . . Minder, which is being published by Inkstone Books, an imprint of Hong Kong's Chameleon Press. The book is the first in a new programme of custom-publishing and international distribution by Inkstone in collaboration with LightningSource, a supplier of print-on-demand services in Britain and the United States. 'Inkstone titles are available not just in Hong Kong, but also become available automatically to American and British retailers via leading US and UK wholesalers, and are also automatically available via Amazon in both countries,' explained Peter Gordon, managing director at Image Alpha, one of the partners in Chameleon Press. This allows authors and publishers to sidestep the problem of distribution and logistics and concentrate on developing targeted and direct marketing. The Phenomenon That Was . . . Minder is being cross-promoted with Clearvision, the distributor of Minder DVDs in Britain, and has been promoted on Sky TV's Web site. More on:
http://inkstone.chameleonpress. com and
www.minderphenome non.com.
Exiled Chinese author Gao Xingjian, now living in France, has been told to rest after suffering from exhaustion, the BBC reports. Gao, 65, author of Soul Mountain and The Other Shore, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 and has since been travelling the world. 'Gao Xingjian is suffering from extreme fatigue linked to the seven years he spent in re-education camps in China and considerable psychological wear linked to post-Nobel activities,' said his spokesman, Salvatore Lombardo.
Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss has gone into the publishing business, according to the Los Angeles Times. Her first project, a tell-all illustrated memoir titled Pandering, was released last month, and she has six more planned for the next two years including 'a gritty photo documentary about Florida strippers and prostitutes by Evan Klanfer, a fashion photographer; Emanuel Zola's book on Tupac Shakur; and Libby Keatinge's stories about working as a Beverly Hills tutor'. So far Pandering, at US$50 (HK$390), hasn't sold well: 'In today's economy that's tough, but I'm Heidi Fleiss, I can't put out a cheap product,' she said.