Salman Rushdie has for some time been enjoying a relaxation of the strict security that surrounded him in the early 1990s. So he was a bit put out to be met, on arriving in Philadelphia to give a lecture, by an armed escort and guard dogs, and to find tactical teams swarming over the campus where he spoke. He said that the reception “absolutely horrified” him.

***

The literary world is divided over whether Dmitri Nabokov should destroy the partial manuscript of Laura, his father Vladimir's last work. Tom Stoppard is in favour of burning, because that is what the author requested; John Banville urges preservation. Dmitri has appeared to dither. But now he has intimated, in an e-mail to an Australian book show, that he may keep the manuscript, having decided “that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation”.

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Twiddling his thumbs during the recent Hollywood screenwriters' strike, the actor Rob Lowe decided to fill his time by writing a memoir. Publishers got excited; one, Jonathan Karp of Hachette, offered a reported $1 million for the book. Then the strike ended, and suddenly Lowe had more pressing projects in his diary: a TV series, and two films. Writing a book cannot compete. “We're going to come back to Karp when [Lowe has] done shooting all these things,” the actor's agent says, but adds: “If there's time then to do it.”

***

The next book from Chris Anderson, who acquired guru status with The Long Tail, will be called Free, and will describe how manufacturers in the digital world will have to give stuff away to survive. It is a concept that scares publishers. But one, Random House US, has conducted an experiment along these lines, and not with a title from the backlist: it gave away, in PDF format, one of its most hyped recent novels, Beautiful Children by Charles Bock - but for three days only. There were 15,000 downloads.

NICHOLAS CLEE

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