Olympic Timeout by Literati of China

By CHARLES McGRATH writing in The New York Times, August 8, 2008

BEIJING — The best-selling book in China right now is “The Tibet Code,” by He Ma, a novel whose title is a deliberate knockoff of you-know-what, which was an immense success when it came out here in translation.

But according to Patricia van Daalen, the rights manager for Shanghai 99, a new publishing house here, the resemblance may end there. “The book is much more serious than ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” Ms. Van Daalen said. “It’s very well researched, with a lot of facts about Tibet and Tibetan culture.”
Also doing well is “The Social Climbing of Du Lala,” by Li Ke, which sounds like a Judith Krantz novel without the furs and the shopping. It’s about a young woman from the provinces who, all on her own, rises in just eight years from an entry-level job to become the head of human resources at a big corporation.
But Chinese publishing is still mostly in the doldrums. Nothing is selling all that well, and no one is bringing out anything new. The situation is a little like that in the United States, where many publishers are reluctant to release anything important this fall until after the presidential election.
For the complete story cross to the NY Times online.