Below are media mentions from Publishers Weekly magazine.
November 28, 1953
Source: Publishers Weekly Archive
From: SHOP TALK
MIDDLE WEST: … On November 9 The Chestnut Court Book Shop in Winnetka had the most successful autographing party ever given by either the Highland Park or Winnetka shop. The party was originally scheduled for Emmett Dedmon, author of “Fabulous Chicago,” but it turned out to be a double-header; Kay Hirsh writes: “We were told that Roald Dahl, author of ‘Someone Like You’ would be in Chicago because his wife, Patricia Neal, was opening that night in the leading rôle in “The Children’s Hour.’ The store sent out flash cards to a selected mailing list. “Never, not even Christmas Eve, has the shop been so mobbed.” And the sale came to 173 copies of “Fabulous Chicago” and 86 copies of “Someone Like You” (Knopf). “Considering the general resistance to short stories,” writes Mrs. Hirsh, “and the fact that Mr. Dahl is known only to a small coterie of followers of such magazines as the New Yorker and Harper’s, we think the sale of his book is equally impressive. We feel that having two authors on one program is a fine idea, as two different kinds of people came to the party: those who wished to meet (or greet) Mr. Dedmon were enchanted by Mr. Dahl, and those who wished to meet Mr. Dahl lingered to meet Mr. Dedmon. As far as we are concerned, the most heartwarming part of the whole evening was that people stayed for as long as two or three hours.” By Wednesday night, the remaining 14 copies of “Someone Like You” were gone; “Fabulous Chicago” is selling at “an alarming rate.” Mrs. Hirsh concludes with a request to publishers to “give us more authors like these two and we will continue to break our backs for more fabulous autographing parties”
May 8, 1961
Source: Publishers Weekly Archive
From: CURRENTS — “ANOTHER AUTHOR AS FATHER”
Roald Dahl has put aside, briefly, the sophisticated, offbeat tales that are his specialty (“Kiss Kiss,” etc.) to turn out “James and the Giant Peach,” to be published by Knopf in October as the firm’s leading fall juvenile. Mr. Dahl’s book, described by his publisher as “a believable fantasy for children of all ages,” is about the marvelous flight across the Atlantic taken by a boy and his friends inside a giant peach. It will be illustrated in color by Nancy Burkert. Mr. Dahl and his wife, actress Patricia Neal, have three children, for whose delectation the saga of James was originally propounded.
December 15, 1989
Source: Publishers Weekly Archive
From: “Roald Dahl Lambastes Booker For Giving Elitist Awards”
Ever since Keri Hulme’s The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985, Britain’s most prestigious literary award has been criticized for honoring “difficult” or “unreadable” books—a criticism that ignores the wide appeal of titles such as the 1986 winner, Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
But the view persists and the ever-outspoken Roald Dahl chose the announcement of the £20,000 Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize November 28 to launch an attack on the Booker. Dahl was this year’s chairman of the judges for the Sunday paper’s prize, won by Rose Tremain for Restoration (Hamish Hamilton).
Billed as a prize for a “stylish but also enjoyably readable novel,” the Sunday Express award attracted particular attention with its brash commercials on popular radio stations. The ads referred to the prize as being “where publishing meets the proletariat, where the literati rub shoulders with library ticket holders… the one with the books you’d like to read, not the ones you feel you ought to….
As guest speaker at the award lunch, Dahl picked up the theme of the ads with a provocative attack on the Booker: “Everything seems to be wrong about the Booker… the judges appear to be chosen not as representatives of the general book reading public… but from a rarefied group of rather intellectual, very ‘literary-minded’ folk who choose books more for their literary elegance than their entertainment value.” He castigated the Booker judges for “misleading” the public by giving the prize to “what they call a beautifully crafted book which is so often beautifully boring” and claimed most winning novels have “almost no plot at all.”
In fact both Restoration and the 1987 and 1988 Sunday Express winners—Brian Moore’s The Color of Blood and David Lodge’s Nice Work—were also shortlisted for the Booker. But the Sunday Express shortlist this year did emphasize the story-telling element. Tremain’s competitors were Margaret
Forster’s Have the Men Had Enough? (Chatto), P.D. James’s Devices and Desires (Faber), Hilary Mantel’s Fludd (Viking), Colin Thubron’s Falling (Heinemann) and Passing On (Deutsch) by Penelope Lively, the 1987 Booker winner. —VIVIENNE MENKES