Don DeLillo

Fresh from selling film rights to Scott Rudin and signing a $2m publishing deal in the US, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg has struck a "substantial" six-figure deal with Jonathan Cape in the UK for his 900-page debut novel, City on Fire.

As the scramble for rights continues around the world, publishers are lining up to salute a book which his lucky UK editor described as "the best American novel I've ever read on submission". But the 34-year-old Hallberg is no literary ingenue.

We've all no doubt at some point in our reading lives found ourselves at the point where we realise that the book we're reading is not up to scratch.

Maybe there's a part of you that knows within a paragraph (or, worse, a sentence); perhaps it takes 50 pages, or a 100, before you start to ask yourself the question: is this a book that I should abandon?

Today in books and publishing: E.L. James' husband isn't a dom; Cosmopolis reconsidered; NYPD called in for Junot Díaz reading; Pussy Riot to storm e-readers.

Pussy Riot: the e-book. The City University of New York's Feminist Press plans to release Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom on Sept. 21st. The e-book will collect writings about the punk band/feminist collective who incurred the Russian government's wrath by performing an anti-Putin song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior.