News & Notes

Book Binders
Ken Follett recently landed a $12.3 million contract from Dell for two novels. Jeffrey Archer claims he's getting $20 million from HarperCollins for two novels and a collection of short stories. But reports that Tom Clancy signed a ve-book, $65 million deal with Putnam were swiftly denied by his agent, Robert Gottlieb: ''It's not true. He has only one book under contract with Putnam, and they'll publish it next summer or fall.'' And anyway, says Gottlieb, at $65 million — or $13 million per book — Clancy ''would be undersold if you look at his hardcover and paperback sales. He's worth much more than that.''

Hot Java
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 65, may be Indonesia's most important writer, but all of his books are banned there. If you try to buy them on the black market, you may end up in jail — just like some students recently imprisoned there for selling his work. Now that an American publisher has taken an interest in Toer, however, he may nally nd a sizable readership here. Last March Morrow published Toer's rst major novel, The Fugitive (written on paper smuggled into a Dutch colonial prison cell in the 1940s), and next spring the publisher will release This Earth of Mankind, the rst volume of his masterwork quartet. Toer wrote the tetralogy in a government-run forced-labor camp in the early '70s. ''On one level, it's the story of a young Javanese boy's experiences with the Dutch colonial system,'' says William Schwalbe, who acquired the novels for Morrow. ''But the boy, Minke, is really a metaphor for the formation of an Indonesian conscience.'' Although the Suharto regime has kept Toer under house arrest in Jakarta for the past 10 years, he remains a greatly revered gure in Indonesia. PEN, which awarded him a Freedom-to-Write Award in 1988, estimates there are 500,000 copies of his most recent novel, Glasshouse (1988), in illegal circulation.