Vikram Chandra, Are You Listening?

The hardback edition of Paul Anderson's Hunger's Brides was a whopping 1,376 pages long, weighing in at four pounds nine ounces. For the just-released paperback version, however, the author whittled it down to 768 pages, dropping one of the plotlines. It's now subtitled, The Essential Story from the Epic Hunger's Brides.

Several questions arise: what were the book's editors doing to begin with? Are the dropped pages to reappear in another paperback? And is the world of publishing becoming even more schizophrenic?

(Report courtesy The New York Times.)