‘Moby-Dick’ sparks Mass. legislative battle: “What about Louisa May Alcott? What about (Nathaniel) Hawthorne? How am I going to face my constituents?” she said. [USA Today]

Debut author wins Booker with searing portrait of Indian poverty: Aravind Adiga, a first-time author from India, won the Man Booker Prize last night with his novel The White Tiger, which was praised by the judges for presenting the “dark side of India” and likened to Shakespeare’s Macbeth “with a delicious twist”. [Independent]

Booklovers turn to Karl Marx as financial crisis bites in Germany: Karl Marx is back. That, at least, is the verdict of publishers and bookshops in Germany who say that his works are flying off the shelves. [Guardian]

National Book Award Finalists Announced: Author Scott Turow announced this year’s National Book Award finalists in Chicago earlier today. The finalists include two previous NBA winners and three debut novelists. Among the fiction finalists are Peter Matthiessen, a 1979 winner for nonfiction, for his novel Shadow Country (Modern Library); and Marilynne Robinson, a finalist in 1983 and 1989, for her novel Home (FSG). [Publishers Weekly]

Publishers seek new talent in Arab world: Western publishers are launching a drive to tap the Arab world for new stars, hoping to bridge the language gap with more than 200 million native Arabic speakers - and make money from selling books. [Guardian]

October 20th, 2008 at 10:36 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Literary critic rejects rubbish TV award on air: It was meant to be the crowning moment of an illustrious career, but the award of a lifetime-achievement prize to Germany’s top literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, veered off script when he spurned the prize and tore into German television. [Guardian]

‘Simpsons’ writer nabs Thurber Prize: Larry Doyle, a former TV writer-producer for “The Simpsons,” was named the winner of this year’s Thurber Prize for American Humor. He was cited for the novel “I Love You, Beth Cooper.” [Chicago Tribune]

Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy: The allegations could diminish Mr. Kundera’s moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism’s corrosion of daily life. The reclusive Mr. Kundera vehemently denied the account. [NYT]

Andy Burnham: a barbarian: The culture secretary is proposing that libraries should abandon the rule of silence. What a cruel and futile plan. [Guardian]

My Parrot, My Self: In 2006, newspapers reveled in the tale of Ziggy, an 8-year-old parrot in Britain who exposed the secret affair that his owner’s girlfriend was conducting with a man called Gary. Ziggy made kissing sounds when the name Gary was spoken on TV and said, “Hiya, Gary,” when the girlfriend’s cellphone rang. She broke down and confessed after Ziggy said, “I love you, Gary,” in an imitation of her voice. The revelation of female infidelity is in fact an ancient staple of parrot literature. [NYT]

October 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Le Clézio, French Writer, Wins Nobel: France’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterized by ”poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy” and focused on the environment, especially the desert. [NYT]

Days of children reading books ‘are numbered’: The days of children reading traditional books are numbered, claims the man spearheading a campaign to improve literacy in schools. [Independent]

Can New Bookstores Survive?: In the long-term, whether experience, distinctive inventory, new ways of merchandising or deep pockets will be enough for the latest crop of bookstores to weather the all-important first five years of business is anyone’s guess. [Publishers Weekly]

E-Textbooks for All: an experiment soon to be underway at the University of Texas at Austin will shift certain classes entirely to e-textbooks. [Inside Higher Ed]

Top novelist feels pressure to ‘dumb down’: Margaret Drabble, one of Britain’s leading novelists and biographers, believes her publishers are pushing her to “dumb down” her work to appeal to a larger readership. [Independent]

Author’s mass-market success upsets Indian literati: He is the biggest-selling writer in English you’ve never heard of. His name doesn’t grace any Booker list, but it is found on the lips of every college student in India. While the global literati dwell on the fiction of India’s past, Chetan Bhagat has become India’s favourite writer by embracing the present. [Guardian]

Charles Wright, Novelist, Dies at 76: Charles Wright, who wrote three autobiographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died on Oct. 1 in Manhattan. [NYT]

An insular view of the Nobel prize: The Nobel prize for literature doesn’t really have much to do with literary excellence - and that’s not a bad thing. [Guardian]

October 9th, 2008 at 11:11 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Cooking with balls: the world’s first testicle cookbook: “The tastiest testicles in my opinion probably come from bulls, stallions or ostriches, although other people have their own favourites,” says Mr Erovic. He also uses those from pigs and turkeys in his cooking and points out that “all testicles can be eaten - except human, of course”. Glad to hear it Ljubomir. [Guardian]

Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers: The online game that Mr. Haarsma designed not only extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel. [NYT]

The World’s Best Paid Authors: In fact, the 10 stars on our list of the best-paid authors pulled in a combined $563 million between June 1, 2007, and June 1, 2008, thanks to hefty advances, impressive sales and silver screen adaptations. [Forbes]

Publisher speeds up release of book about Muhammad: With British publication in doubt for Sherry Jones’ “The Jewel of Medina,” the U.S. publisher of her controversial novel about the Prophet Muhammad has moved up the release date from Oct. 15 to Monday. “By speeding up the publication, we wanted to reduce or eliminate the chance of violence,” Eric Kampmann, president of Beaufort Books, said Thursday, noting that three men were arrested in London last weekend for a fire-bomb attack on the offices of publisher Gibson Square. [Yahoo]

A toast to the late crime writer Jim Crumley: Nineteen days ago an era ended. On Sept. 17, Jim Crumley died. For crime writers of my generation he was the lion, a ferocious but tenderhearted beast who showed us how to haul the spirits of Hammett and Chandler into America’s post-Vietnam mess and make detective stories matter again. [San Francisco Chronicle]

The cultural whipping boys’ manifesto: France has vomited on us for too long: Michel Houellebecq, the award-winning novelist and ageing enfant terrible, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the dapper leftwing philosopher, epitomise France’s love-hate relationship with its bestselling literary exports. In a surprise joint venture, they have produced a book of confessional letters to each other, raging at the vitriol heaped on them as the “whipping boys of our era in France”. [Guardian]

Phila. gay bookstore Giovanni’s Room marks 35 years: That persistence is what has kept the lights on at Giovanni’s in an era when independent bookstores everywhere are going dark. Opened in 1973, Giovanni’s marked its 35th anniversary Wednesday with a nostalgic soiree. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

October 6th, 2008 at 8:59 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

PUBLISHERS TOSS $6M BOOK OFFER FOR ‘30 ROCK’ STAR: PUBLISHERS have been chasing Tina Fey to write a book for years. [NY Post]

What My Copy Editor Taught Me: Helene had no literary theories — she had literary values. She valued clarity and transparency. She had nothing against style, if it didn’t distract from the material. Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and the false word, at the unearned conclusion. She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader: good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning. [NYT]

Nobel judge: There’s nothing great about the American novel: There is no argument like a literary argument. You can criticise a nation’s politics, or its cuisine, or even its dress-sense, but to describe a nation’s books as “ignorant” is fighting talk. [Independent]

Firebomb attack on book publisher: The London home of the publisher of a controversial new novel that gives a fictionalised account of the Prophet Muhammad’s relationship with his child bride, Aisha, was firebombed yesterday, hours after police had warned the man that he could be a target for fanatics. [Guardian]

Is Christopher Paolini’s Brisingr the new Harry Potter?: Christopher Paolini has become a publishing sensation with his Inheritance Cycle fantasy books. [Telegraph]

Why a US alternative to manga failed: But the thing is, DC Comics’ Minx imprint - the abrupt closure of which was confirmed on Wednesday without even a self-justifying press release – could and should have had a future. [Guardian]

October 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

The best place to watch language evolve: Urban Dictionary might seem a frivolous place for a poet to go a-browsing. But it’s a brilliant window on English in transition. In just over an hour online I have learned 20 new words (or more properly neologisms). I have learned that to remove a friend on Facebook, is to “deface”, that “thumb me” is to ask someone to send you a text message, and that “veepstakes” are “the process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate … a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as “veep” and sweepstakes”. [Guardian]

Book Of A Lifetime: Kennedy’s Latin Primer, by Benjamin Hall Kennedy: It has lived in my desk, thumbed, defaced, treasured and from time to time mistreated, for more than 40 years, since I was 12. Benjamin Hall Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer is the Rolls-Royce of text-books and surely the longest lived: 120 years after its publication it is still the best-selling book in the Classics section of my local university bookshop. [Independent]

Words can never hurt us: Twenty years after The Satanic Verses, Muslims are beginning to appreciate the right of others to offend them. [Guardian]

September 26th, 2008 at 10:48 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

50 greatest villains in literature: These are the best of the worst: bloodsuckers, pederasts, cannibals, Old Etonians…the dastardliest dastards ever to have lashed damsel to track and waited for a through train. [Telegraph]

Is e-literature just one big anti-climax?: A year later, Mark Amerika’s Grammatron transcended the fledgling genre by turning it into a multimedia extravaganza. This, I believe, was a crucial turning point. The brief alliance between literati and digerati was severed: groundbreaking electronic fiction would now be subsumed into the art world or relegated to the academic margins. [Guardian]

James Crumley, Crime Novelist, Is Dead at 68: James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 68 and lived in Missoula. [NYT]

Tom Wolfe Isn’t Worried: Tom Wolfe, 77, still has his white suits, white cars and his spiny, italicized, hyper-exclamatory words for certain dum-dum second-raters (like investment bankers). [Observer]

Odd couple’s book of letters gets French literary world buzzing: After months of speculation, the duo was revealed yesterday as Michel Houellebecq, France’s award-winning enfant terrible, and Benard-Henri Lévy, the dapper, leftwing philosopher. The odd couple, who embody France’s love-hate relationship with its celebrity writers, have produced a book of letters to each other in which they lay themselves bare, about their reputations, politics, loves and parents - key for Houellebecq after his mother recently published a memoir calling him a sex-crazed idiot and manipulative fake. [Guardian]

September 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok: David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life. [NYT]

Reprints are king in parts of book world: People whose lives are tied up with books, as writers, critics, booksellers or readers, are always — always — looking for something new. But in the last few years, they’ve been turning to something old. The publishers specializing in reprints have become increasingly important to the people who haunt bookstores searching for the next great read. [Los Angeles Times]

Poetry’s popularity soars online: Poetry, long thought of as an art form in terminal decline, is taking off on the internet according to new figures. [Telegraph]

Target Now Selling Sony Reader: Sony’s Reader Digital Book is now available in Target stores nationwide. [Publishers Weekly]

Annie Proulx bemoans torrent of ‘pornish’ Brokeback fan fiction: The Pulitzer prize-winner calls the film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain “a source of constant irritation” as she’s bombarded with pornographic fan literature. [Guardian]

September 19th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

The End: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world. [New York]

Why cowboys read: America’s libraries are faring surprisingly well in the internet era. Circulation has been rising steadily for the past few years, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics. Libraries are especially thriving in the conservative rural heartlands. The average Wyoming resident checked out nine books in 2005-06, compared with an average of five in California and two in Washington, DC. [Economist]

Attack of the Megalisters: Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. [NYT]

Telegraph signs Alexander McCall Smith to write serialised novel: The website will publish the first of 100 successive episodes of his new novel, Corduroy Mansions, on Monday. In what is believed to be the first project of its kind on a UK website, the serialisation will include simultaneous daily podcast editions, narrated by Andrew Sachs, available to download through iTunes. [Guardian]

Carrie the Kid: Candace Bushnell, whose mid-’90s New York Observer column was the basis for Sex and the City, has signed a deal with the children’s division at HarperCollins to write a young adult novel about Carrie Bradshaw’s high-school years. [Observer]

The new wave of French urban fiction: This new trend first hit the headlines at the Gauloise-end of the nineties when Rachid Djaïdani - a small-time actor and Thai-boxing enthusiast from the deprived banlieues - published his debut novel (Boumkeur) to rave reviews. [Guardian]

September 17th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.

Baltimore Has Poe; Philadelphia Wants Him: But the ghoulish argument between the cities over the body and legacy of the master of the macabre has continued in blogs and newspapers, and on Jan. 13 Mr. Pettit is to square off with an opponent from Baltimore to settle the matter in a debate at the Philadelphia Free Library. [NYT]

Publisher moving on from O.J. to Muhammad: The publisher that took on O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” after it was dropped in the face of public outrage has signed up another rejected project: Sherry Jones’ “The Jewel of Medina,” a novel about a wife of the prophet Muhammad that Random House canceled out of concern that it would anger Muslims. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Esther Woolfson’s top 10 birds in fact and fiction: The prize-winning nature writer lists her favourite instances of birds in literature across the ages. [Guardian]

Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak’s 80th year — which ended with his birthday earlier this summer and is being celebrated on Monday night with a benefit at the 92nd Street Y — was a tough one. He has been gripped by grief since the death of his longtime partner; a recent triple-bypass has temporarily left him too weak to work or take long walks with his dog; and he is plagued by Norman Rockwell. [NYT]

The Nazi novelist you should read: Isaac Bashevis Singer famously called Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun the father of modern literature. I’d take this further and say that he’s the father of postmodern literature as well. With 1890’s Hunger, Hamsun unleashed the first in a series of novels that anticipated everything from the terrifying absurdities of Kafka to the desiccated ennui of the existentialists and even Charles Bukowski’s autobiographical explorations. [Guardian]

September 11th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Book News.