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Oprah Picks 'Great Expectations,' 'Tale of Two Cities'
Oprah Winfrey went "old school"--her words--in selecting two 19th century novels for her next Oprah’s Book Club pick. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, both by English master novelist Charles Dickens, made Oprah’s reading list. On her Monday show, Oprah urged her audience to read Dickens over the holidays, confessing she had never read him. The novels are available from a number of publishers. For book club purposes, Penguin had produced a paperback edition containing both books.
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Koliadina Wins Russian Booker
The Flower Cross, a novel written in old Russian language by Elena Koliadina--which was published exclusively online--has won the 19th Russian Booker Prize and 600,000 rubles (about $19,200) in prize money. Russia's biggest publisher, Publisher AST, will publish a print edition of the book this month.
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Melville House Partners with Shakespeare and Company for Novella Prize
Indie publisher Melville House will publish the winner of the first Paris Literary Prize competition, sponsored by the historic Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris and the de Groot Foundation. The competition seeks submissions of 20,000-30,000 works of fiction by December 18.
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New Poetry Prize in Canada Focuses on Recitation
Last week, Canada's unofficial patron of poetry, Scott Griffin, unveiled a new effort to bring more poetry into the minds and everyday lives of Canadians. The founder of the $200,000 Griffin Poetry Prize launched a high school poetry recitation competition that is beginning as a pilot project in 12 Ontario high schools. It is intended to extend to Quebec schools next year and across the country after that.
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Amazon and Penguin Announce Fourth Novel Award Competition
Amazon.com and Penguin Group have announced the fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. Due to the popularity of the additional young adult category in 2010, the competition will again award two grand prizes: one for general fiction and one for best YA novel. Each grand prize winner will be published by Penguin Group. The 2011 competition will again be open to unpublished and self-published novels.
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2010 National Book Awards
At least for one evening the industry can laugh and put aside questions about gender equity and even the future of print ("we're here to celebrate the book," Borowitz said with mock solemnity, "and its bastard cousin the e-book") and raise a toast to books, authors, and reading.
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Erskine Wins NBA in Young People's Literature
Kathryn Erskine was filled with gratitude as she stepped up to the podium on Wednesday night to claim the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, for her novel Mockingbird (Philomel), about a 10-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome.
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Kelley, Everett, Dove, Madhubuti Win Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards
Authors Robin D.G. Kelley, Percival Everett, Haki Madhubuti and Rita Dove were the winners at the 9th annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, held last night in Washington D.C. The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards are presented annually to authors of African descent for the best works in fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the previous year.
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Gaspereau Press Swamped as Skibsrud Wins Giller
Canada's most prestigious and richest fiction prize, the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was awarded last night to the debut novel The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, published by Gaspereau Press. The house is so small and its production so dedicated to artisanal quality that the book will likely not be available in sufficient numbers to immediately satisfy the big bump in demand that a Giller win creates.
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PW's Best Adult and Kids' Books of 2010
Today, PW launched its best books of 2010 in two separate lists: 100 adult books and another 40 kids books. We think you'll like the lists and find enough to keep your reading until we compile our 2011 lists!
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PW's Best Children's Books 2010
We scoured the past year's books for children and teenagers and selected the very best. This year we have 40 Best Books (plus one for good measure), covering our favorite picture books, novels, and nonfiction. From babies who take over upon arrival and lizards learning about friendship and art in the desert, to twins who are not identical in every way and dystopian worlds that fall apart in almost every way conceivable, 2010 offered something for everyone.
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Best Books of 2010
This year we took our annual slugfest to the pub underneath our new office and came up with a list of the year's top 100 books that could be our best ever. It wasn't any easier with a drink in hand to pick what we had to agree on were the best books of 2010, but once again, we've got a list we love.
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Growing Up Small Press
Bruce McPherson and Allan Kornblum go way back. Both were early pioneers in the small press movement of the 1970s, McPherson coming of age in the heady literary scene surrounding Brown University and Kornblum taking the path of the artisan—studying with the letterpress legend Harry Duncan in Iowa City and beginning as more of a printer than a publisher.
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Amazon Underwrites Best Translated Book Award With Cash Prize
After years of running the Best Translated Book Awards without any cash prizes, the University of Rochester has received $25,000 for this year's winners from Amazon. The awards, launched by Three Percent--a Web site dedicated to raising the awareness of literature-in-translation launched by Open Letter Books (the non-profit press funded by the University)--celebrate original works of international fiction and poetry that have been published in the States in the prior year.
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AAP's Young to Publishing Group Hosts NBA Party
The Association of American Publishers' Young to Publishing Group will host its inaugural House Party: A Celebration of the National Book Awards on November 17, as the award ceremony is taking place. AAP has partnered with the National Book Foundation to broadcast an exclusive, live feed of the awards ceremony at the party, which will run from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM.
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The NBA Aftermath
The announcement last week of the National Book Award finalists brought a variety of responses. Many cheered that four of the five fiction nominees are women. Others cheered that Jonathan Franzen wasn't one of those fiction nominees. Some puzzled over nominated titles that are not so well known, while still others cheered that they weren't so well known.
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'PW' Reviews 'Cultures of War' and 'Lord of Misrule'
Here are new PW reviews of two of yesterday's National Book Award finalists, whose books are just out or due out soon.
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Patti Smith, Peter Carey Among National Book Award Finalists
Today, writer Pat Conroy announced the Finalists for the 2010 National Book Award from the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. The finalists include rock legend and poet Patti Smith, whose memoir Just Kids (Ecco) is a nonfiction finalist, and Man Booker finalist Peter Carey, for his novel Parrot and Olivier in America (Knopf).
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Jacobson Wins Booker
Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize with The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) and joked that he was "speechless - so I'll give the speech I prepared in 1983," the year of his debut with Coming from Behind. Jacobson was long-listed for the prize in 2002 and 2006 but has never previously been shortlisted. Bloomsbury US has just released the title.
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Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel; Picador Reprints 10 Paperbacks
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature today. Vargas Llosa is known for his political works that focus largely on Latin American power and corruption. Macmillan division Picador publishes most of Vargas Llosa's books in the U.S. and is reprinting 10 of his paperbacks in light of the win.
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