Category: publishing

“The chairman of the Booker judges, Sir Peter Stothard, called Mantel ‘the greatest modern English prose writer’ working today, and said she had ‘rewritten the book on writing historical fiction’.”

Ewan Morrison’s Tales From the Mall won more reader votes than the next two contenders combined. But Morrison did some last-minute e-mail campaigning that prize honcho Sam Jordison found both unseemly and self-contradictory – and then he got into a weird exchange with Jordison himself.

The imprint, called Infinitum Nihil (“nothing is forever,” and also the name of Depp’s film production company), already has several titles in the works, including a Bob Dylan biography by historian Douglas Brinkley and an unpublished novel by folk singer Woody Guthrie.

“So as French bookshops prepare to take stock of the British bestseller … or, as it is called in French, Cinquante nuances de Grey … our Gallic cousins would like us to know that they have nothing to learn from us Anglo-Saxons in matters of sadomasochism.”

“A collection of manuscripts written by Franz Kafka and Max Brod will finally be transferred from private hands to the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv District Family Court ruled on Friday, bringing an end to a long and complicated legal proceeding.”

Sabina Knight, a scholar specializing in contemporary Chinese literature, offers an intro.

And he’s not afraid to show it, with a census and family tree for more than 900 (Nine. Hundred.) characters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

On Charing Cross Road, “There’s no point in trying to replicate a large chain. Instead, we can curate things a little better.”

In short: E-books; traditional publishers love self-published winners; Amazon expands Kindle Lending Library (to iffy reactions); and in mobile news: Africa and China.

“This is why novels are magic, and why they’re not only worth celebrating: at some level it’s probably necessary that we celebrate them. They are invented untruths, but without those untruths – those literal lies – we’d be severely limited in what we could ever understand about our real selves.”