Category: publishing

“Elyse Fenton has been awarded the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, set up to honour the Welsh poet and encourage writing among the young. Ms Fenton’s collection Clamor is the first book of poetry to have won.”

“Between now and January 4, members of the public are being asked to choose one book they love from a list of 25 pre-selected titles. They – you! – fill in a form saying, in 100 words, why they would like to give this book to others. The recommendation must be personal, and passionate. Each of 20,000 “givers” will then be sent 48 copies of that book to hand out on the night of March 5 at the venue they have chosen, resulting in what promises to be a national, simultaneous frenzy of book-loving.”

“A survey by market research firm ChangeWave indicates that the iPad is rapidly catching up to the Kindle in the e-book reader market. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Amazon (yet). Amazon offers a free Kindle app for the iPhone and iPad to download Amazon e-books. Because of that move, Amazon saw a surge in e-book sales.”

Laura Miller: “The Bad Sex Award poses as a knowing blow against literary pretension while embodying the most retrograde prudery. … Is there any reason why the literature that makes us laugh, cry and rage shouldn’t also, occasionally, turn us on?”

Toby Lichtig: “In a sense, my question is: what is good sex in fiction as opposed to mere pornography? … And so I propose a modest counterpoint to the good japes at the Literary Review: a Good Sex in fiction award – for good bad sex, good great sex and good sex of the middling variety.”

Maureen Freely, who has translated Orhan Pamuk’s books from Turkish, writes about what drew her to her craft and why she feels the work is important. (She also gives examples of how challenging rendering Turkish sentences into English can be.)

“Well before the iPad was introduced last Spring, many of us had dreamed of a news product encapsulated inside a self-sustaining iPhone application. The advent of the iPad, with its gorgeous screen, only made the dream more vivid. Then, reality interfered.”

The insect imagery in Somerville’s The Shape of Her was enough to defeat Franzen’s Freedom and a novel by former Tony Blair adviser Alastair Campbell. (The latter was disqualified for wanting to win.) Accepting the prize, Somerville said, “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.”

“The devil perched on my shoulder says: Oh, come on. We have been imbibing “Bovary,” “Zhivago,” “War and Peace,” and a host of other classics quite peaceably for decades. Is it possible that the lust for lucre, rather than the luster of literary merit, drives this rush to push new/old product onto the shelves?”

“A [Spanish] newspaper has uncovered evidence that Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa acquiesced to censors during Franco’s regime in Spain to get his books published.”