Category: publishing

“Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun has won one of the world’s richest literature prizes. Ben Jelloun’s novel, This Blinding Absence of Light, won the 100,000 euro [$120,000] International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004, on Thursday. The prize is the biggest for a single work of fiction in English.”

July marks the 100th anniversary of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s birth. The novelist and short-story writer was the only Yiddish author to win a Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1978). “Throughout the summer and fall, media and cultural centers all over the country will devote time and energy to celebrating Singer, one of the most famous Jewish writers of all time.” But not everyone is applauding…

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has been “leading a secret life. Night after night for years he’s been slipping out of the headquarters of the vast right-wing conspiracy, wolfing down spy novels and then reviewing them for Amazon.com. So prolific and proficient has he been at this pursuit that he has attained the coveted title Amazon Top 500 Reviewer. Newt is number 488.”

The Ulysses anniversary brings up some conflicted feelings about the James book, often considered the greatest book ever written. “There are still those in Dublin who neither like nor understand James Joyce. And there are others who are offended by the way a city which once rejected Joyce now uses him and his work to attract tourist dollars.”

It’s June 16, Bloomsday, and that means that James Joyce fanatics all over the world will be holding public readings from Ulysses and enjoying a drop of Irish whiskey in memory of the novel’s protagonist. But in Ireland, where the novel is set and where Joyce grew up, old wounds have yet to fully heal, and while the country has moved on from the days when it denounced its native son as anti-Catholic, pornographic, and “spiritually offensive,” but the Joyce family has never quite gotten over Ireland’s direct snub of one of the great authors of the 20th century.

When Kenneth Maxwell resigned as book editor at Foreign Affairs in mid-May, accusations flew that his departure was the direct result of a strong-arm move by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had objected to Maxwell’s review of a book about the rise of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now, Maxwell’s chosen successor, Princeton professor Jeremy Adelman, has announced that he will not accept the post, having been disgusted with the treatment of Maxwell by the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs.

A Seattle-area publisher of sailing books has pulled his stock from Amazon.com in protest of the online retailer’s refusal to stop selling a book which directly makes the case for sexual relationships between men and prepubescent boys. Amazon says that while the book is clearly reprehensible (and the site’s in-house reviewer says as much,) it is not a pornographic work, and the retailer insists that it will not get into the censorship business.

The latest issue of Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s has been given over to comic art legend Chris Ware, who uses the occasion to take readers who ordinarily might not give comic art a second thought on a tour of the modern scene. “Ware’s curatorial tastes are generally quite broad… Even so, you can see his particular selectivity in the McSweeney’s picks. Ware prefers minimal, iconic, impressionistic drawing to the more deliberate rendering of the European school (“Blacksad” artist Juanjo Guarnido, say), and his introduction is quick to dismiss the comics aesthetic that’s grounded in old superhero comic books.”

“Debut author Anna Funder has won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for her book about the hardships endured by people from the former East Germany. The book, titled Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, earned Funder £30,000 in prize money.” The Samuel Johnson Prize is now in its sixth year of recognizing non-fiction works of all varieties, from travel writing to biography to the arts.

So why all the fuss about celebrating the 100th anniversary of the events in James Joyce’s Ulyses? “This mass devotion to James Joyce is a fine example of a spreading trend in tourism in which a dead author becomes a lure for living admirers and the merely curious.”