Category Archives: News
The NBCC Gets It Right
This may well be unprecedented: last night several major literary prizes were awarded, and I can’t find a single thing to kvetch about.
The National Book Critics Circle isn’t my favorite literary prize (yes, I am the sort of person who has a favorite literary prize–the Booker, even though it outrages and infuriates me almost every [...]
David Foster Wallace at the Ransom Center
Somewhere in a box, I have a number of notebooks from middle school and high school. Not all of them, but some kind of random sampling that my curatorial self saw fit, once upon a time, to save. Once in a while I’ll give in to the urge to look through one, and it always [...]
Springtime and The Story Prize Awards
http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2010/03/day-after-tomorrow.html
Announcing the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
The 2010 PEN/O. Henry prize winners were announced last week, and they look like a truly interesting bunch. Strangely enough, the list hasn’t posted to the official Anchor Books site, but Fiction Writers Review is all over it. This is one of the less homogeneous yearly published collections out there—authors range from popular hard-hitters like [...]
Good Guys, Bad Guys, Which is Which?
For now, at least, the dust has settled in the Amazon/MacMillan confrontation. Last weekend Amazon restored the buy buttons for MacMillan and its imprints, although with some seriously deep discounting of hardcovers and that same objectionable $9.99 sticker on the Kindle editions. Amazon has agreed to accept the same model MacMillan uses for its dealings [...]
Showdown
As of Tuesday night, Amazon’s standoff with Macmillan has showed no signs of resolving itself since they went head to head Friday. For those not following the ins and outs of the situation obsessively, which is probably most people, the setup is as follows:
In the course of negotiations, Macmillan CEO John Sargent proposed a plan [...]
RIP, Kage Baker
Very sad news: the marvelous science fiction writer Kage Baker died Sunday at the too-young age of 57. She was best known for The Company novels, a tour de force time travel series that begins with In the Garden of Iden and continues through another seven novels, concluding with The Sons of Heaven.
You can read [...]
The Lost Booker
Another year, another gimmick. Last year the Man Booker Prize offered us the Best of the Booker, which pitted previous winners against each other. (Won by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, which also won the Booker of Bookers in 1993. Seriously, is it that good? The more I hear about it, the more perversely reluctant I [...]
Another Sad Day
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
… Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he [...]
A Sad Day in the World of Words
Erich Segal: author of Love Story, at 72
… It was short and simply told, famously beginning: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” By the end of those opening sentences he had many readers in [...]
