Category: publishing

Canadian true crime writer Stephen Williams is facing 94 charges and has had his computer confiscated by Ontario police after defying a publishing ban with his two books analyzing the case of the brutal sex killings of Canadian teenagers. The Writer’s Union of Canada has called for a public inquiry into the police treatment of Williams and his wife, award-winning humor author Marsha Boulton, saying that the actions of the authorities are an unwarranted attack on freedom of expression.”

Sales of the Harry Potter books have passed the 250 million mark worldwide. “The series has been sold in more than 200 countries and translated into 60 languages from Hindi to Ancient Greek. The fifth book, The Order of the Phoenix, sold 1.78 million copies on its first day in the UK alone.”

So McDonald’s protests the inclusion of “mcjob” in the new Mirriam-Webster Dictionary. “If McDonald’s couldn’t accept satire as the price of fame, though, why didn’t it protest the McJob coinage long ago? The first use in the Nexis database, it’s true, wouldn’t have raised hackles: It was an innocent play on words in a 1985 UPI story on the labor shortage. ‘Ronald McDonald has a mcjob for you,’ it began, with no scorn intended. But McJob in the ‘robotic, dumb’ sense popped up in the Washington Post just a year later…”

When Canada’s Governor General Adrienne Clarkson first looked in the Governor General’s library, she discovered that 150 of the 492 books that have won a Governor-General’s Award since the inaugural prize in 1937 were missing from the collection. Scouring secondhand bookstores, Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul have reduced the number of missing books to only 11. “The problem is that the vanished volumes are now out of print and thus nearly impossible to find…”

“New York author Shelley Jackson plans to ‘publish’ her short story ‘Skin’ by having each word tattooed on a different person.
Volunteers are pouring in from all over the world – bookshop assistants from London, mothers and daughters from Nebraska, artists from Brazil, a man in Bangkok. There will be ifs, buts, ands and other words inscribed on heads, arms, legs and backs from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Alabama.”

“In these early years of the new millennium, a new Toni Morrison novel is a seismic event. She is a Nobel laureate and, at 72, is considered one of the country’s greatest living writers. Her always-ambitious novels, such as “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” are written on a grand scale and she has become iconic.

The Canadian National Institute for the Blind debuts a new online library for the blind. “There are more than 10,000 audio, text, and Braille titles available on-line, including recent bestsellers such as Life of Pi and The Stone Diaries. Users can also search and order from a collection of more than 60,000 titles.”

Who better to launch a children’s book imprint than Mary Poppins? Julie Andrews, the actress who played Poppins, has contracted with mega-publisher HarperCollins to launch just such a project. Andrews has written multiple children’s books herself, and the new imprint will feature only books which have her personal stamp of approval.

Canadian expat Douglas Glover has won his native country’s Governor General’s award for fiction, beating out Canadian über-author Margaret Atwood for the $15,000 prize. Glover’s winning novel, Elle, is a fictionalized account of 16th-century French noblewoman Marguerite de Roberval’s years as a castaway. Other winners in the GG awards, which celebrate the best Canadian writing of the year, were Vern Thiesson (drama,) Tim Lilburn (poetry,) and Margaret MacMillan (non-fiction).

With Chip McGrath stepping down from his position as editor of the venerable New York Times Sunday Book Review, there is an opportunity for the new editor to finally make some much-needed changes to the section, writes Alex Beam. “Books are fun and interesting to read, but the Sunday Book Review is neither… Too often the reviews read like book reports, cooked up using a predictable formula: summarizing the book, inserting some praise, perhaps ending with a guarded reservation or two, carefully phrased so as not to offend… [Furthermore,] the review hardly ever helps you answer the key question: Should I spend $26 on this book?”